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The New Scriptures

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 8, 1875

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 45, No. 2.

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The New Scriptures.

By G. W. A.

ACCORDING TO THE THEORY OF TYNDALL, HUXLEY, SPENCER, AND DARWIN.
The present is emphatically an age of unbelief. Infidelity, like the frogs and lice of Egypt, is everywhere present, spending its virus against the Bible. Volumes have been written by skeptics and semi-infidel geologists to disprove the Mosaic account of creation. In place of this, latterly, we are presented with the “development theories” of certain English and American professors.
The following is a specimen of how the first chapter of Genesis would read, if rendered according to this infidel cosmogony. The arrangement is by the Cincinnati Commercial. It is a fair presentation of the Tyndall and Darwin theory. G. W. A.

GENESIS—CHAPTER 1.

1. Primarily the Unknowable moved upon cosmos and evolved protoplasm.
2. And protoplasm was inorganic and undifferentiated, containing all things in potential energy; and a spirit of evolution moved upon the fluid mass.
3. And the Unknowable said, Let atoms attract; and their contact begat light, heat, and electricity.
4. And the Unconditioned differentiated the atoms, each after its kind; and their combinations begat rock, air, and water.
5. And there went out a spirit of evolution from the Unconditioned, and working in protoplasm by accretion and absorption, produced the organic cell.
6. And cell by nutrition evolved primordial germ, and germ developed protogene, and protogene begat eozoon, and eozoon begat monad, and monad begat animalculæ.
7. And animalculæ begat ephemera; then began creeping things to multiply on the face of the earth.
8. And earthly atom in vegetable protoplasm begat the molecule, and thence came all grass and every herb in the earth.
9. And animalculæ in the water evolved fins, tails, claws, and scales; and in the air, wings and beaks; and on the land they sprouted such organs as were necessary as played upon by the environment.
10. And by accretion and absorption came the radiata and mollusca; and mollusca begat articulata, and articulata begat vertebrata.
11. Now these are the generation of the higher vertebrata, in the cosmic period that the Unknowable evolved the bipedal mammalia.
12. And every man of the earth, while he was yet a monkey, and the horse while he was yet a hyparion, and the hyparion before he was an oredon.
13. Out of the ascidian came the amphibian and begat the pentadactyle; and the pentadactyle by inheritance and selection produced the hylobate, from which are the simiadæ in all their tribes.
14. And out of the simiadæ the lemur prevailed above his fellows, and produced the platyrhine monkey.
15. And the platyrhine begat the catarrhine, and the catarrhine monkey begat the anthropoid ape, and the ape begat the longimanous orang, and the orang begat the chimpanzee, and the chimpanzee evolved the what-is-it.
16. And the what-is-it went into the land of Nod and took him a wife of the longimanous gibbons.
17. And in process of the cosmic period were born unto them, and their children, the anthropomorphic primordial types.
18. The homunculus, the prognathus, the troglodyte, the antochthon, the terragen—these are the generations of primeval man.
19. And the primeval man was naked and not ashamed, but lived in quadrumanous innocence, and struggled mightily to harmonize with the environment.
20. And by inheritance and natural selection did he progress from the simple and homogeneous to the complex and heterogeneous—for the weakest died and the strongest grew and multiplied.
21. And man grew a thumb, for that he had need of it, and developed capacities for prey.
22. For, behold, the swiftest men caught the most animals and the swiftest animals got away from the most men; therefore the slow animals were eaten, and the slow men starved to death.
23. And as types were differentiated the weaker types continually disappeared.
24. And the earth was filled with violence; for man strove with man, and tribe with tribe, whereby they killed off the weak and foolish, and secured the survival of the fittest.