Dr. Hopkins on Evolution.
By Mark Hopkins
[The Rev. Mark Hopkins, D. D., LL.D., Ex-President of Williams College, is delivering a course of lectures in Princeton Seminary, in the first of which he discusses evolution. The following is the substance of this lecture.] THE grandest description ever given of man is in the first chapter of Genesis. We see there implied the sonship of man and the fatherhood of God. This sonship is truly apprehended only in Christ. Man was not formed in the image of a god, but of God, the God of the first chapter of Genesis, the Creator of the heavens and the earth. In man as created by him and in his image we have a being worthy of redemption. We have herein a congruity essential to the unity of the Scriptures. We care little whether you take creation in the higher or lower sense of the term. In looking at the marvelous distribution of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and their nice adjustments in quantity and quality, we cannot repress the conviction, “He weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance.” We think we are safe in supposing that matter had its origin in time, rather than that it existed from eternity. Do you deny the fact of man’s original creation? Did man come to be man by creation? or evolution? or what is the same thing, by a process of development? Evolution and development imply involution and envelopment. Mr. Tyndall assumes the existence of matter in the sun in a nebulous state. There were shut up in matter certain potentialities, certain forces. Man was developed upward from below. If it be admitted that in certain aspects the language of the Bible favors evolution, it is no less true that it represents God as a personal God commanding those processes. But in making man there is no affinity with evolution. Was he created by God, or was he evoked by forces inherent in matter? We take Genesis. The author of Genesis proclaims the unity of God; monotheism. Was this an inference drawn from the unity of his works? That unity could not then have been known. There was no science to help man to this conclusion. Indeed, as he looked at earth, air, and water, and their deep commotions, he might naturally have inferred the very opposite. Whence this idea of man’s creation in the image of God, and with dominion over every living thing? Nature must have been established when man was created. And how, but through revelation, was he to get an idea of chaos? Evolution does not account for the origin of anything. It assumes the existence of nebulous matter. It puts itself on the same plane with the author of Genesis. How was the matter there? To the brutes and to many persons most things seem a mere matter of course. They are surprised merely at what is new. But to wonder belongs not to a being evolved from an ape. And wonder increases instead of diminishing by reason of familiarity. The future life under a different form is not stranger than the present life under its present form. A personal God is no stranger than a personal self. Existence of all kinds is wonderful. Evolution has no advantages. The one assumption is not worse than the other; the assumption of matter, the assumption of God. Evolution requires new assumptions all the time. Let us concede to nebulous matter an existence. Whence life? Whence organism? Tyndall speaks of an organism sensitive all over. Whence organs? Why, the organs have been differentiated. Differentiated by what? By differentiation. This surely ought to be satisfactory. The eye was formed. This formation began by rays of light falling on pigment cells vaguely sensitive all over. What of propagation? of the sexual relations? How were two individuals of different sexes to reach the same stage of development, and at the same time? Whence the upward tendency? This involves a law which enters into the whole construction. The survival of the fittest cannot account for it. The lower orders were the most ancient. Man did not survive. He came. And he came naked, weaponless, relatively feeble, surrounded by savage beasts, and least fitted to survive. Their idea of the survival of the fittest is the survival of the strongest. Sow wheat and Canada thistles together, and which will survive? Which is fittest? The ground brings forth fruits, seeds, thorns, thistles. It is only by the sweat of the brow that the survival of the fittest for man is secured. Why do not lions, tigers, and wolves dominate the more useful animals for man? Why, but in that law by which the weaker animals are made more numerous and prolific? Evolution cannot account for the movement upwards. Darwin’s theory of the origin of species is supposed to give support to evolution. (1) It may do so if there be a propagation of one species for another. The variety of pigeons is great: but no pigeon has ever been changed to an eagle. (2) The change must be from lower to higher. Species often degenerate. Men degenerate. Here is evolution downwards. Evolution is essentially atheistic. It does not account for the origin of man. Herbert Spencer admits the power of the unknown and the unknowable as the agency by which evolution is brought about. If he maintains that this power is inherent in matter, then he is an evolutionist; but if separate from matter, then he is not an evolutionist. There are as great differences among evolutionists as among theologians. Professor Fiske ranks among his ablest disciples. He speaks of the unknowable; but he knows it to be, and that it is independent of matter. To this power there is no limit in time or space. All the phenomena of the universe are referable to this infinite and eternal power. It is the author of the moral law. To holiness it gives the divine sanction; to sin the divine condemnation. It is an infinite and eternal being, capable of effort (and enormous effort too) through the ages. Evolution knows that this power is not a person, that it has no self-consciousness, that it does not contrive; it knows naught of the unknowable, nor of the dogmas handed down by priests. And that is what they style scientific knowledge. When they introduce the terms sins, holiness, moral law, we recognize the livery of Heaven to clothe evolution in. Now some evolutionists attempt to reconcile science and religion. The phantom of hostility (say they) between religion and science must be exorcised now and forever. What does this amount to? By religion do they mean Christianity? No. Is eternal life embraced in (their) science? No. It is unknown and unknowable. The unknowableness is that we cannot find out him whom we call “Our Father;” that he is not a person. They deny to him every attribute of Father. He cannot work miracles, he cannot make a revelation; cannot answer prayer; is not to be worshiped, nor to be loved. Evolution can consort with Christianity only by destroying it. In fact evolution is reconciled with no religion which recognizes a personal God. Scripture statement: Man was created. Is there more mystery connected with this statement than with the declarations of evolution? A matured man stands before me, one of full stature and perfect in form. Twenty-six years ago where was the material out of which he was made? His carbon perhaps lay in the rocks, and his oxygen and nitrogen were floating over the Himalayas. We simply say, “He grew.” Custom blinds us. No one wonders. Evolution says that man is evolved, when not one particle of matter in him was in the original. Is it any more strange to bring together these particles instantly than in twenty-six years? What great distinction is there between evolution and growth? Look at a field the first of April and then the first of July. Whence the four tons of clover on it? Yes; we know all about it. “It grew.” Life and organization did not always exist. There must have been a beginning. We gain nothing philosophically by these fine-spun theories of “science falsely so called.” Even thus it stands: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”