Los Angeles herald., 1909-08-16

ing question as to its function page
2s0l.
Force is Not Lost
with whom has the Bible lost all
its authoritative force? Not with the
millions who love and revere it's pages
Of truth. Not with professed scholars
| in our colleges, universities and the
| illogical seminaries only with COM
paratively small coterie of men and
women whose poetical fancies have
absorbed their logical faculties; who
have been so hypnotized by scientific
vagaries, seen dimly through the misty
millions of geological eras, that they
refuse to be Influenced by scientific
| facts within their reach; who have so
magnifed the greatness of man as to
eclipse in their own consciousness the
greatness of God; who, in a word, are
so enamored of their own achievements
that they are content to define all re-
| ligion as. self-achievement and exalt
man as creator of God
"Dr. Foster is mistaken The Bible
is still authoritative, while criticism he
represents is losing all authority with
brains and refuse to accept as authort-
tative the unsupported dictum of
scholars, though they be labeled
philosophers or scientists.
" He who calls himself a Bible be-
lever has not weighed his words. He
is naive. He must choose from
among the Bible faiths the faiths he
wants, and which he chooses depends
upon when and where he lives and
what sort of man he is. Speaking
strictly, then, there is not single
Bible believer today Pages 1928.
One can save DR.. Foster from the
charge Of libel in these words only
upon the ground of his naivete, what
ever that may mean. To be sure, he
has not weighed his words. I have
spent more than thirty years studying
the Bible, and I hereby declare that
! believe the Bible to be the word of
God.
investigation Termed SIipshod
1.-THE charge that the Bible teaches
one thing in one place and quite an
other in another place is proof of Slip
shod investigation and shallow think
ing. The charge that laymen do not
know the Bible while they permit their
pastors to make them believe that they
believe 1t is a serious indictment of
the American manhood, for many Of
the strongest, manifest men in the
business world have read their Bibles
and proclaimed their faith in it as the
inspired word of God. To say that
these men are intellectual puppets,
who have no convictions except as the
clergy make them think they have, is
to give to the clergy power beyond
| their due and to discredit the intelli-
gence of the laymen.
Nov who Is to blame for all this?
DR.. Foster a few years ago was an
! orthodox minister, preaching the per-
sonality of God, the deity of Christ
and the authority of the Bible as a
| revelation from God. What broke his
/ 60 nj ed al he fobf fofn
! the darkness which he admits in his
| preface? Three sentences on page 50
explain it:
at should suffice to say that If we
| take the idea of evolution seriously
we must apply it thoroughly and con-
sistently.. Doing, so, papal authority
and Biblical authority and inner-light
authority and a prior authority must
be an effect of experience before they
| in turn become cause of experience.
Thus intrenched supernaturalism is
routed from its final CITADEL
Evolution an Old Story
LET me now take a glance at the
history of this evolution which is
thought by some to be modern dis
covery. Hundreds of years before Christ
| the pagan theory of evolution was in
conflict with the Biblical teaching of
creation by the fiat of God and develop
ment along the line of species. The
Egyptian philosophers taught that the
| first object was a cosmic egg from
which was hatched their god Ptah, who
in due time evolved world. The evo-
luton of today, however has its roots
| in the Greek philosophy which -four
ished from 700 to 800 B. c.
"Plato, the greatest of them all, whom
Dr. Foster classes with the Roman
Catholic church as denying to man the
| ooiA m, terfta idNols poucht a
| dim vision of the truth revealed in
Genesis. He believed that man began
equal with the gods and that beasts
are probably degenerate men, and / be-
| lieve that there is more proof in favor
of Platos descent of beasts from man
than of Darwin's ascent of man from
| the beast 1t takes only a casual
observance to see that there is more
tendency in men to become monkeys
than in monkeys to become men. One
has only to read Sir John j. w. Daw-
sons books to be convinced, if facts
will convince at all, that savage man
was not the progenitor but the work
of civilized man.
"There have been two schools of evo-
lutionists, the naturalistic and the su-
pernaturalistic. The naturalistic evo!u-
| ZIONIST ignores God and virtually, If
not directly, denies his existence. The
supernaturalistic evolutionist believes
in God as the great first cause and
regards evolution as Gods method of
development from the simple to the
complex, from the lower to the higher.
| CDR. Foster in his recent book chooses
| the naturalistic type of evolution,
which places him not only outside the
| Christian ranks, but also outside the
drift of up-to-date scientific thinking)
Finds Only Rotten Fruit
"This improved and now discredited,
if not collapsed hypothesis of evolution
Is responsible for the conclusions of
the destructive higher criticism, the
ripe and rotten fruits of which we find
| in DIR. Fosters book. 1t is robbing the
world of it's God, man of his Savior
| and the church of its Bible. A few
years ago it informed us that Moses
| could not have written the Pentateuch
| because, according to the laws of evolu-
tion, there could have been no written
| language at the time of Moses. But
| the discovery of buried libraries with
thousands of books written hundreds
of years before Moses was born has
silenced that claim, and the testimony
of the pick and shovel has kept on re-
! futing the conclusions of evolution.
The Bible record stands while the mists
of evolutionary speculation have passed
| back into the realm of imagination from
which they came.
'I have tried honestly and fairly to
| investigate the claims of these higher
critics and to study the processes by
which they have come to their conclu-
sions, and I am compelled to say / be-
lieve their claims are myths and their
conclusions are moths which are eating
| AWAY the texture of faith and char