Blasting at the Rock of Ages by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 13, 1909

“Blasting at the Rock of Ages”

By C. M. S.

OUR writers have been chronicling from time to time in our own various periodicals a startling tendency on the part of many of the most learned men of the day to break down all hitherto accepted standards of both religion and morality through the instruction given by them in college and university. Fragment by fragment they have been throwing away the very Word of God, while they have been giving to the hundreds of thousands of young men and women that come each year under their tutelage the strongest possible incentive to doubt everything divine, even to the existence of God himself.

Some of the religious journals of this country have protested weakly against the ruinous tendency. A few of the secular journals have noted the drift of the new teaching with no small degree of wonder, and have whispered startled inquiries to the public whom they serve. The great body of students graduating each year under such instruction seems to have lost its foundation and to be unable to find a solid spot on which to rest its feet. The majority of this great company of highly educated youth, augmented by two hundred twenty-nine thousand each year, is certain of but one thing, that it has lost confidence in the Bible as the revealed Word of God, and is drifting, it knows not whither.

The evils of this campaign are not restricted to the schools and the direct product of the schools. They have permeated the pulpits, and a great portion of the church-membership of the country listen from week to week to dissertations against the Bible and about God that are far more helpful to the cause of agnosticism than to the cause of foreign missions.

The existence of these conditions led a magazine correspondent, Mr. Harold Bolce, two years ago, to enter into an exhaustive study of the kind of instruction given in the colleges and universities

of the United States, particularly along the lines indicated. The results of his investigations, covering the two years, are now being given in a series of articles in the Cosmopolitan magazine, beginning with the May number, under the title given at the head of this article. What the editor of that magazine has to say in introducing the series, is in itself worthy of consideration. To quote:—

What Mr. Bolce sets down here is of the most astounding character. Out of the curricula of American colleges a dynamic movement is upheaving ancient foundations and promising a way for revolutionary thought and life. Those who are not in close touch with the great colleges of the country will be astonished to learn the creeds being fostered by the faculties of our great universities. In hundreds of class rooms it is being taught daily that the decalogue is no more sacred than a syllabus; that the home as an institution is doomed; that there are no absolute evils; that immorality is simply an act in contravention of society’s accepted standards; that democracy is a failure, and the Declaration of Independence only spectacular rhetoric; that the change from one religion to another is like getting a new hat; that moral precepts are passing shibboleths; that conceptions of right and wrong are as unstable as styles of dress; that wide stairways are open between social levels, but that to the climber children are encumbrances; that the sole effect of prolificacy is to fill tiny graves; and that there can be and are holier alliances without the marriage relation than within it. These are some of the revolutionary and sensational teachings submitted with academic warrant to the minds of hundreds of thousands of students in the United States. It is time that the public realized what is being taught to the youth of this country. ‘The social question to-day,’ says Disraeli, ‘is only a zephyr which rustles the leaves, but will soon become a hurricane.’ It is a dull ear that can not hear the mutterings of the coming storm.

Mr. Bolce gives a list of nineteen colleges and universities, extending from Massachusetts to California, some of which he entered as a special student, and some as a visitor attending the lectures, while a portion of the information upon which he bases his articles was obtained direct from presidents, deans, and professors. This material, he declares, ‘constitutes a profound surprise—a series, in fact, of increasing surprises—absorbing and sensational.’

The teaching of these instructors, like the surging sea, is determined to beat its waves against everything solid or substantial with which it comes in contact, or which it can hunt out for attack. Says Mr. Bolce: ‘There is scholarly repudiation of all solemn authority. The decalogue is no more sacred than a syllabus. Everything is subjected to searching analysis. . . . From the college standpoint there are no God-established covenants. What happens at the primaries is more to the point than what took place in Palestine. . . . Whether the subject be a god or a gas, a matter of morals or volcanic mud, a syllogism or a star, the professor approaches it impersonally, critically determined to know the truth. A government is great, but so is a gnat—either may afflict the land. There is nothing ex cathedra in the professor’s curriculum, save as he expresses it himself.’

Humanity, left to itself, demonstrated ages ago its powerlessness to resist the deteriorating tendencies of the flesh and the carnal mind; and into every possible excess of abominable idolatry it went by turning its back upon God, and following the dark lead of its own shadow. With God behind its back and forgotten, and with self alone before its eyes, there was no faculty of the mind which it did not bend to lust, and no god of lust to which it did not bow down in worship. Under such conditions there was nothing too sacred for the most evil pollution, and no form of deity which they did not associate with the most evil propensities of a fallen nature. What they did was what the school men to-day are doing, that is, repudiating ‘all solemn authority.’ They, anciently, ‘refused to have God in their knowledge;’ therefore he ‘gave them up unto a reprobate mind.’ Rom. 1:28. These, to-day, have put the most sacred communications of God upon a plane with the mythology of those same ancients, and have gone so far as to declare even that ‘the highest manifestation of God is man.’ We have every reason to believe that God will treat such individuals in exactly the same manner that he treated the ancients who turned their backs upon him; and the indications are that he is doing so. The ‘reprobate mind’ is indeed working to-day.

Says Mr. Bolce: ‘They teach young men and women plainly that an immoral act is merely one contrary to the prevailing conceptions of society, and that the daring who defy the code do not offend any deity, but simply arouse the venom of the majority—the majority that has not yet grasped the idea. Out of Harvard comes the teaching that ‘there are no absolute evils,’ and that ‘the highest ethical life consists at all times in the breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case.’ . . . Out of Yale comes an almost cynical devotion to science that would eliminate God from the commandments.’

Only the most morally obtuse can fail to see the immoral tendency of such teaching. When you have eliminated God from the commandments and put them on a strictly human basis, and then taught young men and women that it is the ‘prevailing conceptions of society’ which determine the morality or immorality of any act, you have taught them that there is no judge but themselves for any act they may commit. Human inclination then becomes the sole arbiter of right and wrong. Now, while the older generation educated on different lines, holds the ‘balance of power,’ the destructive work of the new education is not so openly apparent. But in a few years this balance will be changed, and the ‘new idea,’ with no foundation in ‘solemn authority,’ with a hazy belief, or none at all, in anything sacred, or holy, or divine, and with the ‘prevailing conceptions of society’ alone for its monitor, will have full freedom to show its disintegrating and soul-destroying characteristics. It has been apparent for many decades that humanity was able to run with sufficient speed in the ways of wickedness without the aid of this spur to its passions.

Reasoning from such a hypothesis as that contained in the teaching referred to, it is not surprising that an instructor should take the position which Prof. F. H. Giddings, of Columbia, advocates in reference to the marriage institution. ‘He has taken,’ says Mr. Bolce, ‘daring ground regarding marriage and unconventional alliances between the sexes. He indorses the beliefs of those who insist that ‘it is not right to set up a technical, legal relationship, an economic convenience, as morally superior to the spontaneous preference of a man and woman who know, and whose friends know, that they love each other.’’

Such a standard as this—if an absolute lack of standard can be called a standard—would completely destroy the home as an institution, and establish absolute anarchy in the matter of morals among the people. That it has this tendency is shown in the fact that the matter of ‘affinities’ and ‘soul mates’ is plainly and not disapprovingly set before the students by such instructors. Professor Earp, of Syracuse University, lecturing on reincarnation, took the position that on the reincarnation hypothesis ‘the ‘affinity people’ might justify their course by believing that the person one meets and finds irresistibly alluring was simply a friend or sweetheart of some ancient yesterday.’

Of the same nature is the instruction of Prof. W. G. Sumner, of Yale, who takes the ground that ‘the majority can make anything right.’ He throws the mantle of current custom over all the habits of society, whatever they may be, and makes them unquestionable morally, if they are in harmony with the prevailing opinion of the people. This is only another way of teaching that old heathen maxim that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God;’ for it makes the people the only judge, their verdict the only criterion of right.

The demoralizing effect of this kind of teaching is seen in what Mr. Bolce presents of the instruction given by Prof. Geo. B. L. Arner regarding marriages between persons of close blood relationship. ‘He believes that with proper restrictions prohibiting the marriage of the diseased and degenerate, consanguineous unions might be valuable to the state,’ and declares that even ‘the horror of incest is based on a myth.’

How much farther must educators go in order to demonstrate the possession of the ‘reprobate mind’ to which Jehovah released the heathen when they had turned their backs upon him? At the same time Professor Sumner, of Yale, is declaring that ‘there is no such thing as God-given and unchanging morality,’ and Professor Earp, of Syracuse, is proclaiming it ‘unscientific and absurd’ to think that God should have ‘chiseled commandments on a rock.’ This same instructor takes the position that our standards of right and wrong are ‘the products of experience;’ that ‘our conceptions of what we should do are not sent to us from heaven, but are the development of the centuries.’

In perfect harmony with this is the position taken by Prof. J. Q. Dealey, of Brown University, who holds that ‘race morality and individual morality are both exclusively human attributes, having their strict analogies in the animal world,’ and being ‘the result of brain development and the consequent dawn of intelligence.’ This would rule out heaven entirely from any connection with humanity, or from any credit for the standard of morality established in the world. The only god which such instructors know is the god of evolution, and an acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis has brought these demoralizing developments in its train. Some who advocate the principles here set forth, may still claim to hold a belief in God, but it is not the God of the Bible, not the God of revelation. The real attitude of all expounders of such philosophy is outlined in these words by Prof. William G. Sumner, of Yale: ‘The notion that there is anything fundamentally correct implies the existence of a standard outside and above usage, and no such standard exists.’

Is it too severe to hold that here is practically a conspiracy to overthrow everything that is substantial, solid, or of proved worth, and to see to it that there shall be nothing permitted to take its place that could form a foundation of true morals for the generation now shouldering the world’s responsibilities? What is it but a mighty stroke of the great deceiver to obliterate God from the knowledge of men, and scatter his law and the morals of the people to the four winds?

From such a setting forth as Mr. Bolce thus presents of the instruction given in the greatest institutions of learning in the country, it is not difficult for the child of God to see where they would lead us. The goal is infidelity and heathenism. The plan is older than man, and did not originate in the human brain. The deceiver of angels and of men is exerting his utmost efforts to destroy in this last generation all faith in God and his work. It is a master-stroke; but it will not fully succeed. ‘Here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.’

C. M. S.