Excerpt from The Conflicts of the Age: 1. An Advertisement for a New Religion, by an Evolutionist; 2. The Confession of an Agnostic, by an Agnostic; 3. What Morality Have We Left? By a New Light Moralist; 4. Review of the Fight, by a Yankee Farmer We can now thoroughly understand and explain all this on the grand new scientific principles of natural selec tion and the struggle for existence. Lecky has shown very skilfully, in his work on Rationalism, that antiquated systems pass away - like old men - not because they have been attacked by argument, but simply because, like the races which have perished slowly in the geologi cal ages, they are not fitted to the new circumstances, and cannot survive among the new ideas which have sprung up by spontaneous generation. In the struggle for exist ence, certain beliefs are cast off, and only those continue which can stand the new conditions. The Reformers un dermined the faith of the Catholic Church, and Mr. Leslie Stephen has shown how the deistical writers of the last century successfully undermined the strangely mixed and incongruous faiths of the Hebrew and Christian Scrip tures. Rationalism and Unitarianism have exposed so much of the weakness of the infallible Bible that shrewd men now see that all must go. The great thinkers of the last century and a half have been against the Bible Hume and Gibbon, and we may add Froude, among his torians, fitted to examine evidence; Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, sainte-beuve, and Matthew Arnold, among men Ofliterary genius; while philosophers like Kant, Fichte. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.