Back to the Bible PRICE By the Same Author The Fundamentals of Geology I have been intensely interested, . . . and I think you prove your points conclusively. Rev. S. Baring-Gould, Lew Trenchard, England. It is a very clever book. David Starr Jordan, Leland Stanford University. I do not see why the argument is not scientific and demonstrative. It seems to me that you have demonstrated the hopelessly unscientific character of the hitherto accepted geological notions. Prof. W. C. Wilkinson, University of Chicago. My first impression of the work is that it may serve a useful purpose in orienting geologists as to the correct appearance of their views upon the leading problems of the science. As a geologist, I some time ago ceased to theorize. I am simply noting facts and trying to explain them. C. W. Hall, Professor of Geology and Mineralogy, University of Minnesota. I must confess that I have never read anything clearer and more convincing on the subject. It seems to me final, so far as the evolutionary theories and claims go. William G. Moorehead, President of Xenia Theological Seminary, Xenia, Ohio. The book ought to have a place among college textbooks. Prof. Luther T. Townsend, Boston University. I think you have brought out with great clearness the difficulties of supporting the evolution theory from the geological side. Prof. Gbo. Howard Parker, Department of Zoology, Harvard University. It is a remarkable piece of logical reasoning. You are a cogent writer, and I am glad we have you on the side of “ primal orthodoxy.” Prof. Franklin Johnson, University of Chicago. I now wish to thank you for publishing it. It was needed. I think you have peeled the onion-coat theory completely. To find your book is like finding a spring after toiling through the dry-as-dust desert. It is refreshing and enjoyable. Gilbert E. Bailey, Professor of Geology, University of Southern California. Revised Edition, 270 pages Illustrated with engravings, charts, and maps PRICE, $1.25 GOD’S TWO BOOKS Many thanks for Mr. Price’s striking book. Naturally I have read it with great interest. ... I have never seen any answer to Sir Henry Howorth’s “ Mammoth,” nor do I see what answer is possible, and the same seems to me to be the case as regards Professor Price’s argument. Prof. A. H. Sayce, Oxford University, England. It will be a perfect armory for use in meeting attacks on Holy Scripture by false science and false criticism. Sir Robert Anderson, London, England. Cloth, 184 pages - PRICE, $1.00 REVIEW AND HERALD PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION Washington, D. C. Back to the Bible OR The New Protestantism By George McCready Price Author of “The Fundamentals of Geology,” etc. But God left free the will; for what obeys Reason is free, and reason he made right; — But bid her well be ware, and still erect, Lest by some fair-appearing good surprised, She dictate false, and misinform the will To do what God expressly hath forbid. —“ Paradise Lost,” IX, 351-356. REVIEW AND HERALD PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION Washington, D. C. NEW YORK CITY SOUTH BEND, IND. Copyrighted, 1916 Review & Herald Publishing Assn. Foreword An explanation of my subtitle, “The New Protestantism,” may serve also as an outline of the attitude of the present volume. The Protestantism with which we are familiar, the old Protestantism, was a declaration of independence directed against a tyranny which dominated all phases of human life, intellectual, religious, and social. Today we are fallen under a different tyranny, the tyranny of what, to balance it against Roman Catholicism, I may venture to call pseudoscien-tificism. '■ The problem confronting the Reformers of the sixteenth *century was to vindicate the Bible as against ecclesiastical tradition; the problem for the Neo-Protestants of the twentieth century is to vindicate a despised and discarded Bible against so-called science already grown arrogant and dogmatic through the numbers of its adherents and the hypnotism of illustrious names. The author’s idea, and that of those whom he represents, is that, modern Christians have tried the method of Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism about long enough, seeking to translate the doctrines of Christianity, and the historic facts on which Christianity is founded, into the language of biology; and that a reversal of this method, the method of a NeoProtestantism, is at least worth trying, and about the next thing in order. It would seem as if every possible method of compromise has been tried, with invariable failure and confusion. ^Vhy not for once treat the Bible as the men of the sixteenth century treated it? Why not take the_ Mosaic accounts of Creation and the Deluge at their face value, and examine the claims of the popular Evolution philosophy in the light of primitive Christian principles, without any ^compromise whatever? Few if any books of modern times have attempted any complete restatement of the fundamental truths of Chris-(v) vi Foreword tianity in the setting demanded by the exigencies of the present situation. But the number of those who in their hearts are still clinging to the Bible as in very deed the authentic word of God, is out of all proportion to the small amount of attention they have hitherto attracted in the literary world; and it is merely as voicing the views of this very large group of what may be called the ultraconservatives, that this book is written. It is no empty boast to say that all the fundamental positions here taken are in complete harmony with the views of thousands of people of culture and education scattered over the whole civilized world. The present volume merely gives voice to the unformulated thoughts of these multitudes, who have caught such vivid glimpses of the needs of the present hour that they already recognize another great world reform as now due,— a reform centering around that first and most basic truth of religion, namely, our relationship to the Creator and his relationship to us. The scientific arguments employed by these Neo-Prot-estants are given here, of course, only in outline. For the details of these arguments the reader is referred to the other published works of The Author. Lodi, California May, 1915 Contents I Neo-Protestantism ------ 9 II Subjective and Objective Methods 28 III Geology and the Deluge - - - 41 IV Historical Sketch - 57 V Modern Philosophy ----- 72 VI The Origin of Evil ----- 87 VII The New Pantheism ----- 97 VIII Occidental Heathenism - - - - 115 IX Creation and Its Memorial - - - - 123 X “The Coming Slavery” - 147 XI The Federation of the World - - - 167 XII Conclusion ------- 181 Appendix A - - - - - - 205 Appendix B ------ 209 Appendix C - -212 (vii) Introduction Dear Professor Price: — You have been much in my mind of late, you and the proposed new book, “Back to the Bible,” the MS. of which, by your kindness, I had the privilege of reading some weeks ago. It has occurred to me that just now, perhaps, is the “ psychologic moment ” for its publication. Books in general might, and probably would, suffer from the occupation of the public mind with the matter of the dreadful war which at present involves so remarkably almost the whole world of mankind. But the subject and the treatment of your book are such that those at least who think with you as to the present and the impending state of the world and the Church of Christ, will be even more interested in what you have to present to them on account of the lurid commentary afforded in current national and international events. Faithfully yours, William Cleaver Wilkinson, Professor of Poetry and Criticism, University of Chicago. 5630 Woodlawn Ave., Chicago March 11, 1915 (viii) CHAPTER I Neo-Protestantism “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau! Mock on, mock on, ’tis all in vain! You throw the dust against the wind, And the wind blows it back again.” —William Blake. I The great English-speaking peoples of America, Great Britain, and her Colonies, undoubtedly constitute what may be regarded as the noblest empire that has ever been permitted to arise and flourish in the earth. To every quarter of the globe have we carried our customs, our laws, our social and religious ideals. More than one third of the population of the earth, and doubtless much more than one half of its wealth, have been committed to our guidance and control; and to us the world in general, civilized and uncivilized, hAs to a great extent grown accustomed to look for examples and ideals in all matters relating to education, morals, and religion. Not without reason, since for three hundred years we have been the people of the open Bible. No light responsibility this, that to us chiefly, since the rejection of the Hebrew nation, has been intrusted the custody of the Holy Scriptures. It is undeniable that, since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Anglo-Saxon races have done more to uphold and disseminate the religion of the Bible, through giving that book in printed form to.the whole world of mankind, than have all other races put together. In short, these English-speaking peoples may be regarded as Protestantism embodied, a living illustration of what the religion of the Bible will do for a people. (9) 10 Back to the Bible Invidious comparisons of nation with nation should, of course, be avoided in the present state of international stress and conflict; but there is no room for doubt that, because of our attitude toward his Word for these hundreds of years, the Supreme Arbiter of national destinies has blessed us by permitting the Anglo-Saxon races to gain control of almost all the non-Christian races that have been brought under the rule of Western civilization. Certainly it can be no chance happening that the language of the English Bible has become also the tongue of the world’s commerce; or that the scientific discoveries and mechanical inventions of the English-speaking peoples have become subjects of household talk the world around. But within a single generation a momentous change has taken place. In respect to its suddenness and its magnitude this change is without parallel in human history. To study this change, its causes and its consequences, is the aim of the present book. II A brief word as to how the change referred to has been brought about, will help us to understand in advance the principles involved. Looking at the situation from the point of view of one who believes the Bible to be the authentic Word of God, a revelation supernaturally vouchsafed to human beings, we shall see that the change spoken of has been brought about by the same means that all down through the ages have been used by the spirit of evil to bring about apostasy, namely, the adopting of something else than the Word of God as the guide of life. To illustrate: A completely changed view of the universe and its origin is now being taught in pretty much all the universities of the civilized world. The doctrine of a literal Creation is strenuously denied; from this denial has followed the rejection of the basic principles of evangelical Christianity, and with that, the rejection of the Bible as in any true sense a revelation of the living God. A pantheistic philosophy, little to be distinguished from that of the Hindus, Neo-Protestantism 11 is rapidly displacing the religion of the English-speaking peoples; and among the inevitable consequences there is already observable a decadence in moral and political ideals, and in the social and family habits of the people. Nor is the change referred to confined to the English-speaking peoples; for it has extended to all the nations of Europe, and even to Japan and to fast-awakening China. But the responsibility for the change can be traced directly to that people who have done so much to disseminate the Bible throughout the world. For though it is often affirmed that Germany is the true source of modern Rationalism, and although this nation certainly has most completely adopted the ruthless ethics of Darwinism in its national capacity, yet we should not forget that Lyell with his doctrine of Uniformity, and Darwin with his biological Evolution, were both Englishmen; and these two ideas lie at the very root of the great change with which we are dealing. What do these things portend? What are to be the results of such radical and far-reaching changes? Whether we like them or not, whether we believe they are for good or for evil, these revolutionary changes in the intellectual and religious beliefs of the people are facts of common knowledge; and if there is any way in which we can make an appraisement of the present situation and forecast the outlook, such a study is surely one of the most important that can claim the attention of thoughtful people. Ill When the human mind awoke from the slumber of the Dark Ages, man found God’s two books spreadfout before him, the written Word and the book of nature. Both were eagerly studied; and so long as the truths of the former were made paramount to the study of the latter, so long as the Bible was allowed its proper influence as the key to the moral and religious lessons from God’s larger and more ambiguous book (not the key to the facts of nature, but the key to the lessons from the facts), the human race made rapid progress in understanding these two great revelations^ Were it not 12 Back to the Bible for the blight of sin, nature would still be a perfect revealing of Gou’s character and his law. And were it not for the beclouding and bewildering influence of sin upon our own faculties, we might even yet read unaided the message of our Father’s love in cloud, and cell, and rock. But nature has been blighted and in many ways perverted and deranged, so that it does not now correctly represent her Creator; while with hereditary and cultivated tendencies to evil the unassisted human reason cannot be trusted to read aright even the record that we have. And so in his mercy the God of heaven has given us the written Revelation to be the guide of mankind in every department of life, intellectual, moral, and religious; and every individual and every people who have consistently taken the Bible for such a guide, have been blessed with prosperity and success. Every teacher is repeatedly called upon to decide how much he is to tell his pupil dogmatically, and how much he is to leave the pupil to find out for himself. Discovery made by oneself is the surest method of having a truth impressed on the mind; but the effort to discover a truth must not be out of all due proportion to the benefit thus gained. Similarly, when the Great Teacher undertook the education of the human family, he was confronted with the same problem. How much ought he to tell us? how much leave for us to discover? In the Bible we have what he decided to tell us; in nature, and in personal and national experiences, we have what he decided to allow us to discover for ourselves. Yet some complain because he told us so little in his textbook; while others complain because he told us so much — they would like to find it all out themselves by the laboratory method! Still others complain because they say that the textbook and the results recorded in our laboratory notebooks do not agree with each other; while some have even advanced the absurd idea that the textbook was never intended to help us in our laboratory work — in other words, that the Bible was never intended to teach science! But gradually and unconsciously the world began to use this new knowledge of the things of Creation in a way sure to N eo-Protestantism 13 becloud the mind and obscure the prime truth of Creation. The great facts of nature which may be discovered by the use of the senses, give us data for forming definite conclusions by inductive methods of reasoning; and so long as we confine our conclusions to subjects regarding which we have all the data in hand, and perfectly understand them and their relations to other departments of thought, our conclusions have all the force and value of syllogistic reasoning. In other words, so long as we do not exceed the limits of our data by jumping to conclusions beyond their scope, we are logically and scientifically sure of our results. But in the very nature of things our data concerning the universe are in little separate groups or compartments not perceptibly connected with each other, or artificially connected by bridges of words; while immeasurably higher and broader than any of the possible conclusions from sense perception are the great spiritual truths of Revelation, such as Creation and Redemption, which ought always to be given formative power to shape and guide all our conclusions obtained from investigating the book of nature. With these spiritual truths as the supreme test, the touchstone, of any new idea, we have a right to be suspicious of any laboratory notes based on the fragmentary, ambiguous evidence we can glean from nature which we may find to be essentially out of joint with the far more definite, far better established, far more easily understood truths of Revelation, the divine textbook of life. Correct inductive methods of reasoning are of great value. They have a high place in the development of the human mind, and constitute one of the ways in which God designed that we should obtain knowledge. But there is a higher light than inductive reasoning based on physical and biological data,— a light beneath which all nature becomes illuminated,— and this light comes from the written Word, or it may be flashed into the soul by the searchlight of God’s Spirit. When the knowledge of nature that we can discover through sense perception and inductive reasoning is used to direct our’steps to the great temple of God’s truth, or is used as an encouragement to faith, it is being used in the 14 Back to the Bible right way. But when this fragmentary knowledge derived from nature is used in the absurd way of constructing a complete philosophy of the universe, when the investigator ignores the higher light of Revelation given to guide us amid the intricate mazes of scientific investigation, then these quasi-scientific methods become a delusion and a snare; and the human mind, forming universal conclusions in a haphazard way from the narrow, limited data at its command, will always find that it has been tricked in its conclusions regarding the most solemn questions of origin, duty, and destiny. But for a century or so these pseudoscientific methods of studying both these books of the Creator — both nature and Revelation — have largely prevailed, and today are well-nigh universal. In the study of the Bible a typical example is what is known as “Higher Criticism.” In natural science we have what is dignified with the misleading title of “the purely scientific method.” But each of these methods of study makes the same mistake, namely, dispensing with the aid of the Spirit of God by politely bowing him out of the study and the laboratory, and undertaking to examine these revelations in a purely human, rationalistic manner, with a multitude of prearranged limitations that forever bar the way to a full knowledge of the truth. In the field of Biblical and historical criticism this method results in ignoring or denying the possibility of miracle and the validity of any miraculous narrative, the reality of prophecy and the validity of any prophetic statement; in short, denying the reality of any divine revelation in the sense in which it has always been understood by the Christian church. In natural science this method of study results in what is termed Uniformity and Evolution, the essence of which is the doctrine that there has never been any real distinctive Creation at a definite time in the past, but that what we see going on in our world is to be the gauge in investigating all that has taken place in the past,— that, in fact, the changes now said to be taking place in plants, animals, and rocks are as much a part of Creation as anything that has ever taken Neo-Protestantism 15 place. The self-contradictory expression of a “continuous creation” is sometimes used to express this idea. Thus, by these false methods of study, the student goes from Genesis to Malachi, from Matthew to the Revelation, and finds no trace of providence or prophecy; or he is conducted from physics and astronomy to biology and geology, and finds no room for divine interposition in the way of miracle, no use for prayer, no record of creation, and no need of a divine Mediator and Redeemer. It seems very strange that men should thus voluntarily place themselves under such a handicap in the way of restrictions in their search for truth, and still claim that they are following correct methods of reasoning. Sir Isaac Newton, that prince of philosophers, long ago pointed out the limits of this method of study, when he first directed the world along the lines of modern scientific research. For he showed how analysis or induction may proceed from phenomena to principles, “from effects to their causes, and from particular causes to more general ones, till the argument end in the most general.” And he was careful to point out that each separate line of investigation in nature, if carried far enough, must inevitably end in the “most general” cause, namely, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe: for he says, “It pertains to natural philosophy to reason from phenomena to God.”—“Principia,” lib. III. Even^Bacon said about the same thing, for he classed among the “impediments of knowledge” what he terms the act of taking particular sciences as slips or cuttings off “from the root and stock of universal knowledge.” In his quaint way he goes on to illustrate the very narrow, limited character of the method which is much more common in our day than it was in his: “I sometimes see the profoundest sort of wits, in handling some particular argument, will now and then draw a bucket of water out of this well for their present use; but the springhead thereof seemeth to me not to have been visited.”—“Interpretation of Nature” I, 380, 53. But with high scorn the modern dabblers in science and philosophy ignore these wise admonitions of the founders 16 Back to the Bible and masters of true inductive science, and loudly boast that their methods of treating the Bible and the book of nature are capable of working out a complete analysis of all the phenomena within the little inclosure that each has fenced off for himself, not only without receiving any assistance from outside sources of knowledge, but without even acknowledging that there is anything outside related to what they are doing. But when a true Baconian induction from all the facts within our knowledge appears likely to greatly disturb prevailing theories, then only does it become “unscientific,” quite “unethical,” to draw general conclusions as Newton and Bacon suggested. Evolution is now in possession of the field and does not purpose to be disturbed. It was perfectly ethical for Huxley, who was only a biologist, to discourse on geology and the general problem of the origin of things. It was scientific good form for Haeckel, another biologist, to describe the exact order of all the various forms of life up through the “geological ages,” and to dogmatize in a domineering, browbeating way about the infallibility of his solution of the “riddle of the universe.” It was perfectly proper for Spencer, who was not a scientist at all, according to the narrow view here under consideration, to write at length on geology and biology, and frame a synthetic philosophy of the universe, its past, present, and future. But if any of us today, in spite of our vastly multiplied knowledge of nature, attempt to survey the whole field of nature in a careful but complete manner, attempt to get the lessons from a comprehensive view of the whole, each specialist in turn proceeds to warn us off his special microscopic preserve, and to call us names as scientific trespassers and philosophic criminals for presuming to talk on matters beyond our own jurisdiction. “ Who are you, anyway ? What particular part of the earth have you dug to pieces down to bedrock? If you have anything to say about this part of the universe, it must be done in the regular way, through the official channels.” Neo-Protestantism 17 Thus, when a general view of nature would be almost certain to destroy confidence in many widely popular ideas, science is now become a matter of authority; and no one is permitted to look at it in a broad way, or to frame a general induction from the sum of all the facts of nature within our knowledge, under penalty of scientific excommunication. In other words, specialization has preempted the whole ground, and refuses any general survey of the geography, erecting on each plot, "Private Property: Trespassers Will be Prosecuted.’’ That is, scientists have framed a code of ethics forbidding a general view of the woods: every man must confine himself to the observation of the particular tree in front of his own nose. It may be of value to restate the general principle involved in the relationship between nature and Revelation. No means within our power can enable us, through facts from nature alone, to gain such a broad view of our relation to nature and to the God of nature that we can depend upon the conclusions thus formed for pointing out our duty or explaining our origin and destiny. Far too many factors in our calculus have been neglected. We are all familiar with the ways in which our senses will deceive and trick us at every turn, until trained to see and feel and hear. We hear a sound on the left that really comes from the right; or we get turned around in a new locality, and feel "sure” that the sun rises in the north. The earth on which we live seems the one fixed point in the universe; whereas it is not only traveling through space at terrific speed, but is constantly rotating with a speed at the equator of a thousand miles an hour. In the same way our reason, though one of the noblest faculties we possess, is not by itself alone a safe or sufficient guide in matters relating to duty and destiny. The taint of sin has touched our intellect as well as our bodily frame. A blind man cannot understand painting, nor a deaf man appreciate music. And the great problems of origin, duty, and destiny are solved rather by honesty and loyalty of heart toward the great All-Father than by any keenness of intellect or accuracy of sense observation. Even reason 2 18 Back to the Bible needs divine enlightenment to keep it within safe lines; and it is for this very purpose that God has given us his written Word. But for these many years the Protestant world has not used the Bible as a guide in the study of the book of nature. It has ignored the fact that there are spiritual laws higher, plainer, and more important than the glimpses we obtain of physical law. The descendants of those who signed the protest at Spires or sailed in the “Mayflower,” afraid of being thought “unscientific,” have hastened to pledge unquestioning belief in the long, devious reasonings and uncertain data arrived at by means of the microscope, the test-tube, or the clinometer, in spite of the moral atrocities involved in the conclusions thus obtained, and their obvious conflict with every fundamental doctrine of the Reformers, of the apostles, and of Christ himself. With infatuated confidence in the torchlike glimmerings of scientific reasoning, Protestantism has berated the Bible, the light of heaven, because it does not confirm the fashionable theories of biology and geology; and of late years has given up using the Bible in the way her founders used it, and has set about a complete reconstruction of theology in accordance with these fashionable theories of science. Protestantism, which gained her name and her reason for existence because she said that the Bible and the Bible only should be our guide in all matters of moral and religious belief and practice, has so far denied the historic doctrine of her origin that she has renounced her Bible for the teachings of modern so-called science. The Protestant church, which jn her youth boldly defended the Bible against venerable ecclesiastical tradition, has now in her strength quietly surrendered her guidebook to the noisy arrogance of an upstart science. Surely another reformation, a revival of old-time Protestantism, is the next thing in order. The problem before the Reformers in the sixteenth century was the Bible versus ecclesiastical tradition; the problem for the Neo-Protestants of the twentieth century is to vindicate a despised and discarded Bible against N eo-Protestantism 19 so-called science already grown arrogant and dogmatic through the numbers of its believers and the hypnotism of illustrious names. IV Such, then, is the problem, the conflict, before the Church of Christ. Nor is it confined to the English-speaking peoples, widely scattered though these may be. This problem, this conflict, is absolutely world wide in its range; or, to use the expressive language of a Bible prophecy, which has given us such a vivid portrayal of its issues, it involves “every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.” And for those who have eyes to see and hearts to understand, one of the most remarkable and significant phenomena of modern times is the spectacle of all the great world forces of the present day arraying themselves together on one side, and consciously or unconsciously uniting together for a common purpose. For in considering the great movements of the present day, such as the so-called New Thought and New Theology, Modernism, Socialism, Spiritism, Church Federation, and World Federation, which are largely or wholly inspired by these changed views of the universe and of religion which are consequent upon the general acceptance of the Evolution doctrine, one of the strangest and most startling features of the situation is that, though seemingly disconnected and sometimes even in conflict with one another, all these diverse movements are consciously or unconsciously working concertedly for a common object, and pressing on together toward a common goal. Nor yet is Protestantism the only one of the great historic religions thus affected. The Modernism which we know is fermenting within the Church of Rome in spite of papal encyclicals, is paralleled by the similar liberal movement in Judaism, and even within the ethnic religions,— Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism; for under the inspiration of the same mysterious forces the most mentally stagnant peoples seem to be lining themselves up on the same side and pressing unitedly and enthusiastically in a common direction. 20 Back to the Bible This common goal toward which the whole world seems to be moving may in religion be called Humanism, or the Religion of Humanity. Politically it is nothing short of the World State, or the Federation of the World. Industrially and commercially it seems still to be a little uncertain whether it is to be the triumph of “ Christian” Socialism, or of the Trust of Trusts,— a view probably contingent upon the way we put our question, whether it is, “What shall we do with the trusts?” or, “What will the trusts do with us?” As seen among the Roman Catholics, it is the Great Unification, which has become the dream of the modernists. Among many of the Protestant churches we see the protean phases of social and political reform occupying the time and attention that used to be devoted to individual regeneration and salvation from sin, these reforms aiming at such objects as “civic righteousness,” “Christian citizenship,” “national reform,” etc., in an effort to make the State and Federal governments semireligious. While among the thousands of intellectual leaders who make science or philosophy ©reeducation or literature their every-day work, and who hold aloof alike from the ordinary activities of business, politics, and religion, this common goal toward which the human race is progressing is the unknown and undefined Something as the next stage in the evolution of the species, to be attained perhaps by the hoped-for ending of war, the extension and intensification of democracy, and the opening up of the mysteries of the spirit world to scientific investigation. V There is only one period in all human history that is at all comparable to the present situation. The Bible record tells us that soon after the Flood the Lord wished the remnants of the human race to scatter out through the earth; but this wish was disregarded. The majority were determined to keep their community consolidated into one body, and to found a government that would grow with the growth of the race and eventually embrace the whole earth. The Neo-Protestantism 21 building of the tower of Babel was for the express purpose of defeating the divinely purposed dispersal—“lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’’ Gen. 11:4. Had this scheme of universal confederacy been permitted, it would have demoralized the world in its infancy, and would have insured the perpetuity of this apostasy through coming ages. But the Lord took the matter in hand, and by thwarting this early scheme of a world federation, a consolidated humanity, he made it impossible for one great universal apostasy to get control of the world. True, apostasy soon did become well-nigh universal; but thanks to the linguistic and geographical barriers by that time erected between the different branches of the human race, men have never since been able to effect any unification of these scattered members; and in the absence of any great world-dominating apostasy, the truth of God has been kept alive in obscure places even in the darkest ages. But our modern age of the railroad and steamship, of printing press, telegraph, and telephone, has in effect abolished all these linguistic and geographical boundary lines, and has converted the world into one vast community, with every man a next-door neighbor to every other man, so that the people are rapidly becoming as truly a unit as if they were all of one language. Not only so, but the race is fast becoming very conscious of its oneness; and as a reaction from the horrors of the present world-wide war, people are already talking enthusiastically about the “solidarity of man,” meaning by this far more than was ever meant by the “brotherhood of man,” which has long been a favorite catchword with certain worldly philosophers. This modern idea is nothing short of a federated humanity, with a universal religion suited to its oneness of effort and in harmony with the human pride and the forgetfulness of God under which this confederation is to be accomplished. Man is a religious animal; and a world state implies a world religion. Such a religion is now forming and maturing before our very eyes, by reconstructing Chris 22 Back to the Bible tianity so as to harmonize with the evolutionary philosophy now prevailing. The result is the World State, and its religion a denatured Christianity — Humanism, or the Religion of Humanity. God in his wisdom broke up that first great apostasy and world federation, because it would have crushed out individual liberty and rendered the plan of the gospel a failure. But the plans of God are accomplished in “the fulness of time;” and at last he gives the race one chance to show what it can do, and what the natural results of human solidarity must be. In the end of the ages, when human activity and ingenuity have culminated in all that man can do, when we have reached the climax of our boasted civilization, and the federation of the unregenerate race is at last accomplished, then God may allow this long-interrupted Babel scheme to be renewed and let men have their way, to show before the angels and the inhabitants of other worlds what human beings can and will do apart from him. As of old he may say, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do: and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.” Gen. ii : 6. Is it reasonable to suppose that if old-fashioned Christianity be true, if the Bible be really a revelation from the God of heaven, it has failed to give us a true prophetic picture of this situation and of its outcome? In answer it may confidently be affirmed that no stronger proof of the divine origin of the Bible could be asked for than the marvelously accurate way in which it has charted out beforehand the road on which the world is now traveling and the goal toward which it is hastening; and no form of professed Christianity can long maintain its allegiance to the Bible, or its spiritual union in character and methods with the New Testament church, which fails to use these prophecies as her best guide amid the bewildering and enticing voices now calling her from every side. All down the centuries the return of her absent Lord has ever been the hope of the Church. The belief in the literal Neo-Protestantism 23 second coming of Christ has not only inspired the most impassioned raptures of the sacred writers, but in all the dreary ages since he went away it has cheered the martyrs in their dungeons and the despised preachers of every reform. In recent years we have seen this doctrine revived with tremendous power; and earnest souls in all the evangelical churches have come together in spirit under the common rallying cry, “The evangelization of the world in this generation.” Such is the hope and such the inspiring motive of the thousands of missionaries in China, India, and Africa, who are telling the old, old story of a Saviour’s love; and the same hope, the same motive, is in the hearts of the tens of thousands who remain in the homeland to “hold the ropes.” And it is obvious that all these still give the Scriptures their value and their power, still refuse to surrender their faith to the noisy claims of the great army of doubters. Accordingly, it is these representatives of old-fashioned Christianity, scattered through all the evangelical churches, not outwardly united, but holding fast their common faith in the Bible as the authentic word of God,— men and women whom I shall venture to designate here as Neo-Protestants,— to whom reference is made throughout the following pages as protesting against this great modern apostasy. As intimated above, the Scriptures have given us many a picturesque prophecy of the present condition of affairs, dwelling on the peculiar features of this apostasy from the point of view of God’s eternal truth. One of the most vivid of these pen pictures is in the second epistle of Peter, a book that the “critics” seem especially bent on discrediting. “In the last days mockers shall come with mockery, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his’coming? for, from the days that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they wilfully forget, that there were heavens of old, and an earth compacted out of water and amidst water, by the word of God; by which means the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens that now are, and the earth, by the same word 24 Back to the Bible have been stored up for fire, being reserved against the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.” 2 Peter 3:3-7, R. V. Several points in this remarkable prophecy deserve especial notice: — 1. It is a description of the “last days;” and the class of people here described are represented as “mocking” at the promise of the second coming of Christ, because they have grown accustomed to denying, or “wilfully forgetting,” the former destruction of the world by the waters of the Flood. This prediction, of course, is accurately in accord with the present situation; for, as we shall see in the sequel, the current doctrine of Evolution has its stronghold in the long-accepted theories of geology that there never was a universal Flood. Belief in a universal Deluge and belief in the current theories of geology cannot be entertained by the same mind, for they are mutually exclusive: the one evacuates the other of meaning. And as the current geology is the groundwork of the Evolution theory, so does the latter render useless and incredible what the Bible calls “that blessed hope” of a literal second coming of Christ and the purification of the earth by fire. 2. These mockers are certainly uniformitarians ; for they argue that “from the day that the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” They intimate that in the days of “the fathers,” people were foolish enough to believe otherwise; but since they “fell asleep,” we have learned better. Note also that this view of uniformity reaches back, not to the close of creation, but to “the beginning of the creation.” Thus creation itself is embraced in their scheme of uniformity; and all distinction is smoothed out between creation and the perpetuation of the world by second causes as now prevailing. Surely no more accurate word picture of the current doctrines of evolutionists and their peculiar methods of reasoning could be desired than is here given us from the inspiration of nearly two thousand years ago. Neo-Protestantism 25 In various other parts of the Bible are very explicit descriptions of that strange and awful culmination of human affairs, the climax of man’s history and of his achievements, just preceding the second coming of Christ. To mention but one, we have in the thirteenth chapter of Revelation the description of a power to arise after the long and triumphant reign of the Papacy, destined to exercise a similar power over the world, equally intolerant in character and universal in its extent. For it is to exercise “all the authority of the first beast in his sight," or in his presence, or in front of him, as it is variously translated. This new world-power is a vast and strange combination of religion, business, political power, and scientific knowledge, as shown by the following: — i. It exercises supreme control over the religious worship of the time, for it causes “the earth and them that dwell therein to worship the first beast,” or the Papacy; and it decrees that “as many as” will “not worship the image of the beast,” which it causes the people to make, shall “be killed.” 2. It controls absolutely the entire business and financial machinery of the world, since the method it uses in enforcing its commands is the very modern method of the universal boycott; for it brings it about that “no man” may “buy or sell” save those who obey its mandates to the most minute particular. 3. It just as absolutely controls the whole world’s national or political machinery, for it “exerciseth all the authority of the first beast in his sight,” and the authority of the first beast was “over every tribe and people and tongue and nation.” It must also be democratic in its methods, for it says to the people that “they” should make an image to the first beast. 4. Lastly, it should be noted that this last day worldpower is to possess a wonderful knowledge of the forces of nature, exercising a seemingly miraculous control over them; and it uses this knowledge and control of nature on a worldwide scale for the purpose of deceiving all mankind and en 26 Back to the Bible ticing them away from the true worship of the Creator. For the prophetic record is, “He doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do.” And all this power of religion, business (finance), and civil authority, backed up by scientific wonders and miracles, is most thoroughly antichristian in character, for in the complementary parts of this same prophecy the Lord sends a special message against it, calling upon “every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people” to “worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.” We must acknowledge that such a message is peculiarly apt and timely when addressed to this age of evolutionists; but coupled with it is a most terrible denunciation against those who “worship the beast and his image.” Thus the worship of the Creator is set in contrast with the “worship" of (or obedience to) those world-powers that have organized a prevailing false system of religion. Finally, the ones who resist these world-powers, holding fast the worship of the Creator, are next seen triumphant and glorified with the Lamb on Mt. Zion, having “come off victorious” over this same world-wide combination and organization for their enslavement and destruction. Rev. 15:2. To complete the fulfilment of the prophetic picture, we have the very remarkable fact that there are still a multitude of conservatives, scattered through all the various bodies of Christendom, many times seven thousand in number, who have not bowed the knee to this modern Baal. The apostasy is not yet fully developed, and has not yet assumed sufficient authority to command worship and obedience under penalty of death; hence the break between the two classes has not been wholly made. But soon for these worshipers of the true God, the Creator, will sound the rallying cry, “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” Rev. 18: 4. And when the final crisis comes, we may be assured that all believers in the great Jehovah as the Creator of the heavens and the Neo-Protestantism 27 earth, will continue to refuse acknowledgment to these powers that have set themselves in opposition to him. You, reader, if you still hold fast your faith in God and his Word, if you feel in your soul the stirrings of this new spirit of Protestantism, may be among this remnant people, proclaiming the old-fashioned gospel of our risen, ascended, and soon-coming Saviour; and though mocked and derided now as a "reactionary” and a "back number,” yet finally you may stand with him on Mt. Zion with the Father’s name written on your forehead. This is the last reform, this the ultimate Protestantism. Our fathers held to the Bible and the Bible only as their sole rule of faith and practice. If we are worthy of being called their children, we must hold to the Bible today in the face of a triumphant apostasy that has already intrenched itself in most of the great educational systems of the earth, and arrogantly assumes that all the learning and scholarship of the day is on its side. But, thank God, his larger book, the book of nature, is open before us, and we shall find in it a wonderful confirmation of the record in his written Word. Thus our opponents find themselves contradicted by God’s two books, which unite to tell the same story. CHAPTER II Subjective and Objective Methods “Error arises . . . from the commutation of what is subjective with what is objective in thought.”—Sir William Hamilton. I Did you ever take up a telescope and look at the person alongside of you with the big end of the telescope next to your eye? How very small he looked, and how far away! It seemed, perhaps, that you might have to walk a long distance to where your companion appeared to be, when in reality you could reach out and take him by the hand without a single step. What was it that caused this strange optical illusion?—Just a good instrument used in a wrong way. About the same thing happens in a mental fashion when we use the facts of nature in a wrong way, or reason incorrectly regarding objective facts that we have discovered in any department of knowledge. By a pseudoscientific method in natural science, in philosophy, or in literary criticism, men get the inductive glass turned wrong end first; and in this way the beginning of our poor old world recedes away in almost endless vistas. Creation is “explained” in terms of modern every-day processes; and then, of course, the Christian religion seems manifestly out of joint with the teachings of their “science,” and so they are led to doubt the reliability of the Bible as a record of the early days of our world. Hence a clear idea of the distinction between subjective and objective methods in the study of science is an essential preliminary, if we wish to obtain any clear understanding of the great modern problems in religion or in science. (28) Subjective and Objective Methods 29 The term “subject” is used in science and philosophy to denote the mind itself. Hence “subjective” denotes “that which belongs to or proceeds from the thinking individual;” while “objective” denotes “what is real, in opposition to what is ideal,— what exists in nature, in contrast to what exists merely in the thought of the individual.” No fuller statement of the matter is necessary in order to show the imperative importance of understanding the difference between the two in all such studies as Biblical criticism, Evolution, geology, etc.; for, as Hamilton says, “Error arises . . . from the commutation of what is subjective with what is objective in thought.”—“Logic,” p. 378. Only by exercising the greatest care can we wholly avoid mistaking our subjective inventions for objective discoveries, thus giving a false appearance of substantiality to some link in a chain of reasoning which is in reality only a shadow of the mind’s own throwing. The subjective method, called also the a priori method, is defined as “that method of investigation that observes and treats realities in subordination to preconceived notions or assumptions, and constructs systems in accordance with the conceptions of the investigator rather than with the facts: opposed to the method of inductive verification.” The Greek philosophers largely, and the schoolmen of the Middle Ages entirely, looked out upon the universe, the things of nature, and the problems of life, from the subjective viewpoint. Most of the modern sciences — all the regenerated ones, such as astronomy, physics, and chemistry — endeavor to use chiefly inductive processes and methods. And, novel as the idea may seem to some, this is generally the attitude of mind with which the Biblical writers looked out upon the world about them; for it is simply the attitude of common sense, and the simple inductive method of determining truth is even directly appealed to in a thousand ways through all the Scriptures. Thus, Henry Drummond remarks that when Thomas came to Christ denying his very resurrection, Jesus gave him facts, scientific facts, objective evidence. “The spirit 30 Back to the Bible of Christ,” he says, “was the scientific spirit. He founded his religion upon facts; and he asked all men to found their religion upon facts.” Indeed, as will appear later, Christianity is the only religion founded upon a long series of facts, and so inseparably based upon these facts as to stand or fall with their truth or falsehood. And such typical words of the Master himself as, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” “The works that I do, . . . they bear witness of me,” “Can ye not discern the signs of the times?”— all these and many more prove undeniably that Christ and the Biblical writers used the objective or inductive method of determining truth, the same method that has in modern times proved so successful in bringing forth from the locked-up treasures of nature those powers and appliances which have made the human race in a quite new sense the lords of creation. Whewell has very tersely put the matter by saying that induction proceeds from particular facts to general principles. J. S. Mill says about the same thing when he defines induction as “generalization from experience.” Contrast-edly we may say that deduction is the particular application of experience, the application of facts or principles already known or assumed. The typical deductive, or subjective, method is illustrated by syllogistic reasoning, or by geometry. The typical inductive method is best seen in physics, astronomy, or chemistry, where a number of observed facts, related to one another in some essential respect, are put together so as to give rise to a general conclusion, as a general principle or a scientific law. A correct induction from the total field of related facts must be absolutely certain truth; error may arise from failing to take into account some one or more of the essential facts involved. Thus the law of gravitation and the law of the conservation of energy are conclusions from inductive investigation and reasoning, and are regarded as established truths, because they have been framed from a sufficiently wide observation of facts to make it incredible that any subsequently discovered facts will be found to disagree with them. Subjective and Objective Methods 31 But deduction also has its proper place in natural science, a place by no means insignificant. Whenever by correct scientific procedure a true induction or generalization has been discovered, this generalization can then be made the starting-point for deductive reasoning within a limited field, and particular applications to other related phenomena within this limited field may then be made of this newly established general rule. Thus it is seen that in science as in ordinary practical life, induction and deduction must go hand in hand, the former the pioneer, the latter the regulator. The true Baconian method of scientific research in its modern improved form and in its totality, the method which has given us about all that we really know of the world around us, may be said to be based wholly on induction, but carried out under the monitorship or superintendence of deduction. That is to say, the methods of scientific discovery are almost wholly inductive; but they are admonished from time to time and held within bounds by old Mother Deduction, who frequently suggests what to look for, and at all times keeps the enthusiastic young investigators from going too far agley. Thus if any one claims to have invented a perpetual-motion machine, we smile incredulously, because we believe in the conservation of energy; and hence we feel confident that no one can really create energy by any mechanical device, however ingenious. Similarly we take but a languid interest ir the reports that occasionally appear of Professor So-and-so’s having at last produced life from the inorganic; for we have such confidence in Harvey’s dictum of life only from life, now supported and confirmed by over two centuries of cbservation and experiment, that we feel sure there must be something wrong with any reported discovery which fails to harmonize with this great generalization. It is in precisely this same way that the modern Christian, the Neo-Protestant, reasons. The greatest inductive generalization, which thus becomes the greatest deductive premise with which to check up all supposed discoveries, is, God and his truth. Hence, whenever by our generalizing 32 Back to the Bible from experience we are in danger of arriving at conclusions contrary to this supreme truth, a correct deductive method comes in to admonish and guide us; and we then find, if we hunt long enough, that there has been some flaw in our supposed inductive method. It is thus, says the Neo-Protestant, that our conclusions in natural science must be constantly checked up against revealed truth, the touchstone of absolute reality. And this is what makes him a Neo-Prot-estant: he believes the Bible before any scientific theories, just as Luther and the other Reformers held to the Bible in opposition to the whole world of scholastic tradition, which was as universally accepted in their day as the Evolution theory is in ours. I As we have said, the highest type of scientific study may, after all, thus be reached by the wise employment of the deductive method. That is, whenever by inductive methods of thought in any department of knowledge we have- arrived at a mountain top whence we may obtain a broad view of truth, and may safely make a grand generalization, then by using this vantage ground we may trace out other details with comparative ease, because of the interrelationship of the different departments of truth. But in all such cases our deduction must be from law as certain as the immutable Word of God, or we can never be absolutely sure of our conclusions drawn therefrom. But there is an ever-present natural tendency on the part of lazy, untrained human nature to employ subjective, or deductive, methods of thinking in a wholly wrong way, often as a sort of short cut to the discovery of new truth. Confused and dazzled by the complex array of endless details of the universe, the human mind must generalize if it is to make any progress in a systematic knowledge of things. But in all ages there has prevailed a tendency of weak human nature first to assume, ready-made, several of these generalizations from the abstract conceptions of the mind supposed to be absolutely beyond question, but perhaps untested as yet by supreme truth, calling these assumptions axioms or “intuitions,” as certain schools of philosophers are accustomed Subjective and Objective Methods 33 to do, and then proceeding to explain the rest of the universe, including even morality and religion, in terms of these (supposed) general truths. Such was the false philosophy which for two thousand years sat like a nightmare on the intellectual life of the world, and which Luther, no less than Bacon and Newton, fought as the most deadly enemy of all true thinking and living; and the barren futility of this scholastic philosophy must ever remain a monument of warning against the folly of using such methods in attempting to study the things of nature. On the other hand, all that is true and valuable in our modern knowledge of how to read the outspread book of nature or of how to harness the latent forces of the universe, has been accumulated by those patient inductive, or objective, methods advocated by Bacon in his “Novum Organum,” the germinal ideas of which, however, are identical with the methods of reasoning employed by Christ in his discussions with the disciples and the Pharisees, and which in the case of Bacon can be traced back historically to that general emancipation of the human will and intellect inaugurated by the sixteenth-century Reformation, which restored the Word of God to its rightful place as the supreme guide of human life in every department of action and thought. II However, as already stated, it is seldom that we can employ exclusively either the inductive or the deductive method in any extended process of reasoning. Practically all our beliefs are based on wise and careful (or unwise and careless) permutations and combinations of the innumerable forms of these processes. And before going farther we should consider for a little while the fundamental rules of reasoning by which, through these complex processes, we seek to apprehend truths from the external world. Most of our beliefs are based on what are termed indirect or probable evidence, called also circumstantial or scientific evidence. We can have direct or immediate knowledge of 3 34 Back to the Bible only such things as we perceive by our senses. Mathematical truths receive our assent because they seem to prove themselves, for we can follow every step in the process of obtaining their results. Other propositions we term ‘ ‘ axioms, ’ ’ because we assume that they have been so repeatedly and firmly established that it would be a waste of time to repeat, whenever they reappear, the whole process first employed in their establishment. In addition to these classes of propositions there are others which can be proved only in quite another way. They depend for their verification upon the putting together of many indirect facts, the coexistence of which facts inevitably produces in our minds the conviction that a certain proposition or hypothesis must be true. Just why our minds should feel a moral conviction forced upon us to accept a truth established in this indirect way, we cannot tell. All we know is that our minds are thus constituted, and that we cannot resist the force’of such indirect or probable evidence, if we permit our mental faculties to act as they normally do. To this class of propositions belong nearly all the great questions of science, of religion, of history, of jurisprudence, or even of the ordinary affairs of life; and the method by which these problems are thus studied is called par excellence the scientific method. But for our guidance as to whether or not we should yield our belief to a proposition where only indirect or probable evidence is available, there are certain rules which must be observed; and the value of our results in any particular instance must depend upon the accuracy with which, consciously or unconsciously, we have adhered to these rules of evidence, which are much more than mere conventions, being grounded in the very nature of the mind and the methods by which it can apprehend knowledge. I shall give some of the most important of these rules, as formulated by George Ticknor Curtis, a celebrated jurist of New York, in his “Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry,” pp. 16, 17: — 1. The first rule is that “every fact in a collection of proofs from which we are to draw a certain inference must Subjective and Objective Methods 35 be proved independently by direct evidence, and must not be itself a deduction from some other fact.” In other words, we must not draw an inference from an inference. We cannot infer a fact from some other fact or facts, and then unite the former with two or more independent facts to make a chain of proofs. Each separate link must have its own logical justification, its own separate proof, just as if it were the only thing to be proved. 2. Second, the several facts, when so established by independent proof, must then be arranged in their proper relation to one another in the group from which the induction or inference is to be drawn. In other words, all the facts must be correlated toward one another in a correct order of relationship. 3. From this proper correlation of all the facts in a scientific argument there follows a third rule, which is that the whole collection of facts under consideration must be consistent with the inference sought to be drawn from them. 4. Hence, there follows a fourth rule; namely, “that the collection of facts from which an inference is to be drawn must not only be consistent with the probable truth of that inference, but they must exclude the probable truth of any other inference.” I need not dwell on the importance of adhering rigidly to all these rules of evidence when dealing with important scientific or religious problems. But attention should be called to the peculiar way in which these rules are often tacitly relaxed or suspended when dealing with a very complex collection of facts, such, for instance, as the mass of material out of which the induction is sought to be drawn that man is descended from the lower forms of life by gradual, naturalistic process. The idea seems to prevail that when an immense number of facts can be brought forward which seem to point in a given direction, we should not be expected to hold rigidly to the rules of proof as given above. Mere numbers of facts massed together seem to be allowed by many to obscure the necessity of logic; quantity seems to be made equivalent to^quality. 36 Back to the Bible For instance, a great number of facts are given, following one another in proper order up to a certain point; then again the chain of proof following this point may also be intact and coherent for another considerable distance; but there is absolutely nothing with which to bridge over this hiatus, this chasm,— no objective fact with which to connect what goes before with what comes after. A link is missing. This “vacuity of proof” is often candidly acknowledged by the leaders engaged in establishing the truth of the main proposition under consideration; but the difficulty is surmounted by reasoning from the first series of facts and the second series of facts that this intermediate fact or facts, this missing link, must have existed; and then the argument goes on confidently to establish the main hypothesis from a total chain of proofs in which a very essential intermediate link has only a mere constructive existence, or is itself only an inference from facts which may be just as consistent with the nonexistence of the supplied link. But such a method of reasoning is of no value; for it borrows from the main hypothesis which it seeks to establish the means of proving essential facts from which the main hypothesis is intended to be drawn as an independent inference. Mentally such a method is analogous to the physical act of a man’s trying to lift himself by pulling at the top of his boots. Ill We need not dwell longer on these rules of inductive evidence, but may resume our consideration of the relations between subjective and objective methods in general. As we shall see subsequently, there is one entire natural science, and there are several of the so-called historical and theological sciences or philosophies, which have never yet been regenerated by the adoption of objective scientific methods; for instead of being built up wholly from independently proved facts, they are still largely based on subjective, or a priori, methods of reasoning, like those which, to use Sir Henry Howorth’s phrase, “dominated medieval scholasticism and made it so barren.” Subjective and Objective Methods 37 In this expression Howorth~was criticizing the Glacial Theory of geology, which theory is an effort to manufacture one of the many missing links in the evolutionary chain. But this author has brought just as strong a charge of using false methods against the whole science as currently taught and understood. Let me quote the exact words of this illustrious author, directed against the general methods used by modern geology: — “ It is a singular and notable fact that while other branches of science have emancipated themselves from the trammels of metaphysical reasoning, the science of geology still remains imprisoned in a priori theories.” Geology, no doubt, furnishes the most conspicuous example of the continued modern use of such methods, and as we shall see in the sequel it has never reasoned inductively regarding the fossil world as a whole, i. e., it has never started with man and all the living species of plants and animals, and by working back among the rocks, and finding where similar plants and animals occur as fossils, and in what condition and connection, has then tried to decide how they came to be there and how the intervening changes took place. That is, it has never tried to frame a world-wide generalization regarding the fossil world, based on the fossils taken together collectively and studied comparatively with the living forms of the modern world as a whole. Such a study by regression from the present back into the past (which would be the only rational or truly scientific method), the current geology has never even professed to attempt, but has always started with some hypothetically “oldest” forms, and after having located them away back at the vanishing point of the vistas of a past eternity, has, as a real burlesque on inductive scientific methods, trusted to its skill in dead-reckoning to be able to work up by slow stages to the present, and to arrive here with a sufficiently small cargo of “living” species undisposed of to join onto the present world smoothly and easily on the basis of Lyell’s uniformity and slow secular change. This is geology by hypothesis, from the subjective point of view; it is a kind of “science” by which some people have for 38 Back to the Bible a century or so tried to explain^the known in terms of the unknown, starting with a hypothesis regarding what we know the least about, and forcing our more accurate knowledge of living plants and animals to square with our theories of the origin of the fossil world. And some people have long chided the Bible because it does not conform to such a method of “scientific research.” Shall we not rather say that it would be an everlasting disgrace to the Bible if it had sanctioned the theories obtained by such methods? A somewhat similar indictment can be laid against the current historical criticism of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. One of the a priori theories lying at the basis of the Higher Criticism is the assumption put forth by Wolf in 1795 that the use of writing for literary purposes was unknown before the classical period of Greek history. Another rests on Astruc’s theory (175.3), that the employment of different names for the Deity in the book of Genesis indicates diversity of authorship.* More recently, or within the last half century, these assumptions, which, as any one can see, take for granted a naturalistic development on the part of the Hebrew Scriptures and a complete denial of the supernatural, have been enormously strengthened (in the minds of the “critics”) by the doctrine of organic Evolution, and have developed into the -Wellhausen system with its modifications, which informs us in a lofty way of the precise order in which the literary and religious development of the Israelites ought to have taken place, and then proceeds to reconstruct the Bible history and literature in minute accordance with this subjective notion. * Note.— As is well known, the documentary theory of the “critics” has been based entirely on the peculiarities of the Hebrew of the Massoretic text, which dates from the sixth century of the Christian era. But as is now being pointed out by such men as Wiener, Dahse, Eerdmanns, Lepsius, and others, it is utterly unscientific to found a revolutionary theory on such a single text, when there are traces of nearly a dozen other Hebrew editions of Genesis, some of which are centuries older than the Massoretic, to say nothing of such translations as the Septuagint, which is almost a thousand years older. Genuine textual criticism is fast discrediting the theory founded on the Astruc “clue,” Wellhausen himself acknowledging that these comparative studies of the Hebrew text have touched the “sore point” in his hypothesis. Subjective and Objective Methods 39 Here is Professor Cheyne’s precious bit of information on the method by which Reuss, one of the founders of modern “criticism,” arrived at one of the fundamental principles on which this system rests: — “It came to him, he informs us, rather as an intuition than as a logical conclusion, and it was nothing less than this: That the prophets are earlier than the law, and the Psalms later than both. From the first, we are told, his principal object was to find (sic) a clue to the development of Israelitish religious culture, so as to make its historical course psychologically conceivable.”—¹¹ Founders of Old Testament Criticism," p. 177. Of course, this man thought he had discovered a wonderful truth, when in reality his “intuition” was only an invention, a mere subjective fancy, just as we might think that the period of Greek culture ought to be later than that of Rome, and the Dark Ages older than either. But the “critic” took his fancy so seriously that he immediately converted it into a subjective major premise, and proceeded to “find” a minor to fit it, from which to reconstruct the religious history of the Israelites. But any schoolboy can see that the whole proceeding narrated above with such charming frankness is the very method used by the scholastics in their tiresome word twistings, and the direct reverse of the true scientific or inductive method of research. Indeed, no less an authority than G. H. Schodde, a man certainly familiar with the whole range of German religious and philosophic thought, says of the entire Old Testament reconstruction scheme: — “It is undeniably a purely subjective production, without a scintilla of external evidence, being founded solely upon subjective analysis and combination.” We need not further pursue this subject of Biblical criticism now. The contrast between these subjective fancies of the Higher Criticism and the inductive or truly scientific methods of archeology when dealing with the very same lines of investigation, is well shown by Professor Sayce in 40 Back to the Bible his little book, “Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies,” which sums up in terse, readable form the final and overwhelming defeat which this false criticism has already suffered from the pickax and spade of the explorer in the Orient. In his picturesque way Sayce tells how the “critics,” in direct contradiction to every shred of a historic document regarding the Hebrews, had figured out decades ago just how the history and national development of the Israelites and other Orientals must have occurred, while modern excavators have been uncovering thousands of documents to testify that the “critics” were wrong and the Bible right. The New Theology is in even a worse predicament, for as a religion it may be termed the subjective method gone to seed. Resting as it does on the conclusions of “criticism” on the one hand and organic Evolution on the other, the latter in turn resting on the false conclusions of an illogical and unscientific geology, etc., as will appear later, it involves a long series of interlocking false assumptions that remind us of the string of antecedents in the old story of “the cat-that-caught-the-rat-that-ate-the-malt,” etc. Hence it is not at all strange if in its results, its fruits, this so-called “advanced” theology is completely out of harmony with the Bible and with the historic religion of Christ and his apostles, which, as we have seen, in its attitude toward the things of nature and the great abiding problems of existence, is in complete accord with “straight” thinking and all true inductive methods of study. Happy would it be if in all departments of scientific or historical investigation men would discard the methods of Aristotle and the schoolmen for those of Bacon and Newton. This the Neo-Protestant has endeavored to do; and the following chapters give an outline of his method of argument. CHAPTER III Geology and the Deluge “ . . . And set you square with Genesis again.” —Browning. I Up on the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California, back of where I am writing, thousands of feet above the sea-level, are thick beds of rock packed full of sea-shells. How did they get there? They are not very different from shells to be found in various parts of the Pacific or the Atlantic. If the ocean were to rise to that height now, it would cover nearly all the State of California; or if the land were to sink down, a similar result would happen. One thing, however, is certain: they are real sea-shells, as beautiful and perfect as those found on the seashore, and the rocks are as full of them as any sea beach you ever saw. How did they get there? or better, How did the water come to go down and leave them there high and dry? We all know that these conditions are not peculiar to Southern California. Almost every country on the globe can furnish similar proofs that the dry land and the ocean have not always been as they are now. Sometimes it is this bed of sea-shells a mile or two high on the mountain side; or it may be a whole forest of trees buried half a mile or more down in the ground, with perhaps a thick bed of coral or crinoidal limestone spread out above it. Sometimes it is the remains of luxuriant semitropical life that once prevailed away up in what are now the arctic regions, or over the very pole itself; or it may be a great mass of strange, unearthly-looking animal bones packed together in such abundance as to indicate a whole herd of these enormous brutes entombed at once. The whole earth is, in fact, a vast graveyard, (41) 42 Back to the Bible with rocks for tombstones, on which the buried dead have written an epitaph recording their own death and burial. Much more is it true of the lower animals than of man, that — “All that tread The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom.” And surely if we can read aright the record of the death and burial of these myriads, we shall have solved the problem of the former history of our world. In fact, the key to the whole question of our origin and the origin of the world lies in the way in which we interpret these rocky records. Have we, of the human race, evolved by natural process, or were we created in some manner different from the way in which nature is now being sustained? Was it just common, every-day causes that produced these changes in the land and water and in the climate of our globe? If so, what untold ages these changes must represent, for there seems no perceptible progress toward any such changes in our modern, quiet earth. From this would follow of necessity a very changed view of the subject of Creation; and some form of the Evolution theory would seem reasonable, even though we might not be able to work out all the details of the process. Or was it possibly the Flood that buried these fossil forms, and made these vast deposits of rock? If this be the explanation, the Flood must have been a vastly more extensive affair than is-generally supposed; for these ancient graveyards of the sea are found in every part of the globe, and the rocks thus made are often of enormous thickness, a mile or so being not uncommon.* What an awful churning up of the land and water this Deluge must have been! No wonder the Scriptures say, “The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.” * Note.— When, however, the textbooks speak of fossiliferous beds ten or fifteen miles thick, it should be remembered how the various “formations” have had to be gathered together from many scattered localities in order to make this great thickness, as only a very small part of such thickness exists in any one place. In other words, this reputed thickness is due entirely to the artificial arrangement of the “formations,” and is thus not a real objective fact. Geology and the Deluge 43 Uniformity, or the Deluge,— these are the two alternatives before the thinking people of our modern world, though for several decades unbelieving scientists have tried by ridicule and every unfair representation to rule the Biblical interpretation entirely out of court. To such a degree has this conspiracy of silence or of travesty and ridicule been carried, that the real Bible alternative to the current uniformitarianism has not had a sober and candid hearing for nearly a century. Modern scientists have been accustomed to answer with mere ridicule any suggestion that the fossil strata are but contemporary vouchers confirming the first chapters of Genesis. And they like to have our modern age forget that up to about 1830 the Bible view of the matter was held by many of the most illustrious geologists of the world, keen-eyed, scholarly men, who were as familiar with all the general problems of the science as ourselves, and who could probably see as far into the logic of a scientific problem as any one. II Christianity is the only historical religion. By this is meant that it is the only religion founded on a long series of facts, and so inseparably bound up with these facts as to stand or fall with their truth or falsehood. Hence for hundreds of years the battle has raged over the truth or falsity of the Old Testament records. Some hundred and fifty years ago the learned men, the so-called “critics,” invented the idea, that in the days of Moses, when the first part of the Bible was supposed to have been written, few people could read or write, and such a thing as a real literature at that time was out of the question. How, then, could these first books of the Bible have been written in such a barbarous age? The “critics” claimed that the use of writing for literary purposes did not go back of 600 b. c. Hence they sneered at the .idea of books or documents in the time of Abraham, or even in the time of Moses; and by their overbearing claims to scholarship they made many believe that the accounts 44 Back to the Bible given in Genesis and Exodus were little better than myths and fairy stories. About the same time the fossils were giving the world many striking reminders of the accuracy of the Mosaic record of a universal Deluge. The rising science of geology was being built up largely on this interpretation of the geological facts, or at least had this as one of its alternative theories. And so the scientists of that day who disliked this idea were driven to accounting for these deposits of the ocean in telltale conditions or in strange localities, by saying that similar exchanges of land and water are all the time going on in the world around us, only so slowly that we cannot notice them. They declared that the land is even now sinking in some places and being covered by the sea, while in other places sea bottoms are being elevated into dry land; and with commendable industry and patience they measured the coasts of Sweden and Greenland and other out-of-the-way corners of the globe, and made the world believe that they had evidence to confirm their doctrine of uniformitarianism; that all the geological changes of the past may have taken place by common every-day processes, similar to what they said is now going on about us, all unobserved by most people. But in order to string out the burial of the fossils over as much time as possible, in accordance with their doctrine of quiet uniformity, they invented the idea that these different types of life lived successively one after another (a sort of creation on the instalment plan, as Cuvier had it), and were thus buried in successive ages. And in their scheme of successive types of fossil life they claimed to have an infallible gauge to tell us the exact order in which these various types of life appeared on the globe. Then a little later in the nineteenth century Charles Darwin undertook to show how all these successive forms might each have been produced from the preceding ones by a gradual natural change or development; and thus the scheme of Evolution was complete, and the world had a learned and fashionable substitute for the record of Creation as given in the Textbook of Christianity. Geology and the Deluge 45 III But since the “critics” had first invented their theory of the illiteracy of the age of Moses, or before the construction of this theory of the geologists and evolutionists, it was only poetic justice that they should first be answered by the disclosures of modern scientific discovery. And certainly they have had many a rude awakening of late years. First, it was the hieroglyphics of Egypt. From the providentially discovered Rosetta stone found near the mouth of the Nile by one of Napoleon’s officers, people learned to read this strange writing that covers all the old monuments of Egypt. In this way it was found that, centuries before Moses, Egypt was filled with writing, from one end to the other. Next, the cuneiform writing of Babylonia was deciphered by means of the trilingual inscription on the Be-histun rock, and it was found, to quote the words of Sayce, that “the Babylonia of the age of Abraham was a more highly educated country than the England of George III.” The “critics” put up a bold front, and for many years denied that any one could really read the cuneiform or the hieroglyphic characters. “It was subjective theory-against objective fact, and, in accordance with the usual ‘critical’ method, fact had to give way to theory.”—Sayce. The “critics” held out as long as they could; but at last, with the discovery of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets in 1887, the old conception of ancient Oriental history was revolutionized, and the assumption of illiteracy in the time of Moses became thenceforth a sheer impossibility. And had it not happened that in the meantime the “critical” position had been tremendously strengthened (seemingly) by the great popular spread of the doctrine of biological Evolution, these theories of the “critics” would have quietly gone the way of the writings of Celsus and Porphyry and Julian. IV But now it was time for the uniformitarian geologists to have their turn. For several decades the disciples of Lyell had things entirely their own way, and the world believed 46 Back to the Bible their loud assertions that every kind of work recorded in the fossiliferous strata is being duplicated or reproduced in the deposits made today. But of late years these confident assertions of the uniformitarians have been subjected to more careful scrutiny, with the result that on every essential point their argument has broken down completely. Let us briefly sketch the fate of this theory of geological uniformity, which has so long opposed the Bible record regarding the Deluge, for the one is a point-blank denial of the other. The following are the leading facts bearing on the subject: — i. The fossils are wholly abnormal in their abundance, for very few fossils are now being made in our modern world. 2. They are abnormal in their exquisite preservation, for mere fragments are about all our modern world can show as materials for fossilization. Both these facts had been known from the earliest days of the science, but they were minimized and explained away by the geologists. Considered alone, these facts were not sufficient to overthrow the popular theory, though in the light of subsequent discoveries they become strong collateral witnesses to the reality of a great world catastrophe. And strangely enough, the very universality of these abnormal conditions has been used by some as a sort of argument to make these strange telltale conditions quite the normal ones after all. 3. There is but one climate known to geology proper,* and this was a mantle of spring-like loveliness spread over the entire globe north and south. But the elephants and other animals found frozen in the ice of northern Siberia prove that this climate was “abruptly terminated,” and became “suddenly extreme as of a single winter’s night.” —Dana. *Note.— As the so-called “glacial” phenomena are considerably later than the other deposits, they are not meant to be included in what is here termed “geology proper.” Geology and the Deluge 47 4. The fossils, looked at broadly, are always larger and better developed than their nearest living representatives. This is of especial significance in cases in which the species or genera are identical. No doubt the superb climate of that ancient world had much to do with this general fact. But the point to be especially noted here is that this remarkable peculiarity is characteristic of all the fossils; and that when we cross over into our modern era, the change is just as sudden and complete as is that of climate. Both these two latter facts have also been known for a long time, though only recently has it been perceived how sharply and distinctly they mark off that ancient world from our own — that ancient world regarded, not as a series of ages long drawn out, but as one age, a unit, merely a former state of our present world. But not even the foregoing four facts were sufficiently convincing to expose the falsity of the popular theories of geology so long as its two fundamental assumptions, namely, Uniformity and the Successive Ages of Life, were regarded as axiomatic, beyond the need of supporting argument, and beyond the possibility of refutation. How both these assumptions have been proved false and unscientific by modern discoveries, makes one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of science, though only a mere outline of these discoveries is all our space will permit us here. 5. Deposits like those of the fossiliferous rocks are not now being formed anywhere in our deep seas or oceans. The first intimation of this far-reaching fact was made by the “Challenger” Expedition (1872-76), which was sent out by the British government to examine the ocean from surface to bottom and determine the physical and biological conditions therein prevailing. Many other scientific expeditions have since continued the work thus begun. The net result of the many revolutionary discoveries thus made is that in the deep ocean absolutely no true stratigraphical deposits are now being formed. The ocean currents are 48 Back to the Bible found to be quite shallow in their action, and have no mechanical effects either in wearing away or in building up strata.* From end to end over the whole ocean floor there is no gravel, no sand, no clay being shifted or deposited, nothing whatever to disturb the eternal calm of the silent waters. But as the majority of the stratified rocks examined by geology show a regular alternation of fish, corals, crinoids, brachiopods, etc., whose habitats are from a mile to three miles down in the ocean, interstratified with beds of clay, or sand, or gravel, or land plants, the discovery of the modern conditions really existing in our quiet oceans was considered a very wonderful thing; or as Zittel naively puts it, “The ‘Challenger’ Expedition marks the grandest scientific event of the nineteenth century.’’— “History of Geology," p. 217. This point is so important to our argument, and the old notions are so tenacious of life, that it may be well to give the words of another standard writer more generally known throughout the English-speaking world, who dwells on the. results of these recent discoveries in bringing out the sharp contrast between the modern deposits forming on the ocean bottom and the fossiliferous strata of the long ago. The two are utterly unlike. These are the words of Sir Archibald Geikie: — “Thanks to the great work done by the ‘Challenger’ and other national expeditions, we have learnt what are the leading characters of the accumulations now forming on the deeper parts of the ocean floor. So far as we know, they have no analogues among the formations of the earth's crust. They differ indeed . . . entirely from any formation which geologists have considered to be of deep-water origin.”— “ Textbook of Geology," p. 929, edition 1903. In short, many leading geologists now contend that neither the globigerina ooze nor the pelagic “red clay” is represented at all in the fossiliferous rocks. The former * Sir John Murray. “ Report on Deep Sea Deposits,” passim; Dana, “ Manual,” p. 229. Geology and the Deluge 49 now occupies forty million square miles of the ocean bottom, and the latter fifty million, the two together making practically all the eupelagic, or true oceanic area. The genera, and even the species, of the globigerina ooze and of the radiolarian ooze are indeed often identical with the fossils found in the Cretaceous strata and elsewhere; but in every other respect (i. e., in texture, arrangement, etc.) the ancient and the modern deposits are wholly unlike. Hence it is that most modern scientists have now accepted the doctrine of the permanency of the oceans, and acknowledge that the old theories in explanation of the manner in which the fos-siliferous strata were formed must be given up, or at least greatly modified. 6. Next, some of the leading writers, such as Suess and Howorth, began to examine the evidence supposed to prove that changes of land and sea-level are now going on, and they found the evidence entirely worthless. Of course the dry land is constantly being worn away and carried down by the rivers, to be deposited near their mouthy, though none of this material ever gets more than a few mnes away from shore. But this is not what is meant by the uniformitarian theory. The essential idea of the popular doctrine was that parts of the land are now rising slowly and gradually above the sea, and other parts subsiding; for only by such a method of exchange, regularly and eternally going on between the dry land and the ocean by means of the earth’s “pulsating crust,” could the deposits of the past be accounted for on the basis of uniformitarianism. But the life-work of Eduard Suess, who is regarded as the greatest of living geologists, is to the effect that the evidence supposed to prove the rise or fall of various parts of the land here and there, is all imaginary, and that such alleged changes are not now going on anywhere on earth. Land and water seem now in absolutely stable equilibrium relatively to each other, and have been so since the dawn of scientific observation, small local and sudden catastrophes due to earthquakes being of course disregarded. Hence we have abso-4 50 Back to the Bible lately no modern examples to point to as at all analogous to those tremendous changes that the rocks tell us have taken place somehow in the past. To quote the words of Suess himself: — “The theory of the secular oscillations of the continents is not competent to explain the repeated inundation and emergence of the land;” for even in those localities, like Sweden and Greenland, which have been supposed to be rising or falling, “displacements susceptible of measurement have not occurred within the historic period.”—“Face of the Earth," Vol. II, pp. 540, 497. In short, this master scientist, after summing up all that modern discoveries have made known to us, writes the epitaph of the old theory in such language as the following: — “Thus, as our knowledge becomes more exact, the less are we able to entertain those theories which are generally offered in explanation of the repeated inundation and emergence of the continents.”—Id., p. 295. These last two discoveries — namely, that duplicates of the fossiliferous deposits are not now being formed in our modern seas and oceans, and that the land is not now on the see-saw up and down — would seem sufficient to make necessary a complete reconstruction of geological theory. But faith in their old theory was firm, and like the “critics” after the disconcerting discoveries in Egypt and Assyria, the uniformitarians have kept telling one another that their “assured results” are in no way affected by these discoveries. V But when the Lord undertakes to turn the searchlight of his truth upon a venerable falsehood in vital conflict with his Word, he does not stop short with giving the world a mere glimpse of this falsehood’s outline; he shows it up in all its native deformity. The instrument by which this is done may not be what the world calls great; if insignificant, so Geology and the Deluge 51 much the better. The glory will then go where it belongs. But the demonstration will be conclusive, and God’s people will be able to see that his Word was all the time truthful and accurate to the last particular. As already mentioned, there have been many people here and there who have continued to stand for the literal interpretation of the first part of the Bible as it used to be understood by the church, contending that it would yet vindicate itself before the world as the most reliable history and the truest science. Taking the plain, consistent teaching of Genesis as a “working hypothesis,” (how much better than any intuition or hypothesis invented by man!) some of these people, these Neo-Protestants, set themselves to examining the claims of geology where it contradicts the Bible as to Creation and the early history of the world, under the conviction that consistency is the best guide to apparently elusive truth; and that, in the words of the old saying, “When you are right, you are more right than you think you are.” The result was that their easy discovery of the false science and false logic on which the geological theories, and especially the theory of successive ages of life, had been built up, was a surprise even to themselves. Only a mere summary of the results of this work can be given here. It constitutes the seventh in this series of facts building up a cumulative argument which refutes the current uniformitarian geology, demonstrates the reality of the Deluge, and thus indirectly confirms the doctrine of a literal Creation. Those who are not familiar with the proofs on this point are referred to the author’s “ Fundamentals of Geology,” where the argument is developed at length. 7. Our seventh fact deals with the successive ages, and shows that this part of the current theory is also without foundation. The merest glance at the foundation ideas of Darwinism and Evolution, as measured up alongside of the Bible record, told these investigators that the crucial point was in the succession of life (or the successive ages) as taught by geology. 52 Back to the Bible For many decades the church has tried to compromise with geology by her “restitution theory’’ and the “day-period theory,’’ but these have proved broken reeds. Was there any more hope in meeting the issue squarely, and taking the record in Genesis exactly at its face value? What scientific evidence did this idea of the successive ages rest upon? Was it based upon a secure foundation of objective fact? or was it just an assumption, a “working hypothesis,’’ liable at any time to be proved false by discovery? Strange as it may seem to some of my readers, this notion of a definite succession of various forms of life, constituting the successive ages in a definite, precise order, now turns out never to have been more than an assumption, supposed to be so self-evident as to be axiomatic — a sort of scientific “intuition”! But the hard objective facts contradicting this idea, and proving that the rocks do not occur in the alleged regular order, are now being found in plenty all over the globe. To mention but one class of facts out of several, there are many instances in Europe, India, Australia, and North America, of great areas of strata found in the “wrong” order, that is, with the so-called “oldest” rocks on top and the “youngest” underneath, with every physical appearance of having been laid down in this order. The district about Glarus, Switzerland, was one of the first to be discovered, and has had scores of volumes written on it in attempts at “explanation.” An instance in Scotland has given rise to considerable discussion, Sir A. Geikie remarking of it, “Had these sections been planned for the purpose of deception, they could not have been more skilfully devised, . . . and no one coming first to this ground would suspect that what appears to be a normal stratigraphical sequence is not really so.”—Nature, Nov. 13, 1884, pp. 29-35. Several other examples are to be found in the southern Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia, one set of these upside-down beds being 375 miles long. Geology and the Deluge 53 More recently we have had government reports on a large number of these upside-down areas in the Rocky Mountains. One of the most recently discovered is the so-called “Bannock overthrust,” named from Bannock County, Idaho, near the middle of the district affected. It covers parts of three States, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, and is about 270 miles long. Here carboniferous limestones are spread out over Jurassic or Cretaceous. (Richards and Mansfield, Journal of Geology, November-December, 1912.) Another very similar area, and possibly connected with it or a continuation of it, extends from near the middle of Montana up to the Yellowhead Pass in Alberta, or about 350 miles, with Cambrian and pre-Cambrian limestones and argillites resting on Cretaceous shales; and in typical instances where good exposures are shown, they “appear to succeed one another conformably.”—McConnell. This district covers about seven thousand square miles, and at a little south of the fiftieth degree of latitude there are no less than five parallel ranges of these Paleozoic mountains, running north and south, with four Cretaceous valleys in between; for wherever the rivers have eroded their channels deep enough, they lay bare the underlying Cretaceous beds. Though at first somewhat dazed by these upside-down conditions, the geologists have nevertheless had such implicit faith in their theory of the invariable order of the fossils that they confidently assure us that these Paleozoic rocks must have been raised up and pushed over on top of the others; and they write huge monographs to tell us how it was done. But we remember how the “critics” stood out against evidence of the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform tablets of Babylonia, and how the Ptolemaic astronomers invented their “deferents” and “epicycles” to explain away troublesome facts revealed by the telescope. Truth is strong; and sooner or later it will be seen that these discoveries wipe out as with a sponge the whole vain system of successive forms of life in a definite order (the successive ages), and prove that no fossils are intrinsically older than others or 54 Back to the Bible than man himself; * and hence that what we have been fooling with all these years under the name of a geological series, or “phylogenic series,” turns out to be simply an old-time taxonomic series buried in the rocks, the how and the when to be determined by other considerations. From a study of the history of the idea, as will be brought out in the next chapter, this outcome is only what we ought to expect; for this theory that the fossils are the index to the age of the rocks, was first put forward by some reckless speculators about a hundred years ago, who thought they had discovered what they had only invented, and who childishly imagined that all the rest of the world would be found to confirm the pretty subjective theory they had mapped out after examining the rocks in a few corners of Western Europe, wholly ignorant of the rest of the world, and sublimely indifferent to what nature might disclose in the future from her buried records elsewhere. VI It may be instructive to group together here the seven facts or principles enumerated above: — i. The fossils are wholly abnormal in their abundance. 2. They are very frequently abnormal in their exquisite preservation, giving many telltale proofs of how they were buried. 3. The warm climate of springlike loveliness was “ abruptly terminated.” 4. The fossils as a whole are larger and better developed than their modern representatives, and the change from the ancient to the modern is just as abrupt and characteristic as is that of climate. * Note.— In the author’s “Fundamentals of Geology” will be found developed and proved with adequate facts the far-reaching law of conformable stratigraphical sequence, which says that any group or assemblage of fossils, “old” or “young,” may be found occurring conformably on any other assemblage of fossils “older” or “younger.” This law of itself, when fully understood, forever disposes of the whole Evolution theory. Geology and the Deluge 55 5. Our deep seas and oceans are not now forming any true stratified deposits whatever. 6. There is no sufficient proof that gradual changes of level are now going on around the coasts of our continents. “Displacements susceptible of measurement have not occurred within the historic period.”—Suess. 7. The distinctions in age between the different types of fossil forms were never more than subjective assumptions, and are now shown by a multitude of facts to be unscientific ip method and utterly untenable. Hence, no fossils are old or young intrinsically and necessarily. Any distinctions we may see fit to make as to age between rock deposits must be founded on other common-sense evidences; for it is now scientifically established that no one kind of fossil can be proved older or younger than another. The fossiliferous series is a purely artificial one, just as is the modern taxonomic series, nothing more. Assuredly, we have here a tremendous series of facts. And it would seem impossible for any rational mind, one capable of appreciating the value of scientific evidence, to face these seven facts or principles without the conviction coming home to him with ineluctable persistence, that there must be something radically wrong with the current geological teachings, and that the record in Genesis regarding the Deluge (which is the only alternative) must be right after all. For since the fossiliferous strata are abnormal in every respect, since nothing at all similar is now forming anywhere on earth, how are we to avoid the conclusion that uniformitarianism is false, and that these fossiliferous rocks are the work of an ancient world catastrophe? And since we now know that there is no scientific way of setting them off in ages, or of telling what kind of life lived first or was buried first, no way of proving one type of fossil older than another or than man himself, are we not shut up to the conclusion that this fossil world was a unit, and buried at one great world catastrophe? (See Appendix A.) 56 Back to the Bible Thus the Mosaic record of a universal Deluge becomes the best of scientific facts, after all, and assumes the importance in Christian theology which its position in the Bible calls for; and then every rational mind must acknowledge that back of it lies a literal Creation, as the Bible declares. But it is now time to turn our attention to another phase of this subject. For in the ease and completeness with which the hard logic of facts has demonstrated the record of the Deluge and (indirectly) that of Creation, we are in danger of forgetting that this view of the matter rests upon very recent discoveries, not all of which are as yet well known, and that most of the world still believe some form of the Evolution doctrine regarding the early history of our world. But the history of the development of this idea has many useful lessons for us, and this history can best be considered as a separate subject. CHAPTER IV Historical Sketch “Theories come into our laboratory by the bushel; when they have served their purpose, they are thrown out of the window.” — Louis Pasteur. I For three days the whole camp of Israel, animated with suppressed but intense excitement, had been busy with preparation. Jehovah himself was coming down on the mountain to speak to them. “And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled.” Ex. 19: 16. And then followed such a scene as this old world never witnessed before or since. Lurid lightnings, terrific thun-derings, were but the prelude and the accompaniment to the solemn, awe-inspiring voice of the long-suffering Jehovah, as his “ten words,” brief, authoritative, final, rolled down upon the ears of those cowering, terror-stricken millions. Frantic with fear as will be the sinner on the last great day, they all with one voice entreated Moses, “Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.” Ex. 20: 19. And yet only a few brief hours elapsed before they were dancing with maudlin joy and senseless gibberish around their golden calf, and planning to go back to Egypt! Having rejected the law of love, they eagerly accepted the yoke of the lawless one. Having spurned the glorious destiny of his children offered them by the King of eternity, they tried to drown thought in the brief, benumbing pleasures of sensuality. Having entreated Jehovah to leave them, they were (57) 58 Back to the Bible left to debase their mind and their manhood before gods of their own invention. How typical is this of the whole history of our race! Paul gives it as quite the usual course of events. He says that the degraded condition of all heathen nations is not because of their having been formed on a low level, but is the result of degeneration,— because they “did not like to retain God in their knowledge.” Rom. 1:28. Nothing stands out more clearly as the result of the discoveries in Nineveh, Babylon, and Egypt, than the fine touches in the thought and life customs of these ancient peoples, showing unmistakable traces of a former state of religious^life still higher and nobler. Their social customs, their languages, tell us this, and particularly their traditions of an Edenic beginning. But above all is this proved by their religions, which give us, embalmed in dry husks of dead formalism and idolatry, glimpses of previous lofty ideals and forms of prayer to one supreme God, the Creator,— all relics of a more intellectual, a more truly human, state in the dim, forgotten past, the afterglow of a once brighter day. Archeology reveals a sad record of racial degeneration, not of evolution upward. Indeed, in every case in which a people have been brought face to face with a fresh revelation of God, either from his Word or from his works, and have not been willing to endure the sight, not willing to consecrate themselves more fully to his service, they have not been long in repeating the history of the Israelites, and bowing in their turn before some invention of their own perverse folly. The history of many reforms might be adduced to illustrate this truth. In this chapter we design to trace the sad results following the misuse of a great flood of light turned upon God’s book of nature. This light was designed to illuminate the record of the Creator’s wisdom and power; but it has been largely used by perverse human ingenuity in devising a monument for self-glorification, which now, in the climax of human history, must inevitably become the Historical Sketch 59 proof and the memorial of the hopelessness of the condition called in the Scriptures by one word, sin. II On a previous page we saw how, on awakening from the long night of the Dark Ages, men began to study nature as well as the Bible. Natural science, religion’s younger sister, was then born. Emancipated from intellectual thraldom, the human mind was expanding in all directions; but God would seem to have had an especial design in thus opening up the secrets of the universe, and speaking again, as from another Sinai, those great, immutable laws that govern the natural world. Looking down the coming years, the prophets had seen the whole world self-hypnotized by adopting “intuition” and self-pleasing theories as a guide in opposition to the Word of God; and so they warned us of the “lawlessness” of the last days, declaring that the last great test of the ages would be over the perpetuity of the moral law of God and over our inherent obligation to God as our Creator. Hence, before this test could be made effective, the world must be given a better view of the immutable principles governing the universe, a fresh revealing of the great fundamental laws of nature, that all men might better appreciate what it is to be a creature, what it is to have a Creator, and how impossible of escape is the obligation of the creature to obey the laws of the Creator, physical and moral. And there was another reason for thus unlocking the secrets of the physical world. The church for long centuries had neglected to heed the command to go “into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Like her Jewish sister, she had shut herself up in proud seclusiveness, deeming the rest of the world too degraded to heed the gospel call. But Christ had said that the gospel of his second coming must, before the end, be “preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations.” And so, in the very evening of time, with the shadows of the gathering night settling down over the church’s unfinished work, he taught men how to harness up the elements of nature, and even the very bolts 60 Back to the Bible of his throne, in speeding around the world this work his people had so long neglected. Ill Very soon after the revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, people began eagerly to study plants and animals, stars and rocks, and the various other subjects of science. And knowledge of the rocks kept pace with or even outstripped knowledge in the other departments of science. A few dates may give a better idea of how the rise of natural science accompanied the reformation in religion, how a knowledge of the book of nature went hand in hand with the increasing knowledge of the Bible. Copernicus was born in 1473, ten years before Luther, and he worked out his astronomical discoveries early in the next century, while Luther was carrying on his reforms. Kepler lived from 1571 to 1630; while Galileo, the father of physics, was born seven years earlier and died twelve years later, both of them being thus contemporary with the great Puritan movement in England. Bacon’s great work that revolutionized the study of nature appeared in 1620-21, the year of the “Mayflower;” while Sir Isaac Newton, whose influence on the subsequent history of science has been scarcely inferior to that of Bacon, was born about two decades later, in 1642. Within this same general period of revival there lived a number of men, such as Steno, Da Vinci, and John Woodward, who were laying the foundations of the science of the rocks by publishing numerous books describing rocks and fossils, often well illustrated. Woodward at least was far in advance of his age, though his work is now neglected because he taught that these things were proofs of a universal Deluge. Others invented various nonsensical theories to account for these curious things in the rocks that looked so much like plants and animals. But by the year 1700 a knowledge of the rocks and their fossil contents had progressed much farther than had a similar knowledge of the living plants and animals. Historical Sketch 61 IV Now began the development of the Evolution doctrine. Brought face to face with these amazing revelations of the early days of our earth as seen in plants and animals found in the rocks, men began to entreat, as did the Israelites, “Let nature as an abstract force speak to us, and we will hear; but let not the personal God of nature, the Creator, speak with us, lest we die.” For while many of the leading writers of this time freely admitted that the geological changes were caused by the Deluge, there gradually arose a class of men, like Lehmann, Fiichsel, Arduino, and Comte de Buffon, who, having caught the prevailing skepticism of the day, denounced with scorn the idea of a universal Deluge, and set about to explain the geological deposits as the work of numerous long ages and revolutions, one after another, prolonged over immense periods of time. In this way the essential ideas of the evolutionary theory were being gradually formulated, and kept shaping more and more the developing sciences dealing with plants, animals, and rocks. So for over a century it was the fashion to begin every geological discussion by starting with some fanciful hypothesis about the origin of our planet or of the universe. For over a century, did I say? This crude, unscientific method has survived even to our day; so that the ordinary textbooks on geology, instead of starting with the present condition of things, the living species of plants and animals, including man himself, and working backward into the past by framing a truly Baconian induction from the sum total of all the available facts all over the globe, still start with the pretty story of how our earth was once thrown off from the sun, and after cooling from a red-hot state, gradually developed the lower forms of life, then higher and still higher forms, until finally the modern species of plants and animals appeared on the scene. And these textbooks, taught in the name of science to our children in the public schools, and in the high schools and colleges throughout the civilized world, confidently 62 Back to the Bible affirm that all this wonderful transformation of the earth took place by simple, gradual, every-day processes. Even the clearest headed of modern scientists are seemingly unconscious that such a system is only another cosmogony, with none of the inherent finality of true science about it; that it is as unscientific, based primarily on as crude subjective speculations, and as contrary to the principles and methods of Bacon and Newton, as are the vagaries of the Hindus about Brahm hatching the universe from the sacred egg» or the Chinese story of Pwanku hewing out the sun, moon, and stars from the primeval granite. This mania for constructing a cosmogony has ever been the evil genius of geology,— the disposition to spin a theory from the subjective consciousness, rather than by patient research and sound induction being content with the limits of scientific reasoning and the positive results thus obtainable. And the multitudinous cosmogonies thus constructed are not only burlesques on Baconian science in both methods and results, but seem to have been inspired — unconsciously perhaps — by the resolve not to “retain” God in the realm of scientific inquiry; for all these cosmogonies are similar in their general outline, and are as antagonistic as possible to the Bible record of Creation. They are all pagan and materialistic schemes; they are all evolutionary in their essential nature; what we call the Evolution theory being only the last of a long series stretching far back to the days of the early Greeks, yes, and beyond that into Egypt, Chaldea, and India, though the modern form of the theory is very much ashamed of its ancient brothers. Their forms are diverse; but all these schemes of the world’s origin are essentially the same in nature; that is, (i) they all teach matter to be eternal, and are thus pantheistic, some more openly so than others; (2) they all try to “explain” Creation by comparison with processes now going on; and (3) they all involve the idea of almost limitless ages during which this process of pseudocreation or evolution took place. In addition they have also this in common, that these evolutionary schemes have been made the foundation of all Historical Sketch 63 the great man-made religions, from those of ancient Chaldea and Assyria down to the Theosophy and Humanism and the so-called New Theology of our day. The modern Evolution doctrine is merely a new religion in process of making; and if its spread has been phenomenal, we must remember how it has made itself inviolable under the aegis of “science,” and how the school systems of all lands, though supposed to be nonsectarian, have been converted into missionary societies for its propagation. Like all these ancient systems of religious philosophy in Greece, Chaldea, and India, it deals primarily with man’s origin and his relationship to the universe. And of late years, as we have seen, it is taking the forms of the Christian religion, adopting even the familiar words and phrases of the Bible, and is incorporating them into its system with changed meanings adapted to its pantheistic and evolutionary doctrines; so that we now hear this rejuvenated heathenism taught from thousands of pulpits, colleges, and universities, and in all the popular magazines. The question, therefore, narrows itself down to this: What religion shall we have, Christianity or heathenism?— for Creation means Christianity, and Evolution means heathenism. History has demonstrated, by many examples, that to accept any scheme of origins contrary to Creation is to relapse sooner or later into heathenism. Such a return to the philosophy, the religion, yes, to the morals, of heathenism, we now see going on before our very eyes, as the result of teaching this doctrine for a generation through our school system. We have already seen some of its fruits. Are we prepared to say that all this is a good thing for the world, and that the prospect looks bright ahead? If not, how can we accuse of bad logic the Bible Christian, the Neo-Protestant, who says he is irreconcilably opposed to such a system of false science and false religion, and that he knows the science must be wrong somewhere, because the religion growing out of it is false — it comes out wrong? In reality this pragmatic test seems to me altogether in accord with the most logical, the most truly scientific, method of reasoning, 64 Back to the Bible the very method we employ in reasoning about the affairs of every-day life. On the ground of surer facts, more certain truth, outside of the natural sciences, we know there must be something wrong with a doctrine of the origin of things that brings us to such frightful conclusions and results. But let us resume our history. V Buffon was one of the first prominent offenders against both scientific methods and Biblical facts regarding geology, and thus in a certain sense may be regarded as the founder of the modern Evolution theory. His scheme of seven “epochs” possessed every one of the characteristics outlined above as distinguishing these evolutionary cosmogonies; hence he may in strictest fact be called the father of modern evolutionary geology. Others who had a strong influence on the development of the science were Werner, William Smith, and Cuvier. Let us say just a few words about each of these three men and their teachings. A. G. Werner (1749-1817) was the chief teacher in a School of Mines at Freiberg, Germany. His forefathers had been connected with the mining industry for three hundred years; and as Werner himself had never been outside of his narrow little district in Central Europe, he naturally developed very contracted ideas. He was an expert mineralogist; but as he found the schists, shales, sandstones, limestones, etc., occurring in a certain order in the places with which he was familiar, he adopted the very narrow and inconsequent conclusion that they would always be found to occur in this same relative order all over the globe. Absurd as it may now seem, Werner taught his thousands of enthusiastic pupils that each of these various mineral deposits encircled the whole globe like the coat of an onion. He wrote no books; but he was a fascinating teacher, and he inspired his students with unbounded confidence in the system of earth-science as he taught it. To quote the expressive Historical Sketch 65 words of A. Geikie: “The Wernerians were as certain of the origin and sequence of the rocks as if they had been present at the formation of the earth’s crust.’’—“Founders of Geology," pp. 288, 289. And as during his forty years of teaching he made his academy at Freiberg one of the great scientific centers of Europe, to which flocked thousands of students from all parts of the world, there is little likelihood of our overestimating the baleful influence of his absurd onion-coat theory on all the subsequent history of the science. With his own field observations limited to the Erz Mountains and the neighboring parts of Saxony and Bohemia, Werner could hardly be expected to make a very fortunate guess in this intuitional, this subjective, way as to how the rocks might be found occurring elsewhere. Yet for a long time his disciples, when exploring Scotland, the United States, Mexico, or South America, always tried to interpret what they found in terms of their master’s theory. Even Von Humboldt wrote his elaborate books in harmony with Werner’s scheme of the world. But at last the thousands of accumulated facts put an end to this solemn farce, by convincing scientists that Werner had not been given super-naturally this knowledge of the order in which the rocks would be found to occur on the other side of the globe; and the onion-coat theory was abandoned in part. I say abandoned in part; for as the rules of identification taught by Werner began to prove inadequate, and the hopeless failure of his theory became more apparent, there was gradually substituted the idea of identifying the rocks by their fossil contents,— an idea first suggested by William Smith (1769-1839), an ignorant land surveyor in England. Under the powerful influence of Baron Cuvier (1769-1832), the greatest scientist of his day, who seems to have developed the same idea as Smith and at about the same time, onioncoats of fossiliferous strata soon took the place of the mineral onion-coats of Werner, and they are today still found in a recondite form in all the textbooks of the science. The new school of Smith and Cuvier professed to “reject all Wernerian errors,” but the chief of them all is still retained, and 5 66 Back to the Bible dominates the whole system of modern geology; so that, in the words of Herbert Spencer, words that are as true today as when written fifty years ago, “Though the onion-coat hypothesis is dead, its spirit is traceable, under a transcendental form, even in the conclusions of its antagonists.”— '‘Illustrations of Universal Progress," p. 343. Cuvier and others of his day taught that each of their assumed successive ages had terminated in a great world catastrophe, in which all the species then living had perished and had been buried in the rocks, the Biblical Deluge having been perhaps the last of the series. But about 1830 Charles Lyell issued his “Principles of Geology,” in which he taught that, instead of these successive catastrophes, only the common every-day changes now going on in earth, sea, and air had operated in the past; and that solely by these mild processes, uniform with those of the present age, all the past geological changes ought to be explained. The scientific world drew a long breath of relief, and eagerly accepted Lyell’s uniformitarianism. The work of arranging the detailed order of the fossils as the index of these successive ages, was chiefly the work of Agassiz. Making use of the then recently discovered facts of embryology, he concluded that the precise order of the fossils in time for any particular group ought to correspond to the embryonic development of the modern individuals of this group, and he arranged the details of the geological series accordingly. And as the geological series is a purely artificial one, pieced together from scattered examples in various localities here and there, just as is the taxonomic series of living forms, it has not been difficult to arrange the order as desired by Agassiz; so that this method (with some minor modifications) has become universal in the biological sciences, and both the fossiliferous and the modern taxonomic or classification series are constantly being checked up and corrected by comparison with the embryonic. But curiously enough, the evolutionists of our day, led by such men as Haeckel, use as the climax of their argument the fact that the embryonic development of any particular species cor Historical Sketch 67 responds more or less closely with this (artificially devised) succession in geological time! And then they affect to look with pitying contempt upon the poor Biblical Christian who has not had enough scientific training to appreciate the force of such a conclusive method of reasoning.* But to resume our historical sketch. At about the middle of the nineteenth century wonderful successive ages were still unconnected; and it was a great puzzle how such innumerable and apparently thrifty species could thus disappear in great bunches, and be replaced just as suddenly and mysteriously by other closely related, yet distinctly different species. Just at this “psychological” moment Charles Darwin stepped forward, and said he could show how the former had simply developed into the latter by natural process, without any violent or supernatural action. How eagerly this suggestion was welcomed by the scientific world, and how universally it is now admired as the highest type of science and philosophy, is a matter of common knowledge. VI But there are several features of the present state of the question that have taken away much of the enthusiasm which animated the students of the Darwinian theory a few decades ago. First, it was the work of the Neo-Darwinians, led by Weismann, Wallace, Lankester, etc., to show that acquired characters are not transmitted to offspring, only characters born with one can be transmitted to his progeny. This left but a part of the original theory of Darwin as he taught it; *Note.— This favorite method of Haeckel and other evolutionists in fixing their attention on the embryonic development of the modern individuals and calling the world to witness the wonderful similarity between this and the (artificially arranged) geological series, reminds us of the exquisite story of the little girl who, on seeing a young lamb for the first time in her life, exclaimed, “How very natural it looks! It squeaks just like my little toy lamb, and has the same sort of wool on its back.” It is encouraging to note that the really eminent biologists of today, such as Adam Sedgwick, T. H. Morgan, Oskar Hertwig, and an ever-increasing number of others, are outgrowing the reasoning of this little girl. 68 Back to the Bible and the Neo-Lamarckians, led by Spencer and others, thought that the principle of natural selection alone was very inadequate to explain the whole of Evolution. They declared that so far from natural selection’s being able to originate a new species, it really could never originate anything at all; “it may explain the survival of the fittest, but it can never explain the arrival of the fittest.” And since, according to the old adage, both parties are probably right in what they deny, it is hard to see anything left of the rich intellectual heritage which we are supposed to have received from Darwin. Then like a bolt from the blue came Mendelism. This has given us an entirely new view of variation and heredity, one that can be demonstrated by concrete facts and reduced to mathematical formulae. From these new facts we find, to quote the words of Bateson, “First, that in great measure the properties of organisms are due to the presence of distinct, detachable elements [unit characters], separately transmitted in heredity; and secondly, that the parent cannot pass on to offspring an element, and consequently the corresponding property, which it does not itself possess.”—Scientific American Supplement, Jan. 3, 1914. The reader should carefully study these two principles of Mendelism, noting how inevitably the second grows out of the first, and how together they leave no room for that large half of Darwinism, the inheritance of acquired characters. For in view of these fixed unit characters which are separately transmitted in heredity, variation becomes merely a question of the recombination of these unit characters in new ways, some recessive, some dominant, some omitted altogether, but none added that are not already actual or latent in the parent. This is Mendelism, the triumph of biological research in the field of heredity, the last argument needed to render tons of books on Darwinism candidates for the top shelf or for the section labeled, “Of Historic Interest.” Against the customary bitter opposition, such as the archeological discoveries in Egypt and Babylon long experienced from the “critics,” Mendelism has now won its way to a position of absolute demonstration for its main tenets. Historical Sketch 69 No reputable zoologist or botanist that I know of now questions its leading results as given above; though many an evolutionary doctrinaire, like Karl Pearson, who is not immediately interested in biology, is still fighting it with the bitterness inspired by inevitable defeat and the destruction of a life-work. And of course these new truths about heredity have not yet filtered down into the popular magazines or the Sunday supplement, from which the masses learn their “science.” The main results of Mendelism, then, are still further to discredit Darwinism and biological Evolution; but one corollary of another character stands out clear and plain, namely, that our modern taxonomic species (to say nothing of the fossils) have been marked off on altogether too narrow lines. They are not all species that are called species; and if Mendelism shows us how a part of the infinite variety existing around us in plants and animals may have originated, this is nothing strange. Some people seem to think this is all there is of the Evolution doctrine, and are surprised that we can admit this origin of many taxonomic “species” as listed in the textbooks, without admitting the whole doctrine. But these things alone are not Evolution. Evolution lies in the successive ages of geology (plus uniformity) which are back of Darwinism, and which we have shown to be based on a long series of blunders and ignorant assumptions wholly out of harmony with modern scientific methods and facts of common knowledge. These many biological discoveries regarding the variation of “species,” so far from proving Evolution, are only so many helps by which the believer in Genesis can the more easily understand how the modern plants and animals have descended from the comparatively few types surviving from the great world catastrophe or cataclysm taught us both by the Bible and by true inductive science. The only difficulty about the doctrine of the Deluge has been, not how such a universal catastrophe occurred, but how the world could have recovered from it; and modern biology is now furnishing some very material helps toward under 70 Back to the Bible standing how this could be. For the more variation we admit, the easier it is to account for the changes in plants and animals (including their geographical distribution) that have taken place since this catastrophe. There are, however, some other very important lessons for us to learn from the net results of modern science,— lessons that are well worth all it has cost to follow to the bitter end this ignis fatuus of trying to explain the origin of our world from the scientific point of view, as being only just like things now going on. We have followed up a number of promising clues,— uniformity and the succession of life, in geology; spontaneous generation, Lamarckianism, and Darwinism, in biology; but each of them has led us up a blind alley, a cul-de-sac, with no view beyond. Is there anything left to try? Uniformity and Evolution have certainly had a fair chance, an open field, and presumably have done their best. But they have failed, miserably failed. The chief lesson for the sober scientist is a warning against all cosmological speculation. Natural science knows nothing about the order or details of Creation, for these are beyond its legitimate sphere; and in speculating along these enticing lines, the subjective errors of cosmology will always creep in to vitiate the accuracy of our conclusions, and even to debauch the true spirit of inductive science. A few decades ago many leaders in natural science openly boasted that science was showing us just how the world was made; they could almost give us a moving-picture show of Creation in the making. The net returns in the way of real facts now remaining from the bankruptcy of Lyellism and Darwinism ought to convince us that in a scientific way we know nothing at all about it. Modern science has simply developed a gigantic negative demonstration that it did not occur by a gradual and long-drawn-out process similar to changes now going on; and the Evolution doctrine is only a sort of noxious by-product in this demonstration. Fifty years ago it did not appear so unscientific to hope that science might yet solve the “riddle of the universe” in terms of the processes of every-day life; for we did not then have the bio Historical Sketch 71 logical and the geological evidence to refute such a notion. Now, however, in the light of fuller knowledge and more accurate methods, this age-lasting mystery of our existence, of our origin and destiny, presses upon us through our microscopes, our test-tubes, and our other instruments of precision, with an insistent cogency which our forefathers were not qualified to feel; and with weary, reluctant sadness does natural science at last confess that about it all she knows absolutely nothing. But what is this except a confirmation of the doctrine of Creation? What we have observed, what we know, is science (Latin, scio, “I know”). But when all our investigations only impress us more strongly with the conviction that we do not know anything in a scientific way as to how the world was made, or how life or the species of plants and animals came into existence, the conclusion is inevitable that Creation was something different, essentially and radically different, from what is now going on. The key-note of the Evolution doctrine is uniformity, that is, that the present operations of nature are as much a part of the origin of things as anything that ever took place in the past. But the net results of modern science are against all this. They teach Creation, not Evolution. They assure us, in words all the more convincing because forced from unwilling lips, that there must have been a real, immediate Creation at the beginning, essentially different from anything now taking place. The opening words of our Bible are at last being vindicated by natural science: “ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (See Appendix B.) CHAPTER V Modern Philosophy “If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine.’’ John 7: 17. I In setting forth the natural causes of error in all human thinking, Lord Bacon, in his “Novum Organum,” names four sources of prejudice which obstruct the discovery or apprehension of truth in every department of thought. In his quaint way he calls them the “four idols,” and by this term he means the false objects of reverence, vain, deceptive, and dangerous, which he declares must be solemnly “and forever renounced” in order to arrive at real truth in any line of thinking. Bacon discusses these sources of error at length under some two dozen aphorisms; and this great philosopher, the one who led us out of scholastic bondage and up to the borders of this promised land of objective or inductive science, expressed the deliberate opinion that these same four idols would again arise and claim the homage of mankind, after the reformation of science. How accurately Bacon diagnosed the weaknesses of the human mind, and how well he understood that human naturt is always the same in all ages and in all climes, is shown by the sad way in which modern thinkers are already fulfilling this prediction on the largest scale. It may be worth while to note briefly what Bacon meant by these four idols: — 1. The Idols of the Tribe.— By this expression is meant those false tendencies common to the whole race of mankind, growing out of the sad fact as taught in the Bible, that man is (72) Modern Philosophy 73 a fallen creature, and naturally loves darkness rather than light. The taint of sin has touched his will and his reason, as well as his body. In the words of Bacon’s aphorism, “It is a false assertion that human sense is the measure of things;” and to adopt such a measure as a test, as the now widely popular intuitional philosophy does in its doctrine of the autonomy of the human mind, is but to put this idol back in its ancient shrine. 2. The Idols of the Den or Cave.— These are the tendencies to error that grow out of the peculiarities of the individual, in addition to the general racial tendencies to error. As Bacon expresses it, “Every one of us has his own peculiar den or cavern, which refracts or breaks the light of nature; ... so that the human spirit, according to its disposition in individuals, is a thing fluctuating, disorderly, and almost accidental.” j. The Idols of the Forum.— These arise from the use of words that disguise thought rather than explain it. 4. The Idols of the Theater.— These are the deceptions, misunderstandings, and prejudices that take their rise from the different tenets or assumptions of philosophers, and from the perverted laws of demonstration,— evils that certainly have not lessened much since Bacon’s time. II We have seen how in natural science the Evolution doctrine has done its share in restoring some of these idols to their former pedestals. But the philosophies of the Absolute have done as much or even more in this direction. Foremost among those who boast of having classified all things in heaven and earth, who claim to have pigeonholed every fact of being and of experience, every emotion of the heart, every relationship possible between God, man, and the universe, must be placed Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Not as a mere tentative scheme, liable to error and subject possibly to revision and amendment, but as claiming absolute finality in its very form of construction, his system of 14: Back to the Bible philosophy has for vast groups molded their lives as citizens of the state, their international relationships with the peoples of other states, and has even usurped the place of revealed religion. If large multitudes of our species, almost entire nations, have divorced the real from the spiritual, the things of life and external nature from the things of duty and the internal moral nature, or from religion, we must seek the cause in the Kantian philosophy and its various modifications. Teaching that the external and real must ever be incommensurable with the internal and spiritual, but that the latter holds a universal primacy over the former, how could the disciples of this cult any longer base religion on mere historic facts like those of Hebrew history or the life of Jesus? Not that they will cast religion aside,— nay, they will be even more religious than before. They proudly boast that they have gained immeasurably by throwing away all the externals, the husks, since now they base their religion on the immutable facts of man’s internal moral nature. But if we as Bible Christians think them in error, how can we hope to convince, with any mere objective arguments, those who have thus intrenched themselves behind a priori categories that embrace everything in heaven and earth and in the spiritual life of man? The doctrine of philosophical absolutism would seem as hard to dethrone as was the doctrine of political absolutism. With lofty scorn the disciple of such a philosophy will pity you as a crass empiric, a mere materialist, if you attempt to meet his mystical a priori arguments by mere objective reasoning. How can the material, the external, the limited, be employed to refute the spiritual, the internal, the Absolute? In the field of Biblical philology or criticism, for instance, how can any facts discovered among the monuments of the East be expected to change the opinions of men with an intuitional conviction that the Prophets of Hebrew literature came earlier than the Law, and the Psalms later than both? And the doctrine of philosophical absolutism proves by its influence on practical affairs to be just as hostile to civil Modern Philosophy 15 and religious liberty as was the old doctrine of political absolutism. History shows us how dangerous it has always been for men, “clothed in a little brief authority,’’ to seek to impose their will upon other men, under the claim of being themselves the special agents and representatives of Deity. “The danger is equally great,” says John Dewey, “when an a priori reason is substituted for a divine Providence. Empirically grounded truths do not have a wide scope; they do not inspire such violent loyalty to themselves as ideas supposed to proceed directly from reason itself. But they are discussable; they have a humane and social quality, while truths of pure reason have a paradoxical way, in the end, of escaping from the arbitrament of reasoning. They evade the logic of experience, only to become, in the phrase of a recent writer, the spoil of a ‘logic of fanaticism.’ Weapons forged in the smithy of the Absolute become brutal and cruel when confronted by merely human resistance.”— “ German Philosophy and Politics," p. 43. The claim of the Kantian philosophy, that religion is based, not on any external historic facts or any supposed divine revelation, but on man’s internal moral nature, seems at first sight pleasing, or at least harmless. We almost feel invigorated at the call of a kind of duty which claims to be grounded on the immutable and undebatable principles of man’s subjective experience, his moral and spiritual nature. But we presently discover that this “duty” is a mere mystical abstraction, devoid of content, which we may liken to a steam-engine running loose hither and thither without any track to keep it in line. With the Bible Christian, duties are always based on reason, and are devoted to some concrete ends, some good to be achieved, which the doing, of the duty realizes. The moral law, as revealed by divine authority, lays down the track on which the engine is to run; and then a sense of duty is useful as a propelling force to urge one in a direction toward a definite end or purpose. But a gospel of duty separated from empirical or pragmatic purposes acts on the individual like more steam and an open throttle on an engine off 76 Back to the Bible the rails; for under such an idea of duty the blind impulses of obedience become the helpless plaything of every despotic demand of existing social and political authorities. And such a pseudomorality becomes all the more dangerous in practical affairs because it clothes despotism in the garb of a transcendent reason, and arms it with all the terrifying weapons of an o priori logic. It stifles criticism, and bans all intelligent questioning. What wonder that such teachings have tended to make their votaries careless of human rights as individuals, and have led them to teach that to fear the State (always capitalized) and keep its commandments is the whole duty of man? What wonder that such teachings become the adamantine strongholds behind which authority shelters itself from criticism and inconvenient questioning? Such teachings regarding duty become especially dangerous when the State is exalted into a mystical, transcendent personality, the source of all good for the individual, the supreme moral entity, as taught by Fichte and Hegel, who amended Kant’s philosophy in accord with a spiritualistic pantheism or monism, usually termed “Idealism.” Under their teachings the deification of History was completed, the progress of humanity was exalted by a genuine apotheosis, and the successive phases of history became only so many stages in the development of the kingdom of God on earth. Hence, as under this scheme the State is the objectified organ of Divinity, patriotism must be the highest type of religion. Disobedience to the authority of the State becomes more and worse than treason; it is impiety, sacrilege. As Dewey has cleverly said, this is the doctrine, “not of the divine right of kings, but of the divine right of States.” Although most other features of the philosophy of Fichte and Hegel have been dropped, these ideas of the deification of History and of the State have been retained and added to the philosophy of Kant in the teachings of the German universities; so that the latter, in this revised and amended form, is still the palladium of German intellectual life. And through the antebellum influence of these German univer Modern Philosophy 77 sities on English and American thought, it would not be easy to exaggerate the pernicious influence of this philosophy on the rest of the modern world. Ill It may seem like an abrupt passage from the zenith to the nadir to pass directly from the stern logic of Kant to the disconnected jumble of impressions which goes under the name of “intuitional” philosophy,— a cult that is expressly devoted to worshiping the first of the “idols” named by Bacon, seeking to apotheosize intuition as the supreme guide of mankind. Many priests has this cult had; but among its chief priests we may select Ralph Waldo Emerson as a representative, for to many persons he is the most familiar example of the autonomy of the individual mind, the “I-am-it” doctrine. Emerson taught an immediate or “intuitional” vision of truth, and of truth in every department of knowledge. In his famous essay on “Self-Reliance,” this is how he puts it: — “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,— that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense. ... A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of bards and sages.” We have seen several examples of how this method works in natural science and in Biblical criticism, when the investigator follows this “gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,” rather than the concrete objective facts in the external world. And yet we are almost forced to think that a follower of this philosophy must be born every second, and that very few of them ever die or learn any better; for, according to President Schurman of Cornell, “Emerson exercises more influence today . . . than any other prophet, sacred or profane, does at the present time.” While many of my readers may regard this language as extravagant almost to the point of absurdity, and while we 78 Back to the Bible may make allowance for these words as the careless after-dinner remark of a not very exact speaker, they are almost matched by the following from the International Encyclopedia, art., “Emerson:”— “The precepts of such essays as ‘Self-Reliance’ may be said to be part of the mental marrow of every educated man in America.” There may be some danger of attaching too much importance to these statements regarding the personal influence of the man here spoken of; but there is little danger of overestimating the prevalence of the system of philosophy thus typified by the intuitionalism (more often called Transcendentalism) of Emerson. Accordingly, it may not be amiss to examine more in detail the system of thinking here represented by one of its best-known exponents. I suppose I ought not to have called it a “system” of thinking, for as is well known, Emerson himself never attempted to form a system of thought, and indeed was almost incapable of consecutive orderly thought, as any one can readily see by his writings. I do not mean to imply that he was of the class of the man described by Pollok,— "... who never had a dozen thoughts In all his life, and never changed their course; But told them o’er, each in its ’customed place, From morn to night, from youth to hoary age.” Emerson’s failing was of a somewhat different order. He had plenty of individual thoughts, but he never tried to connect them. Some of his admirers, it is true, who were more endowed with the ability to think consecutively, have since tried to systematize his “philosophy,” but have found it a hopeless task; for many of his brilliant phrases and dogmatisms are directly contradicted by other phrases or assertions originating in the same brain, put down in cold letters by the same hand, and the proof afterward read by the same eyes. Of course there would be no more use trying to refute such a “system” of philosophy than there would be to go shooting a will-o’-the-wisp. But it may be worth while to point out the pernicious influence of such a mental Modern Philosophy 79 infection, since it has spread so widely, and since in its practical application it dispenses entirely with the Bible as the guide of life, and erects in its stead the “inner light’’ of the individual. IV Should a man trust implicitly every brilliant idea that seems to come to him as an intuition? Many a one has done so in matters pertaining to every-day life, only to discover sooner or later that he was under the sway of a mental delusion. Often his friends have had to discover his mental condition for him, and place him under protective restraint. Obviously the following of such an intuitional guide is not a safe method in matters pertaining to concrete objective realities. Is it any safer or more sensible to follow a similar method in matters pertaining to ethics and religion? In the realm of concrete objective facts these facts of themselves must serve as our guide, our standard, by which to check up and measure the value of any idea coming to us in the guise of an intuition. If it be a genuine intuition, it should nevertheless be susceptible of verification by the regular canons of inductive and deductive reasoning. In a similar way the Christian believes he has in the Bible and in the facts of Christian experience a similar set of genuine facts, which should serve as the final criterion of every idea in ethics or religion that may come to us as “new light,” whether it comes from without or from within. Emerson (whom we have mentioned merely as a type of the intuitional philosophers) apparently never heard of the canons of inductive and deductive reasoning, or if he did hear, he cared no.t a fig for them; for he apparently jotted down and gave to the printer any “gleam of light” that happened to flash across his mind from within, irrespective of its relationship to any fact in the universe. A brilliant idea capable of expression in a clever phrasing was apparently its own justification for existence, and a sufficient reason for him to give it to the world as a part of his “philosophy.” And it made little difference whether his “gleam of light” 80 Back to the Bible from within pertained to politics, art, literature, ethics, or religion. Still less did it concern him whether the present “gleam of light” agreed or disagreed with others he had had yesterday or the day before. Lazy, undisciplined human nature has alwayfe been sufficiently inclined to adopt this intuitional short cut, to save itself the trouble of verifying its ideas by the more laborious pj-ocess of reasoning, without its needing any encouragement from our intellectual leaders, or any attempt at formal justification on a pseudophilosophic basis. We have seen how one of the “critics” naively acknowledges that he used this method in arriving at the wonderful truth that the Prophets must have been earlier than the Law, and the Psalms later than both; how he took this intuitional “truth” as a major premise, and after finding a minor to fit it, was able to reconstruct the whole history of Israelitish religious development. We have seen how Werner and numerous other geological speculators used this method to tell us exactly how the world was made. And it was a closely allied method of intuitional thinking that, according to Charles Lamb, long prevailed among the Chinese, after the value of roast pork had been accidentally discovered by the burning down of Ho-ti’s cabin. Thereafter they always thought it necessary to burn down a house whenever they wanted to have roast pig. It is almost a pity that in Lamb’s dissertation the sage came along subsequently with his gridiron to disturb this brilliant Emersonian-Elian-Chinese “intuition,” for it is by such touches of human nature that we may prove the whole world akin. It is always difficult for us of normal faculties to appreciate the situation of men born color-blind. In the same way it is hard for some of us to place ourselves in the mental attitude of people who seem congenitally incapable of dealing with objective facts in an inductive way, and who substitute for this method what they term, in the modern jargon, the self-inspiration of the subconscious mind. For however we of normal faculties may fail in particular instances, we aim to trust the evidence of our faculties and our reason in so far Modern Philosophy 81 as they deal with concrete realities; and we try to do the best we can at “straight” thinking in dealing with the facts of God, man, and nature by the comparative processes of thought. But I can sympathize with my color-blind brother, so long as he realizes his limitations and does the best he can. I can very charitably sympathize with those who often stumble in their inductions or their syllogisms, but who recognize with us the same common goal of truth, and agree with us in a general way as to the direction in which it is to be sought. And I feel called upon to exercise even a higher grade of charitable sympathy toward those who seem congenitally incapable of consecutive thinking on the great abiding problems of existence. But what name shall we use to describe our attitude toward one logically color-blind, who, nevertheless, aspires to be recognized as an art critic, who openly boasts of his disregard of the evidence of other people’s faculties, and who succeeds in having his phantasmagorias quite generally accepted by the world? I have no disposition to deny the reality of the mental experience of those who rely upon their “intuitions” and dignify them with imposing psychological names. The Christian religion makes provision for two kinds of spiritual influence, or what we may call in a subordinate sense of the word “inspiration,” a good and a bad; and just as the Spirit of God or the influence of good angels may flash a conviction of truth into the soul in a way that makes this conviction independent of cold, logical processes, so do evil spirits have a similar power to impart false ideas, which may often be spoken of as a flash of genius or the action of the “subconscious mind.” But for those who recognize no external criterion of truth, no infallible standard by which to test all these subjective impressions, such as the Christian has in the Bible, it is difficult to see what protection there is from the most dangerous self-deception. However, such selfdeception, due to following such false intuitions, is usually manifest in the intricate realms of morality, ethics, and religion; when it appears in the realm of external realities, we are accustomed to call it hallucination, delusion, or mental 6 82 Back to the Bible aberration. But the so-called “new thinking,” of which we have taken Emerson as a type and an exemplar, has dignified this method of thinking as quite the normal thing, and indeed as the hall-mark of genius, and it is now being defended as a “philosophy,” and taught in a thousand ways from the platform and by the press. What a hopeless task it seems to reach such a “system” of thinking with any argument, when each individual is assured that he has within his own breast the final test of every principle of morals or religion! We may attempt to point out that these methods of testing truth are the very reincarnation of those vicious intellectual methods of the Middle Ages which Bacon exposed, and which we boast our modern age has outgrown. But how' shall we reach with any arguments the followers of such a philosophy and such a religion, when they repudiate logic in the realms of thought under consideration, and deny the possibility of learning truth objectively in the sphere of ethics and religion except through what they are pleased to term “judgments of value”? The whole realm of religion and ethics is thus given over to intellectual chaos, every truth regarding man’s duty and his higher nature is reduced to a mere matter of opinion, and it becomes baldly and literally true that one person’s opinion is regarded as just as good as another’s, and the opinion of each person can change with the shifty winds of inclination. Such are the teachings by men in high places that have prepared the soil of our modern life for the appalling growth and the rapid propagation of such vagaries as Christian Science, and the multitudinous forms of religion grouped under the terms “New Thought” and “Advanced Theology.” Everywhere we see the modern tendency to discard strict processes in religious and philosophic thinking, and to substitute the lazy, slipshod method of regarding individual opinion (or the collective “consciousness,” to use the fashionable modern term) as the criterion of truth. The present generation seem to have a congenital or an acquired distaste for close or long-continued thinking; as one writer expresses it, “Immediacy has become a habit, perhaps a disease.” Modern Philosophy 83 And such a flippant method of dealing with these deepest and most momentous problems of life and of destiny is especially baneful today, when a false world-philosophy like Evolution is already in charge, and is dictating to the intellectual world with all the dogmatism and the browbeating assertiveness of any intrenched intolerance of the past. As we have seen, conditions have now become completely reversed in the realms of science and religion, and a thousand facts from the world of nature are crowding together like a very theater crush for the help of the church. A careful and discriminating examination of the false science and false logic at the bottom of the popular theory, would doubtless lead multitudes to see the better way. But instead of a willingness to reason on the subject, we receive the smug retort of Emersonian pantheistic indifference, “You have a right to your opinion, and I have a right to mine;’’ or, “It doesn’t make any difference what one believes on such matters; just follow the light within you, and you will be all right.” V It would be an interminable task to examine in detail the various philosophic systems prevailing more or less widely in our modern world. Our task is rather to get a broad general view of the field, and especially to note the points common to all, or at least to most of them, and to consider what bearing this general trend of philosophic thought has upon Bible Christianity, or what we have termed the New Protestantism. This can best be attained by considering some statements by the late Prof. William James of Harvard, from the published form of his Hibbert Lectures of 1909. He has entitled his book, “A Pluralistic Universe;” for he was one of the few philosophers who continued to reject the widely popular teachings of monism, holding a modified form of dualism, or “Pluralism,” as he chose to term it, though according to the usual classification the old doctrine of Creation as taught in the Bible may be included under dualism. £1 Back to the Bible Of the latter, Professor James says: — “Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all Catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our British and American universities, and be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised.”—Page 24. We have no occasion to stop here to consider whether or not the doctrine of Creation is properly classed as a form of dualism. Most of us think we know what this doctrine is, and what are the great antipodal distinctions between the doctrine of Creation and its rival, Evolution, no matter how we classify the one or the other. But according to Professor James, the old ideas regarding Creation and the government of the universe, the origin of evil, and the ultimate basis for morals and ethics, are almost universally discarded throughout the higher educational institutions in England and America, and some form of monistic pantheism has been accepted instead. A further examination shows that even Professor James is not by any means more in sympathy with the old views than is the prevailing monism. In fact, his scheme of a “pluralistic universe” is not very widely different from the “intuitionalism” of Emerson and Ritschl, already mentioned, though of course his scheme attempts self-consistency, and affects to be severely logical and scientific. But between his view and the prevailing pantheistic monism, old-fashioned Christianity is so much of an anachronism, so hopelessly out of date, in his opinion, as to call for only a brief passing notice in his addresses on the present situation in philosophy. Thus he remarks: — “I shall leave cynical materialism entirely out of our discussion, as not calling for treatment before this present audience; and I shall ignore old-fashioned dualistic theism for the same reason.”—Page 30. In the same connection he gives another word-picture of the completeness of this change in the intellectual world, and incidentally helps us to see how suddenly this change has come about. For after remarking that he had been told Modern Philosophy 85 by some Hindus that “the great obstacle to the spread of Christianity in their country was the puerility of our dogma of Creation,” the lecturer added, “Assuredly, most members of this audience are ready to side with Hinduism in this matter.” But he proceeds to say that “those of us who are sexagenarians” have witnessed such radical changes as make “the thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and eschatology, its treatment of God as an external contriver, an intelligent and moral governor, sounds as odd to most of us as if it were .some outlandish savage religion.”—Page 29. VI We need not follow this matter further. We have attained the object of our search, and have found abundant proofs of the grim and sad reality. The facts are too well known to admit of doubt that, within a single generation, the whole tone and character of philosophical and theological thought throughout the civilized world, especially throughout Protestantism, has suddenly and completely changed regarding those fundamental ideas of Creation, God’s character and his relationship to the universe, involving also the basic ideas of morality and ethics; and the views now prevailing are practically identical with the monistic pantheism of the Hindus. In previous chapters we have attempted to correct the prevailing errors in geology and biology, because these are questions of objective fact, and therefore easily determined. In subsequent chapters we shall attempt to discuss some of the points of contact between philosophy and morals and economics. But it is not worth while, especially in a popular work, to attempt a similar study in abstract philosophy. To say nothing of its technicalities, such a study would probably not prove more satisfying or more final than others. Uncounted times since the days of Gnosticism and Neo 86 Back to the Bible Platonism has this been tried with varying results; for in many respects the terms used in this part of philosophy, known as ontology or metaphysics, are but mental playthings, and the methods of handling them only an intellectual amusement. At any rate, the same speculations or questions persistently come up as if never before answered, their authors either ignoring the plain and sufficient explanations given in the Bible, or attempting by quasi-logical methods to blaze out a straight path through the universe, or to unlock secrets regarding existence that in the very nature of things the human mind is incompetent to solve. But surely it is pitiful and heart-sickening to hark back over the last half century and listen to the faint, bubbling cries of the friends of old-time morality and religion, as singly or in groups they have sunk into the black depths of this rising tide of pagan philosophy, until from shore to shore of the whole intellectual world such men as James can scarcely longer hear a sound of surviving life. And yet I cannot help saying that I am even encouraged by the very universality of this modern apostasy. To me it seems but a stronger guaranty that the great Jehovah is about to vindicate his truth in a very marvelous way before the people of our age. We have already had a glimpse of how these facts from the natural world, which were formerly thought sure to render obsolete the message of the church or to denature it entirely, are now, in a way that constitutes one of the surprises of history, coming forward to confirm and strengthen her message, and are arraying themselves all on her side. Who can doubt that old-fashioned gospel Christianity is now standing before open doors of opportunity that will again conduct her to a platform of prestige and power, from which she can once more deliver her Master’s message of love with Pentecostal effect to the multitudes of all lands who so sadly need it? But we need not dwell further upon this point here, as it will be taken up again in the sequel. CHAPTER VI The Origin of Evil “ If man is not a free agent, he is not the author of his actions, and has, therefore, no responsibility, no moral personality at all.”—Hamilton. I When Huxley undertook to discuss the Christian doctrine of Creation and the origin of things, he very diplomatically called it the Miltonic cosmogony: people would be less shocked at learning of the conflict between Evolution and the theology of Milton than in seeing the antagonism between Huxley’s science and Bible Christianity. Such a turn made a vital religious question into a mere academic one. In Huxley’s day it was still safer, from the point of popularity, to criticize harshly the theology of Milton than that of the Bible. Today a diplomatic policy for the defender of this theology would point in about the same direction; for as the result of a half century of sneering at the “nursery yarns” of Genesis, people have the most hazy and grotesque ideas of what the Bible teaches on this subject; and it would be easier to gain (in some quarters) a consideration for an idea by attributing it to the great epic poet than to the discredited Textbook of a religion that for so many people retains only a historic interest. Accordingly, since many students of literature are more familiar with Milton than with the Bible, I would remind them that the cosmogony of the former is founded on the latter, and that, barring a few realistic details in his great poem, the two are near enough alike for our present purpose. And in order to save space I shall refrain from citing specific references from the Bible to illustrate my statements. (87) 88 Back to the Bible II Let us now briefly glance at the teachings of the Bible (or of Milton, if the reader prefers) concerning the origin of sin and of evil in general, remembering that these ideas were almost universally held by the Christian Church down until very modern times, or until so radically modified by the incoming of the Evolution doctrine. According to the Bible, the God of heaven, infinite in wisdom, in power, and in love, was absolutely unconditioned in Creation. That is, matter itself came into existence at his word, and not only had no existence before he created it, but is still dependent upon his power for its continuance. Hence matter has no properties except those which God has given it; and if there are seemingly in nature characteristics which are out of harmony with him and his law of love, these characteristics must be the result of the mysterious, unaccountable intrusion called sin. For nothing is plainer in both the Bible and a rational philosophy than that God was in no wise responsible for the entrance of sin into the universe; there was no real cause for it, as might have been occasioned if there had been an arbitrary withdrawing of the divine grace or guidance, or some deficiency in the divine government. This entrance of rebellion could be excused only by showing a cause for its existence, and then it would cease to be sin. Before the entrance of evil, peace and happiness prevailed throughout the universe. Not only did inanimate nature act in perfect harmony with the divine will, but all created beings were also in perfect harmony with their Creator. Love for the divine Father was supreme, love for one another unselfish and impartial. But the bringing into existence of intelligent personalities endowed with the freedom of choice, involved the risk, the possibility, that some day, on some occasion, this choice might be perverted, not by a mere mistake or an intellectual error on the part of some created intelligence, but by his choosing a course of action out of harmony with the fundamental principles of the universe. The Origin of Evil 89 Long before the creation of this world, sin had originated with one of the very highest of the inhabitants of the universe. Little by little this mighty angel began to indulge a desire for self-exaltation; he became jealous of the honor and power enjoyed by the Son of God; he diffused a spirit of discontent and dissatisfaction among the heavenly beings, until this could no longer be endured, and he was “cast out” of heaven. The Bible passes over in silence the many efforts that must have been made by Infinite Love to hold Lucifer back from the perilous course on which he was entering. Even when he and his sympathizers were banished from the abodes of bliss, they were not destroyed. Since a service of love alone can be acceptable to Jehovah, the allegiance of his creatures must rest upon a firm conviction of his justice and kindness. Since the nature of sin had not yet been fully revealed, the inhabitants of heaven and of the rest of the universe could not have seen the justice and mercy of God in the immediate destruction of Satan. Had he been blotted from existence forthwith, they would have continued to serve God; but it would have been a service inspired by fear, not love. The inherent evil of rebellion against the Creator must for the good of the universe be allowed to come to maturity, as an object-lesson to all coming ages, and as a perpetual safeguard against a repetition of this terrible experiment. Only by seeing the results of the working out of Satan’s plans, their degrading and demoralizing effects upon both men and angels, could the subtle influence of the great deceiver be fully destroyed, and the last seeds of questioning and rebellion utterly and forever eradicated. The tacit permission given Satan to introduce his work of deception and rebellion into this world is only a part of the general larger plan of the Creator to allow sin to go to seed, to come to full fruition. God made man upright, “in His own image,” and pronounced him “very good.” But man voluntarily took the side of the great rebel, and in his heart selfishness took the place of love, by the mysterious inherent nature of disobedience. He had been placed as lord of this world; but by his rebellion he unsettled the nice 90 Back to the Bible equilibrium existing between himself and the surrounding conditions of nature; and by a reflex or sympathetic result of his act he dragged down with him in his fall all those forces and objects in the natural world over which he had been placed as king, God choosing to allow all nature thus to witness to him of his fall, and to make this deranged natural law the means of bringing him back to the way of obedience, happiness, and peace. Such is the Bible explanation of how this “present evil world” is, in spite of so many appearances to the contrary, the work of a God of love. It throws the responsibility of evil on what G. J. Romanes calls the only real cause of which we have direct experimental knowledge, namely, the choice of a free personality. And this freedom of the creature’s will is the only condition that can relieve God from being directly responsible for everything found in his universe. And even if we grant the freedom of the creature’s will, the ultimate results, after sin is but a historical memory, after peace and harmony and universal love are again restored to the whole universe, must be sufficient to warrant the frightful risk involved in thus creating beings free to choose between right and wrong, between loving allegiance to the Creator and rebellion against him. And it should be unnecessary to remark here that this Bible account of the origin of evil is not by any means dependent upon the first chapters of Genesis alone, even though in them is found the first picture of God’s work of Creation. Many theistic evolutionists have tried to make it appear that this is about the only part of the Bible directly opposed to their theory. But if all the writings of Moses be neglected, I do not see how the situation would be altered a particle. Open the Scriptures where we like, and we find this key-note to every doctrine,— that man has sinned, that all are now sinners, and that nothing but divine power can bring them back into fellowship with God and into harmony with his law of love. A method of deliverance has been provided, and those who avail themselves of this provision will ultimately be rescued entirely from sin and all its consequences. The Origin of Evil 91 But just at present man is not in harmony with his Maker. Take this general thought out of the Bible, and what is there left? Ill That the present state of the world, and of human nature especially, is not ideally perfect, but is most wretchedly imperfect, abnormal, or depraved, through some cause or causes, few will be inclined to deny. The optimism of Leibnitz argued that the present universe is the best possible one; but I do not know of any who seriously teach this doctrine today. Without at all expressing sympathy for the extreme pessimism of Schopenhauer or of Hartmann, we all realize that there is evil and sin all around us,—“here where men sit and hear each other groan.” “All my knowledge is that joy is gone, And this thing woe crept in among our hearts, There to remain.” The wisest of the ancients, like the clearest minded of their modern children, lamented, but they could not cure, the ingrained, misery-producing evils of the human heart and of all mundane nature. And aside from the explanation of these prevailing evils as given above from the Bible, if we assume, of course, that our world is the work of a personal God, there are only two possible views: — i. That man was created out of hand in his present condition of misery and evil, fierce lusts, murderous hatreds, and innate selfishness, making miserable both himself and all about him; that is, that man was made out of joint with nature and nature’s God. But such a notion charges with purposeless folly a Creator who, on other grounds, is evidently wise and good, making him the direct responsible cause of all our world’s misery and sin; and hence it is too preposterous to be entertained for a moment. 2. That man was formed in an imperfectly developed condition physically, mentally, and morally, and is now on the road (by natural process) to a higher development and ultimate perfection, the present evils and innate selfishness 92 Back to the Bible of human nature being but the survival of something still worse in the past, when such characteristics were the natural endowment, the outworking of principles implanted in nature long before man’s existence. This is the view of biological Evolution. But surely the latter hypothesis is not one whit better than the former; for it makes sin and evil the endowment of the Creator just the same, something that he saddled upon the universe when he started it evolving. It pushes the cause of evil farther back in time, but it in no way relieves God from being directly responsible for it. Why should he make the world in this horrible way? Was he just experimenting? Did he really have to produce the higher forms (man included) by means of these long millions of ages, with their trail of misery and suffering even before man appeared, man himself but very slowly emerging from the chaos of lust and blood, a true product of nature, “red in tooth and claw”? or was he conditioned by the refractory substance (matter) on which he was working, unable to do with it quite as he wished? It would seem that this last supposition is the one now generally adopted by theistic evolutionists; though, as we shall presently see, it is not Christianity, but paganism, pure and unmixed. The agnostics are less dishonoring to the God of nature, for they refuse to believe that an all-wise, almighty Creator would make himself responsible for such a state of things, or that he could be hampered by the properties of the material with which he was working. They urge that it would be nothing short of a tyrant or a fiend that could impart such tendencies to a creature, and then punish it, even by the law of cause and effect, for living out the dictates of its hereditary nature. A few quotations will serve to show what leading evolutionists teach regarding the early state of the human race. Thus Huxley writes: — “For his successful progress as far as the savage state, man has been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the tiger.” The Origin of Evil 93 John Fiske no less positively says that nature has put a high premium on these qualities, by making them the ladder by which the race has ascended to its present condition. He. says,— “Those most successful primitive men from whom civilized peoples are descended must have excelled in treachery and cruelty, as in quickness of wit and strength of will.’’ Elsewhere this latter writer gives us a more general view of the matter with which we are dealing: — “Theology has much to say about original sin. This original sin is neither more nor less than the brute-inheritance which every man carries with him.”—“ The Destiny of Man," p. 103. Le Conte traces this inherited evil back still farther, making it a part of the very nature of things: — “If Evolution be true, and especially if man be indeed a product of Evolution, then what we call evil is not a unique phenomenon confined to man, and the result of an accident [the “fall”}, but must be a great fact pervading all nature, and a part of its very constitution.”—"Evolution and Religious Thought," p. 365. x I would ask especial attention to this last quotation,, because it is from one who called himself a Christian evolutionist, and because I believe it is fairly representative of this large class of thinkers. But there is no discernible difference between this view and the following from Celsus, usually called a Neo-Platonist, who was the first ancient writer to devote a work to the specific task of attacking Christianity: — “For in this world evil is a necessary thing. It has no origin, and will have no end. . . . The vX-q is the source from which what we call evil is ever springing up afresh.”-—-Neander's History, Vol. I, pp. 233, 234. But as the latter was written by a pagan philosopher very soon after the death of the apostles, and in express opposition to the Christianity of the apostolic age, I fail to see why we should call the same teaching Christianity down in this twentieth century, even thougkyit be taught from a theo 94 Back to the Bible logical chair endowed by pious Christians who believe the Bible. Calling a goat a sheep will not give it the character of a lamb. IV If now we glance for a moment at the remedy for this evil, the doctrine of redemption or of salvation from sin, we might expect that with the evolutionists this would only mean to combat the animal within us, and struggle as best we may for the “higher” life, though obviously in direct opposition to the nature with which God has endowed us. As Fiske expresses it, “The process of Evolution is an advance toward true salvation.” And so far as I have read their writings, all Christian evolutionists who teach sin to be mere animalism, substitute this development by civilization or “culture” for regeneration and conversion. But obviously this evolutionary “salvation” is largely or wholly a salvation of the race through the prospective future perfectibility of mankind as a whole; and it is childishly inadequate in dealing with the poor individual here and now who, under this hideous handicap, fails in the sad conflict with his inherited animalism; and it has no gospel for these present moral failures (or those of the past), unless they can be reincarnated at a higher stage of the racial development, or have “another chance” under some less hard conditions in the future; while it goes without saying that, in the view of these theistic evolutionists, this racial culture or development can be accomplished without the intervention of a divine Mediator and the death of a divine Sacrifice. But we have had such ethical culture teachings before, and they have never had any great force in redeeming and uplifting fallen humanity. Just as good ethical teaching was written out in detail by Marcus Aurelius, the pagan Roman emperor; but such a philosophy did not keep him from carrying on some of the most bitter persecutions against the infant church, employing the entire machinery of the Roman Empire in the determined effort to blot it out j>f The Origin of Evil 95 existence. And it certainly is not a very reassuring thought that the leading political idea of ancient Rome is already revived and widely taught both in America and in Europe (as will appear later), namely, the doctrine that the state is absolutely supreme over the individual, the latter thus having no rights or privileges except such as are conferred on him for the supposed good of the whole. It surely seems most ominous to the student of history to see how fast we are coming to a similar situation, with every prospect that the sacred rights and liberties purchased by the blood of our fathers will avail us little in the face of the universal spread of these rejuvenated pagan doctrines spoken of above, which seem to be rapidly nullifying all that the struggles of the centuries have gained for us in the way of civil and religious liberty. The world is sick, and needs salvation from sin. Is the church to confess that her entire experience as an evangelistic agency has been a long mistake, and to begin now along these tame, Christless, cultural, and political lines to remodel her whole work, and thus try to stem the horrible tide of evil that is sweeping over the world? Above all, must the Bible Christians, the Neo-Protestants, who cannot accept these “advanced” views and bow to the great majority,— must they again go through another baptism of blood, when this rejuvenated paganism is again in control, and again attempts to carry out the merciless logic of this theory that the individual must be completely subordinate to the whole, as was done in the days of Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian? The Bible is more, much more, than our religious guide. It is the blessed charter of our civil and religious liberties. And in abandoning it the modern English-speaking peoples have thrown away the only restraining influence that can keep this age from repeating on the largest scale those deeds of blood that stain almost every page of history. How can I refrain from pointing to the instructive spectacle of one of the great nations of the world, one of its intellectual leaders, that in its national capacity and in its international relationship has openly professed to adopt the 96 Back to the Bible ethics of this new philosophy? But surely this example is sufficiently instructive as an object-lesson to give pause to the other nations who have also become more or less tainted with this pagan philosophy. When it was considered merely as an academic question, the view of the universe and of the origin of man as taught by Darwinism did not seem to many persons so horrible, so fraught with peril to all the rights and liberties which we have won in the past four centuries. Even the teachings of the monistic philosophers, in openly glorifying war and proclaiming the ethics of the jungle and the cave as still the supreme code among the nations — in other words, their open application several decades ago of the biological “laws” of Darwinism to international affairs, did not meet with the strong repudiation it now receives from the rest of the world, when we see this doctrine worked out objectively, by the act of a great nation in putting it in practice. Thus it may well be that the present horrible war may serve as a premonitory warning of the real inwardness of this teaching, given beforehand to let the world see it actually worked out in national life. But as surely as night follows day, the whole world will bring upon itself the doom from which it is now frantically trying to escape, if it heeds not the warning to return to that Guide-book which has so long been the safeguard of the rights and liberties alike of nations and of individuals. CHAPTER VII The New Pantheism “Jehovah is the true God; he is the living God, and an everlasting King.” Jer. io: io. “Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.” Isa. 57: 15. I As we watch a mass of living protoplasm under the microscope, say in a frog’s foot, and see the individual cells moving hither and thither, all seems a mass of confusion. We could never in this way arrive at a conception of tissue growth; we need to look at it in the large, to see some of the results accomplished by these apparently confused and random movements. It is much the same when we view the contemporary movements of society. We shall not be able to discern the trend of these movements, or know what to expect in the way of results, unless we look at the matter historically, comparing these modern changes with others that have gone before, and from the results in other ages drawing lessons applicable to the present situation. A few specimens of a full-grown frog would give us the key in the one case; and a few examples from history may at least teach us some lessons in the other. II The name “Pantheism” was apparently coined by John Toland about 1705; but the ideas it represents are evidently 7 (97) 98 Back to the Bible as old as the oldest recorded attempts at philosophical thinking, being the groundwork of the sacred writings of the Hindus, which date from near the dawn of history. Pantheism is a somewhat general term, including various systems of thinking that either identify God with the universe, making the Deity merely a great universal Energy pervading all things; or identify the universe with God, and seek to explain all human experiences in terms of an illusory and transitory fragment of an assumed universal Mind. But all the various protean forms of pantheism alike deny that God is a real personality, a being with a dwelling place, who wills, thinks, and loves, transcending the material universe; and thus, logically, they dispense with the Atonement and all necessity of a divine revelation. Several times in her history the church has met this philosophy in deadly conflict, scorning all parley and all compromise with a doctrine that has always been considered the essence of paganism; and yet in our day this old foe has reappeared with a new face, and again seeks to allure the church into an unholy alliance. We may further add that probably not even in the days of the Greeks and the Romans were pantheistic views so widely held and taught throughout the Occidental world as in this second decade of the twentieth century; and there is no essential difference between the modern phases of this doctrine and its ancient forms that grew up in the stoa of the Athenian market place and on the banks of the Ganges. Greek pantheism came to full development in the Stoics, the most prominent of whom was Marcus Aurelius, one of the most determined opponents of Christianity. The less materialistic Neo-Platonists long endeavored to revamp Christianity into conformity with their world-wisdom; but they were shaken off by the church, and not until the Middle Ages did this old philosophy come up again. Johannes Scotus Erigena taught it in the ninth century, and furnished subjects for the intellectual acrobatics of the School men. The New Pantheism 99 Modern, or the new, pantheism, however, seems to date from Giordano Bruno, who built up a system of personified nature, and was burned as a heretic in 1600. From this point down there have always been those in esoteric circles who have advocated either a materialistic or a spiritualistic pantheism as the ultimate wisdom of the universe, Spinoza (1632-77) being perhaps the most influential in shaping the thought of succeeding generations, his influence cropping out in such literary leaders as Goethe, Arnold, Emerson, and Carlyle. I do not mean to class all these as consistent, thoroughgoing pantheists; with some of them, early Biblical training and the reflex influence of surrounding Christianity usually got the better of this essentially anti-Christian taint. But it would be useless to deny that these, with many others who might be mentioned, have by occasional passages, or by their entire writings (in the case of one or two of them), infected the whole of modern literature with pantheistic speculations, which, strongly assisted by the prevailing doctrines of science, have been the chief cause of the great popular spread of these ideas in our modern world. All pantheism is monistic; but monism includes more than pantheism. As remarked above, there is an extremely materialistic phase that explains the universe in terms of molecules and atoms; and there is another, a spiritualistic or “idealistic” extreme, that practically denies the reality of matter, and explains all phenomena in terms of mind or spirit. Between these extremes there is room for myriad varieties, especially when we consider that multitudes hold pantheistic views in various departments of their thinking, without taking the trouble to shape the rest of their mental processes into consistency with their pantheism. Thus mysticism in religion has usually gone hand in hand with some form of pantheism; and even Calvinism, by its method of identifying the providential conservation of the world with a sort of continuous creation, that is, by failing to distinguish “upholding” from creating, furnished a very congenial soil for the growth of pantheistic views. 100 Back to the Bible Calvinism reached its culmination in Jonathan Edwards, who was undoubtedly one of the most profound minds that the world has seen, and who dextrously avoided pantheism while teaching an absolute monism. But with many theologians since, among the various Protestant denominations that have grown up from the seed planted by the great Genevan, there has been an increasing tendency to lose sight of the distinction between the Bible doctrine of the omnipresence of God and that view of the universe which undeifies God entirely, and interprets all his work in terms of the forces and energies of nature, leaving no room for the supernatural or the spiritual. And since many churches of Cal-vinistic faith among the Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, etc., have gradually dropped their old doctrines of election, sin, and regeneration, substituting for them tacitly or explicitly the various features of the so-called “larger hope” and “New Theology,” this tendency has alarmingly increased; for whenever these views rise to dogmatic assertion or attempt philosophic self-consistency, their undertone is always pantheistic. Ill With our weak, finite human faculties, tainted with hereditary and acquired tendencies to evil as they are, there are many enticing avenues of thought that we can never hope to explore to the farther end. Sooner or later the mind loses itself in labyrinths of thought that circle about without progress, or bring it back to the very point whence it started. And if it succeeds in convincing itself and others that in its journey it has blazed out a straight trail through the Unknown, the “absolute,” the only result can be to make this fruitless, this asymptotic search for “truth,” a self-perpetuating delusion, tempting all succeeding generations to repeat the same weary quest for wisdom. “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those which are revealed belong unto us and to our children.” Deut. 29: 29. The New Pantheism 101 A certain clever writer likens the efforts of such philosophers to those of a baby sucking at a nursing-bottle. So long as there is milk in the bottle, the baby sucks with pleasure and profit; but presently the bottle becomes empty, or is in such a position that no more milk will come; and still the baby goes on sucking just the same, with resulting discomfort and colic. Well would it be if grown-up children could recognize the limits of the intellectual milk supply, and not, like the infant, go on sucking empty air. Some things must ever remain unknown to us in our present state; but every generation seems to furnish a fresh body of people to follow the intellectual acrobats of Neo-Platonism and medieval scholasticism in their tight-rope dance across the chasm that separates us from the region of the unknowable. The plain and unambiguous teaching of the Bible is that the great Creator of the universe is a person, a being who thinks, wills, loves, and sympathizes. Man, who exercises these same powers or capabilities, reveals but weak transcripts, or copies, of their great originals appertaining to Him who is infinite in all his powers and perfections. The Bible very positively teaches God’s omnipresence; but it also teaches just as positively and clearly that there is a place in the universe where God abides, or where he is to be found in a sense in which he is not #found in any other place. But these statements are not at all mutually contradictory. In the thinking of those familiar with the Bible, these statements, which may appear paradoxical to the unbelieving scientific critic, are easily understood in the light of the Biblical teaching that God is present everywhere throughout the universe by his Spirit, his word being just as effective through all the remotest corners of his universe as near at hand; for the simple reason that matter has no “properties” save what God has given it, and hence it can have no innate inertia or reluctance to act which God’s word would need to overcome in order to induce it to act, even when this word reaches out across the boundless fields 102 Back to the Bible of space. This doctrine makes the Creator also omnipresent, or ‘‘immanent,” in the original and proper sense of this word; though we are compelled to refrain from using this word, so much has it been misused by those who would de-personalize God, and who have injected into this word a semi-technical meaning to express their own peculiar pantheistic views. Christ Jesus, our Lord and Saviour, is- spoken of in the Bible as being the very image of God’s substance, and as having been originally associated with the Father in all the work of Creation; and he came to earth to show us what God the Father is like, veiling his deity with humanity, that mortals might become acquainted with their Creator without being consumed. Our finite minds can in no way comprehend the Infinite One, but in Christ we are to behold the Father, and learn as much about the Eternal as we need to know. Beyond this we must trust the hand that never wearies, the mind that never blunders, and the heart that never grows cold. IV But we must now take a brief survey of some of the scientific facts that have seemed to some minds to lead to a pantheistic view of the universe. Until Kepler and his three famous laws, men had no conception of the orderly arrangements of the solar system. Had Kepler himself been asked the ultimate cause of these beautiful laws, he could only have replied that they were due to the supreme will of the Creator. But presently Newton came forward and suggested a secondary, a physical cause. He showed that all these orderly arrangements are but the necessary result of universal gravitation. Even at that early day Voltaire and other philosophers seized upon this discovery as something that enabled them to dispense with an overruling Providence, in the heavens at least. But then came chemistry, the microscope, electricity, and all their associated wonders, with the correlation of forces and the The New Pantheism 103 conservation of energy; until now we see law and order pervading the entire cosmos, from the planets rolling on through space in their trackless paths, to the mote dancing in the sunbeam, and to the protoplasmic units of which our own bodies are composed. Not that we understand all these marvelous laws; but we have got far enough to see their correlation. That is, we now know that such things as gravity, light, heat, chemical affinity, magnetism, electricity, etc., are not really separate forces; for they are all actually transmutable back and forth without loss, and hence must be only different manifestations of the same energy. This is not a theory, but a fact. No laws in all natural science are more immovably grounded in fact than the law of the correlation of forces and its twin law, the conservation of energy. Even vital action in living tissue is now as perfectly correlated with the others; and so far as science can test the problem with its instruments of precision, the amount of energy in our material world seems to be a fixed quantity, radiating constantly into space, but continuously replenished from the sun. Hence we see that law and order reign supreme, and we are accordingly forced to choose between two opposing views, — either the universe is self-sufficient and runs itself, we ourselves being but atoms and cells of the great All, a view which would give us a pantheistic or monistic materialism; or the great Author of the universe must also be far more closely connected with nature, and must carry on all natural phenomena in a far different way than such philosophies as that of Kant have taught. To us moderns there is no middle position possible. It must be either a materialistic (possibly a spiritualistic or idealistic) pantheism, or a Christian theism in-which the great Creator is also the one “in whom we live, and move, and have our being,” in a sense that makes the thought a very uncomfortable one to sinners who have not yet learned to love the great Father of all. There is no third choice for any one who knows anything of physics and chemistry. 104 Back to the Bible A half century or so ago, in man’s first flush of conquest over some of the more marvelous mysteries of nature, and especially after the rise of the Evolution doctrine with its professed explanation of the method by which animals and plants came into existence, the pantheistic view of things rapidly filtered down from the esoteric few and diffused itself widely through the rank and file of the people of all the Western world. At first it was rankly materialistic; but man is said to be a religious animal, and the materialism of Spencer and Haeckel certainly did not long satisfy the mass cf the people. Hence for a decade or more the pendulum has been swinging strongly toward a spiritualistic pantheism that seems to be very religions, and has already taken the long-established religious terms and modes of worship used in the Christian church, and has incorporated them, with changed meanings, into its system of world philosophy, very much as Neo-Platonism tried to do so long ago. There is no need to cite proof. We all know that the Modernism of the Church of Rome, the Liberal movement in the Church of England, the “New Theology” of English Nonconformity and of the Protestant denominations of America, even the Reform spirit of Judaism, are all at bottom one and the same movement, with merely local differences; for they are all alike inspired with the belief that modern scientific discoveries are superior to the Bible, and they all more or less openly teach views of God and of the universe that cannot be distinguished from the pantheism of ancient Greece or of the Hindus. V Two things seem largely to have contributed toward these unhappy results: — I. The first that we may mention is the persistent misrepresentation of the real teaching of the Bible and of historic Christianity as being that of an “absentee God,” governing his estates by delegated agents called light, heat, gravity, electricity, chemical affinity, etc. The philosophy of Kant, The New Pantheism 105 with its numberless modifications, has greatly encouraged what is perhaps a natural tendency of sinful beings to push back into the shadow the acting of God in the various phenomena of nature, and to direct attention exclusively to the phenomena themselves and to the material objects which ■seem like their cause. But I call this taunt that Christians believe in an “absentee God” a gross misrepresentation, for two reasons: — (i) The Christian church has never taught such* a doctrine. Dr. Franklin Johnson, of the University of Chicago, is certainly a competent authority in matters of church history. Let him testify: — “The doctrine of ‘an absentee God’ belongs to Gnosticism, and the Christian church rejected it with horror in the very beginning, and has continued to reject it to this day. There has never been a single dissenting voice. Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Andrew Fuller agree in the statement that God is everywhere and acts everywhere.” (2) The Bible does not teach such a doctrine. Throughout it teaches the omnipresence of ‘ God; and how can an omnipresent God be an “absentee God”? In their beautiful hymn, as recorded by Nehemiah, the Levites used to sing, “Thou, even thou, art Lord alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth, and all things that are therein; . ₍. . and thou preservest them all.” Neh. 9: 6. As far as our world is concerned, Creation is completed, for the record is that the “works were finished from the foundation of the world” (Heb. 4: 3) the Sabbath having been given as the memorial, not of a Creation still going on, but of a completed Creation; and this is doubtless what we have discovered in a scientific way and have called the great law of the conservation of energy. The Creator’s working is still manifest in “upholding all things by the word of his power.” Heb. 1:3. Not because the machine has once been started and then left to act of itself, do breath and pulse continue their ceaseless rhythm; but every rising breast, every throbbing heart, 106 Back to the Bible tells of the sleepless watchcare of the Author of all being. He it is in whom “we live, and move, and have our being;” “who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” Acts 17: 28; Eph. 4: 6. Not that this teaching would ignore the free personality of man. In a very obvious sense, God is in a righteous man as he is not in a wicked man. As Professor Johnson well remarks, “We must deny the immanence of God in wicked* souls, or else deny their wickedness.” We must believe in the freedom of the will, and we must recognize that, as the result of sin, there has been a counter-working against God’s will in nature; or else believe that the bacillus of cholera and the instincts of the viper and the tiger are true theophanies, and that the outbreak of a volcano, with its indiscriminate slaughter of old and young, is a direct act of God, the perfect expression of his will. We live in a world more or less deranged and demoralized by sin. Not only was human nature changed by transgression, but nature itself shared in the perversion of the divine order. As the scripture says, “The creation was subjected to vanity.” The redemptive plan for man includes the restoration of the original order in all creation as well; for the scripture further adds: “The creation itself also shall be delivered.” (See Rom. 8: 19-21.) Because of the deranging of the perfect order, we are bound to recognize the existence of two sets of phenomena in nature. I have no ambition to attempt to mark out the exact boundaries between these two. It is not essential to lay down the metes and bounds. We recognize the fact of the omnipresence of God over all, working out the purposes of his will that all creation shall be brought back fully to the primal order. We see, also, not yet all things working in harmony with the divine plan. In all these phenomena we are still dealing with the things that God has made, and over which he still exercises control; and those few methods of action that we have been able to define and label we call the laws of nature. The varied phenomena of nature thus become only the objectified mode The New Pantheism 107 of God’s thoughts; the forces of nature are but the different forms of one energy or will; and the laws of nature are the orderly ways in which this will acts,— orderly, because “God is not the author of confusion;’’ and invariable (outside of the period during which sin is permitted to exist), because he is perfect, and therefore unchangeable. The All-wise does not have to experiment to learn how best to do a thing. The Almighty One who made matter and gave it its “properties” can never allow it to become a rival to his will or get beyond his control. And he who sees the end from the beginning has already made provision for every possible contingency, and is not to be surprised or driven into some violation of his best or established methods of action by any emergency that may arise. VI II. The second cause contributing to the spread of modern pantheistic notions is the persistent speculative tendency to affirm a material “cause” with which to bridge over all the chasms in our knowledge, or perhaps to act as a material shield to screen us from an embarrassing view of the action of God in all the various affairs of life; for not many find it a comfortable thought thus to live continuously beneath the great Taskmaster’s eye. This disposition to search for a material cause is instinctive in the human mind, and has proved of great practical service in unlocking the closed doors of nature, on many of which our forefathers thought they read a notice of “No Admittance!” But when we have penetrated into the inner sanctuary of any department of nature, we almost invariably come upon a wide chasm that we can pass over only by building a bridge of words; and some of these verbal bridges we have dignified with imposing names, such as “luminiferous ether,” “gravity,” “chemical affinity,” and we impose on the credulity of the public by thus giving out the impression that these words represent the real objective bridge on which we crossed. 108 Back to the Bible But what do we really know of the origin of anything, or of the method by which matter can act on matter (as in the case of gravity or any form of attraction) across seemingly vacant space? We can observe certain regularities in the occurrence of natural phenomena, and so we invent ingenious theories, and decorate them with imposing-looking mathematical formulae to explain the precise action of the ether, or the kinetic action of the molecules. And by persistent use of these inventions we hypnotize ourselves into the delusion that we are dealing with objective realities, and that these theories are something more than learned masks for our ignorance of real nature. It may be quite right, and very convenient in ordinary language, to speak of the laws of gravitation and of chemical affinity; of the properties of light and heat; of electricity, magnetism, and the X-ray; just as astronomers still speak of “sunrise” and “sunset.” Such terms are all right in ordinary speech, if we do not allow them to obscure our thinking when dealing with the deeper problems of the universe. But the most exact and certain of our “laws” may be only the crudest rule-of-thumb conclusion when regarded from a little higher point of view. For we all know that for almost every law yet discovered in physics or chemistry — the most exact of the sciences — some startling and mysterious exception has also been found, reminding us of the pitiful limits of our knowledge. A boy living near a railway track might speak with considerable confidence of the exact times at which all the trains pass; but every now and then a “special” sweeps by, and shows how little he knows of the plans and arrangements at the office of the train dispatcher. VII Let us glance for a moment at the truly wonderful way in which water acts in its expansion and contraction. It is an almost universal rule in nature that solids, liquids, and gases expand with heat and contract with its absence, or The New Pantheism 109 with cold; the result being that solids sink in their own liquids. As long ago as 1867 Dr. Sterry Hunt used this fact to prove that the common idea of a molten interior to the earth cannot be true, for the solids on the outside would sink to the bottom (the center) as fast as they formed. But ice, on the contrary, does not act thus. In the liquid state (water) it contracts with the cold till it reaches 4⁰ C., which is its most condensed state. It then begins to expand with further cold, till it reaches 0° C., when it expands suddenly into ice, and after that follows the usual law of contraction with still further cold. A few other substances have been found to act somewhat similarly at very extreme temperatures. 1 It is a very fortunate thing for us poor mortals that ice is thus an exception to the general rule; for if it occupied less space in the solid than in the liquid state, as most substances do, it would sink in water as fast as it formed, with results too horrible to contemplate. Our lakes and rivers would freeze solid in the first months of wunter, and all the summer could possibly do would be to thaw them out a little on top. Some ingenious attempts have been made to reconcile these strange phenomena about ice with the kinetic theory, but with little success. As for myself, it is easier for me to believe that, through some higher law which we may or may not discover in the future, the Creator makes in the case of ice an exception to his general rule, so that this world can be inhabited. VIII Then there is that still unsolved problem of how light or radiant energy is transmitted to us across apparently vacant space from the sun or the immeasurably distant stars. It was one of the many similar problems propounded by the Almighty to the afflicted Job, to show him that human suffering is not by any means the only unexplained phenomenon. “By what way is the light parted [or distrib 110 Back to the Bible uted]?” was the problem presented to the patriarch; and in spite of all our science, this age-old question is still unsolved. The modern theory of the ether, with its waves or oscillations, is one of these pretentious bridges of words, and it may serve to allay our curiosity with an apparent explanation; but in the last analysis it leaves God’s question just as he asked it, and assists us in no way whatever to understand how the phenomena are really produced. By the theory of the ether the problems are not solved, they are merely postponed. All such phenomena of nature, which prove to be not susceptible of material explanation, tend to produce in the unsophisticated mind the thought of an Intelligence behind nature and independent of it, as the active cause. This, we have seen, is the uniform teaching of the Bible. But scientists insist on presenting a physical cause. We try their theory; but instead of dispelling one mystery, it raises a dozen. How then are we better off than before without any theory? The hypothesis that radiant energy, etc., are transmitted by waves or oscillations in the ether, a rare elastic medium pervading all space, even the interiors of solid bodies, is what some are pleased to call a “thought-economizing device.” This it certainly is; for it serves admirably to keep us from thinking about God as acting throughout nature, and from 'constantly reading the open lessons of his loving care in the daily phenomena of life. Rather let us call it a God-forgetting device; for it seems to me only a materialistic substitute for the action of the power of God; and I for one am not willing, in my thinking, to travel across this chasm on so flimsy a bridge of words. There are many other theories, like this of the ether, which seem only materialistic efforts to postpone or to ignore the real, vital lessons of phenomena,— efforts to push the real Cause back one step farther,— a last desperate effort, in the face of the constantly accumulating evidence of modern knowledge that the great First Cause is far more intimately connected with life and motion than many are willing to The New Pantheism 111 believe. For example, gravitation — and indeed all the attractive forces, such as adhesion and cohesion —- must probably ever remain inexplicable in any physical or materialistic sense. We can readily explain any form of a push in a physical way; but how are we to explain how one particle of matter can reach out and pull in toward itself another separated particle, and exert this pull across the immeasurably wide fields of space? The law of inverse squares may tell us very accurately the manner in which these forces act; but there is no theory of the why of gravitation that is worth employing the time of sensible, truth-loving people. And there never will be any except that this is the way which the great Jehovah has ordained. Since theories regarding such things only explain the known in terms of the unknown, .they can act only as a sort of mental buffer or shield between us and the conception of the working of a personal God. But if for this dead, materialistic ether, this imaginary “power” of gravitation, we substitute the word of an omnipotent Creator to whom matter can never be otherwise than instantly obedient, even across the boundless fields of space, these phenomena of “action at a distance” are at least intelligible; while to me, and I speak now as a scientist, they are intelligible in no other way. IX Among the wonders of nature, nothing perhaps is so remarkable, nothing seems so to usher us into the very workshop of the Creator, as the action of the cell, with its component, protoplasm, when we study it beneath the microscope. Huxley called the latter the physical basis of life, because it is the same in both plants and animals, and is the basis of all organic existence. We cannot distinguish animal protoplasm from that of plants by any physical or chemical tests; the one merely does a different work from the other. 112 Back to the Bible Yes, and how different! The protoplasmic units of all life exhibit such a division of labor, and move so rhythmically about their several duties, that as we watch them under the microscope (there are about five millions of corpuscles in one drop of our blood), we can almost imagine we hear the great Captain of nature issuing his orders to them. It is preposterous for any one to tell us that their regular, soldier-like movements are the result of inherited habit, or are due to innate properties residing in their chemical elements; though even then the question would come up as before, Whence these marvelous properties? Vital processes are certainly not to be interpreted in terms of physics and chemistry, as is admirably shown when the organism dies; for then the chemical forces regain their control, and reduce the whole organism to a mass of inorganic molecules, the gastric juice eating its way through the very stomach that secreted it. But look at this speck in one of our fingers; it is building up bone. Another cell, nay, its exact double, in our brain, is building up brain tissue. Or look at those marvelous creatures that we call the white blood corpuscles, as they travel here and there, ferreting out, and swallowing, the poisons they find in the various parts of the body. These tiny specks of protoplasm have each their allotted work to do. One never tires of dwelling upon the marvels of organic life showing forth the power and wisdom of God. And in spite of all the bridges of words that we may build in the way of biological theories of heredity, the cells of living organisms are controlled, by him who guides the planets in their courses, a being not resident in these cells, but infinitely, gloriously transcending them. X All down through the centuries the Christian church has taught the doctrine of God’s omnipresence, sometimes calling it the doctrine of the divine immensity. The Reformers, and Roman theologians, taught this doctrine, while easily and The New Pantheism 113 completely avoiding all taint of pantheism. And certainly there is nothing in all modern science in the way of objective fact to give us cause to abandon the very beautiful and sublime picture presented in the Sacred Scriptures: “These wait all upon thee. . . . That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good.” From protoplasm to man, from atom to starry system and illimitable space, all things are moment by moment dependent upon the sleepless energy of the great Creator and Sustainer of all. True, the natural human heart does not welcome this thought. It brings us too closely beneath His gaze in our sinful shortcoming and nakedness. Few are willing to live and work thus beneath the very eye of the Infinite. And so they invent a philosophic “dualism” that banishes the Creator from his universe, or they draw the veil of their scientific pantheism over their hearts to hide them from his allsearching gaze. In ancient times men seem to have done the same, as the monuments of Egypt and Chaldea declare; and the marvelous knowledge of nature that they had in the morning of our world, degenerated into the pantheism and nature-worship which we find so early in secular history. It is the old, old imaginary conflict of the law and the gospel. For materialism means the hard exactitude of the law, and the working of a personal God means the blessed love of the gospel. In all physical as in moral law, the wages of sin is death; but a loving, omniscient God intervenes to heal a wound, or cure a disease, or forgive a sin, and says that we may have eternal life as a free gift from him. We shudder at the declaration of the great iron laws of nature, “awful with inevitable fates,” while modern science speaks them to us as from another Sinai; for we feel our shame and nakedness beneath the eye of infinite Purity and unselfish Love. In abject terror we feel like saying with the Israelites, “Let nature as an abstract force speak to us, and we will hear; but let not a personal God, the infinite Creator, speak with us, lest we die.” 8 114 Back to the Bible But it is this same Being upon whom we are momently dependent for life and all its countless blessings; and he it is who delights to welcome his returning children with assurances of life and peace. He himself will bring forth the best robe and spread it over us. That garment, the robe of Christ’s righteousness, was woven in the loom of heaven, beneath the eye of the Master of design, and it will always avail the cowering, shuddering sinner if he will take it now, while it is freely offered, like all the other gifts of the God of nature and of revelation, without money and without price. CHAPTER VIII Occidental Heathenism “This was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” Eze. 16: 49. I The term “heathen” is applied to those peoples who are ignorant of the true God, but who have a god or gods of their own, and a religion of their own. They are not infidels, they are not agnostics, they are not atheists; for they are very religious. But as we are in need of a new term by which to designate the so-called “Advanced Theology” that has grown up in the Western world within a generation, I beg leave to use the one at the beginning of this chapter until a more suitable name can be found. It carries the further appropriateness that it implies that this modern Occidental religion is not yet consolidated into a body, but exists in many and various forms. I also desire to state that I use it not as a term of reproach, but merely as a description. Not long ago some of the popular magazines had articles on “The Passing of Materialism.” These articles were called out in view of the astonishing change that within ten years or so has come over the religio-scientific world. In the seventies and eighties of the last century the Darwinian doctrine was supreme in scientific circles, and the world seemed entering on an age of stark materialism. But of late years, while Evolution in some unknown and undefined form has grown even more fashionable as the “method of creation,” the materialistic view has been almost wholly (115) 116 Back to the Bible discarded; and the God of the Christian religion has been charged with having made the world by the process of evolution—“charged,” I say; for I consider it a libel on the God of the Bible to attribute to him such a bungling, heartless piece of work as the Evolution theory describes; a .crude, unworkmanlike piece of work, and therefore unworthy of one all-powerful and all-wise; an atrocious process, unworthy of a God of love. But though so inconsistent with all the most fundamental ideas alike of natural and of revealed religion, this “theistic” Evolution is now at the steering wheel of most of the European and American educational systems, so obviously in charge of the situation that the popular secular literature laughs at the most recently issued of Haeckel’s works, and talks about the “passing” of materialism. \ II As a contrast to, and a relief from, the flood of books and articles now being sent forth in an effort to reconstruct the fundamentals of Christianity so as to accord with this essentially heathen doctrine, the present writer not long ago took up an old volume by F. W. Faber, “The Creator and the Creature.” It was written in 1856, or before Darwinism was sprung upon the world; and so far as the discussion of his main question is concerned, Faber is in full accord with sound philosophy and primitive Christianity. One of his chapters is entitled, “What It Is to be a Creature;” another, “What It Is to Have a Creator.” The broad fact is dwelt upon and illustrated in detail, that in this mutual relationship between creature and Creator lies the ultimate and sole reason for all moral obligation. We are bound to love and obey God because he has created us, he is our Father; we are bound to love our fellow man because he, too, is the creature of our Father. But when we consider what a changed aspect this Evolution doctrine gives to the whole problem of evil and the doctrine of divine love, and how, as we have seen, it leads inevitably to a view of Occidental Heathenism 117 the omnipresence of God not distinguishable from pantheism, we see that such a doctrine is a burlesque on Christianity, and is as far removed from the gospel of Christ as is Buddhism or any other heathen philosophy. In short, the modern Evolution philosophy and its outgrowth, the so-called “ New Theology ” or “ Liberal Theology,” are but the embryonic stage of another great system of false religion, arising in a manner very similar to that in which Buddhism, Brahmanism, Parseeism, etc., had their origin. For it is a mistake to think that the religions of Greece and Rome, of Egypt and Babylon, consisted any more than do those of modern India and China merely of forms and ceremonies and idol-worship. Such both the ancient and modern systems may have been or may be to a large class of their unthinking, degraded devotees. But in their beginnings, and to all their more intelligent followers, they were much more than this. Rather must we say that all are philosophic systems for explaining the phenomena of nature, the origin of things, and man’s relationship to the universe and to the Power at the head of the universe. The forms and ceremonies of worship came in only incidentally, because man is a worshiping creature. So each of these systems of man-devised religion took whatever degenerate relics of more ancient and purer forms of faith were nearest to hand, and after changing and adapting them to suit its theories of cosmogony and philosophy, incorporated and assimilated them, and thus grew into that particular system of world religion which we know. During the last quarter century or so we moderns have been witnessing another religion in the making, the embryonic development of another great system of heathen religion, designated for the present, “Theistic Evolution.” Like the systems of religious philosophy already mentioned, it deals primarily with man’s origin and his relationship to the universe. And in its essential nature it is as truly pagan or heathen as anything that ever grew up in Egypt, Greece, or India. 118 Back to the Bible III Let us briefly recall some of the points brought out in a previous chapter as to the teaching of this religion or philosophy on two very fundamental points, namely, the reason for sin, and the remedy for it:—- I. We have seen that Evolution has no explanation for the sin and misery of our world, except to make it a part of the nature of things which God himself could not avoid when he started the world evolving. To quote again the words of Le Conte: “ What we call evil is not a unique phenomenon confined to man,” and is not in any way connected with man’s free will as an intelligent being rebelling against his Creator. On the contrary, it “ must be a great fact pervading all nature, and a part of its very constitution.” But man, having ascended from the lower animals through the long-drawn-out struggle for existence, still carries about with him as a relic of the cave and the jungle a large inheritance of animal selfishness and passion. Hence for any of us to sin in any of these various ways is simply to revert a little more to the primitive type, to become a little more like man as originally made. As John Fiske expresses it, “Theology has much to say about original sin. This original sin is neither more nor less than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him.” We might well pause here to show how utterly inadequate is the view that makes sin to be merely inherited animalism; but passing that, it is very evident that Evolution thus makes God the author of sin, and hence also of the misery which is sin’s natural result. If we shrink at pantheism and claim to be theists, we must own that with this view God is either the helpless victim of circumstances or the deliberate author of evil. This fundamental evil, which Le Conte says pervades all nature and is a part of its very constitution, must be something which God deliberately saddled upon the universe when he started it evolving; or else he is not, as we used to think, all-powerful and all-wise. There is no dodging Occidental Heathenism 119 the one or the other horn of this horrible dilemma. According to “theistic” Evolution, sin and misery are either the result of God’s deliberate purpose, or they are something which he could not help, being inherent in the very nature of the material (matter) on which he was working, matter thus having an independent existence apart from God, with properties which are beyond his control. Certainly, according to this theory, it is not man’s fault but his misfortune that he is a sinner; and if there is any being in the universe who is responsible for the present sin and misery of our world, it must be God himself. Are we not justified in calling this a heathenish doctrine? Let us see if its remedy for sin and misery is any better. 2. As we have also shown in a previous chapter, Evolution has no remedy for sin and suffering, either in the case of the individual or in that of the world. Christianity has a divine life coming into the soul from above, by which the sinner is born again and made a child of God, with power to overcome all hereditary and cultivated tendencies to evil. Evolution can only talk loftily of the power of development and culture. Christianity looks forward to the end of the present world-order, to “that blessed hope,” the personal coming again of her absent Lord, with the resurrection of all our loved ones and the final and complete eradication of sin and evil. Evolution can only talk vaguely of future benefits to “humanity” in the coming centuries, encouraging us with the hazy hope that probably the world at some far-off time may “become a more comfortable and agreeable place for the man of the future to sin and die in.” Which, of course, is but to mock at all the hopes of the individual and of the race. To quote again the words of Fiske: “The process of evolution is an advance toward true salvation.” This thought of the progress of the race might be cheering if we could only become incarnated in the future when the race has evolved a little higher; but what comfort can it give here and now to one who finds himself crushed and defeated in the bitter 120 Back to the Bible conflict with evil without and within? or what power has this Christless philosophy to transform the character and change the heart, to make the profligate pure, the proud and self-assertive humble and meek, the cruel and self-loving kind and unselfish? Another enthusiastic exponent of these “advanced” views, declared that it is all a mistake to be looking toward the future. He said, “What is needed more than anything else today is to get rid of the idea that the human race needs redemption or a mediator, and to understand that we are a part of God ourselves.” Not long ago the editor of the Independent reviewed a new book which taught the old-fashioned doctrine of the sacrificial death of Christ. He criticized the book severely, saying that the author was advocating a lost cause, and affirming that there is actually a generation growing up who never heard the sacrificial explanation of the death of Christ. The learned editor of this great representative weekly even went so far as to say that many young people in the popular churches of America would actually be shocked at the suggestion that Jesus died that they might not die. Now if such is the fact, is it at all extravagant or unjust on our part to speak of the young people just referred to as heathen? — providing, of course, that we use the term merely as a description and not as a reproach. No doubt they have been born into the lap of luxury, perhaps may have been educated at Harvard or Yale; they may be descended from the most select families of Puritan New England or Virginia; they may ride around in automobiles and private cars, and be twentieth century Chesterfields in point of manners and culture. But it is surely a fact that a generation which, as the result of early training in an atmosphere of Evolution, Higher Criticism, and New Theology, is ignorant of, or denies the claims to homage of, the Creator of the heavens and the earth; who “never heard” the doctrine of the sacrificial death of Christ; who “would actually be shocked” at the suggestion that Jesus died in our stead in order that we Occidental Heathenism 121 might live,— such a generation can only be appropriately described by the old-fashioned word “heathen,” whether they live in America or in China. But, thank God, there are still many times seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to this modern apostasy. And they are only encouraged to greater faithfulness by the very universality of the false doctrines now prevailing, for they know that it is quite full time for the great Jehovah to arise and vindicate his name as in ages past. Their faith in the Bible assures them that God must soon vindicate before the world the perfect harmony between his written Word and the book of nature, just as he vindicated the Bible in the days of the Reformers. At that time a long-intrenched apostasy had placed tradition and the authority of the church above the written Word; but the Bible was vindicated and restored to its rightful place as the supreme guide of mankind. Today this work of the Reformation has been largely undone, and many have so far abandoned its fundamental teaching that they have relegated to a position of mere historic interest that divine Book which has shown itself so vital with blessing for all who will read and obey. But the other volume of God’s revelation, the book of nature, is also now involved in the present misunderstanding; and while both books are misrepresented as to their true teachings, men largely reject the one because they say it does not agree with the other. Surely a new reformation, a revival of old-time Protestantism, is now in order. Other reforms have been based on various parts of the Bible here and there; the one now due is based on the first part of the Bible, and it also involves the complementary revelation in the book of nature. Hence the logic of the situation demands that God shall vindicate these two records of the early history of our world in a marvelous way before the present generation. His two books must be shown to agree, so that the world may be left without excuse. And when the church once gets a true view of the divine harmony pervading these two messages of the 122 Back to the Bible Creator, there must follow a return to old-fashioned Bible Christianity, accompanied by a transforming power that the world has not seen since the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Creation and Its Memorial “In six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore Jehovah blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Ex. 20: 11, A. R. V. I It has become the fashion in certain quarters to assume that the old views regarding Creation and the early history of the human race are entirely obsolete, and that intelligent persons no longer hold to these outgrown ideas. But there are yet people who, although they may not be able to qualify under the term “intelligent” as used above, are concrete evidence that these old views are by no means dead, but that, on the contrary, they are still possessed of vitality and power among people who are at least trying to be intelligent regarding science and the modern world problems. From what has been said in the previous chapters, it can easily be inferred that in the views of these Bible Christians, these Neo-Protestants, there must be a rational way of accounting for all the events appearing in the early history of the human race, on the basis of the literal truth and trustworthiness of the records given us in the first chapters of the Bible. And while a work like the present cannot be expected to consider all the minutiae in these early records which may be made matters of question by one person or another, it may not be altogether out of place to consider briefly some of the larger events there mentioned. II Let us first take the question of the origin of civilization. Our modern age has well been amazed at the discoveries in (123) 124 Back to the Bible Egypt, Babylonia, Crete, etc., discoveries which, it is needless to say, are in complete accord with the Bible record, that these early times were times of relatively high civilization. The one dependence of the evolutionist is time; just let him postulate a sufficient length of preliminary ages of preparation, and he will cheerfully undertake to account for any degree of civilization. But obviously such a method is dodging the real question, merely postponing it; for, as was long ago pointed out by Archbishop Whately, civilization is always an inheritance, and at least in its elementary forms is never self-originated. In other words, while we are fond of speculating on the probable rise to civilization of primitive savages, a view industriously taught by certain modern schools of ethnology and archeology, there is not a single objective historical example of a savage race that has ever thrown off or outgrown its savagery and has developed an agricultural life (or any other higher stage of civilization) of itself, and without having received the essentials of the change from some external source. This idea that savages have of themselves slowly developed into civilized people is merely a pleasant dream of a romancing age, and is without a particle of justification in objective historical fact. Civilization is always an inheritance, and has never been selforiginated by any race in any age. All of which is sufficient to illustrate the Bible truth that man did not start on the earth as a savage, but only “a little lower than the angels.” (See Appendix C.) Through luxury and loss of self-control, nations have in numerous instances relapsed into barbarism or semibarbarism; but the moral development which must necessarily precede civilization has never been self-developed by any people in any age. As in biology, life can come only from antecedent life, so are civilization and moral development received only from those who already have them. Ill Another fact, this time confirming the Bible record of the multiple origin of languages at Babel, is that more than Creation and Its Memorial 125 fifty languages are known which are so radically distinct from one another that no one of them can be shown to have any relationship with any other. The doctrine of Evolution would seem to demand the unity of the languages of earth; the Bible affirms the unity of the races of earth, but the multiple origin of languages. And long ago William Dwight Whitney declared that to prove the unity of origin of human speech by the existing facts of language “is utterly out of the question,” and “beyond the wildest hope.” And yet from the immutable laws of philology we cannot understand how one language can ever so change from within as to lose its identity and be transformed into another and totally different type of language. Mere time is not a prime factor in the problem. A million years, or ten million, could never cover up the footprints on the road by which a language became transformed into another distinctly different language by natural development. Races have often abandoned old tongues, and have adopted new ones by force of external circumstances, such as conquest, or contact with or absorption by superior races. But there is no historical instance of a language ever having been so transformed from within as to be changed into one of a totally different type; nor can we understand how such a thing could possibly occur. And when we think how easily we can show the genetic relationship between the scattered members of the Indo-European family of languages, and can trace them all back to a common original, it is hard to resist the conviction that no amount of gradual internal change can account for the radical and antagonistic differences between many of the great language groups of the world. All of which, of course, tends to confirm, not alone the Bible record of the confusion of tongues, but also the remarkable complementary Babylonian inscription, “He [God] gave a command to make strange their speech;” and also another old tablet concerning the “most ancient monument of Borsippa,” that “since a remote time people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words.”-— McClintock and Strong's Encyclopedia, art. Tongues, 126 Back to the Bible Confusion of. (See also Lenormant, “Manual,” book I, chap, i, sec. 4.) Now I would not have the reader infer that I put these two facts forward as demonstrative proof of the truth of the respective points under consideration. The fact that civilization as we know it has always been passed on from one people to another as an intellectual inheritance, may not in itself be sufficient to prove that man began life on this earth at a point far above the bestial or the savage state; and because the facts of language seem to point to a multiple origin for the languages of mankind, that may not be demonstrative proof that the record of Babel is true. But they point in these directions, and are good collateral evidence; and they are given here merely to show that the arguments are not all on the other side, as is so commonly assumed by the facile writers who have had the attention of the public for so many years. While these facts are not of themselves sufficient to prove the accuracy of the record in the first chapters of the Bible, they are strikingly in harmony with that record, and utterly out of harmony with the development theory now so popular. IV However, we are approaching some subjects about which we can speak much more positively. We now come to a series of facts regarding the origin of some things other than civilization and language, which constitute a practical demonstration of the reality of a literal Creation at some one point in the past, which we may call the beginning,— at least as near a demonstration as it is possible for human science to produce regarding the reality of any event in the past of which we do not have contemporary human records. As preliminary to the statement of these facts, we should first inquire, What do we mean by Creation? And what would serve as proofs that there must have been a real Creation at the beginning, as the Bible declares? The matter of time is not essential; neither the question of how long ago, Creation and Its Memorial 127 nor the question of how much time was occupied in this work of Creation, is germane to the problem under consideration. These two questions have to do with mere attendant circumstances entirely subordinate to the main issue, which is, Did the world and the plants and animals belonging to it come into existence by processes identical with the processes and laws now operating in our world? or were they originated in the beginning by methods and processes no longer operating in our present world? But these become mere rhetorical questions for any one acquainted with the fundamentals of chemistry, physics, and biology, so clear and decisive is the answer of modern science to them. The essential idea of Evolution is the doctrine of Uniformity; * that is, that the laws and processes now operating to sustain and perpetuate the world as it is, are the very same laws and processes which have always operated in the past; and thus that there never could have been a period of time in the past to which we could point and say, There was the Creation, the beginning of the present order of things. On the other hand, we may give it as the essential idea of the Bible teaching on this point, that there was a period in the past when God acted to bring things into existence, or to begin the present order of things, in a way different from the way by which he is now perpetuating the present order. In other words, the real work of Creation was completed at some definite time in the past, and thus the work of Creation is not now going on. I do not say that God could not have made things by what are termed ordinary natural processes; but the Bible record is that he did not; and it is a record of fact with which we are dealing, not a question of probability or of what we think ought to have been done. For many long years these essential principles have been ignored or obscured. Even friends of the Bible have sought to smooth out all differences between Creation and Evolu * Note.— With his usual clear perception and candor, Huxley declared that for him Sir Charles Lyell was “the chief agent in smoothing the road for Darwin. For consistent Uniformitarianism postulates Evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world."—“Life,” I, t>. 168. 128 Back to the Bible tion, by saying that the work of Creation was after all not so very different from the action of natural law today. Whereas by showing the essential difference between Creation and the present order of things, we can demonstrate Creation as a definite event of the past in a way so conclusive and unmistakable as to make this demonstration one of the grandest truths apprehended by the mind of man in any age, apart from divine revelation. Let us glance at some definite statements of the Bible pertinent to this matter. The author of the book of Hebrews says, “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” Heb. 11:3. Doubtless this refers primarily to the materials of which our world is composed, thus denying the eternity of matter; but without any word-twisting it can also be understood to refer to the method of Creation in general. Similarly we are also told in the same book that “the works [of Creation] were finished from the foundation of the world." Heb. 4: 3. True, Jesus declared, “My Father worketh even until now, and I work” (John 5: 17); but this language of Jesus does not in the least imply that the method of Creation is commensurable with the present order of nature. It simply affirms that God has not started the world running and then left it to run itself. He still cares for the things of his Creation; but this care is exercised in ways and methods distinctly different from the ways by which these things were first brought into existence. But most conclusive of all in this connection are the facts regarding the giving of the Sabbath; for this institution was given to the race as the express memorial of the manner in which Creation was brought about; that is, it was given as the memorial of a completed Creation, and as an everlasting protest, not only against all heathen ideas of the world’s origin, but expecially against the modern doctrine of Uniformity. From all these considerations we may now state the method of proof which we purpose to adopt. We shall Creation and Its Memorial 129 claim to have found undeniable proof of Creation understood in the Bible sense, if we can produce scientific facts of various kinds and of unimpeachable character to the effect that the origin of things must have been different, radically different, not merely in degree, but in kind, from what we call the natural processes going on today in the world around us. Accordingly, let us examine the state of our knowledge regarding the origin of matter, of energy, of life, and of the various types of life: — N i. The Origin of Matter.— Practically all the ancient philosophers believed in the eternity of matter,— that it never had a beginning and can have no end. This, as we have shown in a previous chapter, is a pagan idea, and utterly antagonistic to every fundamental doctrine of Christianity. But modern chemistry has so impressed our age with the doctrine of the Conservation of Matter, that many people today also believe in this eternity of matter, as is seen in the wide diffusion of pantheistic ideas. But all this is evidence sufficient to prove that we have no scientific knowledge that new matter is now being continually, or occasionally, brought into existence. Accordingly, if we- are to call ourselves theists, and refuse to believe in the pagan doctrine of the eternity of matter; if we refuse to make the electrons and atoms and molecules eternal rivals of the great Jehovah, we must believe that at some time in the past, I care not when, the materials of which our universe is composed were brought into existence by the fiat or will of the one whom we Christians worship as our God. And the scientific law of the Conservation of Matter is only a reminder of the truth of this great fact, and a reminder of the incommensurability of Creation and the everyday processes in our modern world. If the spectroscope shows us that our solar system is composed of very much the same substances as are found in the other starry groups afar over all the fields of space, we 9 130 Back to the Bible ought not to be surprised, since all are alike the work of the same infinite Creator. But this fact that they are all composed of similar materials would not tend in any way to prove that these materials were all brought into being at the same time, nor that our solar system was fashioned out of the common stock of the universe already on hand, as the nebular hypothesis supposes. For all that we can tell to the contrary, it would seem probable that the materials of our solar system were called into existence expressly for the position they are now occupying; though of this we cannot speak definitely. Of one thing, however, we are certain, — these materials must at some time have been called into existence by methods and ways that are no longer in operation around us. “ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’'’ But before dismissing this subject of the creation of matter, a few words are necessary regarding the idea of the homogeneousness of matter, that is, the idea that what we call the atoms or electrons are composed of ultimate units which are themselves all identically alike. Would not such a notion be the very quintessence of materialism? — Not a bit of it. On the contrary, I think I shall be able to show that this is the only view of the question consistent with theism and the doctrine of Creation. And thus in still another way do we find one of the prevailing tendencies of modern scientific research confirming the most basic truths of Christianity. The old view of the atoms (or whatever we choose to call the primordial units composing matter), with their intrinsic and invariable “properties,” naturally led us to look upon these properties as inhering in the things themselves. This was indeed materialism. As we have shown in the chapter on philosophy, the modern reaction against this has given us a mystical or pantheistic idealism which is no better. But the materialistic view (or the ordinary scientific view) constantly drove us to search for the differences between these various atoms, so as to “account for” their different Creation and Its Memorial 131 behaviors. And no matter how far back we push our inquiry, this must always be our attitude of mind so long as we think we are dealing with units which are themselves intrinsically different. If the differences are in the things themselves, we must endeavor to find out how and why they are different; and no matter how far back we push our inquiry, we are looking at the subject from the materialistic point of view. But what if the primordial units of which matter is composed are all really alike, mere duplicates of one another? How then could they behave so differently? We may not be able to tell in a detailed way just how such a thing is possible; but in the cells of which all plants and animals are composed we have an analogy which is almost if not quite perfect. These component units of organic matter are, as shown elsewhere, physically and even chemically duplicates of one another, though of course not all of the same size. Why they act so differently is certainly not to be accounted for in terms of their inherent properties. Science has searched a long time along this road, but has found no explanation. From the scientific point of view, nobody knows why protoplasm acts as it does; least of all, why some masses of protoplasm act one way, and exact duplicates act otherwise. But if, with the other view of matter, we look beyond the facts of physics and chemistry, and even beyond the most plausible theories of genetics, we can readily explain their variant behaviors as the result of the working of a tireless, omniscient God. Nothing else is adequate to explain the behavior of living cells. And we are fast being driven to a closely similar view of the ultimate units of matter, call them what we will, electrons, corpuscles, or units of electricity. If these are exact duplicates of one another, surely nothing but the superintendence of a Being external to themselves could keep them from acting like one another under all similar circumstances. That is, on the basis of the common view of the inherent proper 132 Back to the Bible ties of matter, and if matter is at bottom homogeneous, how could the chemical elements, such as oxygen, iron, and sodium, maintain their individuality throughout nature as we know they do, even in the far-distant stars? The homogeneousness of matter is the antithesis of materialism. It is consistent only with the doctrine of a personal Creator, who has placed on these elemental duplicates of one another the stamp of a “manufactured article,” as was long ago pointed out by Herschel and Clark-Maxwell, a hall-mark which precludes the idea of their being eternal or self-existent. VI 2. The Conservation of Energy.— What has been regarded by many as the greatest scientific triumph of modern times was worked out about the middle of the nineteenth century by James Prescott Joule and others, in demonstrating that the results accomplished by any chemical or physical change, or even any physiological one, are exactly equivalent to the efforts producing them. In other words, the amount of energy in our world seems to be a fixed quantity, gradually being dissipated into space, it is true, but momently replenished from the sun, and while in our world always capable of exact correlation in all its multitudinous forms, and transformable back and forth without loss. On the discovery of the radioactive substances (1896), there was in some quarters considerable talk as to whether the law of the Conservation of Energy were not contradicted by the astonishing way in which these substances acted. But further and more accurate experiments have set this matter at rest, as indeed might have been expected; for the law of gravitation itself is not more immovably fixed in the makeup of the universe than this magnificent law that energy cannot be created by any means which we call natural. In all ages there have been men who have spent their lives in the vain effort to invent a machine out of which work could be constantly obtained without the expenditure upon it of an equal amount of work. But the United States Creation and Its Memorial 133 Patent Office has become so tired of receiving applications for patents based on this idea of perpetual motion, that it has long since refused to issue any such patent where this principle is the manifest object; and I suppose that the governments of other countries have taken a similar stand. And why?— Because they know that energy cannot now be created by any device, no matter how ingenious, and they refuse to become a party to any scheme that seems to imply that a modern creation of energy is within the bounds of possibility. Yet what is all this but a confirmation of the declaration long ago made, that “the works were finished from the foundation of the world’’? True, the energy we are constantly employing seems to come to us from the sun; but we must remember that the sun and all its family of the solar system, including our earth, were all made at the same time, that they all belong together as parts of one indissoluble whole; and accordingly no one can say that the total amount of energy called into existence at the Creation of our solar system is being added to at.the present time. At any rate, so far as modern science can judge of the matter, the total fund of energy available for our world is a fixed quantity, and its amount and the terms on which it was to be available for man’s use were fixed or finished “from the foundation of the world.’’ It is a very significant fact in this connection that, with all the multiform speculations which have been made as to the physical source of the sun’s heat, no explanation wholly satisfactory has yet been made as to how this energy steadily streaming to us from the sun is constantly replenished or maintained. VII 5. The Origin of Life.— Several decades ago, when the question of spontaneous generation was still under discussion, Huxley, while admitting that the opposite doctrine of life only from life was victorious along the whole line, declared that if we could look back beyond the abyss of geological time, he would expect to see life coming into exist 134 Back to the Bible ence under forms of “great simplicity;” but he expressly cautioned his hearers (and his readers) that this was on his part only an “act of philosophic faith, ” and was not supported by any present-day proofs that such a thing is anywhere now going on. And since no intelligent man can believe that life has eternally existed on our earth, the origin of life at some time must still be a matter of faith, philosophic or religious; for it certainly cannot be called a natural process. No biological fact rests upon a wider series of observations, none has been subjected to more relentless scrutiny, than Harvey’s dictum that life as we know it comes into existence only from some preexistent life. Direct observational proof that a single speck of protoplasm has ever arisen in our earth otherwise than from a previously existent body of protoplasm, has never yet been forthcoming; though to furnish this proof have been concentrated the learning and laboratory technique of uncounted thousands of the most skilled of modern scientists. The wisest of the ancients in Greece and Rome knew nothing of this great principle of the uncreatability of life as we now know it. Aristotle, the embodiment of all that was then known of natural science, expressly taught that the lower forms of animal life, such as fleas and worms, even mice and frogs, sprang up spontaneously from the moist earth. “All dry bodies,” he declared, “which become damp, and all damp bodies which are dried, engender animal life.” According to Vergil, bees are produced from the putrefying entrails of a young bull. Such were the teachings of all the Greeks and Romans, and even of the scientists of the post-Reformation period, some of whom nevertheless had accumulated a very considerable stock of knowledge concerning plants and animals. In the brilliant era of Louis XIV the world was not much farther advanced. Van Helmont, a celebrated physician of that time, wrote, “The smells which arise from the bottom of morasses produce frogs, slugs, leeches, grasses, and other things.” His recipe for producing a pot of mice was to place Creation and Its Memorial 135 a dirty shirt in the orifice of a vessel containing a little wheat. In about twenty-one days the ferment proceeding from the dirty shirt, modified by the odor from the wheat, would transmute the wheat into mice, the doctor solemnly asserting that he himself had witnessed the transformation. “The mice are born full-grown,’’ he declared: “there are both males and females. To reproduce the species it suffices to pair them.’’—“Louis Pasteur: His Life and Labors," by His Son-in-law, p. 89. D. Appleton & Co., 1886. The famous example of the “barnacle-geese’’ illustrates the state of scientific knowledge on this point only a few generations ago. An illustrated account covering their natural history was printed in one of the early volumes of the Royal Society of London. Buds of a particular tree growing near the sea, it said, produce barnacles, and these falling into the water are transmuted into geese. When at last more exact experiments, based on the earlier ones of Francesco Redi, began to put an end to such nonsense, the discovery of microscopic bacteria started the battle all over again; for here was a whole new world of living forms that seemed not subject in any way to the law of life only from life. Here, it was thought, was a perpetual abiogenetic fountain from which to derive the first stages of the evolution of the not-living into the living. We need not dwell on the magnificent work of Pasteur in finally exorcising from the domain of science this false theory, the rival of the Bible record of Creation; for upon the truth of life only from life are based all the recent advances in the treatment and prevention of germ diseases and the triumphs of modern surgery. It is because we believe in the practical truth of this great law that we use antiseptics and fumigators and fly screens. The lesson for us is neither obscure nor of minor value. The beginnings of life on our globe must have been by methods and processes entirely different from any method or process that science knows of in the present order of nature. Back at the beginning of things there must have taken place a- 136 Back to the Bible most wonderful event, to our modern scientific knowledge an entirely supernatural event,— the beginning of organic life. But how can this be anything else than a real Creation, in the Bible sense of the term? There is no evading this conclusion; nor yet is there anything in either science or philosophy, or in ordinary common sense, to intimate that at this momentous time, when, as Huxley expresses it, the earth was passing through a ■ strange, a unique experience, “which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy,” this creation of the living from the not-living was confined to one mere speck of protoplasm. It may just as probably, yes, a thousand times more probably, have taken place all over the earth at the same general time, as the Bible teaches. VIII 4. The Origin of Species.— As we have already devoted some space to this subject in a previous chapter, we shall not need to say very much about it here, especially since in the space at our command we cannot hope to do more than summarize the present status of this many-sided problem, about which whole libraries have been written in the last half century. But even in a summary I think it can be made clear that the facts as we now know them are a strong confirmation of the doctrine of a literal Creation. In the late eighties of the last century, Weismann and the other Neo-Darwinians began to deny that acquired characters are ever transmitted to offspring; while Spencer and the other Neo-Lamarckians retorted that natural selection alone is utterly incompetent to originate any changes whatever in an organism. The results of both these denials are now almost universally accepted among biologists. But species still vary, no matter how we explain the variation. And when Mendelism appeared, and the mathematical exactness and invariableness of this process of variation began to be realized, it was seen that this process of variation is merely a method of analysis and recombination of unit-characters separately Creation and Its Memorial 137 "transmitted in heredity, some dominant, some recessive, some omitted altogether, but none added that had not been actual or potential in the ancestry. Sir William Dawson well said, “All things left to themselves tend to degenerate;” and Bateson now goes so far as to say in the light of Mendelism, that evolution must be by loss rather than by addition or acquirement of characters. Natural selection merely tends to postpone this innate tendency to degenerate, and to maintain the strain in a higher state of efficiency relative to its environment. But obviously it can never originate anything new; nor is there any direct -observational proof that real new forms have been produced in modern times by any system of selective breeding, either artificial or natural. Indeed, it is demonstrable from the principles of Mendelism that no new combinations of unitcharacters can ever produce a wholly new form, but only such forms as were actual or latent in the ancestry, and such as will again recombine with related unit-characters in reversion to the original. Finally, the real scientific test for any kind or form or “species,” supposed to be new, would be to show (i) that some character had been added which no ancestor had ever possessed; and (2) that this character will maintain itself or remain fixed, and will not merely segregate as a unit-character in the Mendelian manner after hybridization. But every one acquainted with modern biological science knows that not a single example of the few but much-trumpeted “new species” of De Vries and others, has ever successfully passed this searching test. The Mendelian tests reveal these supposedly “new species” as mere varieties. Obviously, Mendelism marks another milestone in the weary search of mankind after the ultimate truth about the -origin of things. For if in the light of our new knowledge we now ask, Have real new kinds of plants or animals ever originated under scientific observation by either natural or artificial means? the answer of science is, “NO,” reluctant but positive. The world of life has been ransacked in the 138 Back to the Bible eager search for pertinent examples; but they are not forthcoming, or at least the paltry few supposed examples are not convincing, and have not stood the tests of rigid inspection. The only rational conclusion from these facts is that living forms, whether of plants or of animals, are still today obeying the divine mandate announced in the beginning, to reproduce, each after its particular kind. Variation there is and variation there has been, even sufficient to produce multitudes of variant forms that we have long classed as distinct taxonomic species. But the verdict of modern biology is that these variations are subject to absolute laws, and the limits within which such variation can take place are also subject to laws as fixed as any other laws of nature. Furthermore, this fact that species are not now originating by natural process is demonstrated like a Q. E. D. of mathematics, when looked at in the light of the geological facts brought out in a previous chapter. There it was shown that the theory of successive forms of life in a particular order is without any support whatever in objective fact; that historically, this theory never was anything more than a crude and hasty hypothesis, which we now know is contradicted by a multitude of facts. In short, this theory belongs with those of “caloric,” “phlogiston,” the Ptolemaic astronomy, and other discarded hypotheses. The far-reaching Law of Conformable Stratigraphical Sequence is that any assemblage of fossils, “old” or “young,” may be found to occur conformably on any other assemblage of fossils, “older” or “younger.” Hence, no fossil species is either old or young intrinsically and necessarily; and hence we cannot prove, in any way worthy of being called scientific, that the lower forms of life lived before the higher forms. From all this it is demonstrated that, even if we could show that species are now in the habit of being transformed into other species, w*e still should have no real series of successive forms as a skeleton on which to build a general scheme of development or evolution. As Huxley declared that Lyell and his Uniformitarianism “was the chief agent in smoothing Creation and Its Memorial 139 the road for Darwin,” so now we see that the utter falsity of this preliminary work of Lyell and Cuvier vitiates all the subsequent work of Darwin and his followers. Still another fact deserves notice here, since it follows as a corollary of the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy. Indeed, we might almost term it the biological aspect of that great law. We can neither create energy nor destroy it; though we can lose it, so far as this world is concerned. The vast fund of energy that comes streaming to our earth from the sun, is transmuted back and forth in a thousand ways; though little by little it is dissipated into space, and we are dependent again upon a fresh supply from the ever-replenished fountain. Just so, in a somewhat more ideal sense, is it with what we may term vital energy. Cells, organisms, even whole races, are subject to degeneration and decay. They cannot acquire new or higher powers, though they may gradually lose what they already have. Water very readily runs downhill, but cannot go uphill in and of itself. Just so with the types of organic life. Bateson, as the exponent of Mendelism, has told us that evolution (when it does occur) is by loss and not by gain. Hence we see that it was not merely an idle sneer of the witty Frenchman, when he remarked that science had not yet explained how an ancestor can transmit to his posterity what he has not himself. He cannot always transmit all he himself has of nature’s gifts. As Sir William Dawson says, “All things left to themselves tend to degenerate.” Little by little the endowment of vitality bestowed upon our world at the beginning has, like radiant energy, been returned to God who gave it; but, unlike radiant energy, the Creator has not established a regular source of supply from without, no elixir of life for the plant and animal kingdoms. As the individual grows old and dies, so do species degenerate and become extinct. The glorious flood of vitality, so profusely showered upon our world in the beginning, has been ebbing lower and lower; and the theory that organic nature steadily 140 Back to the Bible advances from the lower to the higher is as puerile as the old idea of creating energy by perpetual-motion machinery — and a mistake of precisely the same nature.. Both are contradicted by the magnificent law of the Conservation of Energy, which, as we have said, is only the scientific expression of the Bible statement that Creation is completed, so far as our world is concerned; though as the “wages of sin,” death has been decreed upon the individual, and degeneration more or less marked upon every organic type. This view of organic nature as a whole is made absolutely certain by an appeal to the rocks. When we consider all the fossils older than the “recent” as a group by themselves, and begin to compare them with their puny, degenerate descendants, whether among the mollusks, reptiles, mammals, or any variety of plant life, we are invariably met with the proof that degeneration has marked the history of every living form since the Deluge; and who shall deny that even the fossils themselves might show signs of degeneration, if we could have seen the original forms in the morning of our world, when the Creator, looking upon the finished product of his will, “took delight,” and pronounced them “very good”? And not only have species been degenerating in size (and doubtless in longevity), and in symmetry of structure, but countless species are gone altogether, leaving no descendants. “From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone; I care for nothing, all shall go.’ ” Even within the historic period many beautiful plant and animal forms that the Creator placed upon the earth to beautify the landscape and enjoy the free air of heaven, have been extinguished by the greed and cruelty of man. The fossils of the past, as well as our own experience in modern times, confirm the view that Creation is a completed work, and is not now going on; for their unanimous testimony is, that degeneration and decay have marked the history of every form of plant and animal, and there is not a single fact in botany or zoology to negative this general conclusion. Creation and Its Memorial 141 Just as⁻ the individual grows old and dies, so do species degenerate and become extinct. IX From the four great facts given above there can be but one generalization. Matter is not now being created by any means that we call natural; energy is not now being created, so far as our world is concerned; life comes now only from antecedent life; while Weismannism and Mendelism leave no ground for supposing that genuine new kinds of plants or animals are now coming into existence from other different kinds. But the matter of our universe must have had an origin sometime; the energy so vibrant through our world and the solar system must have had a beginning; life must have had a beginning; and the various types of life must have had a beginning; while a rational and- truly inductive system of geology leaves us no room to imagine that the various forms of life were formed serially one after another, but on the contrary gives us every reason to believe that all may have originated together at that birthday of the world when all these forms of life, together with the world of which they are a part, came into existence at the fiat of Him who now sustains all things by the word of his power. This is the last word of science on the first and most fundamental doctrine of religion. Science cannot hope to know anything as to the time occupied in this process of creation, nor can it know anything definite as to how long ago it took place. But if the sum of all our discoveries in chemistry, in physics, in biology, is worth anything at all, the demonstration is complete that matter, and energy, and life, and kinds of life must have come into existence at the beginning by laws and methods not now operating anywhere on earth. Not Uniformitarianism and Evolution, but Creation, is what modern science is teaching us by facts so large and fixed that there is no prospect of their ever being overthrown by any fresh discoveries. For every additional law in the realms of the physical and the biological sciences only renders more secure these cumu 142 Back to the Bible lative proofs that the beginnings of things must have been different, not merely in degree, but in kind, from those “natural” processes by which the order of nature is now sustained. The rest of the matter is easy work for the Neo-Prot-estant. He will simply follow the record in Genesis regarding the details of that most wonderful of events, which must ever lie beyond the reach alike of man’s guessing and of his research. With this record taken at its full face value, there are several other matters which, in view of the scientific and philosophical views now prevailing in our modern world, acquire a new importance; and to these subjects a few words must now be devoted. X According to Genesis, the Sabbath was given to the race, not only as a reminder of the fact that God created the world and the life upon it in six literal days of the same length and character as the seventh, or Sabbath, but also as a reminder that God made man holy, merely “a little lower than the angels;” and that all the world, when thus made, was perfect, and not as it is now, a seething mass of misery over all the lands encompassed by the seven seas. Man is now a fallen creature; but the Sabbath which he has brought with him from Eden is a souvenir, or reminder, of that long-lost home of bliss, and is an everlasting protest that he was not made as we now find him. But as it is a reminder of the fact that man was originally created holy, in the likeness of God, it becomes also a pledge or promise of the time when these bright Edenic conditions will be restored to our sin-blasted world. But as throughout the Bible redemption is always spoken of as a re-creation, we might reasonably suppose that the Sabbath, as the memorial of man’s original creation in the likeness of God, would also be appropriate as the memorial of the soul’s second creation, his new birth. Is it really a Bible fact that the Sabbath is thus designated? or is it just Creation and Its Memorial 143 a brilliant analogy which we in modern times have invented by our hair-splitting theology? Let Ezekiel answer: — “Moreover also I gave them my Sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them.” Eze. 20: 12. But this beautiful thought is centuries older than Ezekiel, as we see from the following words given to Israel through Moses: — “Verily my Sabbaths ye shall keep: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you.” Ex. 31: 13. To sanctify is to make holy; hence the Sabbath was given as a sign that God himself makes us holy, a sign that it takes creative power to renew us in the image of God, just as it took creative or supernatural power to bring us into existence in the first place. And as the Sabbath may be regarded as a standing protest against all pagan or evolutionary theories of the world’s origin, so now it becomes also a protest against the kindred idea (so widely prevalent in our day) of salvation by culture or development; in short, against any doctrine that man has within himself the power to save himself from sin and its consequences. Thus the Sabbath is doubly precious to us in these days, not only as a warning and a protection against the historic papal form of the doctrine of salvation by works, but also against the more characteristically modern doctrine of salvation by development or evolution, as taught by “advanced” theologians. The amazing sacrifice required to effect a remedy for the condition called sin, is an everlasting proof that man could not be developed or educated out of it in any other way. And the Sabbath as the reminder, the sign, of this blood-bought redemption, becomes one of the sweetest institutions that God has ever given to man. Truly, it must have been with a divine insight into the real essential meanings of things that the old Hebrew seers were so continually coupling God’s creative power with his love and his ability to save and redeem. Take the following characteristic declaration from Isaiah: — 144 Back to the Bible “Thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.” Isa. 43: 1. It is because we are God’s creatures that we are under infinite and never-ceasing obligation to love and serve him as our Creator. In this inherent, unescapable obligation of the creature to his Creator, is laid the ultimate and changeless basis of ethics and morality. Hence the Sabbath, as the perpetual sign or reminder of this relationship, becomes the sign or reminder of all moral obligation — the reminder of our duty to worship the Creator, and also of our duty to love our neighbor, who like ourselves has been made by the same Father. And thus we see how very appropriate it is that God is today calling upon this age of evolutionists: “Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.” Rev. 14: 7. How long will it be worthy of remembrance that God created us in the way he did, that he is our Creator and we are his creatures? — Evidently as long as we exist, even should it be to all eternity. But after redemption is completed for all the race who are willing to be saved, after sin with its train of wretchedness is but a memory of the past, after creative power has again made “all things new,” and the new heavens and the new earth stand before the enraptured universe as objective proof of God’s changeless love and his willingness to sacrifice the best Gift of heaven for the good of his creatures, how long will it then be appropriate that the redeemed race shall commemorate this completed redemption? — Evidently as long as redeemed beings exist — time without end. And thus throughout eternity, the Sabbath as the memorial both of the original Creation and of this remaking, this redemption, this regeneration of this part of the universe, the everlasting reminder to our race and to the rest of the universe of God’s wisdom and power in creating and of his love in redeeming, will be gratefully observed by all the loyal dwellers on the earth made new. Creation and Its Memorial 145 “As the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, saith the Lord, so shall your seed and your name remain. And it shall come to pass, that . . . from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord.” Isa. 66:22, 23. XI 1 Finally, it may not be altogether superfluous to say that in view of the facts just mentioned, a few people, a small minority, think that the Sabbath is not understood or appreciated as it should be in this our age. They think that at least all Christians who believe in the Bible and in the doctrine of a literal Creation, ought to see in the Sabbath much more than our fathers ever saw. It is not a new institution; but it becomes almost new to them, in view of these facts about a literal Creation, and in view of the additional fact that almost all the world no longer believe in a literal Creation. Of course, these latter, the great majority, see nothing in the Sabbath more than a weekly holiday. How can they be expected to observe religiously a memorial of that which they regard as a childish, an irrational view of the origin of things, a view which they loftily profess to have outgrown long ago? But if human nature is much the same as it has always been, it is not difficult to foresee an irrepressible conflict over this point in the near future, if this overwhelming majority should again become intolerant, and, like all majorities of the past, should undertake to interfere with the very decided convictions of the small and insignificant minority, whose zeal and doctrines they do not like, this interference being professedly in the interest of harmony and uniformity—“for the good of the whole.” We boast of our progress and enlightenment. We think we have outgrown intolerance and the disposition to coerce minorities in matters of religion. But only a few months ago we were boasting in a precisely similar way that the world had outgrown wrar and race hatreds. The truth is sad; but it must be told. Unregenerate human nature is no better 10 146 Back to the Bible than it has been in the past; and there is little doubt that a genuine revival of apostolic zeal and devotion on the part of a small and despised minority might again arouse the dormant spirit of intolerance to such an extent that it would seem as much of a surprise as was the sudden outbreak of the present great European war. Human nature has not changed a particle since the time when the cry of, “To the lions with him!” used to arouse the blase loungers in the baths or the Forum of Rome, or a similar cry of, “Down with the Protestants!” echoed through the streets of Paris, the metropolis of fashion and culture. The wild, unreasoning behavior of mobs is proverbial; for it seems as if the unseen spirit powers of evil hurry on a mob to do what few of the individuals composing it would dream of doing of themselves. But the modern ease of communication between distant peoples is fast making whole nations (and ultimately will make the world) subject to very much the same hysterical behavior as a huge mob; and accordingly what may we expect when this “collective consciousness” of the world is exalted into an object of religious worship? Huxley had so little admiration for the history of mankind as furnishing an abstract concept suitable for worship, as suggested by Comte, that he declared he would as willingly worship the generalized concept of a “wilderness of apes.” But, thanks to the idealistic and intuitional philosophers, modern evolutionists have outgrown this repugnance of their great leader, having followed rather the general trend of his biological theories; until today this idea of the “collective consciousness” of mankind, or the “absolute reason,” has become transfigured into the most appropriate object of worship, and has been apotheosized as the safest guide of the race, the only infallible criterion of right and wrong. And what consideration can we expect to see shown for the poor, insignificant minority who refuse to bow to the will of this “collective consciousness” as expressed in civil law? The civil and social tendencies which are so rapidly shaping affairs in preparation for this horrible world climax, will be discussed in subsequent chapters. CHAPTER X “ The Coming Slavery” “The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecution, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive, or expire in a convulsion.”—Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on Virginia," xvii. I These words of one of the wisest statesmen of all time imply that the rights of the individual, those civil and religious liberties purchased by our fathers at so dear a price, can be endangered only by a great and radical change in “the spirit of the times.’’ Obviously, no man, no set of men, no internal or external conditions, could rebind the souls, or even curtail the temporal rights, of those sturdy children of the Reformers to whom the above words were first addressed. Liberty (in America) could again be endangered only by such a radical change in the character of the people themselves as would effect a change in “the spirit of the times.’’ In previous pages we have seen how this change has already taken place; and we have now to follow out these changed ideals and changed views regarding the basic principles of morals and religion, tracing some of their effects (147) 148 Back to the Bible which are already visible on the social and political institutions for which Jefferson and Washington, Pym and Hampden, Milton and Cromwell, contended and died, in order that we, their children, might be free. For as the effect of industriously teaching the Evolution doctrine for the past generation or so, “the spirit of the times’’ has already so greatly altered that we can even now see the rapid approach of a “convulsion” like that of which Jefferson spoke; and it may be that some of my readers who are slow to recognize the evils inherent in this doctrine in other respects, will recognize these teachings as in the last degree pernicious in the realm of sociology and civics. II The children of the present are the heirs to the labor of the past. The intellectual accumulations of the ages have descended to us, and lie before us tabulated and indexed for our convenience. A knowledge of our universe in some of its broadest generalities and in some of its most minute particulars, has taught us how to lay our hands upon the sea, the air, the very lightnings of the skies, and bid them come and go at our convenience, relieving our distress, performing our wearying labor, and shortening time and space at our command. But not all are deceived by the tinsel and gloss of our modern civilization. Not all confound this temporal and material progress with progress in real morality and strength of character. Before the present war, it was a very fashionable doctrine that the race had outgrown such “primitive” instincts as war and race hatred; but the spectacle of over half the world in an orgy of blood, and sovereigns and university men of international reputation throwing away their decorations and repudiating their degrees from very hatred of those who had bestowed them, has disillusioned many who had long listened to the fond dream of race progress. Most clear thinkers have known all along that this is not an age of preeminent mental or moral development. “ The Coming Slavery ” 149 They realize that mere intellectual knowledge is not power in the realm of morals. The wide diffusion of intelligence is of little conservative value for either the individual or society at large, if not accompanied by a corresponding improvement in morals. In other words, we may educate the senses, the memory, the reason; but if we do not reach the heart, the will, the conscience, if the secret motives of the soul are not purified, this general diffusion of “education” merely tends to enable the individual to display on a wider stage the motives controlling him. Intellectual education, or what we term in a collective form “civilization” and “culture,” merely gives the individual more power, more opportunities. And in their practical outworkings, as seen all around us, we must own that modern conditions, in some way or other, are as far as ever from developing greater contentment or more self-control on the part of the masses. Even intellectually we should not cherish the conceit that we are the equals of such peoples as the ancient Greeks. Our petty knowledge of certain mechanical contrivances for abolishing time and space has done much to swell the inordinate vanity of the present generation; but it is certain that such things can never carry us one step farther into real nature, any more than they necessarily make us better men and women. Nor do they prove that the people of our modern age are possessed of any brighter or more disciplined minds than were the old Athenians, who wrestled as we are doing with the great abiding problems of existence.* Their literature has been enviously imitated for two thousand years; their sculpture and architecture have been the despair of every generation since; and their civilization, which may be regarded as culminating in the world-empire of the Romans, exhibited, for at least six times the length of our boasted *Note.— Galton says that “the average ability of the Athenian race [was], on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own; that is, about as much as our race is above that of the African Negro;” while Freeman and Mahaffy declare that the average intelligence of the assembled Athenian citizens was higher than that of the English House of Commons, which is generally conceded to be the most dignified of modern legislative assemblies. 150 Back to the Bible century of progress, a development of law and order that we have not surpassed. It is a very superficial view that leads any one to say that the race as a whole is developing physically or mentally or morally. The unit of the nation is the home, the individual character; and who will say that in these respects “the spirit of the times’’ has not noticeably fallen away from the standards of colonial times, or even of two or three generations ago? The creature comforts of a high civilization have never in the history of our world tended to strengthen man’s moral backbone or hold more secure the moral foundations of society. In biology we have learned that acquired characters are not transmitted to offspring. Similarly we cannot biologically inherit the progress that our fathers made in heart culture, any more than in art; and we all know that in the latter we are sadly degenerate. He who reads the thoughts says the same of our morals. The Bible says that “in the last days perilous times shall come,’’ that “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse;” and it enumerates a list of nineteen characteristics belonging to those who have a “form of godliness,” of the truthfulness and accuracy of which the daily papers of every land are a sad and terrible witness. Historical analogies of moral degeneracy might be mentioned almost without limit. No phenomenon is more common in history. The picturesque words of the Hebrew prophet regarding one of these historical beacon-lights may be sufficient: — “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” Eze. 16: 49. In the words of Froude: “We live in days of progress and enlightenment; nature on a hundred sides has unlocked her storehouses of knowledge. But she has furnished no ‘open sesame’ to bid the mountain gate fly wide which leads to conquest of self.”—“Essay on Bunyan," p. 34. “ The Coming Slavery ” 151 In morals and ethics, as in art, our laws and models are all in the dim, misty past; and the dark centuries of sin and woe that separate us from those bright ideals seem to have resulted only in weakening our moral powers of discernment and resolve, and in rendering even more incurable the race’s inherited taint of mental, moral, and physical decay. Ill Thus, if we limit ourselves to a superficial view of the last thousand years, we think we see wonderful progress since the Dark Ages; but when we go back two thousand or three thousand years, the view seems very different. I know this is not a pleasing picture that I am presenting, but truth is more to me than popularity; I would rather be right than be fashionable. And in this problem of why there has been such seeming progress in modern times, as in all other problems, the Bible furnishes the true explanation. The angel told Daniel that, in “the time of the end,” many would be hurrying hither and thither, “and knowledge” would “be increased.” Dan. 12:4. In commenting on this text some two hundred years ago, Sir Isaac Newton declared his faith in its accuracy, and that it would yet be fulfilled. Said he, “I should not wonder if some day men will travel at the rate of fifty miles an hour.” Half a century later, Voltaire brought forward this remark as proof that the study of the prophecies had led even the prince of philosophers to make a fool of himself; but it is easy now to see which was the fool, when this prophecy, given over two thousand years ago to a Hebrew captive, is being fulfilled on a world-wide scale. No; the present wonderful increase of knowledge manifest in the harnessing of the forces of nature, is not the result of inherent racial progress, but has come about, as declared in the Bible, by divine interposition for a special purpose. Had it been the result of racial evolution, it ought to have come about somewhat gradually, and not be all crowded into the last hundred years or so,— a mere fraction .of human 152 Back to the. Bible history,— and after the successive collapse of so many civilizations. There is a reason for it all. The end of the ages was drawing on. Sin would finally go to seed; the last great world apostasy was to be allowed to develop, to show to the universe what the race would do if left to itself. Looking down the dark, tear-misted vista of the ages, God saw how human ingenuity would seek to pervert into a burlesque of Creation the vastly increased knowledge of nature, and relegate to shelves of dust and cobwebs as mere antiquarian literature the Book which he had given us to be the guide of life. And so he timed a special reform for his faithful people to give to the world just before the end, calling upon this age of evolutionists to “worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.” Rev. 14: 7. And then he placed in the hands of men these instruments of hurried travel and instantaneous communication, to speed on the church’s long-delayed work, so as to complete it in “this generation.” IV But the serious-minded scientist, a fatalist like Alfred Russel Wallace, is as much concerned as any one for the outcome of the present conditions along the lines of their natural development. Indeed, any one acquainted with even the outlines of history, cannot fail to view with shuddering forebodings the prospect before society and the world. And the statesmen of the world, helpless before the glacial approach of the oncoming world-crash and social revolution, the “convulsion” that Jefferson saw from afar as the result of the altered “spirit of the times,” are occupied with palliatives and temporary expedients, praying that the deluge may not be in their day. We have had the war of race against race and people against people; what will it be when we see the war of class against class on an even more truly world-wide scale? Goldwin Smith once remarked that our modern system of education begets a general desire to rise in life, but with “ The Coming Slavery 153 resulting disappointment and discontent on the part of the masses. True education will never have this effect of producing discontent and envy; but the kind of education which has prevailed for a half century, the all-pervasive doctrine that progress, whether in the individual, the class, or the race, is to be reached by a process of survival of the fittest, thus making the sad struggle and survival at the expense of others the normal, and not an abnormal, condition of society and of nature in general,— this long-accepted doctrine is one of the chief causes intensifying as never before the innate selfishness of human nature, and in every pursuit of life embittering the rivalry of man against man and class against class. As Sir William Dawson has well said, this doctrine has “stimulated to an intense degree that popular unrest so natural to an age discontented with its lot, . . . which threatens to overthrow the whole fabric of society as at present constituted.’’ —“Modern Ideas of Evolution," p. 12. Perhaps no other one cause and result serve more surely to differentiate the present “spirit of the times” from all that have gone before. The hitherto undreamed-of material comforts and intellectual opportunities of the present day, instead of tending toward universal peace and happiness, have only served to emphasize the principle that the greater the blessing received, the greater will be the discontent and moral depravity of unregenerate hearts. Intelligent men the world over stand in dread of an outbreak of the long-pent-up forces of social revolution that will again overwhelm society with wreck and anarchy, all the more hopeless and horrible this time because it will be universal over the world, conterminous with the bounds of civilization. As Herbert Spencer remarked just before he died, “My fear is that the retrograde movement will become too strong to be checked by argument or exhortation.” The seriousness of the crisis confronting us is recognized by all, or at least by all who are not hiding their heads, ostrich-like, in the delusions of an evolutionary optimism; but the character of the crisis is variously interpreted, and various remedies are suggested. And it is when we try to 154 Back to the Bible. discuss possible ways of dealing with the situation, and attempt to prevent or counteract the threatening evils, that the pernicious influence of the Evolution doctrine begins to show itself. For the Eugenic movement, with its crude prize-animal standards, called into existence to meet the alarming increase of insanity, feeble-mindedness, and the long list of incurable diseases, is not by any means the only world-wide movement that is based primarily and logically on the Evolution philosophy. A doctrine like this could not take such complete possession of our modern world without modifying in a very radical way our social and political ideals and methods. V Panaceas for present-day evils are being sought in two leading directions, the one religious, the other civil and political. On the one hand, the rapid ruin of Christian family life by the sad neglect of parental training, to say nothing of the demoralizing effects of easy divorce and the exploitation of crime by a venal press and a licentious stage, until the old-time Christian home is already largely a mere matter of history; the increasing intemperance, crime, and lawlessness, indicating too surely that self-government on the part of the average individual is fast becoming one of the lost arts,— these, with many other baneful influences, are inducing thousands of well-meaning religious leaders to cry out for religious or semireligious laws to restore the morals of society. To bring this about, and to render the influence of these religious leaders effective, would seem to demand that the church enter politics, and that the various scattered sects unite or cooperate for -the common purpose. And so we have seen the rapid growth of a movement for the federation of all the Protestant churches of America (though ashamed of the name “Protestant”), with indications of union or cooperation on the part of the Roman Church, which has had long experience in such work, a'nd whom the prospect of “ The Coming Slavery ” 155 getting control of the civil government reminds of “departed joys,” which she was almost afraid had “departed never to return.’’ On the other hand, the purely civil and political remedies for the evils of our time are shaping up in two antagonistic and, as it seems, mutually incompatible directions, both of which, strangely enough, appear to be tending in the same general direction, namely, toward the strengthening of the central government in State and nation, and ultimately toward the federation of all the leading governments into a World State, or a Federation of the World. Perhaps we may venture to term these two tendencies the embryonic forms of the policies of the conservative and the radical parties in the coming World State. For while the will of the majority is still supposed to be supreme, while popular taste is still supposed to be the final test of right and wrong, some are openly declaring popular or democratic government a failure, saying with a recent writer, “The populace have had their day, and have proved to be ignorant, criminal, and corruptible.’’ These conservatives realize that it is the abuse of individual liberty on the part of such people as anarchists and the I. W. W. that is bringing about the threatened modern “Reign of Terror.’’ They realize that knowledge and liberty are not in themselves regenerative; they are only forms of power placed within the reach of the individual, better enabling him to disguise for a time, or to carry out on a broader scale, his real governing motives. And we all know that an increase of power in the hands of irresponsible, discontented, and criminally inclined people can only make matters worse. For a half century or so the moral and religious training of the millions has been neglected, or even counteracted by doctrines that have shriveled up every moral and religious motive, until nothing is left as a guide of life but expediency and self-interest; and how long can a community, or a nation, or a world, hold together on such a basis without a strong central authority, .whem ninety-nine per cent are fired with 156 Back to the Bible the conviction that they are being oppressed and defrauded by the other one per cent? The only remedy within reach of the intrenched classes, or the conservatives, is firmly to regulate free speech and individual liberty, and thus to curb the threatened outbreak by strongly repressive measures. For history testifies that whenever a similar situation has been reached before, whenever a people have ceased to be capable of governing themselves as free men actuated by an individual love of justice and right, there has always been waiting a man or a set of men anxious to assume the job. And when these have not succeeded, sooner or later come anarchy and revolution. However, most people are by no means willing yet to acknowledge the failure of democratic government, and are endeavoring to save the situation by various expedients, such as extending the suffrage to include women, and bringing in a more direct action of the people in expressing their desires. They say that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy. Others see in these things only foredoomed failure and disappointment, as was sadly expressed by Lord Salisbury some years ago: “We cannot be certain that any government will not yield its powers to the less-educated and less-enlightened classes, by whom, more and more in many countries of the world, public affairs are being governed.’’ But while this last statement is true, while the “practical’’ politicians are more and more demagogic and play more and more to the gallery, such a tendency is only hastening the inevitable reaction on the part of others; for the independent thinkers, such as the naturally conservative classes, the teachers of economics and sociology in the universities, and some of the most influential editors, voicing the sentiments of such idealistic philosophers as Fichte and Hegel, are heading a strong movement against the old-time principle of government by the consent of the governed. And what such leaders advocate today, millions will heed and act upon in some way tomorrow. What with the labor-unions and the rapid development of class consciousness on the one hand, and the increasing “ The Coming Slavery ” 157 control by the government of all industries and commercial activities on the other, we are certainly seeing the rapid passing of individualism, and this not in America only, but also in Europe. Throughout the whole Occidental world the prevailing trend is steadily away from the rights of the individual, and toward the aggrandizement of the State, making human rights subordinate to the dominant idea of corporate progress. And with the rapid growth of internationalism, the dream of the ages regarding a unification of the race, a world “lapt in universal law,” seems about to materialize. As a recent writer in England ominously expressed it, “As care for the tribe preceded care for the nation, so care for the nation may only precede care for a federation of the nations.” The reaction from the present war will also be a strong influence in the same direction. But when this Federation of the World is an assured fact, with the rights of the individual entirely subordinated to the supposed good of the whole, and with the "universal consciousness” or the ‘‘absolute reason” regarded as the supreme guide in morals, may Heaven pity the poor individual atom in every one of these great soul-crushing machines, or the world-machine, if he has any conscience at all, and this conscience happens to differ from that of the collective conscience expressed in law. How can men who have studied history look on without protest at the steady growth of this heaven-darkening despotism over the grave of liberty? These reactionary tendencies are perhaps more noticeable here in the United States. A generation ago, who ever dreamed that a leading magazine like the North American Review would print such an article as the one found in the issue of that journal for December, 1899, entitled, ‘‘Some Consecrated Fallacies”? The ideas here stigmatized as “fallacies” are those historic sentences in the Declaration of Independence which speak of the inherent rights of man, and which represent the crystallized product of six centuries of struggle on the part of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Of these truly consecrated sentences the writer has the following to say: — 158 Back to the Bible “All men arc simply not created equal in any possible sense of the word. . . . The creation of men has been a gradual process of evolution, and they have been coming into being in different parts of the earth through long generations, with differences and inequalities which development has varied and widened, and not obliterated.’’ This language has not been dug up from the speeches of Douglas and the other defenders of slavery belonging to the time before the Civil War, against whom Lincoln thundered, and whose imperious doctrines were supposed to have been silenced by the sacrifice of the best blood of the nation. But the capitalistic oligarchy of our day is again boldly teaching the same doctrine, and it is everywhere appealing to the accepted theory of Evolution as the justification for these doctrines. A generation ago, who ever dreamed that such a journal as the New York Independent would also repudiate the great central truth of natural rights as being only “a theory,” and would rejoice that “the revolt against it grows apace”? Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the Outlook, as might be expected of an ardent evolutionist of long standing, is leading-out in the crusade against the teachings of the founders of this Republic, that men have inherent rights which the State must not invade. Some time ago, after declaring that government is not founded upon the consent of the governed, but upon the right of every man to protect himself, his property, and those dependent upon him, Dr. Abbott defines government as follows: — “What is government?— It is nothing less than the control of one man’s will by another man’s will. . . . “The real question as to the basis of government, then, is this: When has one man a right by his will to control the wills of other men, to overrule them, to substitute himself as the director of the action of other men, to make his personality dominate another’s personality? And this ■ question brings us to the same result we have already reached,— he has the right to do this whenever the other is, in the exercise of his own will, violating the rights of his fellow men.” “ The Coming Slavery ” 159 We need not here attempt to analyze the subtle and dangerous half truths in this strange, this monstrous definition of government, or to show how such a definition would suit not only the most absolute tyranny ever exercised on earth, but any that we can conceive of as being exercised. As a reviewer of this article well said: — “Government is not the control of men’s wills; it is the protection of men’s rights. It has nothing whatever to do with the wills of men; it has only to do with the actions of men which infringe upon the rights of others. . . . Government, much less than being the control of one man’s will by another man’s will, is neither a matter of will on the one side or the other; it is neither the enforcement of will nor the subjection of will. There is no need of quoting authority on this point. Search the annals of Anglo-Saxon history and jurisprudence from King Alfred down, and the overwhelming answer you will get is that there can be no rule of will but the rule of tyranny.” VI The quotations given above are taken almost at random, and might be multiplied to almost any extent from the current literature of this country and England. Those who have not looked into the matter have little idea of the radical and far-reaching changes which have taken place all over our modern world, and which are the legitimate fruit of the universal spread of the changed views regarding the origin of the world and of the human race. One favorite method of reasoning, borrowed from the monistic philosophy of Fichte and Hegel, perhaps more common in England than in America, but rapidly extending in both countries, is to compare the State, or society in general, with an organism, making the individual merely one of the minor parts of the organism, perhaps a single cell. The organic whole may be held to be identical with the state or the nation, or the idea may be enlarged until the whole race is embraced in a great organic unity. In either view the individual cell becomes 160 Back to the Bible quite insignificant when compared with the State, or society, as a whole, and it is dependent upon the latter for all its rights and privileges. Such are the views of what are called State Socialists; and according to these views the State, or society as a whole, is absolutely supreme over the individual. This is what Herbert Spencer saw arising in his time, and called the “coming slavery;’’ for though an ardent evolutionist, he was so far inconsistent as to be also an individualist, and he strongly opposed the growing tendency to exalt the State at the expense of the individual. This doctrine of State Socialism is practically identical with the deification of the State as taught by Rousseau and the Encyclopedists,— a doctrine which dominated the French Revolution at the time of the Reign of Terror, when France suffered under the worst tyranny that the world had seen for centuries, even though the tyranny was that of the crowd, and though the whole system was, at least at first, supported and sanctioned by public opinion. An English writer, J. R. MacDonald, M. P., in setting forth this view, says, “In the eyes of the State, the individual is not an end in himself, but the means to ‘that far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.’ Or, this thought may be translated into this form: The State does not concern itself primarily with man as a possessor of rights, but with man as a doer of duties.” Elsewhere this author declares that the State must refuse to grant the individual a right of any kind except “for promoting its ends.” Of this doctrine W. E. Walling very pertinently remarks: “The individual is told to remember his duties and to forget his rights — the very language that has been used again and again by all the benevolent despots of the past.”—“The Larger Aspects of Socialism," p. m. Socialist though he is, there is no doubt that Walling is right, and that these views, now so rapidly gaining popularity, constitute one of the most dangerous doctrines ever employed to enslave mankind and keep them quiet under the iron hand of despotism. Rome, “that sat upon her seven hills, and from her throne of beauty ruled the world,” was built upon The Coming Slavery 161 just such a doctrine; but as we shall see in the next chapter, even the iron despotism of Rome, when, as Gibbon says, it filled the world, and when “to resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly,’’ was but a puny infant compared to that which the modern world is capable of becoming when such a world-filling, consolidated humanity at length makes this , language of the great historian something more than a figure of speech, and when the world will literally become “a safe and dreary prison” for the poor individual, the little human cell, that finds itself out of harmony religiously or politically with this last crowning despotism of the ages that has raised tyranny to the n-th power. What would Jefferson, or Washington, or Lincoln say of this atrocious doctrine of the State as an organism, with the individual wholly submerged in the whole,— a doctrine that is but one of the political spawn of the theory of biological Evolution? Would they not declare in words of hot indignation that they had not struggled and suffered for the sake of erecting here merely another huge Juggernaut, under which the rights and liberties of man are again to be crushed out before the fancied progress of the whole? Or what would they say of the kindred doctrine that certain persons or classes are born into an inferior position, with inferior rights which the more favored persons or classes are not obliged to regard as equal to their own? Jefferson fully expected the spirit of the times to alter; but how amazed would he be to hear such ideas taught widely and unrebuked in less than a century from his time! How futile seem the best efforts of one generation to safeguard the rights and liberties of even their own grandchildren! VII In still another way we can see that the acceptance of the Evolution doctrine has as its natural and logical consequence the absolute supremacy of the State over the individual. Huxley taught that by the formation of communities or nations a new order of things came into existence, the laws 11 162 Back to the Bible and ethics of which were wholly antagonistic to the “cosmic order,”—a term used to designate the animal struggle for supremacy and for survival, even, if necessary, at the expense of others. That is, in the social order, where cooperation and altruism prevail, the code must necessarily run directly counter to the code of living hitherto prevailing among men as individuals; because, as Huxley himself has expressed it elsewhere, for his successful progress up from the savage state “man has been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the tiger.” John Fiske has been equally candid and explicit in assigning the strenuous exercise of these same qualities as the cause for the advancement of some people over others, so long as the “cosmic orderprevailed. Fiske says: — “Those most successful primitive men from whom civilized peoples are descended, must have excelled in treachery and cruelty, as in quickness of wit and strength of will.” Now, while most evolutionists have since followed Huxley in saying that the ethical order governing men in a community runs counter to the “cosmic order,” no one has given us any logical explanation of the why of this ethical somersault, this reversal of the most effective means by which the progress of the individual units had hitherto been attained. We merely know that in society we find it more agreeable for us if others practice altruism instead of selfishness; the “best” citizen, the “best” unit in the community, is the one who unselfishly lives for the good of others. The Christian, of course, does not question the value of this altruism; but he does call in question the logic of Huxley and of the other evolutionists in attempting to derive a system of altruistic sociology from their doctrine of biological Evolution. Nietzsche, Treitschke, Bernhardi, and the others who have had the shaping of the policies of the German nation for the past decades, were more logical, more consistent with the premises of their biological theory. “Egoism is the prime characteristic of the noble soul,” says Nietzsche; and so he openly taught such “noble souls” to exercise fearlessly the “unconditioned will to power.” In “ The Coming Slavery ” 163 his famous “genealogy of morals’’ he divides mankind into just two classes,— masters and slaves; and so he has a “master morality” and a “slave morality.” “Here is the new law, O my brethren,” he declares, “which I promulgate unto you! Become hard. For creative spirits are hard. And you must find a supreme blessedness in imposing the mark of your hand, in inscribing your -will, upon thousands and thousands, as on soft wax.” These admonitions may be considered as applicable to the individual, to the master caste, or to the State — at least to the State in its relations with other states. And it is easy to see how this open and consistent application of the doctrine of biological Evolution makes the State absolutely supreme over the individual — if for no other reason, because it has the power. And according to Treitschke, “The one unpardonable sin,” on the part of either the individual or the State, “is the failure to use one’s power.” Possibly if Huxley had been pressed for a logical explanation of why the “cosmic order” of struggle resulting in the survival of the most cunning and most unscrupulous should be regarded as necessarily reversed in the formation of society, he might have responded as others have done, with the analogy of the cell in its relationship to the organism, as referred to above. Or he might have adduced an analogy from chemistry, where two substances, like hydrogen and oxygen, unite to form a compound (water), with properties and characteristics wholly different from either component. But both these analogies prove too much, if we are to remain individualists; for their logic points directly to the absolute supremacy of the State over the individual, the deification of the State as the embodiment of the “absolute reason,” as was pointed out above in the remarks about State Socialism. Furthermore, as the individual, in his relationship to others like himself before joining the community, was subject solely to the laws of the “cosmic order,” why may not the same laws be still operative and the only ones governing the single State in its relationship to other states? As the most successful primitive men were those “who excelled in treachery 164 Back to the Bible and cruelty, as in quickness of wit and strength of will,” why may not nations attain success by the same means, thus following out the cosmic process in the struggle for national existence? I wish to say it as strongly as I know how, There is no logic to show why such a code of international ruffianism is wrong or at all blameworthy, if the Evolution theory be true. The German publicists have the courage openly to defend such a system, and have also the consistency to ground it in their theories of biological law. Witness the following from one of the leading journals of that country, for September, 1914: — “There are two kinds of races,— master races and inferior races. Political rights belong to the master race alone, and can be won only by war. This is a scientific law, a law of biology.” May we not learn at least one lesson from the present horrible struggle, as we see such a code of international ethics put into actual practice, yes, and defended by appeal to the so-called biological law of Darwinism? Possibly such an object-lesson may be more effective than any amount of abstract logic, in showing the inherent wickedness of such a system, and how utterly antagonistic it is to all just ideas of morality, to say nothing of the Christian religion. VIII Such, then, are some of the social and political results of the wide-spread teaching of the Evolution doctrine for a half century. On the part of the struggling masses it breeds ir-religion, envious discontent, lawlessness — syndicalism and anarchism in the Old World, and the I. W. W. in the New. On the part of the comfortable classes it is used as a justification for their oppression in grinding the faces of the poor, and as the pseudoscientific sanction for tyranny. But among high and low alike it has resulted in radically changed ideals regarding human rights and civil government, which are smoothing the way for an attempt at a world-wide despot The Coming Slavery 165 ism, civil and religious, when this modern apostasy shall have obtained sufficient influence to shape legislation in accord with its views. For whether in the coming conflict the radical democrats or the imperialists and state socialists gain the day, the individual is sure to lose, as these changed ideals regarding human rights and civil and religious duties rise up to obscure all that we have learned in these respects in the last four centuries. The history of the English-speaking peoples since the Tudors and the Stuarts shows unmistakably that the Bible is the real charter of human liberty, not merely religious, but civil; while the sad condition of all Roman Catholic countries is a lurid beacon still burning to warn us not to abandon the true source of Anglo-Saxon greatness. But the present generation have been largely educated in an atmosphere of Evolution and Higher Criticism; faith in the Bible has been systematically and persistently undermined in the grammar school, the high school, the college, and in the public press; all of which has tended to banish the redeeming and saving influence of God’s Word as effectively from heart and from every-day life as did the ignorance of the Dark Ages. Those days of intellectual darkness, when the lamp of life was locked up away from the common people in the tomb of the dead languages, were very favorable for the growth of all kinds of foul superstitions, and for the exercise of the spirit-crushing despotism of an apostate church. But as was long ago predicted, it is being demonstrated before our very eyes that a day of great intellectual light is just as fruitful in idiotic superstitions, and just as much a preparation for civil and religious tyranny. A despotic civil authority dominated by an apostate church calling itself Christian, is the logical outcome of the Evolution theory; its triumph is only a question of time; and its strength and universality, when established, can be estimated only by the diligence and the extent of the teaching which for a half century has been preparing the world for just such a state of things, namely, the teaching of a heathen doctrine regarding the origin of things, and the resultant 166 Back to the Bible denial of the Scriptures as the supreme guide of human conduct. A “benevolent” but unchecked despotism, that ignores the individual as an insignificant part of the great whole, and the related idea that the State has a right to regulate religion and ethics by civil law! How the very suggestion that their descendants would yet be compelled to live under such a regime would have brought the indignant flush to the cheek of Jefferson and Washington, Milton and Hampden, and the other heroes of Anglo-Saxon freedom! Twin fiends, born in iniquity, cradled in apostasy from God, nourished and matured on fables of superstition and falsehood, they are today piecing together into life the dismembered forms of tyranny which man fondly believed he had cut to pieces forevermore. After dogging the footsteps of the church all down the weary centuries, and marking the trail with the blood of the noblest and best of her children, these fiends are again today leering with their bloodshot eyes upon the remnant church as she hurries for the last time into the wilderness, as foretold in the book of Revelation, to wait and pray for her final deliverance at the coming of her long-looked-for Saviour. The century which so lately sank beneath the west, dawned smiling on the buoyant hopes of man. Democracy was looked to as the young hero who was to redeem all things. But liberty and material prosperity brought forgetfulness of God, and the closing hours of the century witnessed also the passing of its dream. Man has not in him anything tending toward self-regeneration. A few may be saved; the race will not be. Its wound is incurable. Today, with such unprecedented opportunities, it is going the same way that history shows it has ever gone — building and decorating the tombs of the martyrs of the past, but lighting the fagot for the unpopular heroes of the present. CHAPTER XI The Federation of the World “Extensive religious combinations to effect a political object are . . . always dangerous. . . . All religious despotism commences by combination and influence; and when that influence begins to operate on the political institutions of a country, the civil power soon bends under it; and the catastrophe of other nations furnishes an awful warning of the consequences.”—Senate Report on Sunday Mails, f Jan. IQ, 182Q. I The thought of a unified race, a consolidated humanity, when the battle-flags shall be forever furled “in the parliament of man, the Federation of the World,” has long been a very alluring ideal; and many of our greatest poets and prose writers have contributed of their genius to portray its attractiveness. Although these kindly dreams have received a very rude shock from the spectacle of the great European war, yet there is no doubt that when it is over, when the world has had time to consider its awful results, and the full reaction and revulsion of feeling has come, the old movement for a confederation of humanity, which was first attempted by the well-meaning Czar, Alexander I, under the form of the Holy Alliance, after the Napoleonic wars, will be renewed, and will be prosecuted with even greater enthusiasm than ever before. We know what a sad failure the sovereigns of Europe made of the Holy Alliance, and how, instead of securing greater rights and liberties for the people, it resulted in greater oppression. But the day of the kings is past, and the day of the people has come. And as voiced by the modern idealists, this movement for a confederation of the world seems like a true race-call of “Excelsior!” and at the sound, (167) 168 Back to the Bible myriad souls of more sluggish temperament will feel their nerves thrill and' their pulses quicken, until, under the mystical inspiration of this rallying cry, all humanity will seem to be taking part. But what if this future “Holy Alliance’’ of the people shall be directed by an even more fanatical mind than that of the Baroness von Kriidener, who so dominated Alexander I? II Several material factors are contributing to bring about this attempt toward a federation of the world: — I. First of all may be mentioned the modern development of rapid intercommunication. The railroad, the steamship, the automobile, have in effect abolished distance and time, bringing the distant parts of the world together, so that each man is, so to speak, next-door neighbor to every other man. And the telephone, the telegraph, the daily paper, belting the world with their instantaneous communication, have done even more to abolish linguistic and geographical boundary lines, and to convert the world into one vast community with common interests, common aspirations, and a unified self-consciousness. 2. Modern financial and commercial enterprises long ago ceased to halt at national and geographical boundaries, and their interests have developed increasingly strong motives for internationalism. Material development, economic prosperity, .whether in the indiv'dual, the nation, or the race, is fast becoming the one absorbing pursuit, the one enterprise esteemed worthy of human effort and endeavor. No belief is more wide-spread than the obsession that the elevation of humanity is to be effected by improved industrial and economic conditions, and by increased facilities for the acquirement of the material comforts of life on the part of the proletariat. And the concerted action of the scattered units of the proletariat throughout the world is seen to be essential in order to secure such a result in any adequate degree. The Federation of the World 169 Not only do the present conditions of industrial and commercial competition constitute a system of injustice and wasteful extravagance: one of the greatest sources of waste is seen in the ruinous competition between the nations, a crushing burden in time of peace, but a thousand-fold more crushing as the legacy to be bequeathed from the titanic struggle of the great nations of Christendom,— all because of the surviving race hatreds of nationalism, and the lack of an overpowering feeling of internationalism, the lack of a unified self-consciousness. Thus in many multiplied ways a World State, a consolidated humanity, is considered essential to make the aims of both the capitalistic classes and the proletariat effective. Added to all these, the wide-spread movement for international arbitration and universal peace constitutes a well-organized and liberally subsidized missionary propaganda for at least a sufficient approximation to world unity to admit of the throwing down of the barriers of hatred and exclusiveness that have so long kept the peoples of the world apart. Ill Let us note the influence of the Evolution philosophy upon this idea. Spencer and Darwin, Wallace and Huxley, all halted at applying their evolutionary concepts rigidly to the social development of the race. The definition of Spencer, that the social organism is such that its “corporate life must be subservient to the lives of the parts, instead of the lives of the parts being subservient to the corporate life,’’ illustrates the teachings of the foremost evolutionists of a generation ago, wrhen the private rights of the individual were still held in sacred regard. These men had adopted their evolutionary views in middle life, and they could not entirely shake off the teachings of their earlier years; nor had the rank and file of the people adjusted themselves to this new philosophy. But most modern sociologists have quite outgrown all such scruples inherited from their Bible-loving ancestors, as 170 Back to the Bible they have also the notion of Marx and Lasalle, that the socialistic development is to take place fatally and necessarily, without the intervention of the human will. The latter method was altogether too slow a process; and many are urging that this fatalistic view of evolutionary progress is wholly in the interests of the intrenched classes, and has hindered in a thousand ways the march of reform. Whether this latter view is true or not, there is today a feverish activity to plan and manage the development of the race, under the profound conviction that everything pertaining to human life, including creeds and religious systems, ethics and philosophy,— all are alike proper subjects for racial guidance and control, because all have alike been the product of the evolutionary process in the past, and are now to be shaped in such a way as to contribute to the supposed good of the whole, even though this guidance and control should happen to be at the expense of the individual unit. The prevalent organic theory of society discussed in the preceding chapter makes the individual cell a very insignificant thing compared with the organism as a whole. Thus the modern teaching of sociology, the mature fruition of the Evolution philosophy, reverses the dictum of Spencer, and says that the individual life must be subservient to the corporate life; and of course the ultimate of this must be the unification of the race as a whole. Here in America we see the same sentiment arrived at from another point of view, which illustrates how the socialistic propaganda has its roots much deeper than in mere social and industrial conditions. I refer to the modern extension and intensification of the democratic idea. Democracy was originally, at least in America, meant to be confined to civil affairs; but by the modern extension of the theory, everything n man’s life, not even excluding ethical and religious systems, is to be subject to popular wish and popular control. This idea, which has been called Ultimate Democracy, is based on the same feature of the Evolution doctrine that all things relating to human life are equally and entirely mere matters of convention, matters of expediency; The Federation of the World 171 that morality ’is only petrified custom; and that the race is absolutely free from all external restraint, with no limitations even in ethics and religion, except such as are self-imposed. On this basis we can understand the absorbing interest in all social and political questions that is now so manifest, and the extension of these social and political activities from local or national affairs to international ones, the shaping of the world’s policies and standards so as to reflect and embody the wishes of the people. And if the state has been deified and almost worshiped as the embodiment of the “absolute reason,’’ how much more the World State, the highest possible expression of the Absolute! We have had various forms of despotism in the past; kings and princes, oligarchies and plutocracies, have at various times crushed out the individuality of their subjects. Only on a few ever-memorable occasions have we seen the despotism of the mob exalted to power, but no spectacle in all the dreary monotony of horrors constituting human history is quite so sad, so heart-sickening, as those periods in which the mere wish of the majority has been exalted into a kind of religion, to be carried out irrespective of any regulative standards or restraints. Of all tyrannies there can be none like that of the majority, when that majority recognizes no external source of human rights or human liberties, and reduces all such matters to mere conventionalities, subject, like the taxes or the tariff, to popular wish alone. But now we have this doctrine of Ultimate Democracy diligently inculcated from the press, the platform, and the professorial chair, until there seems every prospect of renewing on an international scale the doctrines and the methods of the Reign of Terror. While they strive to free themselves from “bondage to a Book,’’ as did the monsters of the French Revolution, what is there to hinder our seeing again rampant and on a world-wide scale “the red fool-fury of the Seine’’? IV But let us make a closer analysis of this Ultimate Democracy. 172 Back to the Bible Lying at the basis of even this notion is the idea that all the evils of our world are due to man’s evil environment. Although in biology it is now one of the best established of laws that acquired characters induced by a changed environment are not transmissible to offspring, it seems that in Sociology all the hopes of the future rest on the supposed power of a changed environment to bring about a very radical change in human nature. Explicitly or implicitly it is declared that if man’s evil environment is improved, man himself will thereby automatically and spontaneously improve; that all the race needs is a fair chance; that it must advance, if these contributing hindrances are removed; and that since the race has at last arrived at a world self-consciousness, the people themselves must take hold of this work of reshaping all the environment of man, not omitting the most cherished ideals of the religious life or the family, for these are indeed the most potent of all in their possibilities for good or for evil. As a prominent Socialist writer has put it: “The help we once expected from invisible and incorporeal agencies [that is, from God and Christ and the spiritual agencies of the Christian religion] we are now demanding from man. Society is to save man.” Of course, the sanctities of religion and marriage are not, as yet, always included in the program for race betterment. The formal Socialists have always had a good deal to say about religion and marriage, and what they have said has not been of a nature to reassure us regarding the future; but in general it is the material conditions, the production and distribution of wealth, that are usually meant by man’s surroundings or environment. The thought is, that if we can only place comforts, facilities, opportunities, within the easy reach of all, the race will automatically respond to these changed conditions, and all will be well. This idea in turn is based on the implied perfectibility of the race. The deification of man, the ultimate triumph of a religion of humanity, or Humanism, is a corollary from this thought of the perfectibility, or the improvability, of the race. It is Emerson’s Intuitionalism transfigured and exalted The Federation of the World 173 into the supreme arbiter and guide of race destiny. For this improvement is to be brought about by a racial self-reliance, by man’s conscious efforts in a collective capacity, the real Ultimate Democracy for the whole world; and logically it cannot stop short of the World State, or the Federation of the World, the expression of the Absolute in the realm of politics. But man is as certainly a religious animal as he is a social animal, and a World State implies a World Religion. What shall it be? Under the terms of this Ultimate Democracy, religion also must be subject entirely to the wishes of the people, in fact, must be modified and directed by the voice of the race as a whole. The religions now prevailing, in this view, have grown up in a naturalistic way, and, like all things human, are capable of improvement; and this improvement must be brought about by man’s own efforts, regulated solely by man’s own desires, and directed toward nothing higher than the collective and changing ideals of “race consciousness.” All of which sounds remarkably like the fulfilment of a prediction of a certain old man in the days of Nero, who said that the time would come when the people would have “itching ears,” and be determined to hear from their religious teachers only such messages as suited them, thus heaping to themselves teachers “after their own lusts,” because they would not endure “sound doctrine.” 2 Tim. 4:3. That Spiritualism in a refined and dignified form, in accord with this modern optimistic mysticism, or Humanism, will be one of the large factors in this World Religion, is a matter not open to doubt. For the doctrine of the divinity of man implies that those human individuals who have “passed beyond” know more about religious and spiritual matters than they ever did, and much more than those who are still in the body. Humanism stands in need of a supernatural factor, and here is one ready to hand, with unlimited possibilities. Nor can this Religion of Humanity afford to ignore the intrenched power of the great historic Roman Church. Romanists, who boast of miracles as a sure sign of the true church, will not object to the wonders of .Spiritual 174 Back to the Bible ism when the latter gets into good working order; and the Roman Church, like this Religion of Humanism, aspires to be universal. Here, then, we have a threefold union which would appear to be eminently capable of bringing peace and harmony to our poor distracted humanity; for all parties will see in this union “a grand movement for the conversion of the world, and the ushering in of the long-expected millennium.” V But there are the gravest objections to this program. The Bible Christian, the Neo-Protestant, says at once that this concept of Humanism and Ultimate Democracy ignores the reality of sin. For instead of humanity’s being a unit with a common destiny for all, there are really two great sections of the race, one group composed of those who have made peace with God through Christ, and the other great group composed of those who have not. And why should a false liberalism any longer blind us to this fundamental and all-important distinction? The ultimate cause of evil and misery is not in man’s evil environment, but in man’s evil nature; and all schemes for the world’s salvation, however much we may admire them on other grounds, tend to obscure or tacitly deny the imperative necessity of individual salvation and the new birth. They are concerned with the symptoms rather than with the causes. They aim to get rid of the consequences of sin in human nature without getting rid of the sin itself. And even if they could accomplish anything worth while for the general welfare of the race, and would stop short of curtailing individual rights and liberties under the plea of the good of the whole, they would still be an evil and not a good in so far as they tend to step in between the individual and his direct responsibility to his Creator. And the Bible Christian remembers that this Religion of Humanism seems to be the very power specified in the thirteenth chapter of the Revelation (as referred to in the first chapter of the present work), which is to cause the people to make “an The Federation of the World 175 image to the beast” (the Papacy), and cause all the people of the earth to obey the mandates of that beast and its image, in opposition to the worship of “Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.” Possibly some of my readers will say that I am calling up a phantom, a bogey, with which to frighten uneasy souls. But I am not presenting mere conjectures, nor on the other hand am I presenting my own predictions. I am simply giving tendencies already well pronounced, from which the reader can draw his own conclusions. I also know that the Bible warns us in numerous ways regarding the times just ahead; while it seems to me that the fulfilment of the signs has already progressed far enough to give pause to any who would deride our application of these predictions to the present situation. VI If any one asks, “What will this World State be like?” I can only say, I do not know. As nothing of the sort has yet been seen, we can only conjecture. Personally, I am free to say that I do not look for a very close organic union of the scattered groups of humanity. It will be bad enough if they merely unite on such concepts of progress in social systems, in ethics, and in religion, as are held by them in common, and concertedly undertake to mold the development of the race in accordance with this idea. Instead of governments that are instituted to conserve men’s rights, in which all powers not delegated are reserved to the smaller groups and to the individuals of the people, the modern evolutionary concept is that the whole is infinitely greater than the part; and as the collective body is thus the real source of human improvement, it must take cognizance of such very potent factors as ethics and religion, and hence “the people” must be allowed a free hand in such matters, so as to shape the racial development in the desired direction. I wish to avoid a possible misunderstanding of my position and that of my fellow Neo-Protestants. All honor to those who are trying to secure by every righteous means a 176 Back to the Bible greater degree of “social justice’’ for the oppressed and downtrodden of this or of any land; and all honor to those who are seeking to abolish the horrors of war and the hideous waste and oppressive load of militarism, which has been one of the ways in which the hungry generations have trodden down the poor laboring man. But in the light of history, we cannot avoid the conviction that such a world unification, involving of necessity a concerted effort to subordinate the rights of the individual to the supposed good of the whole, must be despotic to the last degree. For many hundred years “the iron monarchy of Rome,” to use Gibbon’s classic phrase, crushed out the religious if not the civil liberty of the individual for the fancied stability of the whole. But the Roman Empire in its palmiest days was a mere baby, a doll, compared with the possibilities of this great worlddespotism which is already looming up on the horizon of our time, and which millions of voices are already welcoming with glad acclaim. But the Bible Christian, the Neo-Protestant, will never submit to a world despotism such as this, when it attempts to interfere with his duty toward his God. His Master when here on earth persistently and consistently refused to have any part whatever in civil or political affairs, declaring, “My kingdom is not of this world.” On another occasion he said, “If any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: . . . the word that I have spoken, the same will judge him in the last day.” On still another occasion he was offered the undisputed rule of all the kingdoms of the world; but he refused it with the most decided emphasis, thus setting an example for his Church to the close of time. But this offer of the kingdoms of the world has seemed much more attractive to the apostate church of all subsequent ages; and it is evident that any church that avails herself of the offer which was spurned by her Master, thereby declares herself to be not the true Church of Christ. A church that unites with the civil power, be it state, national, or worldwide, must be an apostate church; and hence must be intolerant. But to such a power the true Christian will never The Federation of the World 177 submit. Like all the moral heroes of the past, he declares, “We ought to obey God rather than men.’’ VII But while this world federation is the ultimate goal toward which, consciously or unconsciously, all humanity seems to be moving with steady, glacial flow, a much more immediate issue lies just before us. The radicals among the Socialists, the labor-unionists, the I. W. W.,— in a word, the whole of the proletariat,— are raising issues which they consider are the real first steps toward the goal of their ambitions. And these issues also are not confined to America; they, too, constitute an international problem, a world-wide conflict, with the battle already on; and for its suppression no peace societies have yet been organized, no “truce of God’’ has been proclaimed. For while the wealth of our modern civilization has been steadily concentrating in the hands of a few, who seem privately to control not only the financial systems but the governments of the world, the Socialists and the leaders of organized labor have been conducting schools for the study of these matters on the street corners of every large city throughout Christendom. Lecture halls have been packed with discontented and desperate men, who have listened night after night and Sunday after Sunday to an evangel based on facts and arguments which seem very real to them, and which stir to the very depths some of the most dynamic motives of the human heart. The mail trains have been burdened with literature of the same character. I am not now discussing the right or the wrong of this propaganda. I am trying to face a fact, trying to study in the impartial spirit of science, a condition, a situation, that has already crossed all national and geographical boundary lines, and, not will be, but is a world problem. And since the pursuit of wealth seems to be regarded as the most important object that can occupy the thought and energies of mankind, why should not these problems of the 12 178 Back to the Bible Socialists be indeed the most important that can occupy the attention of civil governments? So long as a handful of men have wealth and power beyond the dreams of Solomon or Croesus; while the great mass of people in all civilized countries have comparatively only a small portion, and can only by constant struggle stand off the collector and the bailiff, and ten millions in the United States, with a much larger proportion in other lands, live on the very border line of destitution, and often do not know where they are to get the next meal, we must own that the socialistic agitators have a big text from which to preach, and have no trouble in getting an audience. We may affect to ignore the influence of the soap-box orators; but in an age of the telegraph and the multiple press the whole world ultimately becomes a wide street corner from which these fiery economic evangelists, the modern Urbans, the Peters, the Bernards, are preaching a new crusade which requires no long, toilsome march; for the Jerusalem of their dreams lies but a few blocks away, in the form of a well-filled warehouse, a sky-scraper, or a brownstone mansion. And it seems high time for every man endowed with reason to throw away his prejudices and theories, to face the facts of the actual situation, and to take his stand with the One who has given us a true account of these conditions and their outcome, in those Scriptures which contain history more modern than the latest daily, and which are a safer guide of life than the wisdom of all the wise. VIII I do not know how far this plan of a world federation may ever be carried out. One thing I do know: That the race has not in it elements enough of integration and cohesion to permit any such scheme to succeed, except temporarily and under the hothouse stimulation of some spiritualistic fanaticism or obsession, which may be able to blend for a time those mutually antagonistic elements with which all former schemes of civil government have been distracted The Federation of the World 179 and torn. Any scheme for world peace and world unity which is built up in a purely human way, on the basis of the deification of man and of his achievements, is foredoomed to failure and ruin; and it may well turn out that such a scheme of a federated world, renewing again on a universal scale the long-interrupted attempt at Babel, may justly be regarded by heaven, for various reasons, as the climax of apostasy, calling for the final closing of the long reign of sin, the close of probation for the race, and the coming of Him whose right it is to reign. What spectacle more horrible to contemplate than that of a world which has closed its probation, which has been abandoned to the course of its own choosing by the justice of a long-suffering Jehovah, who has at last ceased to hold in check the fierce elements of lust and passion and fury, and allows them to rage unleashed and unrestrained? Nations and cities have had their day, have come to the end of their probation, and have gone out into darkness, amid a debacle of blood and ruin. Why not a world? When the doomed nation of the Jews crowded into their beautiful city in their fatuous attempt to withstand the tempest of the Roman legions, they spent every breathing spell in deadly quarrels among themselves; and had the Romans not taken the city, the various factions would have exterminated one another by their own fratricidal strife. When the gay capital of France was at last allowed to experience the simple, natural consequences of the preceding centuries, in banishing the Word of God and abandoning a quick-witted and emotional people to the corrupting influences of a flippant, godless philosophy and the despotism and hypocrisy of an apostate church, the world stood aghast at the spectacle of a whole nation gone mad. Behold then a city, a nation, abandoned to the reaping of the sad harvest of its own sowing. What will it be when the whole world has at last ended its probation, when it is thus entirely abandoned to evil, and when the pent-up forces of demoniac fury bring upon the whole earth a ruin more dreadful than that which came upon Jerusalem or upon Paris? 180 Back to the Bible My soul refuses to dwell on the picture; but 1 could wish, with the prophet of old, that my head were waters and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the sad end of all the dreams of a world peace and a world federation with which the fond hopes of many generations have been deluded by false prophets and unfaithful watchmen, who have preached peace, peace, when there is no such peace warranted by history, by science, by sociology, or by the Word of God. a CHAPTER XII Conclusion “Christian life without Christian doctrine has never yet appeared. Those who claim to show it in Christian lands are simply cuckoos in nests of Christian doctrine which they built not, but whose warm environment makes them what they are.”—The Stone Lectures, 1896. I Science is accustomed to control-experiments, in which all the accompanying conditions can be arranged beforehand with the two or more subjects which are to be tested, so that differences in results, if any, can be more accurately compared, and the exact cause of these differences definitely determined. But in many departments of scientific study we cannot control beforehand the work of nature; we can only select as best we may various pieces of work ready made by nature, of course without any regard to our curiosity as to the causes of things. We cannot take two volcanoes and, by controlling the water supply and the oxygen from the air and from the surrounding oxygen-bearing rocks, determine experimentally whether they are connected with a great molten interior, or originate in comparatively shallow, isolated pockets, so to speak, with their heat supplied by the combustion of carboniferous deposits, as taught by Werner, or supplied largely by chemical action, as taught by Davy and Gay-Lussac. In history, also, we have to take things as we find them. Human beings are not like rabbits or guinea-pigs that we can place under control-conditions and experimentally test our theories. No one historical example can be sufficiently free from complications satisfactorily to determine just what causes have produced the effects observed. But the trail of time is long, with many a turn; and typical examples may be (181) 182 Back to the Bible found in such abundance as to leave no room for doubt regarding the causes that have largely contributed, for instance, to the making or unmaking of peoples and nations. It is the fashion now-a-days to attribute the condition of a community or a nation chiefly to economic causes. But all down the pathway of the ages it has been the cherished moral and religious ideals, or the lack of them, that made individuals or peoples what they were. II Permit me to go back in my memory almost to the extreme eastern limit of the continent. I see a small community of comfortable farmers. There are well-built schools, and churches that are filled every Sunday. There are no saloons, few flagrantly immoral persons, and no helpless and hopeless poor. The younger generation are growing up with education and sturdy morals, some staying on the old farm, some going out to fill places of responsibility in the government, or in such universities as McGill, Harvard, or Princeton, or to enter private professional life, like ministering angels attending to the public welfare. A typical home in this countryside shows us a venerable though very vigorous-looking old man, whose descendants or relatives comprise most of his neighbors. From amid the forest primeval he had selected a location, and with his own hands had cleared the broad acres for his home. He defrauded no one, he oppressed no one; but his various lines of industry gave work to many a young person starting out in life, his home was always open to the weary traveler, and his advice was sought in all matters relating to the public good. He did his duty in the community, and lived at peace with God and man. The wife and mother was fitted to adorn any home in the land. Somewhat younger than her husband, she was yet past middle life, with a sweet, sympathetic intellectuality that comes only as the crowning halo of a saintly life spent in self-sacrifice and self-discipline for the good of others. Conclusion 183 A frail, delicate creature, she had been a semi-invalid for years; but a servant or two looked after the house, while she sedulously devoted herself to her two boys. Her knowledge of the Bible was profound, for it was not merely at morning and evening family worship that it was read. She knew chapter after chapter by heart, almost whole books; and the children had often in a playful way sought to puzzle her by trying to read or repeat a text that she could not at least approximately locate with reasonable accuracy. But it was not the Bible alone with which she was familiar. The poems of Addison, Watts, Cowper, Wesley, Milton, Young, and Pollok were household favorites, and the children had literally been brought up on such literature and the Bible. To the musical rhythm of her poetical treasures she had rocked them to sleep when they were small; and when they grew older she had recited such poems for them as she went about her work, or when they were tired of play had read to them from the prose of Bunyan, or Wesley, or Moody. What wonder, then, that these children grew up with a familiarity with the best in literature and in moral teaching that made it a part of their very nature? To them the hills and the streams, the floating clouds, the shining stars, spoke of a Creator infinite in wisdom and majesty. That first-hand knowledge of nature with which they were familiar from earliest childhood told them of the Creator’s loving watchcare; because this divine love was incarnated in that human love which enwrapped their lives in that miniature heaven on earth — a Christian home. Accustomed to such an interpretation, such an object-lesson, with its government modeled on the divine, these children saw nothing incongruous in the idea that the divine love nevertheless hates sin, and falsehood, and injustice, and tyranny. In such an atmosphere, how natural that to their ears nature and Revelation should speak the same language, and together inspire them with memories and ideals that no sophistries of a deceptive philosophy have since been able to obscure or deface! 184 Back to the Bible The writer is not merely indulging his fancy in this sketch, nor does he have to take the description of it second hand. Nor yet again is it a unique phenomenon; for with only slight local variations this loving and intellectual Christian home could be found duplicated in almost every land where the Bible-trained sons of England, or Scotland, or Germany have been transplanted from their fatherland. But the point of interest to us here is, What was it that produced this type of character? What was it made these people what they were? What gave them those qualities of mind and heart which have made the boasted progress of our times possible, and without which our modern civilization, and especially the liberty, civil and religious, so characteristic of our great republic, would have been utterly impossible? Was Queen Victoria right, after all, when she gave the old African chief a copy of the Bible and told him that that book was the real cause of England’s greatness? Ill I Let us go back about two hundred years, and look for a moment at their intellectual and spiritual ancestors. And we need not tarry in the granite-ribbed country where amid desolate surroundings the Pilgrim Fathers sought to found a state without a king and a church without a pope. In the land whence they came, the cousins whom they left behind finally succeeded in the work which these Pilgrims had abandoned in discouragement, namely, in calling a halt to the despotism of kings and to religious intolerance. By caricaturing their physical peculiarities the gay courtiers of the Restoration long succeeded in making the very name of Puritan sound ridiculous. Even our modern somewhat similar age has scarcely outgrown this prejudice fostered by profligate rascals who were not fit to be lackeys to the least of those indomitable patriots who a generation before had shaken off the tyranny of popery and the divine right of kings. These Puritans were not a mere fanatical sect of narrow-minded, gloomy bigots. They were Anglo- Conclusion 185 Saxon freemen whom the study of the recently emancipated Bible had awakened to value their faculties as a gift from God, and to prize individual liberty as an inalienable right of all who were made in the image of God. They were assembled at the call of the hour from the Church of England, from the extreme Separatists, from the Calvinists, from the Covenanters, even from the Roman Catholics, “with a passion for liberty and righteousness such as the world has never since seen,” and it was their deep sense of personal accountability to God, born of the study of the Bible and of the inspiring culture of Christian family life, that made them what they were. What care we that the Puritans prohibited May-pole dancing and horse-racing? It was their work to give to the world a new picture of liberty and justice; for when they set about to overthrow despotism, and to make a man’s life and property and conscience free from the tyranny of rulers and ecclesiastics, they avoided the mistakes that all others have made, either before or since. Others have deposed or slaughtered their tyrants; some few, like the hysterical patriots of the French Revolution, have endeavored to break free from religious despotism; the Puritans show us the solitary example in history of a people trying their king and their ecclesiastical oppressors by due process of law, and executing the sentence in the calm spirit of judicial equity. Blessed for all coming time are these people who thus grounded the rights and liberties of man, not in the caprice of anarchy and revolution, but in those eternal principles of morality and justice that antedate all governments and transcend all constitutions. Were not Pym and Hampden, Eliot and Milton, Puritans? But wherever freemen sleep securely in Canada or South Africa, in Australia or California, these names are held in highest honor. Cromwell, too, the incarnation of triumphant Puritanism, stood like a rock for religious tolerance; and it was another Puritan, Thomas Hooker, who in Connecticut gave to the world the first written constitution, a document in which free-born men laid down beforehand the strict 186 Back to the Bible limits of the offices to which they proposed to elect their governmental representatives. Was it not because the Bible was made the guide of faith, the charter of liberty, the monitor of duty toward God and man, that they developed to an unprecedented degree that sturdy stuff of which heroes are made, and upon whose civil, intellectual, and industrial achievements great nations grow? They labored, and we have entered into their labors. But there is the greatest danger that our modern age will forget how we received these blessings, and assign to every cause but the right one those characteristics which we now respect and honor. God grant we may not soon forget those principles of the value of the individual, the eternal rights of man as preceding all organizations of society, which we have received from those “sturdy old iconoclasts,’’— “The dead but sceptered sovereigns who still rule Our spirits from their urns.” IV In following this stream of blessing still farther back through the centuries, we might well pause at a point some three hundred years before the Puritans to study the life of Wycliffe, the advance herald of the Reformation, who gave the Bible to the people of England almost two centuries before Luther, and almost a hundred years before the invention of printing. For Wycliffe was not only one of the greatest of the Reformers, but his character is of especial value as a witness to the educating, transforming power of those Scriptures which he loved. But let us go back still farther, into the very midnight of the Dark Ages, and study for a moment the lives of those humble peasants in the obscure retreats of the Alps, who, though hunted for long centuries by every nation living around them, passed along undimned from generation to generation the only treasure they had, the Word of God. Let the modern disciple of Marx and Lasalle, who can interpret the Conclusion 187 character of a people only in terms of economic laws, visit these peasants, shut away from the world, bound to helpless and interminable toil amid their flocks and rocky vineyards, and see how he will account for this perpetual miracle of a free, Bible-loving people turning back century after century the fierce fanatical crusades of the best troops of Italy and France. The true explanation is to be found in their own motto, ¹¹ Lux lucetin tenebris” (The Light shineth in darkness); for theirs was not a faith newly received. They had not of themselves originated the truths which they held in opposition to the dogmas and superstitions around them. They were what their religion made them; and their religious faith was an ancient inheritance from their fathers. We in modern times little dream how much we owe to these people, the first of all Europe to translate the Scriptures into the language of every-day life,— “E’en them who kept God’s truth so pure of old, When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones.” But though possessing none of the comforts and conveniences of life, though ever living under the shadow of a violent death, they did not waste their lives pitying themselves. Compelled by untiring labor to copy out by hand and in secret the precious manuscripts, verse by verse and chapter by chapter, committing large portions to memory, they were not content to hold these treasures selfishly within their own valleys. Century after century, while the rest of Europe was bound with iron chains of superstition to the triumphal car of Rome, the Waldenses continued to send out secretly their colporteurs and their trained and educated missionaries into the surrounding countries. Barefooted and clad in coarse, travel-stained garments like those of their Master, they made their way through the midst of their enemies and penetrated to far-distant lands. Often the messenger of truth never returned to his mountain home; he was languishing in some far-away unknown dungeon, or his bones were whitening around some charred stake, like those of many whom he had left at home, lying “scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.’’ But churches sprang up along his 188 Back to the Bible path where he had scattered the vitalizing leaves from the tree of life; and influences were started in hundreds of places that will be comprehended only when the earth “shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.” V But there is another, a darker side, to look at. We have seen what the Bible will do for a people; we ought also to study for a while what its rejection has done. There is one nation standing out so conspicuously as a warning, with a history so impossible to be misunderstood, that this one example may suffice to teach a lesson, a much-needed lesson, for our times. And here again we shall see that the primary causes shaping national character and destiny are not economic and social, as is now so often asserted, but moral and religious. The work of reform began early in France. Before Luther had nailed up his theses at Wittenberg, the Bible was studied and cherished in the great university at the capital of the nation. Later, some of the most prominent of the nation accepted the Reformed faith, and for a while it seemed almost as if the whole country would follow the Bible religion. But Francis I finally took a decided stand against the evangelical doctrine; and to such lengths was he prepared to go to crush out the rising reform, that, though a professed patron of learning and culture, he issued a decree abolishing printing all over France. Thus evil triumphed in the land of Gaul, and the unhappy nation was left to reap the inevitable results of her sad choice. The forces of evil were allowed to go on developing and maturing their true fruit, till in the scenes of the Revolution two centuries later the world beheld the frightful harvest. The social and economic factors contributing to that wild orgy are so patent that superficial thinkers seek no further for a cause. Such a view is about as narrow as it would be to bring in a verdict that a murder was due to the explosive action of the powder in the gun. It is giving the secondary Conclusion 189 causes instead of the primary. The true philosophy of the Revolution will lead us to see in it but the culmination of that long war against the Bible carried on for so many centuries and with such success. The very completeness of Rome’s triumph in suppressing the Bible and the evangelical religion is without doubt the real primary cause of the horrors of the Revolution, and the reason why, when it did take place, it seemed so much like a whole nation gone mad. If any one holds the view that persecutions are never successful in suppressing the truth and smothering reform, let him study the fate of the brave Huguenots in the long conflict preceding the Revolution. Chased by dragoons as they ventured to meet at night on the hillside or the desolate moor, some were shot down as they knelt in prayer, others were dragged away to serve as galley-slaves. The purest, the most cultured, the best-educated of the nation were chained in torture for the rest of their lives among robbers and assassins. The nation-wide Massacre of St. Bartholomew was not completely effective; the climax of effectiveness was reached when the brutal and licentious dragoons were quartered in the homes of the Protestants, with instructions to do anything they pleased short of actual murder to make their poor victims conform and give up their faith. Such measures effected their object all too completely; and when the caustic wit of Voltaire and his fellows was turned against the only form of Christianity remaining in the land after Protestantism was blotted out, the triumph of infidelity and lawlessness was assured; for what chance had the absurdities of the breviary and the mass against Voltaire? The kings and rulers of France had been persuaded by the Catholic clergy that the doctrines of the Reformed faith would undermine the throne and weaken the power of the monarch. Thus by misrepresenting the natural effects of the study of the Bible, Rome succeeded in arraying the whole power of the kingdom to crush out the truth. It was with the vain purpose of upholding the throne and preserving the dignity of the nobility that the sword of persecution was first drawn in France. But what a blind and fatuous course! 190 Back to the Bible The Bible would have implanted in the minds of the people those principles of truth, temperance, justice, and benevolence which insure a nation’s tranquillity and prosperity. But the deceived and deluded nation prohibited the Bible and banned its disciples. With head bared to the pitiless storm, “the Church in the Desert” saw her pastors toiling as galley-slaves, burning at the stake, or rotting in dungeon, cells; she saw family life broken up, her splendid schools scattered, her records and literature destroyed, and the last of her children fleeing into exile before the insane fury of the persecutor. As the steady procession of these exiles was kept up for generation after generation, and these hunted ones carried-into other lands the intelligence, the arts, the industries, and the sturdy morality, for all of which they were preeminent, what wonder that with the flight of the Huguenots a national paralysis seized the unhappy nation? What wonder that flourishing manufacturing cities fell into decay, that fertile districts returned to their native wildness, or that a period of moral and intellectual decadence followed that brilliant era of the so-called “Grand Monarch”? What wonder that in the half century following the death of Louis XIV the nation made a swift descent toward the abyss of the Revolution? The religion of the New Testament would have solved those social and political problems which were beyond the understanding of the greatest men of the nation, and which, remaining still unsolved, brought the anarchy and ruin of the Reign of Terror. But the people had lost the blessed lessons of the gospel out of the national life; and the innate selfishness of human nature continued on the one hand stubbornly to resist reform, and on the other to eat away the very foundations of society, until the whole structure tumbled about the people’s heads. The established church encouraged the rich in their heartless oppression of the poor; and the poor sought in vain for any relief from their servitude and degradation. For centuries the greed, profligacy, and legalized tyranny of the nobles had reduced the peasants to Conclusion 191 a state lower than that of chattel slaves. Thus the rich wronged and oppressed the poor, and ostentatiously flaunted before them demoralizing examples of profligacy and vice. The poor envied the rich their luxury, and on their own scale industriously imitated their vices; and when at last they learned their power, and heard from across the ocean the echoes of the newly established liberty, they had not the moral and religious restraints to hold them back from the wildest excesses. With diabolical cunning and heartlessness Rome had worked upon the jealousy of the king and the ruling classes, inciting them to hold the masses in bondage, thinking that in the general weakness thus produced in all classes, her rule would be more undisputed and secure. I say Rome had done thus; but perhaps it was hardly a conscious aim on the part of her ecclesiastics; perhaps we ought rather to assign her course to the spirits of evil behind the scenes. But it seems ever to be recognized by Rome as well as by other tyrants, that in order to enslave men effectually, the shackles and fetters must be bound upon their souls; that the surest way to prevent them from escaping their bondage is to render them incapable of freedom. For in such a work moral degradation is a thousand-fold more horribly effective than mere economic and political oppression. Deprived of the Bible, and feeding only on the gibes and low witticisms of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, what wonder that the nation became the prey of Spiritualism and a thousand superstitions, and wholly unfitted for self-government? With the piteous cries of the starving peasants sounding through the doors and windows of his banqueting-rooms and his council-chambers, the successor of the great Louis would only say to his ministers, “Try to make things go on as long as I am likely to live; after my death it may be as it will.” And later, as he lay a-dying, and the cries outside could not be shut entirely away from the royal ears, he added, “After me, the deluge.” And the deluge came. 192 Back to the Bible But why need we go into the sickening details of that period of horror? Every one is familiar with this wild orgy of a naturally splendid nation in delirium; but the very important fact with which the world is not so familiar, a fact which certain writers seem to be studiously endeavoring to keep away from the modern reading public, is the logical connection between the triumph of Rome in so successfully shutting out the Bible from the whole nation, and this wild outbreak of the elemental passions of millions rebelling against all rule and all restraint. VI There is no more appropriate lesson for our time; for in how many ways is the whole Occidental world repeating seriatim the steps leading up to the French Reign of Terror. Again has skepticism become fashionable, and for another generation have the sacred truths of old-time Christianity been held up to jeers and scoffing before the susceptible minds throughout the whole school system of Europe and America. Again have the pulpit and the press vied with each other in the nefarious work of destroying the faith of the common people in the only effectual barrier which the world has ever known against lawlessness, superstition, and vice, namely, the Word of God. And again do we see the inevitable results in the plague of Oriental superstitions and multitudinous heathen cults which have overspread the Western World. Again do the cries of distress break upon our ears from the four winds, rising from the millions of the discontented and desperate. True, the lot of the modern working man is in many respects superior to that of the French peasant. But compared with our modern wealth and luxury the two are much alike. At any rate, the modern Lazarus is unconscious of any progress in the betterment of his conditions so long as he sees that the gulf between him and Dives grows evermore wider and deeper. As he looks upon the boundless self-indulgence flaunted before his eyes, his Conclusion 193 brain maddened by the teachings of two generations that the underpaid labor of the poor is the source of the wealth of the rich, the modern “wage slave,’’ as he has been taught to call himself, feels that his lot is wretched and intolerable; and we can hear him covenanting with his fellows not to endure it any longer. And when the blessed lessons of Christian forbearance and charity are despised or forgotten, and thousands of public instructors are continually reminding him of his rights and his political power, there can be but one outcome, no matter how long it be delayed. For as Henry George so forcefully expressed it, to put the right of free speech and political power into the hands of men degraded by poverty and embittered by injustice, is to conduct a blind Samson into the temple and twine his arms around the pillars of national life. The poor of two or three generations ago had even less of the material comforts of life; but they were infinitely more contented and happy. Who can deny that the difference is largely due to the fact that the modern masses have lost the very real consolations of religion, as well as its moral training in temperance, self-denial, and thrift? But with the intemperance and continual excitement incident to our modern life, especially in the cities, neither fathers nor mothers have the time or the inclination to train their children as their own parents were trained. They leave such things to the Sunday school or the public school; while the real, effective education of the rising generation seems to be given by the corner cigar stand, the “movies,” the comic and sporting pages of the daily papers, supplemented by a godless philosophy in science and sociology; the inevitable result being that the masses are just as truly heathens and revolutionists as were the peasants and artizans of Paris. Undoubtedly it is the total body of family teachings, customs, beliefs, laws, every-day habits and associations, which arise in every community and envelop every individual like the ambient air — what Herbert Spencer called the “superorganic environment,”— these are the great elements in determining national character. But who is so rash as 13 194 Back to the Bible to say that in all these we are holding our own and are not rapidly on the down grade? Steadily, but not silently, the forces of terror underneath our modern civilization, in what has been called the “mudsills of society,” are swelling and expanding to the bursting point. When they do break forth, where are the moral and religious restraints that will be sufficient to curb their fury? VII The lessons of history are for us. The Old World contains not merely the graves of our forefathers; it is full of the tombs of dead empires, dead civilizations. Some have petrified or fossilized, like the Egyptian and the Chinese; some were violently overwhelmed from without; some, like that of Rome, which ours most resembles, rotted out from within while standing on their feet, the northern barbarians simply coming in time to bury the decaying carcass as a sort of cosmic health measure. Even while Augustus was turning the brick city into one of marble, that civilization was already so infected with the germs of national decay that no human power that we know of could have saved it or much prolonged its fate. Rome was a long time in dying, because her people had once been clean and free; and soul-blighting despotisms grow but slowly over the graves of such peoples as the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons. But I cannot believe that Providence purposes to allow this long tragedy of the ages to be again repeated here; and as the modern infection has seemingly spread to all nations, and as the symptoms, of decline are every day more pronounced, the collapse will come swiftly, in accordance with the spirit of this age of electricity and steam. But I must refrain from assuming the tone of a prophet. What further warnings do we need, if we keep our Bibles open before us? For not only does the Bible illumine the past, giving us the only rational and true philosophy of history; not alone is it the only safe guide in the present, alike for the individual and the nation. It alone can light Conclusion 195 up the dark vistas of the future; and it is surely full of significance that the crisis before us, the awful climax of human history, occupies so large a part of the total prophetic portions of the Bible. And he who through indolence, bigotry, or false pride will not believe these predictions and heed these warnings, when even now their fulfilment looms big on the horizon, and the doom of Great Babylon herself trembles on the tongue of time, is rejecting the last and only means that a merciful God can give to instruct and warn him. “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” VIII In conclusion, there are a few remarks that press for utterance to those whom I have previously called Reformed Protestants, or Neo-Protestants. Some of these remarks are of the nature of warnings; some exhortations. i. One of the most subtle dangers of our age is the temptation besetting the lover of his fellow men to waste time and effort, perhaps even to do unconscious but positive harm, in attempting legislative reform. Because of the prevailing lawless, irreligious state of society, there is an ever-increasing temptation for the churches to try to make themselves heard as churches in civil legislation. The halls of our legislatures are fairly mobbed year after year by earnest, well-meaning men and women who desire to see enacted into law religious or semireligious precepts which they hope will improve the morals of society, and save the country from impending ruin and anarchy. I do not here refer to the temperance reformers; for the licensed liquor traffic is a purely civil affair, the partner of criminality and vice, and ought to be wholly outlawed. But it is not to be denied that many are going much farther than to seek the end of a harmful traffic capitalized on the vices and weaknesses of poor humanity; for they are encroaching on that domain of religion which our forefathers so wisely declared is forever outside the jurisdiction of civil govern 196 Back to the Bible ment. These well-meaning but perplexed reformers would be shocked to be told that in this they are only serving as advance agents of the Roman Church, and that when they have established appropriate precedents, the latter is the agent that will step in and use these precedents to the full. And yet whether religious legislation is enacted and enforced by Catholics or by professed Protestants makes little difference. The boot, the thumbscrew, and the rack probably hurt as much in the hands of a Protestant manipulator as in the hands of a papist. The courts of High Commission and the Star Chamber under the Protestant Stuarts were as truly agents of tyranny as the Inquisition under the papal Alva and Torquemada. And we as a people can allow religious combinations to interfere in civil or political affairs only at the peril of our dearly bought liberties; for there is no indication that human nature has changed in the passage from the sixteenth or the seventeenth century to the twentieth. 2. Again, we must beware of expecting too much from any social or economic reform. We may do our best to lighten the load on the back of the toiler; we may seek to give him an equal opportunity with others to look up from his muck-rake to the crown of mental and spiritual culture hanging above his head. As we, like Rama, gaze out upon the ocean of the future, and see its surface blend with the dipping sky, we may wish to build for humanity a solid path far out toward the feathery palms and beckoning fruits that seem to shine on the horizon. But we must not expect our civil laws to change human nature in the least degree. That beautiful day-dream of the ages, the promised land of happiness and peace, recedes ever before us like a mirage. Our age is chasing this vision faster than ever before; but sooner or later the masses are going to awake to their sad disappointment, and terrible will be their awakening. Let us not be found on the side of those demagogues who are encouraging this delusion. There is but one force that can save, that can regenerate humanity. Only one can give life. Electrical or other artificial appliances may for a time stimulate dead tissue into Conclusion 197 activity, or even move arms or legs. But it is life only that can beget life; and the gospel remedy for sin and misery, must be applied to men individually. When Christ himself was here, though surrounded by crying abuses, oppression, and tyranny, he attempted no civil reforms; nor has he left his Church any commission to purify the governments of earth,— not because he was indifferent to the woes of humanity, but because the remedy was not to be found in any external conditions or any human means. To be effectual, the cure must be administered to men individually, and must regenerate the heart. 3. My first positive exhortation is a call to simplicity, both in the individual and in the family life. We live in an artificial age, doubtless the most artificial t-he world has ever seen. Not many of my readers will believe this statement; but no matter. I am not here calling for a return to the “state of nature’’ pictured with so much deceptive sentimentality by Rousseau and Cooper. My ideals of the normal life were not obtained from any such sources. As in a physical sense the human body can resist alike the polar frosts or the tropic heat, so in a spiritual sense is the Christian independent of external conditions, and may develop the spirit of the Master in a shepherd’s tent in the age of Hammurabi, or in a modern metropolis; in a Russian prison, or in free America; but not unless he discriminates between the artificial and the real, between the transitory and the enduring, between the things that tend to strengthen character and those subtle, ambient influences that tend to weaken and degrade. Why need I specify particular habits or customs? The patriotic Roman of the time of Nero or Marcus Aurelius could not cross a threshold, or greet a friend, or enter a carriage, or take a bath, without making some pious movement of hands or head to indicate his remembrance of the national gods; or by refraining from it, proclaiming that he was a Christian and a citizen of another country. Similarly the subtle idolatries of our artificial life have so diffused themselves through the modern world-system, the modern Baby 198 Back to the Bible Ion, that he who would keep himself unspotted from them must be on duty long hours and take no moral vacations. The prize-ring, the fashion-plate, the green and the pink sheets, the tango, bridge-whist, the “movies,” the baseball bulletin, the ticker-tape,— these are the names of a few of the national gods which so many millions of our modern age are taught to worship religiously from the cradle to the grave; and those who bring them no offerings or burn them no incense are already considered about as unsocial, as “unpatriotic,” as those who in the olden time for similar refusals were compelled to do service as human torches to light the grounds of the emperor’s palace or were fed to the lions in the arena. We have mentioned a few of their modern names, but the tutelar spirits behind them are the same as in the days of Rome, and there is little to choose between the ancient and the modern forms under which they are invoked; and accordingly the apostle’s exhortation to his little children to keep themselves from idols has not expired by limitation. In still another sense are the artificial conditions incident to our modern complex civilization an ever-increasing evil, and voice a loud call to all the wise to seek a return to more natural conditions. And this, too, is a call to the individual Christian; the world has chosen its course, and will not be turned back. The necessaries of life and of happiness always come from nature, from the land. But as civilization advances, a larger and larger proportion of people are separated more and more from direct contact with the resources of nature. The line of artificial connections between the individual and these ultimate fountains of nature becomes evermore longer and more tortuous. Each human being becomes more and more dependent upon others, more and more helplessly dependent upon the general community for the bare necessities of life. The primitive husbandman, to say nothing of the free hunter, is perfectly capable of an independent existence, and of a grade of existence practically as good as that of any around him. And this conscious ability to control first-hand the sources of natural supply keeps him ever a free con Conclusion 199 tracting party in all his relations with the community of which he is a member. Majorities have little power to intimidate his intellect or to coerce his conscience. But in the highly developed division of labor inseparable from an advanced civilization, the movement of every cog in the social and industrial wheel is helplessly dependent upon the movement of every other cog and every other wheel for the very necessities of life. The individual’s whole training in efficiently doing the one thing at which he becomes an adept is ever at the expense of his general knowledge, at the expense of his independence; and as middle life comes upon him, he feels helpless in the grip of social and economic conditions over which he knows he has no more control than over the rise of the tides or the movements of the planets. He knows he must keep up the lock step of the industrial parade, or go down in ruin just as surely as a buffalo or a steer that loses its footing in the wild rush of a stampede. And his realizing this makes him less a man, and more a slave; less able to feel his personal responsibility to God alone for his every act of life, and more and more dependent upon some other man or some set of artificial conditions that have robbed him of his prerogative as a free-born son of the Eternal. As Henry George so pathetically pointed out, these tendencies are inseparably joined with our advanced civilization. The bread line is as much a natural product of modern progress as is the automobile. George tried to teach society to pronounce the magic “open sesame’’ that would throw wide open the door to the palace of all men’s dreams. But the multitudes have proved slow learners; and I fancy that even if they should learn these magic words, a knowledge of this new dialect would not change the fundamentals of human nature. His remedy was too much like a return to the land laws given by Jehovah to the Israelites for it ever to become popular in a world of selfishness and sin. The “white parasols and the elephants mad with pride’’ will continue to multiply on the same earth with those who have but a loin-cloth about them, and a wooden bowl from which to eat their rice. The marble palace and the sky-scraper will continue 200 Back to the Bible. to have their complement in the squalid tenement and the sweat-shop. And all the benevolent legal devisings of the human mind will do no more than partially mitigate these conditions. The lesson is for the individual, the family, who wishes to break away from the evil environment of modern Babylon. Out of the cities, back to the land, back to the free air of heaven, where the man and the woman are removed from constant dependence upon other mortals, where they can bring up their children with less contamination from the outside evil environment, and where all can come face to face with nature and the God of nature. This is the modern emancipation proclamation; and it is sounding today for every one who is determined to let nothing stand between him and his duty to his God. 4. Just one word more. Last but scarcely least is our duty to give to the world these new and cheering truths regarding the harmony between the book of nature and the Book of Revelation. It is a comparatively new experience that the Church now has, this of seeing the great truths of the natural world arraying themselves for her help. A new experience this, for the Church to be now the one to insist that the geologist and the biologist hold steadily to the exact wording of their favorite textbook without any dodging or quibbling, and without any pleas of wrong translation or of interpolations or imperfections of the record. But such is the present situation. It is now the evolutionist’s turn to run for cover. For outside the divine Guide-book which she has brought with her down the ages, and outside the historic record of the holy work she has been constantly doing for individuals and for nations, the Church of this twentieth century has no more convincing credentials of her divine origin, no truer friend, no more valiant helper or defender, than modern science has at last become in spite of those busybodies who have so long sought to keep these sisters apart by slandering the one to the other. The bell of time has struck. The door of the Church’s opportunity is wide open, and it leads to a platform already Conclusion 201 illuminated by a thousand lights from which she may again deliver her Master’s message to an attentive world. Instead of vainly trying to learn a new language, and to translate her good tidings into the terms and style of the modern Gnosticism, how cheering for her to awake to the fact that the tongue of Pentecost is still the language best understood by the multitudes awaiting her, and the only effective language with which to reach the hearts of men! And as in obedience to her commission to preach the gospel to every creature she again steps forward into the focus of the world’s gaze, let her remember that the promise of her Master’s presence is as far reaching and as long enduring as the command. APPENDICES Appendix A The writer has so great a dislike for geological speculations that only the entreaty of friends has induced him to try his hand at this usually very unprofitable business. But as some seem still to have difficulty in forming a mental picture of how a universal Deluge could possibly take place, the following facts are enumerated to show that such a thing accords perfectly with possibility, and even probability. Further than this we cannot go. The facts here given are scientifically established; but the reader should beware of saying that the cause or the manner of the Deluge of the Scriptures is hereby demonstrated. As the writer has shown in his “Fundamentals of Geology,” the general fact of there having been a great world catastrophe is now as well established as is the destruction of Carthage or the burning of Moscow; but the exact cause and manner of this event are matters of hypothesis. The earth’s axis is not perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, but is inclined about 23^ degrees from the perpendicular. The astronomical cause of this position is not known; but this astronomical habit of the earth being once established, it is difficult to conceive of a cause competent to change it, save the direct will of the Being who established it. But if we may suppose such a change to be possible, if we may suppose that the earth’s axis was formerly perpendicular, or even less inclined than now, and that some external cause changed it to its present position, and changed it suddenly,— that change would let loose forces sufficient to do an inconceivable amount of geological work, far more than our problem requires. Calculations have been made on the supposition of a far less disturbance than the maximum indicated above; and it (205) 206 Back to the Bible has been shown that the earth, like a huge top, would “begin to wabble, and it would continue to wabble as a top does when going to sleep’’ (Houghton), and until it had adjusted itself to its new position of rotation. In the meantime its surface would be shattered and dislocated beyond all conception, and twice each day the oceans would roll a mighty tidal wave around the globe, the latter attaining a maximum every 15c days, as Twisden has calculated, of about six miles in height at the equator. And as tidal waves are true translation waves, as first explained by Russell and Hopkins, and involve a movement of the whole mass of the water bodily to the very bottom, irrespective of the depth, and as the tide tends to travel at the equator at the rate of 1,000 miles an hour, we again have energy vastly more than we require for our problem. For the transporting ability of moving water varies as the sixth power of its velocity; so that if the velocity is doubled, a current or translation wave would be capable of moving bodies 64 times as heavy. And as a current of 100 miles an hour and of sufficient volume would almost dig out the mountains by the roots, we need not speculate as to what one of 1,000 miles an hour could do. Let us now consider the quantity of water on the globe. About 72 per cent of the earth’s surface is water, and 28 per cent land (Wagner). The average depth of the ocean is now considered to be about what Murray first made it, namely, 13,000 feet, while the average height of the land is only about 2,250 feet. Hence the ocean is about six times as deep as the land is high; and as its surface is about 2.5 times that of the land, there is about 15 times as much water below the sea-level as there is land above it. It follows that if all the present dry land were to sink beneath the ocean, it would raise the water only a few hundred feet, probably only about five or six times as much as the tide now sometimes rises in the Bay of Fundy. Furthermore, if all the inequalities of our globe could be smoothed out, so that the entire surface would be of a uniform level, the water would cover it completely with a uniform depth of about one and one-half miles. * • ■ Appendix A 207 Another way to help us to understand this problem would be to draw on a blackboard a circle 79 inches in diameter, or such segments of it as can thus be shown. Now on a circle of this size, representing the earth, the height of the highest mountains would be represented by a very slight and sharp protuberance .055 of an inch in height, and the deepest part of the ocean by a corresponding depression .06 of an inch in depth; while to represent the average height of the land would require some instrument of precision much more delicate than a clumsy piece of chalk, and the results would not be discernible across an ordinary room. In view of all this, what an extremely slight disturbance of this delicate equilibrium would it require to spill the ocean over the land! Indeed, is it not one of the constant miracles of nature that the ocean keeps so obediently within its bounds as it has within historic times? “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.’’ In one of Sir William Dawson’s works (I cannot recall the exact location) we are given the comment of this very competent scholar on Gen. 8: 3, where the text of the Authorized Version says that “the waters returned from off the earth continually [margin, “in going and returning”]: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.” Dawson taught that the original expression here indicated tidal action; and he is far from being alone in saying that “the fountains of the great deep” mentioned in this connection can refer only to the ocean, which thus would be the chief cause assigned in the Bible for the Deluge, though of course Noah would be much impressed with the torrents of water pouring from the heavens. And it seems to me that these 150 days, which are twice mentioned in Genesis, are at least very significant in the light of the maximum period of tidal action as calculated by Houghton and Twisden, mentioned above. Our confidence in this hypothesis of the part played by tidal action is much strengthened when we examine the record in the rocks themselves, for it seems to me that noth 208 Back to the Bible ing but the hypnotizing suggestion of a perverse theory could prevent any competent observer from reading a record of tidal action in almost every one of the great geological deposits. Thus, at South Joggins, Nova Scotia, there are 76 successive seams of coal. In the British field there are 87 coal beds; in South Wales, over 100, 70 of which are worked; in the Liege basin on the Continent, 85; and in Westphalia, 117. And in each of these localities the successive beds are practically duplicates of one another, so far as fossil contents are concerned; and they alternate with beds of shale or sandstone or limestone that are also often extremely alike, indicating that each particular kind came from its own locality, and that an alternating movement of the water back and forth, “going and returning,” as the Bible says, was what produced these deposits. I say confidently that this is the most obvious reading of the rocky record on the spot, in the light of what we know of the modern action of the elements, and in view of the hopeless bankruptcy of the uniformitarian theory which has had a fair chance and an open field for nearly a century. So much, then, as to the probable cause of the Deluge. The problem of how the world could ever have recovered from such a catastrophe, is, as I have said elsewhere, a more difficult one, and involves the supposition of miraculous intervention. But I am thankful that there are still a few who believe in such miracles as the resurrection of Christ and the incarnation. And perhaps some will now be encouraged to add this of the Flood to their scanty list, since the very stones are now crying out, and modern science reluctantly gives us this permission. And some old-fashioned people may even remember that the faith for which millions of martyrs gave their lives was maintained in the face of something more substantial than the fear of being taunted as “unscientific.” Appendix B Under the supposition that some of my readers may not have seen my “Fundamentals of Geology,’’ it may be well for me to give here some remarks on the subject of geological time, in order to guard against any possible misunderstanding, or to forestall possible criticism or misrepresentation. A system of true inductive geology, such as the writer has outlined elsewhere, will never profess to say how long ago any or all of the geological changes took place. Nor yet will it be caught teaching the palpable absurdity that they all took place at the same time. The lowest beds in the Gorge of the Colorado obviously were not deposited at the same time as those at the top. On the other hand, I think it just as self-evident that some beds now classed as of the same age because of their fossils, are not contemporaneous in the geological sense. For example, it is surely against all the common-sense evidences of age to say that the Cambrian beds around the Baltic near Petrograd, where “the rocks still retain their original horizontality of deposition, [where] the muds are scarcely indurated, and the sands are still incoherent’’ (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. V, p. 86; eleventh edition), are of the same age as those beds, metamorphosed almost beyond recognition and buried deep beneath the mountains of other rocks,— beds that occasioned the heated wrangle between Sedgwick and Murchison in the early days of the science. But the current theory says that these are of the same age; and it also says that the soft Tertiary beds of California and England, constituting hundreds of miles of surface deposits with every physical indication that they have not very long ago been raised above the sea, are of the same age as those mountainous schists in the Alps which first disturbed Werner’s onion-coat nonsense, and the discovery of which, as Zittel says, “was a (209) 14 210 Back to the Bible very great blow to the geologists who upheld the hypothesis of the Archaean or Pre-Cambrian age of “all gneisses and schists.’’ Nor yet will a true inductive geology say that the many examples of seemingly undisturbed mountains of coral or crinoidal limestone were all grown in situ overnight. If I have shown that the fossils offer no scientific method of proving one kind of fossiliferous deposit older or younger than another, it is to be hoped that the other common-sense tests of age are still left to us, unless, indeed, our long trance under the hypnotic spell of Cuvier and Lyell has allowed these faculties to atrophy. These tests still remain with us; and it is now the business of our science to begin over again and try to construct a scheme of the geological events with less theory and a more strict adherence to objective fact, content if perhaps we can distinguish those multitudinous deposits which were manifestly due to this great world-catastrophe from those which were probably accumulated during the “indefinite” period of the earth’s previous existence, or from those which have occurred subsequently. But if we cannot be sure of these matters, let us at least refrain from repeating the sad fooleries of the past in the way of groundless speculation. If these and other problems of the rocks seem too much for us to solve, let us at least honestly say so. We are not required, with our finite minds, to solve all the riddles of the universe. Many phenomena taken singly would seem to indicate that this great world catastrophe must have occurred a very long time ago. And many of the indications of interval between successive geological events, considered singly and on the basis of uniformity, would also seem to imply a long time. But we cannot hope to settle such matters in a scientific way even approximately, and the sad experience of former blunders ought to teach us modesty and caution. All that a true geology can say with positiveness is that this world catastrophe must have occurred since man and multitudes of living species of plants and animals appeared on the globe. Archeology and Bible chronology, each in its sphere, may seek Appendix B 211 to establish a more or less approximate date; but geology can only deal with relative time, and no method hitherto devised of reading absolute time from the rocks has the slightest scientific value. Even less can geology say anything regarding the origin of the species of plants and animals found fossil in the rocks. Geology deals with the ruins of a world, not with the beginning of one. If we now know that no one kind of fossil can be proved to be older or younger than others intrinsically and necessarily, and if we infer from this that all the various types of life probably originated together contemporaneously (which is the most that science can say), we must beware of dogmatizing on this subject in the name of science. If we could read the whole story of the origin of the world from nature alone, we should not have needed the first chapters of Genesis. But as these matters are considered at length in my “Fundamentals of Geology,” I need not prolong the discussion of the subject here. Appendix C The science of geology throws much light on the problem of what kind of environment surrounded the race in the early days, though as yet it can say but little regarding the physical habits or social customs of man himself at that time. Let us first take the matter of climate. In the light of the monumental works of Sir Henry H. Howorth, refuting the glacial theory, and in the light of my own writings on the breakdown of the theory of definite successive ages, there is no need to say anything here regarding the absurd distinctions in point of time made between the various fossiliferous deposits. The Flood marks the great and indelible boundary between the two worlds in which man has lived. And the evidence of geology is unanimous and unequivocal that the world before the Flood enjoyed a sort of perpetual spring, including climatic and atmospheric conditions so astonishing that, were it not for the objective evidence, we could scarcely believe them possible, let alone account for them. Palms and other tropical forms grew in England; and evergreens, like ivies and magnolias, to say nothing of other semitropical or warm-temperate climate forms, grew away up within the arctic circle, thick beds of coal formed out of such vegetation being found scattered over all the lands of that region. Corals and other warmclimate sea-forms also occur abundantly in the same parts of the earth; while the Siberian “mummies” of elephants and other animals show that the climate in which they luxuriated “was abruptly terminated,’’ as Dana says, and “became suddenly extreme as of a single, winter’s night, and knew no relenting afterwards.’’ This mild, equable climate of springlike loveliness was conducive to luxuriant plant growth; and there is nothing in science inconsistent with the touching picture given by (212) Appendix C 213 Milton, that it was into such a wilderness of beauty and luxury that the first pair were banished from their primal home, compared with which, nevertheless, the rest of the earth seemed tame and dreary by contrast. “Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide; They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way.’’ Amid such surroundings of almost Edenic beauty, lavishly supplied by nature with food and every comfort, the early race, who had for a period held open communion with the angels, and who even yet were not wholly shut out from the inspiring visits of those heavenly teachers, multiplied and lived for nearly two thousand years. But the growing wickedness of all but a few, turning into a curse the rich bounties of nature, debasing their manhood in rioting and luxury and equally degrading cruelty and tyranny, led the great Jehovah to change all this pleasant environment, to sweep away the abundant supply of food, and to make man’s life a real struggle for existence. Thus it was in true and intelligent love for the race and the generations yet unborn that he — “Called for a cloud to darken all their years, And said, Go, spend them in a vale of tears.” Into surroundings of climate and vegetation very different now from their original environment, the few survivors from the Deluge went forth from the floating refuge in which their Creator had preserved them while the war of the elements was transforming that world of beauty into a desolate wilderness, with terrific extremes of heat and cold. In this changed world they were confronted with the alternative of continuous toil or actual starvation. We have no way of knowing how much knowledge the race brought with them regarding the uses of fire, the domestication of animals, the usefulness of the various cereals,— in short, regarding the whole of the practical lore of the agriculturist and the builder ; though it is reasonable to suppose that the race that 214 Back to the Bible had but recently conversed with angels, and had learned under their tuition the great facts and principles regarding the natural world, would not be helpless amid their new and strange surroundings. But one thing is self-evident: they were now under the stern necessity of employing all they knew about such matters in the desperate endeavor to wring a bare subsistence from the desolated earth. Gradually, by unremitting toil, the enlarging group became more comfortable; but again the same characteristics appeared that had called down the judgments of God upon the antediluvians. And again the same Power, with kind regard for the future well-being of the race, frustrated their scheme for a centralization of power and the control of all the individual units of mankind, by scattering them abroad upon the face of the earth, to begin in various lands separated nations, which henceforth should “not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.” Dan. 2:43. The astonishing works of early man thus forcibly driven forth from his second original home, are now to be found in almost all the earth, even in regions where the degenerate descendants have lost all knowledge of what their ancestors once were and did. And these early works, scattered over all the continents, exhibit a most striking similarity. So remarkable, indeed, is this resemblance that it seems conclusive of a very considerable advance in building and the other arts of civilization before these scattered fragments of the race were thus dispersed. How they could build such wonderful structures, limited largely as they must have been, at least at first, to the rude implements which each could individually manufacture from the rocks and ores, and how they had the sublime courage to conceive and attempt such things, and then perseveringly to carry them through to completion, is a puzzle to us all. Surely, compared with the men who built Stonehenge in England, or even the mound of Cahokia in Illinois, and the teocallis and temples scattered over the larger part of both the Old and the New World, to say nothing of Birs Nimrud Appendix C 215 in Babylon, and the Sphinx and the pyramids in Egypt, we must conclude that the men who dug Suez and Panama have little of which to boast. And compared with those ancient observers of nature who, scattered over so many lands some four or five thousand years ago, nevertheless understood at that early day all the leading principles of astronomy, including the rotundity of the earth, and who in their amazing works display an easy mastery of all the chief laws of civil and mechanical engineering,— compared with these men I see little cause for modern boasting. With no facilities to help them, they accomplished wonders; with every facility, we accomplish little more, in many respects much less. Have we evolved from them by development, or have we degenerated ?