The logical result of this reasoning cannot escape the notice of any who carefully consider it.  If, for any reason, any community of human beings should decline in moral and intellectual character until they should finally reach the original state of savagery, it would again become their duty to lay aside all high ethical claims as no longer suited to their condition.  The extraneous complications which had grown out of mere social order having passed away, rectitude also would pass away; benevolence, philanthropy, humanity, would be wholly out of place, and however lovely Christian charity might appear from a sentimental point of view, it would be ill adapted to that condition of society.  In such a state of things the strong and vigorous, if sacrificing themselves to the weak, would only perpetuate weakness, and it would be their duty rather to extirpate them, and by the survival only of the fittest to regain the higher civilization.  I state the case in all its naked deformity, because it shows the confusion and darkness of a world in which God is not the moral centre.

And here, as already stated, modern speculation joins hands with the old heathen systems.  According to Hindu as well as Buddhist philosophy, this retrograde process might not only carry civilized man back to savagery, but might place him again in the category of brutes.  If tendencies control all things and have no limit, why might they not remand the human being to lower and lower forms, until he should reach again the status of the mollusk?

Now, over against all the systems which make mind either a product or a phenomenon of matter, we have the Scriptural doctrine that man was created in the image of God.  This fact explains the differences which distinguish him from the beasts of the field; for even in his lowest estate he is amenable to the principle of right and wrong.  Paul taught, in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, that when men descend to the grade of beasts—­and he shows that they may descend even below the dignity of beasts—­so far from becoming exempt from moral claims, they fall under increased condemnation.  The old Hindu systems taught that there can be no release from the consequences of evil acts.  They traced them from one rebirth to another in kharma, as modern speculation traces them physically in heredity.  The one saw no relief except in the changes of endless transmigrations, the other finds it only in the gradual readjustment of the nerve-cells.  But we know by observation and experience that the spiritual power of the Holy Ghost can transform character at once.  No fact in the history of Christianity is more firmly or more widely established than this.  The nerve-tissues to the contrary notwithstanding, the human soul may be born again.  The persecuting Saul may become at once a chief apostle.  The blasphemer, the sot, the debauchee, the murderer, may be transformed to a meek and sincere Christian.  Millions of the heathen, with thousands of years of savage and bestial heredity behind them, have become pure and loyal disciples of the spotless Redeemer.  The fierce heathen Africaner, as well as the dissolute Jerry McCauley, have illustrated this transforming power.