cas vista a key) cei a Ae ey Do 
8 PREFATORY. 
and in Spencer's chapters on “The Unknowable” (so the 
Synthetic Philosophy denominates God), caused a revul- 
sion of sentiment,— the anti-religious bias of evolution 
standing forth the clearer to my mind, the longer I oc- 
cupied myself with the subject. 
I determined to investigate for myself the data on 
which the speculations whose mazes I had trod these 
years were built up. The leisure hours of three years 
were devoted to the study of first-hand sources of Com- 
parative Religion. The result of this research was de- 
posited in two articles contributed to the Theological 
Quarterly in 1906 and 1907. I fear that the forbidding 
character of the foot-notes served as an effective deterrent 
to the reading of these articles. I have now given, in se- 
veral chapters of this little volume, in popular language 
the argument against evolution to be derived from the 
study of Religion. The reading of Le Conte’s and 
Dana’s text-books of geology and various other treatises 
supplied the data on palaeontology embodied in the first 
chapters of the book. The notable circulus in con- 
cludendo (“begging the question”) of which evolution- 
ists here are guilty was first pointed out to me by Prof. _ 
Tingelstad of Decorah, Iowa, who was in 1908 taking a 
course in Evolution at Chicago University, and who 
called on me for discussion of the doctrine as he received 
it from “head-quarters.” 
As an excursus in the subject of Pedagogy, I have 
treated in my Seminary lectures the past years, under the 
head of natural sciences, the argument against evolution, 
and the outlines of these lectures have furnished the 
framework for the present volume. It is hoped that 
especially our young men and women who take courses 
at our universities will examine the case against the fas- 
cinating and in some respects magnificent conception of 
evolution as this case is presented in the following chap- 
