Beecher on Evolution by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 28, 1883

Beecher on Evolution.

By Editor

A. WILFORD HALL, author of the “Problem of Human Life,” gives a unique report of Mr. Beecher’s lecture on Evolution. His decision was that Mr. Beecher had read up for his lecture on but one side of the subject, and not very thoroughly on that, and that he was unacquainted with the overwhelming arguments which have been presented against Darwin’s theory. There was none of the fire and energy which the celebrated orator has been accustomed to throw into his lectures, and a sense of humiliation seemed to rest upon the speaker’s friends, and somewhat upon the speaker himself. Mr. Hall says:—

“We wished to see it out, and witness the novel sight of monkeyism gone to seed in the person of the foremost Christian minister of the civilized world; and we saw it. And so painfully humiliating did the solemn farce appear to us that we could not have felt more lugubrious had we been at a funeral. The immense audience seemed to take the same view of the occasion, as not a clap nor a sign of applause greeted the speaker from beginning to end of his puerile and disjointed attempt to prove himself and his audience but a congregation of highly developed and carefully cultivated monkeys. About the only witty thing he said was, ‘I had just as lief [which he pronounced liv] come from the loins of a monkey as to be made of dirt and come from a mud-hole, wouldn’t you?’ One gentleman near us saw the point of the joke on Genesis, and showed his appreciation by curling his lip.”

The conclusion at which Mr. Hall arrived in regard to the teachings of Mr. Beecher is just what we have stated as our belief of the tendency of his “nihilistic theology.” The report says:—

“The direct and necessary tendency of his entire reasoning was to disparage the divine authenticity of the Scriptures and the fundamental doctrines of orthodox theology, while the unavoidable effect, upon all who were not imperviously disgusted with his unparalleled apostacy, was to weaken faith in the Bible as anything but a compilation of poetic and allegorical compositions, conveying but imperfect ideas of the earlier stages of human advancement from that barbarism which succeeded the ape dynasty. We solemnly asseverate our belief that one such lecture, coming from Mr. Beecher, trusted and revered as he has always been by so many, does more for the spread of infidelity, and even atheism, than any course of lectures Ingersoll ever delivered.”

We consider it one of the most striking evidences of the decline of true piety in the American churches that Mr. Beecher has been so long looked upon as a leading Christian teacher. Eloquence, oratorical power, is preferred to reverence for the sacred Scriptures; the man is worshiped, and the word of God degraded; science, falsely so-called, is suffered to usurp the place of inspiration. “The glory is departed.” “Babylon is fallen.”