uth of the
Old Testament will be settled, and as sure as Christ is the Son of God,
and has all power in heaven and on earth, it will be settled upon the
lines of the attitude which he took up towards that book, and it will be
settled to the disgrace of those who professed to believe in Jesus,
but deserted his position before full examination was made. That no
transcriber ever made a slip, or that no translator ever made a mistake,
is not held by any one. But the day that it is proved that the Old
Testament is not substantially true, faith in Christ and Christianity
will get a shake from which it will never recover.

We have not lost faith in the Bible. There is no need for doing so. The
word of the Lord will endure forever. But meantime, brethren, let us be
faithful, prayerful, and cautious, and be not easily moved from the rock
of God's word by the pretensions of "scholars" or of science, falsely so
called.

I do not know that there is any necessary connection between the two,
but a belief in evolution and scholarly doubts about large portions of
the Old Testament, as a rule, go together. You must not profess to know
anything of science in many quarters if you doubt evolution. In the bulk
of even religious books it is referred to as a matter that science has
settled beyond dispute. To expect that many of our young people will not
be so far carried along by this current is to expect too much. Many of
them will be carried so far; it is a question of how many and how far.

There perhaps never was a theory before believed by as many educated
people without proof as the theory of evolution. It is an unproved
theory; there is not a fact beneath it. That you have low forms of life,
and forms rising higher and higher till you get to man, is fact. But
that a higher species ever came from a lower is without proof. Let those
who doubt this say when and where such a thing took place, and name the
witnesses. Not only are there no facts in proof of it, but it flies in
the face of facts without number. If like from like is not established,
then nothing can be established by observation and experience. What
other theory do we believe which contradicts all that we know to be true
in regard to the subject to which it refers?

Not only does it contradict fact and experience, it contradicts reason.
If you listen to the voice of reason, you can no more believe that the
greater came from the less than you can believe that something came