And further, Christ Himself puts His imprimatur on Genesis 1 and 2. How puny the denial of these chapters by Bishop Barnes and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher appears in the light of the statement by Christ Himself. We read:- " He answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?" (Matt. 19:4-64And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, 5And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? 6Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Matthew 19:4‑6)).
Christ says that from the beginning God made them male and female. No, says the evolutionist, in the beginning was a speck of protoplasm. The infatuated Bishop of Birmingham said:- " As a result of the discoveries and discussions of the last, hundred years, men of science now affirm that something like a million or more' years ago, some tribal group of ape-like beings began to develop a human brain. After some FIFTY THOUSAND GENERATIONS we have been produced. Detailed evidence of this development is not available, though imperfect records of it MUST exist in geological strata."
His ignorance of both science and the Bible is here displayed in all its crudity.
Shall we believe Bishop Barnes, or the One whom he acknowledged as Master, but to whom he gave the lie direct? The fact is Bishop Barnes was not the evolution of fifty thousand generations of ape-like beings, but the degeneration of parents who sinned and fell. The tendency of the race has not been upward but downward, save where Christianity has operated, and raised man through the knowledge of God through Christ to purity of thought and word and deed, to love of God and his fellow-man. Put Bishop Barnes alongside the Apostle Paul. Paul's writings do not show him to be lower in the human family, nor approximately nearer, even in the smallest degree, to those supposed ancestors of ape-like character, who began to develop a human brain.
Professor Patrick Geddes (St. Andrew's University) and Sir J. Arthur Thompson (Aberdeen University) say, at the end of their joint book, " We must leave that rich mastery of THE EVOLUTION SECRET we once hoped for to the successors we would fain send out so much better equipped " (Evolution, p. 232).
So evolution is still a secret. A secret is something unknown! What an admission 1 It is at least honest and we can hope these professors may have embraced the truth of God's creation of man, as did Professor Romanes, who had to abandon in his riper years evolutionary theories for the solid truth of the Word of God.
They see, too, how these doctrines of " survival of the fittest "—these biological theories of evolutionists—run on parallel lines with the thought, which led to the great war (1914-1918) with all its unspeakable brutality. They compare, " The striking social parallelism of his [Professor Weissmann's] own theory of the germplasm, of the ovum's strict inheritance, with the thought of contemporary Germany with the victories and hegemony of Prussia, the renewed claims of its aristocracy, and above all, with its doctrine of race, political and anthropological combined... All these movements alike have now found eloquent, though hardly scientific expression in Houston Stewart Chamberlain [the renegade Englishman, whose writings in German helped on the war], whose contemporary vogue in Germany is thus earned and explained " (Evolution, pp. 214, 215).
These professors were pretty far-seeing, for their book was printed in May, 1912.
General Friedrich von Bernhardi writing in the same year, clearly shows that he considered that evolutionary ideas were on the side of brutality and ruthlessness. He wrote:- "'War is the father of all things.' The sages of antiquity, long before Darwin, recognized this... War gives a BIOLOGICALLY just decision ... But it is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and as such, an indispensable factor in civilization."
Professor Lasson (Berlin University) writes:- " The state (which realizes the highest form of the culture of the races) can realize itself only by the destruction of other states which logically can only be brought about by violence " (Das Kulturideal and der Kreig, p. 15).
Again:- " War is the noblest and holiest expression of human. activity " [Jung Deutschland, Official Organ of Young Germany, October, 1913].
We get here with a vengeance the "survival of the fittest"—fittest only by reason of brute strength and ferocity, as a lion or tiger would survive an unarmed man.
A tree is known by its fruits. If evolutionary axioms translated into politics led to the awful and blighting consequences of war, with all its brutality and wholesale destruction of life, and its aftermath of collapse of civilization and terrible incubus of debt, and in the realm of religion leads to the destruction of faith in the Bible, in Christ and His atoning work, then the less we have of evolution the better. Compare von Bernhardi's teaching and the Sermon on the Mount, and we can see at a glance where evolution and where the teaching of Christ lead us.
We have seen from the Bible that:-
1. God created man and woman
2. He created man in a special way.
3. He created him in His image, after His likeness.
4. He created woman in a special way.
5. He set man and woman in dominion over the lower creation.
6. He instituted marriage.
7. He instituted marriage designedly to illustrate deeper and spiritual things.
To refuse all this is to refuse the whole Bible. Bishop Barnes and all likeminded were as sensible as a man who, standing under an arch, with his pick loosens and dislodges the central stone. They do it to their own destruction.
All this is further emphasized in the New Testament. We get the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ in Luke 3. His descent is there traced from David and Abraham, and finally we read, " Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God " (Luke 3:3838Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God. (Luke 3:38)).
Adam was thus the son of God, and that by direct creation, is the assertion of Scripture, which we implicitly believe. We are therefore not surprised when all the proved facts of science (not hypotheses) confirm this belief. The- Scriptures say that Adam was the son of God. The evolutionist says he was the son of the ape-like man, who in turn was the son of the man-like ape, and in turn descended from lower forms, until we get to the bit of protoplasm, the origin of which is entirely unaccounted for—the whole made up of guesses and unproved theories.