male and female prostitutes in connection with Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in connection with religious revivals and missions.  Another bestial tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling down the weak, in the mad struggle for wealth; how and when has religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present civilisation?  All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by the recognition of human duty, of the social bond.  Religion has not eradicated them, but science, by tracing them to their source in our brute ancestry, has explained them and has shown them in their true light.  As each recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the bestial tendencies in man, and that man in evolving further must evolve out of these, each also feels it part of his personal duty to curb these in himself, and so to rise further from the brute.  This rational ‘co-operation with Nature’ distinguishes the scientific from the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is becoming stronger and stronger in all those who, in losing faith in God, have gained hope for man."[21]

For this rational setting of oneself on the side of the forces working for evolution implied active co-operation by personal purity and nobility.”  To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be imagined for efforts after personal perfection.  The Theist may desire personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in his dealings with them.  The Atheist desires personal perfection not only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature, and each strengthening of the higher, is a gain for all, and not for himself alone."[22]

Besides all this, the struggle against evil, regarded as transitory and as a necessary concomitant of evolution, loses its bitterness.  “In dealing with evil, Atheism is full of hope instead of despair.  To the Christian, evil is as everlasting as good; it exists by the permission of God, and, therefore, by the will of God.  Our nature is corrupt, inclined to evil; the devil is ever near us, working all sin and all misery.  What hope has the Christian face to face with a world’s wickedness? what answer to the question, Whence comes sin?  To the Atheist the terrible problem has in it no figure of despair.  Evil comes from ignorance, we say; ignorance of physical and of moral facts.  Primarily, from ignorance of physical order; parents who dwell in filthy, unventilated, unweathertight houses, who live on insufficient, innutritious, unwholesome food, will necessarily be unhealthy, will