The Terrible Results of the Evolutionary Hypothesis When Carried to Its Logical Conclusions

The fourth important lesson of the year 1917 is the terrible results of the evolutionary hypothesis when carried to its inevitable logical conclusions. There is not time to go into that at any length, but if there were I could show you by quotations from Nietzsche, Treitschke, Bernhardi, Klaus, Wagner and other German philosophers and political writers, upon whose writings lies the immediate responsibility for the present war. that the war was the direct product of German Neo-Darwinism. For example, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, to whose philosophy more than that of any one else the German state of mind that led to this war is due, says in his book, “The Joyous Wisdom,” Section 7)11: “We children of the future do not by any means think it desirable that the kingdom of righteousness and peace should be established on the earth.... We rejoice in all men who, like ourselves, love danger, war, and adventure.... We count ourselves among the conquerors; we ponder over the need of a new order of things, even of a new slavery — for every strengthening and elevation of the type ‘man’ also involves a new form of slavery.” Of course, the whole meaning of this is that the survival of the fittest, Darwinian evolution in its extremist form, is a beneficial thing, and demands war as a beneficial institution. Klaus Wagner, in his book, “War,” page 183, says, “Unless we choose to shut our eyes to the necessity of evolution, we must recognize the necessity of war. We must accept war, which will last as long as development and existence; we must accept eternal war.” Prof. Ernst Hasse says in “Die Zukunft des Deutschen Volkstums,” page 126, “‘War is the father of everything,’ says Heraclitus. It will be the father of the new German race of the future.” This was written as long ago as 1908. The evolutionary origin of this opinion is evident to any one familiar with evolutionary teaching. General von Bernhardi says in his famous book, “Germany and the Next War,” to which many attribute the present war more than to any other single writing, “The efforts directed toward the abolition of war must not only be termed foolish, but absolutely immoral, and must be stigmatised as unworthy of the human race.... The weak nation is to have the same right as the powerful and vigorous nation! The whole idea represents a presumptuous encroachment on the natural laws of development.” Heinrich Treitschke, whose teachings share with those of Bernhardi and Nietzsche the dishonor of being chiefly responsible for the present ruthless war spirit in Germany, says in his book, “Politics,” Volume 1, page 121, “The Germans let the primitive Prussian tribes decide whether they should be put to the sword or thoroughly Germanized. Cruel as these processes of transformation may be, they are a blessing for humanity. It makes for health that the nobler race should absorb the inferior stock.” Of course, such a philosophy is clearly evolutionary. No one can read the writings that created in Germany the spirit that led to this war and that inspired the methods by which this war has been carried on. without seeing that this war is the harvest of the seed that Darwin sewed when he gave to the world his theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, and that Herbert Spencer sowed when he gave to the world the phrase, “The survival of the fittest” and the philosophy that this phrase embodies. The Germans are persuaded that they are “the fittest” and therefore that the Belgians and the rest of “the inferior stock” must get out, and that it does not matter much how they are exterminated. This may seem to some of you like evolutionism gone mad, but in point of fact it is only evolutionism carried to its logical issue. It is the direct outcome of the type of philosophy that has ruled our

colleges and universities, and even some of our theological seminaries, for a generation. We are talking about the necessity, for our safety’s sake, of getting the German language out of our schools; it is far more necessary for our safety, and for the safety of the whole human race, that we get this soulless, cruel, remorseless philosophy of evolutionism, the egg of which was laid in England and hatched in Germany, out of our universities, colleges and high schools. Sow evolutionism as taught by Darwin and Spencer and you reap Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi, and then you find you reap the present war, with its cruelty, its lust, its murder, its rape, its agony, its death, and almost universal dissolution and hell. It was interesting week before last to hear Prof. Shailer Matthews saying in this city that the German philosophy must go, when there is no one in all the land who has more persistently labored than he to get us to do all our theological thinking in the terms of German philosophy and German criticism. If he really means what he says, he would better retract and recall some of the stuff which he has been sowing broadcast among ministers and theological students in the past six months.