Nature, in like manner, is often used as a substitute for God, to avoid the mention of His name.
Modernism is a fine sounding word, suggestive of learning and culture and the last word in science, but doubts or denies many of the essential doctrines of the Christian religion. It is infidelity pure and simple and of the most dangerous kind, camouflaged under this attractive name. Who can deny the statement that the only thing modern about modernism is its hypocrisy? It is ancient infidelity pretending to be a Christian view. Bearing the Christian flag, it attacks Christianity. Modernists are evidently ashamed of a name which fitly describes their views, and seek another. Infidels have tried to win under their own name. They have failed. Will they succeed under the camouflaged name of modernism? Camouflaged under an attractive name, modernists doubt or deny the real inspiration of the Bible, the Virgin birth of Jesus, his deity, his miracles, his bodily resurrection, the resurrection of the dead, and his personal second coming to judge the quick and the dead. Some modernists reject a part of these great truths, and some reject all.
Liberal is another term stolen by infidels ashamed of their own name. They are no more liberal in a good sense than others.
A Rationalist is not entitled to the term, because he is often more innocent of reasoning than his opponents. Reason is not opposed to revelation. We believe in an inspired revelation, because it is reasonable to do so. Rationalism is another camouflage for infidelity. We can have some respect for an honest professed skeptic, but how can we respect a man who insists on adding hypocrisy to his infidelity, that, by so doing, he may make greater havoc of the church? Modernists give such a diluted interpretation to inspiration, to the statements of Scripture, and the Apostles’ Creed, and the creeds of the churches, that all may mean little or nothing, and the floodgates of infidelity and atheism are opened wide.
It has been truly said, “If the Bible is not really inspired, it is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind; for, from lid to lid, it claims to be the word of God.” Likewise, if Moses was not inspired, he was the greatest liar of history.
Every variety of infidel and species of atheist will rejoice, if evolution be accepted,-whether modernists, liberals, rationalists, or simple unbelievers on their way to the bottomless pit. If evolution wins, Christianity loses and the church fails.
We hope that scientists will consign to innocuous desuetude their camouflaged sesquipedalian vocabularies, and tell us what they mean in short words, so we all may know what they say.
47. WHAT ARE WE TO BELIEVE?
Some would have us believe there is no God; or that matter is eternal; or that matter was evolved out of nothing; or that all things came by chance; or that there is nothing but matter,—no God, no spirit, no mind, no soul.
Some would have us believe that God created nebulous matter, and then ceased to control the universe; that life developed spontaneously; that species developed by chance, or natural selection, or by a powerless “law,” from one primordial germ. Others say that all the countless exhibitions of design by a matchless Intelligence, are to be explained by a causo-mechanical theory, which means the theory of blind unintelligent chance, without purpose or design or interference of God. Some say that God may have created one germ or at most 4 or 5, and that 3,000,000 species of plants and animals developed from this microscopic beginning. We are asked to believe that some plants became animals, or some animals became plants, or that all plants and animals came from the one germ they allowed God to create. They say that all species developed by growth, but do not explain why we still have the one-celled amoeba, the microscopic bacilli of plant life, and the microscopic species of animal life. Many geologic species are largest at the beginning; many ancient animals were much larger than their successors; and the reptilian age was noted for animals of enormous size. Yet they want us to believe that growth is universal.