The Other Side of Evolution

Evolution is claimed by its advocates to be the greatest intellectual discovery of the past century, and, by some, the greatest thought that ever entered the mind of man. In the words of its greatest philosopher, Herbert Spencer, "It spans the universe and solves the widest range of its problems, which reach outward through boundless space, and back through illimitable time, resolving the deepest problems of life, mind, society, history and civilization." It has woven into one great philosophy the history of the material universe, the entire organic creation, man and all his faculties, the whole course of human history and the origin and progress of all religion.

It also undertakes to account for the Bible, for what is popularly called higher criticism represents the biblical branch of Evolution. It has reconstructed the Bible and remanded its miraculous narratives to the realm of myth. It has formulated a theology in which the most sacred doctrines of evangelical belief are discarded. In its central theory of the origin of man, it vitally affects the doctrines of the nature of man, of sin and penalty, man's need and the work of Christ. It even touches the person of Christ, for many of its advocates say that He too comes within its scope. In its radical and most consistent form, it utterly discards belief in God. Most of the great teachers of Evolution, such as Ernst Haeckel of Jena, are and have been atheists.

It is true that many evolutionists are theistic. But it is not enough to be theistic. The devil is "theistic," so was Thomas Paine. Christianity is far more than theism. It is the grossest sophistry to teach that because a belief has some truth in it we must therefore tolerate it. All false doctrine is sugarcoated with truth. That we are not overstating the dangerous nature of the theory will appear from the following opinions of competent scholars and observers.

Prof. George Frederick Wright, the eminent geologist, says of Evolution: "It is the fad of the present, which is making such havoc and confusion in the thought of the age, leading so many into intellectual positions, whose conclusions they dare not face and cannot flank, and from which they cannot retreat except through the valley of humiliation." (Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1900.)

Prof. George Howison sounds this alarm: "It is a portent so threatening to the highest concerns of man, that we ought to look before we leap and look more than once. Under the sheen of the evolutionary account of man, the world of real persons, the world of individual responsibility, disappears; with it disappears the personality of God." (Limits of Evolution, pp. 5, 6.)

There is a vital connection between Facts, Doctrines, Experiences, Conduct and Prospects. These successively flow from each other. Christianity rests on facts, from these we derive doctrines and from doctrines come experiences, which give rise to conduct and that ends in suitable prospects. Facts form the basis of Christianity. When, therefore, Evolution attacks the Facts of the Bible, it attempts to undermine the very basis of all Christianity. President Francis L. Patton has said: "You may put your philosophy in one pocket and your religion in another and think that, as they are separate, they will not interfere, but that will not work. You have to bring your theory of the universe and your theory of religion together. This is the work of this age."

While all do not go the length of the radical evolutionists, yet such is the natural working of the human mind, that this will be its logical conclusion. If this theory is accepted, we must look for widespread lapse from all Christian faith and, as conduct follows belief in all intelligent creatures, we shall see also great moral declension.

To the ordinary man, the matter appears in this light: If we cannot believe a man's statements we will not take his advice. If we cannot believe the Bible's narratives why should we believe its religion? If it is not trustworthy as to facts of this world, why depend upon it as to the other world? If it cannot teach correctly the nature of insects and animals, why should it be able to tell us the nature of God? The common man reasons rightly. The Bible must stand or fall by its reliability all along the line of truth of every kind.

Evolution is being taught, or taken for granted to-day in high schools, academies, colleges, universities, and seminaries. It meets the Sunday School scholar at the first chapter of Genesis. A busy city pastor says he has been asked about it every day in the week. It is a living question and must be met. In every free library are the works of Spencer, Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley and others, and these are read continually.

It does seem as if the other side of such a question ought to be given and considered, if there be another side, and there certainly is.

The theory of Evolution is being accepted to-day upon ex-parte evidence. The books on Evolution are numbered by hundreds, those giving the other side are few. Many do not even read for themselves but rely upon the weight of noted names, or the supposed "consensus of scholarship."

It is even asserted that none but scholars have the right to discuss the subject. Dr. Lyman Abbott says in his "Evidences of Christianity" that "those who are not scientists must be content to await the final judgment of those who are experts on this subject, and meanwhile accept tentatively their conclusions." Not to notice this demand that we rest on an unfinished theory, might we not ask permission to accept, "tentatively" at least, the Bible as it is, while awaiting the conclusions of scientists as to what we shall think or believe about it; especially in view of the fact that all that has been done so far by Christianity on earth has been effected by the conservative belief in the Bible.

But non-scientific people are able to comprehend Evolution. The scientist to-day is able to state conclusions in language the non-scientific can readily understand, and the evolutionist himself tells us we can understand his facts and arguments. So we who are not scientists may proceed to investigate a subject in which we have so much at stake. The questions involved are too important to be left to the scientist alone. The scientist is mainly a witness as to the facts of nature. It is the duty of the whole body of the intelligent Christian community, lay and clerical, to generalize and draw conclusions. These form, as they have in the past, the court of last resort in such discussions. The best generalizer will be, not the scientist whose labors are necessarily confined to a single science, or even to a department of it, and who may be even more or less biased by his environment, but the best juryman will be the intelligent non-scientific mind. It is before the judgment seat of Christian Common Sense that this and all other theories must appear. It is the man in the pew who says to this pastor, Come, and he cometh, and to that professor, Go, and he goeth.

Nor is this examination premature. Evolution has been now for many years before the public and its writings fill libraries. We may assume that the evidence is now before us and, if not all in, at least enough is given us by which to judge its nature and probable outcome. This we may further assume in view of the fact that the advocates of the theory admit that an increasing number of facts are not giving increasing evidence but that their case is more beset with difficulties than in the day of Darwin, the father of the hypothesis, or rather, its step-father. So we may proceed with our examination.

The author of this book makes no claim to being a scientist. He is simply one of the great jury to whom this theory appeals. He has, therefore, here simply considered the evidence and given herein his conclusions. The facts and arguments of evolutionary writers will form the chief source of the examination. Nearly one hundred writers and works are cited. Out of its own mouth we will condemn it.

The citations in a book as small as this must be brief but care has been taken that they are fair as to the points they are given to show. It is not claimed that the citations from evolutionary writers exhibit their opinion on the whole subject but that they do show their fatal admissions and their general uncertainty on the whole subject.

It will be shown that Evolution is not accepted by all scientists and scholars; that it is rejected by some of the greatest of these; that it is admittedly an unproven theory; that it has never been verified and cannot be; that not a single case of evolution has ever been presented, and that there is no known cause by which it could take place. Its arguments will be considered one by one and their fallacy shown. It will be shown to be, by its own principles, unscientific and unphilosophical, and simply a revamping of the old doctrine of Chance clothed in scientific terms. Finally, it will be shown that it is violently opposed to the narrative and doctrines of the Bible and destructive of all Christian faith; that it originated in heathenism and ends in atheism.

Much of the material in this book has been presented by the author in lectures upon the Bible during Bible institutes and conferences, and he has been frequently requested to put it in printed form. He hopes that where the arguments do not convince, they will at least bring the reader to what Mr. Gladstone called "that most wholesome state, a suspended judgment."

Among others, the following writers are cited: Agassiz, Abbott, Argyle, Askernazy, Balfour, Brewster, Ballard, Bruner, Barrande, Bunge, Brown, Bowers, Bixby, Bonn, Clodd, Conn, Cope, Clarke, Cooke, DeRouge, Dana, Dawson, Dubois, Etheridge, Fovel, Fiske, Gladstone, Galton, Gregory, Hilprecht, Huxley, Howison, Haeckel, Haecke, Harrison, Herschel, Hartman, Harnack, Heer, Humphrey, Hoffman, Hamann, Ingersoll, Jones, Kelvin, Koelliker, Liebig, Lecky, LeConte, Lang, Meyer, Max Mueller, Monier, Murchison, Naegeli, Paulsen, Pfaff, Petrie, Pattison, R. Patterson, Pfliederer, Patton, Parker, Ruskin, Romanes, Reymond, Renouf, Schliemann, Sayce, Starr, Schultz, Sully, Spencer, Schmidt, Sedgwick, Stuckenberg, Snell, See, Townsend, Thomas, Tyndall, Thomson, Virchow, Von Baer, Wallace, Winchell, Warfield, Wright, Whitney, Wagner, Woodrow Wilson, White, Wiseman, Zahm, Zoeckler.

I especially acknowledge indebtedness to Prof. George Frederick Wright, of Oberlin College, in revising this book and for his valuable suggestions and corrections, and especially his favorable introduction. To his works confirming many of my conclusions I refer the reader, as follows: The Logic of Christian Evidence, The Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, The Ice Age in North America, Man in the Great Ice Age.

Alexander Patterson.

In issuing a third edition of this book it is proper to state what changes, if any, have occurred in the discussion.

While the belief in Evolution is wide-spread, no known cause or causes have yet been discovered by which the supposed changes in species occurred, for "Evolution" is not a force or energy of any kind, but only the name of a theory by which the present order of nature is supposed to have come. The method Darwin proposed was by Natural Selection arising from the prodigality of production, the small variations that occur in living things, the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, aided by environment and other causes all of which by slow degrees during infinite ages have produced the progressive order of species.

This has been decided to be insufficient and has been abandoned by evolutionary writers. It is now agreed that the changes must have occurred in variations originating in the embryo or in the germ, or in the very substance of which that is composed. But all this is far beyond human ken as all writers admit, as follows: "We are ignorant of the factors which are at work to produce evolution. We do not even know whether the life processes are conducted in accordance with the principles of chemistry and physics, or are in obedience to some more subtle vital principle." (Metcalf, Organic Evolution.) President David Starr Jordan and Prof. Vernon Lyman Kellogg, both of Stanford University, say: "These changes or variations, if they do occur, cannot be explained." (Evolution and Animal Life, p. 112.)

This is universally admitted by scientific writers and the search is now for some proof for Evolution along these lines. But as President Jordan makes the still greater confession that "science does not comprehend a single elemental fact of nature," and such writers as the late Lord Kelvin, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, agree thereto, the required proof seems far off.

So the discussion is in even a less tangible state than in Darwin's time, for that had a theory supposed to be sufficient, but now there is no known cause which can be demonstrated or offers the slightest explanation, as admitted above by these leading writers.

The facts which are advanced to support the theory are dealt with in this volume and their fallacy shown, that all may be explained without reverting to such an unproven theory as Evolution.

Alexander Patterson.

Chicago, April 15, 1912.

The doctrine of Evolution as it is now becoming current in popular literature is one-tenth bad Science and nine-tenths bad Philosophy. Darwin was not strictly an Evolutionist, and rarely used the word. He endeavored simply to show that Species were enlarged varieties. The title of his epoch making book was, "The Origin of Species by Natural Selection." On the larger questions of the origin of genera and the more comprehensive orders of plants and animals, he spoke with great caution and only referred to such theories as things "dimly seen in the distance."

Herbert Spencer, however, came in with his sweeping philosophical theory of the Evolution of all things through natural processes, and took Darwin's work in a limited field as a demonstration of his philosophy. It is this philosophy which many popular writers and teachers, and some thoughtless Scientific men have taken up and made the center of their systems. But the most of our men of Science are modest in their expressions upon such philosophical themes. Herbert Spencer does not rank among the great men of Science of the day. Lord Kelvin's recent remarks upon the subject are most truthful and significant. (See below pp. 18, 24.)

Mr. Patterson does well to emphasize the fact that orderly succession does not necessarily imply evolution from resident forces. The orderly arrangements of a business house proceed from the activity of a number of free wills, each of which might do differently, but act in a definite manner, through voluntary adherence to a single purpose. God is all wise and good as well as all powerful. His plan of Creation will therefore be consistent whatever be the means through which he accomplishes it.

Mr. Patterson, also, does well to dwell upon the "uncertainties of Science." Inductive Science looks but a short distance either into space or time, and has no word concerning either the beginning of things or the end of things. Upon these points the Inspired Word is still our best and our only authority. While not saying that all the points in this little volume are well taken, I can say that I disagree with fewer things in it than with those in almost any other on the subject, and that it is fitted to serve as a very needful tonic in these days of the confusion of bad Philosophy and fragmentary Science.

George Frederick Wright.

Oberlin, Ohio, Aug. 10, 1903.

Before entering upon the discussion we need to enquire as to the meaning of the word "Evolution" as applied to the theory. We must also ask a definition of the theory as given by its best-known writers; and also enquire as to the spheres it claims to cover. To clearly state a question is often half the task of solving it.

We must distinguish between the ordinary conversational sense of the word Evolution and the technical use of the term as designating a theory by that name. We speak of the evolution of the seed into the plant and the further evolution of the flower and the fruit, meaning by our words merely the natural progressive action of the life within the plant. This principle the evolutionist applies to the whole universe which he says came in a similar way.

Again we use the word Evolution to describe any succession of things which show progress. Such an instance is given us in the change in appliances for the use of steam from the time when its power was first observed in the lifting lid of the tea-kettle to the time when it drives the latest ocean liner. This is, however, simply the succession of a series of things in advancing order, but without vital connection. Their real relation is outside of themselves in the minds of the inventors who, in turn, may be many and widely separated. Succession is not Evolution nor does it prove or imply such a process. That demands an intimate and genetic connection between the things as they appear, the higher growing out of the substance of the lower in physical things and the intellectual likewise.

The theory of Evolution asserts that from a nebulous mass of primeval substance, whose origin it never attempts to account for, there came by natural processes, as a flower from a bud, and fruit from the flower, all that we see and know in the heavens above and the earth beneath.

Tyndall's statement of the scope of the theory is as follows: "Strip it naked and you stand face to face with the notion, that not only the ignoble forms of life, the animalcular and animal life, not only the more noble forms of the horse and lion, not only the exquisite mechanism of the human body, but the human mind with its emotions, intellect, will and all their phenomena, were latent in that fiery cloud." (Christianity and Positivism, p. 30.)

Dr. Lyman Abbott further defines its application to man thus: "Evolution is the doctrine that this life of man, this moral, this ethical, this spiritual nature has been developed by natural processes." (Theology of an Evolutionist.)

Herbert Spencer's celebrated definition is as follows: "Evolution is a progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from general to special, from the simple to the complex elements of life." But we deny the right to apply this definition exclusively to the theory of Evolution. Creation also proceeds on the same order, so also does manufacture or any other intelligent operation.

The clearest account of the theory is that given by Prof. Le Conte, as follows: "All things came (1) by continuous progressive changes, (2) according to certain laws, (3) by means of resident forces." (Evolution and Religious Thought.) It is the latter clause in which the real meaning of the theory lies. These "resident forces" include exterior influences such as food, climate, etc.

The theories of Evolution are as many as the respective writers. Each one has his own theory as to the scope and cause and operation of it all. Theistic Evolution allows the intervention of God at the creation of the primeval "fire-mist" and at the origin of life and the production of man's spiritual nature. The atheist denies any interference of a Creator at all. Haeckel says the best definition of Evolution is "the non-miraculous origin and progress of the universe." He and many others say that if the Creator is admitted at any point, He may as well be admitted all along. This is consistent Evolution.

The theistic and the atheistic evolutionist however agree in saying that man was descended from the brute, as to his body at least, and some even, as above shown, claim this descent for the whole man. This doctrine as to man is the vital part of the whole theory and in this all evolutionists are practically agreed. So that so far as their effect on Christian doctrine and Bible fact is concerned, all may be classed together.

With perhaps the exception of Prof. Ernst Haeckel of Jena, all evolutionists admit that Evolution is unproven. One of the latest writers, and most impartial, is Prof. H. W. Conn, who says in his "Evolution of To-day:" "Nothing has been positively proved as to the question at issue. From its very nature, Evolution is beyond proof.... The difficulties offered to an unhesitating acceptance of Evolution are very great, and have not grown less since the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species, but have in some respects grown greater." (pp. 107, 203.) He makes many such admissions. Dr. Rudolph Schmidt writes, "All these theories have not passed beyond the rank of hypotheses." (Theories of Darwin, p. 61.) Prof. Whitney, of Yale University, says, "We cannot think the theory yet converted into a scientific fact and those are perhaps the worst foes to its success who are over-hasty to take it and use it as a proved fact." (Oriental and Linguistic Studies, pp. 293-4) Tyndall said: "Those who hold the doctrine of Evolution are by no means ignorant of the uncertainty of their data, and they only yield to it a provisional assent." (Fragments of Science, p. 162.) Dr. J. A. Zahm writes: "The theory of Evolution is not yet proved by any demonstrative evidence. An absolute demonstration is impossible." (Popular Science Monthly, April, 1898.) Huxley said, "So long as the evidence at present adduced falls short of supporting the affirmative, the doctrine must be content to remain among the hypotheses." (Lay Sermons, p. 295.) Down to the end of his life, he said the evidence for Evolution was insufficient. (Quarterly Review, January, 1901.)

This universal admission will be a surprise to the non-scientific, especially in view of the astounding and sweeping claims the theory has made. It will seem strange that a confessedly unproven theory should be made the basis of all "modern thinking," the foundation of a universal philosophy, the cause of a revolution in theology, and the reason for rejecting the narratives of the Bible, and, on the part of some, of abandoning Christianity and launching into atheism. Yet such is the case. Well may we draw a long breath here and say, Is this Science? Is it scientific to accept as true an unproven theory and make it the basis of all belief? We have even more startling facts to present as to this amazing form of unbelief.

In discussing Evolution, we must also continually distinguish between fact and theory, between things proven and assumed. For the writers continually intermingle these in a confusing way. We need ever to ask concerning its statements, Is this proven or assumed? The jury have a right to ask that everything be proved absolutely before rendering a verdict for Evolution.

The statement is often made that Evolution has "the Consensus of Scholarship." This carries force to the non-scientific, indeed to all, for we must rest our faith, for facts at least, on the opinion of scientists. But while many have followed it, there remain many scholars who have not bowed the knee to Baal. Prof. Haeckel, its greatest living advocate, complains bitterly of the opposition of many of the scientists of Europe, and that many once with him have deserted him.

The late Dr. Virchow, the great pathologist and the discoverer of the germ theory, was an active opponent of Evolution. He says: "The reserve which most naturalists impose on themselves is supported by the small actual proofs of Darwin's theory. Facts seem to teach the invariability of the human and the animal species." (Popular Science, pp. 50, 52.) Dr. Groette, in his inaugural address as rector of the University of Strasburg, rejected Evolution.

Dr. D. S. Gregory of New York, editor of the Homiletic Review and in a position to know the facts, vouches for the statement, that, "It is a strange fact that no great scientific authority in Great Britain in exact science, science that reduces its conclusions to mathematical formulae, has endorsed Evolution."

The late Dr. J. H. W. Stuckenberg, of Cambridge, wrote me, that many of the scientists of Germany reject the extreme views of Evolution, and the inferences which men like Prof. Haeckel, of Jena, have drawn from Darwinism. He quotes Dr. W. Haecke, a zoologist of Jena, the home of Prof. Haeckel, as saying: "We the younger men must free ourselves from the Darwinian dogma, in which respect quite a number of us have been quite successful." Prof. Paulsen, of Berlin, has exposed some of Haeckel's fallacies and regards his reasoning as "a disgrace to Germany." He said the mechanical theory for which Darwinism was held to stand, is rejected by such scientists as Naegeli, Koelliker, M. Wagner, Snell, Fovel, Bunge, the physiological chemist, A. Brown, Hoffman and Askernazy, botanists; Oswald Heer, the geologist, and Otto Hamann, the zoologist. Of Carl Ernst von Baer, the eminent zoologist and anthropologist, Haecke affirms, that in early years he came near adopting the hypothesis of Evolution into his system, but that at a later date he utterly rejected it. The same change occurred in the late Du Bois Reymond and Prof. Virchow, the eminent scientist of the University of Berlin. (See also articles of Dr. Stuckenberg in Homiletic Review, January, 1901, May, 1902.)

Sir J. William Dawson, the great geologist of Canada, utterly rejected it and says: "It is one of the strangest phenomena of humanity; it is utterly destitute of proof." (Story of the Earth and Man, p. 317.) Dr. Etheridge, examiner of the British Museum, said to Dr. George E. Post, in answer to a question, "In all this great museum, there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of these views." Thomas Carlyle called Evolution "the gospel of dirt." Ruskin said of it, "I have never yet heard one logical argument in its favor. I have heard and read many that are beneath contempt." (The Eagles Nest, p. 256.)

Prof. Zöckler writes: "It must be stated that the supremacy of this philosophy has not been such as was predicted by its defenders at the outset. A mere glance at the history of the theory during the four decades that it has been before the public shows that the beginning of the end is at hand."

Such utterances are now very common in the periodicals of Germany, it is said. It seems plain the reaction has commenced and that the pendulum that has swung so strongly in the direction of Evolution, is now oscillating the other way. It required twenty years for Evolution to reach us from abroad. Is it necessary for us to wait twenty years more to reverse our opinions? Why may we not pass upon facts for ourselves without awaiting the "Consensus of European Scholarship," which is after all so subject to perplexing reversals? It makes plain people dizzy to attempt to follow leaders of opinion who change with every wind that blows across the ocean.

Many citations will appear in the following pages which show the strong exceptions taken by leading scholars against the theory in whole or in part. Indeed, as said already, the arguments to be given herein against Evolution are drawn from the statements of leading evolutionists themselves. Some of these are earlier opinions and some their latest utterances. In every case the state of the discussion will be shown to be far from that "Consensus of Scholarship" so airily claimed by the writers on the subject and so unhesitatingly accepted by their followers.

It may be objected that some of these authorities are dead and that later scholars differ from them. Not to mention the names of still living writers named above, let us remark that all wisdom is not left to our day. Socrates and Bacon are dead, yet their opinions are still of value. Moses is dead, yet the Ten Commandments are still believed if not obeyed. Our present evolutionary writers will also one day be dead, yet they hope even then to be given some credit for sense and science. The "consensus of scholarship" ought to include wisdom past as well as present.

It is also to be remembered that there are thousands of quiet thinkers who have never given in their adhesion to this startling theory, and more, that the great masses of the church at least, have no confidence in it. Those preparing to launch their ships upon this current had better, as a matter of common prudence at least, wait a while at least till the mists have rolled away.

Prof. George Frederick Wright says, "The history of science is little else than one of discarded theories.... The so-called science of the present day is largely going the way so steadily followed in the past. The things about which true science is certain are very few and could be contained in a short chapter of a small book." (The Advance, May 12, 1902.)

It is sometimes charged to the church that it has held theories which the discoveries of science have shown to be untrue. But it must be borne in mind that these false theories were just as firmly held by the scientists of the day as by the church.

Dr. Andrew White has written two great volumes on the warfare between science and theology. He might write many and larger volumes on the wars between the theories of science. Every one of these discarded theories, and they are numbered by thousands, has been the center of terrific conflicts.

Galileo's discovery of the satellites of Jupiter was opposed by his fellow astronomers, who even refused to look at them through his telescope. Dr. J. A. Zahm quotes Cardinal Wiseman as saying that the French Institute in 1860 could count more than eighty theories opposed to Scripture, not one of which has stood still or deserves to be recorded. At a meeting of the British Association, Sir William Thomson announced that he believed life had come to this globe by a meteor. His theory lived less than a year. Mr. Huxley said that the origin of life was a sheet of gelatinous living matter which covered the bottom of the ocean. This theory had even a shorter life. Among the most recent reversals of this kind is that of a universally held theory, namely, that coral reefs are built up by the coral insects in their desire to keep near the surface as the ocean's bottom sinks. Prof. A. Agassiz has just demolished this theory.

Scholars were unanimous a short time ago that Troy was a myth. But Dr. Schliemann's great discoveries have overthrown that "consensus of scholarship." Prof. Harnack, one of the greatest of critics in his great work, The Chronology of the Christian Scriptures, admits that science, meaning Higher Criticism, has made many mistakes and has much to repent of. Joseph Cook said, "Within the memory of man yet comparatively young, the mythical theory of Strauss has had its rise, its fall, its burial."

The thirty thousand citizens of St. Pierre on Martinique, trusting in the assurances of the scientists, remained in their fated city and the next day were overwhelmed in the most awful calamity of modern times.

We may consider in this connection the dissatisfaction of some of the greatest minds of evolutionary circles with the results of their own theory.

Mr. Herbert Spencer is thus quoted, writing in his eighty-third year: "The intellectual man, who occupies the same tenement with me, tells me that I am but a piece of animated clay equipped with a nerve system and in some mysterious way connected with the big dynamo called the world; but that very soon now the circuit will be cut and I will fall into unconsciousness and nothingness. Yes I am sad, unutterbly sad, and I wish in my heart I had never heard of the intellectual man with his science, philosophy and logic." (Facts and Comments.)

Prof. Frederic Harrison, the agnostic, thus writes: "The philosophy of evolution and demonstration promised but it did not perform. It raised hopes, but it led to disappointment. It claimed to explain the world and to direct man, but it left a great blank. That blank was the field of religion, of morality, of the sanctions of deity. It left the mystery of the future as mysterious as ever and yet as imperative as ever. Whatever philosophy of nature it offered, it gave no adequate philosophy of Man. It was busy with the physiology of Humanity and propounded inconceivable and repulsive guesses about the origin of Humanity." (North American Review, December, 1900, p. 825.)

From the opposite side of the field, President Woodrow Wilson writes: "This is the dis-service scientific study has done for us; it has given us agnosticism in the realm of philosophy, scientific anarchism in the field of politics. It has made the legislator confident that he can create and the philosopher sure that God cannot." (Forum, December, 1896.)

Another feature which strikes the non-scientific mind curiously is the wide differences among great scientists as to the facts of nature. The age of the earth is variously declared to be ten million years by some, and by others equally able, a thousand million years. The temperature of its interior is stated to be 1,530 degrees by one, and 350,000 degrees by another. Herschel calculated the mountains on the moon to be half a mile high, Ferguson said they were fifteen miles high. The height of the Aurora Borealis is guessed from two and a half to one hundred and sixty miles, and its nature is still more widely described. The delta at the mouth of the Mississippi was calculated by Lyell to have been 100,000 years in forming. Gen. Humphrey, of the United States survey, estimated it at 4,000 years, and M. Beaument at 1,300 years.

The deposits of carbonate of lime on the floor of Kent Cavern in England have been estimated by different scientists to have been from a thousand to a million years in forming.

The discovery of radium and other similar substances, it is said, is almost revolutionizing the theories of the constitution of matter and affecting all physical science.

These facts are not cited to discredit science. No one in his senses would fail to acknowledge our great debt to the earnest and laborious workers in these varying fields. But these instances of many such are cited to show that there is need for caution in accepting proposed theories.

In undertaking to account for the universe, Evolution faces four problems. 1. The origin of matter. 2. The origin of force. 3. The formation and orderly arrangement of the universe. 4. The origin of life. In all of these it fails; it confesses its failure in the first two and last, and makes ludicrous attempts to explain the third. We will consider each in turn.

1. Evolution fails to account for the origin of matter. Spencer says this is the Unknowable. So that Spencer's great philosophy rests on what he doesn't know and cannot find out. Darwin said as to the origin of things, "I am in a hopeless muddle." Prof. Edward Clodd wrote: "Of the beginning of what was before the present state of things, we know nothing and speculation is futile, but since everything points to the finite duration of the present creation, we must make a start somewhere." (Story of Creation, p. 137.) Science is what we know. Therefore Evolution rests upon an unscientific foundation. Nor is there any other account conceivable than that the Bible gives. As long as this first and fundamental fact is not solved, the theory must be content to be at most a limited one, and far from being that sweeping discovery which its advocates assert it to be.

2. Evolution fails to account for the origin of Force. The great forces which animate the universe, such as gravity, heat, motion and light, must be accounted for by this theory to give it the standing it demands. It makes no attempt to do this. Evolution is silent when we ask, Whence came these mighty forces? Calling them Laws of Nature does not answer the question. Laws need law makers and enforcers also. Laws do not enforce themselves. As forces, they show the ceaseless giving out of energy. Where is the dynamo from which this perpetual energy originated and still proceeds?

In this connection, let us notice the reticence and limitations of really great scientists as to the nature of these energies. Lord Kelvin, the greatest living scientist, said at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he was president: "One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perseveringly for fifty-five years. That word is failure. I know no more of electric and magnetic force, or of the relation between ether, electricity and ponderable matter, or of chemical affinity, than I knew and tried to teach to my students of natural philosophy fifty years ago in my first session as professor."

Haeckel himself, the greatest living evolutionist, admits: "We grant at once that the innermost character of nature is just as little understood by us as it was by Anaximander and Empedocles 2,400 years ago.... We grant that the essence of substance becomes more mysterious and enigmatic the more deeply we penetrate into the knowledge of its attributes." (Riddle of the Universe.)

3. Evolution fails to account for the orderly movements of the heavenly bodies which have the accuracy of a chronometer, aye, which are the standards by which all chronometers are regulated, so that the astronomer can calculate to a second when the heavenly bodies shall pass any particular point of view or form their many conjunctions. There is no collision, no noise. "There is no speech nor language, their voice is not heard."

Our Solar System is unique in the heavens. Prof. See tells us there is no other like it in the regularity of its orbits, and in its distant position from the powerful attractions of the mighty systems of the heavens. The earth, too, is the only world so far known to be advanced enough for the production of life. Its situation is far enough from the sun to be beyond its powerful heat and electric energy and yet near enough to preserve and continue all life. The arrangement of its surface into land and water proportions gives the requisite amount of moisture over the land areas. The atmosphere is mixed of gases in just the right proportions for life. All this speaks as loudly as any mechanism can speak, of intention and benevolence and control and careful adjustment; far from that haphazard effect which comes from the undirected working of "resident forces."

Evolution declares the universe began with a nebulous mass, which Tyndall says was "fire-mist," and contracted as it became cold; but Spencer says it was a cold cloud which became heated as it contracted. We are left to the perplexity of deciding for ourselves which theory we will accept. This is only one of many such contradictions we shall meet. But however, or whatever it was, it organized itself into the wonderful universe of stars by a rotary motion which the contraction produced, and this threw off portions as a carriage wheel throws off mud, each portion taking up a similar motion and cooling in a similar fashion until it became cool enough for living things.

Proof for all this is supposed to be seen in a nebula which is seen in the constellation Orion, which has a spiral form and is supposed to be a world in the making.

But in February, 1901, a new star appeared surrounded by a nebula and this in rapid motion from the center. This sudden appearance of a world in a nebulous state seems like the reversing of the evolutionary process or indeed like a world being destroyed and reduced to its first estate. Other facts are also contradictory, such as the motion or revolution of some of the satelites in a reverse order from that demanded by the theory.

Indeed the whole nebular theory is now being called in question.

Prof. George Frederick Wright of Oberlin University, thus writes of it:

"The nebular hypothesis, which all forms of evolution now assume for a beginning, involves the supposition that the molecules of matter composing the solar system were originally diffused through space like the particles of mist in a vast fogbank, and that then, under the action of gravitation, they began to approach each other and to collect in masses, which began to revolve about their axes and to move in orbits around the center of attraction. Every step in this supposition involves an added mystery. The existence of the molecules in their original diffused state is but the beginning of the mystery, though that is utterly incomprehensible.

"The power of gravitation which compels the separated particles to approach each other is an utter mystery, which has completely baffled all efforts at explanation by scientific men. The revolution of the various masses of the solar system on their axes and in their orbits is another mystery for which there is no solution.

"Thus is the thorough-going evolutionist at every point confronted with an insoluble mystery, and he deceives himself if he fancies that he has discovered anything which will take the place of the Christian's conception of God as the creator, sustainer and ruler of all things." (Record-Herald, Chicago, Dec. 24, 1902.)

Other facts are even more perplexing to this theory. The moon is moving from her place at an increasing rate and astronomy cannot account for it. The earth's axis of revolution has varied from time to time. Only one star in a thousand has ever been catalogued. Of only about a hundred is the calculation of the parallax possible, so distant are they.

As to our earth, a well-known writer says: "No one of standing in the scientific world of to-day is willing to go on record as having a theory of his own regarding the internal fires of this planet or attempting to account for their origin."

In view of this state of uncertainty, it seems to the non-scientific mind hazardous to project across these vast ages a guess as to what the conditions were and how the universe originated. And above all to found on this guess a vast philosophy of the universe affecting all we hold precious for this life and that to come. Well may we hesitate before such demands.

4. The origin of life is a problem Evolution has sought in vain to solve or account for by its natural or resident forces.

Prof. Le Conte labors hard to show that it might have come from the union of the four gases, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, under some peculiar circumstances. If he had said under the direct act of the Creator we could assent cheerfully. For these do enter into the substance which forms the bodies of living things. But the claim of Evolution is that all came by "resident forces," self-operating. Once admit the direct act of the Creator, and, as Haeckel says, they might as well admit it along the whole process, for the argument for a single instance is valid for the whole. So they will have none of it.

Prof. Le Conte labors to show that protoplasm might be self-originating, but Prof. Conn says, "Protoplasm is not a chemical compound but a mechanism.... Unorganized protoplasm does not exist.... It could never have been produced by chemical process. Chemistry has produced starches, fats, albumens, but not protoplasm." (Method of Evolution.)

Lord Kelvin, in writing to the London Times, said:

"Forty years ago I asked Liebig, walking somewhere in the country, if he believed that the grass and flowers which we saw around us grew by mere chemical forces. He answered, 'No, no more than I could believe that a book of botany describing them could grow by mere chemical forces.'"

Tyndall, after laborious experiments during eight months, thus candidly states the result, in an address before the Royal Institute, London: "From the beginning to the end of the inquiry, there is not, as you have seen, a shadow of evidence in favor of the doctrine of spontaneous generation.... In the lowest, as in the highest of organized creatures, the method of nature is, that life shall be the issue of antecedent life."

And Mr. Huxley also admitted, "The doctrine that life can only come from life is victorious all along the line." Prof. Conn states, "There is not the slightest evidence that living matter could arise from non-living matter. Spontaneous generation is universally given up." (Evolution of To-day, p. 26.)

Wilson, the great authority on the cell says, "The study of the cell has seemed to expand rather than narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world." (The Cell in Development and Inheritance, p. 330.)

Here then, is the greatest chasm of all: Evolution fails at the very start in the story of life. Yet this is its chosen field. On this depends the whole theory. If there was a Creator at the origin of life, why not at the origin of all living things? It is simply a question of degree. The making of a single cell, the simplest creature that lives, is as great a mystery as that of man. Conceptually the one is as possible as the other.[1]

This is Evolution's great field of labor. It was this which mainly occupied Darwin's labors and is the basis of the whole sweeping theory. This suggested man's animal origin and all that follows as to man's history and religion and civilization. So that this is the basal part of Evolution. Yet against this fundamental argument, two great charges are made and admitted: First, not a single case of evolution of species is known, and, second, no law or force by which such changes could take place has been discovered. We will consider these two fatal defects.

In support of this assertion we might quote the admissions of nearly every evolutionary writer. Prof. Winchell writes upon this point as follows:

"The great stubborn fact which every form of the theory encounters at the very outset is, that notwithstanding variations, we are ignorant of a single instance of the derivation of one good species from another. The world has been ransacked for an example, and occasionally it has seemed for a time as if an instance had been found of the origination of a genuine species by so-called natural agencies, but we only give utterance to the admissions of all the recent advocates of derivation theories, when we announce that the long-sought experimentum crucis has not been discovered." (The Doctrine of Evolution, p. 54.)

Prof. Conn, in one of the most recent works upon Evolution, says: "It is true enough that naturalists have been unable to find a single unquestioned instance of a new species.... It will be admitted at the outset on all sides, that no unquestioned instance has been observed of one species being derived from another.... It is therefore impossible at present to place the question beyond dispute." (Evolution of To-day, p. 23.)

Here then is a fatal defect. The world has been ransacked for evidence, the museums are full of specimens, the secrets of nature have been explored in every land, the minutest creatures discovered and analyzed. We have the remains of animals and plants of many kinds thousands of years old, such as the mummied remains from Egypt, and yet not a single instance of the change Evolution asserts has ever been known! Yet this change of species is the fundamental argument of Evolution. On this rests its theory of the origin of man and all that flows from that assertion, and this basal assertion is absolutely without an actual instance of fact.

The changes in certain species such as roses, primroses, tomatoes, pigeons and dogs, are not new species, but only varieties, having none of the traits of species, easily intermingling, propagating, and readily reverting to their original forms, changes which true species are not susceptible of. Darwin admitted that the continued fertility of these varieties was one of his greatest difficulties. One of the definitions of species is that they will not interbreed and propagate. So that hybrids are sterile. "After its kind," is the primal law of nature, and as Dr. Jesse B. Thomas says, "The stubborn mule still blocks the way of Evolution."

Evolution is not a force. There is no power or cause which is known as Evolution. The word simply describes the order in which things have been supposed to come. We must draw a clear line of distinction between Cause and Order of Appearance. There is a certain order in the succession of living things as they came, but what caused that order is the very question at issue. The Duke of Argyle warns against confusing these when he says, "Evolution puts forward a visible order of phenomena as a complete and all-sufficient account of its own origin and cause." (Theories of Darwin.)

The absence of an agreed cause is admitted by evolutionists. Huxley says, "The great need of Evolution is a theory of derivation." (Man's Place in Nature.) Darwin admits, "Our ignorance of the laws of derivation is profound." (Descent of Man.) "The laws governing inheritance are for the most part unknown." (Origin of Species.) Prof. Conn in Evolution of To-day, says, "No two scientists are agreed as to what is the cause of the supposed changes of species." (p. 337.) Prof. Clodd traces it to the protoplasm which forms the germ and ends his exhaustive treatise by saying the cause is still unknown. (Method of Evolution.)

Darwin's theory was Natural Selection. It is this which is technically called "Darwinism," although some writers apply that name to the general subject of Evolution. Natural selection is the theory that inasmuch as minute variations occur in the struggle of living things for existence, the variations which would prove favorable to the welfare of the animal would be transmitted to its progeny and be increased and so, in many generations, the accumulating effects, aided by climate, food, sexual selection, and other causes, would amount to a new species. Prof. Conn says of this theory, "Natural selection is almost universally acknowledged as insufficient to meet the facts of nature, since many facts of life cannot be explained by it." (p. 243.)

Mr. Huxley said long before: "After much consideration, and with assuredly no bias against Mr. Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction that as the evidence now stands it is not absolutely proved that a group of animals, having all the characteristics exhibited by species in nature, has ever been originated by selection, whether natural or artificial." (Lay Sermons, 295.)

The theories as to what produced the supposed changes are as many as the writers on Evolution. Prof. Conn says, "All agreement disappears. Each thinker has his own views." And adds, "Thus far we have seen no indication of the manner in which this evolution has been manifested." (p. 20.) Prof. J. Arthur Thomson, lecturer on zoology in the School of Medicine, Edinburgh, said: "Unless we can give some theory of the origin of variations we have no material for further consideration. Unfortunately we are very ignorant about the whole matter." The various writers ascribe the changes to food, climate, sexual selection, extraordinary births, isolation and many other supposed causes. All these have been in turn combatted by other evolutionist writers, and the war goes on and has produced libraries of volumes. It is around this that the conflict rages and the war is a merry one.

It is when Evolution gives the particulars of these changes that it becomes especially interesting. We will, by way of lighting up the examination, consider a few of the stories it tells us as to how things came.

Spencer tells us how the backbone came to be, for the primitive animals had none. Prof. Conn quotes his account as follows: "He thinks the segmentation, the division of the spinal column into vertebrae, arose as the result of strains. Originally the vertebrate was unsegmented, but in bending its body from side to side in locomotion through the water, its spinal column became divided by the action of simple mechanical force." (Evolution of To-day, p. 65.) Thus what we usually consider a serious calamity, the breaking of one's backbone, became one of the greatest blessings, for what would we be without flexible backs, with which to follow the meanderings of Evolution?

Evolution also tells us how legs originated. The earliest animals were without legs. Some animal in this legless state found on its body some slight excrescences or warts, which aided materially its progress as it wiggled along, and thus it acquired the habit of using these convenient warts. This habit it transmitted to its posterity and they increased the habit until the excrescences, lengthened and strengthened by use, became legs of a rudimentary kind, which by further use developed a system of bones and muscles and nerves and joints such as we have ourselves.

Spencer's account of the origin of quadrupeds is that the earliest animals propagated by dividing into two parts, and in some of these the division was not perfectly made, and so the animal had duplicated ends, each of which had legs, forming finally the present quadruple arrangement.

Eyes originated from some animal having pigment spots or freckles on the sides of its head, which, turned to the sun, agreeably affected the animal so that it acquired the habit of turning that side of its head to the sun, and its posterity inherited the same habit and passed it on to still other generations. The pigment spot acquired sensitiveness by use and in time a nerve developed which was the beginning of the eye. From this incipient eye came the present wonderful combination of lenses, nerves and muscles, all so accurately adjusted that, of the sixteen possible adjustments of each part, only once in a hundred thousand times would they come together, as they now are, by chance.

Land animals began thus, according to Evolution: In a time of drought some water animals, stranded by the receding waters, were obliged thenceforth to adopt land manners and methods of living. Although, strangely, the whale by the same cause was forced to the water, for it was once a land animal, but in a season of drought was obliged to seek the water's edge for the scant remaining herbage, and, finding the water agreeable, remained there and its posterity also, and finally, the teeth and legs no longer needed, became decadent and abortive as we see them now. Darwin inferred the history of the whale's marine career from seeing a bear swimming in a pool and catching insects with its wide-open mouth as it so skimmed the water's surface.

The same drought produced another and wonderful change, for it is to this that the giraffe owes his long legs and neck. The herbage on the lower branches withering up, he was obliged to stretch his neck and legs to reach the higher branches. This increased, as all such changes increased, in his posterity, and finally after many generations produced the present immense reaching powers of the giraffe. So that the same drought deprived the whale of his legs and conferred them upon the giraffe.

The mere recital of these speculations will be enough for all who have not surrendered their judgment to the keeping of others. It seems scarcely necessary to assure readers unacquainted with the theory, that this is not exaggeration or caricature. We have simply abbreviated, and rendered into untechnical language, the accounts of evolutionary writers given in all seriousness and with high-sounding scientific terms. Any such work will give many specimens of similar accounts. Reply seems unnecessary, yet must be made.

1. All this is pure speculation. Not a single such change is known, or has been observed.

2. All is based on Natural Selection, which evolutionists have themselves discarded; yet for want of any other theory they are constantly obliged to fall back upon it.

3. Such acquired traits are not transmitted, as Prof. Thomson of Edinborough, tells us. Only characteristics inherited, or congenital in the fertilized egg cell, are so transmitted. (Outlines of Zoology, p. 66.) The "sports" such as the white robins and crows occasionally seen, disappear as individuals and do not propagate as distinct types.

Let us pause here to contemplate the spectacle of a theory, which its own advocates admit is unproven, and which has been opposed by some of the greatest minds, a theory which has not a single direct fact of evidence, and has no way of accounting for the changes which it declares have taken place; such a theory accepted as the basis of every science, the foundation of a universal philosophy, taught in educational institutions to youth as if demonstrated, demanding immediate and universal submission, undertaking to revise Scripture, to revolutionize theology, and to prescribe what we must do to be saved and to save others! Surely it is safe to hesitate before such demands.

We will not discount the great service done humanity in the patient research in the realms of nature by laborious students. All this should be given weight. We also admit the value of a theory as a means to the ascertaining of truth. But we cannot consent that the vast interests affected by Evolution shall be decided by "the balancings of probabilities," or the mooted value of a theory. This is no place for theories, which must be held tentatively, if at all. This is a matter which affects the belief and lives and hopes of millions, their welfare here and hereafter. Religion is too sacred to be made a shuttlecock tossed about in the arena of intellectual amusement.

Sir J. William Dawson said of some writers and their theories: "To launch a clever and startling fallacy, which will float a week and stir up a hard fight, seems as great a triumph as the discovery of an important fact or law; and the honest student is distracted with the multitude of doctrines and hustled aside by the crowd of ambitious groundlings." (Story of the Earth and Man, 313.)

Evolution has much to say for itself, but, as we see, it is all of the nature of circumstantial evidence. This seems to the non-scientific mind as strange for anything called science, which we have been accustomed to think means something known or proven. We have been accustomed to see cases thrown out of court when presenting no evidence and to fare badly in general on mere circumstantial evidence. However, as Evolution is so persistent for a hearing, we must examine what it has to advance for our consideration. Its arguments are drawn from Geology, Classification, Distribution of Plants and Animals, Morphology and Embryology.

The argument from this science is that the fossils appear in the strata of the earth in advancing order, the simplest first, and more complex afterwards. The assumption is that the higher came from the lower, by a chain of infinitesimal changes, through a long series of ages. Now the facts are not as claimed. We will show this later. But admitting that they are, the argument is wanting.

1. All this is pure assumption. No such changes are known in existing species to have ever taken place, and the assumption that these changes took place in geologic ages is wholly unwarranted. If it cannot be predicated of the animals we see and know, how can it be asserted of a period millenniums ago?

2. Mere succession is not evolution. The coming in orderly succession is evidence of some plan but not necessarily of evolution. An intelligent Creator would work in the same way, especially if he had intelligent beings to instruct thereby, at the time or afterwards.

3. Evolution in comparing the successive comings of the rocky strata and the fossil creatures, compares two kinds of things that cannot be made analogous. Rocks are not produced by evolution, the higher growing out of the lower, as is claimed of species. That certain species appeared with the lower rocks and strata, and higher orders with later rocks and strata only proves of one, as of the other, an advancing order of production but tells nothing of the cause of either.

4. We are supported in these doubts as to the value of Evolution's argument from Geology by the fact, that many of the most eminent geologists deny any proof of evolution in their chosen science.

Sir Roderick Murchison said, "I know as much of nature in her geologic ages as any living man, and I fearlessly say that our geologic record does not afford one syllable of evidence in support of Darwin's theory." The great Swiss geologist, Joachim Barrande states, "One cannot conceive why in all rocks whatever and in all countries upon the two continents, all relics of the intervening types should have vanished.... The discordances are so numerous and pronounced, that the composition of the real fauna seems to have been calculated by design for contradicting everything which the theories (of Evolution) teach us respecting the first appearance and primitive evolution of the forms of life upon the earth." (Quoted by Winchell, in Doctrine of Evolution, p. 142.)

Prof. Conn, an evolutionist, admits the presence of many facts disclosed by geology which oppose the theory of Evolution. He says, "In the earliest records geology discloses, we find not a few generalized types but well differentiated forms, nearly all the sub-kingdoms as they now exist, five-sixths of our orders, nearly an equal proportion of sub-orders, a great many families and some of our present species. All this is a surprise and an unexplained problem." Such a result, he says, is not what Evolution would lead us to expect. All the important classes of animals made their appearance without warning. (Evolution of To-day, pp. 6, 100, 103, 118.)

Haeckel writes, "We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that various groups have from the time of their first appearance, burst out into an exuberant growth of modification of form, size and members, with all possible, and one might almost say, impossible shapes, and they have done this within a comparatively short time, after which they have died out not less rapidly." (Last Link, p. 144.)

The testimony of geology, as adduced by geologists and even by evolutionists, is that it does not sustain the claims of Evolution. Species existed in present form from the earliest times. Geologic species came in suddenly and went out suddenly. Some of the simplest remain unchanged through all earth's transformations to the present time. (Dr. Robert Patterson, Errors of Evolution, p. 221.) The great fossil cemeteries show that the living creatures fell in serried ranks, overtaken by cataclysms, in every act of life. Le Conte tries to explain this by saying that there were "paroxysmal" eras, but what the paroxysms were, or whence they came, he does not say. The whole testimony is against Evolution and reverts to proof of the Bible story of Creation. Professor Adam Sedgwick says: "At succeeding epochs, new tribes of beings were called into existence, not merely as the progeny of those that had appeared before them, but as new and living proofs of creative interference."

This is one of the strong points of Evolution. It is claimed that plants and animals can be so classified in an ascending order that it is evident the higher came out of the lower. We object as follows:

1. There is no classification agreed upon by scientists. This comes largely from want of agreement as to what a species is. Scientists differ widely and radically. Spencer presents a review of all these schemes of classification and ends by saying, "It is absurd to attempt a definite scheme of relationship." His own plan of the scheme he says is the figure of a "laurel bush squashed flat by a descending plane." (Principles of Biology, p. 389.) This agrees with his statement as to the absurdity of such schemes. Some arrange the whole in a continuous straight line from the lowest up.

Darwin thought the whole came from half a dozen germinal forms. Where these came from he did not say. Dr. J. Clark Ridpath said, "The eagle was always an eagle, the man always man. Every species of living organism has I believe come up by a like process from its own primordial germ." (Arena, June, 1879.) Haeckel insists that the theory demands but a single primeval germ as the ancestor of all living things. He presented a tree, showing twenty or more stages between primeval protoplasm and man, but this has been now rejected by evolutionists. Prof. D. Kerfoot Schults represents the classification as follows: "If all the animals that have ever existed on the earth be represented by a tree, those now existing on the earth will be represented by the topmost twigs and leaves, and the extinct forms will be represented by the main trunk and branches." (First Book on Organic Evolution, p. xiv.)

But the source of all, the primeval protoplasm, is wanting. The missing primeval germ or germs leaves the tree without a root, and Prof. Conn tells that even the sub-kingdoms are not united by fossils. Spencer admits that not a single species has been traced to its source or its family tree completed, and even the ancestors of our living species are wanting.

Prof. Dana admitted as follows, "If ever the links (upon which the doctrine of Evolution depends) had an actual existence, their disappearance without a trace left behind is altogether inexplicable." Here then is a tree without root or trunk or branches, and having only the tips of outer twigs and leaves, in other words, a phantom tree, a fit representation of the theory for which it stands.

The present orders of plants and animals give a strong argument against Evolution. It has been seen that Succession is not Evolution. The mere coming of animals in orderly succession shows only plan, but the means of executing that plan is not shown thereby. But further, while in the geologic ages there was Succession, here in our age is Simultaneousness of species, two very different and contradictory phenomena. Why has Succession ceased? Why have not the higher orders pushed the lower out, as in the geologic ages, if Evolution was the cause? Yet here they all exist quietly together as if they knew nothing of Evolution or its requirements.

Nor have any such changes occurred in thousands of years, as the mummied remains of cats and crocodiles and ibises in Egypt show. Surely 4,000 years would show some evolution if there had been such a thing; but it is not seen in all the 4,000 years, or even in the more distant period since primeval man existed, for we have the remains of animals found with man in his early history. Out of 98 species, 57 are the same as we have to-day unchanged, and still others, as the lingula, the same as in ages past. Thus Evolution's trusted argument from Classification utterly fails of demonstration.

The distribution of plants and animals is another favorite argument of this theory. Certain animals are said to be found only in certain regions, the bison only in North America, the kangaroo only in Australia, the armadillo only in Mexico. Evolution triumphantly asks, Were they created only in these places? We now simply remark that difficulties as to Creation do not prove Evolution. Evolution says the ancestors of these came from other parts ages ago and by long isolation and environment became what they are.

Facts again are against the theory. Huxley himself says that in the neighborhood of Oxford are animal remains like those of Australia; that Britain was once connected with the continent, and so these animals passed over. The same is true he says of the isolated fauna of New Zealand and South America. (Address in Daily Post, March 27, 1871.)

This argument might be used against Evolution as well as the previous arguments. Two islands in the Pacific, only fifteen miles apart, have the animals of Asia in one and of Australia in the other. One of the Bermudas has lizards like those of Africa and another like those of America. In fact it is evident that animals and plants have scattered widely.

The comparative study of plants and animals presents another argument for Evolution. It is found, for example, that there is a similarity of plan in the fin of the fish, the wing of the bird, the flipper of the whale, the leg of the animal and the arm of the man. So also in a measure with all other corresponding parts. This Evolution says, shows that all these animals are genetically connected and all came from the same ancestors.

Huxley himself replies to this argument in these words, "No amount of purely morphological evidence can suffice to prove that things came into existence in one way rather than another." (Study of Zoology, p. 86.) Another great scientist, Prof. Quatrefages, professor of anthropology in the Museum of Natural Sciences, Paris, writes on this as follows: "Without leaving domain of facts, and only judging from what we know, we can say, that morphology itself justifies the conclusion that one species has never produced another by derivation." Prof. Conn admits, after going through the whole subject with the latest facts, that unless some further explanation can be found, homology does not prove descent. (Evolution of To-day, p. 76.)

This resemblance of parts is just what we should expect in things originating from one intelligent operator, whether Creator or manufacturer. It is found in every factory. The wheel is the same in the wheelbarrow, the cart, carriage and locomotive. In fact, uniformity of plan proves unity in the cause, and not the diversity of chance causes claimed by Evolution. If Evolution were true, there would be as much diversity among organs as there is among the forms of organs. If the operation of chance conditions has resulted in radical changes in the forms of organs, why then is there not this similar diversity among the organs themselves? Evolution has no reply. Creation has such reply; God is one and his plan one. Why should not the forms of all these things be alike, seeing they are to live in the same climates, eat the same food and propagate in the same manner?

The rudimentary, abortive and discarded parts found in some animals form one of the strongest arguments Evolution advances. The favorite instance it presents is found in the horse. The horse walks on one toe and has splints further up the leg, which they tell us are the remains of the other toes, and the callosities on the leg are the remains of thumbs. The remains have been found of an animal as large as a dog which resembles the horse and has two toes, and another older animal, as large as a fox, which has four toes. Putting these side by side, Evolution calls them all horses, and says the one-toed animal came from the two-toed, and he from the four-toed, and that this proves the evolution of the horse from the Eohippus (Old Horse) as it is called.

1. Bearing in mind that this conclusion is pure assumption, and only inference at best, let us remark that it violates the primal law of evolution laid down by Spencer, that of evolution from the simple to the complex. It should have shown first the one-toed horse, then his development into a two-toed animal, and so on up to a horse having five toes. This would be evolution. As it is, we see the opposite of evolution, degradation, which often occurs in nature, and we see few if any instances of any subsequent restoration to primal conditions.

2. Besides all this, that most necessary thing to a good horse, a pedigree, is wanting. The connecting links are all missing in his ancestral tree. For the ancestors of that first of horses are unknown. But he is not alone in this, for even his owner has the same sad want of proven descent, as we will see later. Just how the horse lost his appendages, and why he dropped toe after toe in this extraordinary manner the story leaves untold.

3. But another great objection exists. It takes time to breed horses. It required all of the Tertiary period to produce the one-toed animal from the four-toed ancestor and much longer time was required to develop him from a totally different animal, where more than a mere question of toes comes in. For we have to face the difficulty, and the time necessary, to develop a good horse, say from an alligator, and the still greater task of producing him from an animal without toes at all, or even legs, or anything to hang legs on, and simply a bag of jelly-like substance, which the evolutionist assures us was the ancestor of all horses and their riders. If it appears to the reader that life is too short for such business we can say the geologist agrees with him, for he tells us the age of the old earth itself was not one tenth long enough to produce Evolution's horses, and still less their riders.

Another instance of Evolution's proofs is the swim-bladder of fishes. This Evolution sometimes states is an incipient lung, and that the fish learned in a drought to breathe air. Sometimes, as the need of the theory demands, the swim-bladder is claimed as the relic of a discarded lung. These however are two different and opposing claims. Either as a prophecy or a relic the swim-bladder is fatal to the claims of Evolution. If it is an incipient lung, then here is intention, which Evolution rejects. If a relic, here is retrogression, the opposite of evolution. The abortive organ is one of the difficulties of the theory which Darwin admitted, and Prof. Conn tells us, is not yet answered. Prof. Huxley said, "Either these rudiments are of no use to the animal, in which case they ought to have disappeared, or they are of some use to the animal, in which case they are arguments for teleology." (Darwinism, p. 151.)

Evolution derives its greatest argument from the study of the embryo. It makes three claims. First, that the germ of everything, plant and animal, is the same, neither chemical analysis nor the microscope showing any difference. If therefore, such vast variety could come from origins so alike, why could not all we see come from a similar origin, the primitive animal, which was also such a simple cell? Second, in the growth of the embryo it recapitulates the ancestral history of that particular organism. Third, all this when compared with the geologic record, and the present orders of living things as classified, presents the full succession of the forms of life, the one supplying what the other lacks.

These claims must be examined separately.

1. The claim that the germs of all living things are alike is not true. The resemblance is only superficial. Protoplasm, of which the germ is composed, differs and is not homogeneous material. That which builds the muscles is one kind, and that which builds brain and nerves is entirely different. Prof. Clodd tells us it is not a chemical compound but a mechanism. Nor could the germs be alike. For the plant breathes carbon, the animal oxygen. The one oxidizes, the other deoxidizes. There are still greater and deeper differences.

Tyndall says, "Under the most homogeneous material, there lie structural energies of such complexity, that we must question whether we have the mental elements with which to grapple with them.... The most trained and disciplined imagination retires in bewilderment from the problem. In that realm, inaccessible to everything but mind, the wonders of Creation are wrought out.... Here is determined the germ and afterwards the complete organization." (Fragments of Science, p. 153.) So that these cells or germs, which appear so alike, contain each in itself the entire plan and life of the coming creature, to the color of a feather, the trick of a hunting dog and the smile and dimples of a child.

2. The second claim that the course of each embryo traverses its ancestral history, is not nearly so vociferously made as some years ago. Prof. A. Agassiz writes, "Anything beyond a general parallelism is hopeless." Prof. Conn admits "Embryology alone is not a safe guide, and only when verified by the fossils can it be relied upon. It seldom gives a true history.... The parallel is largely a delusion.... It often gives a false history." (Evolution of To-day, pp. 125, 134, 137, 150.) Prof. Thomson writes, "Recapitulation is due to no dead hands of the past, but to physiological conditions which we are unable to discover." (Outline of Zoology, p. 63.) He also says that the young mammal was never like a worm, a fish, or reptile. It was at the most like the young of these in their various stages. So far from the course of all being alike, Baer says he can tell the difference between the embryo of the common fowl and duck on the second day. (Principles of Biology, p. 1.) So far as this claim holds good, it forms an argument against evolution. For here is a goal or ideal to which all things strive. This is intention, and plan and purpose, all of which is opposed to the main idea of Evolution. It is in line with Creation.

3. The culminating argument for Evolution is given by arranging in ascending classification the geologic orders of life (which we have seen do not appear as Evolution demands), and placing alongside of these the classification of present animals (which we have seen is not agreed upon, and is as diverse as the writers themselves), and then laying alongside of these two artificial arrangements, the embryonic recital (which is now doubted and is often false to the past history), and triumphantly pointing to the three-fold combination. The gaps geology shows are thus filled by present forms and what both lack, by the embryonic recital.

Here are compared three things which radically differ. The geologic record shows progress from lower to higher, although not that complete nor unvarying record necessary to the theory, while the present orders of life exist simultaneously. Both show the existence of separate things having no individual connection. The embryo is a single individual, designed from its conception on a predetermined plan, animated by internal forces, and limited to a certain end and life. It is as Dawson says, a "closed series." The worlds of living and fossil creatures consist of myriads of individuals, under many widely different conditions, and aimed at widely different ends and lives. The two are contradictory for the uses of Evolution.

What we do see in these three facts are three marks of personal intelligence. In embryonic growth we see the plan of production. In the coming of the fossil creatures we see the progress of the plan in historical appearance. In the present display of nature we see the ultimate purpose of the whole. It all forms one great consistent plan and bears all the marks of personal and creative work.

So that summing up the argument from comparison of the three facts, the geologic order, the present classification, and the embryonic growth, we find in the first absolute separation of species, in the second no genetic connection as already shown under that argument, and in the third different phenomena having no points in common with the other two. The whole argument then fails of conclusion and reverts as the former do, to proof against Evolution.

A theory to be proven must meet the facts and account for them. The theory in question fails lamentably in this. There are countless facts not only unaccounted for but diametrically opposed to it and antagonizing it. We cite some of these:

1. Degeneration in nature. Nature shows a constant tendency downward. Prof. E. D. Cope, an eminent evolutionist, writes: "The retrogradation in nature is as well or nearly as well established as evolution." The wild varieties of plants and animals are far inferior to the cultivated kinds. The older species are far superior to the present. The saber-toothed tiger is far superior to the present animal. So also is the Mammoth as compared with the elephant. Plants show degeneration in colors. The order of superiority is from yellow, the lowest, to white, pink, red, purple and blue, the highest. When they drop from blue to yellow, it is degeneration. Some now having green flowers once had colored blossoms. Progress is not seen to be upward in the flowers. So also parasitism is degeneration both in plants and animals. The course of nature is not, as it has not been, constant development upward. The scripture statement "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain," describes accurately the condition of nature (Ro. 8:22.)

2. Continued unchanged species for ages. The crustacea, for example in Lake Tanganyika, Africa, remain as the receding ocean left them ages ago.

3. Species instead of increasing in number have decreased. There were 500 species of trilobites. They have all disappeared. There were 900 species of ammonites; all are gone. Of the 450 species of nautilus, only three remain. Indeed whole families have become obliterated. All this is antagonistic to Evolution.

4. Species continue the same under the most diverse environments. Environment is claimed as a cause of the changes demanded by Evolution. But the same species exist in the most diverse regions, e. g., mosquitoes, whales and oaks.

5. Adaptation of one species to another. Darwin says that a single case of the adaptation of one species to another would be fatal to his theory. Yet he himself gives the data for hundreds of such adaptations. He adduces the fact that a hundred head of red clover produced 2,700 seeds. A similar number protected from insects produced none. The fertilization of plants by insects is well known. The Smyrna fig is said to owe its value to its fertilization by the piercing of an insect. Some of these insects have been introduced into California for that purpose. There is an orchid which can be fertilized only by an insect falling into a cup of liquid which the flower has, and escaping through a side opening in which it touches the pollen.

Dr. Andrew Wilson writes: The colors of flowers—nay, even the little splashes of a hue or tint seen on a petal—are intended to attract insects that they may carry off the fertilizing dust, or pollen, to other flowers. It is to this end also that your flowers are many of them sweet-scented. The perfume is another kind of invitation to the insect world. The honey they secrete forms a third attraction—the most practical of all.

6. Complex adjustments of nature. Evolution in vain attempts to account for the wonderful complex adjustments we see in nature, such as the mimicry of animals and plants; the walking stick so closely resembles a twig that it deceives the closest observer. The withered leaf butterfly, with spots and wrinkles, is exactly like the thing it imitates. This is true also of the leaf butterfly and of another which exactly resembles a bird's dropping. Evolution cannot account for the ventriloquism of insects, such as the cricket and tree toad; the battery of the electric eel; the beauty of insects and fish and shells and birds and flowers, especially the harmony of their colors. Edible insects are plainly colored, the poisonous kinds highly colored. Some butterflies have "scare-heads" on their wings, exactly resembling an owl's head, and other insects have similar frightful appearances which they thrust out when attacked. All this tells of design and interest and often has the appearance of humor in the creation of these numerous creatures.

7. The mathematical adjustments of nature are as exact as the multiplication table. Illustrations of this are the accuracy of the orbits of the heavenly bodies and the law of gravitation. The growth of the cell proceeds on geometrical progression in the division of parts into 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. The climbing plants form their coils with mathematical accuracy and proportion. The proportions in which chemicals will mix is mathematically fixed.

Prof. Tyndall thus calls our attention to crystallization: "By permitting alum to crystallize in this slow way we obtain these perfect octahedrons; by allowing carbonate of lime to crystallize, nature produces these beautiful rhomboids; when silica crystallizes we have formed the hexagonal prisms capped at the end by pyramids; by allowing saltpeter to crystallize, we have these prismatic masses, and when carbon crystallizes we have the diamond." (Fragments of Science, p. 357.) "Looking at it mentally we see the molecules [of sulphate of soda] like disciplined squadrons under a governing eye, arranging themselves into battalions, gathering around distinct centers and forming themselves into distinct solid masses, which after a time assume the visible shape of the crystal now held in my hand. Here then is an architect at work, who makes no chips nor din, and who is now building the particles into crystals similar in shape to these beautiful masses we see upon the table." (Belfast Address.)

8. The structure of living things shows the true principles of architecture. A Mr. McLaughlin, a noted Scotch mathematician, tried by mathematical calculation to ascertain the shape of a building which would contain the most room with least material and yet embody the greatest architectural strength in its retaining walls. After many laborious calculations, he found after he had arrived at a conclusion that the honey bee had long before given the same plan of structure in its cell. The human skull is a true dome, and the spinal column a true pillar. The ribs of the ship are copied from the fish, the yacht from the duck, and its deep fin from the fish.[2]

Evolution pretends to account for every one of these facts by chance changes, extending through countless ages as has already been shown in its amazing account of the origin of legs, eyes, backbones and other members. Surely this is an appeal to credulity! The faith of the Christian is sometimes taxed but what shall we say of the faith of the evolutionist? Which is more credible, the simple account of miraculous creation or this long, involved and absolutely unseen and unknown process?

9. The age of the earth. Prof. George Frederick Wright, the geologist, tells us that geologic time is not one-hundredth part as long as it was supposed to be fifty years ago, and the popular writers who glibly talk of the antiquity of man are behind the times and ignorant of the new light which as a flood has come from geology.[3]

Summing up the case, Prof. Francis M. Balfour tells us: "All these facts that fall under our observation contradict the crude ideas of those so-called naturalists, who state that one species can be transmitted into another in the course of generations." So also Sir David Brewster declares: "We have absolute proof of the immutability of species, whether we search for it in historic or geologic times."

Dr. Etheridge, the famous English authority on fossils, says: "Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by fact. Men adopt a theory and then strain their facts to support it. I read all their books, but they make no impression on my belief in the stability of species. Some men are ready to regard you as a fool if you do not go with them in all their vagaries, but this museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views."

The central point in the whole theory is the descent of man from the brute. It is this which, as stated, gives it importance to the Christian. But for this, the hypothesis would be but a curious scientific theory. It is a matter of comparatively minor interest how the universe or the various species came. It is only because these theories are used to assert the animal origin of man that they are dealt with here.

It is in this claim as to the origin of man that all the various theories of Evolution agree, however they may vary in other matters, and, as this is the vital point, these theories are considered as one in this discussion. This is a question merely of fact. Did or did not man descend from the brute or was he specially and divinely created? This is the question in a nut-shell. The two accounts are as follows placed side by side. Darwin's account is accepted substantially by all evolutionists.

(Gen. i:26, 27; ii:7; v:1, 2.)

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.... And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.... And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.... In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him: male and female created he them; and blessed them and called their name Adam."

(From Darwin's Descent of Man, ii, 372.)

"Man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arborial in its habits and an inhabitant of the Old World. This creature, if its whole structure had been examined by a naturalist, would have been classed among the Quadrumana, as surely as would the common and still more ancient progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys. The Quadrumana and all the higher mammals are probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal, and this through a long line of diversified forms, either from some reptile-like, or some amphibian-like creature, and this again from some fish-like animal. In the dim obscurity of the past, we can see that the early progenitor of the Vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal, provided with branchia, with the two sexes united in the same individual."

The Bible account is circumstantial, with mention of places and rivers of undoubted historical character. It is accepted by subsequent Scripture writers and made the basis of their historical and spiritual teachings. The evolutionary account is lacking in all of this. There are no exact data nor any attempt to give any. No description save an imaginary one is ever given. As no one was there to see, the whole is fanciful.

The two accounts are utterly irreconcilable. Whatever the Scripture account means it does not mean Evolution, and literary justice demands that we do not impose upon a writer a meaning he did not intend or give.

Prof. Pfliederer writes, "There is only one choice. When we say Evolution we definitely deny Creation. When we say Creation we definitely deny Evolution." Prof. James Sully says, "The doctrine of Evolution is directly antagonistic to that of Creation." (Bible Student, July, 1901, quoted by Prof. Warfield.)

How anyone can accept both accounts passes all understanding. The late Dr. John Henry Barrows, president of Oberlin University, tells of meeting a Hindu boy in his visit to India, who had attended the mission schools and learned there the shape and situation of the earth. He had of course previously been taught the Hindu cosmogony that the earth was surrounded by salt water and that by a circle of earth and that by successive circles of buttermilk, sweet cane juice, and other "soft drinks" with intervening circles of land. Dr. Barrows asked the boy which belief he would hereafter hold. He replied that he would believe both. This might be possible to the Hindu boy, but it surpasses all previous intellectual feats that any intelligent person can accept both the Bible account and Darwin's account of the creation of man.

We will review the arguments for and against the evolutionary account of the origin of man from the following spheres and subjects:

1. The Argument from the Evolution of Species. 2. From Similarity of Structure in Animals and Man. 3. Rudimentary Organs in Man. 4. Human Characteristics in Animals. 5. History of the Evolution of Man from the Brute. 6. The "Missing Link." 7. The Brain. 8. Man's Mind and Consciousness. 9. Language. 10. Pre-historic Man. 11. Antiquity of Man. 12. Savage Races. 13. History of Mankind. 14. Religion. 15. Ethics. 16. Christian Experience. 17. Christ.

On this argument rests the theory of man's animal origin. But for the desire to prove that such is man's origin, the argument would never have been conceived. We introduce it here again to call special attention to this fact. We have seen that there is decided difference of opinion on this theory; that many object to it; that there is not a single case of such origin of species known; that there is no law or force or cause agreed upon or known by which such origin of species could take place; that there are countless objections and facts against it; that its arguments are confessedly insufficient; and they are at best but inferences and only "the balancing of probabilities."

If therefore the proofs of the Origin of Species are wanting the whole theory of Evolution falls in ruins to the ground. There would seem no need to proceed further. Yet Evolution lightly steps over the ruins of its previous claims and proceeds to further assertions. Some of the greatest of the exact scientists stop here. Prof. Dana, the great geologist, says: "Man's origin has thus far no sufficient explanation from science. The abruptness of transition from preceding forms is most extraordinary and especially because it occurs so near the present time." (Elements of Geology.)

Prof. Virchow, the most eminent pathologist of Europe, wrote as follows: "There always exists a sharp line of demarcation between man and the ape. We cannot pronounce it proved by science that man descends from the ape, or from any other animal. Whoever calls to mind the lamentable failure of all attempts made very recently to discover a decided support for the 'generatio aequivoc' in the lower forms of transition from the inorganic to the organic world will feel it doubly serious to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, should be in any form accepted as the basis of our views of life."

Many more such expressions might be quoted from eminent scientists to the same effect. But as we will use these under the respective heads of the foregoing order of argument, we pass on here to the arguments as stated.

It is well known that the internal and external form of man is like that of the lower animals. This, Evolution claims, is an argument for genetic connection. The same argument would prove that a locomotive was born from a stage coach, and that from a cart, and that from a wheelbarrow. Similarity of structure proves only uniformity of design. An intelligent maker of any nature would so operate, and man himself so manufactures now. Why should not God make man on the model of the lower animals, seeing he is to live in the same world, under the same conditions, eat the same food and propagate in the same way? There is no reason for departure from a form which has proved useful and appropriate. All the parts in the human form have been thus tested in the lower forms and found right for their purpose and are now, as we would expect, applied to man. Man is the climax of all. All is for his use in the lower worlds of plants and animals; then why not use their frame and inner organs also? The mechanic uses the same appliance such as the wheel in his most complex construction as well as in the simplest engine.

But there are parts in the human frame not found in the lower orders. Wallace, one of the greatest evolutionists, says the soft human skin cannot be accounted for by natural causes, nor the valves in the human veins which are in different position from those of the brute, nor the human foot nor larynx, nor the human voice, especially the female voice, nor the absence of hair on the body, nor why man is short armed and long legged, while his ape-man ancestor is the reverse. Many more such problems vex the evolutionist. Creation accounts for all this, and does so by one simple, sweeping argument in place of Evolution's complex and bewildering maze of speculations.

Ruskin teaches us in this extract that God works by law and does not deviate therefrom even where it seems to us that He might have wrought differently: "But God shows us in Himself, strange as it may seem, not only authoritative perfection, but even the perfection of obedience, an obedience to his own laws; and in the cumbrous movement of those unwieldiest of His creatures, we are reminded, even in His divine essence, of that attribute of uprightness in the human creature, 'that sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not.'" (Seven Lamps of Architecture, II., p. 78.)

Evolution points to certain features in man which it claims came from his brute ancestry, such as the long hairs in the eyebrow, which they say came from the ape-man, the tips of the ear, and the hair on the forearm, which slants from the hand to the elbow. The whole outside ear is also claimed as a relic from that brute and is unnecessary for hearing. So also of the five toes when a solid foot would have been better, although most of us think not. They also point to some evidences of a tail which they say was rubbed off when the ape-man learned to sit down. This, however, many apes do now with no signs of decreasing tails. Many internal members and organs are pointed to, which are too numerous here to mention. One instance is as good as the whole catalogue, and one reply also.

All this proves too much for the theory. Here is the loss of useful organs and the survival of others not needed. This is not evolution, at least not the kind we have been asked to build our hopes upon for progress. Further, these so-called "relics of the brute" are counted as having no use save to support Evolution. The "gill-slits" in the neck of the human embryo are the favorite instance of this kind of fact. Haeckel and, after him others, picture the forms of fish, dog and man in embryonic state, and say in triumph, There is proof of the descent of the man from the dog and of him from the fish; and this resemblance has survived to tell the tale, there being no other use for it. But this is not the only feature that "survives." Heads and mouths and eyes also "survive." Why are these not pointed to as proofs of descent? Because we can see use for them, while there appears to be no use for the "gill-slits" except to prove Evolution. If we could see some use in the "gill-slits" in the neck of the embryo, the argument of Evolution would fall to the ground. Evolution's argument from the gill-slits and all other "relics of the brute" rests therefore on ignorance, a very unsafe foundation for a scientific theory, for knowledge is constantly increasing, especially of the human frame, and there is not the slightest doubt, reasoning from analogy and past experience, that there is use for these peculiar embryonic features.

We repeat the argument of Huxley as to these rudimentary parts: "Either these rudiments are of no use, in which case they should have disappeared; or they are of use, in which case they are arguments for teleology." (Darwinism and Design, p. 151.)

Evidences of this nature are of that kind called circumstantial, and in law are least relied upon, for on such evidence some innocent men have been hung. Shall we condemn the whole race to a bestial origin on the same evidence? All arguments founded on such facts are weak, puerile and unworthy of scientists. No wonder that Prof. Paulsen said Haeckel's speculations are "a disgrace to the philosophy of Germany." Shall we suspend a philosophy of the universe upon a few long hairs? Shall we allow the guess as to the origin of the tip of the outer ear to revolutionize theology? Shall we risk our eternal destiny on the supposed uselessness of the so-called "gill-slits" in premature puppies? Yet this is the demand of Evolution reduced to plain English.

The human characteristics found in animals form an argument for Evolution. We find the animals have memory, love, hatred, jealousy; that they can think and plan, use means and weapons, admire things of beauty, and some have sports. All of this, so Evolution claims, points to genetic connection with man. But all this only shows uniformity in the inner as in the outer being. There is as much reason for the one as for the other. Life is the same wherever we find it. The forces which operate in the rain drop are the same as in the universe of boundless space. The intellectual nature of man is the same as that of angels who have no genetic connection with us. Even devils are the same in the intellectual nature as God himself. Mind is the same thing wherever it exists. To say therefore that because animals have certain characteristics like those of man, they are the ancestors of man, is a leap to a conclusion entirely unwarranted by either facts or logic. Yet it is on such conclusions that Evolution rests. Creation would proceed on the same comprehensive plan, and we have seen that man does also. He applies his forces as he does his materials to the most varied uses.

Nor has any instance of the development of a brute or his faculties to any approach to man's faculties ever been known. The highest animal is still immeasurably below the lowest and most bestial man, not only in the grade of the faculties that they have in common, but in others which the animal does not possess and cannot acquire. There is a great gulf fixed which they do not pass over—as our next section will show.

Many have essayed the relation of the story of the change from the brute to the man. In doing so, some have covered themselves with ridicule, yet the attempts continue to be made as do others to produce perpetual motion. To bridge this chasm is necessary in order to sustain Evolution, for this is the heart of the question. It is said that a famous professor of history abandoned his chair because of the uncertainty of the facts of history. One would expect that the attempt to relate what happened before man had any history, or even existed, would be even more hazardous. Yet we are given the account with such assurance as sometimes to deceive the very elect—who abandon their Bibles. Haeckel's attempt was the most impressive, and swept all before it, for a year or two. He presented a many-branched tree, whose roots were protoplasm, its trunk protozoa, its successive branches sponges, fish, reptiles, birds, marsupials, monkeys, apes, man-apes, and the topmost branches, man. Of the twenty-one stages, half have been proved to be "wrong" by evolutionists and the rest are "doubtful."

The home of the primeval man, or ascending-ape, whichever it or he was, is one of the difficult facts to settle. Haeckel locates it at the bottom of the Indian ocean. He can thus defy disproof. Another says it was in the tropics somewhere. This is also a safe assertion. The difficulty is that the remains of the pre-historic man are found in the northern regions, while the ancestor animal was a denizen of the tropics. So another declares that the original home was in the northern regions, to which a pair of wild animals of the ancestor kind were driven by something or somebody, and their retreat cut off, and so they were forced to the life in caves and adopted the habits we find among cave dwellers.

But although our ancestor cannot be located we are told just who and what he was. Thus Prof. Edward Clodd, an authoritative evolutionist, tells us in his book, "The Making of a Man," as follows: "Whichever among the arboreal creatures possessed any favorable variation, however slight, of brain or sense organ, would secure an advantage over less favored rivals in the struggle for food and mates and elbow room. The qualities which gave them success would be transmitted to their offspring. The distance in one generation would be increased in the next; brain power conquering brute force and skill outwitting strength. While some for awhile remained arboreal in their habits, never moving easily on the ground, although making some approach to upright motion, as seen in the shambling gait of the manlike apes, others developed a way of walking on their hind legs, which entirely set free the fore limbs as organs of handling and throwing. Whatever were the conditions which permitted this, the advantage which it gives is obvious. It was the making of a man." (p. 126.)

It seems difficult, indeed unfair, to take this seriously. We must assure the reader that the author of this description shows no intention of humor either here or elsewhere in his work, or indeed any consciousness of it. All is given in perfect sobriety. We must therefore accept it as a profound scientific deliverance of the most authoritative kind and deal with it accordingly, and believe that walking on the hind legs and throwing things with the fore limbs was "the making of a man." How easily men are made!

1. This argument rests on the theory of Natural Selection now discarded by most evolutionists.

2. Apes have done all he here claims and far more. The chimpanzee has been taught to sit at a table, to drink out of cups, to eat with a knife and fork, to wipe his mouth with a napkin and use a toothpick, but has got no further in the ways of good society, and as to increase of cranial development, has obtained none save as the effects of undue potations have produced an enlarged feeling.

3. The whole account is purely imaginary as no professor of Evolution was there to observe the facts. It is in short an intrusion into the realm of fiction, which clearly belongs to Mr. Kipling in his wonderful jungle stories.

Again in his book on "Man and His Ancestor," (p. 67.) Prof. Morris gives us a full description of this unseen and purely hypothetical ancestor as follows: "It was probably much smaller than existing man, little if any more than four feet in height, and not more than half the weight of man. Its body was covered, though not profusely, with hair; the hair of the head being woolly or frizzly in texture and the face provided with a beard. The face was not jet black, like a typical African, but of a dull brown color; the hair being somewhat similar in color. The arms were long and lank, the back being much curved, the chest flat and narrow, the abdomen protruding, the legs rather short and bowed, the walk a waddling motion somewhat like that of the gibbon. It had deep set eyes, greatly protruding mouth with gaping lips, huge ears and general "ape-like aspect." Prof. John Fiske thought it was much more than a million years since man diverged from the brute. During an active geologic age before the cave-man appeared on the scene, "a being erect upon two legs and having the outward resemblance of a man wandered hither and thither upon the face of the earth." (Destiny of Man, p. 55.)

We read all this with astonishment that anyone could penetrate the dim vista of millions of years ago and transcribe such a detailed and circumstantial account of what then existed. It reads like a picture from life. Yet not only was the writer not there, but no one else was present, for this was the father of us all, according to Evolution.

We are told that, given time enough, all this series of changes from the primeval cell to the modern philosopher or scientist is possible. But time for this is limited by the age of the earth. For Lord Kelvin has stated that only a few million years are possible on any calculation and this would all be needed for the change from ape to man to say nothing of the interminable ages necessary for the change from the protozoa to the fish and then to land animals and so on to mammals and up to the ape.

The after life of the ape-man is described with the same circumstantiality as the coming to manhood's estate. Dr. Robert Patterson combines the various features of Evolution's description and this creature's history in the following extract: "It is a fearful and wonderful picture they give us of the origin of marriage from the battles of baboons, of the rights of property established by terrible fights for groves of good chestnuts, of the beginning of morals from the instincts of brutes, and of the dawnings of religion, or rather of superstition, from the dreams of these animals; the result of the whole being that civilization and society and law and order and religion are all simply the evolution of the instincts of the brutes and that there is no necessity for the invoking any supernatural interference to produce them." (Fables of Infidelity.)

It is here we meet the "theistic" account of the origin of man. It was to this creature we are told God imparted a soul or spirit supernaturally. For this strange creature was the Adam of theistic Evolution. Eve they say nothing about. Nor are we told how or when the soul was imparted, whether in a single animal, a pair, or a herd; whether awake or asleep. Nor are we told what they did next, or how the soul-ape got along with the rest of the species. Nor are we told what particular state, or act, or habit, entitled him to the new nature he received. It seems as if the ability to "stand on the hind legs and throw things with the fore limbs," which Prof. Clodd tells us was the "making of a man," scarcely entitled him to such a divine inheritance as an immortal soul.

This also was the Adam who fell according to the theistic evolutionist, though how such a creature could "fall" seems difficult to conceive. It was this thing whose sin, Paul tells us, brought death on the whole race. It was this who is a type of Christ who is "the Second Adam." Out and out Evolution has but a fraction of the difficulties, either physical or spiritual, to face that this make-shift compromise "theistic" theory has before it. It is not surprising that the thorough-going evolutionist rejects this strange compound of fiction and theology.

We appeal to the common, every-day man of fair judgment: Which takes more faith, or if preferred, credulity, the accepting of that strange, complex, unauthenticated account of man's origin or the simple and, with an omnipotent God in mind, entirely possible account of the Bible? "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: and man became a living soul." Which is the more noble, the more satisfying to our desires for a high and divine origin as well as high and divine destiny?

The Missing Link is the great desideratum of Evolution, for the evolutionist indignantly disclaims the present apes or monkey as ancestors. He tells us the connecting link was a creature superior to these. But of which he is unable to show any specimen. It is purely mythical. We have the remains of millions of animals reaching through all the ages and why is this particular specimen wanting?

Dr. Rudolph Virchow, the great discoverer of the germ theory, has for thirty years, according to Haeckel, "opposed the theory of man's descent from the brute." (Last Link, p. 27.) He himself says: "The intermediate form is unimaginable save in a dream.... We cannot teach or consent that it is an achievement that man has descended from the ape or other animal." (Homiletic Review, January, 1901.)

Dr. Friedrich Pfaff, professor of natural sciences in the University of Erlangen, writes on the question as follows: "Nowhere in the older deposits is an ape that approximates more closely to man, or man that approximates more closely to an ape, or perhaps a man at all. The same gulf which is found to-day between man and the ape goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the tertiary period. This fact alone is sufficient to make its unintelligibleness clear to every one who is not penetrated by the conviction of the infallibility of the theory of the gradual transmutation of and progressive development of all organized creatures. If, however, we now find one of the most man-like apes (gibbon) in the tertiary period, and this species is still in the same low grade, and side by side with it, at the end of the ice period, man is found in the same high grade as to-day, the ape not having approximated more nearly to man, and modern man not having become further removed from the ape than the first man, every one who is in a position to draw a right conclusion can infer, that the facts contradict a theory of constant progression, development and ceaselessly increasing variation from generation to generation, as surely as it is possible to do." (Age and Origin of Man, Am. Tr. Soc., p. 52.)

From time to time the discovery of the "missing link" is announced and telegraphed through the civilized world, only to be remanded to its place among the remains of brutes or men. We will consider the instances of such as they have been presented:

1. The Calaveras Skull now in the California State Museum. This has been shown recently to be a hoax. It was placed in a mine shaft 150 feet deep, by Mr. R. C. Scribner, a storekeeper at the mine, as a practical joke. This he lately acknowledged to the Rev. W. H. Dyer, of Los Angeles, a clergyman of the Episcopal church.

2. The Neanderthal Skull. This was found in 1856 in Prussia. It had narrow receding forehead and thick ridges over the eyes. It was claimed by the evolutionists as from two to three hundred thousand years old. Dr. Meyer of Bonn examined the evidence, and found it to be the skull of a Cossack killed in 1814. Many other scientists agreed with him. (Bible Science and Faith, p. 278.)

3. The Colorado specimen. Prof. Stephen Bowers of the Mineralogical and Geological Survey of California, gives this account of another such discovery: "A few years ago the newspapers contained an account of the discovery of a skeleton in Colorado, by a Columbia College professor, which he was pleased to call the 'missing link' between man and the apes. He gave this remarkable creature an antiquity of a million and a half of years. The friable bones were carefully wrapped in cotton and shipped east. But scarcely had the learned professor gotten away with his prize when certain cowboys came forward and claimed the bones to be that of a pet monkey which they buried but a dozen years previously."

4. The late find of skeletons at Croatia, Austria, is heralded as the discovery of a connecting link. But these are skeletons of men and not of brutes. They are degraded men and nothing is better known than the possibility of degeneracy in man. We have degenerates now with all the peculiarities of these low specimens, retreating brows and jaws and flat faces. Degeneracy does not prove evolution. While the shape of these skulls is low and long it has not been shown that their cubical capacity is much less than that of normal man.

5. The Pithecanthropus Erectus. This is the most popular relic with Evolution. It consists of a piece of a skull from the eyes upward, a leg bone and two teeth. These were found in Java by Dr. von Eugene Du Bois in 1891. The cubic measurement of the skull is 60 inches, the same as that of an idiot, that of a normal man being 90 inches, and of an ape 30. These specimens were found at separate places and times. The skull is too small for the thigh bone. The age of the strata in which they were found is uncertain. Authorities are divided as to the nature of these. Haeckel admits that the belief that this is the missing link is strongly combatted by some distinguished scientists. At the Leyden congress, it was attacked by the illustrious pathologist Rudolph Virchow.

The assumptions based upon this specimen and necessary for evidence are as follows: First, that it is as old as claimed, a hundred thousand years at least, or a million as stated by some. Second, that these bones belong to the same individual. Third, that they are the remains of a full-grown individual. Fourth, that they are the remains of a human or semi-human being. Fifth, that they are not the remains of an idiot whose capacity the brain represents.

With all these unproven assumptions, and against the opinion of many of the finest scientists in Europe, Haeckel and some evolutionists have declared this is the missing link. They place this piece of a skull of one creature upon this leg of another and insert these teeth belonging to a third, all so far separated in life that they probably did not even know each other, and rechristen the whole "Pithecanthropus Erectus," which may be freely translated "The ape that walked like a man," being thus the first that arrived at that point which Prof. Clodd tells us was "the making of a man." And this specimen is Haeckel's Last Link, and this he says demonstrates the truth of Evolution.

The evidence of bones and other remains is now generally suspected. It has been found that even in the case of recent remains, as in criminal trials, experts are often unable to decide whether they are human or brute, recent or remote, and what part of the frame they occupied. It is said that Wallace, the great cotemporary with Darwin in the promotion of the theory, now admits there is no evidence of an evolutionary link between man and the lower animals.

The brain forms the principal difference between man's body and the brute's. The brain is especially used as proof by the evolutionist. It is the organ of mind. Its size corresponds with the intellectual state of the creature. It is the theory of Evolution that there was an increase in the size of the brain in some of the man-apes of that day, although none such is seen now.

Prof. Edward Clodd thus describes these supposed brain changes after the Ice Age: "The changes by which he met these new conditions were in a very small degree physical. They were almost wholly mental. The principal physical change was in the growth of the brain and the expansion of the cranium, giving rise to a less bestial physiognomy and an advanced mental power." (Man and His Ancestor, p. 181.)

How could man adapt himself by increasing the size of his brain? Why should the passing away of the ice age increase the size of the brain? However, he disposes of the whole matter, after arguing through pages of supposition and assumption, by stating, "The absence of facts forces us to confine ourselves largely to suggestions and probabilities." (Making of a Man, p. 188.) But probabilities are not science and we have a right to ask from those claiming to be scientists actual facts and not guesses, for so great an assertion as the descent of man from the brute.

The capacity of the ape brain is 30, of the human 90 cubic inches. There is no evidence of change in either the ape or the man. The prehistoric man has as good a head on his shoulders as his modern descendants. Bruner says the most ancient skulls even exceed ours. Dr. Pfaff says the stone age men are equal to the present generation. So if education does not increase the size of man's brain, why should the new tricks of Prof. Clodd's ancient "arboreal creature" enlarge that individual's brain 200 per cent? On the other hand, the ape of to-day and the ape of 3,000 years ago as mummied and preserved in Egypt are the same. The big-brained ape of Evolution has unaccountably disappeared and even his skull is missing.

Evolution claims that all man's faculties have been derived from the brute, as was his physical frame. It is fair to say that this is met at the door by the protest of some of the greatest scientists, themselves sympathetic with Evolution.

Prof. John Fiske wrote on the origin of mind: "We can say when mind came on the scene of evolution, but we can say neither whence nor why.... It is not only inconceivable how mind should have been produced from matter, but it is inconceivable that it should have been produced from matter." (Darwinism, pp. 63, 69.) Prof. Dana has said, "The present teaching of geology is that man is not of nature's making.... Independently of such evidences, man's high reason, his unsatisfied longings, aspirations, his free will, all afford the fullest assurance that he owes his existence to the special act of the Infinite Being whose image he bears." (Geologic Story, p. 290.)

Prof. George H. Howison writes on this theme: "To make evolution the ground of the existence of mind in man, is destructive to the reality of the human person and therefore, of the entire world of moral good and of unqualified truth." (Limits of Evolution, p. 6.) Lord Kelvin, the most eminent living scientist, wrote in a letter to the London Times, "Every action of human free will is a miracle to physical and chemical and mathematical science."

Evolution has long tried to create an argument for the derivation of man's speech from the cries of animals. This is met however by the philologist with positive denial. Prof. Max Mueller says: "There is one barrier which no one has yet ventured to touch,—the barrier of language. Language is our Rubicon and no brute will dare to cross it.... No process of Natural Selection will ever distill significant words out of the notes of birds and animals." (Lessons on the Science of Language, pp. 23, 340, 370.)

False claims have been made for the languages of savage people and ancient races. Darwin said that the people of Terra del Fuego were the lowest in the scale, so far as discovered, and their language correspondingly crude. But further investigation shows that they have 32,430 words; over twice as many as Shakespeare used. The language of some of the tribes of the Congo is described by a missionary as more complex than Greek. The history of languages shows the same want of evidence for an evolutionary origin. The oldest forms are the most complex. Modern Greek and Latin are simpler than the ancient forms. English is an improvement in this respect on the old Anglo Saxon, whose grammatical forms it has largely cast off and reduced the language to greater simplicity.

A scientist is now endeavoring to ascertain the speech of monkeys. He has ascertained that these animals have different sounds for different wants, a fact as to other creatures that he could have ascertained by a visit to the nearest poultry yard. The hen has as many calls as the monkey, and as many meanings too. Her call for food is one sound. Her cry of alarm at a passing hawk is another, and her brood perfectly understands all, and without previous education. All animals and birds, and many insects too, have sounds with meaning in them, but language is another matter.

The remains of early races form an argument used by Evolution. These remains are found in many places in caves and are accompanied by tools of stone and vessels of pottery and the remains of animals. These degraded peoples are pointed to by Evolution as man in a state of development.

If the preceding arguments were well founded this would appear reasonable enough. But in view of the fallacious character of the prior reasoning, we must halt at this claim. There are many and conclusive reasons for rejecting this unproven claim. For it is unproven. It is only inference and assumption.

1. These men of the cave do not necessarily represent man in a course of progress, for we find to-day the same classes of people with their stone tools and pottery and living as prehistoric man lived. There to-day exist men in every stage of the supposed progress from the cave man to the highest in civilization. Such remains could be had in any burial place of these savage peoples. Prehistoric man, so-called, is still with us and we can interview him as to his state and history.

2. We have seen that modern man has not developed in brain capacity above prehistoric man. It is also true that he has not developed physically. Dana tells us that the skeleton found at Mentone compares favorably with the best modern men. Indeed we have degenerated in many respects. We have almost lost the sense of smell as compared with savage peoples or even animals. Our teeth are certainly not improving. If we are to find perfect specimens we do not look at the most advanced classes but to the reverse. Those who live to extreme old age are generally in the lowly ranks. But why has physical development ceased at all? Why are there not some superior beings by this time? But alas, there are no marks or indications of wings or halos on either the great saints or scientists of the day.

We are told that while physical evolution has ceased among men, evolution now works along mental lines of progress. This is a radical shifting of the ground of evolution, for heretofore all this has been not only omitted but discarded. If evolution is anything, it is physical. Nor does Evolution give any account of the causes of the stoppage of physical development and the change to mental evolution. We will also show later that this supposed progress has not been such as claimed.

Evolution asserts that a vast antiquity for man has been proven by remains that have been found. It is commonly said that these remains are hundreds of thousands of years old. But the claims for these vast periods are now being greatly reduced and generally discredited. Dr. Zahm says of these speculations: "We could not give a better illustration of the extremes to which the unguided human intellect is subject than the vacillating and extravagant notions of the antiquity of man." (Bible Science and Faith, p. 315.) The age of the peat beds of Abbeville, in France, in which human remains were found, was once estimated at 20,000 years. The estimate has been reduced to a fifth of that age. The remains of the animals found with man are supposed to prove his extreme antiquity. The remains of the mammoth were once cited as such proof. But the mammoth has been found in such a state of preservation that its flesh has been fed to the dogs.

The enormous ages which have been credited to these remains are well illustrated by the discovery of a skeleton at New Orleans while digging for the gas works. From the depth of the stratum in which it was found it was estimated by scientists at the age of 57,000 years. Soon after, the gunwale of the skeleton's Kentucky flat boat was found in the same stratum, and the age therefore of the remains was reduced from 57,000 to 50 years. The evidences from peat bogs, stalagmite formations, stone, iron and bronze tools are all now considered unreliable by scientists. So many exposures of mistakes in the estimate of age from these have been made, that the whole is looked upon with suspicion. Instance after instance might be given.

It has been claimed that we can arrange these past races in an ascending order as they worked in stone, bronze, or iron, in their successive history. This is a false theory. We have all these "ages" existing to-day. On the other hand, Dr. Livingstone found no stone age in Africa. Dr. Schliemann found in the ruins of Troy the bronze age below the stone age. The early Egyptians used bronze, the later ones stone tools. In the Chaldean tombs all these are found together. Europe had the metal age while America had the stone age. (Creation and Evolution. Prof. Townsend.)

These prehistoric races to which Evolution points us as representing man in his early state, do not represent that early world. They are found at the outer limits of the world and not at the acknowledged center whence man came. They are, in short, what we find to-day at the outlying regions of earth. They therefore, are exceptional peoples and not representative of the world at that time, or now.

The dynasties of Egypt were once cited against the Bible narrative, but these have been reduced to moderate figures. A thousand years was taken off by one discoverer recently from the age of the middle kingdom. There is a question whether the Egyptian dynasties were successive or in some cases contemporary. There is also the well-known fact that the Egyptians had years of varying length. They often counted dynasties by years of three months and also of a month! Dr. Flinders Petrie lately discovered in the tombs of the kings, preceding the first dynasty of Egypt at Abydos, Grecian pottery of Mycean clay, and this in a tomb estimated to date from 5,400 B. C.! (Atlantic Monthly, October, 1900.)

The same kind of estimating is now being done from the Assyrian tablets and their records. We must remember these old kings were great boasters and liars, too. We don't know the basis of their calculations. Perhaps Assyria also had three month years. If their method was like Egypt's, and they were connected as we know by much intercourse and literature, we may expect like inaccuracy. The ancient dates given in the inscriptions found in Nuffar recently, are already suspected by scholars. The date for the temple uncovered there was 3,200 B. C. This number is the product of forty multiplied by eighty; evidently a round number for eighty generations, and not at all a careful or exact chronological statement.

However, let us compare the two accounts, the Bible and the Assyrian. The one precise in statement, accurate in ten thousand points as demonstrated, with us for thousands of years, trusted and tried. The other inexact, mythical in its legends, having all the marks of inaccuracy, just discovered, made by people we know nothing of and having no character to speak of, and full of vain boastings and absurd claims. Which is the true and which the false? Let the jury decide. We will abide the verdict.

Prof. A. H. Sayce of Oxford, writes: "The light that has come from the remnants of the past has been fatal to the pretenses of critical skepticism. The discoveries of Abydos have discredited its methods and results. They have shown that where they can be tested they prove to be absolutely worthless. It is only reasonable to conclude that methods and results, that thus break down under the test of monumental discovery, must equally break down in other departments of history where no such test can be applied. It is not the discoveries of the higher critics, but the old traditions which have been confirmed by archaeological discovery." (Homiletic Review, March, 1901.) This statement is made by one of the most able archaeologists and semitic scholars in the world.

The age of man on earth has much testimony from science agreeing with the Bible account. From many the following are cited:

Dr. J. A. Zahm, the distinguished scholar, says, "I am disposed to attribute to man an antiquity of about ten thousand years. It seems likely that the general consensus of chronologists will ultimately fix on a date which shall be below rather than above ten thousand years as the nearest approximate to the age of our race." (The Bible, Science and Faith, p. 311.) He quotes many other authorities.

Prof. Winchell tells us, "The very beginnings of our race are still almost in sight." (Sketches of Creation.) Dawson thinks man has been on earth about seven thousand years. Geology agrees that man did not exist before the ice age. The stone age is fixed at about seven thousand years ago by others.

Professor George Frederick Wright tells us, "The glacial period did not close more than ten thousand years ago. This shortening of our conception of the ice age renders glacial man a comparatively modern creature. The last stage of the excessive unstability of the earth was not so very long ago and continued down to near the introduction of man." (Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1902.)

S. R. Pattison, F. G. S., tells us, "Science shows to us a number of converging probabilities which point to man's first appearance along with great animals about 8,000 years ago." (Age and Origin of Man Geologically Considered, Am. Tr. Soc., p. 29.)

Dr. Friedrich Pfaff, professor of natural science in Erlangen, thus sums up the evidence from geology as to man: "(1) The age of man is small, extending only to a few thousand years. (2) Man appeared suddenly: the most ancient man known to us is not essentially different from the now living man. (3) Transitions from the ape to the man, or the man to the ape, are nowhere found. The conclusion we are led to is that the Scripture account of man, which is one and self-consistent, is true.... This account of man we accept by faith, because it is revealed by God, is supported by adequate evidence, solves the otherwise insoluble problems, not only of science and history, but of inward experience, and meets our deepest need.... The more it is sifted and examined the more well founded and irrefragable does it prove to be." (Age and Origin of Man, Am. Tr. Soc., pp. 55-56.)

Evolution delights to compare savage peoples alternately with present civilized races and with the brute. Prof. Conn says, "There is a greater difference between a Newton and a Hottentot, than between the Hottentot and the orang-outang." He fails to notice, or state, that the first is a difference of degree only, and the latter a difference of kind. It would be possible to develop a Hottentot into a philosopher, but no attempt is ever dreamed of, to change an orang-outang into a Hottentot. On the other hand, the lowest savages have under culture shown their human inheritance of faculties beyond the brute. Two pigmies taken to Italy learned to speak Italian in two years with fluency. They showed themselves superior to many European children, and one became proficient in music. The skill of this race with poisoned arrows, pits for game, and cultivation of various kinds, is well known.

The savage races show the opposite of evolution. They are races in ruins. Max Mueller says, "What do we know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter in their history? They may have passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive may be for all we know a relapse into savagery, or corruption of what was something more rational and intelligible in former ages." This estimate of this great scholar is attested by facts. Where to-day is the Hindu race that could build the Taj Mahal? What Greek race to-day could reproduce the architecture or statuary of their ancestors? The ruins of all eastern and many western lands point to fallen races as well as ruined structures. The world's history is that of the fall of great nations such as Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Rome, in all of which are sad examples of architecture and peoples alike in decay.

History is appealed to to show the progress of man and his continuance in the evolutionary line since his origin in the brute. Our present civilization is pointed to and compared with the past and we are told that this is the result of evolution.

Some remarks of a preliminary kind are called for here. It is to be remembered that history does not cover a very long period, that the record is often broken, and that the facts are often very uncertain. Large sections of the world we know historically nothing or little of, such as Asia and Africa. We must remember that progress is confined mostly to Europe and America and these form but a third of the population of the world. Also that European progress is a comparatively recent matter. We are now considering the entire history of the race and must take in these vast outside regions to arrive at correct conclusions. To judge the entire progress of mankind from a short-sighted view of a limited portion is as unscientific as it is unscriptural.

We must also remember that Europe owes its progress to the influence of Christianity. For to-day it is the Christian nations only that have progress and the most Christian have the most progress. No fact is better seen or proven. Lange states, "Among human tribes left to themselves, the higher man never comes out of the lower. Apparent exceptions do ever, on close examination, confirm the universality of the rule in regard to particular peoples, while the claim, as made for the world's general progress, can only be urged in opposition by ignoring the supernal aids of revelation that have ever shown themselves directly or collaterally on the human path." (Commentary on Genesis, p. 355.) We have seen that so far as present savage races are concerned they have made no progress, and semi-civilized races, such as the Egyptians, Chinese and Hindus have retrograded.

We need also to consider the vast and great civilizations which existed in remote antiquity as is now revealed by archaeology. The recent discoveries in Assyria and Babylonia and Egypt show vast empires of culture as well as national extension and power, and that their earlier culture was the greatest. So Prof. Hilprecht, of the University of Pennsylvania, testifies of Babylonia: "The flower of Babylonian art is found at the beginning of Babylonian history." (Recent Researches in Bible Lands, p. 88.) Horace Bushnell tells us, "All great ruins are but a name for greatness in ruins."

It is to Egypt we must go for the earliest records of human civilization. Here the account of Prof. Sayce, of Oxford, gives us the facts: "The earliest culture and civilization to which the monuments bear witness was in fact already perfect. It was full-grown. The organization of the country was complete. The arts were known and practiced. Egyptian culture as far as we know at present has no beginning." (Recent Researches in Bible Lands, pp. 101, 102.) "The older the culture, the more perfect it is found to be. The fact is a very remarkable one, in view of modern theories of development and of the evolution of civilization out of barbarism. Whatever may be the reason, such theories are not borne out by the discoveries of archaeology. Instead of the progress one should expect, we find retrogression and decay. Is it possible the Biblical view is right after all and that civilized man has been civilized from the outset?" (Homiletic Review, June, 1902.) Prof. Flinders Petrie tells us that the Great Pyramid bears on its stones the marks of the solid and tubular drill, edged with stone as hard as diamond, and cutting one-tenth of an inch at a revolution, and showing no sign of wear. They had also straight and circular saws. The same building reveals scientific and astronomical knowledge equal in some respects to modern science.

Not only were the past civilizations great, but, in many respects, far above the present. So that the race has even fallen from higher levels. Lecky thus writes of the Greeks: "Within the narrow limits and scant populations of the Greek states, arose men, who in almost every conceivable form of genius, in philosophy, in epic, dramatic and lyric poetry, in written and spoken eloquence, in statesmanship, in sculpture, in painting, and probably in music, attained the highest levels of human perfection." (History of European Morals, p. 408.) Galton says of the same civilization: "The millions of Europe, breeding as they have for two thousand years, have never produced the equal of Socrates and Phidias. The average ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, nearly two grades higher than our own; that is, about as much as our race is above the African negro." (Hereditary Genius, p. 320.)

It does seem as if such testimony of these great scholars should make us not only chary of the theory which claims ever upward and onward progress, but also more modest in our boasted modern progress and position. Prof. Frederick Starr of the Anthropological department of Chicago University, says that the American race is reverting to the Indian state. He bases this on measurements of faces of 5,000 children. This is a dismal outlook. It is not what Evolution has promised us. The followers of Evolution have reason to be indignant at such a turn in its course. However, we may comfort them and ourselves with the hope that if Evolution fails us we have other resources.

Consciousness of God and the hereafter is the great distinction between man and brute. This is the basis of all religion. Of this Evolution gives the origin in the dreams of animals.

According to that department of the evolutionary theory popularly called Higher Criticism, all religion, including Israel's and Christianity, was derived from fetishism and from that it developed to animism, and so to polytheism and finally monotheism. But the lowest savages have, according to anthropology, the belief in a Supreme Being. Andrew Lang says, "It is among the lowest savages that the Supreme Beings are regarded as eternal, moral, powerful." (Making of Religion, p. 206.) Fetishism and animism are processes of decay, says Dr. John Smith, quoting Hartmann, DeRouge, Renouf, Lang and others. (Integrity of Scripture, p. 68.) Traces of monotheism are found in China, India, Egypt and elsewhere. In all nations is this decay found save in one, Israel.

It is further found that mankind had an original theistic religion common to the race, which is just what the Bible teaches. All the evidence is to the effect that the further back we go, the purer the religions are found to be. The earliest Romans were more pure in religion than the later people. The early Greeks more so than the more recent. The early handwritings give a purer and more theistic religion than the later books. Dr. Jacob Chamberlain thus sums up the evidence for the Hindu Vedas: "They all teach the Godhead is one, that he is good, that man is in a state of sin, not at peace with the Holy One, that man is in need of holiness and purity, that there can be no harmony between sinful man and a holy God unless sin is in some way expiated and expurgated, and that this is the greatest and most worthy end of existence." (Northfield Echoes, August, 1900, p. 256.)

The ruins of Assyria and Egypt point to a religion resembling that of the Israelites. So far is this noticed that some have said that Moses copied much of what he taught Israel from them. This conclusion is not necessary. The fact is that man had a deposit of truth at the beginning, and all men had the same. Both Moses and Egypt and Assyria therefore, had much of what survived from that early revelation. The fact here stated agrees with the Bible account and not with Evolution.

"The study of the mythology and philosophy of the heathen world does not show an evolutionary progress to a higher state, but the reverse." (Francis M. Bruner in The Evolution Theory.) Christianity has not been a development of these religions, for it is and was, antagonistic to them at every point. It was an opposing force introduced suddenly and utterly at variance in every particular with all about it.

Sir M. Monier said in an address in 1887: "There can be no greater mistake than to force these non-christian writings into conformity with some scientific theory of development, and then point to the Christian's Holy Bible as the crowning product of religious evolution. So far from this, these non-christian books are all developments in the wrong direction. They begin with some flashes of true light and end in utter darkness."

Evolution has a system or systems of Ethics. It traces the beginning of the sense of right and wrong to the instincts of animals, such as the parental instinct, the recognition of marital rights, and the right to respective properties such as nests and burrows. So that the animal, or man, came to see that it was best on all accounts to be good to oneself and others. So Mr. Spencer's definition of right is the happiness of oneself, one's offspring and others. Acts are good or bad as they increase happiness or misery. He ignores the moral instinct and exalts expediency and utility. This is the level of the uncivilized or savage races.

Dr. James Thompson Bixby of Leipsic, makes humanity the goal of Evolution's ethics. "The test of what is morally good is the tendency of the given motive to help forward the progress of the race toward the ideal humanity." (Ethics of Evolution, p. 212.) Every Bible believer will see how far short these fall of the standard of holiness and happiness the Bible places before us. But when or where did any people ever aim to help forward the "ideal perfection of humanity" who did not have the mighty impulse which the Bible, and only the Bible, gives to that object? There is not even the sense of brotherhood necessary for the motive. To point natural man to that is to ask him to act outside his nature.

The law of the Struggle for Existence never taught Christian ethics. The self-sacrificing Christian has something which never came from Evolution. The Cross is the final test of Evolution. By it that theory and all other false theories are weighed in the balances and found wanting. The struggle for existence is the law of self and is the antithesis of the Cross, which is the very opposite of the struggle for existence. Nor is the struggle for existence the law of the lower creature. That law is to bring forth fruit, to propagate their species. That is the plant's goal; when it has so done it retires or dies. The little bird will struggle more fiercely for its young than for its food, or even for its life, which it imperils often to save its brood. Below the unfallen creation and regenerated humanity is the unregenerated selfish man. Not Evolution but Revolution can create Christian ethics. History does not present an instance of progress in ethics save as aided by the Bible.

In undertaking to account for man, Evolution must account for the fact of Christian experience. Conversion revolutionizes a man. It turns him against his natural likes and dislikes. He even turns against himself and the selfish becomes unselfish. This is not development, for that operates according to the nature of the thing. Develop a wolf and you may get a dog. Develop man from the savage state and you may have the condition of the Greek in the highest state of culture and yet in the lowest state of vice. Introduce Christian experience and you have Christianity with all the civilization which proceeds and flows from it.

There is no such consistent body of testimony for any fact, science or truth as there is for Christian experience. It is the same in all ages, in all lands and in all classes of society, and in all circumstances of life. This evidence is perfectly legitimate and must be considered by the student of human life and character. Let Evolution then account for Conversion which changes man's inner nature, and gives a life which lives contrary to natural human instincts and conduct; and Christian hopes which yearn for deliverance from sin and self and long for the highest spiritual state and hasten to meet the holy and all-seeing God.

The missions of our great cities as well as those of the foreign field are full of witnesses for the transforming effect of Christian experience. The author of this book can vouch for the following from personal knowledge. A business man in Illinois became addicted partly from use in disease to alcohol and the use of morphine and also cocaine. He used all these and in excessive quantities; as much as forty grains of morphine in a day. He tried seven "cures." He visited Europe to consult specialists. He spent in all over $15,000 in seeking a cure and all in vain. By the persuasions of Christians he was led to seek relief in prayer and experienced what Christians call conversion and was immediately delivered from all his appetites. The author of this saw him three months after and found him a sober man and without any desire for drink or drugs. He saw him again a year after and he was still rejoicing in full deliverance. Since beginning this book, a correspondence was had to verify the case still further, and he is reported as follows: "In January, 1899, his weight was 113 pounds. In January, 1901, his weight was 183 pounds. He is an official member of a prominent church, a director of the Young Men's Christian Association and a great worker in both." No evolution can account for such a change. It is as great a miracle as cleansing the leper.

Prof. George Romanes of Oxford, was, it is said, brought back from infidelity to faith by the letters of a Japanese missionary friend, dealing with experimental and practical religion. Evolution asks for facts. Here are facts, and they tell not of Evolution but of Regeneration.

Evolution cannot account for Christ. Without entering here on an argument for His divinity, we simply present him and ask the evolutionist to account for such a character and life. Let us listen to what the enemies of Christianity say of Christ.

Renan said: "The incomparable man to whom the universal conscience has decreed the title of the Son of God, and that with justice.... Between thee and God there will be no longer any distinction."

Jean Paul Richter said: "The holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among the holy, He lifted with pierced hands empires off their hinges and turned the stream of centuries out of its channel and still governs the ages." (Dr. Liddon's Bampton Lectures.)

Rousseau testified as follows: "What sweetness, what purity in his morals! What force, what persuasion in his instructions! His maxims how sublime! His discourses, how wise and profound! such presence of mind, such beauty and precision in his answers, such empire over his passions! It would be much harder to conceive that a number of men should have joined together to fabricate this book than that a single person should furnish out the subject to its authors. Jewish writers would never have fallen into that style, and the gospel has such strong and such inimitable marks of truth that the inventor would be more surprising than the hero." (Emilius and Sophia, or An Essay on Education, pp. 79, 80, 81.)

Thomas Paine: "The morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind. It has never been excelled." (Age of Reason, p. 5.)

Robert Ingersoll, to M. D. Landon, in a letter giving permission to print his speeches: "In using my speeches do not use any assault I may have made on Christ which I foolishly made in my earlier life. I believe Christ was the perfect man. 'Do unto others' is the perfection of religion and morality. It is the summum bonum." (Homiletic Review, November, 1899, p. 475.)

Theodore Parker: "Shall we be told such a man never lived—the whole story is a lie? Suppose that Plato and Newton never lived, that their story is a lie? But who did their works and thought their thoughts? It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated Jesus? None but a Jesus." (Discourses on Religion, pp. 362-3.)

Napoleon Bonaparte: "Everything in Jesus Christ astonishes me. His spirit overawes me. Between him and whoever else in the world there is no possible line of comparison. I search in vain in history to find the similar to Jesus Christ, or anything which can approach the Gospel. In him we find a moral beauty before unknown, and an idea of the Supreme superior even to that which creation suggests."

To say that Jesus was an evolution of that age, as some evolutionists do say, and that we may look for even a greater in the future, is to be guilty not only of blasphemy but of gross ignorance as to the age in which Jesus came. There was nothing in that age to give rise to such a character. He came as a flash of lightning in a dark sky, or, according to the Bible figure, as the rising of the sun in the world's night.

Before making so serious a charge against a scientific theory as that it is both unscientific and unphilosophical, we will show that others have held a similar view and that among these are many scholars. We have already seen Prof. Paulsen's remark that Haeckel's reasonings are a "disgrace to the philosophy of Germany." Prof. George Frederick Wright calls Evolution a "fad," "the cast-off clothing of the evolutionary philosophy of fifty years ago." The Duke of Argyle says, "It is such a violation of and departure from all that we know of the existing order of things as to deprive it of all scientific base."

There are four stages of proof necessary for a full demonstration.

1. Observation of facts.

2. Classification of these facts.

3. Inferences legitimately drawn therefrom.

4. Verification of these conclusions.

1. It fails in its facts. That this is true is evident from the reticence of the exact scientists to commit themselves to the theory. If the facts were all that they say, these laborious and faithful laborers in the laboratory and field would acknowledge the case. In the presentation of facts, the theoretical evolutionist culls out and magnifies those looking his way and passes in silence or minifies those antagonistic to the theory. It makes much of the change of a low salt water animal into its fresh water form, and passes over the immutability of all the great species. Evolution dwells upon the splints in the leg of the horse and passes over lightly the vast unbridged gaps between organic and inorganic matter, the origin of the vertebrates, the countless missing links between the species. It rests its argument on the "gill-slits" in the necks of embryonic fish, puppies and infants, and passes airily over the origin of matter, of life, of consciousness and of Christian experience. It presents ex-parte evidence.

2. Evolution fails in classification. We have seen the testimony of Evolution itself on this point. Nor is there any agreed definition of species. Not a single species has been traced to its origin. The species defy chronological classification. The most primitive species exist to-day and the most advanced were in existence almost at the first. Nor can the classifications which are attempted be advanced as proof of evolution. They are as evidential of manufacture or of creation or of any other process of intelligent mind.

3. Evolution rests on inferences. As its great philosopher, Spencer, has said, no inference is warranted unless it accounts for all the facts. Not only does no inference of Evolution do this, but it admits again and again that it is beset with countless difficulties. Nor are these inferences the only ones that might be drawn. It is not only necessary to draw an inference but to show that no other inference is possible. Some of these are the wildest possible deductions from the facts,—as for example, the theories as to the origins, already cited, as to whales and giraffes. Sir J. William Dawson, the eminent geologist, says of Evolution's deductions as follows: "It seems to indicate that the accumulated facts of our age have gone altogether beyond its capacity for generalization, and but for the vigor which one sees everywhere, it might be taken as an indication that the human mind has fallen into a state of senility and in its dotage mistakes for science the imaginations which are the dreams of its youth." (Story of the Earth and Man, p. 317.)

The works of writers on Evolution abound in such phrases as "seems to be—I infer—it is conceivable—it might have been—it is probable—I think—apparently—must have been—no one can say—not difficult to conceive,"—and other unscientific terms, and on such deductions they project other inferences, and so leap skilfully from one supposition to another across the quagmire of Evolution.

Evolution is undertaking a philosophical impossibility—the proving of a negative, that there could be no other method than derivation. This is the philosophical basis of the whole theory.

4. Finally Evolution fails in the fourth step. It admits again and again that it has not demonstrated its case. Not a single instance of evolution of species has been shown or produced, and no law of the change is given. The gaps it does not bridge are many. We specially need to notice that it gives no account of the origin of matter or force. It can give no account of the origin of life. It utterly fails to account for man's self-consciousness or intellectual, moral or spiritual nature. It takes no account whatever of the other world or life and entirely disregards the facts of Christian experience. In short, so far from being a great universal philosophy, it is simply a disjointed combination of unproven theories.

The evolutionist, Prof. Conn, admitting the missing factors, says candidly, "It is therefore impossible to make Evolution a complete theory." (Evolution of To-day, p. 6.)

Sir J. William Dawson thus sums up the evidence: "The simplicity and completeness of the evolutionary theory entirely disappear when we consider the unproved assumptions on which it is based and its failure to connect with each other some of the most important facts in nature; that in short, it is not in any true sense a philosophy, but a mere arbitrary arrangement of facts in accordance with a number of unproved hypotheses. Such philosophies, falsely so-called, have existed ever since man began to reason on nature, and this last of all is one of the weakest and most pernicious of all. Let the reader take up either Darwin's great book or Spencer's Biology and merely ask, as he reads each paragraph, What is here assumed and what is proved? and he will find the fabric melt away like a vision. Spencer often exaggerates or extenuates with reference to facts and uses the art of the dialectician where argument fails." (Story of the Earth and Man, p. 330.)

Prof. William Jones tells us Evolution is "a metaphysical creed and nothing else; an emotional attitude rather than a system of thought." (Homiletic Review, August, 1900.)

The evolutionist not only uses his imagination but claims the right to do so. Tyndall has written an essay on the Scientific Use of the Imagination. Now when the pictures of an evolutionist's imagination are held up as facts, as in the description of man's development from the brute, he leaves the realm of science and enters that of fiction. Mr. Gladstone has said of this: "To the eyes of an onlooker their pace and method seem to be like a steeple-chase. They are armed with a weapon always sufficient if not always an arm of precision, 'the scientific imagination.' They are impatient of that most wholesome state a Suspended Judgment." (Homiletic Review, October, 1900, quoted by Dr. Jesse B. Thomas.)

The language used by the evolutionist is peculiar for persons claiming to believe in law as the great agency of nature and to base their conclusions on the operation of fixed causes. The changes which together make up the birth of a new species are occasioned they say by "chance happenings," "undesigned variations," "accidental variations," "utterly undetermined antecedents," "unintentional variations," and other like expressions. The synonyms of this idea are exhausted by them in describing the way in which the changes first occurred, by which one species began the journey up to another stage of existence. It is simply a revival and revamping of the old doctrine of chance.

Prof. Frank Ballard says of this: "Chance manufactured protoplasm out of nebulosity.... To accept this after rejecting faith on the ground of its difficulty, is to quibble and cavil."

An illustration of the appeal to chance and its use is found in the following account as given by Prof. Ernst Haeckel, the greatest living teacher of Evolution, of how tree-frogs became green: "Once upon a time there were among the offspring of ancestral tree-frogs some which among other colors exhibited green, not much, perhaps not even perceptible to our eyes. The occurrence of this color was spontaneous, a freak. The descendants of these greenish creatures, provided they did not pair with frogs of the ordinary set, became still greener and so on, until the green was pronounced enough to be of advantage when competition set in." (Last Link, p. 176.) Here the origin of greenness in the tree-frog begins with a chance happening and is promoted by a chance union of the greenish frog with one not in "the ordinary set," but of the more select circle of the green, and the favoring chances continued in this same remarkable way until the color became of use in protecting them.

It was with similar chance happenings, Evolution tells us, that all the great kingdoms, classes, orders, families, genera and species originated. It was by chance happenings that the present beautiful and infinite variety of nature came. It was by unintended accidents that the wonderful adjustments in the universe came. It has been calculated that the possibility of the letters of the alphabet, if thrown promiscuously, coming together in the present order is once in five hundred million million million times. What would be the chances of the innumerable combinations of nature coming together in the order in which they are by the chance happenings to which Evolution attributes them?

The interest in the question of how things came to be centers for the believer in the Bible narrative and doctrine. We have been accustomed to bring all things to Bible testing and so far with assured results. The Bible has never failed and we believe will not fail now. We therefore ask, What does it teach as to Evolution? We are amazed to find Evolution makes no appeal to the Bible, and the Bible makes no allusion to Evolution. They are strangers to each other. The argument from Scripture for Evolution has not yet been written. The best the theistic evolutionist can say as to the Bible account of the origin of man is an apology for its narratives, or some explanation which vaporizes its facts into figures of speech.

We have heretofore given the Bible account and that of Evolution printed in parallel columns (p. 61). The reader is again referred to these, and asked to notice the differences in these two accounts. The Bible account is not the description of the slow transformation of an ape into a man-like ape, and that into an ape-like man, and that into a cave man, and he into a stone-tool man, and that again into a pottery-making savage, and he into a weapon-making barbarian, and he into a Chinese and after that into a Roman or Greek, and last into an Englishman and American and he into a spiritual being in the image and likeness of God. Common literary honesty demands that we give an author his own intended meaning. If the Bible meant Evolution why did it not give it? Two accounts more utterly dissimilar could scarcely be given than the Bible account of man's creation and the account of Evolution. We may take one or other and be consistent but the rules of literary exegesis and common sense and Scripture alike forbid taking both.

To call it "poetry" or an "allegory" is no explanation. Why did not the writer make poetry or allegory which had some agreement with facts? Why lead us into a perplexing situation when he might as well have given us some other account or omitted it altogether?

The differences between these two accounts are obvious. The Bible account describes a definite act, the Evolution account a long-continued process through millions of years. The Bible account is a production de novo of a new and original creature; the Evolution account gives one of a numerous line of ancestors; the Bible account presents us with a perfect creature "in the likeness of God;" the Evolution account with a brute slightly raised above the common herd. The Bible account gives a descriptive narrative with accompanying events; the Evolution account leaves all the events unknown save as guessed at by the imagination of the various writers. The Bible account gives a high and noble origin by a special and creative act of his Creator; Evolution tells of a degraded origin from a brute by the operation of blind forces. The Bible account is noble and satisfying and, to one who believes in an omnipotent God, credible, calling for belief in one creative act; the Evolution account is filled with difficulties and paradoxes calling for the wildest stretch of imagination and the utmost application of credulity.

The Bible account is frequently referred to as an actual history by other Scripture writers; the evolutionary account has not one Scripture reference or the slightest hint from Scripture of its having any place whatever in fact. The Bible account agrees with and is the basis of the spiritual teachings of the Bible; the evolutionary account has no such agreement and needs to be explained away to be allowed any place whatever in sacred writings. If the Bible is the book the common consent of the wisest of all mankind and of every age has affirmed it to be, it should have some intimation of this "greatest discovery of the human mind." For the Bible does touch on the greatest problems of the world and life.

Not only does the Bible give a very different account of the origin of man, but also of nature. Its definition of the beginning of things is as follows: "By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear." (Heb. 11:3.) The term it applies to this is Creation. It gives also a circumstantial account of the coming of the present order as we have it, closing with man's creation.

In order to bring the evolutionary theories within the possibility of Bible sanction, a theory of interpretation is adopted which calls the narratives of Creation and the Fall myths, legends, allegories, parables, "scenic representation," or "idealized history" according to the theological bias of the interpreter. These all amount to the same thing, for they do away with the historical value of the accounts. It is only a play upon words to say they are "parables" for parables are not unhistorical. Every one of Christ's parables is true to life and facts. It is claimed that the Bible narratives are poetry and therefore are not historical. The evolutionist for his purpose confounds poetry and fiction. They are not synonymous. A poetical form does not imply fictitiousness. The Psalms have much history under their poetical form. But the first chapter of Genesis is not poetry. Hebrew poetry has a well-defined form as seen in the poetical books. This chapter does not conform to that form, and accordingly it is printed not in poetical form but as prose in the Revised Version. The mere repetition of certain phrases is not the mark of poetry, but is characteristic of the oriental languages in which the Bible was written.

But who is to decide what in the Bible is historical and what is not? What is to hinder anyone from so discarding any fact whatever in the Bible? Why has not the enemy of Christianity the same right to apply this reasoning to the accounts of the death and resurrection of Christ? Where will this process end? The proclaimer of such theories is putting a weapon into the hands of the opponent of Christianity that he will use one day to the destruction of the faith of many. Once having permission to apply these terms, it is easy to make these narratives, or anything else in the Bible, mean anything or nothing as is desired. As an ancient writer said, "Twenty doctors can make a text read twenty different ways." We protest against this loose method of interpretation for many reasons:

1. We object to every new theory interpreting the Bible to suit itself.

2. There is not the slightest warrant in these narratives or elsewhere for such interpretation. They are given as facts and are always so treated. Creation and the Fall are everywhere spoken of as actual facts both by Christ and all other Scripture writers.

3. It is on this system of interpretation that every false system rests, such as Mormonism. All the modern vagaries support themselves from Scripture by accommodation of its language to their doctrines.

4. The Bible is not a book of puzzles, a delphic oracle, to be read in any way suited to the occasion or desires. It has a plain meaning and is for everyday people and everyday needs.

5. The acceptance of the Bible account as unquestioned fact and the literal interpretation of it by Christ and his apostles ought to be enough for anyone calling himself Christian or even for any other who will accept good human testimony. These writers were 1900 years nearer the date of the events in question than we. They had access to knowledge now lost to us. From any standpoint, we may rest our view of these narratives on the testimony of the New Testament Scriptures. The references of the New Testament to the Old are numbered by hundreds. Any Bible with references, or any text book or Bible with Helps will show these. It is enough here to give those Christ refers to.

Christ himself cites from twelve books and about twenty-four narratives as follows: Creation, Matt. 19:4; Law of Marriage, Matt. 19:5; Cain and Abel, Matt. 23:35; The Deluge, Matt. 24:37; Abraham, John 8:56; Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot's wife, Luke 17:28-32; Manna, John 6:49; Brazen Serpent, John 3:14; Shew Bread, Matt. 12:3, 4; Elijah and his Miracles, Luke 4:25, 26; Naaman, Luke 4:27; Tyre and Sidon, Matt. 11:22; Jonah and "The Whale," Matt. 12:39; The Books of Moses, John 5:46; The Psalms, Luke 20:42; Moses and The Prophets, Luke 24:27; Isaiah, Matt. 13:14; Daniel's Prophecies, Matt. 24:15; Malachi, Matt. 11:10; The entire Old Testament, Luke 24:44. Of not one of these does he convey the slightest hint of aught but trustworthiness and literal interpretation.

6. The still more serious issue is presented of asserting that both Paul and Christ either did not know that these were myths, or knowing so gave no intimation that they used them in any way other than as true narratives. This would not only shake all confidence in Christ as divine and his apostles as inspired, but would shake all confidence in any fact or teaching from Scripture whatever. For Scripture rests on facts and these facts on witnesses. To these, appeal is constantly made. On the truth of these all depends. Here then is a "mythical" Adam made the basis of marriage; a "mythical" Adam and his fall, the argument for man's need and Christ's work, and the same "mythical" Adam made the proof of the resurrection. In short the whole system of Bible truth is attacked by these theories, from credibility in Christ himself to the last hope of the believer in the world to come.

Whom shall we believe? Shall we credit Evolution which admits that its theory is unproven and full of difficulties, with not a single case of Evolution to support it, nor a power which could produce it, and with countless facts to antagonize it, or shall we believe Jesus Christ who was never mistaken, or false in his facts, or teachings, and who believed these chapters, cited them and accepted their narratives without question?

We have arrived at the vital point in this discussion. If Evolution were only a scientific question, it would interest a limited circle. As a deeply religious question it interests all. That Evolution affects vitally all evangelical belief is apparent to the most superficial inquirer. It is not only a matter of historic fact but of doctrinal teaching. Man's nature and need as a descendant from the brute is one thing, and as a spiritual being, fallen from the likeness of God, another. The responsibility in either case is very different and therefore has to do with eternal destiny for weal or woe, and also with the work of Christ.

The theology of the Higher Criticism which is also the theology of Evolution, of which it is the Biblical branch, is thus summed up by an evolutionary writer, in a recent article giving the articles of belief of the theology of Evolution: "The Bible can no longer speak with unquestioned authority.... Poor old Adam disappears.... Christ's divinity is only such as we may possess ... the atonement is only such as we see in all life and nature.... As to the future life we find ourselves left very much in the dark.... We no longer regard going to heaven as the center of our interest." (Theodore D. Bacon quoted in Homiletic Review, Nov. 1902.)

Evolution teaches, as stated by Dr. George A. Gordon, of Boston: "Man's state and fate is on account of the irrationality he has brought up with him from the animal world." (Immortality and the New Theodicy, p. 100.) The future of man according to Evolution is that as he has risen from the brute state he ought not to be punished for his defects but rather rewarded for having done so well. Evolution teaches that man has in himself the elements of his salvation. These if developed will produce the change he needs for this world and that to come. He will proceed on the same lines as he has traveled to reach his present state. Development is the Saviour of Evolution. The Bible says that to develop man is to develop sin and, "Sin when it is finished bringeth forth death." It requires the intervention of the Supernatural in Regeneration to save man. Evolution is self-saving.

The future is radically affected by the theory of Evolution. The development of mankind is its objective point. To bring man to a point of development will bring the Kingdom of Heaven. The fate of the individual is not made much of. He is sacrificed for the race or species. But while not much is made of the individual the general teaching is that somehow it will be well with all at last. It is a fact that all universalists are evolutionists. Evolution makes Heaven and Hell terms which mean little or nothing. The present social state of man is the great quest. Evolution is a bridge which reaches neither shore. It knows not whence man came nor where he goes.

1. The Bible rests its doctrines upon its facts. There is no character in Scripture aside from Christ upon whose historical character so much Scripture doctrine depends as upon Adam. The creation of man is made the basis for the sanctity of marriage by Christ, who quotes the words of the account in Genesis. (Matt. 19:4-6; Mark 10:6-9.) Paul makes this narrative the basis of his great argument for the state and need of man and the work of Christ. "Through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin.... Death reigned from Adam to Moses.... By the trespass of the one the many died ... the judgment came of one unto condemnation ... as through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous." (Rom. 5:12-21, R. V.) Here the actuality of the narrative is the very basis of the declaration of man's state in sin and a type of the extent and nature of Christ's work. So also the use by Paul in the account of the resurrection doctrine: "As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive." (1 Cor. 15:22-45.)

2. The Bible teaches that man was made in the image of God. That image was Christ who is elsewhere declared to be "the effulgence of his glory and the very image of his substance." (Heb. 1:3.) In this image man was made. This is a very different picture presented to us from that given by the evolutionist of a brute "which could stand on its hind legs and throw things with its forelegs."

3. The Bible teaches that all are guilty and condemned and lost, and without excuse. It teaches that man fell from a high state as a race and as a race is responsible for his condition. It cites death as the proof of this. It teaches that man is inherently averse to God by nature and wilfully continues to do wrong and in short is condemned and lost. It teaches that he once had the truth and wilfully gave it up for sin. That he does so now in spite of the law of God written in his conscience and that out of Christ he is lost and without hope. (Rom. 1-5; Ep. 2:1-3, 11, 12.)

4. The Bible teaches that what man needs is a pardon, a reconciliation with God, a ransom, a regeneration, a resurrection. He must be translated from death to life, from the kingdom of darkness to that of light. If he has not all this he is lost and doomed.

5. The Bible teaches that in order that man might enjoy this, Christ had to come and die, "the just for the unjust that he might bring us to God." He died as a sacrifice, as an offering, as a ransom, as a propitiation, as a reconciliation. His death made it possible in justice as well as in mercy to save man.

6. The Bible gives a description of man's means of salvation which is most opposite to the hope held out by Evolution. It is by a radical and supernatural change that he becomes right and only as all men so change or are changed will the world become right. Conversion is not Evolution but regeneration, the implanting of a new and opposite nature.

7. The Bible teaches a different outcome of human life and history. It points to an end by supernatural means to the world and a judgment for mankind and the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven by supernatural means. It cites the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Deluge as examples of the world's end. It gives the most awful combination of earthly figures as the picture of the doom of the impenitent and the most beautiful figures earth and sky can furnish or the mind of man conceive as the home of the saved. Nothing could be more different than the theologies of Evolution and of the Bible.

Many well-meant volumes have been written to reconcile Evolution and evangelical belief. None are satisfying, although the eagerness with which some were at first received are witness to the desire to retain both beliefs.

The theistic evolutionist thinks that to find a place for the Creator somewhere along the line is enough. St. James rebukes this insufficient theology in these words: "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble." (Jas. 2:19.) So also Christ himself said: "Ye believe in God believe also in me.... I am the way, the truth and the life.... No man cometh unto the Father but by me.... He that honoreth not the Son honoreth not the Father which hath sent him.... For as the Father hath life in himself even so gave he to the Son also to have life in himself.... He hath committed all judgment unto the Son that all men may honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He that honoreth not the Son honoreth not the Father." Theism then is not enough in the opinion of Jesus Christ.

The whole Christian system is in question in this theory. The whole aim of Evolution is to dispose of the supernatural as much as possible. The radical evolutionist gets rid of God entirely he thinks. The theistic evolutionist limits the interference of the supernatural to the creation of matter, of life, of man's spiritual nature, and the incarnation and work of Christ. The tendency of evolution is to make the miracles of Christ mythical and the phenomena of conversion natural. The theistic evolutionist is on a side hill. He must go up or down. He is not consistent, and, as the human mind asserts its right to consistency, he is forced, willingly or unwillingly, often unconsciously, to the one side or the other, and he finds himself led along lines which take him far from evangelical belief. In its consistent form, Evolution leaves no room for a Creator. Indeed Haeckel, the greatest of living evolutionists and the legitimate successor to Darwin's place and greatness, states, as already quoted, thus: "It entirely excludes supernatural process, every prearranged and conscious act of a personal character. Nothing will make the full meaning of the theory of descent clearer than calling it the non-miraculous theory of creation." (History of Creation, pp. 397, 422.) Another evolutionist, Carl Vogt, says: "Evolution turns the Creator out of doors." Infidels all accept of it gladly. Every atheist is an evolutionist.

James Freeman Clark thus writes: "In the system of the Greek and Scandinavian mythology, spirit is evolved from matter; matter up to spirit works. They begin with the lowest form of being; night, chaos, a mundane egg, and evolve the higher gods therefrom." (Ten Great Religions, p. 231.)

Sir J. William Dawson, the late eminent geologist of Canada, writes of the theory as follows: "The evolutionist doctrine is one of the strangest phenomena of humanity. It existed most naturally in the oldest philosophy and poetry, in connection with the crudest and most uncritical attempts of the human mind to grasp the system of nature; but that in our day a system destitute of any shadow of proof, and supported merely by vague analogies and figures of speech and by arbitrary and artificial coherence of its own parts, should be accepted as a philosophy and should find able adherents to string upon its thread of hypothesis our vast and weighty stores of knowledge, is surpassingly strange." (Story of the Earth and Man, p. 317.)

Evolution is working towards a pantheistic atheism. This is expressed in the creed of the late Cecil Rhodes, the late magnate of South Africa, as follows: "I believe in Force Almighty, the ruler of the universe, working scientifically through natural selection to bring about the survival of the fittest and the elimination of the unfit."

It is apparent that the adoption of such a theory as Evolution must affect the spiritual state of the person receiving it. Man's mental and spiritual natures are intimately connected. While those in a settled previous spiritual experience may carry Evolution as "a working theory" only, those in an immature state will be vitally affected. Especially is this true of youthful minds. It is indeed a fact that many young men have started with high purposes to prepare for the ministry, and even for foreign missions, and have, after adopting these modern theories, abandoned their purpose, and thousands have abandoned all personal religion. Pastors can tell of many such instances.

Some have said that the adoption of Evolution has helped their faith. They fail to see that bringing the Bible down to their faith is not bringing their faith up to the Bible. It is a weakening of faith and not a strengthening of it. This apparent increase of faith simply prepares the way for its utter ruin. The first step leads to a wider divergence, as many have shown, that leads to wreck of all faith in a supernatural God or world or Bible. The mind will follow its natural workings. Loss of faith in the facts of the Bible leads to loss of faith in its truths. The acceptance of this theory still further leads to a lessening of the sense of our need of Christ that the Bible teaches and man should feel. And further the acceptance of this theory, while it may not affect materially the minds of experienced Christians, will through them affect others.

There is also a latent unconscious loss of faith that is realized only in some great emergency, when in "the storm and stress" of life the soul looks out for something to hold to. It is then that the rotting platform of unbelief goes down in wreck. The other extreme is also a cause of ruin. In the time of great prosperity when all the allurements of life and time and sense present themselves, it requires all the purpose one has to stem the tide of temptations. It is here that a false belief will work havoc. The mind conceives that after all sin is not so hateful or salvation so needed or doom so fearful.

The effect on experimental personal experience is evident. Instead of looking for a regeneration, a revolution of the inner state, the believer in Evolution necessarily looks for a change from education or other form of development. Such a thing as conversion or a baptism of the Holy Ghost he will cease to look for or desire. There will come declining feeling, lessening devotion, prayer will become perfunctory and there will come increasing occupation with and love for other things. Evolution as a belief makes right many things that were before held to be wrong. It is an easy religion to hold. It strikes the world at the angle of least resistance and enables the holder to accept almost anything that the natural man desires. The conflict of "the flesh and the spirit" ceases; the flesh, that is the natural man, has conquered.

These theories in many seem to be but evidences of a previous wrong state of heart. The wish is father to the thought. The theory is accepted because it allows the laying aside of views that restrain the desires. Such persons are willing to admit the existence of God and his contact with man at Creation if relieved from any nearer relationship. It is therefore worse than unbelief. It is antagonism. It is enmity. Christ said, "Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil." The heart and life are the basis of their opinions. It is evident that argument here fails. "A man convinced against his will remains an unbeliever still."

Evolution is a comfortable theory to the world. It elevates man. It hides the presence of God. It calls for no repentance or consecration. It boasts of human progress and claims merit therefor. In short it is the worship of man rather than the worship of God. It deifies man and it ignores Christ. Once committed to this theory, there is no extreme the person may not reach. Some have abandoned Christ and Christianity because of it. It is in fact in doctrine and experience and conduct, the antithesis of Christianity.

Such a theory as Evolution and its vaporizing method of Bible interpretation, prepares the way for "isms" of every kind. It is to this we are indebted for the swarm of these that afflicts the church to-day. Once allow that the Bible may be interpreted to suit such theories and any heresy or absurdity can prove its position from the Bible as all of them by this same process do.

It is already weakening the power of the pulpit, and this in turn is one great reason for the declining effect of the preached word. Once received into a minister's heart the edge of his sword is dulled if indeed the sword is not itself sheathed. He may not preach Evolution either as a method of creation or a method of salvation, but his own inner faith is weakened in the old truth which had such power to convert the souls of hearers. When openly advocated and taught, it is useless to seek revivals among those so taught. So it is the fact that conversions to-day are mainly confined to the young and others not affected by the error.

All the indications point to the further weakening of the hold upon men of the supernatural and the eternal. To eliminate the former and, while acknowledging the latter, to disparage all reference to the future life, seems to be the tendency of the day. As already cited, one of its chief advocates tells us, "Heaven is no longer the center of the Christian's hope." The consequence is the material and intellectual interests receive chief attention and other agencies take the chief place religion should have. Education received in the United States over $200,000,000 in gifts during the last few years, to say nothing of the many fold more received from incomes and public funds. Meanwhile the causes of Christ are languishing, missions are dwarfed, small churches in great masses of the population are struggling for existence against fearful odds, while the money of professed Christians pours in these mighty streams for all other purposes. No sensible person will disparage education, but "Religion is the chief concern of mortals here below."

Further it is the few who can take advantage of the higher education for which these millions are given. But five per cent of the common school scholars can attend college. The many must toil for existence. It is to the poor the gospel was preached by its Founder. It is to the poor it means most. To those who have little else it is the all in all. It is to these it should be preached in its freedom and fullness. The principles of natural selection of the fittest which sends millions to higher institutions and neglects the masses of the people is the opposite of the gospel.

Cardinal Newman wrote: "There is a special effort made almost all over the world, but most visibly and formidably in its most civilized and powerful part, to do without religion.... Truly there is at this time a confederacy of evil marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself and taking measures enclosing the church of Christ as in a net and preparing the way for a general apostasy." (Quoted in "Christianity and Anti-Christianity." S. J. Andrews, p. 4.) Whether this is the final form of unbelief is difficult to say. It bears the marks of anti-christianity the apostle speaks of. The unbelief of the latter days will rest on belief in the unvarying stability of nature. (2 Peter 3:4.) The coming of this theory is aimed to dissipate any looking for supernatural changes such as the Scriptures teach are coming to earth, such as the last day, the coming of Christ, the resurrection and all the vast series of changes therein declared. Hence that wholesome fear of God so operative in deterring evil and stimulating good is removed. Based on this unbelief, the enemy of God and man can advance to the accomplishment of his purposes as never before. All satanic methods before this have been crude and coarse compared with this last invention. It is the most subtle and sweeping of all evil methods to ensnare the mind of man. Based on what is called science, promoted by the scholars of the day, taught in the fountains of learning and preached from pulpit and platform, it must have a widespread effect. Heretofore attacks on Christianity have been made from without. This is from within. It is the trusted leaders who are now undermining the fortress in which they live.

But revivals always begin at the bottom. It was a few poor fishermen who commenced the gospel age. It is their successors to whom we must look as we have in the past for return of apostolic power. "God chose the foolish things of the world that He might put to shame them that are wise; and God chose the weak things of the world that He might put to shame the things that are strong; and the base things of the world, and the things that are despised did God choose, yea and the things that are not, that he might bring to naught the things that are: that no flesh should glory before God." (1 Cor. 1:27, 28, R. V.) So we look hopefully to God for that only which will deliver the church from this and all other pestilent evils, theoretical and practical, a revival of true religion by the power of the Holy Spirit, and the preaching of the old gospel of the cross of Christ.