living things has been developed.

The Bearing of Evolution on Christianity.

It is evident that the evolutionary theory not only contradicts the Bible story of creation but, if true, deprives Christianity of every claim of being the true religion. If all things have come into being through the action of forces residing in matter then the world did not come into being through a divine fiat or command. As Haeckel says: "Every supernatural creation is completely excluded." (Quoted by John Fiske in "A Century of Science," 1899, p. 51.) Thomas Huxley is quite as definite: "Not only do I hold it to be proven that the story of the Deluge is a pure fiction; but I have no hesitation in affirming the same thing of the story of the Creation." ("Science and Hebrew Tradition," 1896, p. 230.) Furthermore, the theory, by its implications, disposes summarily of the immortality of the soul. The belief in an immortal soul is termed by Haeckel as "quite excluded" by the bearing of evolution on the origin of man. The fall of man becomes a myth, since man has not fallen from a high estate but has through many ages of slow development arrived at the use of reason and the dominion over nature; not a perfect man, made in the image of God, but a cousin to the tail-less apes, newly accustomed to walking on two feet, is the ancestor of our race. Without a fall of man there is no possibility nor even a necessity of redemption; our entire Christian theology would be dealing with shadowy abstractions, unreasonable fears and hopes, and purposeless strivings. The belief of the Christian is to the evolutionist of some value as a phenomenon in the history of the mind, but not the slightest intrinsic value is recognized in any of the doctrines of Christian faith, not even in the belief in a personal God. God is, according to Spencer, the Unknowable. Naturally, there can not be miracles, since all processes in nature are conceived as governed by laws not directed by a Divine Intelligence but by forces resident in nature. Hence, too, there can be no inspired revelation of God, since that would presume not only the existence of a personal God but an intervention in natural processes of thought (miracle). John Fiske wrote: The hypothesis of inspiration "conveys most certainly a conception of Divine action as local, special, and transitory; and in so far as it does this, it bears the marks of that heathen mode of philosophy which was current when Christian monotheism arose." ("Darwinism and Other Essays," 1895.) Evolution says: If there is a God we have no means of knowing Him; and what we know of nature certainly precludes the idea that God, if He exists, will concern Himself about man or break down the laws of nature even for an instant in his behalf. The conclusion is, that there is no inspired Bible. Nor indeed an absolute religion. All religious truths are considered relative, with no such distinction as true religion and false religion, since there is no criterion revealed (according to the theory) by which we can test a religion whether it be true or false. Finally, there is no absolute standard of morals. Moral truths, like the religious, are relative only. In other words, the teaching that "Christ has atoned for sin," is as little to be accepted as an absolute truth, as the command: "Thou shalt not steal" must be accepted as embodying an absolute rule of conduct. Clodd says in "The Story of Creation": "Man by himself is not only unprogressive, he is also not so much immoral as unmoral. For where there is no society there is no sin! Therefore the bases of right and wrong lie in conduct towards one's fellow; the moral sense or conscience is the outcome of social relations, themselves the outcome of the need of living….. While the lower instincts, as hunger, passion, and thirst for vengeance, are strong, they are not so enduring or satisfying as the higher feelings which crave for society and sympathy. And the yielding to the lower, however gratifying for the moment, would be followed by the feeling of regret that he had thus given way, and by resolve to act differently for the future. Thus at last man comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherited habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persistent impulses….. Morals are relative, not absolute; there is no fixed standard of right and wrong by which the actions of all men throughout all time are measured….. That which man calls sin is shown to be more often due to his imperfect sense of the true proportion of things, and to his lack of imagination, than to his willfulness." Clodd adds that if conduct has been made to rest on "supposed divine commands (!) as to what man shall and shall not do," that is an assumption which at best serves to restrain the "brutal and ignorant."

J. B. Warren, of the University of California, has well stated the effects of the evolutionary theory on religion and morals:

"Its legitimate tendency is to degrade mankind from that mental and moral dignity that is always recognized as belonging to them, and to place them on an essential level with the brute creation—even with the lowest forms of vegetable and animal existence. According to that theory, man differs from the lower organisms not in kind so much as in the degree of development. Mr. Darwin himself was troubled about the value of his own convictions, on the ground that his mind was evolved from that of lower animals. That is to say, he reckoned his own mental actions as valueless and untrustworthy, because of the essential identity between his mind and that of the lowest creatures that live in the mud of our swamps. Thus we see the legitimate tendency of this theory to degrade the mental dignity of man. And it also degrades the moral nature and faculties of man, and undermines the very foundations of moral and religious principle, in that it teaches that man is only a better developed brute—the natural result being that man is no more under moral obligation than the brute, or has no different basis of moral obligation from the brute, but only a better idea of right and wrong, because on a higher plane in the process of evolution. It strikes at the root of the doctrine that men are, by their origin and nature, under peculiar and special obligations to God. In the words of the late Dr. Robert Patterson, such a theory tends to 'obliterate a belief in the divine origin and sanction of morality, and in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and to promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of man to the level of the brutes, living only under the laws of their brutal instincts.' Such a theory is dishonoring to man and offensive to God."

When these discrepancies between a world-view governed by the Christian's faith in Revelation and one governed by the theory of evolution are once clearly understood, there will be no need to inquire, why, on the one hand, enemies of the Bible in all ranks of life greeted with such joyous acclaim the principle announced by Darwin and, why, on the other hand, a chief purpose of Christian apologetics has become the demonstration that Christianity is justified even by reason in the world-view which it inculcates, and that, on the other hand, the evolutionary hypothesis is contradicted by the facts of religion, of history, and of natural science.

CHAPTER TWO. Unexplained Origins.

The evolutionary scheme of development is, by its originators and defenders, accepted as a working hypothesis by which it is believed that the origin of all forms which matter has taken, and of the activities of living things, including man and human society, can be accounted for. It is an attempt to answer the old question, suggested to the thinking mind by a contemplation of nature: Whence these things? It it a theory of origins.

Now, a hypothesis, being "a theory,