Evolutionism in the Pulpit 89 salve to conscience the doctrine that “the Bible was not in tended to teach science”, one of those half-truths that are more misleading than a downright untruth. In this way the story of creation as given in Genesis was set aside, and the whole book discredited. As Christ could not by any logical possibility be made a product of evolution without an absolute denial of His supernatural birth and His Divine claims, and the new birth, or creation, for man in Him was open to the same objection, these truths were either ob scured, minimized, or totally neglected and even denied. To such lengths were some of the sworn “defenders of the faith once delivered to the saints” ready to go in order to avoid being considered as hopelessly “unscientific” and “behind the times in scholarship.” That was twenty years ago or more. But strangest of all is the fact that a few of these minis ters are still clinging to the “gospel of dirt,” as Carlyle aptly styled it, and are referring to it in a way that indicates a belief on their part that such reference is still evidence of up-to-date scholarship. As early as 1889 Professor Virchow, of Berlin, admittedly the ablest anthropologist of modem times, when summing up the results of investigations of this subject by himself and other leading scientists, covering a period of twenty years, declared: “In vain have the links which should bind man to the monkey been sought; not a single one is there to show. The so-called proanthropos, who should exhibit this link, has not been found. No really learned man asserts that he has seen him. . . . Perhaps some one may have seen him in a dream, but when awake he will never be able to say that he has approached him. Even the hope of soon discovering him has departed; it is hardly spoken of.” Shortly before his death, some ten years later, in an address before the Inter national Medical Society, he spoke to the same effect, and with even a greater degree of positiveness, asserting that “the attempts to find the transition from animal to man have ended
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