298 THE DOMINION COVENANT: GENESIS ment and all supernatural religion.  It is difficult to say which he hated more, although religion received the more vitriolic attacks. Dynamic Sociology stands as the first and perhaps the most comprehensive defense of government planning in American intellectual history. It was published about 15 years too early, but when his ideas caught on, they spread like wildfire. In fact, they became the ‘coin of the realm” in planning circles so rapidly that the source of these ideas was forgotten. Because the book is almost unknown today, and because Ward’s con- cepts and language are so graphic, I am providing an extended sum- mary and analysis of his thought. In  Dynamic Sociology we have the heart and soul of modern, post-Darwin social evolutionist philosophy. Ward did not pull any punches. He did not try to evade the full impli- cations of his position. Modern thinkers may not be so blatant and forthright, but if they hold to the modern version of evolution –  man- directed evolution – then they are unlikely to reject the basic ideas that Ward sets forth. If you want to follow through the logic of  man- directed evolution, you must start with Ward’s  Dynamic  Sociology. Ward was forthright. He made it clear that the enemy is revealed religion, which in the United States in the early  1880’s, meant Chris- tianity. In the  82-page introduction to the book, in which he outlined his thesis, Ward announced that those people claiming to have received divine inspiration, and those who have founded religious systems,  have  been  found  by  modern  medicine  to  be  not  only “pathological” but to be burdened by  “an actually deranged condition of their minds.”142 Because of the power these religious leaders have wielded historically, “we can only deplore the vast waste of energy which their failure to accomplish their end shows them to have made.”143 (Waste, above all, was what Ward said his system of social planning would avoid.) There is no evidence, he wrote in volume two, that religion provides any moral sanctions whatever. As a matter of fact, we find in the advanced countries that individuals who avow no religion are the true moral leaders. ‘The greater part of them are found among the devotees of the exact sciences. Yet there is no more exemplary class of citizens in society than scientific men. . . .  “lAA Furthermore, the “criminals and the dangerous classes of society are 142. Lester Frank  Ward,  Dynamic Sociology; or Applied Social  Science, as Based Upon Statistical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences (New York: Appleton, [1883] 1907), I, p. 12. (Reprinted by Johnson Reprints and Greenwood Press.) 143. Ibtii.> I, p. 17. 144.  Ibid., II, pp. 281-82.