Part 2 (1/2)

2. The divine development begins in the beginning, with G.o.d, creating the heavens and the earth; but the theory of atheistic evolution has no beginning, a.s.serting the eternal existence of a changing world.

3. The divine development is the unfolding of an intelligent plan, showing the adaptation of means to ends for the accomplishment of a purpose; the atheistic theory of evolution denies plan, purpose, adaptation and final cause.

4. The divine development is conducted, and continually reinforced by the will of the Omnipotent G.o.d; the atheistic development evolves only the forces of matter.

5. The divine development has a moral character, and terminates in the highest holiness and happiness of all obedient men and angels; but the atheistic development contemplates and promises only the evolution of animal instinct and pa.s.sions, the eternal death of the individual, and, for the universe, only purposeless cycles of progress, and catastrophies of ruin.

In this chapter we discuss only the theory of atheistic evolution. In the discussion of all questions affecting human life it is advantageous to trace them to their origin, and to follow them out to their practical results. Thus we get a clear view of the whole subject, and are enabled to a.s.sign to it its proper influence. It is also a great benefit to the ma.s.s of mankind to conduct such discussions in plain language, and to translate the roundabout phrases, and the Latinized words of scientific men, as much as we can, into the vulgar tongue; to state the subjects of discussion so as to be understood of the people. So we shall put the whole business of Darwinism and development before you, reader, in a nutsh.e.l.l, by simply asking you the question at the head of this chapter, ”Was your mother a monkey?”

What a question!

Well, then, your grandmother? her grandmother? or does it seem less offensive, or more likely to you to go back some thousands of years, and say your forefathers were apes?

That is exactly what Mr. Darwin says when we translate his scientific language into the vulgar tongue: ”The early progenitors of man were no doubt once covered with hair, both s.e.xes having beards; their ears were pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail having the proper muscles. The foot, judging from the condition of the great toe in the foetus, was then prehensile, and our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm forest-clad land. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons.”[5] This ancient form ”if seen by a naturalist, would undoubtedly have been ranked as an ape or a monkey.

And as man, under a genealogical point of view, belongs to the CATARHINE or Old World stock (of monkeys), we must conclude, however much the conclusion may revolt our pride, that our early progenitors would have been properly thus designated.”[6] So here you have your genealogy, name and thing fully described. Mr. Darwin thinks it is quite an honorable pedigree: ”Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of n.o.ble quality. * * * Unless we willfully close our eyes, we may, with our present knowledge, approximately recognize our parentage, nor need we feel ashamed of it. The most humble organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our feet; and no one with an unbiased mind can study any living creature, however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvelous structure and properties.”[A] There are people, however, who do not grow enthusiastic at the idea of their long-tailed progenitors; but there is no accounting for taste in such matters!

For elderly people, who do not take so enthusiastically to monkeys as his junior readers, Mr. Darwin has provided a rather less gymnastic ancestry. How would you like to have a fish for your forefather? If it were one of Neptune's n.o.ble tritons, or the Philistine fish-G.o.d, Dagon, or a mermaid, it might not be so repulsive as the ape; or even a twenty-pound salmon, flas.h.i.+ng its silver and blue in the sunlight as it spins the line off the reel, might not be so utterly disgusting as the monkey burlesque of humanity. But, alas! Mr. Darwin has been sent to this proud nineteenth century as the prophet to teach us humility, and here is the scientific statement of the structure of our fishy forefathers: ”At a still earlier period the progenitors of man must have been aquatic in their habits, for morphology plainly tells us that our lungs consist of a modified swim bladder which once served as a float.

These early predecessors of man thus seen in the dim recesses of time must have been as lowly organized as the lancelot or amphibioxus, or even still more lowly organized.”[7]

That certainly is a very humble origin. We are not, however, by any means to the end of our pedigree. Mr. Darwin says that your codfish aristocracy are descended from a race of squirts--the squirts which you picked up on the sh.o.r.e and squeezed, when you were a boy, discharging these primitive Babc.o.c.k Extinguishers upon your playfellows, irreverently regardless of the harm done the poor squirt, the ancestor of the human race. If you doubt it, here is the latest deliverance of infallible science upon the subject. He describes the Ascidians: ”They hardly appear like animals, and consist of a simple tough leathery sack, with two small projecting orifices. They belong to the Molluscoida of Huxley, a lower division of the great family of the Mollusca; but they have recently been placed by some naturalists among the vermes or worms.

Their larvae somewhat resemble tadpoles in shape, and have the power of swimming freely about. * * * We should thus be justified in believing that, at an extremely remote period, a group of animals existed resembling in many respects the larvae of our present Ascidians, which diverged into two great branches, the one retrograding in development and producing the present cla.s.s of Ascidians, the other rising to the crown and summit of the animal kingdom, by giving birth to the vertebrata.”[8] Thus it appears that Mr. Darwin deduces his origin, and that of mankind in general, from one of these Ascidians, or, in plain English, makes them a race of squirts.

The notion of evolution is a belief that all living beings, plants as well as animals, have not been created, but, like Topsy, just grew, from the very smallest germs or spores. Evolutionists inform us that all kinds of organisms have been evolved from four or five primeval germs or spores; or more consistently with their great principle, that the simple gave birth to the differentiated, from one primeval germ or egg. Mr.

Darwin alleges four or five primal forms, acknowledging that a.n.a.logy would lead him up to one. But other members of this school consistently and boldly follow up the stream to its fountain, and allege a single primeval living seed as the origin of all living things, and that this must have been a microscopic animalcule, or plant spore, of the very lowest order, which, multiplying its kind, gave birth to improved and enlarged offspring; and they, in their turn, grew, and multiplied, and differentiated into varieties; and so, in the course of endless ages, the poorer sorts peris.h.i.+ng and the better sorts prospering, the world became filled with its existing populations, without any new creative acts of G.o.d, and without any particular providential care over the new species.

The particular process according to which this multiplication and improvement took place, Mr. Darwin calls Natural Selection. Every creature tends to increase and multiply; and the very slowest breeders would soon fill the earth, were their multiplication not checked by hunger, by the attacks of enemies, and by the struggle for existence.

But all are not born alike strong, or swift, or of the same color; some of the same brood are better fitted to escape enemies, or to fight the battle of life, than others. These will survive, while the weak ones perish. This Mr. Wallace calls, the survival of the fittest. They will transmit their superior size, or swiftness, or better color, or whatever superiority they possess, to their offspring. The process will go on in successive generations, each adding an infinitesimal quant.i.ty to the stock gained by the past generation; just as breeders of improved stock increase the weight of cattle by breeding from the largest; or breeders of race-horses increase the speed by breeding from the swiftest. In this way varieties from the same family will grow into different species.

And, as only those differences which are beneficial to the animal are preserved, they will grow into improved species; and, as variations of all sorts take place, so all sorts of varieties and species arise in process of time. All will thus tend to perfect themselves according to the laws of nature, and without any special oversight or care of G.o.d, or of anybody but Natural Selection; which Mr. Darwin takes special care to describe as an unintelligent selector. He defines the nature which selects to be ”the aggregate action and product of natural laws,” and these laws are ”the sequences of events as ascertained by us.” He ridicules the idea of G.o.d's special endowment of the fantail pigeon with additional feathers, or of the bull dog's jaws with strength, and says, ”But if we give up the principle in the one case, if we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in order, for instance, that the greyhound, that perfect image of symmetry and vigor, might be formed; no shadow of reason can be a.s.signed for the belief that variations alike in nature, and the results of the same general laws which have been the groundwork through Natural Selection of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided.”[9] This, then, is the grand distinctive difference of Mr. Darwin's mode of producing the various animals; namely, that it is unintelligent, their variations are not designed nor intended by the Creator, but they are the results of a method of trial and error, producing a hit-and-miss pattern. The failures all perish, and the successes live and prosper; but there is no intentional or special guidance of G.o.d in the business. And the business includes the whole process of peopling the globe, from the creation of the first four or five germs down to the last formation of human society. G.o.d is thus dismissed from the greatest part of the world's life, including all human affairs. This is not exactly atheism in theory, but practically it amounts to much the same thing.

It is this excommunication of G.o.d's agency from the management of the world, and especially from human affairs, by Mr. Darwin's method, which has so commended his books to the unG.o.dly world. There is a general agreement among this cla.s.s of writers, that Mr. Darwin has destroyed the basis of the argument for the being of G.o.d from design as displayed in the adaptations of birds and beasts to their conditions. Mr. Huxley says that ”when he first read Mr. Darwin's book, what struck him most forcibly was the conviction that teleology, as commonly understood, had received its death blow at Mr. Darwin's hands.”[10] ”For the notion that every organism has been created as it is, and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin subst.i.tutes the conception of something which may fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary incessantly; of these variations the few meet with surrounding conditions which suit them and thrive; the many are unsuited and become extinguished. * * * For the teleologist (the Christian) an organism exists, because it was made for the conditions in which it was found.

For the Darwinian an organism exists, because out of many of its kind it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it was found. * * * If we apprehend the spirit of the Origin of Species rightly, then nothing can be more entirely and absolutely opposed to teleology, as it is commonly understood, than the Darwinian theory.”[11] Prof. Haeckel argues to the same purpose that Darwin's theory leads inevitably to Atheism and Materialism. Dr. Buchner says of Darwin's theory, ”It is the most thoroughly naturalistic that can be imagined, and far more atheistic than that of his decried predecessor, Lamarck.” Carl Vogt also commends it because ”It turns the Creator, and his occasional intervention in the revolution of the earth and in the production of species, without any hesitation out of doors, inasmuch as it does not leave the smallest room for the agency of such a Being. The first living germ being granted, out of it the creation develops itself progressively by Natural Selection, through all the geologic periods of our planet, by the simple law of descent. No new species arise by creation, and none perishes by annihilation; the natural cause of things, the process of evolution of all organisms, and of the earth itself, is of itself sufficient for the production of all we see. Thus man is not a special creation, produced in a different way, and distinct from other animals, endowed with an individual soul, and animated by the breath of G.o.d; on the contrary, man is only the highest product of the progressive evolution of animal life, springing from the group of apes next below him.”[12]

Whether, therefore, Mr. Darwin himself intends his theory to be atheistic or not, it has had the misfortune to be so viewed by the greater number of its supporters; and, accordingly, it is this view of it which we shall keep prominent in the following discussion. Mr. Darwin does undoubtedly intend his theory to be antagonistic to the Bible account of creation and providence, and an improvement upon it; and, whether atheistic or not, it is undoubtedly anti-Christian.

_I. The History of the Theory._

The first thing which strikes a common person on first hearing this theory is that it is a very queer notion for any Christian man to invent. We are naturally curious to know how a man, educated in a Christian country, could have fallen into it. But it is, in fact, no new discovery, but an old heathen superst.i.tion. Some four hundred years before Christ, when the world had almost wholly apostatized into idolatry, Democritus, among the Greeks, became offended with the vulgar heathen G.o.ds, and set himself to invent a plan of the world without them. From Eastern travelers the Greeks knew that the Brahmins, in India, had a theory of the world developing itself from a primeval egg.

He set himself to refine upon it, and imagined virtually the Nebular Hypothesis. He said that all matter consisted of very small atoms, dancing about in all directions, from all eternity, and which at last happened into the various forms of the present world.

The ancient Phoenicians held a theory that all life was from the sea; and that, as the wet mud produces all sorts of herbs in spring now, so originally it produced all manner of animals. They wors.h.i.+ped it as a G.o.d, and called it Mot, or Mud. Anaximander took up the theory and carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates. Lucretius still further developed the theory in a poem in six books. The spread of Christianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr.

Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens overspread the East, when some of them, it seems, favored it. But it seems to be an unlucky dogma, since, with the downfall of the power of the false prophet, the anti-Christian form of science went down again.

The dogma of the trans.m.u.tation of species reappeared, however, in the Romish Church in a religious form; the old heathenism, which had never been wholly banished from the minds of men, thus rea.s.serting itself.

About the tenth century some began to teach that the bread of the communion of the Lord's Supper was transubstantiated, and the wine also, into the body, and blood, and soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is probably the most complete trans.m.u.tation of species which has ever been imagined or described. The evolution of bread into Deity is only equaled by Mr. Tyndall's endowment of matter with all the potencies of life and thought; a miracle differing from the popish transubstantiation only in the element of time, but in its essential nature equally supernatural. The dogma excited great discussion for centuries, and produced as many theories of transubstantiation as we now observe of evolution, keeping philosophic minds and pens busy till the dawn of modern science after the Reformation.

La Place threw out the Nebular Hypothesis, which is substantially Democritus' concourse of atoms, only La Place endeavored to subst.i.tute circular motions under the law of gravitation, instead of Democritus'

chance arrangement, as a sufficient cause for the formation and motions of planets. Herschel's discovery of the nebulae was hastily laid hold of by a number of writers, and notably by the author of the Vestiges of Creation, as furnis.h.i.+ng the primeval matter necessary for world-making; and till the spectroscopic discoveries of the composite nature of gaseous nebulae, they were claimed as specimens of worlds in process of formation. La Place supposed his nebulous matter to be gas in a state of white-heat combustion, compared with which the heat of the hottest fire would be a cool bath. In no other way could he dissipate the world's substance into sufficient thinness for his vortices. But Spencer saw that this tremendous heat would be fatal to all forms of life, and especially to sensitive beings; and Tyndall shows us that this original matter must have had all the potencies of life and sensation, and a potency of sensation means being able to feel. Now the worst fate threatened against sinners in the Bible is a place in the lake burning with fire and brimstone, which burns at 500 Fahrenheit; but the temperature of the original fire-mist was a thousand times hotter. Some of these scientists call such a fate as the Bible threatens against the wicked, cruel. But here is a h.e.l.l manufactured by the evolutionists infinitely worse than that of the Bible; for the h.e.l.l of the Bible is only for the wicked, but the evolutionists' h.e.l.l is indiscriminately for all, saints and sinners, and all sorts of creatures, innocent as babes unborn of any crime; yet they, or, which is the same thing, the matter containing all the potency of their sensations, that is their power of feeling, were born in this h.e.l.l, and kept in it from all eternity, until it pleased the evolutionists to begin to cool it down a little. However, it was rather scientific than benevolent reasons which induced Mr.

Spencer to reverse the order of procedure, and make his star dust cold to begin with, and to heat it up by condensation and pressure to about the temperature of molten iron; which was still an uncomfortably warm lodging for Mr. Tyndall's potencies of sensation for some millions of years. The division of opinion about the original nebulae, however, still prevails; some evolutionists of the old-fas.h.i.+oned order still taking their nebulae hot, while others, with Spencer, prefer it cold, with star dust.

As to the Spontaneous Generation of life, there has been less progress of opinion, though great variety has been exhibited. Ovid and Virgil describe the way in which a carca.s.s produces bees. It was generally believed that putrid meat produced the maggots, till the blow-flies were discovered laying their eggs. Then it was alleged that the entozoa, the worms found in the bodies of animals, were self-produced, without eggs, until the microscope discovered that one could lay 60,000 eggs. Strauss, however, adhered to the idea that as the tapeworm, as he supposed, was self-produced, so man was originated by the primeval slime. So also Professor Vogt, and M. Tremaux develop their animals from the land, and the latter accounts for their various qualities from the various qualities of their respective birthplaces, the crop being conditioned by the soil. But Mr. Darwin derives all his organisms from the sea.

Electricity in its galvanic form was for a while the agent to fire the earthly or marine mud with the vital spark; and Mr. Crosse's experiments were supposed instances of the creation of acarii or mites in the battery bath, until it was found that the bath contained eggs and the electricity only hatched them. Some English evolutionists still adhere to the theory of Spontaneous Generation, but the leading Germans deny any instance of it being known. Huxley denies that any case of it has been established as now practicable; but supposes that if we could have been present at the beginning of the world, when all the elements were young and vigorous, we should have seen the chemical elements of the earth and air combining to form living beings, by the mere powers of their nature. If that were the fact, it would be a fact unique and unparalleled, utterly out of the course of nature, and so as contrary to the theory of evolution as if these living beings had been inspired with life by Almighty G.o.d.