Chapter I: Preliminary (1)

I. Man a Creation of God and a Child of God.

The fact of man’s creation is declared in Gen. 1:27—“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him”; 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

(_a_) The Scriptures, on the one hand, negate the idea that man is the mere product of unreasoning natural forces. They refer his existence to a cause different from mere nature, namely, the creative act of God.

Compare _Hebrews 12:9_—“_the Father of spirits_”; _Num.
16:22_—“_the God of the spirits of all flesh_”; _27:16_—“_Jehovah,
the God of the spirits of all flesh_”; _Rev. 22:6_—“_the God of
the spirits of the prophets._” Bruce, The Providential Order,
25—“Faith in God may remain intact, though we concede that man in
all his characteristics, physical and psychical, is no exception
to the universal law of growth, no breach in the continuity of the
evolutionary process.” By “_mere_ nature” we mean nature apart
from God. Our previous treatment of the doctrine of creation in
general has shown that the laws of nature are only the regular
methods of God, and that the conception of a nature apart from God
is an irrational one. If the evolution of the lower creation
cannot be explained without taking into account the originating
agency of God, much less can the coming into being of man, the
crown of all created things. Hudson, Divine Pedigree of Man:
“Spirit in man is linked with, because derived from, God, who is
spirit.”

(_b_) But, on the other hand, the Scriptures do not disclose the method of man’s creation. Whether man’s physical system is or is not derived, by natural descent, from the lower animals, the record of creation does not inform us. As the command “Let the earth bring forth living creatures” (Gen. 1:24) does not exclude the idea of mediate creation, through natural generation, so the forming of man “of the dust of the ground” (Gen. 2:7) does not in itself determine whether the creation of man’s body was mediate or immediate.

We may believe that man sustained to the highest preceding brute
the same relation which the multiplied bread and fish sustained to
the five loaves and two fishes (_Mat. 14:19_), or which the wine
sustained to the water which was transformed at Cana (_John
2:7-10_), or which the multiplied oil sustained to the original
oil in the O. T. miracle (_2 K. 4:1-7_). The “_dust_,” before the
breathing of the spirit into it, may have been animated dust.
Natural means may have been used, so far as they would go.
Sterrett, Reason and Authority in Religion, 39—“Our heredity is
from God, even though it be from lower forms of life, and our goal
is also God, even though it be through imperfect manhood.”

Evolution does not make the idea of a Creator superfluous, because
evolution is only the method of God. It is perfectly consistent
with a Scriptural doctrine of Creation that man should emerge at
the proper time, governed by different laws from the brute
creation yet growing out of the brute, just as the foundation of a
house built of stone is perfectly consistent with the wooden
structure built upon it. All depends upon the plan. An atheistic
and undesigning evolution cannot include man without excluding
what Christianity regards as essential to man; see Griffith-Jones,
Ascent through Christ, 43-73. But a theistic evolution can
recognize the whole process of man’s creation as equally the work
of nature and the work of God.

Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 42—“You are not what you have
come from, but what you have become.” Huxley said of the brutes:
“Whether _from_ them or not, man is assuredly not _of_ them.”
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:289—“The religious dignity of man
rests after all upon what he _is_, not upon the mode and manner in
which he has _become_ what he is.” Because he came _from_ a beast,
it does not follow that he _is_ a beast. Nor does the fact that
man’s existence can be traced back to a brute ancestry furnish any
proper reason why the brute should become man. Here is a teleology
which requires a divine Creatorship.

J. M. Bronson: “The theist must accept evolution if he would keep
his argument for the existence of God from the unity of design in
nature. Unless man is an _end_, he is an _anomaly_. The greatest
argument for God is the fact that all animate nature is one vast
and connected unity. Man has developed not _from_ the ape, but
_away from_ the ape. He was never anything but potential man. He
did not, as man, come into being until he became a conscious moral
agent.” This conscious moral nature, which we call personality,
requires a divine Author, because it surpasses all the powers
which can be found in the animal creation. Romanes, Mental
Evolution in Animals, tells us that: 1. Mollusca learn by
experience; 2. Insects and spiders recognize offspring; 3. Fishes
make mental association of objects by their similarity; 4.
Reptiles recognize persons; 5. Hymenoptera, as bees and ants,
communicate ideas; 6. Birds recognize pictorial representations
and understand words; 7. Rodents, as rats and foxes, understand
mechanisms; 8. Monkeys and elephants learn to use tools; 9.
Anthropoid apes and dogs have indefinite morality.

But it is definite and not indefinite morality which differences
man from the brute. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, concedes that
man passed through a period when he resembled the ape more than
any known animal, but at the same time declares that no anthropoid
ape could develop into a man. The brute can be defined in terms of
man, but man cannot be defined in terms of the brute. It is
significant that in insanity the higher endowments of man
disappear in an order precisely the reverse of that in which,
according to the development theory, they have been acquired. The
highest part of man totters first. The last added is first to
suffer. Man moreover can transmit his own acquisitions to his
posterity, as the brute cannot. Weismann, Heredity, 2:69—“The
evolution of music does not depend upon any increase of the
musical faculty or any alteration in the inherent physical nature
of man, but solely upon the power of transmitting the intellectual
achievements of each generation to those which follow. This, more
than anything, is the cause of the superiority of men over
animals—this, and not merely human faculty, although it may be
admitted that this latter is much higher than in animals.” To this
utterance of Weismann we would add that human progress depends
quite as much upon man’s power of reception as upon man’s power of
transmission. Interpretation must equal expression; and, in this
interpretation of the past, man has a guarantee of the future
which the brute does not possess.

(_c_) Psychology, however, comes in to help our interpretation of Scripture. The radical differences between man’s soul and the principle of intelligence in the lower animals, especially man’s possession of self-consciousness, general ideas, the moral sense, and the power of self-determination, show that that which chiefly constitutes him man could not have been derived, by any natural process of development, from the inferior creatures. We are compelled, then, to believe that God’s “breathing into man’s nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7), though it was a mediate creation as presupposing existing material in the shape of animal forms, was yet an immediate creation in the sense that only a divine reinforcement of the process of life turned the animal into man. In other words, man came not _from_ the brute, but _through_ the brute, and the same immanent God who had previously created the brute created also the man.

Tennyson, In Memoriam, XLV—“The baby new to earth and sky, What
time his tender palm is pressed Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that ‘this is I’: But as he grows he gathers
much, And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’ And finds ‘I am not what
I see, And other than the things I touch.’ So rounds he to a
separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro’ the
frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.” Fichte
called that the birthday of his child, when the child awoke to
self-consciousness and said “I.” Memory goes back no further than
language. Knowledge of the ego is objective, before it is
subjective. The child at first speaks of himself in the third
person: “Henry did so and so.” Hence most men do not remember what
happened before their third year, though Samuel Miles Hopkins,
Memoir, 20, remembered what must have happened when he was only 23
months old. Only a conscious person remembers, and he remembers
only as his will exerts itself in attention.

Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 110—“Never
shall I forget the phenomenon in myself, never till now recited,
when I stood by the birth of my own self-consciousness, the place
and time of which are distinct in my memory. On a certain
forenoon, I stood, a very young child, within the house-door, and
was looking out toward the wood-pile, as in an instant the inner
revelation ‘I am I,’ like lightning from heaven, flashed and stood
brightly before me; in that moment I had seen myself as I, for the
first time and forever.”

Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 3—“The beginning of conscious
life is to be placed probably before birth.... Sensations only
faintly and dimly distinguished from the general feeling of
vegetative comfort and discomfort. Still the experiences undergone
before birth perhaps suffice to form the foundation of the
consciousness of an external world.” Hill, Genetic Philosophy,
282, suggests that this early state, in which the child speaks of
self in the third person and is devoid of _self_-consciousness,
corresponds to the brute condition of the race, before it had
reached self-consciousness, attained language, and become man. In
the race, however, there was no heredity to predetermine
self-consciousness—it was a new acquisition, marking transition to
a superior order of being.

Connecting these remarks with our present subject, we assert that
no brute ever yet said, or thought, “I.” With this, then, we may
begin a series of simple distinctions between man and the brute,
so far as the immaterial principle in each is concerned. These are
mainly compiled from writers hereafter mentioned.

1. The brute is conscious, but man is self-conscious. The brute
does not objectify self. “If the pig could once say, ‘I am a pig,’
it would at once and thereby cease to be a pig.” The brute does
not distinguish itself from its sensations. The brute has
perception, but only the man has apperception, _i. e._, perception
accompanied by reference of it to the self to which it belongs.

2. The brute has only percepts; man has also concepts. The brute
knows white things, but not whiteness. It remembers things, but
not thoughts. Man alone has the power of abstraction, _i. e._, the
power of deriving abstract ideas from particular things or
experiences.

3. Hence the brute has no language. “Language is the expression of
general notions by symbols” (Harris). Words are the symbols of
concepts. Where there are no concepts there can be no words. The
parrot utters cries; but “no parrot ever yet spoke a true word.”
Since language is a sign, it presupposes the existence of an
intellect capable of understanding the sign,—in short, language is
the effect of mind, not the cause of mind. See Mivart, in Brit.
Quar., Oct. 1881:154-172. “The ape’s tongue is eloquent in his own
dispraise.” James, Psychology, 2:356—“The notion of a sign as
such, and the general purpose to apply it to everything, is the
distinctive characteristic of man.” Why do not animals speak?
Because they have nothing to say, _i. e._, have no general ideas
which words might express.

4. The brute forms no judgments, _e. g._, that _this_ is like
_that_, accompanied with belief. Hence there is no sense of the
ridiculous, and no laughter. James, Psychology, 2:360—“The brute
does not associate ideas by similarity.... Genius in man is the
possession of this power of association in an extreme degree.”

5. The brute has no reasoning—no sense that _this_ follows from
_that_, accompanied by a feeling that the sequence is necessary.
Association of ideas without judgment is the typical process of
the brute mind, though not that of the mind of man. See Mind,
5:402-409, 575-581. Man’s dream-life is the best analogue to the
mental life of the brute.

6. The brute has no general ideas or intuitions, as of space,
time, substance, cause, right. Hence there is no generalizing, and
no proper experience or progress. There is no capacity for
improvement in animals. The brute cannot be trained, except in
certain inferior matters of association, where independent
judgment is not required. No animal makes tools, uses clothes,
cooks food, breeds other animals for food. No hunter’s dog,
however long its observation of its master, ever learned to put
wood on a fire to keep itself from freezing. Even the rudest stone
implements show a break in continuity and mark the introduction of
man; see J. P. Cook, Credentials of Science, 14. “The dog can see
the printed page as well as a man can, but no dog was ever taught
to read a book. The animal cannot create in its own mind the
thoughts of the writer. The physical in man, on the contrary, is
only an aid to the spiritual. Education is a trained capacity to
discern the inner meaning and deeper relations of things. So the
universe is but a symbol and expression of spirit, a garment in
which an invisible Power has robed his majesty and glory”; see S.
S. Times, April 7, 1900. In man, mind first became supreme.

7. The brute has determination, but not self-determination. There
is no freedom of choice, no conscious forming of a purpose, and no
self-movement toward a predetermined end. The donkey is
determined, but not self-determined; he is the victim of heredity
and environment; he acts only as he is acted upon. Harris, Philos.
Basis of Theism, 537-554—“Man, though implicated in nature through
his bodily organization, is in his personality supernatural; the
brute is wholly submerged in nature.... Man is like a ship in the
sea—in it, yet above it—guiding his course, by observing the
heavens, even against wind and current. A brute has no such power;
it is in nature like a balloon, wholly immersed in air, and driven
about by its currents, with no power of steering.” Calderwood,
Philosophy of Evolution, chapter on Right and Wrong: “The grand
distinction of human life is self-control in the field of
action—control over all the animal impulses, so that these do not
spontaneously and of themselves determine activity” [as they do in
the brute]. By what Mivart calls a process of “inverse
anthropomorphism,” we clothe the brute with the attributes of
freedom; but it does not really possess them. Just as we do not
transfer to God all our human imperfections, so we ought not to
transfer all our human perfections to the brute, “reading our full
selves in life of lower forms.” The brute has no power to choose
between motives; it simply obeys motive. The necessitarian
philosophy, therefore, is a correct and excellent philosophy for
the brute. But man’s power of initiative—in short, man’s free
will—renders it impossible to explain his higher nature as a mere
natural development from the inferior creatures. Even Huxley has
said that, taking mind into the account, there is between man and
the highest beasts an “enormous gulf,” a “divergence immeasurable”
and “practically infinite.”

8. The brute has no conscience and no religious nature. No dog
ever brought back to the butcher the meat it had stolen. “The
aspen trembles without fear, and dogs skulk without guilt.” The
dog mentioned by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper
moved by the wind seemed to testify to “a sense of the
supernatural,” was merely exhibiting the irritation due to the
sense of an unknown future; see James, Will to Believe, 79. The
bearing of flogged curs does not throw light upon the nature of
conscience. If ethics is not hedonism, if moral obligation is not
a refined utilitarianism, if the right is something distinct from
the good we get out of it, then there must be a flaw in the theory
that man’s conscience is simply a development of brute instincts;
and a reinforcement of brute life from the divine source of life
must be postulated in order to account for the appearance of man.
Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165-167—“Is the spirit of man derived
from the soul of the animal? No, for neither one of these has
self-existence. Both are self-differentiations of God. The latter
is simply God’s preparation for the former.” Calderwood, Evolution
and Man’s Place in Nature, 337, speaks of “the impossibility of
tracing the origin of man’s rational life to evolution from a
lower life.... There are no physical forces discoverable in nature
sufficient to account for the appearance of this life.” Shaler,
Interpretation of Nature, 186—“Man’s place has been won by an
entire change in the limitations of his psychic development....
The old bondage of the mind to the body is swept away.... In this
new freedom we find the one dominant characteristic of man, the
feature which entitles us to class him as an entirely new class of
animal.”

John Burroughs, Ways of Nature: “Animal life parallels human life
at many points, but it is in another plane. Something guides the
lower animals, but it is not thought; something restrains them,
but it is not judgment; they are provident without prudence; they
are active without industry; they are skilful without practice;
they are wise without knowledge; they are rational without reason;
they are deceptive without guile.... When they are joyful, they
sing or they play; when they are distressed, they moan or they
cry; ... and yet I do not suppose they experience the emotion of
joy or sorrow, or anger or love, as we do, because these feelings
in them do not involve reflection, memory, and what we call the
higher nature, as with us. Their instinct is intelligence directed
outward, never inward, as in man. They share with man the emotions
of his animal nature, but not of his moral or æsthetic nature;
they know no altruism, no moral code.” Mr. Burroughs maintains
that we have no proof that animals in a state of nature can
reflect, form abstract ideas, associate cause and effect. Animals,
for instance, that store up food for the winter simply follow a
provident instinct but do not take thought for the future, any
more than does the tree that forms new buds for the coming season.
He sums up his position as follows: “To attribute human motives
and faculties to the animals is to caricature them; but to put us
in such relation to them that we feel their kinship, that we see
their lives embosomed in the same iron necessity as our own, that
we see in their minds a humbler manifestation of the same psychic
power and intelligence that culminates and is conscious of itself
in man—that, I take it, is the true humanization.” We assent to
all this except the ascription to human life of the same iron
necessity that rules the animal creation. Man is man, because his
free will transcends the limitations of the brute.

While we grant, then, that man is the last stage in the
development of life and that he has a brute ancestry, we regard
him also as the offspring of God. The same God who was the author
of the brute became in due time the creator of man. Though man
came _through_ the brute, he did not come _from_ the brute, but
from God, the Father of spirits and the author of all life.
Œdipus’ terrific oracle: “Mayst thou ne’er know the truth of what
thou art!” might well be uttered to those who believe only in the
brute origin of man. Pascal says it is dangerous to let man see
too clearly that he is on a level with the animals unless at the
same time we show him his greatness. The doctrine that the brute
is imperfect man is logically connected with the doctrine that man
is a perfect brute. Thomas Carlyle: “If this brute philosophy is
true, then man should go on all fours, and not lay claim to the
dignity of being moral.” G. F. Wright, Ant. and Origin of Human
Race, lecture IX—“One or other of the lower animals may exhibit
all the faculties used by a child of fifteen months. The
difference may seem very little, but what there is is very
important. It is like the difference in direction in the early
stages of two separating curves, which go on forever diverging....
The probability is that both in his bodily and in his mental
development man appeared as a _sport_ in nature, and leaped at
once in some single pair from the plane of irrational being to the
possession of the higher powers that have ever since characterized
him and dominated both his development and his history.”

Scripture seems to teach the doctrine that man’s nature is the
creation of God. _Gen. 2:7_—“_Jehovah God formed man of the dust
of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul_”—appears, says Hovey (State of the
Impen. Dead, 14), “to distinguish the vital informing principle of
human nature from its material part, pronouncing the former to be
more directly from God, and more akin to him, than the latter.” So
in _Zech. 12:1_—“_Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and
layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man
within him_”—the soul is recognized as distinct in nature from the
body, and of a dignity and value far beyond those of any material
organism. _Job 32:8_—“_there is a spirit in man, and the breath of
the Almighty giveth them understanding_”; _Eccl. 12:7_—“_the dust
returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto
God who gave it._” A sober view of the similarities and
differences between man and the lower animals may be found in
Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence. See also Martineau,
Types, 2:65, 140, and Study, 1:180; 2:9, 13, 184, 350; Hopkins,
Outline Study of Man, 8:23; Chadbourne, Instinct, 187-211; Porter,
Hum. Intellect, 384, 386, 397; Bascom, Science of Mind, 295-305;
Mansel, Metaphysics, 49, 50; Princeton Rev., Jan. 1881:104-128;
Henslow, in Nature, May 1, 1879:21, 22; Ferrier, Remains, 2:39;
Argyll, Unity of Nature, 117-119; Bib. Sac., 29:275-282; Max
Müller, Lectures on Philos. of Language, no. 1, 2, 3; F. W.
Robertson, Lectures on Genesis, 21; Le Conte, in Princeton Rev.,
May, 1884:238-261; Lindsay, Mind in Lower Animals; Romanes, Mental
Evolution in Animals; Fiske, The Destiny of Man.

(_d_) Comparative physiology, moreover, has, up to the present time, done nothing to forbid the extension of this doctrine to man’s body. No single instance has yet been adduced of the transformation of one animal species into another, either by natural or artificial selection; much less has it been demonstrated that the body of the brute has ever been developed into that of man. All evolution implies progress and reinforcement of life, and is unintelligible except as the immanent God gives new impulses to the process. Apart from the direct agency of God, the view that man’s physical system is descended by natural generation from some ancestral simian form can be regarded only as an irrational hypothesis. Since the soul, then, is an immediate creation of God, and the forming of man’s body is mentioned by the Scripture writer in direct connection with this creation of the spirit, man’s body was in this sense an immediate creation also.

For the theory of natural selection, see Darwin, Origin of
Species, 398-424, and Descent of Man, 2:368-387; Huxley, Critiques
and Addresses, 241-269, Man’s Place in Nature, 71-138, Lay
Sermons, 323, and art.: Biology, in Encyc. Britannica, 9th ed.;
Romanes, Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution. The theory
holds that, in the struggle for existence, the varieties best
adapted to their surroundings succeed in maintaining and
reproducing themselves, while the rest die out. Thus, by gradual
change and improvement of lower into higher forms of life, man has
been evolved. We grant that Darwin has disclosed one of the
important features of God’s method. We concede the partial truth
of his theory. We find it supported by the vertebrate structure
and nervous organization which man has in common with the lower
animals; by the facts of embryonic development; of rudimentary
organs; of common diseases and remedies; and of reversion to
former types. But we refuse to regard natural selection as a
complete explanation of the history of life, and that for the
following reasons:

1. It gives no account of the origin of substance, nor of the
origin of variations. Darwinism simply says that “round stones
will roll down hill further than flat ones” (Gray, Natural Science
and Religion). It accounts for the selection, not for the
creation, of forms. “Natural selection originates nothing. It is a
destructive, not a creative, principle. If we must idealize it as
a positive force, we must think of it, not as the preserver of the
fittest, but as the destroyer, that follows ever in the wake of
creation and devours the failures; the scavenger of creation, that
takes out of the way forms which are not fit to live and reproduce
themselves” (Johnson, on Theistic Evolution, in Andover Review,
April, 1884:363-381). Natural selection is only unintelligent
repression. Darwin’s Origin of Species is in fact “not the
Genesis, but the Exodus, of living forms.” Schurman: “The
_survival_ of the fittest does nothing to explain the _arrival_ of
the fittest”; see also DeVries, Species and Varieties, _ad finem_.
Darwin himself acknowledged that “Our ignorance of the laws of
variation is profound.... The cause of each slight variation and
of each monstrosity lies much more in the nature or constitution
of the organism than in the nature of the surrounding conditions”
(quoted by Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 280-301). Weismann has
therefore modified the Darwinian theory by asserting that there
would be no development unless there were a spontaneous, innate
tendency to variation. In this innate tendency we see, not mere
nature, but the work of an originating and superintending God. E.
M. Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:873-881—“Spirit was the
moulding power, from the beginning, of those lower forms which
would ultimately become man. Instead of the physical derivation of
the soul, we propose the spiritual derivation of the body.”

2. Some of the most important forms appear suddenly in the
geological record, without connecting links to unite them with the
past. The first fishes are the Ganoid, large in size and advanced
in type. There are no intermediate gradations between the ape and
man. Huxley, in Man’s Place in Nature, 94, tells us that the
lowest gorilla has a skull capacity of 24 cubic inches, whereas
the highest gorilla has 34-½. Over against this, the lowest man
has a skull capacity of 62; though men with less than 65 are
invariably idiotic; the highest man has 114. Professor Burt G.
Wilder of Cornell University: “The largest ape-brain is only half
as large as the smallest normal human.” Wallace, Darwinism,
458—“The average human brain weighs 48 or 49 ounces; the average
ape’s brain is only 18 ounces.” The brain of Daniel Webster
weighed 53 ounces; but Dr. Bastian tells of an imbecile whose
intellectual deficiency was congenital, yet whose brain weighed 55
ounces. Large heads do not always indicate great intellect.
Professor Virchow points out that the Greeks, one of the most
intellectual of nations, are also one of the smallest-headed of
all. Bain: “While the size of the brain increases in arithmetical
proportion, intellectual range increases in geometrical
proportion.”

Respecting the Enghis and Neanderthal crania, Huxley says: “The
fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to
take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form by the
modification of which he has probably become what he is.... In
vain have the links which should bind man to the monkey been
sought: not a single one is there to show. The so-called
_Protanthropos_ who should exhibit this link has not been
found.... None have been found that stood nearer the monkey than
the men of to-day.” Huxley argues that the difference between man
and the gorilla is smaller than that between the gorilla and some
apes; if the gorilla and the apes constitute one family and have a
common origin, may not man and the gorilla have a common ancestry
also? We reply that the space between the lowest ape and the
highest gorilla is filled in with numberless intermediate
gradations. The space between the lowest man and the highest man
is also filled in with many types that shade off one into the
other. But the space between the highest gorilla and the lowest
man is absolutely vacant; there are no intermediate types; no
connecting links between the ape and man have yet been found.

Professor Virchow has also very recently expressed his belief that
no relics of any predecessor of man have yet been discovered. He
said: “In my judgment, no skull hitherto discovered can be
regarded as that of a predecessor of man. In the course of the
last fifteen years we have had opportunities of examining skulls
of all the various races of mankind—even of the most savage
tribes; and among them all no group has been observed differing in
its essential characters from the general human type.... Out of
all the skulls found in the lake-dwellings there is not one that
lies outside the boundaries of our present population.” Dr. Eugene
Dubois has discovered in the Post-pliocene deposits of the island
of Java the remains of a preeminently hominine anthropoid which he
calls _Pithecanthropus erectus_. Its cranial capacity approaches
the physiological minimum in man, and is double that of the
gorilla. The thigh bone is in form and dimensions the absolute
analogue of that of man, and gives evidence of having supported a
habitually erect body. Dr. Dubois unhesitatingly places this
extinct Javan ape as the intermediate form between man and the
true anthropoid apes. Haeckel (in The Nation, Sept. 15, 1898) and
Keane (in Man Past and Present, 3), regard the _Pithecanthropus_
as a “missing link.” But “Nature” regards it as the remains of a
human microcephalous idiot. In addition to all this, it deserves
to be noticed that man does not degenerate as we travel back in
time. “The Enghis skull, the contemporary of the mammoth and the
cave-bear, is as large as the average of to-day, and might have
belonged to a philosopher.” The monkey nearest to man in physical
form is no more intelligent than the elephant or the bee.

3. There are certain facts which mere heredity cannot explain,
such for example as the origin of the working-bee from the queen
and the drone, neither of which produces honey. The working-bee,
moreover, does not transmit the honey-making instinct to its
posterity; for it is sterile and childless. If man had descended
from the conscienceless brute, we should expect him, when
degraded, to revert to his primitive type. On the contrary, he
does not revert to the brute, but dies out instead. The theory can
give no explanation of beauty in the lowest forms of life, such as
molluscs and diatoms. Darwin grants that this beauty must be of
use to its possessor, in order to be consistent with its
origination through natural selection. But no such use has yet
been shown; for the creatures which possess the beauty often live
in the dark, or have no eyes to see. So, too, the large brain of
the savage is beyond his needs, and is inconsistent with the
principle of natural selection which teaches that no organ can
permanently attain a size unrequired by its needs and its
environment. See Wallace, Natural Selection, 338-360. G. F.
Wright, Man and the Glacial Epoch, 242-301—“That man’s bodily
organization is in some way a development from some extinct member
of the animal kingdom allied to the anthropoid apes is scarcely
any longer susceptible of doubt.... But he is certainly not
descended from any _existing_ species of anthropoid apes.... When
once _mind_ became supreme, the bodily adjustment must have been
rapid, if indeed it is not necessary to suppose that the bodily
preparation for the highest mental faculties was instantaneous, or
by what is called in nature a _sport_.” With this statement of Dr.
Wright we substantially agree, and therefore differ from Shedd
when he says that there is just as much reason for supposing that
monkeys are degenerate men, as that men are improved monkeys.
Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 1:1:249, seems to have hinted the
view of Dr. Shedd: “The strain of man’s bred out into baboon and
monkey.” Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was related to
an ape on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side. Huxley replied
that he should prefer such a relationship to having for an
ancestor a man who used his position as a minister of religion to
ridicule truth which he did not comprehend. “Mamma, am I descended
from a monkey?” “I do not know, William, I never met any of your
father’s people.”

4. No species is yet known to have been produced either by
artificial or by natural selection. Huxley, Lay Sermons, 323—“It
is not absolutely proven that a group of animals having all the
characters exhibited by species in nature has ever been originated
by selection, whether artificial or natural”; Man’s Place in
Nature, 107—“Our acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis must be
provisional, so long as one link in the chain of evidence is
wanting; and so long as all the animals and plants certainly
produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fertile
with one another, that link will be wanting.” Huxley has more
recently declared that the missing proof has been found in the
descent of the modern horse with one toe, from Hipparion with two
toes, Anchitherium with three, and Orohippus with four. Even if
this were demonstrated, we should still maintain that the only
proper analogue was to be found in that artificial selection by
which man produces new varieties, and that natural selection can
bring about no useful results and show no progress, unless it be
the method and revelation of a wise and designing mind. In other
words, selection implies intelligence and will, and therefore
cannot be exclusively natural. Mivart, Man and Apes, 192—“If it is
inconceivable and impossible for man’s body to be developed or to
exist without his informing soul, we conclude that, as no natural
process accounts for the different kind of soul—one capable of
articulately expressing general conceptions,—so no merely natural
process can account for the origin of the body informed by it—a
body to which such an intellectual faculty was so essentially and
intimately related.” Thus Mivart, who once considered that
evolution could account for man’s body, now holds instead that it
can account neither for man’s body nor for his soul, and calls
natural selection “a puerile hypothesis” (Lessons from Nature,
300; Essays and Criticisms, 2:289-314).

(_e_) While we concede, then, that man has a brute ancestry, we make two claims by way of qualification and explanation: first, that the laws of organic development which have been followed in man’s origin are only the methods of God and proofs of his creatorship; secondly, that man, when he appears upon the scene, is no longer brute, but a self-conscious and self-determining being, made in the image of his Creator and capable of free moral decision between good and evil.

Both man’s original creation and his new creation in regeneration
are creations from within, rather than from without. In both
cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a
product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same
divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact
that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship
of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water
had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the
brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John
H. Strong: “Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in
the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in
the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed
himself. God’s work was never really or fully done; man was a
compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements
could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not
really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The
evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot
sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no
regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that,
though man came _through_ the brute, he did not come _from_ the
brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose
image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God
succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long
creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed
itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.” See also A.
H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.

An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the
savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a
sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny
God’s authorship. He closes his first great book with the
declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally
breathed “by the Creator” into the first forms of organic being.
And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles
Kingsley’s finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent
with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples
like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis
of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but
we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and
must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act,
introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by
other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the
incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism,
33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin
from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing
argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph
over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way
that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of
that await his tireless feet.” All this is true if we regard human
nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as
the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E.
Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in
heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in
environment is his presence in human life at every point.”

The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the
verse: “There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries
passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb
gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.” That this
conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is
clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of
the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man’s body
was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three
breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance
of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit.
These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human
life. He thinks natural selection may account for man’s place _in_
nature, but not for man’s place _above_ nature, as a spiritual
being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr.
Darwin’s conclusion as to the essential identity of man’s bodily
structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from
some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.” But
the conclusion that man’s higher faculties have also been derived
from the lower animals “appears to me not to be supported by
adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many
well-ascertained facts” (461).... The mathematical, the artistic
and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of
advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and
could not have been developed by natural selection. The
introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of
higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to
which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man’s
intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed
from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this
origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.

Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of
the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of
the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid
apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases
taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the
following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized
man, 32.” _Ibid._, 360—“The inference I would draw from this class
of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the
development of man in a definite direction and for a special
purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and
vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher
intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as
the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in
organic development,—else the laws which govern the material
universe are insufficient for the production of man.” Sir Wm.
Thompson: “That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is
the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends
me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.” Hartmann, in his
Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of “the possibility
of discovering the true link between the world of man and
mammals,” declares that “that purely hypothetical being, the
common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,” and that
“man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which
have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species
of apes now extant.” See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts,
1876:251, and Geology, 603, 604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk.
3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and
Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat.
and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History
of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson,
Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man,
38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of
Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine,
Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43;
Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov.
1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,
1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.

(_f_) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself. Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood, therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God’s special Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God’s creations take place in and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to him by faith. Man’s natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and qualifies the doctrine of Sin.

Texts referring to God’s natural and common Fatherhood are: _Mal.
2:10_—“_Have we not all one father_ [Abraham]? _hath not one God
created us?_” _Luke 3:38_—“_Adam, the son of God_”; _15:11-32_—the
parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even
before the prodigal returns; _John 3:16_—“_God so loved the world,
that he gave his only begotten Son_”; _John 15:6_—“_If a man abide
not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they
gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are
burned_”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with
Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually
united to him can perish everlastingly. _Acts 17:28_—“_For we are
also his offspring_”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen
audience; _Col. 1:16, 17_—“_in him were all things created ... and
in him all things consist_”; _Heb. 12:9_—“_the Father of
spirits._” Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1.
Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness
in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all
these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love
is both preserving and atoning. God’s natural fatherhood is
mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom
all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of
God, as we were _created_ in Christ; we are spiritually sons of
God, as we have been _created anew_ in Christ Jesus. G. W.
Northrop: “God never _becomes_ Father to any men or class of men;
he only becomes a _reconciled_ and _complacent_ Father to those
who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal
sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.” Chapman,
Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of
all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God
always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but
the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”

Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are: _John
1:12, 13_—“_as many as received him, to them gave he the right to
become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who
were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the
will of man, but of God_”; _Rom. 8:14_—“_for as many as are led by
the Spirit of God, these are sons of God_”; _15_—“_ye received the
spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father_”; _2 Cor.
6:17_—“_Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the
Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will
be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters,
saith the Lord Almighty_”; _Eph. 1:5, 6_—“_having foreordained us
unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself_”; _3:14,
15_—“_the Father, from whom every family_ [marg. “fatherhood”] _in
heaven and on earth is named_” (= every race among angels or
men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159); _Gal 3:26_—“_for ye are all sons
of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus_”; _4:6_—“_And because ye
are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
crying, Abba, Father_”; _1 John 3:1, 2_—“_Behold what manner of
love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called
children of God; __ and such we are.... Beloved, now are we
children of God._” The sonship of the race is only rudimentary.
The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ.
_Gal. 4:1-7_ intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which
the child “_differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord
of all_,” and needs still to “_receive the adoption of sons_.”
Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another
to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes
fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in
themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or
character of their children. No father can normally discharge his
fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even
the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.”
Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that
all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not
spiritually sons of God; they are only “_servants_” who “_abide
not in the house forever_” (_John 8:35_). God is their Father, but
they have yet to “_become_” his children (_Mat. 5:45_).

The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that
God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is
physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and
spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his
Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of
their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the
higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a
spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by
those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example,
C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who
maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and
who quotes, in support of this view, _John 8:41-44_—“_If God were
your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the
devil_” = the Fatherhood of God is not universal; _Mat. 5:44,
45_—“_Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of
your Father who is in heaven_”; _John 1:12_—“_as many as received
him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to
them that believe on his name._” Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit,
103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his
sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which
the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience
of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests
either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the
universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the
universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case
the teaching belongs to ‘_another gospel_’ (_Gal. 1:7_), the
recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an
‘_anathema_’ (_Gal 1:8._)”

But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite
party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does
not _become_ the Father, but _is_ the heavenly Father, even of
those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of
the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made
the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood
of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are
true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the
world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and
to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood
apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of
love and holiness.” A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There
is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once
began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If
there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But
Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent
and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God,
and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the
products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by
nature partakers of the life of God. They are called ‘_children of
wrath_’ (_Eph. 2:3_), or ‘_of perdition_’ (_John 17:12_), only to
indicate that their proper relations and duties have been
violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of
love, and that is found in man’s essential divinity.” We object to
this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what
can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in
Christ (_Col. 1:16_) and was a son of God by virtue of his union
with Christ (_Luke 3:38_; _John 15:6_). But since man has sinned
and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In
a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of
Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (_Eph.
2:10_—“_created in Christ Jesus for good works_”; _2 Pet
1:4_—“_his precious and exceeding great promises; that through
these ye may become partakers of the divine nature_”).