p. 7 | Satisfactory to Rome

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jan 11, 1905

Satisfactory to Rome.

Dr. B. F. Da Costa has well expressed the silent satisfaction with which the Roman Catholic Church sees that “all those forces of science, which it was once thought would be fatal to her, are now, in a way which constitutes one of the surprises of history, so grouping themselves as to afford her a new foundation.”

And we can trace it all to the effects of the scientific and philosophic teaching of the day. For it is the younger men, men educated in an atmosphere of Evolution and “Higher Criticism,” and accustomed from youth to hear the records of Genesis sneered at as “nursery yarns,” who are leading out along these lines. And, as it was in the Dark Ages, when the Bible was shut away from the people, and their ignorance of it resulted in crime and lawlessness on every side, and in their having no protection against their civil and ecclesiastical oppressors, so now we see iniquity abounding on every hand, and the people with no care for, or knowledge of, their danger from the religio-political combinations now forging the chains for their enslavement.

A religio-political despotism is the logical outcome of the evolution theory; its triumph is only a question of time; and its strength and universality when established can be estimated only by the popularity of the teaching which for nearly half a century has been preparing the world for just such a state of things, by teaching that the struggle for existence is the normal and not an abnormal condition of society, that man has developed from the lowest and crudest beginnings through this process, and can therefore complete the work of self-regeneration and purification without any outside, “supernatural” help or revelation.