p. 7 | EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY by Geo. McCready Price

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jan 4, 1905

EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY

By Geo. McCready Price

V. EVOLUTION AND THE WORLD PROBLEMS.

We of the twentieth century are in some respects the heirs of the ages. The intellectual accumulations of centuries have descended to us, and, in our great libraries, lie before us, tabulated and indexed for our convenience. A knowledge of the secrets of nature, unknown to our fathers, has taught us to harness the mighty resources of water, earth, and air, and make them minister in a thousand ways to our real or supposed necessities.

But all are not deceived by the superficial seeming of our modern civilization. Most clear thinkers know that this age is in no way superior to those of the past in real mental or moral development. They know that mere knowledge is not power in the realm of morals. An Alexander may be educated at the feet of an Aristotle, and a Nero by a Seneca, but the mere intellectual training thus received will result only in giving greater scope and power to the fiendish propensities of the soul. We know also that the creature comforts of a high civilization, like those of Babylon, Egypt, Greece, or Rome, have never tended to strengthen the foundations of man's moral nature. He who understands man's nature knew it would be for his good that he should only eat of the fruit of the ground in toil and sorrow. We can not inherit the progress that our fathers made in heart culture any more than we can in art, and all acknowledge that in the latter we are sadly degenerate. The literature of Greece and Rome has been imitated for over two thousand years; their sculpture and architecture have been the despair of every generation since; and their civilization exhibited, for over a dozen times the length of our boasted modern period of progress, a development of law and government that we have not surpassed, but can only copy.

In the words of Froude: "We live in days of progress and enlightenment; nature, on a hundred sides, has unlocked her storehouses of knowledge. But she has furnished no 'open sesame' to bid the mountain gate fly wide which leads to conquest of self." In morals and ethics, as in art, our laws and models are all in the dim, misty past; and the Dark Ages of sin and wo, that separate us from those bright ideas, have served only to weaken our moral powers of discernment and resolve, and to fasten about our degenerate frames our heritage of mental, moral, and physical decay.

Why the Increase of Knowledge?

The present increase of intellectual knowledge and of mechanical power in the hands of man is not the result of inherent racial progress, but of divine interposition for a special purpose. Had it been the result of Evolution, it ought to have come about somewhat gradually, say, a gradual development in art, etc., since the time of ancient Egypt, and not be all crowded into the last hundred years,—the last sixtieth part, or less, of human history. No, there is a reason for it all. The church, for long centuries, had neglected to heed the command to go "into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." Like her Jewish sister, she had shut herself up in proud seclusiveness, deeming the rest of the world too degraded to heed the Gospel call. But Christ had said that the Gospel of His coming kingdom must, before the end, be "preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations." And so, in the very evening of time, while the shadows of the gathering night were settling down over the church's unfinished work, He taught men how to employ the elements of nature, and even the very bolts of His throne, in speeding the work His people had so long neglected.

The Down-Grade Tendency.

But the logical, reflecting scientist is the very man who stands most in awe of the outcome of present conditions along the lines of their natural development. Any one familiar with the history of nations can not but feel a terrible foreboding creep over him as he faces the prospect presented by civilized society the world over. So much is this the case that those who stand at the heads of nations, and are real statesmen and not mere politicians, are nevertheless almost solely occupied with desperate endeavors to check, for a little season at least, the almost universal tendency toward retrograde movements as the next thing in order, so that the social crash will not come in their day. Most thinking men now acknowledge that we seem as far away as ever from the long-talked-of, long-hoped-for age of universal peace and brotherly love.

Present Education Ineffective.

A writer in the Forum, December, 1896, says:—

The diffusion of intelligence is now understood to be of little conservative value, if not accompanied by a corresponding improvement in morals.

That is, you may train the memory, reason, and perceptive faculties to the highest pitch, but if the morals, the secret motives of the soul, are not cleansed, the intellectual training gives the person only a greater power for evil.

As to the moral outlook, we have the following from President Harper, of Chicago University:—

It is difficult to prophesy what the result of our present method of educating the youth will be in fifty years. We are training the mind in our public schools, but the moral side of the child's nature is almost entirely neglected. The Roman Catholic Church insists on remedying this manifest evil, but our Protestant churches seem to ignore it completely. They expect the Sunday-school to make good what our public schools [and he might have added the homes] leave undone, and the consequence is that we overlook a danger as real and as great as any we have had to face.

Growing Discontent.

Then, again, as Goldwin Smith remarks, our modern system of education "begets a general desire to rise in life." This desire "to rise" must inevitably breed almost universal discontent, as we see is the case in every grade of society about us; for very few, even by industry, temperance, and perseverance, traits not especially common in our day, can manage to "rise" as fast as they think they ought. Organized greed and social position have the upper hand, and evidently mean to keep it.

And the almost universally-accepted doctrine that all progress, whether in the individual or the race, is to be reached only by a ceaseless struggle for existence and survival at the expense of others, has, in the words of the late Sir William Dawson, "stimulated to an intense degree that popular unrest so natural to an age discontented with its lot, . . . and which threatens to overthrow the whole fabric of society as at present constituted."—"Modern Ideas of Evolution," p. 12.

This popular and perfectly natural application of the evolution doctrine to every-day life is certainly intensifying, as never before, the innate selfishness of human nature, and, in every pursuit of life, embittering the sad struggle for place and power. Perhaps no other one cause and result serve more plainly to differentiate the present strenuous age from all those that have gone before. The hitherto undreamed-of blessings and comforts of the present day, instead of tending toward universal peace and happiness, have only emphasized the fact that the greater the blessings received, the greater discontent and depravity will be produced in unregenerate hearts. Intelligent people of to-day, even tho evolutionists, are in dread of another retrograde movement, that will again bring upon us the wreck and anarchy of the French Revolution, all the more hopeless and horrible this time, because it will be universal over the world, conterminous with the bands of civilization. As Herbert Spencer says: "My fear is that the retrograde movement will become too strong to be checked by argument or exhortation."

Ineffective and Evil "Remedies."

Thus far all are agreed. It is only when we begin to discuss possible methods of acting so as to prevent these natural tendencies of societies and nations, that the logic of the evolution philosophy is illustrated. To stop the alarming increase of incurable diseases, such as idiocy, cancer, and consumption, we have every now and then some logical but heartless evolutionist advocating a return to the old customs of Sparta or Plato's ideal republic, where all the malformed and sickly were killed in infancy. Such teaching, while logical enough as a means of securing the perpetuation of only the "fittest" specimens of our race, is rather too manifestly inhuman to become a dangerous doctrine very soon.

But the rapid increase of crime and lawlessness of every sort, the increasing lack of self-control so apparent all about us, has suggested two methods of dealing with these conditions which are more plausible, and hence, far more dangerous. They are the greatest social and political problems of to-day. One of these specifics for the evils of our modern life may be described as a "benevolent," but sturdy, despotism; the other is the next step, the regulation of religion and morals by law. Twin fiends, born in iniquity, and cradled in apostasy from God, they are to-day piecing together into life the dismembered forms that man fondly believed he had cut to pieces for evermore. Even now are they leering their bloodshot eyes upon the remnant church, as she hurries, for a last, brief period, into the wilderness; and what but the promise of Jehovah stands between her and their fury? These are the living questions of the hour. Is popular government a failure? Or does the state need the assistance of the church, or the church of the state? These are the problems before us, which we must soon individually and collectively decide.

I do not mean to say that all evolutionists are advocating either of these methods, much less both of them. Rather may we say that some are advocating one remedy, some the other. But both of them are certainly "in the air," or are characterizing the spirit of the times; and for the simple reason, that, since most of the educated classes believe the evolution theory, these are the natural remedies suggested to their minds, in view of the emergencies of the present social and political conditions, because they are the logical remedies from the standpoint of their theory.

[The second article on this topic will appear next week.]