Page:The church, the schools and evolution.djvu/44

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Any one of average intelligence can see at a glance that these two programs of salvation are headed in opposite directions. By one we strive after an ideal; by the other we quit all striving and surrender to a Person. One is salvation by a human resolution to press toward the pattern set before us by the "Flower of the Race"; the other is salvation by a divine rescue from that natural hatred of purity and holiness which made possible the murder of the Son of God. By one program we adopt the principles and follow the spirit of the life of Christ; by the other we trust in the merits of the shed blood and substitutionary death of Christ.

These two programs are mutually exclusive. Thus the evolutionary philosophy utterly destroys the doctrine of the new birth.


7. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of the holiness of God, for it makes God the author of sin.

Le Conte says:

If evolution be true, and especially if man be indeed a product of evolution, then what we call evil is not a unique phenomenon confined to man and the result of an accident [the fall], but must be a great fact pervading all nature and a part of its very constitution,

No thinking man can get away from that conclusion. For if evolution in any form is a fact, then the thing the Bible calls sin was either somehow embedded, by a competent and responsible Creator, in man's very constitution as a necessary process of his evolution, or else it slipped into the race through the bun-