And Dr. Gerald Birney Smith, speaking of present-day missionary methods, says: Humanly determined programs are being substituted for dogmatic decrees in the work of the churches. This is genuine democracy. The missionary enterprise is rapidly being conceived as a democratic social program rather than as the rescue of a few individuals from the divine wrath.... Education is coming to be a primary means of accomplishing the missionary task.
Such a mission to the lost would be altogether unthinkable if men were believed to be spiritually dead. For dead men are helpless to adopt principles and strive after ideals. Dead men do not need education, they need life.
[p 40] 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 bungling [p 41] and unwatchful incompetence of an impotent Creator. Thus in either case God becomes the author of sin!
This puts evolution almost, if not altogether, on the ground of blasphemy! God responsible for the unspeakable woe and the unmeasured suffering of man? God the author of that inherent force in man’s nature which has filled the earth with hatred, violence, bloodshed, and death? Let him think so who can!
After these doctrines of the Word are set beside the evolutionary philosophy, and after it begins to dawn on the thinking mind how utterly irreconcilable they are, the absolute impossibility of a consistent evolutionist believing in an inspired, inerrant, and infallible Bible becomes well nigh an axiom. It is no wonder that Dr. W. B. Riley exclaims: What thinking man fails to see the infinity of space between Modernism and Orthodoxy, or to apprehend the fact that daily they are drawing farther apart! Time holds no promise of even a patched-up peace.
Lord Kelvin was astonished at the preachers and teachers who are trying to apply the doctrine of evolution to the fundamentals of the faith. He said: I marvel at the undue haste with which teachers in our Universities and preachers in our pulpits are restating the truth in the terms of evolution, while evolution itself remains an unproven hypothesis in the laboratories of science.