Protestantism Drifting by G. B. Thompson

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 4, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 14.

Protestantism Drifting

By G. B. Thompson

IV. Science and the Bible

THE apostle Paul has uttered a warning concerning the misleading teaching of "science falsely so called." True science and the Bible agree; but much that is palmed off as science is simply speculation, and men's opinions about things of which they know but little. Yet the foundation of true Protestantism, the very "essence" of this glorious system, the Bible, is diluted by the scientific speculations of men who stand as the professed Protestant expositors of the present time.

Critics in colleges and universities in this and other lands, pry into musty tomes and study the roots of words and seek to figure out the past. These same critics have but little understanding of the present, which, like a panorama, is passing before them. Yet their speculations are of sufficient weight to set aside in thousands of minds the divine utterances of the sacred Scriptures.

Account of Creation

Nowhere are the batteries of "Higher Criticism" and scientific guessing more concentrated than in their attack on the Bible account of creation. The conflicting guesswork of geology and Evolution is accepted instead of the account given by Moses. Millions of years, instead of six days, were occupied in making the world, according to scientific, geological guessing. Man was not made in the image of his Maker, from the dust of the ground, but came up, through countless ages of evolution, from the very lowest order of animal life, through tadpoles and apes.

The International Congress of Zoölogy in session at Cambridge, England, is reported a few years ago to have declared that "science had now established the absolute certainty that man has descended through various stages of evolution, from the lowest form of animal life, during a period estimated at a billion years."

Mr. Harold Bolce says in the February (1910) Cosmopolitan:

It is explained to the girls of Cornell that both man and the simian stock sprang from the same progenitor, and that this early antecedent of man "was a hairy tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits." But the teaching goes still farther behind the record of Holy Writ, declaring that before this four-footed "Adam" there was a "pre-Adamite," and that "if we look still farther back in the dim recesses of time, we shall see the geological line running through a long series of diversified forms of marsupial, of reptile, of fish, to an ultimate ancestral animal—a fish-like creature, which united both sexes in itself, and in which the lungs existed as a float and the heart as a simple pulsating vessel. No Paradise was the birthplace of this first parent, but the shore of a restless sea, whose changes by day and by month begot in him that periodicity of function, which, like an echo over eternities, to this day survives in his latest human descendant."

Such statements are indeed startling, and awaken a righteous indignation. Both man and apes from the "same progenitor"— man related to apes! — Darwinism pure and simple. So then if we wish to see our ancestry we have only to visit a zoölogical garden and look at the simians confined there.

"Of course," says Hastings, "there is no disputing about tastes; and if a man chooses to put away his history, his heritage, and his hopes as a son and creature of Almighty God, and trace his genealogy to the monkey, the mollusk, the moner, and the mud, we must respect his rights, and allow him to exercise his preferences; but when he insists that we shall also trace our genealogical line through ancestral apes and patriarchal pollywogs, we respectfully decline the honor. We prefer to look higher; and as there is still a little uncertainty among scientific men on the point, we propose to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and still look up to a heavenly Father, instead of down to a little dot of a mud-spawned moner, as the source of our existence."

To prove the claim of science that man is the result of evolution, and came from the simian stock, the earth has been bored into at a thousand places, and the bottom of the sea explored in search of the "missing link." But with all the scientific investigation of earth and sea made in search of the coveted "link," it has not yet been discovered.

Some Results of Research

They found the missing link once in "the Calaveras skull." It was 150 feet below the surface. There could be no doubt about it! But when Wm. R. C. Scribner confessed that he had brought it into the mine as a practical joke, scientists were ashamed. . . . They found the missing link in the Neanderthal skeleton in Prussia, and proclaimed it three hundred thousand years old; but it turned out to be only a Cossack killed in 1814. Columbia College had a smart professor who dug out of Colorado's soil a skeleton. It was heralded as of remarkable antiquity, and the friable bones were being paraded to the ends of the earth, when some cowboys complained that the grave of their pet monkey had been rifled. I was taken into a little pavilion near Manitou, and was shown the petrified(?) body of a remarkable little fat fellow who had been brought up from the bottom of the Colorado River. But a man needed not to be a scientist to discover that it was nothing more than a figure hewn out of stone. To be sure, the greatest ado has been made over the Pithecanthropus Erectus. It consists of a piece of a skull and leg bone and two teeth, found in Java, in 1891. Dr. Alexander Patterson says the cubic measurement

of that skull is sixty inches—the same as that of an idiot. These specimens were found at separate places and times. The skull is too small for the thigh bone. The age of the strata in which they were found is uncertain. Even Haeckel admits that the belief that this is the missing link is strongly combated by some distinguished scientists.—"The Finality of Higher Criticism," pages 79, 80.

It is thus that the sapping and mining goes on, and in the schools, colleges, universities, and the authority of the Bible is neutralized in the minds of the people, and the philosophical speculations of men are substituted in its place. The following eloquent words from the pen of the late H. L. Hastings are a fitting commentary with which to close this article:

We do not always see most clearly the things that are nearest to us. Our estimates of contemporaneous matters often need revision. We must bow to the logic of events, and accept the verdict of history. If in the dawning of the fortieth century, it shall be found that the law and the prophets are obsolete, the Gospels and Epistles discarded, Moses forgotten, and Paul and his writings set aside to make room for the inerrant productions of Wellhausen, Kuenen, Briggs, and Harper; if the Queen of Sheba of that remote period, in her quest for wisdom, shall take a limited through ticket for Chicago, without so much as asking for a stop-over at Jerusalem; if it shall be found at last that men have lived in this world for centuries and millenniums, not knowing whence they came or how they got here, until the last half of the nineteenth century—the Creator having kept these things from wise and prudent men like Adam, and Enoch, and Abraham, and Moses, and David, and Solomon, and Daniel, and Paul, and Jesus of Nazareth, that He might reveal them to such devout and guileless babes as Darwin, with his "early, ape-like progenitors;" Huxley, with his life-producing, jelly-like Bathybius, at the bottom of the sea; Haeckel, with his "spontaneous generation" of "organisms without organs;" Tyndall, with his prayer-gage and his agnosticism; and the Higher Critics with their conglomerate theories and inventions; and if the experience of twenty centuries shall demonstrate the superiority of the new and inerrant evangel which these men are proclaiming; the world will rejoice in the "survival of the fittest,"—unless, indeed, the Higher Critics of those times shall dissect and discredit these new scriptures, and discarding them, produce yet "another gospel," which shall be entirely their own.

If it shall then appear that the hunted prophets, who wandered in sheepskins and goatskins, and were destitute, afflicted, and tormented, "of whom the world was not worthy," have gone down before the onslaught of the learned and well-salaried professors of modern universities; if it shall appear that the Word of the Lord which they uttered at the loss of all things and at the peril of life itself, has paled its ineffectual fires before the rising radiance of oracular Higher Criticism; if it shall then be learned that God hath chosen the rich in this world, poor in faith, and heirs of the kingdom; who can tell how welcome this information may prove to those who suppose that gain is godliness, and that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a poor man to enter the kingdom of heaven?

Another Side

But if, from the far distant mountain peaks of the fortieth century—provided this groaning creation has not ere that time been "delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God," and entered upon those dateless cycles of bliss and blessing where centuries are no more numbered—mankind shall still look back beyond Astruc and Wellhausen to Moses and the prophets; if the little tracts of the hunger-bitten apostle to the Gentiles shall still be read, while the huge tomes of well-fed professors are

forgotten; if the men who stood alone and faced the lions shall be found to be as clear-sighted as their critics who are backed by millions and millionaires; if prophets and apostles still shine "as the stars forever and ever," while learned experts are lost in haze and gloom and darkness; if it be seen that Jesus of Nazareth is still the Light of the world, after all that Higher Critics have said by way of correcting His errors and exhibiting His "limitations;" if the law still goes forth from Zion instead of Chicago, and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem instead of from some German university or beer-garden; if, instead of pocket editions of the works of the Higher Critics for use in family worship, in Sunday-schools, and in churches, the writings of Moses and the prophets and Christ and the apostles are still read in the synagogs every Sabbath day, while the learned lucubrations and ponderous misrepresentations of the Higher Critics of our times are forgotten—the people who live in those days must accept the conditions they can not alter, and inquire for the eternal paths and see where is the good way, and walk therein.

A further study of this must be reserved till next week.