THE FUNDAMENTALS VOLUME VII CHAPTER I THE PASSING OF EVOLUTION HY PROFESSOR GEORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT, D. D., LL. D., OBERLIN COLLEGE, OBERLIN, OHIO The word evolution is in itself innocent enough, and has a large range of legitimate use. The Bible, indeed, teaches a system of evolution. The world was not made in an instant, or even in one day (whatever period day may signify) but in six days. Throughout the whole process there was an orderly progress from lower to higher forms of matter and life. In short there is an established order in all the Creator’s work. Even the Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which being planted grew from the smallest beginnings to be a tree in which the fowls of heaven could take refuge. So everywhere there is “first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.” But recently the word has come into much deserved disre- pute by the injection into it of erroneous and harmful theo- logical and philosophical implications. The widely current doctrine of evolution which we are now compelled to combat is one which practically eliminates God from the whole cre- ative process and relegates mankind to the tender, mercies of a mechanical universe the wheels of whose machinery are left to move on without any immediate Divine direction. This doctrine of evolution received such an impulse from Darwinism and has been so often confounded with it that it is important at the outset to discriminate the two. Darwinism was not, in the mind of its author, a theory of universal evolu- 5
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