His hypothesis breaks down here.  The minds which, according to Darwin, are developed by natural selection and sexual selection, use their power to suspend the law by which they have reached their high positions.  Medicine is one of the greatest of the sciences and its chief object is to save life and strengthen the weak.  That, Darwin complains, interferes with “the survival of the fittest.”  If he complains of vaccination, what would he say of the more recent discovery of remedies for typhoid fever, yellow fever and the black plague?  And what would he think of saving weak babies by pasteurizing milk and of the efforts to find a specific for tuberculosis and cancer?  Can such a barbarous doctrine be sound?

But Darwin’s doctrine is even more destructive.  His heart rebels against the “hard reason” upon which his heartless hypothesis is built.  He says:  “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly the result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as a part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered in the manner indicated, more tender and more widely diffused.  Nor could we check our sympathy even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.  The surgeon may harden himself while performing an operation, for he knows he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were to intentionally neglect the weak and the helpless, it could be only for a contingent benefit, with overwhelming present evil.  We must therefore bear the undoubted bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind.”

The moral nature which, according to Darwin, is also developed by natural selection and sexual selection, repudiates the brutal law to which, if his reasoning is correct, it owes its origin.  Can that doctrine be accepted as scientific when its author admits that we cannot apply it “without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature”?  On the contrary, civilization is measured by the moral revolt against the cruel doctrine developed by Darwin.

Darwin rightly decided to suspend his doctrine, even at the risk of impairing the race.  But some of his followers are more hardened.  A few years ago I read a book in which the author defended the use of alcohol on the ground that it rendered a service to society by killing off the degenerates.  And this argument was advanced by a scientist in the fall of 1920 at a congress against alcohol.

The language which I have quoted proves that Darwinism is directly antagonistic to Christianity, which boasts of its eleemosynary institutions and of the care it bestows on the weak and the helpless.  Darwin, by putting man on a brute basis and ignoring spiritual values, attacks the very foundations of Christianity.

Those who accept Darwin’s views are in the habit of saying that it need not lessen their reverence for God to believe that the Creator fashioned a germ of life and endowed it with power to develop into what we see to-day.  It is true that a God who could make man as he is, could have made him by the long-drawn-out process suggested by Darwin.  To do either would require infinite power, beyond the ability of man to comprehend.  But what is the natural tendency of Darwin’s doctrine?