"Well, then, remembering that, even according to Huxley's 'act of philosophic faith,' the origin of the living from the not-living must at some time have taken place according to natural law, why should we suppose that such a process was confined to one example? If, when the young planet 'was passing through physical and chemical conditions which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy,' the 'necessary conditions' were favorable for one such creation of life, why not a few billion? Would the production of a few billion such beginnings of protoplasm be any less 'natural' than of one alone? Remember, however, that both the arrangement of these 'necessary conditions,' as well as the endowing of matter with these 'properties,' not only requires a cause, but this cause must be intelligent, for there is indisputable design in this first origin of life.... The food for a developing embryo might, for aught that we know, be conveyed to it direct from the ultimate laboratories of nature, and it thus be built up by protoplasm in the usual way, without the medium of a parent form—other than the great Father of all. Or would it be any less according to natural law to believe that a bird passed through all the usual stages of embryonic development from the not-living up to the full-fledged songster of the skies in one day—the fifth day of creation? And if one example, why not a million? For, remember that the youthful earth was then passing through strange conditions, 'which,' as Huxley says, 'it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy.'"[99]
Omitting some remarks about embryology, I continue this quotation as follows:
"But what 'law' would be violated in this springtime of the world if, instead of twenty years or so for full development, the first man passed through all these stages in one day—the sixth of creation week? He might as well have originated from the not-living as the evolutionist's first speck of protoplasm, for he certainly now starts from a mass of this same protoplasm, identical, as we have seen, in all plants and animals.
"And by originating thus, he would escape that horrible heritage of bestial and savage propensities which he would get through evolution, a heritage that would make it not his fault, but his misfortune, that sin and evil are in the world, and which would also shift the responsibility for the evidently abnormal condition of 'this present evil world' off from the creature to the Creator, and change to us His character from that of a loving Father, fettered by no conditions in His creation, to that of either a bungling, incompetent workman or a heartless fiend; for, though I am almost ashamed to write the words, the god of the evolutionist must be either the one or the other." (p. 121.)
With an appreciation nurtured by centuries of study of God's larger book, baffled often though she has been, and disappointed many times in the words she has endeavored to spell out, Science to-day proclaims its subject, its title page, which she has now at last deciphered, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
[REPORT ON "ILLOGICAL GEOLOGY"]
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