38 The Fundamentals tion which has superseded Darwinism can tell us nothing here. They are a part of the mass of proof that man is by nature a religious being; and that indisputable fact points to the further fact that he is God’s creature. People who are endowed with an abnormal capacity for “simple faith” may possibly attribute the intellectual and aesthetical phenomena of man’s being to the great “primordial germ,” a germ which was not created at all, but (according to the philosophy of one of Mark Twain’s amusing stories), “only just happened.” But most of us are so dull-witted that we cannot rise to belief in an effect with- out an adequate cause; and if we accepted the almighty germ hypothesis we should regard it as a more amazing display of creative power than the “Mosaic cosmogony” described. WHY A FAILURE? But all this, which is so cleár to every free and fearless thinker, gives rise to a difficulty of the first magnitude. If man be a failure, how can he be a creature of a God who is infinite in wisdom and goodness and power ? He is like a bird with a broken wing, and God does not make birds with broken wings. I f a bird cannot fly, the merest baby con- cludes that something must have happened to it. And by an equally simple process of reasoning we conclude that some evil has happened to our race. And here the Eden Fall af- fords an adequate explanation of the strange anomalies of our being, and no other explanation of them is forthcoming. Cer- tain it is, then, that man is God’s creature, and no less certain is it that he is a fallen creature. Even if Scripture were silent here, the patent facts would lead us to infer that some disaster such as that which Genesis records must have befallen the human race. MAN WITHOUT EXCUSE But, while this avails to solve one difficulty,, it suggests another. The dogma of the moral depravity of man, and irremediable, cannot be reconciled with divine justice in pun-
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