I NFL UENCE OF MODERN SCIENCE UPON BELIEF IN MIR A CL ES. 235 



make a mud pie. There are thoughtful and reverent Christians: — it need not be 

 denied — who regard the theory of an abrupt creation of the human body as insuf- 

 ferably crude, and quite out of harmonv with the usual methods of the Creator. 

 Evolutionism in some form may or may not be true. On that point I do not, 

 in this paper, define my belief; but I do say that in these days it is hurtful and 

 stupid to deny and oppose every theory of evolution. Many sincerely, think a 

 creative evolutionism must be admitted as the theory of Copernicus was admit- 

 ted. To denounce such honest opinion is uncandid, bigoted and mischievous. 

 It loses to faith many noble souls. But while just now the efforts of unbelieving, 

 scientists may in some respects be damaging to the church, 



THE EVIL IS TRANSIENT. 



It will soon pass away, for reasons like the following : 



1. The scientific infidels are by no means as learned and competent to overturn 

 Christianity as they think they are. A young mouse, born and bred in a wooden 

 chest, one day climbed to the top, and looking out into the dim and dusty attic, 

 remarked that never before had he supposed the universe to be so large as it then 

 appeared to him. God's universe is larger than some scientists have perceived.- 

 It contains more facts than matter and motion. It is too soon, by at least a. 

 thousand years, for any scientific Samson to come out with the jaw-bone of a. 

 Megalosaurus to level all the churches to the side-walk. 



2. The scientific faith-destroyers are at war among themselves. They are 

 united only by hatred to the church of Christ and unbelief in the possibility of 

 miracles. Otherwise they float on a foaming sea of speculation theory and ex- 

 travagant disagreement. Moreover they are varying and changing from day to 

 day. 



3. Another reason why the evil effect of scientific unbelief will be transient 

 is the fact that scientific infidels ask men to believe incredible things. Reasonable 

 people cannot yet believe in the spontaneous generation of life, or that God is a 

 slave to his own laws. It is too much, to ask us to admit that the brain secretes 

 soul as the liver secretes bile ; or that a beefsteak can be literally and exactly 

 transmuted into a prayer. 



Parents are asked to believe that their dead children are nothing but manure 

 in the universe, and they turn in horror and pain to the dusty old Bible to see 

 what it may teach. The faith-destroyers say, " throw away the Bible, because it 

 is so hard to swallow the camel of supernaturalism," and then they ask you to 

 swallow, not one camel, but a whole menagerie of camels, elephants, gorillas, 

 saurians, rhinoceroses and whales. It is too much to ask. They will not go 

 down. 



4. Bad fruit grows on the tree of scientific infidelity. The people are getting 

 impressions of the real value and effect of the new gospel, frora what goes by the 

 name of nihilism and communism. 



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