Page:The church, the schools and evolution.djvu/15

 destroys both the foundations of the Church and the content of the Gospel. Indeed, evolution has been proclaimed to the world as the ally of a philosophy which boasts of its capacity to drive Christianity out of existence.

For the Church, therefore, to fail to fight a theory that strikes at her very vitals would be to become a traitor to the Lord who bought her and sent her into the world to preach His gospel. And so she is compelled to choose between submitting to an unproven and destructive theory, which has never saved any one who has believed it, and preaching the gospel of God's grace, which has infallibly saved every one who has believed it. The true Church is fighting the theory of evolution in order that the message she is commissioned to preach may not be rendered of none effect by a non-belligerent attitude toward it being mistaken for approval of it.

Not only the fact that the theory is entirely unproven, but also and more particularly the nature of its influence on faith in the Bible compels the Church to reckon with it. We will go into these two reasons for antagonizing this speculative guess.

I. The Theory of Evolution is Unproven.

The reason we reflect on this for a few moments lies in what has already been said. If evolution is a fact, iben for the Church to refuse it and fight against it would be to fight against God, which ought to bring her to swift judgment for her mad folly. But if it is onl y an unproven theory, then she is justified if she has good reasons for fighting its propagation. We will therefore note what the scientists themselves have to say regarding the theory.