EVOLUTION AND CHRIST.
Evolution cannot account for Christ. Without entering here on an argument for His divinity, we simply present him and ask the evolutionist to account for such a character and life. Let us listen to what the enemies of Christianity say of Christ.
Renan said: "The incomparable man to whom the universal conscience has decreed the title of the Son of God, and that with justice.... Between thee and God there will be no longer any distinction."
Jean Paul Richter said: "The holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among the holy, He lifted with pierced hands empires off their hinges and turned the stream of centuries out of its channel and still governs the ages." (Dr. Liddon's Bampton Lectures.)
Rousseau testified as follows: "What sweetness, what purity in his morals! What force, what persuasion in his instructions! His maxims how sublime! His discourses, how wise and profound! such presence of mind, such beauty and precision in his answers, such empire over his passions! It would be much harder to conceive that a number of men should have joined together to fabricate this book than that a single person should furnish out the subject to its authors. Jewish writers would never have fallen into that style, and the gospel has such strong and such inimitable marks of truth that the inventor would be more surprising than the hero." (Emilius and Sophia, or An Essay on Education, pp. 79, 80, 81.)
Thomas Paine: "The morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind. It has never been excelled." (Age of Reason, p. 5.)
Robert Ingersoll, to M. D. Landon, in a letter giving permission to print his speeches: "In using my speeches do not use any assault I may have made on Christ which I foolishly made in my earlier life. I believe Christ was the perfect man. 'Do unto others' is the perfection of religion and morality. It is the summum bonum." (Homiletic Review, November, 1899, p. 475.)
Theodore Parker: "Shall we be told such a man never lived—the whole story is a lie? Suppose that Plato and Newton never lived, that their story is a lie? But who did their works and thought their thoughts? It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated Jesus? None but a Jesus." (Discourses on Religion, pp. 362-3.)
Napoleon Bonaparte: "Everything in Jesus Christ astonishes me. His spirit overawes me. Between him and whoever else in the world there is no possible line of comparison. I search in vain in history to find the similar to Jesus Christ, or anything which can approach the Gospel. In him we find a moral beauty before unknown, and an idea of the Supreme superior even to that which creation suggests."
To say that Jesus was an evolution of that age, as some evolutionists do say, and that we may look for even a greater in the future, is to be guilty not only of blasphemy but of gross ignorance as to the age in which Jesus came. There was nothing in that age to give rise to such a character. He came as a flash of lightning in a dark sky, or, according to the Bible figure, as the rising of the sun in the world's night.