Putnam patriot., 1925-07-24
DIR. .TALMAGE'SSERMONIN
 1883 APPROPOS IN 1925
Noted Divire Breaches On "Ev. olution and Inhdelity" 42
 Years Ago
Sons of Gorilla or Som of God the
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 Rev. De Witt Talmage of Brooklyn. N. Y. whose sermons were printed weekly in The Patriot. spoke on "Ev- oiution and Infidelity" back in 1883. In view of the present legal contro- versy in Dayton. Tenn, the views of the great preacher, expressed forty two years ago, are of more than pass ing interest
 The following is taken from the Boston Herald:
 New York, Jan. 2l. 1888. At the Brooklyn Tabernacle, this morning. the pastor, Rev. De Witt Talmage. took for the subject of his remarks .Eyolu- ton and Infidelity.' Sons of a gorilla or sons of God. said the speaker. is the question of our time Last Sabbath showed you that evolution was contra dieted by the Rihle, by science, by oo- servation and by common sense. I showed yea that the Bible account of the starting of man and bird and all worlds collided with the evolutionists' account as positively as two express rail trains going in opposite directions 90 miles the hour. l come now to say that the evolutionists try Co impress the people that the line of ancestry leads right on up from the primal germ. through fish and reptile and qnadruped and gorilla, to man. They indeed admit that there Is q missing ling, but it is not missing link so much as it Is whole chain. Between the physical construction of the high est brute and the physical construction of the lowest man, there is chasm wide as the Atlantic Ocean.
 They tell us that probably in Cen tral Africa or Borneo may be found the creatures half way between brute and man. those undiscovered orang- outangs being the highest step of the animal ascent and the lowest step of the human creation. But here are the simple facts that the largest grain of the gorilla ever found has about 30 cubic inches and the lowest human brain over 70. You need a bridge of at least forty arches to span that gulf. Between the brute of Darwinian and Speneerian eulogy and man there is a difference of bone, a difference of muscle. a difference of nerve, a differ enee of blood glohule. The one creat- ure dumb, the other gifted with artie- ulafion. Beside that, if according to evolutionists the descent of pair of catarrhine monkeys was man. why did not all the monkeys have the same kind of descendants, and the woods be- come full of them? Was il only these two beasts of the forest honored with human progeny?
 Beside that. it is evident that brute life and human life have no kinship, in the fact that animal life is able, in a few hours or days or months. to take care of itself; while the human race starts in helplessness which, for ten or twelve years. is complete. Had we been derived from the brutes, we would have had their strength from the start, as they would have had our weakness. Not only unlike, but op- posite.
 'sMr. Darwin admits that the dove cote pigeon has not changed in thou sands of years. The lizards in the lower strata of the earth are as per feet as the lizards now. The first fish, called the ganoid was as complete as the same f l called the sturgeon. now. Darwins whole system is a guess, and Huxley and Haeckel and Spencer and Tyndal come and help him guess, guess about man and guess about the brute and guess about the worlds, but as to one solid foot of ground to stand on. they never have had 1t and never will have it.
 q set against all the visionary the ories of these men the self conscious ness that we are not the blood rela- tions of the dog that lawns at our feet or the swine that wallows in the mire. tell you plainly that if the muskrat was your father and the opossum your mother and the kangaroo your great aunt and the toads and the snappinR turtles your illustrious predecessors, my father was God. know it. feel it. IL thrills me through and through with such unutterable ecstasy that all the arguments drawn from zoology and morphology and anthro- pology and paleontology shall never shake my belief.
 Evolution makes everything a mys- tery, and the more they write, and the more they talk, and the more they ex- plain. the more the mystery. Evolu- tion is not only infdel and atheistie and absurd. it is also brutal in it's ten deneies. If there is anything that would have tendency to make man bestial it is the thought that he Is de scended from a beast. All the seien- lists who are evolutionists express no expectation of hereafter. They tell us the mind is only another aspect of the body. Thoughts are only molecular formations. When the body dies the entire nature dies. From such bes- tial, stenchfal, damnable doctrine l beg you to turn away"
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