Professor Huxley and others, in our time, are trying to elaborate some basis of ethics independently of religion. But, as a matter of fact, these very men are living on conventional moral promptings and restraints derived from the Bible. The best basis of morals yet known is that of Christianity, and it is from its high and ennobling cultus that even the enemies of the truth are deriving their highest inspiration. Mr. Goldwin Smith, in an able article published in the Forum of April, 1891, on the question, “Will Morality Survive Faith?” shows at least that the best ethics which the world now has are the outcome of religious belief and of Christian belief, and he leads the minds of his readers to gravely doubt whether a gospel of agnostic evolution could ever produce those forces of moral prompting and restraint which the centuries of Christianity have developed. He does not hesitate to assert that those who hold and advocate the modern anti-theistic speculations are themselves living upon the influence of a Christian cultus which has survived their faith. A true test of their principles could only be made when a generation should appear upon which no influence of Christian parents still remained, and in a society in which Christian sentiment no longer survived.[191] It may be said that the truth must be received without regard to the results which may follow. This is admitted, but the same cannot be said of theories. If there is perfect harmony between all truths in the physical and the moral world, then all these should have their influence in reaching final conclusions.
4. The philosophies, ancient and modern, have agreed in lowering the common estimate of man as man; they have exerted an influence the opposite of that in which the New Testament pleads for a common and an exalted brotherhood of the race.
Hinduism raised the Brahman almost to the dignity of the gods, and debased the Sudra to a grade but a little higher than the brute. Buddha declared that his teachings were for the wise, and not for the simple. The philosophers of Greece and Rome, even the best of them, regarded the helot and the slave as of an inferior grade of beings—even though occasionally a slave by his superior force rose to a high degree. In like manner the whole tendency of modern evolution is to degrade the dignity and sacredness of humanity. It is searching for “missing links;” it measures the skulls of degraded races for proofs of its theories. It has travellers and adventurers on the lookout for tribes who have no conception of God, and no religious rites; it searches caves and dredges lakes for historical traces of man when he had but recently learned to “stand upright upon his hind legs.” The lower the types that can be found, the more valuable are they for the purposes required. All this tends to the dishonoring of the inferior types of men. Wherever Christianity had changed the old estimates of the philosophers, and had led to the nobler sentiment