Faith
has been found to subsist and flourish under various creeds and all
manners of worship, in all stages of civilization. All that it wants is
something to shelter and sustain and encourage it, in its struggles
against the baser instincts. Any religion which does this, by appealing
to the imagination and inspiring whole-souled belief, might be
considered satisfactory in any given community.
The next question, therefore, which we are entitled to ask ourselves is
this:
After science has succeeded in eating into and breaking down the
particular temple in which our fundamental faith had found a refuge,
what fitting substitute has it been able to discover or devise, in order
to meet this universal requirement?
The nearest approach to a scientific answer appears to be the theory of
evolution, which informs man that, instead of being a special and
majestic creation of an all-wise Almighty, as he had so foolishly and
ignorantly imagined, he can consider himself a remote and more or less
accidental, development of a protoplasm; and more immediately, the
lineal descendant of the ape, to whom he still bears a close
resemblance, in a scientific way.
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