But the theory of evolution fosters a doctrine of the “immanence of God” which is nothing but a modern form of pantheism. For example, Prof. Josiah Royce, of Harvard, has said: God is the spirit animating nature, the universal force which takes the myriad forms, heat, light, gravitation, electricity, and the like.
And Prof. George B. Foster said: God is a symbol to designate the universe in its ideal achieving capacity.
This is pantheism, pure and simple, for God and His created universe are not distinguished from each other. And this blots out the distinction between the natural and the spiritual realms.
Realizing, therefore, that no matter how perfect a course of reasoning may be or how inevitable the [p 85] conclusions resulting it all falls like a house of cards if the premise is false, it becomes necessary to determine whether pantheism is false or true, in order that we may know whether we started with a valid premise.
Is pantheism true?
One thing we know is true. The Bible clearly and sharply distinguishes between God and His creation. No one who reads the Bible can dissent from that statement. And pantheism absolutely denies that Bible distinction.
It therefore immediately resolves itself into a question as to whether the Bible is true.
This brings us straight back to Christ’s formula—“If any man wills to do, he shall know.” He who accepts the challenge of this formula will come to know, beyond all possibility of disproof, that neither pantheism, evolution, nor any other doctrine that denies or casts doubt on the infallibility of the Bible is true. He will know it because it is supernaturally verified to him in answer to his faith.
This formula is the divine challenge to every form of unbelief in an inerrant Bible. There never has been an hour since Pentecost when the aggressive hurling of this challenge at defiant and destructive unbelief was more needed. And the whole Christian Church, backed by the Word of God, is hurling this challenge back into the teeth of the whole evolutionary camp today.
Either be fair enough, be scientific enough, be honest enough, challenges the Church, to act upon Christ’s formula and gain for yourselves that supernaturally verified knowledge which will make further faith in [p 86] the evolutionary theory impossible, or else do not assume to pronounce any further on those truths of which you know nothing because you have been unwilling to take the means to find out what they are. Go and join the ranks of the other unbelievers and Bible-rejectors, taking your doubt-born theories with you as a reinforcement to their warfare against the Bible, and then the Church can fight you in the open and drive you to defeat with the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. If you are determined to destroy faith in the inerrancy of the Bible, at least be fair enough to come out from under the cover of “Christian education,” and stop assuming to interpret in the light of evolution—a light that is darkness—those sublime doctrines which are at once the foundation and the message of the Church. Get out of the Christian schools, which were founded to strengthen, not to destroy, the faith of young people from Christian homes, and give place to those who believe the Book. Increasing hosts of Christian parents are too heart-broken over the invasion of their own homes by this destroying wolf in sheep’s clothing to tolerate this situation much longer. They are asking, in the words of a Chicago newspaper editorial concerning the destructive teachings of Prof. George B. Foster, in the Chicago University Divinity School: Is there no place to assail Christianity but a divinity school? Is there no one to write infidel books except the professors of Christian theology? Is a theological seminary an appropriate place for a general massacre of Christian doctrine?