« 
 
 apt* ° ^ 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
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 5//^. 
 
 BL 263 .D78 1884 
 
 Drury, John Benjamin, 1838- 
 
 1909. 
 Truths and untruths of 
 
 evolution 
 
 WIS 
 

 &. 
 
Ufbtier ILccturcs, 1883 
 
 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 OF EVOLUTION 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN B. DRURY, D. D. 
 
 New York 
 ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY 
 
 900 BROADWAY, COR. 20th STREET 
 
Copyright, 1884, 
 By Anson D. F. Randolph & Co. 
 
 ST. JOHNLAND PRINTED BY 
 
 STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY, EDWARD O. JENKINS, 
 
 SUFFOLK CO., N. Y. 20 NORTH WILLIAM ST., N. Y. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The lectures constituting the present volume 
 were delivered in April, 1883, before the students 
 of the Theological Seminary and Rutgers Col- 
 lege, at New Brunswick. When chosen to lecture 
 on the Vedder Foundation I thought I could not 
 better accomplish the object designed, than to 
 present so far as could be done in the course of 
 five lectures, the line of argument which had 
 brought satisfaction to my own mind when con- 
 fronted with the chief of the problems presented 
 by modern science. In the discussion I have 
 sought to be just and fair to science as well as to 
 religion. As the reader will see, instead of com- 
 bating Evolution as altogether inadmissible, I 
 concede a possibility of its truthfulness, and aim 
 to show that the believer in God and a Rev- 
 elation, has nothing to fear from it as a foe to 
 religion, when its postulates are freed from as- 
 sumptions, and its truths are separated from 
 its untruths. It was the expressed wish of the 
 founder of the lectureship that the courses de- 
 
iv PREFACE. 
 
 livered should be published and thus reach a 
 wider audience than that immediately addressed. 
 The present volume is sent forth in compliance 
 with that wish, seconded by the oinnion of those 
 who heard the lectures, that they would prove 
 useful in clearing up some of the difficulties 
 with which many honest and thoughtful minds 
 are troubled in view of claims that are made in 
 the name of science. 
 
 The lectures are printed as delivered, except 
 that an occasional note has been appended. They 
 are sent forth with the earnest prayer that they 
 may be helpful in a period so full of questionings 
 and doubtings as the present. 
 
 J. B. D. 
 
 Ghent, N. Y. November, 1883. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 Inteoductoky: Evolution, the Hypothesis ... 1 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 Evolution and the Earth 31 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 Evolution and Man 60 
 
 LECTURE IT. 
 Evolution and Civilization 89 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 Evolution and the Bible 118 
 
TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS OF 
 EVOLUTION. 
 
 LECTURE FIRST. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY: EVOLUTION, THE HYPOTHESIS. 
 
 The scope of the lectureship, in accordance 
 with whose terms I appear before you, is de- 
 fined, by the instrument establishing it, as 
 " a course of lectures on the present aspects 
 of modern infidelity, including its cause and 
 cure." 
 
 In coming to the consideration of this gen- 
 eral theme, I am profoundly impressed by the 
 fact that in our day the chief and most formi- 
 dable assault on our Christian faith comes from 
 the side of the natural sciences. 
 
 Speaking in the name of these sciences, 
 which seek to usurp to themselves the very 
 name of science, unbelief challenges the very 
 fundamentals of religion, and is insidiously 
 giving an infidel tone to modern thought and 
 literature. A chief danger to religion lies in 
 this direction. Do not understand me by this 
 
2 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 to affirm that the students of nature are pre- 
 dominantly unbelievers, and that natural sci- 
 ence itself is necessarily materialistic, atheistic 
 or infidel. On the contrary, it can be estab- 
 lished that the chief contributors to a true 
 science of nature have ever been devout Chris- 
 tians, and a legitimate science is to-day, as 
 always, the friend rather than the foe of true 
 religion. What I would emphasize is the 
 fact that, to-day, natural science is relied upon 
 to furnish to every school of antagonists to 
 religion, such weapons as they have, — is, in 
 other words, both the arsenal and citadel of 
 modern infidelity. It has become such through 
 the growing influence of the scientific hy- 
 pothesis known as evolution, and the fre- 
 quent assumption, that it has made untenable 
 faith in God and the Bible. 
 
 Always and everywhere the root of unbe- 
 lief is the natural opposition of the heart to 
 God and His law. The vast majority of unbe- 
 lievers are merely inattentive or indifferent 
 to the claims of religion, — they neither seek 
 for nor give, a reason for their unbelief. But 
 this course does not suffice for all, nor perma- 
 nently for any. Men cannot escape thought, 
 and if questioned by none else, the soul must 
 give a reason to itself for its doubts and un- 
 belief. A thoughtful man cannot be content 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 3 
 
 without some plausible reason for not accept- 
 ing the strong and seemingly invincible claims 
 of Christianity. The situation, to-day, is sub- 
 stantially this, — that nearly all who reject our 
 revealed faith and the religion of Christ are 
 depending for a logical defence in so doing 
 on the scientific theory of evolution. The 
 real battle, therefore, in our day between the 
 Christian faith and infidelity is waged in this 
 field of thought, and the issue is over the ex- 
 istence of a personal Deity. Unbelief, speak- 
 ing in the name of evolution, boldly asks: — 
 Is God any longer to be considered as a ne- 
 cessary factor in the history of the universe ? 
 
 The questions contended over within the 
 pale of Theism, — such as prophecy and mir- 
 acles, the credibility and authority of the 
 Bible, the person and work of Christ, — are, in 
 this new phase of the struggle, relegated to a 
 subordinate position. The assailants tacitly, 
 if not avowedly, concede that on these issues, 
 granting the postulate of an intelligent per- 
 sonal creator and governor of the world, the 
 battle has gone against them. 
 
 If there has been a creator and ruler, such 
 in His being and works as we have been ac- 
 customed to infer from the evidences of wis- 
 dom and beneficence so conspicuous in nature, 
 everything essential to the Christian system 
 
4 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 is made both possible and probable. Kevela- 
 tion and redemption, providence and miracles 
 and prayer, fit so readily and perfectly into 
 the system that they altogether cease to be 
 anomalous or incredible. It is coming to be 
 discerned that to concede the possibility of a 
 revelation removes the chief ground 'for re- 
 jecting its contents, that if there be such a 
 thing as the supernatural, the position of 
 Christianity after centuries of futile assault 
 is left well-nigh impregnable. Hence the 
 cause of infidelity practically depends on its 
 success in denying God and the supernatural. 
 
 Until recently this seemed so impracticable 
 that few skeptics were willing to join issue 
 at this point. Now, as has been said, it is 
 the chosen ground of battle, and it is boldly 
 claimed that the world and its inhabitants 
 have come into being, and are what they are, 
 through a process of unintelligent mechanical 
 evolution, which not only makes unnecessary, 
 but actually excludes, the intervention of any 
 supra-mundane power, and does away with 
 creation and a creator, save it be as an im- 
 personal, initial force. 
 
 The issue thus presented by the infidel cannot 
 be evaded, and the believer of all others need 
 have no wish to evade it. It necessitates a 
 careful examination of the position behind 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 5 
 
 which, the enemy has entrenched himself, and 
 presents to ns the question whether the use 
 which is sought to be made of this latest gen- 
 eralization of science be legitimate. Perchance 
 there may be a wide difference between evo 
 lution, and evolution as the excuse for unbelief. 
 At all events it will be timely to inquire into 
 the state of the question, and seek to learn 
 how much of truth and how much of error there 
 may be in this hypothesis of science, which 
 bears so directly upon our most fundamental 
 religious beliefs. 
 
 Called therefore as I am to discuss "one 
 of the present aspects of modern infidelity," 
 and viewing the situation to be such as I 
 have sketched, it has seemed to me I could 
 not do better than examine with carefulness 
 and candor the present state of the case. 
 If I shall do nothing more than map out 
 the issues, and exhibit what is fact, and what 
 theory and assumption, in the postulate so 
 boldly appropriated by the unbeliever, I shall 
 feel my labor has not been lost. For many a 
 problem, when its terms are freed from ambi- 
 guity and confusion — when it is once simply 
 and correctly stated — is near to a solution. 
 
 I propose to examine, therefore, as honestly, 
 dispassionately, and carefully, as is possible, 
 the evolutionist's hypotheses, and their appli- 
 
6 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 cations, accept truth wherever it is found, and 
 eliminate, as far as it is discoverable, that which 
 is false. My general topic can properly be 
 formulated as, "The Truths and Untruths of 
 Evolution." 
 
 I am addressing, I assume, those who are 
 with me believers in God and the religion 
 of the Bible. 
 
 My aim will be not so much to convince the 
 unbeliever, to confound or convert the infidel, 
 as to confirm faith and dispel doubt. 
 
 If I may suggest anything to help the hon- 
 est doubter, or relieve the fears of those to 
 whom it seems that the very citadel of our 
 faith is in danger, I shall be content. As for 
 the confirmed skeptic, if the intuitions of the 
 soul, and the witness of the conscience to God, 
 do not convince, I am persuaded no amount 
 of reasoning will avail to do it. 
 
 What I submit for your consideration is the 
 fruit of much careful investigation and thought, 
 and though laying no claim to originality or 
 novelty, beyond what always appertains to 
 independent thinking, it will I trust prove 
 suggestive and useful as an aid in studying 
 the present position and probable future of the 
 evolution hypothesis. 
 
 It is sometimes charged that faith in God 
 and Christianity must necessarily incapacitate 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 7 
 
 and unfit one for the fair and unbiased treat- 
 ment of such a subject. Perhaps it does for 
 an unbiased study of a postulate that excludes 
 God and the supernatural, but not of any ques- 
 tion that is essentially one of science, as evo- 
 lution properly and legitimately is. But aside 
 from this it may well be doubted if it is pos- 
 sible, or desirable, for an earnest and thoughtful 
 man to come to the examination of any ques- 
 tion entirely unbiased. However, in the case 
 before us it will be conceded, I doubt not, 
 that the believer is no more unfitted by his 
 faith, than the skeptic by his want of faith, to 
 deal fairly in the matter. 
 
 The scientific spirit ought to be especially 
 truth-loving, and dispassionate, yet one can 
 read but a little way in the so-called science 
 of the day, without discerning not merely an 
 indifference to the bearings of its conclusions 
 on the conception of God, and the postulates 
 of religion, but an absolute anxiety to escape 
 even the supposition of God, and a persistent 
 effort to magnify the so-called antagonisms 
 of science aud religion. This manifests, we 
 submit, a bias against, much less favorable be- 
 cause harder to overcome, to the dispassionate 
 investigation of truth, than a bias/or, God and 
 religion: since the latter rests on kinds of 
 evidence as substantial and satisfying as the 
 
8 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 evidence for scientific truth. In other words, 
 I believe one is better equipped for finding 
 the truth, who believes, on the testimony of 
 his own soul and consciousness, and the 
 phenomena of mind and spirit, that there 
 is a God, than one who ignores every kind 
 of truth, save that discoverable by scientific 
 induction. 
 
 At all events, it shall be my endeavor to 
 preserve throughout the discussion, at least as 
 fair and honest a spirit, as those who appeal 
 to science to excuse their infidelity. 
 
 Necessarily, in so brief a course as this, there 
 is time only for hints and suggestions. I shall 
 need confine myself to the barest outlines of 
 thoughts and arguments, hence I shall in many 
 cases, be able to no more than indicate the 
 course of treatment fullest of promise in the 
 interest of truth, and leave it for each to fol- 
 low it out for himself. 
 
 EVOLUTION THE HYPOTHESIS. 
 
 Evolution is the general name for that meth- 
 od of accounting for existing diversity, which 
 supposes present complexity to be the result 
 of successive and gradual modifications of 
 simpler forms. It makes the development of 
 the individual from the germ, by successive 
 but closely connected differentiations, to be 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 9 
 
 the image and type of the genesis of all ex- 
 isting beings. 
 
 One of its clearest and ablest expounders, 
 Huxley, defines the term, when employed in 
 biology, "Asa general name for the history 
 of the steps by which any living being has 
 acquired the morphological and the physio- 
 logical characters which distinguish it." 1 
 
 He has applied this definition both to the 
 genesis of the individual, and to the sum of 
 living beings, but when given in connection 
 with the latter the definition receives an ad- 
 dition, from which, I believe, proceed most 
 of the untruths discernible in its applications. 
 Evolution in this definition becomes much 
 more than the Idstory of nature's transforma- 
 tions. He says, " Evolution is the process by 
 which the physical world and all things in it, 
 whether living or not living, have originated 
 through the continuous operation of purely 
 physical causes out of a primitive relatively 
 formless matter." 
 
 •Article "Evolution," Encyclopaedia Britannica. Our 
 quotations of the views of leading evolutionists are taken 
 as far as possible from the ninth edition of the Ency- 
 clopaedia Britannica, rather than from their published 
 works, both as more convenient and as embodying the 
 later and more matured opinions of the advocates of 
 evolution. 
 
10 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 To the same purport is the definition of other 
 evolutionists. 
 
 Herbert Spencer's is substantially this: — 
 " Evolution is a change from the homoge- 
 neous to the heterogeneous, from the indefi- 
 nite or undetermined, to the defined or deter- 
 mined, from the incoherent to the coherent; 
 and the causes of these changes are involved 
 in the ultimate laws of matter, force or motion. 
 The rationale of which is a distinctly mechan- 
 ical process." 
 
 James Sully, author of the article on "Evo- 
 lution in Philosophy" in the last edition of 
 the Encyclopcedia Britannica, thus defines it: 
 — "Evolution includes all theories respecting 
 the origin and order of the world which re- 
 gard the higher and more complex forms of 
 existence as following and depending on the 
 lower and simple forms, which represent the 
 course of the world as a gradual transition 
 from the indeterminate to the determinate, 
 from the uniform to the varied, and which 
 assume the cause of this process to be imma- 
 nent in the world itself that is thus trans- 
 formed." 
 
 In all these definitions we note that they 
 make evolution not merely the history of a 
 process, but equally the complete account of 
 its causality. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 11 
 
 By the legerdemain of a definition, other 
 than second causes are barred out. As Hux- 
 ley expressly says when speaking of man's 
 place in nature, " He is now known to be the 
 last term in a long but uninterrupted series 
 of developments effected without intervention 
 of any but what are termed secondary causes." 
 
 It is this limiting of causality to purely me- 
 chanical forces, this exclusion of other causes 
 than those immanent in things themselves, that 
 has served so generally to identify evolution 
 with materialism. It is emphasizing this feat- 
 ure that enables the infidel to claim that the 
 hypothesis of a personal creator is no longer 
 necessary. The universe, under this concep- 
 tion, becomes not merely a mechanism but 
 a self-evolved and self-evolving one, possess- 
 ing within itself the causes of all its trans- 
 formations. 
 
 It is true that Huxley and Spencer and 
 Sully, would probably disclaim the intention 
 to absolutely exclude any other than mechan- 
 ical causality, and would possibly append to 
 their expressions, if pressed, the saving clause, 
 "/. c, any other cause that science knows about." 
 Indeed Spencer expressly says that " while all 
 phenomena can be formulated in terms of mat- 
 ter, motion and force," these are, in the last 
 analysis, "but symbols of the unknown real- 
 
12 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 ity;" and escapes with many others the logi- 
 cal sequence of bald materialism, by admit- 
 ting, back of and beyond second causes, an 
 unknown and unknowable potentiality. So 
 long however as the causality is made an in- 
 tegral part of evolution, and that a causality 
 inherent in things themselves, the definition 
 of Hseckel is to be preferred, both for its 
 frankness and its clearness, when he says: 
 — "The general theory of evolution assumes 
 that in nature there is a great, unital, con- 
 tinuous, and everlasting process of develop- 
 ment; and that all natural phenomena with- 
 out exception, from the motion of the celestial 
 bodies and the fall of the rolling stone, up to 
 the growth of the plant and the consciousness 
 of man, are subject to the same great law of 
 causation; that they are ultimately to be re- 
 duced to atomic mechanics." 
 
 Now, just so far as exponents of evolution 
 assume to exclude the operation of causes 
 other than those inherent in matter, they 
 transcend the limits of a true science. It 
 has to do merely with the how, and not the 
 whence, of things. 
 
 Dr. Carpenter, in his address before the 
 British Association in 1872, justly says: — 
 " When science sets up its own concep- 
 tion of the order of nature as a sufficient 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 13 
 
 account of its cause, it is invading a province 
 of thought to which it has no claim." "To 
 set up the laws of nature as self-acting, and as 
 excluding or rendering unnecessary the power 
 which alone can give them effect, appears to 
 me as arrogant as it is unphilosophical." 
 
 So also W. Stanley Jevons, in his full and ex- 
 haustive treatise on " The Principles of Science," 
 in controverting the idea that "the course of 
 nature is being determined by invariable prin- 
 ciples of mechanics, which have acted since 
 the world began and will act for infinite ages 
 to come," says, "Such notions I would de- 
 scribe as superficial and erroneous, being de- 
 rived, as J. think, from false views of the nature 
 of scientific inference, and the degree of cer- 
 tainty of the knowledge which we acquire by 
 inductive investigation" (p. 430). Further 
 on, in another connection, but speaking of 
 the same class of scientists, he says, "there 
 is an erroneous and hurtful tendency to rep- 
 resent our knowledge as assuming an approxi- 
 mately complete character" (p. 449). 
 
 These authorities will suffice, I take it, to 
 bear me out in the declaration, that it is 
 unscientific and pure assumption, to assert 
 that there have been no causes at work in 
 producing present diversity except those cap- 
 able of scientific analysis. 
 
14 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 There is no ground, except as it is hidden 
 away in the terms of a faulty definition, for 
 the postulate that the process of evolution 
 has known no other causality than that in- 
 herent in nature itself and discoverable by 
 science. 
 
 We are willing to accept what science can 
 demonstrate, and feel ourselves the richer for 
 its many contributions to our stores of knowl- 
 edge, but we cannot accede to the claim that 
 there is nothing real or credible beyond the 
 narrow limits in which its observations are 
 made. There is much truth outside of what 
 can be measured and weighed by the appli- 
 ances of a purely natural science, and it is not 
 by any means axiomatic, as some scientists 
 seem to imply, that what science cannot 
 formulate is either non-existent or unknow- 
 able. The fact is that science itself is ever, 
 and on all sides, meeting with phenomena 
 inexplicable by its formulated or discovera- 
 ble causes. As Jevons well puts it, "The 
 more we have explained the more there is 
 to explain." 
 
 Sir W. R Grove, whose name is inseparably 
 associated with "the correlation of forces," con- 
 cedes his inability to pass beyond the phenom- 
 ena of light, heat, electricity, magnetism, mo- 
 tion and chemical aifinity. He says, " We 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 15 
 
 are totally unacquainted with the ultimate 
 generating power of each and all of them, 
 and probably shall ever remain so; we can 
 only ascertain the normse (the rules) of their 
 action :" from all which it is clear that, from the 
 standpoint of a true science, anything in the 
 definition of evolution that limits its causes, 
 and excludes all others than those immanent 
 in the world itself, is unscientific, and nothing 
 but an arrogant assumption. 
 
 This may be accounted one of the untruths 
 of evolution, as it is the parent of many others. 
 
 Excluding this gratuitous limiting of its cau- 
 sation, it seems most probable that evolution, 
 considered as descriptive oithe process by which 
 the world has come to its present condition, is 
 likely to become established. Already with 
 the majority of scientists is it accepted as a 
 working hypothesis, and each year is adding 
 to the number of those who in this sense are 
 evolutionists. 
 
 In other words, that the universe and living 
 beings have come to their present condition 
 through a process of gradual modification of 
 previous conditions, — i. e., through a develop- 
 ment, an evolution, — is coming to be regarded 
 as harmonizing more facts and offering fewer 
 difficulties than the un til-recently-accepted hy- 
 pothesis of special creations. It is in this as- 
 
16 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 pect, in presenting the present as born of the 
 past, that evolution has in it an important 
 and valuable truth. 
 
 A half-century ago men were beginning, 
 through the progress of geological investi- 
 gations, to gather the idea that the earth 
 had not come into being as it is now, but 
 that it had been progressively fitted to be 
 the support of life and the home of man. 
 But while thus abandoning the idea that God 
 by a single fiat had fashioned the dwelling- 
 place, nine-tenths and more of all the stu- 
 dents of its living inhabitants were studying 
 them in the light of the accepted hypothesis, 
 that every true species of the vegetable and 
 animal kingdoms, now existing, had origi- 
 nated in the simultaneous creation of a first 
 pair. 
 
 This was so generally held, not, as the 
 skeptical scientist is fond of asserting, be- 
 cause of the accepted theological or biblical 
 theory of the origin of things, but because 
 the idea of permanence was embodied in 
 every accepted definition of what constitutes 
 a species. 
 
 De Candolle, the botanist, defined a species 
 of plants by saying, "We unite under the des- 
 ignation of a species all those individuals that 
 mutually bear to each other so close a resera- 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 17 
 
 blance as to allow of our supposing that they 
 may have proceeded originally from a single 
 being or a single pair;" and Cuvier, an equal 
 authority as a zoologist, defined a species as 
 "a succession of individuals which reproduces 
 and perpetuates itself." So long as these de- 
 finitions were accepted as correct, there was 
 no escape from the inference that each species 
 must reach back to an original pair, and that 
 they had proceeded directly from the hand of 
 the Creator. 
 
 The immutability of species was then an in- 
 superable, as it is even now a serious, difficulty, 
 in the way of the acceptance of any hypothesis 
 of evolution. 
 
 The strength of this objection has been 
 weakened, but not altogether destroyed, by 
 the Darwinian theory of natural selection, to 
 the promulgation of which, and to the inves- 
 tigations which it has stimulated, are princi- 
 pally due the influence and wide acceptance 
 of evolution. Whatever may be the ultimate 
 fate of Darwin's particular theories, it is beyond 
 question that he inaugurated a revolution in 
 scientific methods, and lived to see evolution 
 become the prevalent working hypothesis of 
 science. 
 
 And yet the acceptance of the later theory, 
 so far as it has been accepted, is due much 
 
18 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 less to the positive arguments in its favor, than 
 to those negative ones which have tended to 
 its advantage through casting a doubt on, or 
 positively disproving, the earlier hypothesis. 
 
 It has not yet been satisfactorily shown how 
 species have originated, nor that a true species 
 is other than immutable, and yet it has been 
 made certain that if species were created it 
 was not in the way and manner formerly 
 supposed. And this has been so generally 
 accepted that evolution is regarded as a ten- 
 tative and probable hypothesis — at least as a 
 method of creation — by many who fully dis- 
 cern the weakness of its positive arguments. 
 
 The original hypothesis of special creations 
 covered not only the fact of a creation, but a 
 particular mode of creation. It supposed a 
 special fiat for each species, that each primi- 
 tive pair came into being in maturity and all 
 simultaneously. 
 
 The advance of geological science demon- 
 strated long since that the old conception of 
 a simultaneous creation of all types was erro- 
 neous ; new species have been appearing upon 
 the scene all along the course of earth's geo- 
 logical history. The present geographical dis- 
 tribution of living forms shows that many 
 species of plants and animals are limited in 
 their geographical range, and that continents 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 19 
 
 and seas and islands, as well as the different 
 zones, each have their flora and fauna, so 
 that different centres as well as different 
 epochs of creation must be supposed. 
 
 Beyond this, the vast and rapid growth in 
 the number of species — each, under the old 
 definition of species, a special creation, — has 
 served to raise the question, whether it be 
 not more rational to attribute at least some 
 of these variations to modifications by de- 
 scent. For example, the total number of 
 animal species described up to 1831 was 
 70,000, in the fifty years since the number 
 has grown to 320,000, while it is estimated that 
 not a day passes without adding to the list. 
 Not less than 12,000 species of insects alone 
 it is stated are awaiting description in the 
 museums of natural history. In the vege- 
 table kingdom the number of species is even 
 more numerous. And when we add to the 
 recent forms those of the geological series, 
 the estimate of fully 2,000,000 different spe- 
 cies as the total does not seem excessive. 2 
 
 When we remember that among these mul- 
 titudinous species many are separated by mi- 
 nute characteristics, and all from the highest 
 to the lowest so gradually shade off one into 
 another that it is difficult to draw dividing 
 2 See Lubbock's "Fifty Years of Science," p. 15. 
 
20 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 lines, we can readily understand how many 
 scientists came to question whether independ- 
 ence of origin was necessary to the idea of a 
 species, and whether the old conception of the 
 mode of creation did not need modification. 
 
 It was such facts and considerations as 
 these that led Darwin and Wallace independ- 
 ently to formulate the theory of " survival 
 of the fittest," and convinced many that it is 
 necessary to modify the creation hypothesis, 
 so as to reduce the number of special creations, 
 and give greater potency to secondary causes 
 in producing existing diversity. 
 
 The modern progress of biology, in calling 
 attention to the community of embryological 
 substance and form, the identity in plan of 
 structure which brings into relationship most 
 diverse individuals, and the presence in many 
 species, of rudimentary organs of which there 
 can be given no satisfactory explanation on 
 the theory of independent creation, has con- 
 tributed still further to give probability to 
 the theory of modification by descent. 
 
 The same science, by demonstrating that dif- 
 ferentiation begins way back in the nucleus 
 of protoplasm, beyond the detection of the 
 microscope or chemical analysis, gives the 
 highest probability to the theory that God 
 when He creates does so by touching the 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 21 
 
 hidden sources of being, and leaves the vis- 
 ible form to shape itself by the interaction of 
 inherent properties and general laws. 
 
 All this renders it probable that things and 
 beings are what they are by some process of 
 gradual modification. To it properly attaches 
 the name of evolution, provided it be supposed 
 to begin subsequent to the creative act. 
 
 Evolution, regarded as descriptive of a pro- 
 cess in nature, has much, we thus see, to 
 commend it, but' it ought to be distinctly re- 
 membered and emphasized that it is as yet a 
 mere theory, and must not be regarded as 
 having more than a hypothetical value. In 
 whatever form it be held, — whether that be- 
 hind which infidels and agnostics hide and 
 defend their unwillingness to believe, or that 
 which many Christians hold in conjunction 
 with their faith in God and the Bible, — it 
 must not be lost sight of, that it is yet un- 
 proven, and may not properly be used for any 
 other purpose, or in any other way, than is 
 legitimate for an hypothesis. Because a theory 
 harmonizes with very many facts, with more 
 than a previous or rival theory, does not 
 make it any less a theory, or convert it into 
 an established principle. The key that fits 
 all the wards of the lock is the only true 
 key, and only the theory that fits all the 
 
22 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 facts may be accounted the absolutely true 
 one. Few scientific theories to-day can en- 
 dure this test, and least of all this of evolu- 
 tion. However, for purposes of investiga- 
 tion and as a help to scientific progress, a 
 theory — an hypothesis — may be most use- 
 ful, even if unestablished, and possibly or 
 even probably erroneous. Science has made 
 and is making her progress with just such 
 hypotheses, scarcely any but what are contra- 
 dicted at certain points and so strongly as to 
 awaken the suspicion that a new and broader 
 generalization will some day succeed them. 
 
 The nebular hypothesis has yet to fit into 
 itself the anomalous movements of the moons 
 of Uranus. The atomic theory so useful in 
 developing our knowledge of chemistry has 
 had to be modified again and again, and in 
 the opinion of many chemists is almost certain 
 at no distant day to give way to a theory 
 more consonant with all the facts. The mo- 
 dulatory theory of light seems almost mathe- 
 matically demonstrable, yet the difficulties 
 presented in the supposition of a transmit- 
 ting ether are such as to strongly suggest 
 that the ultimate explanation of the old time 
 "imponderables" and the present "correlated 
 forces" has not yet been reached. 
 
 We cannot dispense with either of these by- 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 23 
 
 potheses, they fit into more of the facts than 
 an}' other, and yet each is, after years of in- 
 vestigation, nnestablished, and will possibly 
 some day be superseded by some more com- 
 prehensive and truer generalization. If it be 
 so with these older and better tested theories, 
 how much more need of a cautious and ten- 
 tative use of that which has only yesterday 
 become probable. 
 
 No one who is at all imbued with a proper 
 reverence for true science can do other than 
 protest against that advocacy of evolution 
 which claims for it triumphant establishment, 
 and reasons from it as from a very axiom of 
 science. It has indeed a possible truthfulness, 
 but its difficulties are yet many and great. 
 
 If I were to formulate a definition of evo- 
 lution, such as the present condition of our 
 knowledge warrants, it would be this: — 
 
 Evolution is that hypothesis which sup- 
 poses the process by which present diversity 
 in nature has been reached to have been one 
 of progression ; the more complex and better 
 endowed, proceeding in accordance with laws 
 imperfectly known, out of simpler and lower 
 forms. 
 
 It seems probable there has been some 
 such evolution as this, and this is as far 
 as a scientific definition is able to go. 
 
24 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 The philosophical forms of the evolution 
 theory, i. e., the forms it assumes when co-or- 
 dinated Avith other knowledge, and applied to 
 the world-old problems of the "whence" and 
 the "whither" of the universe, are principally 
 three: — Materialistic, Agnostic, and Theistic 
 
 The first is characterized by the recognition 
 of nothing but efficient or mechanical causes, 
 rejecting all forces other than those inherent 
 in nature itself. Hence is eliminated from the 
 universe the First Cause — a personal, intelli- 
 gent, self-existent Creator, and equally final 
 cause, the supposed evidence of design. Such 
 evolution is simply blind, unintelligent pro- 
 gression, controlled by merely natural forces, 
 from fire-mist to man. 
 
 It seeks vainly to give any plausible account 
 of origins, and makes man — doomed to die, 
 and a mere automaton — the highest product 
 and the only goal, of this mechanical process. 
 It abounds in startling assumptions, and, its 
 advocates themselves being witnesses, it is 
 wanting in essential evidence at well-nigh 
 every vital point. This perceived weakness 
 of the argument for a purely materialistic ev- 
 olution would seem the real occasion for the 
 formulation of the second form of the hy- 
 pothesis, the agnostic, which diifers from the 
 materialistic only in granting the possibility 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 25 
 
 of a cause, back of and higher than mechan- 
 ical force, but claiming* that its existence and 
 its nature are alike unknowable. This " un- 
 knowable" is so plainly nothing but a cleus 
 ex mackina, a mere device to escape a formal 
 denial of a first cause, that it is of little weight. 
 As in all else, agnostic evolution agrees with 
 materialistic, we shall in our further discus- 
 sions treat them as one. The difficulties of 
 materialistic and agnostic evolution, and the 
 failure of their advocates to meet them, will 
 be considered in our succeeding lectures, treat- 
 ing of the applications of the hypothesis; for 
 which reason we shall not now pause to con- 
 sider them further than to make a remark 
 or two on a fundamental characteristic, — their 
 denial of what are known as final causes. 
 
 These must be eliminated from nature or 
 else they abide, as they have ever been re- 
 garded, the conclusive proofs of the existence 
 of a God — the Cause of causes, and the solid 
 basis of a knowledge of His attributes. 
 
 Hence, many and beautiful and complicated 
 as are the contrivances and adaptations to be 
 noted everywhere in nature, admirable as are 
 the adjustments by which beneficent ends are 
 secured, Ave are bidden to see in them all, noth- 
 ing foreseen or intended by a superior power, 
 but only the necessary outcome of the fortui- 
 
26 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 tous interaction of unintelligent and unchange- 
 able forces, called laws. "It is plain," as says 
 Janet in his unanswered and I believe unan- 
 swerable argument in defence of final causes 
 and the old teleological method, " that this 
 is nothing but the theory of chance under 
 a learned disguise." 
 
 He says substantially: "If by evolution 
 anything more is intended to be expressed 
 than the gradation of organic beings, rising 
 step by step, or at intervals, from the less 
 perfect to the more perfect forms, — a pro- 
 cess that necessitates the idea of intelligent 
 control, it is only another name for the Epi- 
 curean's fortuitous concourse of atoms, and 
 expresses the successive gropings of nature, 
 until favoring circumstances bring such a 
 cast of the dice as evokes an organization 
 that can survive. And when evolution, in 
 admitting nothing but efficient causes, brings 
 itself to this position, it is exposed to the 
 objections that in all past time have been 
 urged against the idea that the world can 
 be the product of chance." 3 
 
 There is in phenomena, a manifest working 
 unto an end, and no system that denies this 
 
 3 See Janet's "Les Causes Finales," original edition, 
 p. 416. And "Final Causes," the translation of the sec- 
 ond edition, p. 282. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 27 
 
 will ever commend itself as true to nature. 
 This has been well elaborated by the Duke of 
 Argyle, as well as the French savant, neither 
 of whose arguments have been successfully 
 met. 
 
 The fact that the difficulties in the way 
 of materialistic or agnostic evolution are so 
 many and crucial, requiring of its advocates 
 a boldness of assumption and a baldness of 
 dogmatic assertion, that are anything but sci- 
 entific, gives to the remaining form of the 
 hypothesis — the theistic—o, natural precedence. 
 Even many who are inclined to the other 
 forms of the theory, are constrained, by the in- 
 vincible character of the objections to a purely 
 natural origin of matter and life, to assume a 
 Creator, and so far are to be accounted the- 
 ists, even though, as is the case with some, 
 the Creator is scarcely more than an initial 
 force. Aside from such, it is proper to divide 
 theistic evolutionists into two schools, both of 
 whom hold to a Creator who is not a mere 
 logical abstraction, but a Self-existent, All- 
 powerful, All- wise Personage— a true God. 
 
 The one supposes creation a single act, which 
 wrought, the Creator is remanded back into 
 the heavens as no longer needed, since the 
 result of creation is so perfect a mechanism 
 as not to require, at any subsequent point, 
 
28 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 adjustment, superintendence, or control. We 
 do not dispute the grandeur of this conception, 
 and fully recognize the homage it bestows on 
 the wisdom as well as the might of the Cre- 
 ator. It is, we allow, worthy of an infinite 
 mechanician to construct a machine that will 
 perpetuate itself and never need the interven- 
 tion of its maker. The chief difficulty is, that 
 it fails to adequately explain the facts. 
 
 The other supposes not only that God created, 
 but that He also governs and controls Plis han- 
 dy work. It holds fast to a Providence, as w r ell 
 as a first cause, believes that God is "the Father 
 Almighty" as well as "the Maker of heaven and 
 earth." This is the only form of the evolution 
 hypothesis, it seems to me, that adequately 
 meets the facts, that has a probability of es- 
 tablishment, and that the Christian can ac- 
 cept. This sees in the history of the universe 
 a process of evolution, but it is one origina- 
 ted and controlled by Divine intelligence and 
 power. It supposes the existence and opera- 
 tion of fixed and unchangeable laws, efficient 
 agents in carrying out the plan of the Great 
 Architect, but they are what they are, and 
 have efficiency, by the ordinance and appoint- 
 ment of the Creator, and He is ever and al- 
 ways co-ordinating and controlling their in- 
 teraction unto the accomplishing of purposed 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 29 
 
 results. It is, in other words, as Joseph Cook 
 has recently well said, an evolution not by 
 law, but according to law. 
 
 The advances and discoveries of science 
 have, it may be, overthrown the conceptions 
 of a simultaneous creation of living forms 
 in their maturity; they may have, and we 
 believe they have, made probable that the 
 earth's history — the process by which present 
 existences have received their being and form — 
 has been an evolution; that the development 
 of the individual is a type of that of the sum 
 of human beings; and, in addition, that this 
 evolution has been largely or mainly wrought 
 out by forces or laws inherent in things them- 
 selves. Nevertheless, at the beginning must be 
 supposed a Creator, omnipotent and all- wise; 
 for only thus can be explained the origin and 
 the wondrous adaptations of the universe. 
 Equally, to account for the progressive modi- 
 fications of earth and its inhabitants, the main- 
 tenance of that beneficent equilibrium through 
 which earth has teemed with life and the prog- 
 ress has been upward rather than downward, 
 there is need not only of a Creator, and a cre- 
 ation way back in the beginning, but of a 
 presiding Providence, and creations all along 
 the ages. Certain is it, that again and again 
 something has touched the springs of exist- 
 
30 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS. 
 
 ence and given a new trend to being. It is 
 perhaps impossible to decide, and we do not 
 know that it matters, whether God has done 
 it directly, or through an agency implanted 
 by Him. In either case, it bespeaks Him a 
 living potential Being, presiding over, as well 
 as originating, the universe ; and this, we take 
 it, is the essential fact to be established in the 
 present discussion. So long as one holds on 
 to faith in God, — the Father Almighty pre- 
 siding over and administering the govern- 
 ment of the world, — he is on safe ground. 
 
 Let evolution be seen to be only an instru- 
 ment or method of God, and it ceases to be 
 antagonistical to faith and religion. As with 
 every hypothesis, so with this, the truth is to 
 be ascertained by the success with which it uni- 
 fies and harmonizes the facts it is propounded 
 to explain. The truths and untruths of evolu- 
 tion, will be exhibited by its success or failure 
 in solving the problems that present them- 
 selves in earth and man, civilization and re- 
 ligion. Into these fields we purpose to press 
 the inquiry. 
 
LECTURE SECOND. 
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE EABTH. 
 
 In my last lecture I examined the defini- 
 tions and philosophical forms of the evolution 
 hypothesis, pointed out what I conceived to 
 suggest an untruth in the common definitions, 
 and among the philosophical forms, indicated 
 as the only one likely to be established, the 
 theistic, which makes it the expression of the 
 creative wisdom and providential control of 
 that God whom we reverence and worship. 
 The views expressed are now to be tested by 
 application to the facts with which the hy- 
 pothesis has to do. 
 
 It is plainly vital to any form of the theory 
 which eliminates God, and a controlling intel- 
 ligence from the universe, that its account of 
 origins and its series of causations be complete. 
 It must take in, not only the phenomena of the 
 material world, but of humanity, civilization, 
 morals and religion. It must exhibit and 
 prove a necessary and unintelligent progress 
 
32 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 from primordial atoms, up to the highest man- 
 ifestations of human intelligence and morality, 
 — connect by an unbroken gradation of ascent 
 the diatom and infusoria with, a Shakespeare 
 and a Newton, — protoplasm with the phe- 
 nomena of conscience and the ethics of Chris- 
 tianity. A break anywhere in the long chain, 
 the failure anywhere along the line to show a 
 necessary connection, the having at any point 
 to suppose or invoke a determining power out- 
 side of nature, at once makes possible, proba- 
 ble, and perfectly reasonable, the existence of 
 a controlling mind independent of nature, and 
 gives the highest probability to the theory 
 that the entire process from beginning to end 
 is under its direction and efficient control. 
 
 In this lecture I desire to inquire how sat- 
 isfactorily the existence and present condition 
 of the earth can be accounted for on the theory 
 of materialistic or agnostic evolution. The 
 inquiry is briefly this : — Is it possible to sup- 
 pose our planet, in its past and present con- 
 ditions, the product of causes or forces inher- 
 ent in matter itself, or must we, to account 
 for earth and its contents, predicate some- 
 thing outside of and superior to nature, — a 
 Supreme Intelligence, a Self-determining Will? 
 
 It has always been the weakness of evolu- 
 tion hypotheses, from the days of Democritus 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 33 
 
 and Lucretius down to Lamarck and St. Ili- 
 laire, that they failed to give even a plausible 
 explanation of crucial facts. We proceed to 
 inquire whether at the present day the situa- 
 tion has materially changed. 
 
 The theory of Kant and Laplace as to the 
 method of world-building, known as the neb- 
 ular hypothesis, is the starting point of every 
 modern theory of evolution. This, though 
 yet a mere supposition, serves to bring into 
 unity and scientific correlation so many facts, 
 both of astronomy and geology, that all sci- 
 entists use it as a working hypothesis, and re- 
 gard it as a most probable account of the 
 origin of the solar system and of the earth's 
 structure. The time has long passed when it 
 was regarded as in conflict with revealed re- 
 ligion, and as superseding a Creator. The 
 devout Christian scientist holds to it as firmly, 
 and accepts it as an account of the way God 
 built the world, as freely as the materialist 
 who argues from it that the world need have, 
 and has, no Creator. 
 
 The fact is, that this, as the theory of evo- 
 lution itself, is and can be interpreted in ac- 
 cordance with either conception. Our con- 
 cern with it is to ascertain, not so much its 
 truthfulness, as whether, if it be true, it affords 
 any countenance to the idea that the world is 
 
34: TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 self-evolved, — that there has been no inter- 
 ference from without. 
 
 The nebular hypothesis, as you know, is 
 briefly this: that originally the entire space 
 occupied by the solar system was filled by 
 an evenly diffused nebulous mass of matter. 
 This mass is supposed to possess a slow ro- 
 tary motion. Under the reciprocal attrac- 
 tion of its parts condensation goes on, under 
 which the rotation is accelerated, so that un- 
 der well-known mechanical laws successive 
 rings are formed, and then spheres : thus the 
 planets and their satellites, each moving in 
 the same plane and at proportionate distances, 
 come into being, while the central mass as it 
 contracts gives off light and heat and remains 
 the controlling centre of the system. 
 
 While this method of world-formation was 
 first proposed as pure hypothesis, and yet re- 
 mains an hypothesis, it so well suits and ex- 
 plains the circular character of the planetary 
 orbits, the plane in which they lie, the uniform 
 directions of their revolutions, and the oblate 
 spheroid shape of the earth, that though there 
 are facts that are yet inexplicable by it, it is gen- 
 erally accepted as the most probable mode by 
 which the solar system came to be what it is. 
 
 Granting all that is claimed for it, accept- 
 ing it as true, does it make unnecessary an 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 35 
 
 intelligent Creator and Ruler ? Does it afford 
 the materialistic evolutionist all he needs for 
 a starting point in the long course of unintelli- 
 gent upward progression ? We say nothing 
 here about what must, on his supposition, be 
 potentially present in the fire-mist, in the prim- 
 itive nebulous mass; — the life, intelligence, 
 and consciousness which are manifested in the 
 higher and later stages of the process, which has 
 here its beginning. We do not now press the 
 difficulty of supposing that in this original 
 matter there is " the promise and potency of 
 every form and quality of life." 
 
 There are sufficiently formidable chasms to 
 be bridged before we come to this. Whence 
 the matter? Whence the force? Whence 
 the relation of the two ? Whence that exact 
 adjustment of materials, motions, interac- 
 tions, and combinations, from which has 
 resulted earth, as habitable and the abode of 
 order, — a cosmos rather than a chaos? At 
 the very beginning of his chain of successive 
 transformations the materialist has to predi- 
 cate matter and force, — and both in definite 
 and fixed amounts. For it is as well estab- 
 lished, as the case admits, that matter and 
 force are each indestructible, and hence are 
 the same in amount to-day as when present 
 in the nebulous mass. From nothing to 
 
36 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 matter, — and if force be not a part of matter, 
 from matter to force, — are leaps that are be- 
 yond even the imagination of the materialistic 
 evolutionist. And, therefore, if he may noi 
 accept a creator and a creation, he is shut 
 up to an eternity of both matter, and the 
 source, whatever it be, of its motion. 
 
 This, if at all conceivable, is only so on the 
 supposition of eternal cyclical changes. The 
 primitive nebula must be regarded as only 
 the debris of former worlds, and the outcome 
 of the evolution now going on will be an 
 ultimate return to primordial atoms. 
 
 The very postulate of evolution — it being 
 a progression from the simple to the complex, 
 implying alike a starting point and a goal — 
 would seem to sufficiently negative this con- 
 ception. But, beyond this, the evolutionist's 
 own theory of the correlation of forces seems 
 to demonstrate its impossibility. What Sir 
 William Thomson has called " the dissipation 
 of energy " is mathematically proven to be 
 going on continually, so that the sun's heat, 
 the source of energy so far as our system is 
 concerned, is passing out into space, from 
 which it does not return. 1 It can .therefore 
 
 1 For a full and clear statement and discussion of this 
 "dissipation of energy," see Newcomb's "Astronomy," 
 pp. 500-505. Also Jevon's "Principles of Science," pp. 
 441-8. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 37 
 
 be predicted that the present constitution of 
 the solar system will not endure forever, — 
 that the time is coming when the sun will be 
 a cold and burnt-out mass, and the mechan- 
 ical energy of the universe will be exhausted. 
 By the very law by which all force is con- 
 vertible into heat, — since that ultimate form of 
 energy is certainly being dissipated, and its 
 entire reconversion into mechanical power is 
 impossible, — it follows that the mechanism will 
 run down and the machine stop, as certainly 
 as a clock, when the weights no longer exert 
 their influence. 
 
 This necessary end of the process — implying 
 as it does its beginning — negatives, it would 
 seem, the only possible form of the supposition, 
 that mattter and force are eternal. In fact 
 scarcely a single materialistic evolutionist is 
 found who longer claims for them eternity. 
 The thorough-going materialist leaves the 
 problem unsolved, the agnostic places it in 
 the domain of the unknowable, while others 
 admit that here a Creator must be supposed, 
 however well He may be dispensed with in 
 the subsequent process. J. Clerk Maxwell, 
 in article "Atom," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
 says — "We have reached the utmost limit 
 of our thinking faculties when we have ad- 
 mitted that, because matter cannot be eter- 
 
38 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 rial and self-existent, it must have been 
 created." 
 
 But the proof of a Creator at this starting 
 point i3 not merely a negative one. The 
 fact rests not merely on the dilemma, either 
 eternity or Creation, but is susceptible we 
 think of affirmative demonstration. 
 
 To constitute a first step in the supposed 
 evolution, force or energy or motion is as ne- 
 cessary as matter, and the two must be in some 
 form co-ordinated one with the other. Besides 
 this, as the amount of matter is a fixed quan- 
 tity, and according to an accepted axiom of 
 science, it has not been and cannot be in- 
 creased or diminished, something outside of 
 itself must have established this amount at 
 the time of its production. 
 
 A parity of reasoning leads to the conclu- 
 sion that something above itself has meas- 
 ured out and generated the precise amount 
 of energy which would suffice to execute 
 the work to be accomplished. 
 
 Not only so, — matter exists, we have every 
 reason to believe from chemical science, in 
 elemental atoms, which combine only in cer- 
 tain fixed and definite proportions. These 
 various elements must be supposed to have 
 been present in the original nebulous mass, 
 and that too in definite quantities and pro- 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 39 
 
 portions, so that not only the total of matter 
 and energy must have been somehow fixed 
 and determined, but equally the amount of 
 each element, and the nature and proportion 
 of their chemical affinities. For instance, 
 there must have been just enough oxygen to 
 combine according to its atomic weight with 
 all the different elements into whose com- 
 position it enters, and leave nothing over. 
 The same is true of hydrogen, carbon, nitro- 
 gen, and all the other elements. The amount 
 of each is just sufficient and no more to make 
 and keep the world the habitable abode it is. 
 Now here is co-ordination that bespeaks 
 design and a designer. At the very begin- 
 ning, when matter was in its simplest forms, 
 when laws as the expression of forces or prop- 
 erties, were fewest, we see the same need of an 
 intelligent mind and ruler, in order to their 
 wise and beneficent collocation and co-ordina- 
 tion, as when the process of differentiation had 
 grown more complex and varied. Indeed, 
 the argument for a first cause, an intelligent 
 Creator, is more unanswerable here than at 
 any other point in the series, for these results, 
 collocations, co-ordinations, cannot be attri- 
 buted to any previous evolution, cannot be 
 claimed as the product of exclusively efficient 
 or necessary mechanical causes, but must be 
 
40 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 acknowledged to have constituted a part of 
 the nebulous mass at its origin. And this 
 goes far to conclusively prove that both the 
 matter and its contents, were brought into 
 being and co-ordinated by a supreme and 
 extra-mundane power. 
 
 Materialistic evolution, therefore, as to the 
 very substance out of which all existing forms 
 are to proceed, fails to give any rational account 
 of its origin. It leaves unanswered the infer- 
 ence that the nebulous mass, its properties and 
 motions, can only be accounted for as the cre- 
 ation of an all- wise and self-existent ruler; that 
 there has been, in other words, a beginning in 
 which God created the heavens and the earth. 
 The only refuge from this conclusion is the 
 remanding of everything, back of the nebulous 
 matter, to the region of the unknowable, leav- 
 ing the origin of all things an-unsolvable mys- 
 tery. Whoevej* accepts a Creator here, by so 
 doing is compelled, it seems to us, to renounce 
 all a 'priori argument against the existence 
 of a power superior to nature, and his subse- 
 quent interference at other and later stages of 
 the process. But granting matter and force — 
 the materials for a mechanical evolution — there 
 is another abyss that must be bridged, or the 
 process cease to be self-sufficient, and that is the 
 chasm which separates dead and living matter. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 41 
 
 The introduction of life upon our earth is a 
 problem that presents fully as much and grave 
 difficulty as the origination of matter. And 
 the failure to solve it, is even more fatal to 
 evolution as a necessary, gradual, and con- 
 tinuous process. For it necessitates the inter- 
 position of a supernatural power, a Creator, not 
 merely at the beginning, but midway in the 
 upward progression. Huxley, in his article 
 on " Biology," says: " If the hypothesis of evo- 
 lution be true, living matter must have arisen 
 from not-living; for by the hypothesis, the 
 condition of the globe was at one time such 
 that living matter could not have existed in 
 it, life being completely incompatible with the 
 gaseous state." How necessary such evolution- 
 ists feel it to be, to account for a purely natural 
 or mechanical origin of life, is seen in Helm- 
 holtz's and Sir Wm. Thomson's suggestion 
 that it may have been introduced from a mete- 
 orite. On which supposition Huxley justly ob- 
 serves: — "It makes no difference if we adopt 
 Sir Wm. Thomson's hypothesis, and suppose 
 that the germs of living things have been trans- 
 ported to our globe from some other, seeing that 
 there is as much reason for supposing that all 
 stellar and planetary components of the uni- 
 verse are or have been gaseous, as that the 
 earth has passed through this stage." 
 
42 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 Every materialistic evolutionist feels that 
 here is a crucial test, and if their theory is 
 to stand, life must have proceeded out of the 
 not-living. Hence it has been zealously sought 
 to prove the possibility of spontaneous gen- 
 eration, and again and again have we heard 
 that this formidable chasm has been closed. 
 
 Twice within the past twenty- five years has 
 it been confidently announced that sponta- 
 neous generation, — abiogenesis, — life from the 
 non-living, has been experimentally demon- 
 strated. 
 
 Pouchet, director of the Museum of Natural 
 History at Rouen, in 1859, and Dr. Bastian in 
 1870, obtained bacteria and infusorial life from 
 fluids claimed to be entirely freed from every 
 possible living germ. Pasteur repeated, with 
 greater care and scientific accuracy, the exper- 
 iments of the former, and demonstrated that 
 the inference drawn was erroneous, and that 
 life was only present when the germs were 
 introduced from the air, and that where suf- 
 ficient care was taken to obviate this, or suf- 
 ficient heat employed to destroy the germs, 
 life invariably failed to appear. What Pasteur 
 did for Pouchet, Tyndall has done for Dr. 
 Bastian, and to-day there is scarcely an evo- 
 lutionist who does not admit that at present 
 there is no such thing as abiogenesis — that the 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 43 
 
 sayings, omne vivum ex vivo and omne. vivum 
 ex ovo, "all life from a living germ," express 
 a universal and established fact. Tyndall and 
 all others agree with Huxley in saying, "The 
 properties of living matter distinguish it ab- 
 solutely from all other kinds of things, and 
 the present state of knowledge furnishes us 
 with no link between the living and not-liv- 
 ing"; and also, " The fact is that at the pres- 
 ent moment there is not a shadow of trust- 
 worthy direct evidence that abiogenesis does 
 take place, or has taken place within the pe- 
 riod during which the existence of life on the 
 globe is recorded." 2 
 
 The only escape from the inference that 
 life, like matter, was a gift of a living poten- 
 tial Creator, is that offered by Huxley in the 
 addenda to the passage already quoted — "The 
 fact," viz., that there is no evidence that abio- 
 genesis does take place or has taken place, 
 " does not interfere with any conclusion that 
 may be arrived at deductively from other con- 
 siderations that, at some time or other, abio- 
 genesis must have taken place." "The other 
 considerations " reduce themselves, we see from 
 the course of his reasoning, merely to this 
 syllogism : mechanical evolution is established 
 
 2 Article "Biology," Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. III., 
 pp. 588-596. 
 
44: TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 by irrefragable proofs; such evolution neces- 
 sitates abiogenesis; therefore, though it is 
 not known to occur now, and has never been 
 known to occur, it must have taken place. 
 Than which I know of no more glaring case 
 of begging the question. 
 
 To most minds, the concessions that living 
 matter cannot come out of the non-living, and 
 that life only appeared when the globe came 
 to be fitted to maintain it, proves, as far as is 
 possible, its introduction by a power that is 
 not of earth. 
 
 This is apparently conceded by the one who 
 above all others deserves to be called the fa- 
 ther of modern evolution, — the ldte Charles 
 Darwin. For in his epochal book, — " The Or- 
 igin of Species," — in which he formulates his 
 law of natural selection, he expressly assumes 
 the creation of one or a few low forms of life, 
 and only claims to show how from them all 
 the others have proceeded. Whatever were 
 Darwin's personal beliefs, — and we have rea- 
 son to think he was not disinclined to entirely 
 eliminate God and the supernatural from the 
 universe, — his writings stamp him as a the- 
 istic evolutionist. He no where seeks to ac- 
 count for the origin of matter, or life, or intel- 
 ligence, but only for their development in 
 divergent forms when once existent. 
 
of evolution: 45 
 
 Notwithstanding this admission, the Dar- 
 winian theory is really the stronghold of ma- 
 terialistic and agnostic evolution, since it is 
 the nearest approach to anything like a plau- 
 sible accounting for the existing forms of the 
 vegetable and animal kingdoms, apart from 
 Divine creation and superintendence. 
 
 Darwin formulated a law, which evidently 
 has been widely operative in diversifying 
 natural forms, and serves to explain beauti- 
 fully and simply very much that character- 
 izes existing species alike of plants and 
 animals. Mechanical evolutionists hastened, 
 as soon as promulgated, to use it as the mas- 
 ter key that unlocks every mystery and ex- 
 plains every difficulty in their hypothesis, and 
 while to-day abating much in their claims, 
 they yet have to rest upon it as the only 
 formulated cause of the wide diversity in 
 nature. 
 
 Of such importance is this theory, in its re- 
 lation to the wider theory of evolution, that, 
 at the risk of wearying you by traversing all- 
 too-familiar ground, I must dwell briefly up- 
 on it. 
 
 The postulates on which it rests are well- 
 nigh axiomatic for their truthfulness. The 
 first is the fact, that the increase of "iving 
 forms on the earth is in a geometrical rat T 'o, 
 
46 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 so that in a very few generations the num- 
 ber becomes far in excess of the means for 
 their support. The progeny of a single pair 
 would suffice in a few centuries to overstock 
 the whole earth. As the consequence of such 
 a tendency in plants and animals, there is a 
 struggle for existence, in which the weakest 
 perish, and the strongest survive; by the 
 weakest being meant those least fitted, and by 
 the strongest those best fitted to maintain the 
 struggle. Hence the law is appropriately 
 called "survival of the fittest." Now the fit- 
 ness does not inhere only or chiefly in strength, 
 but rather in adaptation to environment, so that 
 the advantageous peculiarities which enable 
 any particular form to survive are many and 
 varied. It may be physical strength, or some 
 peculiarity of claw or teeth, which makes more 
 certain the capture of its prey, or it may be 
 some defensive adaptation by which a natural 
 enemy is more certainly eluded. 
 
 The survivors in this struggle are those who 
 possess the peculiarities best fitted to their sur- 
 roundings. Thus far the theory is neces- 
 sarily accepted — its truth is axiomatic. But 
 to make up the law of natural selection, by 
 which the origin of species is to be explained, 
 another postulate is put forth and maintained 
 by Darwin with a wealth and skill of illustra- 
 
OF EVOLUTION'. 47 
 
 tion and argument, that cannot but call forth 
 admiration. This is the tendency of plants and 
 animals to vary despite the general law of here- 
 dity that like produces like. This is well seen 
 inplantsandanimalsunderdomestication;and 
 by the careful cherishing of desirable varia- 
 tions many new and profitable varieties have 
 been perpetuated. This has been done by 
 human intelligence co-ordinating the laws of 
 heredity and variability. Darwin claims that 
 it is done in nature by the same laws, with- 
 out superintending intelligence, that varia- 
 tions are continually occurring, slight, it may 
 be, but yet sufficient to decide the issue in the 
 severity of the struggle for existence, and 
 where the variation is profitable it secures 
 the survival of its possessor. 
 
 Thus ever wider and wider variations arise 
 and are perpetuated, and constitute what we 
 call Species. All this occurs, not as the theist 
 claims by a process divinely superintended and 
 governed, but of necessity. 
 
 From one or a few simple forms of life all 
 the present forms have sprung, through the 
 operation of this law, without intervention or 
 control by God. It was put forth as having 
 universal and unlimited potency. 
 
 No one doubts that there has been such a 
 thing as natural selection, in the sense that 
 
48 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 certain forms, because of inheriting valuable, 
 advantageous peculiarities, have been thereby 
 marked out, selected, fitted to survive; the 
 whole question turns upon how extensively 
 and potentially the law has operated. 
 
 Is there or is there not a limit to variabil- 
 ity? Does the proposed law suffice for the 
 explanation of all, — as well as of some, — of the 
 past and present diversity of form and function? 
 For more than twenty years the controversy 
 on this point has been waged, and though the 
 final verdict may not have been reached, there 
 are certain conclusions that can be regarded as 
 settled. 
 
 One is that the potency, whatever it may 
 be, of Darwin's law, is more or less restricted. 
 Alone and by itself it fails at many points to 
 satisfactorily account for crucial facts. 
 
 As an explanation of necessary evolution it 
 has to be supplemented again and again, and 
 collocated with other and unknown forces and 
 laws. This is conceded on all sides. Darwin, 
 in the fifth edition of "The Origin of Spe- 
 cies," — issued ten years after the first — limits 
 the operation of the law in these words — " I 
 am convinced, ... it has been the most im- 
 portant, but not the exclusive means of modi- 
 fication." He was compelled to invoke new 
 factors to meet its deficiencies, as sexual se- 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 49 
 
 lection and pangenesis, and then leave much 
 to be accounted for by unknown laws. 3 
 
 Alfred R. Wallace, who propounded the 
 principle contemporaneously with Darwin, 
 has always held it as of only limited ap- 
 plicability, and has well pointed out its fail- 
 ure when applied to man. 
 
 St. George Mivart, of equal rank with Dar- 
 win, Wallace, Huxley and Tyndall as a scien- 
 tist, though an evolutionist, remands natural 
 selection to a subordinative role, and not only 
 asserts, but is generally conceded to prove, that 
 "it requires to be supplemented by the action 
 of some other natural law or laws as yet un- 
 discovered. ' Natural selection ' is insufficient, 
 both on account of the residuary phenomena 
 it fails to explain, and on account of certain 
 other phenomena which seem actually to con- 
 flict with that theory. 1 ' 4 
 
 Huxley, whose lucid exposition of the theory 
 served more even than Darwin's labored book 
 to give it popular currency and acceptance, 
 concedes, in the last edition of the Encyclo- 
 pcedia Britannica, "How far 'natural selec- 
 tion' suffices for the production of species re- 
 mains to be seen". . . "it must play a great 
 
 s See "Descent of Man," Vol. I., p. 146. 
 4 " Genesis of Species," pp. 17, 33, 257. Compare also, 
 "The Cat," Chap. XV. 
 
50 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 part in the sorting out of varieties into those 
 which are transitory and those which are 
 permanent." . . . "The causes and condi- 
 tions of variation have yet to be thoroughly 
 explored; and the importance of natural se- 
 lection will not be impaired, even if further 
 inquiries should prove that variability is defi- 
 nite, and is determined, in certain directions, 
 rather than in others, by conditions inherent 
 in that which varies." 5 
 
 One of the latest important works that has 
 appeared is "The Theories of Darwin," by 
 Eudolph Schmid, in which, in presenting "the 
 present state of the Darwinian theories," the 
 author says (p. 107) — "In summing up all we 
 have said about theories of descent, of evo- 
 lution, and of selection, we still find all the 
 solutions of the scientific problems to be 
 hypotheses, but hypotheses of very different 
 value. The least valuable is the selection 
 theory. It possesses the merit of having 
 started the whole question of the origin of 
 species; it may explain subordinary develop- 
 ments; natural selection may have co-operated 
 as a regulator in the whole progress and the 
 whole preservation of organic life. It seems 
 certain however, according to Ed. Von Hart- 
 
 s Article "Evolution," Encyc. Brit, Vol. VIII., p. 657. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 51 
 
 man, that the impelling principle which called 
 new species into existence lay or originated 
 in the organisms and did not approach from 
 without. This seems to be confirmed more 
 and more decidedly with every new step of 
 exact investigation as well as reflection." 
 
 These latest conclusions of science as to the 
 insufficiency of Darwin's theory, or " natural 
 selection," to explain the origin of species, 
 these concurrent testimonies as to its having 
 but subordinate efficiency in moulding the 
 forms of life, make it unnecessary to devote 
 more than a casual glance at the points 
 wherein it breaks down. The grounds for 
 denying it the potency at first claimed are 
 chiefly these — 
 
 1st. The preponderating evidence is very 
 strong in favor of a limit to the variabil- 
 ity of species, and against the proposition 
 on which the whole Darwinian theory is 
 founded, — that there is no essential differ- 
 ence between varieties and species. The fact 
 that varieties, however they may differ — and 
 in structure they do differ more widely than 
 many species — are universally fertile with each 
 other; and that, in all the wide variation intro- 
 duced by domestication, infertility has not been 
 produced; joined to the fact that species when 
 crossed universally manifest this, the peculiar- 
 
52 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 ity of hybridism, combine to prove that there 
 is an essential distinction between the two. 
 
 This distinction has not yet been broken 
 down, and though the theory has made it ex- 
 ceeding probable that many real varieties are 
 reckoned as species, and the boundaries of true 
 species must be very largely extended, it has 
 not demonstrated that there is no real differ- 
 ence between them. Facts prove, as Huxley 
 concedes, that, coupled with wide morphologi- 
 cal or structural changes, there exists great 
 fixity of physiological or functional character- 
 istics. Indeed, under domestication, a limit 
 is ultimately reached beyond which variation 
 cannot be carried; and it is demonstrable that 
 it is equally so in nature, and that there the 
 limit is much sooner reached. In view of this, 
 the widening of specific limits seems all that 
 can be justly claimed for the theory. 
 
 If specific modifications have been by descent, 
 as it seems probable that they have been, it has 
 been regulated, not by this but by unformulated 
 laws, and may as well as otherwise have been 
 due to creative power exerted directly on the 
 germs. 
 
 2d. The testimony of the geological record 
 opposes the theory in many points. The 
 theory implies not only a general upward 
 gradation in plants and animals, an advance 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 53 
 
 from the lower to the higher, as we indeed 
 find, but the same advance in particular 
 families or types, which confessedly we do 
 not find; since particular families began ap- 
 parently in their higher rather than their 
 lower members. The theory demands prog- 
 ress by slow gradual modifications; the 
 geological record seems to indicate leaps: 
 many forms of life have appeared suddenly 
 on the scene and unconnected with previous 
 forms. According to the theory there ought 
 to have been many transitional forms; the 
 record affords scarcely any. Those which 
 have been adduced as the assumed progeni- 
 tors of the horse, and winged reptiles, while 
 lending some additional weight perhaps to 
 the theory of evolution, viz., that present 
 forms have been reached by successive modi- 
 fications of previous ones, do not materially 
 strengthen the theory of natural selection. 
 While it still remains an almost insuperable 
 difficulty in that theory, that, in the very 
 strata which afford the most continuous 
 records for the longest periods, there is an 
 entire absence of such forms, as modification 
 by such a law would call for. It is still a 
 fact that the main types of the invertebrates 
 appear almost contemporaneously and without 
 any traceable intermediate forms. 
 
54 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 3d. The enormous lapse of time required for 
 the development of existing species, is, fur- 
 ther, an insuperable bar to its acceptance. 
 Darwin says, "Natural selection acts solely 
 by accumulating slight successive favorable 
 variations; it can produce no great or sudden 
 modification ; it can act only by slow and short 
 steps." 6 Mivart estimates that, by this meth- 
 od, " it would have taken 2,500 million years 
 for the complete development of the whole 
 animal kingdom to its present state." And 
 if natural selection has been the only method, 
 this is not at all excessive in view of the length 
 of time it has taken to differentiate, say the 
 greyhound from the wolf. Now earth, it is 
 mathematically demonstrable, could not, ac- 
 cording to the nebular hypothesis, have been 
 the home of life for more than 100,000,000 
 years, some estimates say 10,000,000 years, 
 and even the longer period would scarcely 
 suffice for the production of the higher mam- 
 mals. 
 
 4th. The theory utterly fails to account for 
 the incipient stages of organs and organisms, 
 which, however profitable in their perfect and 
 mature form, previous to that must have been 
 useless, or even injurious. 
 
 Mivart, in his " Genesis of Species," has 
 
 6 "Origin of Species," p. 421. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 55 
 
 fully set forth and illustrated this objection, 
 and shown both the utter impossibility of the 
 acquisition of many peculiarities by any such 
 slow and gradual process, and following 
 Nageli, the mathematical improbability, that 
 a modification, occurring in one or a few in- 
 dividuals surrounded by others, would be 
 perpetuated rather than be lost. 
 
 These objections are recognized as fatal to 
 Darwin's celebrated theory as a full and 
 satisfactory account of the origin of specific 
 differences. 
 
 The theory does serve however to explain 
 with much plausibility a number of facts — 
 e. g., rudimentary organs as atrophied through 
 disuse; the phenomena of mimicry, — i. e., 
 close resemblance of certain plants or ani- 
 mals to other and perhaps different plants 
 or animals, as a safeguard from enemies, and 
 hence an advantageous peculiarity certain to 
 be perpetuated ; while it fits in with some of 
 the facts of the geographical and geological 
 distribution of species; of the homology of 
 form and function; and biological develop- 
 ment. 
 
 We have dwelt thus upon the theory of 
 natural selection, since it is the only one of 
 which science has as yet been able to explain 
 the operation. 
 
56 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 The laws with which it has co-operated to 
 effect present diversity are conceded to be 
 unknown, and are merely inferred because 
 there seems evidence that existing forms and 
 species have in some way descended from 
 pre-existent ones. 
 
 This the present geographical distribution, 
 taken in connection with geological remains, 
 makes most probable. For it is a conceded 
 fact that the geological remains in many cases 
 show the prevalence in geological ages of the 
 same typical forms as are found in the same 
 localities to-day. Thus in Australia is found 
 a particular fauna, and among those peculiar 
 to it, and indeed found nowhere else, are the 
 kangaroos and other pouched beasts, and the 
 same type of creatures is found in its geologi- 
 cal remains. The same fact is true of the 
 very peculiar animals of the sloth and arma- 
 dillo type — found alone in South America. 
 
 Alfred R. Wallace has collated many cor- 
 roborative illustrations of this feature of 
 geographical distribution, and further shown 
 that the diversity of animals and plants on 
 islands is directly proportionate to the degree 
 of ease with which they can have passed 
 from one to the other. These considerations, 
 with some of those already referred to, as 
 being best explicable on the supposition of 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 57 
 
 genetic relationship, lend much strength to 
 the hypothesis of an evolution of specific dif- 
 ferences. We have seen that Darwin's theory 
 does not by itself explain them, that there 
 must be supposed other laws, yet unknown 
 and unformulated, supplemental and co-op- 
 erative, to account for the facts. The very 
 fact that different laws have conspired unto 
 the result; that the relation of plants to 
 insects, of many a species to other species, is one 
 of mutual dependence; that the outcome of the 
 struggle for existence has fitted the earth to 
 be a home for man; proves that there must 
 have been a co-ordination and collocation of 
 laws and efficient causes throughout the pro- 
 cess, and this we cannot conceive of, apart 
 from an all-wise and almighty co-ordinator 
 and ruler. 
 
 Mechanical, necessary evolution fails as 
 signally to explain the origin of species as 
 it does to account for the introduction of life, 
 and the beginning of the world. These all are 
 inexplicable by any other evolution than that 
 which has back of it a living, personal God, 
 creating and governing all things for His own 
 ends; and such evolution, subsequent to its 
 beginnings, differs not from what in theology 
 we call Providence. 
 
58 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 In reviewing the ground we have traversed 
 in this lecture, we see that materialistic and 
 agnostic evolution, in seeking to account for 
 the earth and life by causes or forces inherent 
 in itself, is necessitated to bridge the chasms 
 between the non-existent and the existent, 
 between nothing and matter, and matter and 
 force, between the not-living and the living, 
 and between the widely separated forms of 
 vegetable and animal life. We have seen 
 that it fails in each and every instance. We 
 could equally demand of it, to explain still 
 higher steps in the necessary progression. 
 Whence sensation, intelligence, consciousness? 
 By what principle immanent in nature has 
 man, with his reason and conscience, self- 
 determining will and spiritual intuitions, 
 been evolved ? These difficulties are as in- 
 explicable, by such evolution, as those into 
 the consideration of which we have entered. 
 
 The only rational conclusion, the only con- 
 sistent account of earth and its contents, is 
 an evolution back of which is a creator and 
 a providence in one person. For the origin of 
 matter, of force, of life, of intelligence, of man. — 
 a creator : for the progressive process by which, 
 under laws and secondary causes ordained by 
 the Creator and co-ordinated by Him, earth 
 has become what it is, — a Providence. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 59 
 
 True science, when it has traced out the 
 history of the earth and its myriad inhabi- 
 tants, when it has mastered the wondrous 
 connections and intimate relationships of its 
 phenomena, and when, discerning herein the 
 presence of a plan, of thought, intention, pur- 
 pose, it asks the questions, whence ? and why ? 
 will find its only answer to be : — God. 
 
LECTURE THIRD. 
 
 EVOLUTION AND MAN. 
 
 The advent of man with powers bespeaking 
 a different order of being from any below him, 
 demands even more than the incoming of life, 
 sensation, and intelligence, the interposition 
 of an omniscient and omnipresent Creator; and 
 this is strictly accordant with a divinely co- 
 ordinated and controlled evolution. Mechan- 
 ical evolution, on the contrary, is constrained 
 to make man, as everything below him, the 
 necessary outcome of unconscious and unin- 
 telligent forces, — merely the highest and final 
 product of a slow and constantly ascending 
 natural selection. 
 
 The Agnostic as much as the Materialist 
 must so regard him. For let it be admitted 
 that man is the Creation of God, and has in 
 his soul something that bespeaks his origin 
 and is akin to his maker, and God ceases to 
 be the altogether unknowable, and the funda- 
 mental postulate of Agnosticism is overthrown. 
 
TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS. 61 
 
 Agnostic and Materialist therefore agree in 
 making man only an evolution from the brute, 
 a survival from the same stock as the Anthro- 
 poid Apes. 
 
 The difficulties however of such a concep- 
 tion are greater than at any previous point in 
 the process. 
 
 They are such as to cause many an evolu- 
 tionist, as notably Alfred Russell Wallace, to 
 pause, and concede that here mechanical evo- 
 lution fails and that " a Superior Intelligence 
 has guided the development of man in a defi- 
 nite direction and for a definite purpose." 
 
 However efficient natural selection has been 
 in accounting for the " Origin of Species," many 
 besides Wallace have been constrained to con- 
 cede its inability to explain the "Descent of 
 Man." Wallace's arguments on this point 
 have never yet been satisfactorily met. He 
 urges that natural selection does not account 
 for the size of man's brain, so much in excess 
 of the highest apes, and of his own need when 
 but a slight remove from his brute ances- 
 try. It cannot account for the loss of such 
 useful peculiarities as a hairy covering for his 
 back, and the prehensile character of the 
 feet. Nor can it explain the latent and long 
 unused capabilities of the human hand and 
 voice, and the acquisition of man's character- 
 
62 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 istic mental and spiritual faculties. These are 
 difficulties, we may add, not only in the way 
 of natural selection, but of any theory of unin- 
 telligent and mechanical evolution. 
 
 The hiatus between apes and man is so great 
 as to be a serious stumbling-block in the way 
 of any theory of gradual modification. If 
 man and the ape have had at a remote period 
 a common ancestor, where are the many inter- 
 mediate and transitional forms that must have 
 existed ? It is conceded that man is the latest 
 and possibly the final outcome of the long pro- 
 cess. However far back his advent, compared 
 with the other forms of life, it is recent, and 
 from his first appearance the earth-record is 
 measurably complete. Now this record speaks 
 of no such half men and half apes, as, on such 
 a theory, we have a right to expect. On the 
 contrary the earliest human remains show 
 that man was then no whit less endowed with 
 cranial capacity than the man of to-day. Then 
 as now the size of brain does not perhaps pos- 
 itively decide whether the condition was one 
 of savagery or civilization, but it does pos- 
 itively negative that it was ape-like. To the 
 same purport is the fact, that no man has ever 
 been found so embruted or sunken in savagery 
 as to be without capacity for spiritual quicken- 
 ing and development, a capacity no ape has 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 63 
 
 ever manifested, and this proves man's intel- 
 ligence to be of a different kind from that of 
 the brutes. In fact it must be granted that 
 if brute instinct be of the same order as hu- 
 man intelligence, then, as Sir John Lubbock 
 justly says, if "anthropoid apes approach 
 nearer to man in bodily structure than do any 
 other animals, it must be admitted that ants 
 have a fair claim to rank next to man in the 
 scale of intelligence." * 
 
 In view of this, we ask, are we more en- 
 titled to look for the missing link in the do- 
 main between man and the monkey, than 
 between man and the ant? Is it bodily 
 form, or intelligence, that is man's chief char- 
 acteristic ? In either case, however, the chasm 
 is immense and cannot be closed. 
 
 The evidence is cumulative that serves to 
 disprove the postulate of materialistic and 
 agnostic evolution, that man has been evolved 
 from the brute. 
 
 Just as to account for matter and force and 
 life a divine interposition is needful, so is it 
 even more essential, in order to account for 
 man, possessed as he is of a soul with moral 
 attributes, and a higher order of intelligence 
 than that of the brutes. 
 
 There are two inferences necessarily drawn 
 1 Lubbock's "Ants, Bees, and Wasps, "'p. 1. 
 
64 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 from the hypothesis of mechanical evolution 
 that deserve especial consideration, and all the 
 move because it is claimed, that they are estab- 
 lished by independent and positive evidence 
 and hence are put forth as not merely consis- 
 tent with man's descent from the brute, but 
 positive arguments in favor of such an origin. 
 
 These inferences are: — Maris vast antiquity; 
 and his low primitive condition, only slightly 
 in advance of his supposed brutish ancestry. 
 
 We readily see, that the establishment of 
 these postulates is essential to the mainte- 
 nance of any theory of mechanical or necessary 
 evolution ; if they be overthrown or weakened 
 by just so much is the entire hypothesis 
 discredited. To the establishment of these 
 propositions therefore have been given great 
 industry of research and wide learning. It 
 becomes us to examine them with great care- 
 fulness and candor. 
 
 In what remains of this lecture we will 
 consider the question of Maris Antiquity; and 
 reserve for our next, the equally important 
 and closely connected question of his prim- 
 itive condition, — the origin of his civilization. 
 
 In consistency with the claim that "man is 
 descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished 
 with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal 
 in its habits and an inhabitant of the Old 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 65 
 
 World, and classed among the Quadrumana as 
 surely as would the common and still more 
 ancient progenitor of the Old and New World 
 monkeys," 2 he must be regarded as coining 
 on the stage of earth not only in a condition 
 of savagery lower than any now known, but 
 at a time most remote from the distant period 
 to which the dawn of history carries us back. 
 On the hypothesis of slow gradual modifica- 
 tions, one hundred or even five hundred thou- 
 sand years would not be an excessive estimate 
 of his age on earth, if it be measured by the 
 ratio of his progress in the four or five thou- 
 sand years covered by the records of history. 
 
 But we will not concern ourselves with this 
 inferential style of reasoning. Fond as the 
 advocates of a great antiquity are of using it, 
 it carries no weight unless mechanical evo- 
 lution itself be accepted, and that too in a 
 form which admits of no modifications or 
 progression except by a process, as slow, 
 gradual and steady, as that by natural selec- 
 tion. To argue antiquity from an assumed 
 progression, at an assumed rate, from sav- 
 agery to civilization, from the ape-like an- 
 cestor, to the cultured descendant, is a mere 
 begging of the question. 
 
 The issue is capable of being tried in the 
 2 Darwin's "Descent of Man," Vol. II, p. 372. 
 
66 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 light of facts. It is a question of evidence. 
 Do the facts as far as ascertained prove the 
 great antiquity of man ? 
 
 We will proceed to interrogate the evidences, 
 but before doing so, it may not be amiss to 
 state that latterly there has been in deference 
 to facts, a great curtailing of man's age, from 
 the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of 
 years claimed for it, on the ground that he 
 has become what he is by the slow process 
 of natural selection. Even Ha^ckel has con- 
 ceded that the claims at first advanced were 
 probably excessive, and admits that a modest 
 minimum of twenty .thousand years may prove 
 all that the facts will warrant. E. B. Tylor 
 in his article on " Anthropology " in Encyclo- 
 paedia Britannica, uses equally moderate lan- 
 guage, — as, e. g., "from twenty to one hundred 
 thousand years may fairly be taken as a mini- 
 mum," the evidence of prehistoric remains, 
 requires "an antiquity of at least tens of 
 thousands of years." The development of 
 culture and language " necessitates that to 
 the four or five thousand years to which the 
 ancient civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, and 
 China date back, a probably much greater 
 length of time must be added." This is a 
 marked abbreviation of the hundreds of thou- 
 sands that were at one time claimed. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 67 
 
 This bringing down the sojourn of man on 
 earth to somewhere within from double to 
 quadruple the time usually allowed his his- 
 tory is necessitated by any temperate weigh- 
 ing of the facts relied upon to prove his age. 
 Though his advent may be remanded back 
 to a geological period, it is to the period 
 confessedly the topmost of the series. He 
 belongs to Cenozoic time, — the Quarternary 
 age, — the geologically Recent period. There 
 have been frequent announcements that evi- 
 dences of his existence in the Pliocene and 
 even Miocene period of the Tertiary had been 
 found, but more careful examination has ever 
 disproved the claim. So that no recognized 
 authority assigns to man an antiquity older 
 than the Pleistocene of Lyell, and the Middle 
 Quarternary or Recent period of other geol- 
 ogists. There are those who indeed expect 
 the evidence of greater age will be found, 
 but the fact remains that it has not yet been 
 adduced. 
 
 The sciences to be interrogated as to man's 
 antiquity are three: Geology, Prehistoric Ar- 
 chaeology, and the Science of Culture. And 
 the evidence adduced correspondingly falls 
 under three heads: — 1. Facts which concern 
 the geological position of human remains. 
 2. Facts which respect man's association, 
 
68 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 and contemporaneousness with certain ex- 
 tinct mammals. 3. Facts which respect his 
 race characteristics, diversities of speech, and 
 the origin and growth of civilization. 
 
 We will as briefly as possible examine the 
 argument. 
 
 Within the last fifty years, and more par- 
 ticularly the last twenty-five, facts have 
 been multiplying tending to connect man 
 with a past geological epoch, and an extinct 
 fauna. Very few fossilized crania, or bones 
 of man have been found — and such as have 
 been discovered are conceded to have afforded 
 very slight evidence as to his antiquity. 
 
 Their age as inferable from their posi- 
 tion, rests upon geological considerations, 
 and as to these there is no such agreement 
 as to require the supposition of any very 
 great antiquity. 
 
 The evidence as to age on the hypothesis 
 of a kinship to the brutes, equally breaks 
 down in respect to the crania that are con- 
 fessedly the most ancient, as notably the 
 Engis and Neanderthal skulls. As to the 
 first, Huxley says: "There is no mark of 
 degradation about any part of its structure. 
 It is in fact a fair average human skull, 
 which might have belonged to a philosopher, 
 or might have contained the thoughtless brain 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 69 
 
 of a savage." As to the latter, he says, while 
 in some characteristics "the most pithecoid 
 of human crania yet discovered, . . . its ca- 
 pacity may be estimated at about seventy- 
 five inches, which is the average capacity for 
 Polynesian or Hottentot skulls." And "in 
 no sense can it be regarded as the remains 
 of a human being intermediate between men 
 and apes." 
 
 In the light of these oldest human remains 
 he declares "if any form of the doctrine of 
 progressive development is correct, we must 
 extend by long epochs the most liberal esti- 
 mate that has yet been made of the antiquity 
 of man." 3 
 
 The remains of man which are depended 
 on to prove his antiquity and condition, are 
 not his fossilized bones so much as the fruits 
 of his skill and handiwork, which have sur- 
 vived the destruction of time. It is the posi- 
 tion and relations of these indisputable relics 
 of his art, that furnish the principal ground 
 for claiming for him a high antiquity. 
 
 For instance, mingled with the drift, or val- 
 ley gravels of certain rivers, as the Somme, 
 the Seine, and the Garonne, in France, and the 
 Thames, the Wey and the Ouse in England, 
 
 3 Conclusion of Huxle3 T 's "Man's Place in Nature," 
 also Quatrafages' "Natural History of Man," pp. 83-5. 
 
70 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 are found worked flints, — the indubitable evi- 
 dence of the existence of man at the period of 
 their deposition. 
 
 Associated with these tools and weapons 
 of flint, are found the bones of extinct mam- 
 mals, such as the mammoth, the rhinoceros, 
 the hippopotamus, the cave lion and bear, 
 the hyena, etc., etc. Evidences of man's ex- 
 istence and handiwork, are also found in 
 numerous caves in England, Belgium, the 
 south of France, and elsewhere. In nearly 
 all cases his weapons, and tools and pottery, 
 if not his own bones are associated with the 
 same or a similar extinct fauna, as is found 
 in the flint-bearing gravels. 
 
 Likewise in the peat-bogs, particularly of 
 Denmark, and in what is known as Kjokken 
 Moddings, or kitchen refuse, or shell, heaps, 
 which are numerous and extensive at many 
 points adjacent the sea-coast of northern Eu- 
 rope, are found not only the relics of the 
 shell-fish and animals on which men lived, 
 but many of their weapons and tools, and 
 in such order and arrangement as give us 
 some idea of their condition and mode of life 
 at successive periods. 
 
 Already at this epoch, however, man has 
 come to have substantially the same eviron- 
 ment as in the historical period, and has passed 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 71 
 
 out of the geological epoch. The same re- 
 mark applies to the very interesting remains 
 that have been recovered from the beds and 
 shores of the Swiss Lakes, where prehistoric 
 men had for generations as a protection against 
 beasts of prey or hostile tribes of men, their 
 houses built upon piles in the lakes and thus 
 easily isolated from the land. This particular 
 form of dwelling is no evidence of antiquity, 
 as similar structures are found to-day, where 
 among certain tribes considerations of con- 
 venience or security make them desirable, as 
 extensively in the northern parts of South 
 America, and not infrequently elsewhere. 
 
 In Europe and Asia such structures were in 
 use during the historical period, and are men- 
 tioned by Herodotus in his account of the 
 Ancient P&onians; by Hippocrates, and by 
 other ancient writers. 4 
 
 The remains recovered from the sites of the 
 Swiss Lake dwellings, assure us that they were 
 in use from the stone age down to the bronze, 
 yea into the iron, even to the time of the 
 Eoman conquests. The fauna was some of it 
 different from to-day, but none of it geological, 
 
 4 As to the use of this form of dwelling iu historic and 
 even present time, see Lubbock's " Prehistoric Man," pp. 
 174-77. Also Southall's "Recent Origin of Man," pp. 
 156-58, 178-79. " Epoch of the Mammoth," pp. 40, 58. 
 
72 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 or such as to require the assumption of any 
 great antiquity. 
 
 These several classes of remains furnish all 
 the direct geological or prehistoric evidence 
 there is for man's great antiquity. It remains 
 for us to examine the arguments built upon 
 them, and ascertain whether it is a necessary 
 conclusion that these prehistoric men lived so 
 many thousands of years antecedent to the 
 dawn of history. 
 
 It is readily granted that man was present 
 in Europe while yet large portions of it were 
 feeling the influence of the last glacier period, 
 that he lived in a climate and among a flora 
 and fauna markedly different from the present, 
 that he carried on the struggle for existence 
 amid difficulties to which his descendants are 
 strangers. We accept this to be the evidence 
 of the river gravels and the caves; though the 
 remains of human art and of the extinct mam- 
 mals have suffered so much of dislocation and 
 mixture by watery currents and other agencies, 
 that the proof of contemporaneousness can be 
 scarcely regarded as conclusive. Dismissing 
 this doubt, however, the question of age turns 
 upon how long a time has been necessary to 
 effect the changes that have taken place. 
 
 When were the flint-bearing gravels of the 
 rivers deposited? How long, since man was 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 73 
 
 at least an occasional occupant of the caves, 
 and the contemporary of the mammoth, the 
 reindeer, mid cave bear? How much time 
 must be allowed for the changes in configur- 
 ation of land and in climate that have taken 
 place ? The answer to these questions will 
 depend altogether on the views we take as to 
 the kind and degree of the forces by which 
 these changes have been wrought. The ad- 
 vocates for a very long period, with Sir Chas. 
 Lyell at their head, are without exception 
 uniformitarians, i. e., they assume that geo- 
 logical changes have been wrought by the 
 same forces, not only, as are operating to-day, 
 but by these forces operating in the same way, 
 and with substantially the same energy as at 
 present. 
 
 It is by this convenient assumption, that, 
 learning the ratio per year or century of any 
 change now going on, the time requisite for 
 the work accomplished can be readily reckoned. 
 
 Thus Sir Charles Lyell reasons in respect to 
 parts of the shores of Norway. They are found 
 to be rising at the rate of say two feet and a 
 half in a century, therefore where they have 
 been upheaved to an altitude of six hundred 
 feet it must have required a period of twenty- 
 four thousand years. So too the time it has 
 taken to form the alluvial shores and the 
 
74 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 delta of the Mississippi, or the Nile, may be 
 calculated by ascertaining the amount of sedi- 
 ment that is each year carried down by their 
 waters, and dividing by it the alluvial mass; 
 thus assuming the delta of the Nile, for exam- 
 ple, to have grown at the rate of three inches 
 and a half in a century, it would have taken 
 several hundred centuries to have accumulated 
 the many feet that make up its present thick- 
 ness. On the same principle, Huxley assigns 
 ten thousand years, and others three to four 
 times as many, as necessary to have produced 
 the gorge below Niagara Falls. The mighty 
 rush of water is cutting away the rock at the 
 rate of from one to three feet per year: it is 
 therefore a simple mathematical calculation 
 to ascertain how long it has taken to wear 
 away the six miles of ravine that lie below the 
 present Falls. 
 
 It is by calculations such as these that the 
 date of the river-gravel and cave men is sought 
 to be ascertained. 
 
 As to the flint implements of the Somme 
 Valley, their age is calculated by estimating 
 how long it must have taken for the beds of 
 gravel rising from the chalk fully one hun- 
 dred feet in places, to have been formed, on 
 the supposition that every change has been 
 wrought by the agency of the present river, 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 75 
 
 flowing indeed at a higher level and with some 
 greater volume, but in other respects no more 
 potent to work changes than at present. 
 
 The calculation begins by estimating the age 
 of a deposit of peat about thirty feet in thick- 
 ness, which overlays, and is more recent than, 
 the gravel. The age of this has been com- 
 puted in this way. At about eighteen inches 
 from the surface have been found several flat 
 dishes of Roman pottery, from which it is 
 inferred that the peat has only grown about 
 eighteen inches in perhaps eighteen hundred 
 years, at which ratio of deposition the age of 
 the whole thirty feet cannot be less than three 
 to four hundred centuries. This conclusion 
 led even Sir Charles Lyell to hesitate to adopt 
 the proposed rate as a true chronometric scale. 
 But it is precisely on this principle that such 
 calculations are made. If a valley has been 
 worn down, it has been at an average erosion 
 of so many feet a century; if the coast line has 
 sunken, it has been at a given ratio of de- 
 pression ; if peat has formed, it has been at a 
 fixed rate; and as all these .features are pres- 
 ent in the Somme Valley it must have re- 
 quired so many millenniums to have brought 
 it to its present condition out of the original 
 chalk. This is manifestly assuming that the 
 forces of nature operate with a uniform ratio 
 
76 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 of intensity. Without pausing at this point 
 to controvert the postulate, we may further 
 observe that the age of the cave men in many 
 cases is ascertained in the same way. An 
 instance is found in connection with the 
 famous Kent cavern of England. 
 
 Beneath a deposit of stalagmite five feet 
 thick were found flint implements and the 
 ashes and coals of a fire. At once a time 
 measure was sought, and it seemed ready at 
 hand, for two hundred and twenty years ago 
 a man had carved his name upon the stalag- 
 mite, since which time it had grown only 
 one-eighth of an inch, hence to form the five 
 feet must have required a period of one hun- 
 dred and twenty thousand years, and a prom- 
 inent lecturer from England claimed before an 
 American audience only a few years ago, that 
 on this evidence we must believe the man or 
 men who built that fire in Kent cave did it 
 more than a hundred thousand years ago. 
 
 Such results it would seem must necessarily 
 cast suspicion on the methods by which they 
 are reached. We have only instanced one or 
 two of the many applications of this principle 
 of uniformity as the basis for an estimate of 
 time. The occasion does not admit or require 
 that I should do more. All such estimates 
 are utterly worthless, since nothing is capable 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 77 
 
 of more triumphant demonstration than the 
 very converse of the assumed principle. 
 
 There is no such thing in nature as the as- 
 sumed indefinitely continued uniform activity 
 of its forces. 
 
 It may be on the contrary laid down as a 
 law, that the forces of nature have no uniform 
 ratio of activity. 
 
 Peat is forming to-day as it has in the past, 
 at nearly every rate of growth, from one foot 
 a century to one foot a year, and how long it 
 has taken any particular deposit to form can- 
 not be calculated on the assumption that every 
 part has growth at the same rate. 
 
 This is equally true of stalagmite: it may 
 grow as slowly as the case cited, one-eighth 
 of an inch in two hundred and twenty years; 
 it has been known to form as rapidly as one- 
 eighth of an inch in six months; and because 
 at one period the deposition is very slow, 
 it by no means follows that at another and 
 earlier it may not have been very rapid. The 
 same is true of those wider and more exten- 
 sive changes which respect the elevation, or 
 depression of land, carrying with them as 
 they necessarily do important changes of 
 climate and corresponding variations of flora 
 and fauna. These are not, any more than 
 the other and minor modifications, made at a 
 
78 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 uniform rate. A coast line may rise for a 
 century at the rate of only a few inches or 
 feet in all that time; it may also rise or sink 
 suddenly, as has happened to the coasts of India 
 and South America; or again, in the period of a 
 single generation it may undergo most marked 
 changes, such as Darwin notes as having oc- 
 curred in Chili 5 or as are now taking place in 
 Hudson's Bay, whose shores have risen several 
 feet in the memory of man. And the fact 
 that change has been going on for a century 
 at one rate, is no criterion for judging what 
 the rate will be in the century to come or 
 what it has been in centuries past. The pres- 
 ent popular school of Uniform itarian geology, 
 founded by the lamented Lyell, was a natural 
 and proper reaction from the Cataclysmal 
 theories that had obscured the important dy- 
 namic effects wrought by long continued 
 action of existing forces. But just as the day 
 of accounting by sweeping catastrophes for 
 every geological change is past, so we believe 
 will it soon be with rigid Uniformitarianism. 
 The one extreme is as far from the truth as 
 the other. 
 
 Other agencies have operated in nature 
 than those we see at work every day. And 
 moreover, these ordinary agencies and forces 
 5 See "Voyage of a Naturalist," p. 310, 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 79 
 
 have wrought on a wider scale and with 
 a greater energy than we ordinarily observe. 
 Thus have changes, we doubt not, been many 
 times wrought more extensively and rapidly 
 than is conceivable on the uniformitarian 
 hypothesis. 
 
 Besides, uniformity itself is cumulative, and 
 accumulations of slight changes tend neces- 
 sarily and invariably to catastrophes. 
 
 It may take a long period for such accumu- 
 lations to overthrow the equilibrium, but the 
 time necessarily comes when there must be a 
 readjustment. Then the changes are so rapid 
 as to be cataclysmal, and a very brief space 
 may suffice to work fundamental and revolu- 
 tionizing effects. 
 
 It is such catastrophes as these, that are 
 perchance centuries in preparing and other 
 centuries in working out their effects — catas- 
 trophes which are readjustments made neces- 
 sary by changed conditions, that are lost 
 sight of by geologists of the Lyell school. 
 The fact that uniform conditions exist and 
 have been observed for long periods, af- 
 fords no basis for predicting the length of 
 their continuance, or fixing the date of their 
 beginning. Who would be prepared in view 
 of the uniformity in the contraction and ex- 
 pansion of water under the wide range of 
 
80 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 degrees of heat marked by 40° to 200° for, 
 the changes that take place when 32° is 
 reached on the one side, and 212° on the 
 other? Yet something similar to this is to 
 be looked for throughout the whole domain 
 of nature. Uniformity necessarily tends to 
 its own overthrow. When catastrophes are 
 spoken of and their agency invoked to ex- 
 plain natural phenomena, thought naturally 
 reverts to such as earthquakes, volcanoes, 
 tidal waves, and the like, which come seem- 
 ingly by no law and most unexpectedly. The 
 very fact that such unpredictable events can 
 interpose and work wide-reaching effects, 
 make more or less uncertain the estimates 
 based on rigid uniformity. But these are 
 not the kind of catastrophes that have been 
 most potential and widely revolutionizing in 
 their effects, but rather such as by their cul- 
 mination have brought increasing cold and 
 glacieration unto the changing the climate 
 and life of extensive regions, and those 
 which in turn destroyed the glaciers, and 
 gave more favorable conditions to vegetable 
 and animal life. In such wide reaching 
 changes, though the causes leading up to 
 the event may have acted slowly and uni- 
 formly, there must be conceived to have 
 been an acceleration of rate as the crisis 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 81 
 
 approached, and with it a more intense and 
 rapid action of all the forces. 
 
 The avalanche, for example, is prepared for 
 by each increase of snow and ice, — and as 
 certainly as the mass grows, so certainly will 
 the law of gravity cause a portion some day 
 to be launched on its destructive course, but 
 no one can predict the time, or measure the 
 rapidity or extent of the changes, by the rate 
 of growth that produced the needful con- 
 ditions. 6 Whatever were the cause or causes 
 of the glacier period we may be sure the 
 nearer it came to its culmination, the 
 more intensely they operated. And what- 
 ever causes produced the increase of heat 
 which melted them, we may be certain that 
 each season brought a more and more rapid 
 wasting of the accumulated ice, and a cor- 
 responding amelioration of climate, until an 
 equilibrium was reached. 
 
 The position of the earlier remains of human 
 
 6 I cite the Avalanche as an illustration of this sort of 
 cataclysmal change, since however circumscribed may be 
 its effects, the catastrophe is prepared for by a gradual 
 process, and is followed by changes which however rapid 
 and extensive at first, become finally slow and gradual. 
 What we would emphasize is that many of the greatest 
 and most influential changes in nature are of a similar 
 character— catastrophical— preceded and followed by long 
 periods of slow and gradual modifications. 
 
82 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 art and their juxtaposition to the members of 
 a fauna indicative of an almost arctic tempera- 
 ture, goes far to prove that man had his home 
 in Southern Europe at a period when the 
 glacier system was with increasing rapidity 
 passing away. The phenomena can only be 
 explained on some such catastrophical theory 
 as we are advocating. The very length of 
 time required on the rate of change assumed 
 by the rigid Uniformitarian is in itself a dis- 
 proof of the theory. The men of the river- 
 gravels and the caves would seem to have 
 been destroyed or driven away by just such 
 floods as must have occurred in the more and 
 more rapid melting of the glaciers. Every- 
 thing in the situation, character and rela- 
 tions, of the remains, suggest a sudden — if 
 what may have taken a century or two, 
 may be called sudden — change in climatic 
 conditions. 
 
 The most probable explanation of this change 
 supposes along with the depression of the cen- 
 ter and south of Europe, an elevation of both. 
 Northern Asia and Africa — converting on. 
 either side of the glacier-capped mountains' 
 of Europe, what had been land-locked seas, 
 into denuded plains. The effect on the north 
 was a lowering of the temperature of Northern 
 Europe and Asia, and the transference of the 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 83 
 
 belt of perpetual ice further north. While 
 on the south the effect was the drying of the 
 inland sea of Africa, — the converting it into 
 the heated waste of sand, known as the Sahara, 
 and this not only took away the most abun- 
 dant source for the precipitation that fed the 
 glaciers, but furnished the heated winds that 
 caused them to melt so rapidly, that the rivers 
 must be conceived as having fully a hundred- 
 fold the volume and force of to-day. The more 
 such a catastrophe as this is made probable 
 and well-nigh certain, the more likely does it 
 become that its effects would be most wide- 
 reaching, and abandoning the Uniformitari- 
 an's disproven method of reckoning, we can 
 believe it need not have been more dis- 
 tant in time, than that deluge of which 
 nearly every race and language retains the 
 tradition. Whether this be so or not, cer- 
 tain is it, that time backward cannot be 
 computed on the principle of rigid uniformity 
 of the operation of nature's forces. And with 
 this method of calculating time done away, 
 the grounds on the score of geology and 
 prehistoric archaeology for claiming for man 
 a vast antiquity also fail. 
 
 The extinct animals among whom he lived 
 give, we further see, no criterion of age, be- 
 cause they themselves are old or not, just as we 
 
84 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 determine the probable cause of their extinction. 
 If, as is most probable, they were destroyed 
 as much before the changes of climate, and the 
 flooded condition of their habitat, as the weap- 
 ons of man or the struggle with other beasts, 
 the same events that buried the evidences of 
 man's presence swept them away, and contem- 
 poraneousness with them does not add a cen- 
 tury to the age of man. This is strongly 
 confirmed by the structural condition in 
 which many of these remains are found. 
 Very many have even to-day more of the 
 structure of bone, than stone. This is es- 
 pecially noticeable in the numerous remains 
 of the mammoth in Russia; where, preserved 
 by frost, specimens have been found so per- 
 fect as to give an almost complete idea of its 
 appearance and habits. Indeed, there it is 
 plain, that a sudden destruction overtook 
 whole herds of these massive mammals, and 
 that, at no extravagantly remote period. 
 And the fact that sudden glacieration de- 
 stroyed them, favors, very decidedly, the hy- 
 pothesis, as to the causes which destroyed the 
 glaciers of central Europe, referred to above. 
 
 In considering the facts deduced from the 
 ancientness of race peculiarities, and diversity 
 of language, — the science of Culture, — in their 
 bearing on man's antiquity, we have need to 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 85 
 
 invoke the same principle we have been con- 
 sidering. Quiet and slow as are nature's 
 forces when in equilibrium, they act violently 
 and rapidly when the equilibrium is disturbed, 
 — when they are seeking a new adjustment. 
 We are ignorant of the causes that produced 
 the original divergence alike in races and 
 speech, but there seems little doubt in the 
 light of all analogy that whatever they were, 
 the limit of divergence was, within a short 
 period, reached. Since then the environment 
 and the nature responsive thereto, have re- 
 mained so constant, and the causes likely to 
 produce change have been so few and slight 
 during the whole historical period, that the 
 principal types alike of races and language 
 have remained substantially fixed. 
 
 If this be correct, then the argument for a 
 long antiquity in order for man to differentiate 
 his form, and color, and speech and arts by 
 slow and gradual steps, is completely done 
 away. Probably the very same cataclysm 
 that so radically changed the climate, the 
 flora and the fauna, of man's dwelling places, 
 may have started the train of causes that has 
 given us the races of men and led to the con- 
 fusion of their tongues. The geological strata 
 in their breaks, upheavals, convolutions, etc., 
 as well as in their proofs of sudden transforma- 
 
86 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 tions of life, — extensive destructions of old 
 forms and the incoming of new ones — afford 
 evidence that if these changes were brought 
 about by existing forces, they were operating 
 far more widely, energetically and rapidly than 
 now. They could not have been wrought by 
 a law like natural selection or survival of the 
 fittest, which only admits of slow and almost 
 imperceptible modifications. Clarence King 
 did good service a few years since in showing 
 this, as to our American continent, particularly 
 with reference to the more recent geological 
 ages. There is even stronger evidence of the 
 same fact as to the fields in Southern and West- 
 ern Europe in which the remains of prehis- 
 toric man are found. He had to. struggle 
 with, and flee from, if not succumb before, a 
 rapidly and catastrophically changing envir- 
 onment. 
 
 The weakness of the argument for a great 
 antiquity, drawn from a changed fauna, and 
 the time requisite to develop a high civiliza- 
 tion in the same territory where savagery has 
 prevailed will be apparent, if we suppose, the 
 history of our own country were lost, and had 
 to be reconstructed from the material with 
 which Archa3ologists have to work. 
 
 If there were no other data but those mark- 
 ing the contrast between the present evidences 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 87 
 
 of an advanced civilization, and the arrow- 
 heads and flint implements dug up in our fields 
 and gathered in our museums, the tokens of 
 a pre-existent savagery, together with the de- 
 crease verging to extinction of a fauna natural 
 to a savage social condition, the inference 
 would be drawn that an enormous length of 
 time must have elapsed in order to so great 
 and radical a change. According to the reas- 
 oning of Lubbock, Tylor, and others, the num- 
 ber of years necessary to work such changes, 
 for the stone age to develop into the bronze, 
 and the bronze into the iron, for the old fauna 
 to yield to one substantially new, would on 
 the hypothesis of slow, gradual modification, 
 be numbered by the hundred thousands. Yet 
 in the light of history we know that most of 
 these changes have been wrought in a single 
 century, and all have required less than three 
 hundred years. 
 
 A careful weighing of the evidence leads 
 us to the conclusion that man's antiquity is 
 far less than has been claimed. We deem it 
 certain that he has not been a denizen of 
 earth for the period that must be allowed 
 on the supposition of nothing but slow and 
 uniform rates of change in himself and his 
 surroundings. 
 
 His antiquity we can safely say is not such 
 
88 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS. 
 
 as to support the hypothesis of mechanical, 
 ■unintelligent evolution. 
 
 In our next lecture we shall endeavor to 
 'show that equally there is no good or valid 
 ground for the assertion that man was origi- 
 nally a brute-like savage. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 EVOLUTION AND CIVILIZATION. 
 
 In support of a necessary evolution, inclu- 
 sive of man and everything below him, much 
 attention has been given to the proving that 
 his origin was back in dim geological time, 
 and that his original condition was far below 
 that of any known savages. Both these postu- 
 lates are necessary to the hypothesis sought 
 to be proven. For while the establishment 
 of both would not weaken the objections on 
 other grounds to mechanical evolution, or 
 favor it, more than the supposition that 
 an intelligent Supreme Being has begun in 
 Creation and has guided by Providence, 
 whatever evolution there has been; we 
 readily see that the failure to establish 
 either of them is fatal to any theory of 
 necessary evolution as accounting for man's 
 origin and progress. 
 
 In our last lecture we briefly presented some 
 
90 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 of the arguments against accounting for man 
 as an evolution from the brutes, and then ex- 
 amined the claim as to his antiquity. We 
 found that the claim rested on an unproved 
 and improbable theory of uniformitarianism 
 in nature's operations. That the facts ad- 
 duced proved indeed extensive and radical 
 changes of land, and water, and climate, of 
 vegetation, animal life and man, but that 
 such changes could as well have been ef- 
 fected in one millennium as a hundred, and 
 did not probably antedate the historical pe- 
 riod more than, if as much as, a thousand 
 years. We now turn our attention to the 
 other postulate, that man at his origin was 
 but a slight advance over the brute, and that 
 he has risen by slight and progressive modi- 
 fications from an ape-like savage to his high- 
 est present condition. 
 
 He must be supposed, without intervention 
 from a Divine Maker or Ruler, to have ac- 
 quired his speech, his arts, his morals, his 
 religion; and to have passed from the lowest 
 manifestation of each to the highest, by a 
 principle of progression inherent in himself, 
 or imposed by his environment. 
 
 Of course if this could be proven, if man 
 has come to be what he is by a process as 
 slow and gradual as that of natural selection, 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 91 
 
 it would be a strong presumption in favor of 
 man's claimed antiquity. In fact this is the 
 argument principally urged and relied upon 
 to establish that fact. 
 
 This is the argument for man's hoary anti- 
 quity deduced from the science of culture, to 
 which in our last lecture we scarcely more 
 than alluded. We then deferred its discus- 
 sion, because a full reply to it turns upon 
 the questions we are now to consider: viz., 
 Whether man ivas originally as brute-like as is 
 claimed? And by ivhat process has he become 
 what he is, in his most civilized condition ? These 
 questions are to be answered, not by the 
 "it may be supposed" and "we may readily 
 conceive " style of argument which is so fre- 
 quently employed by the advocates of an un- 
 intelligent evolution, but by a careful weigh- 
 ing of evidence, an appeal to facts. If man 
 has descended from the brutes, if he has as- 
 cended from an ape-like savage, it is to be 
 properly decided only by an examination of 
 his oldest remains, the study of his earliest 
 records. 
 
 Now the first question to be asked is, 
 where are these to be found? Assuredly, 
 at the original home of the race, — the cen- 
 ter from whence he has radiated. For the 
 evolutionist holds as most accordant with 
 
92 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 his theory, what is otherwise most proba- 
 ble, the unity of the human family, and if 
 the diverse races have descended from a com- 
 mon ancestry, there must have been some- 
 where an original central home. It is the 
 concurrent opinion of nearly all ethnologists 
 that this home was somewhere on the great 
 plateaux of Central Asia, and that from thence 
 man has migrated or extended unto the va- 
 rious habitable portions of the globe. 
 
 Now, it will be conceded that the evidences 
 thus far adduced for savagery, and an originally 
 low type of humanity, have not been gathered 
 in these the earliest seats of man and his 
 works. On the contrary, they have been col- 
 lated from what must have been, supposing 
 the opinions of ethnologists to be correct, the 
 very outposts of population, from the scenes 
 of migrations most distant from the original 
 centres. The study of the so-called "prehis- 
 toric man" has thus far been chiefly confined 
 to his European habitat. The classification 
 of men according to the materials used in 
 meeting their necessities, — the division of 
 prehistoric times into Ages of Stone, Bronze 
 and Iron, is based on what has been learned 
 respecting man, as he has lived and wrought 
 in Western Europe, in Denmark, Belgium, 
 France, Switzerland, and Great Britain. Sir 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 93 
 
 John Lubbock in his interesting and authori- 
 tative work on "Prehistoric Times" (p. 2) 
 says: "In order to prevent misapprehension, 
 it may be well to state at once, that for the 
 present, I only apply this classification to 
 Europe, though in all probability it might be 
 extended also to the neighboring regions of 
 Asia and Africa." Should we concede all 
 that is claimed respecting the successive pe- 
 riods through which man is supposed to have 
 lived in Europe, there is absolutely nothing 
 presented to show that his lowest and rudest 
 condition there, was not contemporaneous 
 with not only a higher, but an exceedingly 
 high civilization, in the older homes of the 
 race. In fact the evidence is entirely want- 
 ing of a stone age, not only in the supposed 
 original seat of man, but in the countries ear- 
 liest settled. In the valleys of the Euphra- 
 tes and the Nile, where archaeology has pur- 
 sued its investigations most thoroughly, that 
 which is earliest in time is usually found the 
 fullest of evidence as to the skill and ability 
 of artisan and builder. As far back as we 
 are able to go in the antiquities of Egypt, and 
 Babylon, of Persia, India and China, we are 
 able to discern no inferiority in man, his works 
 or his civilization. His achievements bespeak 
 him the peer of his descendants. If his first 
 
94 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 exercises of skill, his first attempts in the arts 
 were with stone, he so soon passed beyond it 
 and out of its limitations, that there are no 
 such relics or remains of stone weapons or 
 implements, as would suggest a time when 
 their use was general. 1 What prehistoric 
 archaeologists are fond of terming "primitive 
 men" " the oldest known types of humanity," 
 are by no means likely to have been really 
 such, since they are found just where, and 
 only where we would expect to find the strays 
 and exiles from the ancient home, and amid 
 surroundings that made the struggle of life 
 most severe. Hence to find rudeness of art, 
 and inferior civilization, yea, savagery here, 
 would tell nothing as to what might have 
 been the condition at the same time in the 
 older abodes of men. Bearing in mind that 
 the facts we are to consider refer not necessa- 
 rily to primitive man, but only to the earliest 
 inhabitant of Western Europe, let us examine 
 into their significance as showing his original 
 condition, and the successive steps of his up- 
 ward progress. 
 
 It is conceded by all that the men of the 
 
 1 Implements and weapons of stone are found in Egypt 
 and Babylonia, but not under such circumstances as to in- 
 dicate exclusive use, or a ".s/one <Tje-" Vide Southall's 
 "Epoch of the Mammoth," Chap. XIX. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 95 
 
 Drift, the contemporaries of the cave bear 
 and the mammoth, the claimed to be old- 
 est inhabitants of Europe, were true men, 
 and removed many degrees from the brute. 
 As was seen in our last lecture — the few 
 human crania and bones that have been dis- 
 covered, prove the men of that age to have been 
 far removed from the ape, to have been human 
 in form, and with brains promising as much 
 native ability and intelligence as their de- 
 scendants. There is an utter failure to con- 
 nect them with the brute. The earliest men 
 in Europe possessed, we have good evidence, 
 not only speech, and reason, but the rudi- 
 ments of the arts, and morality, — character- 
 istics which mark them as of a different order 
 from the brutes. The facts that man has pro- 
 gressed to where he is, and that no savages 
 have been found so degraded and debased, 
 as not to be susceptible of improvement, con- 
 clusively show that man's powers as man 
 differ in kind from those ol' the brute tribes, 
 otherwise the failure to find animals capable 
 of similar progress and improvement is in- 
 explicable. 
 
 It is a confirmation of this view that the 
 savage races existing to-day, and, on the hy- 
 pothesis supposed, the survivals of an ancient 
 savagery, afford, it is now conceded, no in- 
 
"96 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 stances of any race without speech, or morals, 
 or religion ; and equally none who fail to ex- 
 hibit capabilities of progress, and such com- 
 munity of nature as stamp them as one with 
 man, and separated by an impassable gulf from 
 the highest brutes. The natural powers of the 
 savage, even of the lowest, are far greater than 
 they seem, to those who estimate their achieve- 
 ments and adaptations in the light of a radically 
 different environment and civilization. Every- 
 thing connected with them has suffered in be- 
 ing reported to us by those who have had 
 absolutely no points of sympathetic contact 
 with them. Their strange speech, and habits 
 of life, are often altogether unintelligible to a 
 casual observer. Travellers, judging every- 
 thing by their own standards, have frequently 
 reported them as simply brutish. But when 
 their languages have been mastered, their 
 customs and views sympathetically studied, 
 and their devices to meet experienced needs 
 investigated, it has always been found that 
 they possess, — in a rudimentary form indeed, 
 but really, — all the human capabilities and 
 powers which have wrought out higher civ- 
 ilizations. The late Charles Darwin, what- 
 ever we may think of his theories, was a 
 careful observer and an honest reporter of 
 facts, and his testimony on this point is wor- 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 97 
 
 thy of note. In his "Voyage of a Naturalist" 
 lie expresses his belief that the Fuegians ex- 
 ist in a lower state of improvement than any- 
 other savages. Comparing them with the 
 Australians, while assigning superiority to the 
 latter in acquirements, because they can boast 
 of the boomerang, the spear, and thro wing- 
 stick, their method of climbing trees, of track- 
 ing animals, and of hunting, " It by no means 
 follows," he says, " that they are likewise 
 superior in mental capacity." From what he 
 saw of the Fuegians on the " Beagle," who 
 had spent two years in England, he says, 
 "compared with what I have read of the 
 Australians, I should think the Fuegians the 
 more improvable." Of these Fuegians on 
 the "Beagle" he further says, "I was con- 
 tinually struck with surprise how closely 
 they resembled us in disposition and in most 
 of our mental qualities." 2 
 
 And the more it is looked into, the more 
 will the conviction grow, that it is the use 
 of a false criterion of judgment, — it is the 
 trying them by the standard of our modern 
 and artificial civilization, that has led to the 
 assignment of savages to kinship with the 
 brutes. The savage, despite the fewness of 
 his wants, the limited range of his thoughts, 
 
 2 Darwin's "Voyage of a Naturalist," pp. 207, 434. 
 
98 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 shows all the attributes of humanity — and in 
 mental capacity, in the essentially manlike 
 quality of intelligent adaptation to his en- 
 vironment, is the equal of his civilized broth- 
 er. The degree of skill and the extent to 
 which he uses it, the actual inventions and 
 contrivances which prove thought and re- 
 flection, the adaptations that show the pos- 
 sibility of progression, may greatly vary, 
 and be fewer among savage than civilized 
 men, yet so far as he feels his needs man 
 everywhere and under all circumstances ex- 
 hibits the capacity to meet them. And it 
 will invariably be found that the savage has 
 attained to and practiced the best devices 
 attainable in his circumstances. If the civil- 
 ized man were placed in exactly the same 
 environment, with all his superior knowledge 
 and skill acquired under civilized surround- 
 ings, he would we believe much less success- 
 fully wage the struggle for existence than the 
 savage, and would be driven in the end to 
 adopt substantially the same devices, weap- 
 ons and utensils, with which the despised 
 barbarian has fought and won the battle 
 with nature. The wigwam of the Indian, 
 the mere brush shelter of the Fuegian, the 
 hut of the Hottentot, is much more service- 
 able in the migratory life they are compelled 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 99 
 
 to live, than the more commodious and stable 
 and valuable dwellings of civilization. 3 
 
 The invention of the boomerang, the cata- 
 maran, the outrigger that converts the canoe 
 of the South Sea Islander into a very life boat 
 that can ride in the perpetual surf of his reef- 
 bound home, serve in themselves to show that 
 the savage is not tied down to his savagery 
 by any natural or inherent incapacity. His 
 
 3 Indeed civilized man adopts the same habitations when 
 similarly circumstanced. Ernest Ingersoll, in ' ' Harper's 
 Monthly," April, 1882, p. 691, describing the "hoodies" 
 occupied by the builders of the Denver and Bio Grande 
 R.R., says:— "You will see numbers of little huts about 
 three logs high, roofed flatly with poles, brush, and mud, 
 and having only a window-like hole to creep in and out 
 through; or into a side hill will be pushed small caves 
 with a front wall of stone and mud and a bit of canvas for 
 a door; or Icelandic fashion will be imitated in a regular 
 dug-out, i. e., a house all cellar and roof, entered by a 
 slanting passage cut into the ground. In these kennels 
 the laboring men find shelter and when they have finished 
 the difficult work .... there is no regret in leaving or 
 bother about locking up." In Parker's "Early Fortifica- 
 tions of Rome," in Plate I. of Supplement, showing Primi- 
 tive Fortifications of Gabii, can be seen a village of huts 
 occupied up to 1870 by peasants, in close proximity to a me- 
 diaeval tower, a fine and very early temple, and to walls of 
 massive and cyclopeean structure. Anything more primi- 
 tive than these thatched tents,— looking like haystacks, — 
 it would be difficult to find. They were used because suf- 
 ficient for the need, and if they must be abandoned, the 
 loss would not be felt. 
 
100 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 condition is what it is through other causes 
 than this. The severity of the struggle for 
 bare subsistence is what holds him down. 
 Where there is no division of labor, where 
 the individual must centre all trades in him- 
 self, where there is no dependence save on 
 personal skill, prowess or labor; habitation, 
 utensils and weapons will be naturally rude 
 and simple, — just what may be needful and 
 no more to accomplish the desired end. A 
 Robinson Crusoe with no wrecked vessel to 
 draw from, however well conversant with the 
 arts of civilization, would be forced to com- 
 mence life on his island, and long continue 
 to live, in w r hat Archaeologists would term the 
 Stone age, and would do it no better than, if 
 as well as, the savage. This natural capacity 
 to supply by intelligent contrivance his needs, 
 as characteristic of man wherever found, is 
 further manifest in the fact, that though wide- 
 ly separated by distance or time, he has se- 
 cured the same ends by substantially the same 
 devices and methods. There is just variety 
 enough in the application of the principle to 
 prove the independence of the conception. 
 This might be widely illustrated did time 
 allow. I can only barely refer to the primi- 
 tive methods of securing fire; the identity of 
 the principle of the primitive lamp, whether 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 101 
 
 among the Esquimaux, the inhabitants of the 
 Faroe islands, or the ancient Greeks, Romans, 
 Assyrians, or Egyptians: the sling, the bow 
 and arrow, the spear and battle-ax, as weap- 
 ons, among races and tribes most widely sun- 
 dered in time as well as locality ; the similarity 
 of primitive pottery, in shape, manner of for- 
 mation, and even decoration, whether from the 
 tombs of Egypt or Peru, the mounds of Amer- 
 ica or the caves of the Palaeolithic Age in 
 Europe, or made to-day among widely scat- 
 tered bands of savages, or by the outcasts of 
 civilization. 
 
 Applying these principles gathered from the 
 study of the lower races of to-day, to the men 
 of the Stone age in Europe, we find in the 
 simplicity and rudeness of their weapons, 
 utensils and arts, evidence not of natural 
 inferiority, but only of the fact that they 
 were waging a hard struggle for life, were 
 in the midst of adverse circumstances. And 
 in the fact that they successfully waged the 
 battle, that, surrounded by such natural ene- 
 mies as the cave bear, the cave lion, the mam- 
 moth and the uroch, they yet asserted and 
 maintained the mastery, we have the best of 
 evidence that they were true men — not half 
 brutes. Their appliances were indeed rude 
 and simple,'but they were sufficient, and there 
 
102 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 is unmistakable evidence that even in the 
 midst of such surroundings and of such a 
 struggle, the taste and aptitude for drawing 
 and carving, — the rudiments of what have 
 come to be known as the Fine Arts, — were 
 developed. These men of the caves and grav- 
 els were unmistakably the kin of the European 
 of to-day. Men can be classified as to their 
 civilization, we care not to dispute, both con- 
 veniently and profitably according to the ma- 
 terials on which they exercise their inven- 
 tive genius and executive skill, and we do not 
 object to the particular classification which 
 has been proposed for the earlier inhabitants 
 of Western Europe. 
 
 The Rude Stone Age, or Paleolithic, the 
 Polished Stone Age, or Neolithic, the Bronze 
 Age, and the Iron Age, well represent the dis- 
 tinctive characteristics of the different condi- 
 tions in which the prehistoric inhabitant may 
 be supposed to have lived. How far any or all 
 of them were contemporaneous, and how far 
 and long they were successive, is not proven, 
 and we doubt much if it ever will be proven. 
 It is assumed by prehistoric archasologists 
 with a bias toward mechanical evolution, 
 that they were not only successive, but that 
 they most slowly and gradually passed one 
 into the other. Going backward from the 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 103 
 
 Iron Age, which is set down as having lasted 
 over two thousand years, each age is claimed 
 as vastly longer than the other, and that the 
 earliest, or Palaeolithic, was the longest of all. 
 
 Now both these postulates we hold to be 
 mere assumptions, based in part on an as- 
 sumed time-measure that is deceptive, as 
 pointed out in our last lecture, and in part 
 on the assumption that the changes have 
 been entirely wrought by a process of natural 
 selection, or one that has operated as slowly 
 and gradually. 
 
 We do not consider the question of success- 
 iveness as at all settled, but waiving that for 
 the present, for it is after all unessential, the 
 real issue is as to the causes and manner of 
 the changes that merged the Palaeolithic into 
 the Neolithic, and that into the Bronze, and 
 that into the Iron Age? Did they operate 
 slowly or rapidly ? Now in assigning vast 
 time for these changes, the cause is invaria- 
 bly assumed to be the continuation of an evo- 
 lution which had its beginning in an ape-like 
 man. In dismissing this as a mere begging 
 the question, and in the absence of reliable 
 data for computing time, we can only reason 
 as to the causes and manner of these changes 
 by what we know to have taken place in his- 
 toric time, and what would be likely and ne- 
 
104 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 cessary on the well-established postulate that 
 man everywhere is as to his capabilities and 
 faculties the same. If the Palaeolithic man 
 was not, we have seen, a merely improved ape, 
 he was endowed with capacity and skill to 
 meet his most urgent wants. All the remains 
 of his art attest that he was so endowed. The 
 material on which he exercised his ingenuity, 
 and, we might add, the rudeness of his work, 
 tell absolutely nothing as to his mental en- 
 dowments, his cranial development, his native 
 and potential ability. They merely tell us 
 something of the conditions and circumstances 
 under which he waged the struggle for ex- 
 istence. They tell us that the struggle was 
 severe, and that it was carried on in practical 
 isolation, an isolation due either to sparcity 
 of population, to geographical causes, or the 
 misfortunes of warfare. 
 
 The effect of these causes was precisely 
 what is seen among savage races and tribes 
 to-day, a necessary bending of every energy 
 to the mere preservation of life. But as num- 
 bers increased, as natural and human enemies 
 became less formidable, as the severity of the 
 struggle relaxed, as isolation became less com- 
 plete, man had more scope for the exercise 
 of his powers, and naturally and gradually 
 the Palaeolithic man became the Neolithic. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 105 
 
 His weapons, his utensils, become more ela- 
 borate; though still of stone there is more 
 pains taken in the shape, the finish, the 
 ornamentation, i. e., there is regard paid to 
 beauty and elegance, in addition to mere 
 utility. Later, they are also made from a 
 greater range of materials, betokening the 
 dawn of commerce; while the more numerous 
 specimens of carving and drawing prove the 
 further development of the ossthetic sense. 
 
 The bronze age manifestly could only come 
 in with the breaking down of separative 
 barriers. It tells of the abatement of war- 
 fare; of the dawn of commerce; of intercourse 
 with older settlements, with the ancient civi- 
 lization, whence weapons and implements 
 and ornaments were obtained, or if manu- 
 factured by themselves, as eventually they 
 were, equally of such intercourse, since only 
 thus could they secure the copper, and par- 
 ticularly the tin, which enter into their 
 composition. 
 
 All the evidence as well as probability goes 
 to show that iron, in the same way, came in 
 through outside influences, and for many 
 purposes drove out the use of bronze, just 
 as that had driven out the use of stone. 
 
 Now these changes would go on, we see, 
 almost of necessity, unequally. Some tribes 
 
106 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 more favorably located, as respects gaining 
 subsistence, the forsaking their isolation, and 
 the carrying on of commerce, would pass 
 rapidly from one age to another. Others 
 would continue for generations with little 
 or no change. This is axiomatic, and does it 
 nut render probable much of contemporane- 
 ousness in the assumed-to-be successive ages? 
 These considerations render the classification 
 that has been made worthless as a basis for 
 the estimation of time, however valuable as 
 descriptive of condition. Some measure of 
 contemporaneousness of the four periods or 
 conditions is necessarily conceded by every 
 archaeologist, and whether there was much 
 or little as respects the different tribes and 
 communities whose remains have been stu- 
 died, there is no reasonable doubt but that 
 all, even the oldest, were contemporaneous 
 with higher civilizations nearer man's orig- 
 inal home. It seems reasonably certain that 
 the portion of Europe where are found the 
 remains of the so-called primitive man, was 
 already the scene of one of those forced mi- 
 grations, by which ever and anon tribes and 
 races are thrust out from their homes, and 
 by being brought into new regions and a 
 fresh environment forced to begin over again 
 and at a disadvantage the struggle of life. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 107 
 
 This supposes the possibility of degradation 
 not only of individuals but of races and com- 
 munities. But no student of history or of 
 civilization can for a moment doubt that 
 such degradation has occurred, yea, is con- 
 stantly occurring. 
 
 The comparison of the evidences of a former 
 civilization, with the condition of the known 
 descendants of its possessors, as witness Per- 
 sia, Greece and Egypt; the absolute loss of 
 a remarkable civilization such as the ruins 
 of Peru, Central America, and Mexico tell us 
 existed, but of which the natives of those 
 countries scarcely retain the tradition; with 
 numerous instances of the same fact as to 
 lesser civilizations and in narrower spheres; 
 make certain that there has been degradation 
 as well as progress in the career of nations 
 and races. Wherever savagery is found, it 
 still remains a question, as Von Humboldt puts 
 it, " Whether it is to be looked upon as the 
 dawning of a society about to rise, or whether 
 it is not rather the fading remains of one sink- 
 ing amid storms, overthrown and shattered 
 by overwhelming catastrophes." American 
 archaeology since Humboldt's day, by mak- 
 ing known the existence in the heart of our 
 continent of a civilization superior to any 
 existing at the date of its discovery, has 
 
108 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 served to greatly corroborate his opinion 
 that the savages of America, in all their 
 gradations, were the deteriorated remnants 
 of races once in a higher social condition. 
 The advocates of a necessary upward evolu- 
 tion, a general progress of the race, are con- 
 strained to admit, along with it, occasional 
 instances of deterioration and cases of degra- 
 dation. Degeneration in culture is accordingly 
 conceded by Tylor and Spencer as a secondary 
 cause of the barbarism and savagery in the 
 world. As where the history can be traced 
 it is found to be invariably the primary and 
 single cause, it would certainly seem that the 
 burden of proof that it is not the cause in 
 every case rests upon those who dispute it. 
 But such degeneracy not only has occurred, 
 but is constantly occurring. It goes ever 
 along with and as a consequence of advanc- 
 ing civilization. Human progress has its 
 waifs and wrecks, as well as its successful 
 ventures. And those who fail in the con- 
 stantly intensifying competition, who do not 
 succeed in keeping pace with the advancing 
 requirements of the age, are dropped and lost 
 to sight. They are crowded out and down, 
 and are compelled to wage the struggle in a 
 less exacting sphere and on a lower plane. 
 In such instances there is a reversion to what 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 109 
 
 is simple and unexacting in labor, ingenuity 
 and skill. And so right in the midst of the 
 highest modern civilization may be found that 
 which is as rude and primitive as the relics 
 of the Stone age and the cave men. 
 
 Dr. Arthur Mitchell, in his admirable book, 
 "The Past in the Present," has gathered a most 
 interesting series of facts illustrative of this 
 principle, and of the survival because of adap- 
 tability to situation and circumstances of the 
 arts and utensils of the so-called Stone age 
 among those who live in the very midst of 
 present civilization, and who want neither for 
 capacity nor culture. 
 
 If the settler on the frontier of our own 
 country, driven thither by the severity of the 
 struggle in the more thickly settled portions 
 of the land, were judged as to intellectual 
 power and social culture, by the rudeness of 
 his sod-house or " dug out," and by many an 
 extemporized appliance, he would stand a 
 chance to be classified as of the Palaeolithic 
 age. Certain is it that all the so-called suc- 
 cessive ages — of stone and bronze and iron — 
 are co-existing to-day, have been co-existent 
 during the historic period, and it seems not 
 an unwarranted inference that they have been 
 co-existent during the prehistoric period also. 
 And this is strengthened by the fact, that 
 
110 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 in the fluctuations of population it is certain 
 that a people in the Pakeolithic condition may 
 follow on the same site as well as precede 
 those of a more advanced culture. This prob- 
 ability has been verified and proven by the 
 excavations of Dr. Schliemann on the sites of 
 Ancient Troy and Mycense. 
 
 The report of the excavations at Troy 
 shows the remains of five successive cities, 
 the fourth from the surface being identified 
 by Dr. Schliemann as the Troy of the Ho- 
 meric Poems. "Whether the identification be 
 correct or not, the fact of the succession of 
 cities and different populations on the site re- 
 mains, and the relics show, from the oldest 
 period to the latest, the associated use of stone 
 and bronze: implements and weapons of stone 
 predominating at one time and of bronze at 
 others, — the epoch most markedly of the Stone 
 age being the third, or the one exactly inter- 
 mediate between the others. The very oldest 
 relic-bed yielded terra-cotta whorls and fine 
 pottery, with articles of silver, bronze and 
 ivory. His excavations at Mycenas reveal 
 the same intermixture, the seemingly oldest 
 workings in gold and silver and bronze being 
 the most perfect and beautiful, and found in 
 association with arrow-heads of stone. 
 
 These facts, deducible from what has been 
 
OF EVOLUTION. Ill 
 
 observed and ascertained respecting the laws 
 and course of culture and civilization in his- 
 toric and prehistoric times, leave no ground 
 whatever to infer from the character of the 
 weapons, implements, dwellings and utensils, 
 of the early inhabitants of Western Europe, 
 either their natural inferiority to the man of 
 to-day, or a very great lapse of time in order 
 to have undergone the changes in culture 
 denoted by the use of stone, bronze, or iron. 
 
 There is prevalent an erroneous idea as to 
 the nature and possibilities of human progress. 
 It has been born of the wondrous achieve- 
 ments in Science and the Arts which are the 
 boast and pride of our century. The indu- 
 bitable advance in knowledge and pow r er over 
 nature, in many novel appliances and adjust- 
 ments, have fostered the idea that we are 
 wiser, more skilful, better endowed men than 
 any that have preceded us. We have solved 
 so many problems, conquered so many diffi- 
 culties, that it seems as if we were likely to 
 press on to unlimited attainments. All this 
 has been favorable to, if not the origin of, the 
 theory of a necessary upward progress of the 
 race. And because of this, many have been 
 won to acceptance of mechanical evolution as 
 the explanation of man's seemingly unlimited 
 upward progression. Hence it is the more 
 
112 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 important that we come to a discernment of 
 the true nature and the limitations of human 
 progress. What is commonly called progress, 
 'and what we hail as an advance along the 
 whole line, and regard as a slow, gradual and 
 universal movement upward, is in reality 
 nothing but the complex effects of advances 
 in a few particular directions. The causes of 
 modern progress have been in nearly every 
 instance discoveries. It has not been by the 
 slow and gradual uplifting process that the 
 mechanical evolutionist claims and many imag- 
 ine, but by leaps. A new principle has been 
 discovered, a new device contrived, an inven- 
 tion made, each a sudden projection into the 
 current of activity, which has deflected it into 
 new channels, or entirely turned its course. 
 The effect of every discovery is at first revolu- 
 tionary within the sphere where it operates. 
 The advance in the new direction is rapid 
 until the potentialities of the principle or sug- 
 gestion are exhausted, when progress ceases, 
 the evolution stops, or, as sometimes, is con- 
 verted into a retrogression. For example: A 
 chief factor in modern progress has been the 
 discovery and application of the force of steam. 
 It is scarcely more than a century since it was 
 first successfully applied to the generation of 
 power. Yet for twenty-live years not a sin- 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 113 
 
 gle new factor or element has been discovered 
 whereby to increase its potency or extend its 
 applications. One generation nearly sufficed 
 to carry the discovery to its farthest limits 
 and exhaust its potentialities. We are now 
 engaged in doing the same thing with elec- 
 tricity, and less than fifty years will probably 
 be enough to perfect the analysis and deter- 
 mine all its capabilities. 
 
 It is the same with that other characteris- 
 tic of our age, — the saving of labor by me- 
 chanical devices. 
 
 Within a very brief period substantial per- 
 fection is reached. The spinning-jenny, the 
 sewing machine, the mower and thresher soon 
 reach the full measure of adaptability to their 
 work and thenceforward there is no improve- 
 ment. Man's natural capacities are such that 
 applied to the solution of any problem, the 
 meeting of any necessity, it is soon accom- 
 plished and that fully. The element that is 
 new in modern progress, is not any increase 
 or change in that capacity, but only in the 
 circumstances under which it has been called 
 to act. 
 
 The greatest achievements after all are 
 not those of which our times can boast, — 
 those things most essential in the struggle 
 for existence and comfort, were devised, 
 
114 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 invented or discovered way back in the 
 obscurity of a dim past. And their dis- 
 coverers and inventors were by that very 
 circumstance shown to have been men of 
 like capacity with us. The most useful pro- 
 cesses and arts, the most essential of im- 
 plements and devices, the fundamentals of 
 mechanics, as the making of bread, the mould- 
 ing of pottery, the mechanical powers, were 
 not only discovered by the progenitors of the 
 race, but were so early carried to their per- 
 fection that nothing has since for thousands 
 of years been added to them. When the pos- 
 sibilities have been tested and exhausted, as 
 they soon are, the world is by so much en- 
 riched, but progress in these channels ceases. 
 Much so-called progress is only re-discovery. 
 Arts are lost through change of taste and 
 method, and are so speedily and utterly for- 
 gotten, that when revived and practiced in 
 response to a revived demand they are hailed 
 as new discoveries. When subsequent re- 
 search shows them ancient, it is frequently 
 and almost invariably found that the older 
 and forgotten forms are the superior, attest- 
 ing that the capabilities of the ancients were 
 no whit inferior to the moderns. 
 
 All the facts bearing on the past of our 
 race, on the development of civilization, favor 
 
OF EVOLUTION. H5 
 
 the conception that man came on the theatre 
 of earth in the plenitude of his powers, — not 
 in his lowest but in his highest type. 
 
 Placed in the world to master it, he soon 
 won the lordship over nature and the brutes; 
 beginning at first with weapons and imple- 
 ments rudely fashioned of stone, he early 
 improved them, and rapidly passed from one 
 stage of progress to another. But along with 
 advance in civilization and culture went de- 
 terioration and degradation. And in the strug- 
 gles for power and supremacy, by the neces- 
 sary law of the survival of the best endowed 
 in the old and crowded homes of the race, 
 many were driven forth to inhospitable re- 
 gions and compelled to begin over again the 
 upward struggle. Such we believe to have 
 been the Palaeolithic and Neolithic men of 
 Europe. How long they were in that con- 
 dition we can only guess, but to account for 
 their upward progress, it need not have been 
 many generations. 
 
 It seems from the configuration of skull and 
 skeleton, they were the progenitors of what 
 history calls the Iberian and Celtic races, the 
 descendants of which yet occupy side by side 
 the old habitat. 4 Their later impulse in civ- 
 
 4 The grounds for this inference based on the charac- 
 teristics of crania examined are well summarized in an 
 
116 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 ilization, when developed and known as the 
 Bronze age, was almost demonstrably the 
 result of contact, and extensive commerce 
 with that mysterious people, the Ancient 
 Etruscans. 
 
 The remains found in Western Europe 
 countenance, we thus see, neither of the in- 
 ferences of mechanical evolution. The facts 
 give no indication of a brutish origin for man, 
 or a necessary ground for assigning him a 
 very great antiquity. 
 
 The evolution that has culminated in the 
 present civilization is not one that began at 
 the brute, and has necessarily operated. It 
 began with a man, made in the image of God, 
 and has been divinely ordained and con- 
 trolled. It seemed likely to be only down- 
 ward when disobedience brought discord and 
 violence. The degradation and deterioration 
 produced by sin, seemed to promise extinction 
 rather than upward progression. Upward 
 evolution began and has prevailed, alone 
 through the recovery of the true knowledge 
 and image of God: and the rapid and peculiar 
 progress of modern times is the fruit of that 
 
 article on "The Present Phase of Prehistoric Archeol- 
 ogy," republished from the "British Quarterly Review " 
 in " The Eclectic Magazine " of January, 1873, Vol. XVII. 
 p. 87. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 117 
 
 fuller revelation and redemption which we 
 have in Jesus Christ. 
 
 This I believe to be the true philosophy 
 of civilization, and the key that explains 
 why, in the opposing tendencies upward and 
 downward, the outcome has been the im- 
 provement rather than the deterioration of 
 the social condition of the race. I have not 
 time to pursue the inviting theme. For the 
 present I must be content with having shown 
 the failure at every point of Mechanical Evo- 
 lution, be it Materialistic or Agnostic. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 EVOLUTION A.ND THE BIBLE. 
 
 We have seen in the discussion of evolution 
 and its applications that its truths and untruths 
 inhere in the form of the theory which is held. 
 These are reducible to simply two. 
 
 The one may be properly designated as me- 
 chanical evolution, since it acknowledges no 
 other cause or causes than what inhere in things 
 themselves: it operates necessarily and contin- 
 uously, and everything now existing, man in- 
 cluded, has been differentiated from an orig- 
 inal nebulous mass without intervention or 
 control of any power above or outside itself. 
 In this bald form it seems purely materialistic 
 or atheistic, and fails so signally to give any 
 satisfactory account of crucial facts that it is 
 with difficulty maintained or defended, with 
 any show of reason or by any considerable 
 body of adherents. Hence the vast majority 
 of those who accept and hold to this form of 
 the theory, suppose a first cause, an initial 
 
TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS. 119 
 
 creative act, a sort of Deity, to bring into ex- 
 istence the matter and force, whose interaction 
 in accordance with fixed laws have produced 
 everything that exists. And as these evolu- 
 tionists, while conceding that there may have 
 been a creation and a Creator, and by this 
 concession escape some of the difficulties of 
 pure materialism, yet claim that this origina- 
 tor of all, is and must ever remain " the un- 
 knowable," they are properly termed, agnostics. 
 
 Whether atheistic or agnostic, such evolu- 
 tion is blind, unintelligent and necessary, 
 knowing no causes except mechanical and 
 efficient ones. 
 
 The other form of the hypothesis may be 
 termed purposive evolution, in that it is a 
 process which proceeds in accordance with a 
 plan or purpose, has in it the evidences of 
 design, and necessitates not only the interpo- 
 sition of a personal intelligent First Cause at 
 the beginning, but also the wise and powerful 
 superintendence and control by such a Being 
 of all the after progress. 
 
 This divergence in the very definitions and 
 forms of the hypothesis, naturally extended 
 through all its proposed applications. There 
 is no occasion that I should fully recapitulate 
 the contents of the previous lectures. In them 
 I sought to point out how the materialistic, me- 
 
120 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 chanical theory failed to account for the or- 
 igin of matter and force and the laws that 
 regulate their interaction; for that wonderful 
 co-ordination by which the world has escaped 
 ruin and is reaching forth to a better rather 
 than a worse future; how it equally failed to 
 account for life, intelligence, and many of the 
 features that characterize their diversity. I 
 still further sought to point out that it failed 
 still more conspicuously in bridging the gulf 
 that separates man from the brutes, and that 
 its necessary postulates of a vast antiquit} 7 for 
 man, and an almost brute-like savagery as the 
 starting point in his civilization, were discred- 
 ited when we carefully examined the evidence 
 by which they were assumed to be established. 
 Along with this exhibition of the untruths, I 
 was careful to express the conviction that 
 there is an important truth in evolution as de- 
 scriptive of the general method by which the 
 present condition of things has been reached. 
 It seems well established that we may not 
 longer conceive of all things, and especially 
 species of plants and animals, as having orig- 
 inated at one time and in one creative act. 
 
 It seems most probable that by laws, of 
 which natural selection is doubtless one, but 
 one of very limited and subordinate effic- 
 iency, and by forces, whose working we see, 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 121 
 
 but which as yet we cannot formulate, new 
 species of life have sprung out of old ones, 
 and the present has been born of the past; 
 that in short a development, — progress in ac- 
 cordance with law, — has been characteristic of 
 nature, and the general rule of its activities, 
 and in this sense there has been an evolution. 
 It seems highly probable that just as the tree 
 is developed out of the seed, and the animal 
 from the egg^ so the classes and families, the 
 genera and species in which living beings 
 are grouped, have been evolved, — developed, 
 — have grown out of simpler and less com- 
 plex forms. It is we hold a worthy study 
 to seek the efficient causes, the general 
 laws of this evolutionary progress, and we 
 are grateful to the science which is so in- 
 dustriously seeking out and illustrating the 
 hidden bonds that connect diverse phenomena 
 and forms. But we have sought to show by 
 pointing oat some of its failures and fallacies, 
 that a purely mechanical process, which rec- 
 ognizes only material and efficient causes, is 
 not a sufficient explanation of the evolution. 
 There is throughout the whole process the 
 evidence of a working toward an end, of the 
 unfolding of a plan, of an adjustment or co- 
 ordination of laws and forces, which bespeaks 
 design and a designer controlling the inter- 
 
122 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 action of the mechanical and efficient causes. 
 Single laws act uniformly and invariably; 
 brought into juxtaposition, knowing the ac- 
 tion of each on the other, having before 
 us all the forces and conditions, we can pre- 
 dict with certainty the result, — the necessary 
 outcome. The achievements of our modern 
 arts and civilization, have been brought 
 about by just such intelligent co-ordination or 
 combination of fixed and unchangeable laws. 
 When useful and beneficent results thus issue 
 from the interaction of selected forces or laws, 
 when the finished pattern comes from the Jac- 
 quard loom, or time and distance are almost 
 annihilated by steam and electricity, we are 
 constrained to recognize the intervention of 
 a co-ordinating intelligence and will. Such 
 results are not explicable by a consideration 
 of the efficient causes merely, for they depend 
 on the purposive collocation and regulation of 
 the causes rather than the mechanical energy 
 which makes them efficient. Finding there- 
 fore in nature results indicative of a purpose, 
 and in the general course of nature a pro- 
 gression, — an evolution — we in like manner 
 are forced to the assumption of a controlling 
 Intelligence and Will, to at all adequately ex- 
 plain the particular collocation and co-ordina- 
 tion by which such results have come to pass. 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 123 
 
 The universe had an Intelligent Creator, or it 
 was born of a lucky chance. 
 
 It has throughout been my endeavor, in 
 developing what of truth there is in evolu- 
 tion, to emphasize the necessity of a Provi- 
 dence continuously directing and controlling, 
 as much as of a Creator planning and pro- 
 ducing, the universe. It is a conception, not 
 particularly repugnant to the mechanical evo- 
 lutionist, that the world is only an infinitely 
 perfect — a self-propagating, and self-regulat- 
 ing — mechanism, even though an act of crea- 
 tion be assumed for its origination. 
 
 It was shown that such a theory, though 
 it be in a sense Theistic — conceding as it does 
 the existence of a God, and the infinity of His 
 knowledge and power, — affords only a par- 
 tial and inadequate explanation of the facts. 
 
 I have therefore pointed out that, granting 
 much for the operation of unknown and un- 
 formulated causes in producing modifications 
 and new adjustments, the interposition of a 
 power outside of nature is as necessary to 
 explain many things in the course of this 
 evolution subsequent to its beginning; — 
 e. (/., the advent of life, sensation, intelli- 
 gence, and man — as to account for the first 
 creative act. 
 
 The inference of repeated interpositions of 
 
124 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 creative power is as unavoidable, as of the 
 first; while concession of one takes away 
 every a priori objection to others. If God 
 has interposed once and again as Creator, it 
 renders most probable, if not certain, such a 
 supervision of His work as is expressed in the 
 idea of providence. 
 
 We saw that the evolution which earth has 
 experienced went forward, not merely by slow 
 and gradual modifications, but also by leaps, 
 by great and sudden transformations, indica- 
 tions, if not of the introduction of new forces, 
 at least of a new collocation and adjustment 
 of existing ones; and, by consequence, a strong 
 suggestion of some superior power co-ordina- 
 ting, governing, and controlling them. 
 
 All this was only confirmed and established 
 by the study of man. 
 
 We saw that mechanical evolution utterly 
 failed in its endeavor to connect him with the 
 brutes. However much his body suggests 
 kinship with lower creatures, the points of 
 divergence are so great and radical, above 
 all his mental and spiritual attributes are so 
 different not only in degree but in kind, that 
 it is impossible to view him as other than the 
 creation of God. 
 
 We further saw, from his civilization, that 
 always and everywhere, whatever his environ- 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 125 
 
 ment, man is a controller and co-ordinator of 
 the forces and objects around him for the ac- 
 complishment of his purposes, — is a self-de- 
 termining Providence to himself and those 
 dependent on him; and this serves to prove 
 him akin in his nature to that Being who is 
 supreme over all. Through his spiritual na- 
 ture, his capacity for abstract thought, his 
 self-determining will, his moral sense, he is able 
 to attain to a knowledge of God. Through 
 these attributes of Spirit, he, though a finite 
 being, is able to catch a true, though it may 
 be a partial, glimpse of the Infinite Spirit. 
 
 Evolution viewed thus as a divinely planned 
 and ordered process, becomes we believe even 
 a better and surer basis of Natural Religion, 
 than the conception of special multitudinous 
 creations. Rightly viewed it carries with it 
 the conviction that God in power, wisdom and 
 goodness has made and governs the world. 
 
 The older theory chiefly emphasizes his 
 power. This throws into prominence more 
 particularly his wisdom and goodness. The 
 failure of mechanical evolution, and the es- 
 tablishment of a purposive, teleological evo- 
 lution, thus strengthens instead of overthrows 
 all the inferences as to God, His nature and 
 His works, which Natural Religion has drawn. 
 It only remains for us to show the relation of 
 
126 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 such evolution to the Bible and the Bible to 
 it. Many readily concede the consistency of 
 evolution and natural religion. But not a 
 few who admit and rest upon this, claim that 
 it has discredited the Bible, as the Word of 
 God, and made necessary the abandonment 
 of the idea that we possess an authoritative 
 Revelation from the infinite Creator and Ruler. 
 At the same time it is not to be disguised, 
 that many have hesitated to accept any sort 
 of evolution, and have been troubled at the 
 very suggestion of its possible truthfulness, 
 lest its establishment might involve the over- 
 throw of revealed religion. We believe the 
 boast of the one, as the fear of the other, is 
 without foundation. Evolution helps us to 
 understand and interpret the Bible; and the 
 Bible equally helps us to better understand 
 and explain evolution. They rest upon dif- 
 ferent lines and kinds of evidence, and the 
 claimed antagonism is very largely the result 
 of exclusive attention to the particular criteria 
 by which their truthfulness is respectively 
 established. The truthfulness of the Bible, its 
 claim to be the Word of God, rests upon as 
 good evidence of its kind, as that whereon 
 scientific truth reposes; and it is a kind which 
 as appealing to the individual consciousness 
 and experience as well as the reason, is to 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 127 
 
 many minds more convincing than that to 
 which evolution, or any scientific inference, 
 must appeal. 
 
 It is not necessary that I should enter upon 
 the broad theme of the rightful and different 
 criteria of truth, and show on what convincing 
 evidence rests the conclusion that our holy 
 religion is true, and that the book which tells 
 of its origin and history, and which is the only 
 sufficient explanation of the fact of its exist- 
 ence, is God's book and truth itself. I only 
 claim that, supposing it to be such, it is authori- 
 tative upon the points on which it speaks. Did 
 we as infallibly understand, as God has here 
 infallibly revealed His truth, it would be con- 
 clusive in matters of science so far as touched 
 upon, as well as in religion. But in the inter- 
 pretation of the Bible, as well as of nature, 
 there is need of caution and moderation of 
 statement. It may well be doubted if our 
 exegesis of Scripture is as yet in all points sat- 
 isfactorily decided. Doubts and obscurities 
 have been removed by a more exact criticism 
 of the text, by a more thorough application 
 of grammatical rules, by the discoveries of 
 history and archasological research, and this 
 good work will continue, to our better under- 
 standing of the Word of God. And among 
 the rightful appliances for shedding light 
 
128 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 on the Bible we believe the ascertained facts 
 and truths of Natural Science are as deserv- 
 ing of regard, as those of grammar, history, 
 or archaeology. 
 
 There are those who because the science of 
 geology or of biology, the probable hypothe- 
 sis of evolution, contradict their exegesis of 
 some passages of Scripture, are ready to as- 
 sert they are antagonistic to revelation. And 
 equally others who because their traditional 
 views of Bible teaching have been contra- 
 dicted by scientific discoveries which they are 
 constrained to accept, are ready to declare 
 the authority of the Bible overthrown. Far 
 wiser and more likely to be fruitful of advan- 
 tage to the truth will it be to let each inter- 
 pret the other, and seek rather for the points 
 of agreement than those of difference. Be- 
 lieving as I do the Bible to be the Word 
 of God, and nature the work of God, I am 
 confident that time will prove their entire 
 agreement, and if meanwhile there seem 
 points of antagonism, I can wait in faith the 
 clearer light which will show their real agree- 
 ment, and meanwhile examine the more care- 
 fully alike the accepted interpretations of Scrip- 
 ture and the postulates of science to the end 
 of discovering wherein the error that certainly 
 exists and makes the antagonism, may lie. It 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 129 
 
 surely ought not to surprise us or trouble us, 
 if we may not at once bring every detail into 
 accord, especially when our knowledge is yet 
 so imperfect and so much of our science, if 
 not of our exegesis, is hypothetical. It will 
 speak much for the probable truthfulness of 
 evolution as a divinely ordered process, if it 
 is not only not absolutely contradicted by 
 the Bible, but is found in general features to 
 be in accord with its revelation of God and 
 His working. This, I believe, is the state of 
 the case. As has already been seen, evolu 
 tion leaves unaffected the old argument from 
 the evidences of design, for the existence of 
 God. It proves that God exists, that He has 
 an interest in all His works, and especially in 
 man, and thus makes probable that to beings 
 endowed with capacity to know Him, and 
 enter into spiritual communion with Him, He 
 would more fully reveal Himself and His pur- 
 poses of grace. 
 
 Assuming that what is thus probable has 
 actually occurred, that in the Bible we have 
 this fuller revelation of the divine nature and 
 works, how does it correspond with what we 
 have gathered about Him from His other book, 
 that of nature ? 
 
 Evolution, if embodying a truth, will fit into 
 what we learn of God from the volume of 
 
 \ 
 
130 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 revelation, and at no point will there be irre- 
 concilable antagonisms. 
 
 We will briefly examine the two points on 
 which the Bible seems to many in conflict 
 with every form of evolution, and because of 
 which some have renounced the Bible and 
 some have opposed every form of evolution : 
 viz., its account of creation, and the compara- 
 tively brief time, according to its chronology, 
 that has elapsed since the advent of man. As 
 to the first I need not greatly enlarge. Evo- 
 lution has not materially changed the condi- 
 tion of the case as settled in the light of 
 geological facts. Before evolution became 
 probable as a method of Creation, geology had 
 made it well-nigh certain that earth and its 
 living inhabitants had not been brought into 
 being less than ten thousand years ago, and 
 in the course of six days of twenty-four hours. 
 Its revelations as to successive strata and 
 their distinctive fossils made necessary a vast 
 extension of the age of the earth, and pro- 
 duced the conviction that the days of Genesis 
 were time-cycles commensurate with the vast- 
 ness and magnitude of the works wrought in 
 them, rather than ordinary days. A re-exam- 
 ination of the Biblical account in the light 
 of these facts, has led to a general acceptance 
 of the view, as old at least as Augustine, 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 131 
 
 that the days of Genesis are not and were 
 never really intended to be ordinary days, 
 but God- divided or measured, rather than sun- 
 divided, periods of time. Such scientists as 
 Hugh Miller, Guyot, Dana and Dawson have 
 pointed out how on the hypothesis of the days 
 of Genesis being long periods characterized 
 by distinctive creative acts, there is a most 
 remarkable analogy between the Biblical and 
 geological records. 
 
 One of my predecessors in this lectureship, 
 a recognized authority as a Biblical scholar, 
 the late Dr. Tayler Lewis, not only in his 
 lectures on this foundation, but in his ad- 
 mirable additions to Lange's Commentary 
 on Genesis, has well-nigh put an end to 
 controversy on this very point by showing 
 that in the history of events so far removed 
 from human experience as those recounted 
 in the first chapter of Genesis, we must, just 
 as in prophecy, look to have words used 
 in their primitive and profounder senses, 
 since in their ordinary significance they are 
 altogether inadequate for the purpose in 
 hand. Hence in Genesis, " day " is a period 
 through which a thought of God and a cre- 
 ative fiat is worked out; "evening" and 
 "morning" are not indications of time, but 
 characteristics of the process. The first, de- 
 
132 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 scribing the mixed and chaotic condition 
 in which the new order begins — an 3"$, only 
 the secondary sense of which is evening, 
 and the other describing the sureness and 
 steadiness with which the process went on, — 
 even as the breaking forth of the dawn out 
 of the darkness of the night, which is the 
 root meaning of ipa, the secondary sense of 
 which is morning. 
 
 His exhaustive discussion of the matter 
 daves nothing to be added, and has prac- 
 tically settled the exegetical controversy as 
 to the time involved in creation, and proven 
 that the narrative allows of all the time that 
 the very slowest of processes may require. As 
 bearing on evolution, applying the same prin- 
 ciple to other expressions, as to the supposed 
 indications of time, Dr. Lewis makes it plain 
 that the writer of the history of creation used 
 throughout the narrative expressions suscep- 
 tible of meanings in exact accordance with 
 what seems now the most likely conclusions 
 of science. The terms used seem to suggest 
 and necessitate the conception of an evolution. 
 The very name of the book — nnpifi, literally 
 "births" — suggests it. The terms of the fiats — - 
 "let the waters be gathered together," "let 
 the dry land appear," " let the earth bring 
 forth (grow) grass," etc., "let the waters bring 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 133 
 
 forth abundantly," "let the earth bring forth 
 the living- creature after Ms kind," — all imply 
 not a simultaneous, rapid and hurried process, 
 but one of development, succession, progress, 
 — as plain intimations of evolution as we 
 could expect. 
 
 In the light of the best exegesis and the 
 best science there is no real contradiction by 
 Genesis of this most probable scientific theory 
 as to the method of creation. 
 
 As to the other contradiction claimed, 
 which respects the age of man on the earth, 
 we saw in our Third and Fourth Lectures 
 that the space of a few thousand years, or 
 even a single thousand previous to the his- 
 torical period, is all that the facts as to 
 the claimed-to-be-proven great antiquity of 
 man really demand. If the uniformitarian 
 principle in geology be abandoned, and I 
 believe it must be, and modification by noth- 
 ing but short and slow steps be disproven, as 
 it has been, man need not be older than the 
 shortest time that Biblical chronology allows. 
 But while this is so, it may be well to em- 
 phasize the fact that the chronology of the 
 Bible is a matter of deduction from incidental 
 expressions. There is in that divine history 
 no attempt to give clews as to time, and many 
 dates in the chronologies suggested are ob- 
 
134 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 scure and uncertain. The extent of the un- 
 certainty may be gathered from the fact that 
 the various systems of chronology that have 
 been proposed, differ nearly fifteen hundred 
 years. The Bible history gives time enough 
 for every change that man has witnessed 
 or experienced: for the rise and develop- 
 ment of the ancient civilizations, and the 
 diversifications of races and languages, on 
 the only hypotheses which at all adequately 
 explain the facts. 
 
 The Bible contains nothing that is not con- 
 sistent with all the requirements Of such evo- 
 lution as we find in nature. Beyond this it 
 contains much that serves to enforce and il- 
 lustrate the conception that evolution rightly 
 conceived is God's method of working out 
 His purposes; that when He creates it is by 
 touching the sources of being at points be- 
 yond the ken of science and human observa- 
 tion; that when He governs, it is by so 
 collocating forces and laws that the result 
 comes to pass through means so slight and 
 insensible as to almost escape discovery and 
 analysis. 
 
 The Bible itself as a Revelation is an 
 excellent example of God's method, as evo- 
 lutionary. 
 
 The Divine Teacher in the first and most 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 135 
 
 profound of His parables expressly says, 
 "The seed is the Word of God," and thus 
 presents the word as not only having ca- 
 pacity for growth, when received in the 
 heart, but itself the result of a growth, the 
 fruition of an evolution. 
 
 The Bible has one living central theme — 
 Christ the gift of God unto salvation. All its 
 parts are grouped harmoniously about this cen- 
 tral living germ. To explain its unity, despite 
 the fact that it was given in bits and por- 
 tions through more than twenty centuries, to 
 account for the growth in fullness and clear- 
 ness of the Revelation, until it culminates in 
 the Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Res- 
 urrection of the Saviour, and the outpouring of 
 the Spirit, we are constrained to see the con- 
 trolling hand of God guiding and co-ordinating 
 human agents and events unto the unfolding 
 more and more of His Divine will and pur- 
 pose. The history of God's kingdom or 
 church which the Bible contains, equally 
 bears evidence that God is bringing to pass 
 the glorious consummation promised through 
 a divinely governed growth, or evolution. 
 We catch glimpses of the same thing in 
 the wider history of the world, only less 
 manifestly since the history is less fully writ- 
 ten out in the light of its great Ruler's pur- 
 
136 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 poses. Yet everywhere in human events is 
 to be discerned the working of " a power that 
 makes for righteousness," and Revelation bids 
 jus see the solution of the fact, in a righteous 
 God's controlling the springs of action, mak- 
 ing the wrath of man to praise Him and 
 restraining the remainder of wrath. 
 
 His purposes are wrought out, while the 
 absolute independence of action, the fullest 
 freedom of will and choice, on the part of 
 the agents, is never once, so far as conscious- 
 ness goes, interfered with. God's method 
 manifestly is to work His purposes, as far 
 as possible and ordinarily, through secon- 
 dary causes, by means of natural laws and 
 forces. 
 
 This is not only perceptible in his provi- 
 dential government, but in many of the signs 
 and wonders that attest His interposition on 
 behalf of that Redemptive work, which is the 
 theme of the Bible. Many of these were 
 only new collocations of ordinary laws, mir- 
 acles merely because out of the usual experi- 
 ence of men; and where there is a direct 
 exercise of creative might, the introduction 
 of new forces, or unknown agencies, such as 
 when Christ changed the water into wine, 
 and fed the five thousand, the mode is still 
 to use the ordinary and natural as far as it 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 137 
 
 will go, supplementing, rather than supersed- 
 ing, the usual laws of nature. 
 
 The creative touch is ever applied at the 
 sources of being, and back of the visible phe- 
 nomena. 
 
 The Bible, in its account of God's workings, 
 enforces the conception which evolution gives 
 us, that His ends are accomplished through 
 creative power calling into being germs 
 which unfold through the ages under the 
 control of a watchful Providence. Because 
 of this God never makes haste. Time is one 
 of His servants, and He lets time do much 
 that we, in our short-sightedness, would say 
 might as well be done by a single momentary 
 exercise of might. 
 
 Hence the Bible's time — measures, as ap- 
 plied to God's working, are expressed not 
 in years, or centuries even, but in " Olams," 
 (D T Siy), and "Eons" (atcov), epochs during 
 which a thought of God is wrought out, 
 periods measured less by the lapse of time, 
 than by the succession of events. I cannot 
 pause to develop or illustrate this marked 
 characteristic of the Book of God, and I 
 scarcely need point out how such time 
 measures fit into the conception that the 
 Divine method of compassing His results, 
 is by evolution. 
 
138 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS 
 
 Still further, it is a marked characteristic 
 of the Scripture history that most of God's 
 purposes are wrought out by ordinary Provi- 
 dential control, by collocation of natural laws 
 and usual agencies, and only at crucial points 
 in the history has He interposed by super- 
 natural manifestations, by inspired men and 
 measures, by signs and wonders that are 
 miracles. This is precisely analogous to 
 what a right theory of evolution makes us 
 to see in nature. There, as in revelation, God 
 ordinarily and for long periods wrought ex- 
 clusively through second causes, by natural 
 forces in their ordinary collocations, and 
 degrees of strength, but the history of earth 
 shows, just as the Bible history points out, 
 that there have been times when a Creative 
 touch gave a new impulse and direction to 
 its development; when life and intelligence, 
 and the soul of man were introduced, and new 
 epochs begun. 
 
 Evolution while essentially a progression, 
 as applied to man, is confronted with the fact 
 of deterioration, degradation. It is the Bible 
 alone that unlocks this anomaly. In its light 
 all is plain. The cause of the persistent ten- 
 dency downward is a moral one. It is due 
 to the presence of sin. Because of this, self- 
 ishness and violence have prevailed — when 
 
OF EVOLUTION. 139 
 
 might makes right, the weaker is oppressed 
 or driven forth, or debased. 
 
 Evolution also tells us of an upward trend, 
 but fails to show its cause or limits. The 
 Bible here also supplements the light of na- 
 ture. It shows us that this also depends on 
 right moral principles. 
 
 It shows us that real human progress is 
 alone in connection with God's Kingdom of 
 righteousness. Even the Mechanical Evolu- 
 tionist has to concede that all things are 
 manifestly working unto an end, and that 
 this end is man. The Bible shows the same 
 fact, but clears it of its difficulties and limita- 
 tions, by showing that it is not man, a mortal 
 automaton, that is the end whereunto all 
 things conspire, but man the child of God, 
 the heir of immortality, the possessor of a spirit 
 that is capable of oneness with God. It pre- 
 sents as the worthy end to which a Divinely 
 ordered Evolution has been and is tending, 
 the one model, perfect representative man, 
 the man Christ Jesus, through whom oneness 
 with God is attainable, by all who come into 
 fellowship with Him. Thus in many ways 
 do the books of Nature and Revelation sup- 
 plement one another, and a rightly conceived 
 evolution and the Bible agree, rather than 
 conflict. 
 
140 TRUTHS AND UNTRUTHS. 
 
 There are mysteries, and there will be mys- 
 teries, so long as we see through a glass 
 darkly, and know only in part, alike in nature 
 and in Revelation. 
 
 We may never here perchance pass alto- 
 gether out of the shadows which surround 
 us, but sure are we that most of truth will be 
 gained when we look for it in the light shed 
 by the converging rays that go forth from 
 Nature and Revelation, when rightly studied 
 as having for their source and end, the glory 
 of God, as manifested in Jesus Christ the 
 Saviour of all who trust in Him, the Fountain 
 of truth, the Light by which we see light. 
 
 "For of Him, and through Him and unto 
 Him, are all things. To Him be the glory 
 forever. Amen." 
 
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