The Gospel of Evolution

If we study the individual animal, the same fact of the unity of phenomena is again borne in upon us. The bodily functions are by no means so distinct in their nature as we were wont to think. To take but an illustration.

The sense-organs of man are all found to be only so many modifications of the integument.

The skin or tactile organ is the integument. The tongue or taste organ is but the integument folded inwards and a little modified. The nasal cavities are also lined with a modification of the same tissue, and even the most complex sense organs that are at the same time the most important – that is the eye and the ear – are, as the study of development or embryology shows us, only the result of a series of remarkable changes affecting certain parts of the epidermis of the animal.

Those physiological functions of the human body that appear to be clearly marked off are really not completely demarcated. Take as example the excretory action of the skin, lungs, and the renal organs. The lungs get rid especially of carbon dioxide; the skin of water; the renal organs of the products of nitrogenous decay. But each of these organs also eliminates those products which are eliminated by the other two. Thus the lungs, whilst they get rid principally of carbon dioxide, also get rid of water in the form of steam and of nitrogenous matter. The skin gives off a certain quantity of carbon dioxide and nitrogen excreta. And the renal organs also eliminate all three of the chief forms of excretory matter. When any one of these three organs is not functioning at its best, extra work is thrown upon the others, and in some extreme cases this metastasis, or transference of function, is very remarkable. Thus an ulcer in the human body has been known to secrete milk.

Try to realise at least something of what all this means. It is no longer possible to mark off clearly the various domains of science. Science is one, for it is the study of nature, and nature is one. In every branch of our knowledge that daily grows more unified, the transitions are found to be innumerable and the gradations infinitesimal. Our chemical groups, our geological rocks and strata, our inorganic and organic kingdoms, our plants and animals, our classes, orders, genera, species, all are seen to be artificial.

Here is then the new message that science is uttering to man. It is in truth good news. There is no break anywhere. The universe is one vast whole. It is true that at first there seems to be a loss because of the indistinctness that now veils the old lines of demarcation. At first some taring of a shock is felt when we realise that the old definitions and classifications are only matters of convenience, and really represent nothing in nature. But our view of the whole gains incomparably. We are led to take a larger and more true conception of the universe. If the subdivisions disappear the unity of the whole comes out with wonderful clearness. We study phenomena from below upwards, and see something more than an unbroken series. We see that actually there is no below and no above.' The mineral kingdom of the non-living passes into the living. This by gradual stages of ascent rises to the loftiest forms of plants and animals yet known. But these in their constant decay and in their death once for all as individuals, return to the mineral kingdom again. If only we grasp the full meaning of this new gospel founded on science, all life acquires a new significance. Most of all our own life, as the highest expression known to us of the phenomena of matter in motion, becomes more solemn and more full of hope. In it more than in any other are gathered together the forces of the universe. The attraction of the stone for the planet, and of the particles of rock one for another, the loves and hates of chemical atoms, the energies of electrified and magnetised bodies, the variations of innumerable simpler forms of organisms, long chains of heredity reaching back through incalculable times, myriads of adaptations, struggles and failures, deaths and lives, all have met in us. We, more than all others, are the heirs of the ages. While our less fortunate brethren, the lower animals, the plants, the minerals, are playing their good part in the universal history, without the consciousness in full of the meaning of it all, we read the signs of the past and of to-day. "We know what we are, but we know not what we may be," in all the detail that our children's children will see and live. Yet we know that the race has a future that will transcend its past, as that past transcended the dark dumb lives of the ancestry whence our kind has sprung.

The Gospel of Evolution is replacing that of Christianity. Science is taking the place of Religion and yielding to mankind the poetry that its forerunner missed. Nature is our all in all. Only the whisper of a secret thought here and there of hers has yet reached our ears. But one. The only good result that is supposed to flow from prayer does not really flow from prayer at all, but is explicable by purely natural facts. It is healthier that people should know these facts, than that they should refer real sensations to an imaginary cause. This special re-action which under certain circumstances follows, but is not paused by prayer to a supernatural existence, forms but a minute part of the results which flow from belief in prayer. I desire to destroy prayer not only because it is a fraud, but because it is a hindrance to progress. Men pray to do that which they should link hands to perform for themselves. They are down on their knees, crying like children, when they should be on their feet, working, striving for their fellows. I grudge every moment of time that is given by man to god. Man wants all we can do; our heart, our brain, our love, our faculties, all, all these are sacred to man; they must not be desecrated to the use of god. It is sacrilege to steal for god the wealth needed for the enriching of man.

Why, only a few weeks since I read a letter from the Dean of Peterborough, asking for £40,000 for the repair of Peterborough Cathedral. And men, women and little children are rotting in cellars in the very city wherein that letter was published. And he will get it. £40,000 are given so easily for a house of god, but 40,000 pence would be grudged to make decent the hovels in which human beings live. I hate the charity which pours out wealth for a god, and counts in miserly fashion every farthing given for man.

There are no means of progress upon earth save those of study and of work. Study of nature to find out what is; work to apply the knowledge for the increase of human happiness. For centuries upon centuries men have prayed to god for deliverance from poverty, from misery, from crime; and poverty, misery and crime are found on every side. It is time that we should turn from god to man, from prayer to work, from dreaming to acting. Man shall do for earth what prayer has failed to do; and man's thought, man's love, man's sturdy effort shall make that Golden Age for which so many have prayed, but so few have worked.

Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, at 63, Fleet Street,

London, B.C. – 1884.