Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 18, 1909

Science and the Scriptures

• THE apostles of the advanced theology are making more and more sweeping claims and are becoming more and more outspoken in their attitude against the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures. They are now beginning to assert that in a short time no voice will be raised in protest against the teachings of that class of scientists who have arrayed themselves against revealed truth. A journal of wide influence interprets the present situation thus:—

Twenty-five years ago religionists of this [conservative] class were denouncing and deriding Darwin and his disciples. To-day they are still proclaiming the inerrancy of the Scriptures or of the official utterances of the church. They are busy heretic-hunting, among the Protestant sects as well as in the pale of Catholicism, but their number seems to be diminishing, their confidence weakening; and no man who has watched the course of theological digression since the publication of “The Origin of Species,” can entertain doubts as to the ultimate extinction of these conservatives. The complete acceptance of the doctrine of evolution—if not of Darwinism in the narrow technical sense—has shattered that old cosmogony on which so much of ancient Christian dogma rested.

This indicates that kind of harmony between Biblical theology and science which existed between the lion and the lamb, when the lamb lay down inside the lion. It is becoming more and more evident that in a short time only those who accept the closing message, which urges the worship of the Creator of “heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters,” will stand in defense of that gospel of creation which is “the power of God unto salvation.”