A FAITH-KILLING COMBINATION.
JESUS likened a certain class of teachers to whited sepulchres which were filled with dead men's bones. The similarity was appropriate, for those teachers professed to be speaking the words of life, and setting forth the character of God, when they had stripped the flesh from every living truth they sought to teach, by their traditions and their own inconsistent lives. Outwardly they appeared as the representatives of God Himself; inwardly they were filled with the husks of death, and they had nothing but husks of death to give out to hungry souls. To-day the land is filled with churches; but in many pulpits dedicated to the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the doubtings of the agnostic, the scoffings of the skeptic, the revilings of the infidel, have greater place than the worship of God and the truth of God. In a beautiful church, with the finest of church appointments, the writer listened not long ago to a scoffing arraignment of the Bible from one who bore the name of pastor. It was the doubtings of Paine, and not the verities of the Gospel, that this pastor poured out to his people. A few days ago in San Francisco a "pastor" of a great church devoted his whole sermon to extolling the infidel Ingersoll and the work he had done for the church. He thus placed himself on the same ground as that occupied by Ingersoll. Not only that, but this lecture was only one of a series of three on "The World's Great Infidels," preached by this pulpit infidel to the congregation entrusted to his care. It is true now, as it was in the days of Jeremiah, that the "people love to have it so," else would they not sit under such teachings from week to week and pay a princely salary to the expounder of such doctrines. The rapidity with which this kind of teaching has monopolized the fashionable pulpits of the land has startled and astonished many honest souls, and such are asking what is the cause of this growing infidelity in clerical cloth. President Harper, of the University of Chicago, has essayed to answer the query, and lays the blame upon the lack of purely religious instruction in the colleges that prepare young men for the ministry. He says: "Many college men, who might otherwise enter the ministry, turn aside to teaching, to business, or perhaps to some other work, because of the influence of the purely technical instruction given in the colleges. It is certainly a fact that many young men and women who enter college as Christian workers in their home churches take little or no active part in church life after they have completed their college work." He would have come much nearer the truth if he had stated that the teaching of the belief-destroying doctrine of evolution, coupled with the agnostic-breeding theories of the Higher Criticism, have done this sad work of which true Christians are complaining. President Jordan, of the Stanford University, in a lecture before a large audience in the Unitarian church of Oakland some weeks ago said, among other things:— Evolution is the theory that plants and animals are descended from a lower form of life; that man has been developed from a lower form of animal. This theory is better established than the doctrine of gravitation. The most elaborate system of the philosophy of evolution is that of Spencer, and will last longer than many others, because it is founded on a solid basis. There is no source of life excepting life. We do not know anything about the way in which life came upon this earth. At one time it was not. Now it is. Evolution is not a creed. It is only so far as may be, of force. It is not a religion, but simply a matter of fact. If evolution be a matter of fact, then the Bible is a matter of fancy. If "we do not know anything about the way in which life came upon this earth," then we certainly do not believe what the Bible says of it. Evolution may not be a religion, but it is certainly used as a club, both consciously and unconsciously, to beat down religion and religious belief in the9lives of the thousands of young men and women who patronize the colleges of the land. When Darwin and Huxley and Spencer are held up before every young person that enters college as the great exponents of a great truth, and they find that "truth" in direct opposition to the Word of God, they are at first astounded. They hear it from day to day, and, looking to their teachers as men of wisdom, they gradually come to believe the teaching, and lose faith in the Word of God, which their college work causes them to neglect. President Harper would have more teaching of a purely religious type in the colleges to remedy the faith-killing work which they are doing now; but the men who would probably do that teaching would be men of the Higher Critic type, whose work is as destructive to true faith as is that of the teachers of evolution. "When the Son of Man cometh, will He find faith on the earth?"—Not if those who are teaching such theories can accomplish all they are trying to do.