Evolution Substituted for Revelation
tion of its ideal of perfected personal character and a perfected human society, has already displaced the hope of a day when the present order of things shall suddenly and forcibly be destroyed to make way for the instantaneous establishment of a heavenly kingdom.” He says further, in explanation of this thought, that instead of waiting for the day of the Lord, as an event which is to come “out of the clouds,” Christians find inspiration in the thought that they are working with God in an age-long process toward a far-off goal sometime to be reached. This is Evolution substituted for revelation. It does not seem to us that it would be hard at all for the ordinary man to see that this “defense of the faith” is frank infidelity. If we can not believe the writers of the New Testament respecting the utterances of Jesus regarding His second coming, why should we believe their utterances regarding His first advent, regarding the incarnation, regarding His supernatural birth, regarding His crucifixion and the events connected therewith, regarding His resurrection or His ascension? Logic would demand that if we were to reject what He said regarding His second coming as crude ideas, which the writers of the New Testament imbibed from erroneous Jewish thought, we should relegate a great deal more of the Gospels to erroneous teaching gathered from the same source, and finally that everything which did not harmonize or pay tribute to our superior latter-day view should be utterly rejected as unworthy of Christ. Thus we would come at last to believe that the very witnesses Christ chose were not true witnesses at all, but false, and that the enduement of the Spirit they received, that they might be true witnesses, was in itself a farce, as far as effecting what the Master designed. From such “defenders of the faith” we can most devoutly pray in the language of the old litany, “Good Lord, deliver us.” How one could conceive that this would be a help to any Bible student is more than we can possibly understand. If the Gospels and the writers of the New Testament in general—for every one speaks of Christ’s second coming, and all are in harmony—do not tell us the truth respecting this, we have no foundation on which to build faith in Jesus Christ as a Saviour. One of the reasons why this doctrine of apocalypticism, as it is called, is passing, is said to be that the disciples were disappointed in their hope of Christ’s soon coming, and that the things which He is said to have promised “have not been, and can not now be fulfilled;” in other words, the disciples believed that the Lord was coming in their day; He did not come; their words have been proved false. We beg our readers to study the question further. That phase of the subject we will treat in our next.