p. Fifteen | Signs of the Times, Vol. 57, No. 41. (10/21/1930)

Earlier text: The Wind Blows,--But Ye Know Not Whence It Cometh

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By Arthur Whitefield Spalding and Belle-Wood Comstock, M. D.

FROM the third to the ninth year of the child is the field of this volume. This period is recommended to be all embraced in the preschool experience; and for the teaching of the child in the home four distinct lines of parent-and-child education are carried simultaneously. These embrace home government, education through story-telling and nature study, hygiene and health habit formation, and a line of home culture that embraces industrial education, character training, and spiritual development.

“Through Early Childhood” presents an entrancing world of companionship and training in which parents and children mingle. The Christian home is here seen in its most charming and inspiring aspects.

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Starting Childhood Great, Wide, Wonderful World Inside and Out To Know and to Do Mysteries and Sanctities The Books of God Growing Up Sermons and Smiles Sciences of Mind and Body Princes of the Realm Looking Up Farewell to Childhood

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The Blessing of Suffering

IT IS blessed to be like Him in everything, even in suffering. There is a great want about all Christians who have not suffered. Some flowers must be broken or bruised before they emit any fragrance. All the wounds of Christ send out sweetness—all the sorrows of Christians do the same. Commend me to be a bruised brother, a broken reed—one like the Son of man. The Man of Sorrows is never far from him.—Robert Murray McCheyne.

Building on the Right Foundation

Our business is not to build quickly, but to build upon a right foundation, and in a right spirit. Life is more than a mere competition as between man and man; it is not who can be done first, but who can work best; it is not who can rise highest in the shortest time, but who is working most patiently and in accordance with the designs of God.—Joseph Parker.

The Men Who Try and Fail

THE men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.—Lloyd Jones.

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GO TO THE MOUSE, YE EVOLUTIONISTS!

SOLOMON advised the sluggards of his day to hie them to the ants to get a cure for laziness. With equal pertinence we can to-day advise the evolutionists to go to the lowly mouse for a cure for their theories. Henry Fairfield Osborn put out a book some years ago, “The Earth Speaks to Bryan.” Now the mouse speaks to Osborn.

Here’s the how of it:

Seventeen long years ago Dr. F. B. Sumner began experimentation with mice at the Scripps Institution for Biological Research at La Jolla, California. During these years he has bred literally tens of thousands of these little creatures in search of principles of heredity and environment that would bear out the theories of evolution. His avowed purpose was to find actual proof for evolution by laboratory experimentation, evidence that would be indisputable.

But a few weeks ago he abandoned the study, for, so he said, the longer he experimented, the greater was the modification and loss of many of his convictions on evolution and its laws. “The more I studied and observed these thousands of wild mice,” said Dr. Sumner, “the less clean-cut were my convictions, and I know a great deal less now than I did when I first left college.”

Three cheers for the mice and three cheers for Dr. Sumner.

The mice reflected the laws of nature much more accurately than do the textbooks on the theory of evolution studied in college, and Dr. Sumner has proved himself an honest scientist by accepting the results of laboratory demonstration rather than the bare hypotheses of evolutionary philosophy.

ABSOLUTELY UNSCIENTIFIC

The chief trouble with the whole evolution cult is that they depend wholly upon philosophic and theoretic deductions rather than upon actual experiment in nature’s great laboratory. Evolution is more accurately a philosophy than it is a science anyway. The name of science has been invoked only to give sanctity to its philosophy, for science is the magic word in our twentieth century.

Evolutionary “science” is far removed from actual experimental science. The sciences of physics, electricity, or astronomy, for example, have little or nothing in common with the “science” of evolution. The former are worked out with microscope, test tubes, balances, and telescopes, while the latter is evolved by some pedantic philosopher sitting in a swivel chair surrounded by the heavy tomes of Greek philosophy. For the former we have the highest respect; with the latter we beg the right to differ, for when we come to philosophic deductions, one man’s ideas are as valid as another’s, and much depends upon what one wants to believe, what one will believe, when one gets into the sphere of philosophy.

THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE

A view of the Palmolive Building in Chicago with the famous Lindbergh Beacon lighted. The beacon was recently dedicated with impressive ceremonies in the presence of many air notables.

In evolution, the philosophy preceded the “evidence” by many years. Men thought out a scheme of the origin and process of life, and then began to cast about for something in the natural world to bolster up their speculations. True science proceeds by the reverse method. It discovers the facts first, and then forms its conclusions. Evolution formed its conclusions and has been busy ever since trying to find a fact or two in substantiation. That’s exactly what Dr. Sumner was trying to do, and he was candid enough to admit that the facts did not bear out the conclusions handed him in ready-made packages by evolutionary professors in the cloistered halls of learning.

Charles Darwin built his whole scheme of evolution upon his theory of natural selection. When men went to nature to find corroboration for Darwin’s thesis, they could not find it. Hence to-day there is not one evolutionist in a hundred who holds to Darwin’s idea of the method of evolution. Other ideas were advanced, such as the theory of acquired characters, etc., in an attempt to explain the mode of evolution; but most of these have gone into discard with Darwin’s natural selection hypothesis, until to-day the evolutionists frankly confess they don’t know how evolution has come about. They stoutly maintain it has, but how they don’t know.

The backbone of evolution is geology with its fanciful diagram of the various ages of the earth as purportedly found in the fossil stratifications. Every evolutionary textbook has a graph of these ages running all the way from the Cambrian and the Paleozoic to the Quaternary and the Cenozoic. To the student in school this scheme looks very imposing and plausible, but if he should get a steam shovel and dig a hole through the earth, anywhere on the vast surface of the globe, he would never find the fossil strata in the order the swivel-chair theorists have outlined it in the evolutionist’s bible.

In other words, evolution is not based upon the demonstrations of nature. It is purely a speculative scheme, and when man goes to the rocks themselves or to the mice themselves, he finds that nature with its various voices speaks an altogether different piece than evolution would have us learn.

LABEL AND CONTENTS DIFFER

Evolution is not a science; it is a philosophy. And its philosophy either removes God altogether from the operations of nature or else exiles Him so far away that He is negligible either as the creator or as the sustainer of life. We must not be hoodwinked because evolution puts the label, “Science” on the outside of its package. The contents are only abstract speculations and barren philosophies. The exhortations of Scripture are most timely in view of these facts:

“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” Colossians 2:8.

“Keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: which some professing have erred concerning the faith.” 1 Timothy 6:20.

Any talk of a conflict between science and religion is inane. There cannot be, for God is the author of both. But between religion and “science falsely so called” there is a gulf fixed, wide and unbridgable.