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it would be most difficult to determine what is included and what excluded. 

 In the time gone by Christian atheism would have been regarded as an 

 absolutely impossible form of belief, but would it be quite impossible now 

 to find persons ready, perhaps unconsciously, to justify the phrase Atheistic 

 Christianity ? 



Some would have us believe that all things living have resulted 

 from the working and inter-action of the forces belonging to non-living 

 matter only, and expect us to be convinced further that the above view of 

 the conversion of the non-living into the living, in obedience to laws which 

 govern matter only, is not inconsistent with the acceptance of the belief in 

 one creating, designing, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent will. It has 

 also been held that a God who only creates the Universe, which he then 

 practically abandons, is equivalent to a living God that governs the world 

 and ordains everything according as He wills, not only the Maker, but 

 the Preserver of all things. But is there no interval between the idea of 

 a first cause originally creating matter and enacting laws for its subsequent 

 guidance and arrangement, and the idea of an existing, living God who 

 governs the world, to whom men may with reason appeal for counsel and 

 guidance, whom they may obey, and to whom they are indebted for life, 

 and health, and everything ? Does first cause comprise all that men imply 

 when they speak of the everlasting living God ? Does creative power and 

 law-enaction include all the attributes of the God of man ? If so, it is 

 indeed, as has been suggested, a veiy small matter if by modern discovery 

 the scene of the operation of the first cause is put back in a past some- 

 what more remote from our era than has been hitherto supposed to be 

 the time of its activity. For in this case we should undoubtedly have, 

 as has been suggested, a first cause to fall back upon, still a creator to 

 acknowledge, a law-maker to reverence. But I would ask in all serious- 

 ness whether any form of the evolution hypothesis, which dissevers God 

 from all that follows upon the primal act of creation, is consistent with 

 serious belief in His existence, in fact, belief in a living God? What 

 man could worship, pray to, love, or adore such hypothetical first cause 1 

 I beg of you to consider whether this conception of the operation of a once- 

 creating, once law-enacting first cause in a past inconceivably remote is an 

 adequate substitute for the theistic idea which has been held for more than 

 two thousand years. However positively some may affirm that the view 

 objected to is not atheistic, it must be held to be of this nature unless the 

 word is used in a sense which no one who believes in a God could allow. I 

 have myself often begged for information concerning the powers and 

 attributes of the' God sanctioned by the evolution hypothesis, but so far 

 in vain. The suggestion that the idea of continuousness, or the exer- 

 cise of power transmitted through matter from the first beginning, or 

 the 'continuous extension of working and action of such supposed first cause 

 is equivalent to the idea of omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, is 

 surely almost an insult to the understanding. Ought not those who care to 

 acknowledge such newly-invented first cause, and those who foolishly try to 



