Page:The church, the schools and evolution.djvu/32

 of spiritual death worked until man was so far down in the filth of his moral putrefaction that the only way God could save the race from extinction was to save the one family that had accepted spiritual life from Him, and blot the rest of the race out in the flood.

Then, starting out again under more favorable circumstances than before, man went from bad to worse until, in one great universal brotherhood, he rose up and defied God at the Tower of Babel, and God had to smash the brotherhood into fragments by the confusion of languages.

Time after time God tried man and found his progress downward always, no matter how favorable the circumstances that surrounded him, until finally he came to earth Himself in the Person of His Son. This brought both the reality and the completeness of man's spiritual death to a demonstration that can never be refuted, for at the cross man displayed, to its eternal uncovering, the awful corruption of that spiritual condition that could not tolerate in its presence incarnate purity and holiness, even though he had to become the murderer of God manifest in the flesh to get away from it.

Even in his worship man's progress is steadily downward. Beginning with God, he progresses downward until he is worshipping birds, then beasts, and then creeping things.

But evolution says that man is coming up from primitive conditions into fuller life. And so the evolutionist cannot tolerate such doctrines as these which the Word of God sets forth. To a consistent evolutionist, man is not spiritually dead, for that would