“Turn to what little exact science we have.  Trust to evidence and the logic of facts.  It is true it is but little, but, on the other hand, it is less fluid and shifting than philosophy.  The moral law, let us suppose, demands that you love your neighbour.  Well?  Love ought to show itself in the removal of everything which in one way or another is injurious to men and threatens them with danger in the present or in the future.  Our knowledge and the evidence tells us that the morally and physically abnormal are a menace to humanity.  If so you must struggle against the abnormal; if you are not able to raise them to the normal standard you must have strength and ability to render them harmless—­that is, to destroy them.”

“So love consists in the strong overcoming the weak.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“But you know the strong crucified our Lord Jesus Christ,” said the deacon hotly.

“The fact is that those who crucified Him were not the strong but the weak.  Human culture weakens and strives to nullify the struggle for existence and natural selection; hence the rapid advancement of the weak and their predominance over the strong.  Imagine that you succeeded in instilling into bees humanitarian ideas in their crude and elementary form.  What would come of it?  The drones who ought to be killed would remain alive, would devour the honey, would corrupt and stifle the bees, resulting in the predominance of the weak over the strong and the degeneration of the latter.  The same process is taking place now with humanity; the weak are oppressing the strong.  Among savages untouched by civilisation the strongest, cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; he is the chief and the master.  But we civilised men have crucified Christ, and we go on crucifying Him, so there is something lacking in us. . . .  And that something one ought to raise up in ourselves, or there will be no end to these errors.”

“But what criterion have you to distinguish the strong from the weak?”

“Knowledge and evidence.  The tuberculous and the scrofulous are recognised by their diseases, and the insane and the immoral by their actions.”

“But mistakes may be made!”

“Yes, but it’s no use to be afraid of getting your feet wet when you are threatened with the deluge!”

“That’s philosophy,” laughed the deacon.

“Not a bit of it.  You are so corrupted by your seminary philosophy that you want to see nothing but fog in everything.  The abstract studies with which your youthful head is stuffed are called abstract just because they abstract your minds from what is obvious.  Look the devil straight in the eye, and if he’s the devil, tell him he’s the devil, and don’t go calling to Kant or Hegel for explanations.”

The zoologist paused and went on: