[24] Lay Sermons, etc., p. 330.
[25] Contemporary Review, vol. xviii. 1871, p. 444. In this same article Mr. Huxley says: "Elijah's great question, Will ye serve God or Baal? Choose ye, is uttered audibly enough in the ears of every one of us as we come to manhood. Let every man who tries to answer it seriously ask himself whether he can be satisfied with the Baal of authority, and with all the good things his worshippers are promised in this world and the next. If he can, let him, if he be so inclined, amuse himself with such scientific implements as authority tells him are safe and will not cut his fingers; but let him not imagine that he is, or can be, both a true son of the Church and a loyal soldier of science." "And, on the other hand, if the blind acceptance of authority appear to him in its true colors, as mere private judgment in excelsis, and if he have courage to stand alone face to face with the abyss of the Eternal and Unknowable, let him be content, once for all, not only to renounce the good things promised by 'Infallibility,' but even to bear the bad things which it prophesies; content to follow reason and fact in singleness and honesty of purpose, wherever they may lead, in the sure faith that a hell of honest men will to him be more endurable than a paradise full of angelic shams." There can be no doubt that the Apostle Paul believed in the infallibility of the Scriptures. Imagine Professor Huxley calling St. Paul to his face, a sham! What are all the Huxleys who have ever lived or ever can live, to that one Paul in power for good over human thought, character, and destiny!
Professor Huxley goes on in the next paragraph to say: "Mr. Mivart asserts that 'without belief in a personal God there is no religion worthy of the name.' This is a matter of opinion. But it may be asserted, with less reason to fear contradiction, that the worship of a personal God, who, on Mr. Mivart's hypothesis, must have used words studiously calculated to deceive his creatures and worshippers, is 'no religion worthy of the name.' 'Incredibile est, Deum illis verbis ad populum fuisse locutum quibis deciperetur,' is a verdict in which for once Jesuit casuistry concurs with the healthy moral sense of all mankind." (p. 458). Mr. Huxley calls believers in the Scriptures, and (apparently) believers in a personal God, bigots, old ladies of both sexes, bibliolators, fools, etc., etc.
[26] Lay Sermons, etc. p. 331.
Büchner.
Dr. Louis Büchner, president of the medical association of Hessen-Darmstadt, etc., etc., is not only a man of science but a popular writer. Perhaps no book of its class, in our day, has been so widely circulated as his volume on "Kraft und Stoff," Matter and Force. It has been translated into all the languages of Europe. He holds that matter and force are inseparable; there cannot be the one without the other; both are eternal and imperishable; neither can be either increased or diminished; life originated spontaneously by the combination of molecules of matter under favorable conditions; all the phenomena of the universe, inorganic and organic, whether physical, vital, or mental, are due to matter and its forces. Consequently there is no God, no creation, no mind distinct from matter, no conscious existence of man after death. All this is asserted in the most explicit terms. Dr. Büchner has published a work on Darwinism in two volumes. Darwin's theory, he says, "is the most thoroughly naturalistic that can be imagined, and far more atheistic than that of his decried predecessor Lamarck, who admitted at least a general law of progress and development; whereas, according to Darwin, the whole development is due to the gradual summation of innumerable minute and accidental operations."[27]
FOOTNOTE:
[27] Sechs Vorlesungen über die Darwinische Theorie. Von Ludwig Büchner. Zweite Auflage, Leipzig, 1848, vol. i. p. 125.
Carl Vogt.
In his preface to his work on the "Descent of Man," Mr. Darwin quotes this author as a high authority. We see him elsewhere referred to as one of the first physiologists of Germany. Vogt devotes the concluding lecture of the second volume of his work on Man, to the consideration of Darwinism. He expresses his opinion of it, after high commendation, in the following terms. He says that it cannot be doubted that Darwin's "theory turns the Creator—and his occasional intervention in the revolutions of the earth and in the production of species—without any hesitation out of doors, inasmuch as it does not leave the smallest room for the agency of such a Being. The first living germ being granted, out of it the creation develops itself progressively by natural selection, through all the geological periods of our planets, by the simple law of descent—no new species arises by creation and none perishes by divine annihilation—the natural course of things, the process of evolution of all organisms and of the earth itself, is of itself sufficient for the production of all we see. Thus Man is not a special creation, produced in a different way, and distinct from other animals, endowed with an individual soul and animated by the breath of God; on the contrary, Man is only the highest product of the progressive evolution of animal life springing from the group of apes next below him."[28]