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Mr. Peabody selected to carry forward his work, engaged in the erection of a large building accommodating over two hundred, at a cost of $136,500. This apartment house, which is substantially uniform with the seventeen additional buildings since constructed from the Peabody fund, is five stories high, built around a hollow square, thus giving plenty of fresh air and sunshine to the rear as well as the front of the entire building. The square affords a large playground for the children where they are in no danger of being run over by vehicles, and where they are under the immediate eye of many of the parents. The building is divided into tenements of one, two, and three room apartments, according to the requirements of the occupant. There are also nine stores on the ground floor, which bring a rental of something over $1,500 a year for each of the buildings. By careful, honest, and conscientious business management, the original sum of $2,500,000 has been almost doubled, while comfortable, heathful homes have been procured for an army of over 20,000 persons. Some of the apartments contain four rooms, many three, some two, others one. The average rent is about $1.15 for an apartment. The average price for threeroom apartments in the wretched tenements of London, is from $1.45 a week. In the Peabody dwellings, the death rate is .96 per one thousand below the average in London. Thus it will be seen that while large, healthful, airy, and cheerful homes have been provided for over 20,000 at a lower figure than the wretched disease-fostering and crime-breeding tenements of soulless Shylocks, the Peabody fund has, since 1862, grown to nearly $5,000,000, or almost twice the sum given for the work by the great philanthropist. No words can adequately describe the magnitude of this splendid work, any more than we can measure the good it has accomplished, the crime prevented, or the lives that through it have grown to ornament and bless society. In the Liverpool experiment, the work has been prosecuted by the municipal government. In the Peabody dwellings, it has, of course, been the work of an individual, carried on by a board of highminded, honorable, and philanthropic gentlemen. To my mind, it seems far more practicable for philanthropic, monied men to prosecute this work as a business investment, specifying in their wills that rents shall not rise above a figure necessary to insure a fair interest on the money,

rather than leave it for city governments, as in the latter case it would be in great danger of becoming an additional stronghold for unscrupulous city officials to use for political purposes. I know of no field where men with millions can so bless the race as by following Mr. Peabody's example in our great cities. If, instead of willing every year princely sums to old, rich, and conservative educational institutions, which already possess far more money than they require, -wealthy persons would bequeath sums for the erection of buildings after the manner of the Victoria Square or the Peabody Dwellings, a wonderful transformation would soon appear in our cities. Crime would diminish, life would rise to a higher level, and from the hearts and brains of tens of thousands, a great and terrible load would be lifted. Yet noble and praiseworthy as is this work, we must not lose sight of the fact, that at best it is only a palliative measure: a grand, noble, beneficent work which challenges our admiration, and should receive our cordial support; still it is only a palliative.

There is a broader aspect still, a nobler work to be accomplished. As long as speculation continues in that great gift of God to man, land, the problem will be unsettled. So long as the landlords find that the more wretched, filthy, rickety, and loathsome a building is, the lower will be the taxes, he will continue to make some of the ever-increasing army of bread winners dwell in his foul, disease-impregnated dens.

The present economic system is being rapidly outgrown. Man's increasing intelligence, sense of justice, and the humanitarian spirit of the age, demand radical changes, which will come immeasurably nearer securing equal opportunities for all persons than the past dreamed possible. No sudden or rash measure calculated to convulse business and work great suffering should be entertained, but our future action should rest on a broad, settled policy founded upon justice, tempered by moderation, keeping in view the great work of banishing uninvited poverty, and elevating to a higher level the great struggling millions without for a moment sacrificing individualism. Indeed, a truer democracy in which a higher interpretation of justice, and a broader conception of individual freedom, and a more sacred regard for liberty, should be the watchword of the future.

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY.

BY PROF. JAS. T. BIXBY, PH. D.

IN the life and letters of Charles Darwin there is a memorandum, copied from his pocket note-book of 1837, to this effect: In July, opened first notebook on Transmutation of Species. Had been greatly struck with the character of the South American fossils and the species on Galapagos Archipelago."

These facts, he says, were the origin of all his epochmaking views as to the development of life and the work of natural selection in evolving species.

His suspicions that species were not immutable and made at one cast, directly by the fiat of the Creator, seemed to him, at first, he says, almost like murder.

To the greater part of the church, when in 1859, after twenty years of work in accumulating the proofs of his theory, he at last gave it to the world, it seemed quite as bad as murder.

It is very interesting now to look back upon the history and career of the Darwinian theory in the last thirty years; to recall, first the fierce outcry and denunciation it elicited, then the gradual accumulation of corroboratory evidence from all quarters in its favor; the accession of one scientific authority after another to the new views; the softening, little by little, of ecclesiastical opposition; its gradual acceptance by the broad-minded alike in theological and scientific circles; then, in these recent years, the exaltation of the new theory into a scientific and philosophic creed, wherein matter, force, and evolution constitute the new trinity, which, unless the modern man piously believes, he becomes anathematized and excommunicated by all the priests of the new dogmatism.

In the field of science, undoubtedly, evolution has won the day. Nevertheless, in religious circles, old time prej udices and slow conservatism, clinging to its creeds, as the hermit crab clings to the cast-off shell of oyster or clam,

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still resist it. The great body of the Christian laity looks askance on it. And even in progressive America, one of the largest and most liberal of American denominations has recently formally tried and condemned one of its clergy for heresy, for the publication of a book in which the principles of Evolution are frankly adopted and applied to Christianity. For a man to call himself a Christian Evolutionist is (we have been told by high Orthodox authority) a contradiction in terms.

I think it is safe to say to-day that Evolution has come to stay. It is too late to turn it out of the mansions of modern thought. And it is, therefore, a vital question, "Can belief in God, and the soul, and divine revelation abide under the same roof with evolution in peace? Or must Christianity vacate the realm of modern thought and leave it to the chilling frosts of materialism and scepticism?"

Now, if I have been able to understand the issue and its grounds, there is no such alternative, no such incompatibility between Evolution and Christianity.

There is, I know, a form of Evolution and a form of Christianity, which are mutually contradictory.

There is a form of Evolution which is narrowly materialistic. It dogmatically asserts that there is nothing in existence but matter and physical forces, and the iron laws according to which they develop. Life, according to this school, is only a product of the happy combination of the atoms; feeling and thought are but the iridescence of the brain tissues; conscience but a transmuted form of ancestral fears and expediences. Soul, revelation, providence, nothing but illusions of the childish fancy of humanity's infancy. Opposed to it, fighting with all the intensity of those who fight for their very life, stands a school of Christians who maintain that unless the special creation of species by divine fiat and the frequent intervention of God and His angels in the world be admitted, religion has received its death wound. According to this school, unless the world was created in six days, and Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and it obeyed, and Hezekiah turned the solar shadow back on the dial, and Jesus was born without human father, and unless some new miracle will interfere with the regular course of law, of rain and dew, of sickness and health, of cause and effect, whenever a be-liever lifts up his voice in prayer, why then, the very foundations of religion are destroyed.

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