This is not merely readjustment; it is revolution. For it is the rejection of theology with its appeals to human obligation to deity, and to man's hopes of future reward or fears of future punishment; and it is the acceptance of wholly secular motives as incentives to right action. Those motives, having their foundation in the physical, mental, and moral results of our deeds, rest on a stable basis. No longer interlaced with the unstable theological, they neither abide nor perish with it. And one redeeming feature of our time is that the churches are beginning to see this, and to be effected by it. John Morley caustically remarks that "the efforts of the heterodox have taught them to be better Christians than they were a hundred years ago." Certain extremists excepted, they are keeping dogma in the background, and are laying stress on the socialism which it is contended was at the heart of the teaching of Jesus. Wisely, if not very consistently, they are seeking alliance with the liberal movements whose aim is the "abolition of privilege." The liberal theologians, in the face of the varying ethical standards which mark the Old Testament and the New, no longer insist on the absoluteness of moral codes, and so fall into line with the evolutionist in his theory of their relativeness. For society in its advance from lower to higher conceptions of duty, completely reverses its ethics, looking back with horror on that which was once permitted and unquestioned. It is with this checking of "the ape and tiger," and this fostering of the "angel" in man, that Huxley dealt in his Romanes Lecture. There was much unintelligent, and some wilful, misunderstanding of his argument, else a prominent Catholic biologist would hardly have welcomed it as a possible prelude to Huxley's submission to the Church. Yet the reasoning was clear enough, and in no wise contravened the application of Evolution to morals. Huxley showed that Evolution is both _cosmical_ and _ethical_. _Cosmic Evolution_ has resulted in the universe with its non-living and living contents, and since, dealing with the conditions which obtain on our planet, there is not sufficient elbow-room or food for all the offspring of living things, the result is a furious struggle in which the strong win and transmit their advantages to their descendants. Nature is wholly selfish; the race is to the swift, and the battle to the strong.