The Fundamentals - 1917: Vol.4

64

The Fundamentals Nature’s limitless network of types and symbols and resemblances is wondrously beautiful. It wakens the spirit of poetry in the soul, but an absent-minded dreamer has gazed and forgotten himself, and is lost in a labyrinth of vagaries. Darwinists have been turning the world over searching for a common fatherhood, but they have found a common maker- hood. An Italian—a Dr. Barrago—gave his book the title, “Man, made in the image of God, was also made in the image of an ape”, and Mr. Darwin refers to it without dis­ approval, and the blasphemy is logical. Darwinism degrades God and man. RUDIMENTS The Darwinian notion of rudiments is that they are abortive reversions to ancestral types. Wherever one of the cult has heard of anything nearly or remotely like rudiments—» for instance, Stanley Hall on rhythm, beating waves, ancestral fish and dancing—particularly outside the bounds of heredity, it has been grist for their mill. And yet they hardly know where to put these structures. If they claim that they are absolutely useless they place them outside the scope of natural selection; and if, on the other hand, they admit that they serve some purpose they admit that God may have made them. Hux­ ley felt the difficulty when he confessed: “It is almost impossible to prove that any structure, how­ ever rudimentary, is useless; that is to say, that it plays no part whatever in the economy; and if it is in the slightest degree useful there is no reason why, on the hypothesis of direct creation, it should not have been created.” (Britan- nica, Art. on Evolution.) May we add that if Mr. Huxley and Mr. Darwin and I and you have failed to discover the use of anything, “there is no reason why it should not have been created” ? We remember that we have not even defined life; that the most that we can do is to distinguish some of its forces; that we

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