Page:The church, the schools and evolution.djvu/33

 make progress out of the question. And if progress upward is denied—if the only progress possible to the natural man is progress in corruption, then the whole doctrine of evolution is gone.

This is why it becomes necessary for Canon E. W. Barnes, of Westminster Abbey, when he accepts evolution, to reject the Bible. He says:


 * The inevitable acceptance of evolution means giving up belief in the fall and in all the theology built upon it by the theologians from St. Paul onward. Man was not made perfect and then marred; his evolution is still proceeding.

So here again it is utterly impossible for the consistent evolutionist to accept the Bible doctrine of the fall of man.

3. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of sin.

The Bible makes man's fall deliberate and wilful, and his continued attitude of sinful enmity against God, in spite of all God's offered power to change it into love, one of excuseless lawlessness and rebellion.

This makes man entirely responsible for his sin and naccountable to God for everything sin does in his life. And so the Bible says:


 * Every one shall give account of himself to God.

And those who go out of this life in the unconfessed and therefore unforgiven sin of rejecting God's mercy in Christ shall "go away into everlasting punishment," where there will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth."

But to the evolutionary philosophy, sin cannot be