Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 49:195 (Jul 1892)
Article: Evolution And The Fall Of Man
Author: John Thomas Gulick

BSac 49:195 (July 1892) p. 516

Evolution And The Fall Of Man

John Thomas Gulick

Osaka, Japan

[The writer of this communication has the remarkable merit of being a self-denying missionary most highly esteemed by his associates, and at the same time of having won from the most eminent scientific men in the world the highest encomiums for original work in certain scientific lines. For many years Dr. Gulick was a resident of the Sandwich Islands, during which he conducted a most important series of observations upon the direct effect of the conditions of life in modifying the forms of certain animal species. The results of these observations, and the inferences drawn from them, have been published in elaborate papers, read before the Linnean Society. The respect in which his views are held will be seen in the following note by George F. Romanes (who is generally acknowledged to be Darwin’s natural successor in the exposition of the theory of the origin of species by natural selection) introducing a communication of Dr. Gulick to Nature,1 the leading scientific journal of England: —

“I cannot allow the present communication to appear in these columns without again recording my conviction that the writer is the most profound of living thinkers upon Darwinian topics, and that the generalizations which have been reached by his twenty years of thought are of more importance to the theory of evolution than any that have been published during the post-Darwinian period.”—Eds.]

If it should eventually appear that man ascended from lower animal life (which I suppose is still an open question), how are we to understand the story of the fall?—a fall into sin and death, instead of a gradual rise out of animalism, with many stumblings backward?

I think our chief difficulties on this question arise from two sources: In the first place, we have added a host of our own speculations to the Scripture account of Adam’s disobedience; and, in the second place, we use words without any careful definition, and imagine we have found contradictions in the results of different lines of investigation, when in reality no such contradiction exists.

Let us first consider the latter point. May it not be true that, in one important sense, man has risen above all the other animals and above his original condition as man, and at the same time equally true that, in another important sense, he has fallen below the condition in which he commenced his career as man and below the condition of any animal? It seems to be true that man is the only animal that is capable of apprehending the nature

BSac 49:195 (July 1892) p. 517

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