The issue is plainly stated. Writing on 23rd July, 1883, he said:- " I am a cordial CHRISTIAN EVOLUTIONIST. I do not agree, by any means, with all of Spencer—his agnosticism—not all of Huxley, Tyndal and their school. They are agnostic. I am not emphatically. But I am an EVOLUTIONIST, and that strikes at the root of all medieval and orthodox modern theology—the fall of man in Adam, the inheritance by his posterity of his guilt, and, in consequence, any such view of atonement as has been constructed to meet this fabulous disaster. Men have not fallen as a race. Men have come up. No great disaster met the race at the start. The creative decree of God was fulfilled. Any theory of atonement must be one which shall meet the fact that man was created at the lowest point, and, as I believe, as to his PHYSICAL being, evolved from the animal race beneath him; but, as to his, moral and spiritual nature, is a son of God, a new element having gone in, in the great movement of evolution, at the point of man's appearance."
Mr. Beecher had no right whatever to call himself a Christian evolutionist. He might call himself, as Darwin could and did, a deistic evolutionist, but a Christian evolutionist never. No evolutionist has the right to call himself Christian. Mr. Beecher denied the creation of man as given to us in Gen. 1, consequently denied the fall of man, and consequently refused the great truth of atonement. His statement amounts to this, he refused the Bible as inspired and treated it as a literary production in which he could admire what suited him, and draw moral lessons therefrom for his unitarian sermons.