W. W. P by William W. Prescott

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 5, 1909

W. W. P

By William W. Prescott

with criticisms of his ideals and opinions as modified by his environment?

Again: if God is himself the presupposed unity of the objective world and the subjective, and Jesus is only a man, the first to gain that goal of union by evolution, or the first man in whom God manifested himself as occupying that unity, what is to hinder another man, or any man, from attaining by evolution the same goal? Why has no other man, in well-nigh two thousand years after Jesus, reached that goal as Jesus reached it? What significance can the success of Jesus in reaching it have for the death in infancy, in ignorance, and in sin of unnumbered myriads since Jesus triumphed? He either died or did not die. If he died, every bond of death in the physical universe held him in the grave. He either rose from the dead, or he did not. If he did not, what can evolution by necessary laws tell us of his divine humanity? If he did, it must have been because every bond of death in the physical universe was broken from him by the whole energy of life in the universe, by the power of the living God. And how can evolution by necessary laws include the eternal God?

Once more, he was either conceived by the Spirit of God and born of Mary, or he was not. If he was born of human parents, by what hitherto unheard-of process did evolution enable that child to put the contrast of divinity with humanity between itself and its humble parents? For he was either conceived and born of them as a divine-human child or himself acquired divinity during his individual life. If he was born so, the contrast is inconceivably abrupt between the parents and the child. If he was not born so, but became divine in any legitimate sense of the term divinity, his imperfect humanity prior to its becoming divine must be explained.

So of many questions that throng around the cradle and the grave of Jesus which can not be answered by either the silence or the contempt of the advocates of any theory of evolution rigidly confining its methods of reasoning to finite things, however eloquently that theory may set forth the humanitarian aspects of the life of Jesus. . . .

When man, who expresses his moral freedom in the simple prediction, “I will,” violates his dependence upon God by saying, “I will,” he discovers all the possibilities of sin; and he can return to God only by coming to himself again and saying, “I will God's will.” But such a self-surrender of man's moral nature in the freedom of faith is no possible resultant of necessary evolution. It is the soul's self-surrender responding to self-sacrifice in the divine nature—to Jesus, the eternal Son of God who alone could say, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.

It is nothing less than astounding that those who have been “set for the defense of the gospel” should be so ready to surrender the fortress of faith and to place more confidence in the unproved and unprovable assertions of self-satisfied scientists than in that revelation concerning himself and his works which the God of heaven has condescended to make to man. The conclusions which are deduced from a very limited range of observation and from such assumptions as in their very nature shut out the existence of the supernatural, are received as of more authority than those words of light and wisdom which have been a guide and a hope to men of all ages.

In answer to all these claims and denials of a false science, we present a “Thus saith the Lord.” Instead of regarding Jesus as a mere product of his time, the flower of Judaism, we accept him as the eternal Son of God, who took our flesh that by uniting divinity and humanity in his own person he might become the way of salvation to fallen man. We accept in their fullest sense the words of Jesus, “Without me ye can do nothing,” and depend upon the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, the representative of Christ, as the power for righteousness and hope of perfection; and we “look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness,” not as the product of evolution, but as the fulfilment of that promise of old, “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.” Our confidence is in creation rather than in evolution.