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 thunderings, 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 sen

suality. Having entreated Jehovah to leave them, they were 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 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 Creater. 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 thunderbolts of heaven, in speeding around the world this work his people had so long neglected.

III

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.

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, Füchsel, 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