Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 54:215 (Jul 1897)
Article: Evolution Theories And Christian Doctrine
Author: W. Douglas Mackenzie

BSac 54:215 (July 1897) p. 542

Evolution Theories And Christian Doctrine1

Rev. W. Douglas Mackenzie

The word “evolution” has been popular for little more than a generation. In that time it has awakened the enthusiasm or the dread of large numbers of people who knew little or nothing of its previous history or inner meaning. It has been clothed by some with regal authority over all other ideas and theories that ever occupied the attention or guided the research of the human mind; and by them has been treated as the key to all mysteries, the one method of explanation to which all events and facts in the history of the universe must submit and by which their innermost secrets shall be laid bare. By others this word has been feared during these thirty years, aye, and hated too, just in proportion to the mystic delight which it conferred on the former class. Men have feared lest to believe in evolution necessitated a denial of the providence of God or of the reality of his self-revelation; lest some would be forced by holding this theory to give up their faith in Christianity with all the hopes of a future which are identified with that faith.

I.

We must not yield to the idea that evolution is an isolated dream of our generation, that Darwin launched it upon the world on his own authority for the first time. The

BSac 54:215 (July 1897) p. 543

idea is one which had occurred to many of the master minds both in ancient and modern times. Towards the end of last century it began to attract and dominate the thought of men who were working in very different fields of investigation. On the one hand, the great metaphysical schools of Germany were full of the conception of development or evolution: to see all things as related to one another, and to read the inner secret of those relations, was their ambition and effort; to see a concrete universe unfolding logically step by step before his eyes was the lofty ambition of every true follower of Hegel. On the other hand, the students of science were working towards it in their strenuous efforts to understand the relations of the different classes of plants and animals to one another. The great work of classification had proceeded on certain generally accepted principles; but enormous difficulties attended the attempts of the most acute minds to state the principles of classification in a final form. No form could be found that was final. Exceptions to every rule abounded on every hand. Gradually there appeared one investigator after another who dared to suggest that, perhaps, species had not been separately and directly created, but that the later forms of plant and animal life could be traced back through intermediate stages to the earliest. That suggesti...