Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith. Robert Patterson
they were evolved. They assume that they contained all that is necessary to evolve what exists now. That is begging the question at the outset; for if these first prototypes contained the principle of evolution, we should know something about them from observation, and it should be shown that there are such organized beings as are capable of evolution.
"I ask, Whence came these properties? If this power and capacity of change is not inherent to the first progenitors, then I ask, Whence came the impulses by which those progenitors which have not this power of change in themselves acquire them? What is the power by which they are started in directions which are not determined by their primitive nature? From the total silence of the supporters of the transmutation theory on these and other points, he did not think it worth their while to take the slightest notice of this doctrine of evolution in his scientific considerations. He acknowledged what the evolutionists had done incidentally in scientific research; none had done more than Mr. Darwin. He believed he had been injured woefully by his adherents. He was a far better man than most of his school made him."
It is to be acknowledged, however, that many scientists are evolutionists. Mr. Darwin is not alone in his belief. If he were, it would not be worth while to spend time in examining it. Quite a number of scientific men have fallen into it, and lecture and write commendations of it; and it has become quite popular among a certain class who do not like to accept the Bible doctrine that God created man, with its necessary consequence that the creature ought to obey his Creator; and they have proceeded to patch it out into completeness—for, as you observe, it is a little defective; like its own primeval squirt, it lacks a head and a tail—it has neither a beginning nor an end properly fitted to it. It takes a piece out of the middle of the universe from the management of God, but it leaves the beginning and the end totally unaccounted for; telling us neither whence came the first germs, nor whither tends the final fully developed angel. Mr. Darwin, though he calls one of his works, the Origin of Species, really avoids the question of origin. He admits the miracle of the creation of the four or five original germs of life, which, according to the evolutionists, is as unscientific as if he admitted four or five hundred. They desire to escape the operation of God altogether. Moreover, he gives no account of the origin of the law of heredity, by which each being produces its like; nor yet of the origin of the power of variation, according to which profitable variations occur. Here, then, is still a field in which God reigns. But it is specially with Mr. Darwin's admission of the Creator to bestow the origin of life that evolutionists are displeased. If they admit God at the beginning of the world they see plainly that there is no possibility of getting rid of him afterward. Messrs. Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, Buchner, Haeckel and Vogt combine their forces accordingly to evolve the world as we find it without God's intervention.
Mr. Huxley, perceiving that to make either man, or monkey, or nomad, you must have materials, kindly brings a little pitcher of protoplasm, which he calls the physical basis of life. It is the meat our Cæsar feeds on, and indeed, for that matter, all living things. All vegetable and animal tissues are made up mostly of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen; and as the materials of which all living beings are built are the same originally, and are simply these chemical substances with a little iron, salt and lime, with their properties, he will have it that all life, including man's life and thought, is merely a development of protoplasm. This is the clay out of which all the various bricks, and tiles, and tea cups, and porcelain vases of the great world building are built. We don't need to begin with monkeys, nor fish, or pollywogs, now to develop into men, for we go down to the very bottom, since we have the stuff they all are made of, namely, protoplasm. Still this clay needs a potter to mold and bake it.
The difficulty about the protoplasm is that it must be alive. You can not get a living pollywog, no more than a living elephant, out of dead protoplasm. Mr. Huxley shows very well that all protoplasm consists of the same materials; in fact, that all flesh is grass, as the Scripture says. The difficulty is how to convert the grass into flesh, unless by some animal eating it; or to convert the nitrogen, carbon and water into grass or grain, or any other form of protein or protoplasm, without the previous action of some plant. In short, how are we to make the chemical materials live? Here Mr. Tyndall comes in and endows the matter of the universe with life, and with all the potency of producing bodies and souls. In his famous Belfast Address he says: "Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong the vision backward, beyond the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in this matter, which we in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life."
Yet, after all this marvelous endowment of matter with all potency, we have not got quite back to the beginning. For still the questions arise, Where did this almighty matter come from? Who endowed it with these wonderful potencies? And how does it happen to work so well, in such orderly and regular evolution of star dust, suns, planets, pollywogs, monkeys, men and maggots, in eternal cycles, ever advancing higher and doing better and better for the race, though poorly enough, it appears, for the miserable individuals? Here Buchner, Vogt, Spencer and other materialists come in and perfect that which was lacking; showing how the star dust made itself, and how the paving stones made themselves, and are under no obligations to any Creator but themselves. Matter and force are all they need, and endless time in which to work, and they will account for the universe without any Creator at all. Everything and every person must be just as it is, according to the regular operation of the laws of Nature.
As Buchner, Vogt and Spencer have given the system a head, Lubbock, Evans and others have supplied it with a tail, and demonstrated how society, and morals, and religion have been excogitated by the apes out of their meditations in the forests. It is a fearful and wonderful account they give us of the origin of marriage from the battles of the baboons, of the rights of property established by terrible fights for groves of good chestnuts, of the beginnings of morals from the instincts of brutes, and of the dawnings of religion, or rather of superstition, from the dreams of these animals; the result of the whole being that civilization, and society, and law, and order, and religion, are all simply the evolution of the instincts of the brutes, and that there is no necessity for invoking any supernatural interference to produce them. The termination of the whole, as far as you and I are concerned, is that "We shall fade away as the faint cloud melts into the blue ether," into the eternal sleep of death.
It thus appears that there is an orderly succession and attempted adjustment of one part of the doctrine of evolution to another, and that all the various workers are cooperating toward one grand result. It is true they differ widely in their professed religious creeds and political partialities. Mr. Darwin avows his belief in a Creator. Mr. Huxley votes on the London School Board for the introduction of the Bible into the public schools. Mr. Spencer is willing to allow the existence of some great unknowable mystery. Some of the French and German evolutionists dispense with any reference to God, as an unnecessary hypothesis. Others oppose the idea of God altogether, as inimical to progress. M. Comte proposed a worship of humanity. M. Strauss would worship the universe. But with all this variety of uniform, and armor, and tactics, the evolutionists are all soldiers of the same army, and are all fighting the same great battle, for the brutal origin of man, and his independence of God. From which independence of God, and brutal origin of mankind, result very important consequences. For the belief of this notion necessarily destroys all faith in the Bible, and in the Christianity which it reveals, and revolutionizes the basis of the civilization founded upon it, and all the laws protecting life, property, marriage and religion; which laws are based upon the belief of mankind in the dignity of man, the sacredness of human life, and the sanction of morality by the All-seeing Judge of all the earth, who will reward every man according to his works. For all practical purposes it makes no great difference whether a man denies that there is any God at all, or admits that there is some kind of a god who created the world millions of years ago, and just set it a spinning to work out its destiny as best it might, but never after concerned himself about it, or its people, and never will; for nobody will ever trouble his head about a god who never troubles his head about him.
Most of the evolutionists are zealous advocates of their system. These propagandists have had such a degree of success in attracting public attention, in inspiring a large proportion of the secular press, besides scientific journals, as advocates of their notions, and