or in
the Age of Iron?

There never _was_ any "Fall." Evolution proves a long slow _rise_.

And if there never was a Fall, why should there be any Atonement?

Christians accepting the theory of evolution have to believe that God
allowed the sun to form out of the nebula, and the earth to form
from the sun, that He allowed Man to develop slowly from the speck of
protoplasm in the sea. That at some period of Man's gradual evolution
from the brute, God found Man guilty of some sin, and cursed him. That
some thousands of years later God sent His only Son down upon the earth
to save Man from Hell.

But evolution shows Man to be, even now, an imperfect creature, an
unfinished work, a building still undergoing alterations, an animal
still evolving.

Whereas the doctrines of "the Fall" and the Atonement assume that he
was from the first a finished creature, and responsible to God for his
actions.

This old doctrine of the Fall, and the Curse, and the Atonement is
against reason as well as against science.

The universe is boundless. We know it to contain millions of suns, and
suppose it to contain millions of millions of suns. Our sun is but a
speck in the universe. Our earth is but a speck in the solar system.

Are we to believe that the God who created all this boundless universe
got so angry with the children of the apes that He condemned them all
to Hell for two score centuries, and then could only appease His rage by
sending His own Son to be nailed upon a cross? Do you believe that? Can
you believe it?

No. As I said before, if the theory of evolution be true, there was
nothing to atone for, and nobody to atone. _Man has never sinned against
God._ In fact, the whole of this old Christian doctrine is a mass of
error. There was no creation. There was no Fall. There was no Atonement.
There was no Adam, and no Eve, and no Eden, and no Devil, and no Hell.

If God is all-powerful, He had power to make Man by nature incapable of
sin. But if, having the power to make Man incapable of sin, God made Man
so weak as to "fall," then it was God who sinned against Man, and not
Man against God.

For if I had power to train a son of mine to righteousness, and I
trained him to wickedness, should I not sin against my son?

Or if a man had power to create a child of virtue and intellect, but
chose rather to create a child who was by nature a criminal or an idiot,
would not that man sin against his child?

And do you believe