WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT?

There is testimony in dust. (Mark 6:11).

In the charnel heaps of the past, God has written for the present.

"History repeats itself." Its tragic scenes must be reenacted because man has not learned WHY. It would be a wise nation indeed, that was fully warned by the wreckage of others.

Men who reject those parts of the Bible that proclaim the doomsdays of an offended God, have yet to explain the same kind of record, written larger in the tumbled walls of a thousand buried cities. If the Bible does not fit your notion of God, where was your God when great nations collapsed?

Where was the modernist’s God when, on proud Babylon’s palace wall, a ghostly hand wrote for an insulting king and his flunkies, the doom of a kingdom? If you doubt the reality of that hand, the ruins spell out the same message.

Nineteen hundred years ago the hated Nazarene wrote la the Jerusalem dust a writing soon shuffled out by the feel of the heedless throng. Perhaps it was the same decree that was written in the dust with falling lean when He gave the city over to its fate. Perhaps He wrote in the dust what was, In a few years, written large enough for the world to read by the Roman legions.

When He went the way to Calvary, he turned once, long enough to pronounce the doom of a nation. Silent before the high priest, (Matt. 26:63) silent before Herod (Luke 23:9), silent before Pilate (Matt. 21:12, 14). Jesus—the sport of the rabble—turned all blood-wet and uttered words that later found echo in the rhythm of marching armies. If there are some who doubt the Bible record, nineteen centuries have not effaced the conditions He foretold.

In this book I would not mock at scholarship. We know too little.

We are dreadfully informed in ways that cannot save us and woefully ignorant of danger. There never was a time when the world had so many encyclopedias in book covers and under hats, yet with all our doctors (D.D. L.L.D., Ph.D.) the world is alarmingly sick. Our schools would dwarf the ancient temple; so would our prisons. We are so bulging with information that it is now possible for one man above the clouds, to destroy a city in 30 minutes.

Jerusalem was headquarters for knowing ones who were blind on the God side (Luke 19: 42, 44). Deny the words of Jesus, but you cannot deny the fulfillment. Sometimes the buzzards are tutors, and the word has not yet graduated from the school of ruins.

Am I pessimistic?

Not unless my mind is wandering.

I know that men have prepared many resignations for Jehovah and have thrust oft repealed farewells upon Him, but I have the comforting conviction that He his not gone anywhere. The God who put a Paradise at both ends of the Bible will make good every prophecy that lies between.

ALIBI, LULLABY, BY-BY

(Authorities differ in spelling by-by; we use the shorter form.)

By B. K Shadduck Ph.D.

Alibi?

Let the witty colored man explain it,

"Alibi is when the lawyer prove you is where you ain’t so the jury specify you ain’t where you is when you was. After the co’t house adjourn, the lawyer man say. ‘Client. you is cleared; you is scientifically not guilty. but promise me you is more cautious enough in the future’."

This is the picture in miniature of man’s age-long eagerness to accept any two-faced theory that winks one way at sin and another way at reform.

I have known a man to strut his pedigree and expect the homage of common people as a tribute properly due to one having his proud family name. I have known the same man to excuse his sins and promise himself easy mercy after death, on the plea that God cannot expect chastity from sensual humans so recently descended from the ancestors of apes. The sin-lover finds it very consoling to meditate on how well he is doing considering the fact that his ancestry was 99.9% brute, but you start a fight if you suggest a lowly pedigree when he parades his social prominence.

This brute beginning is very convenient as an alibi for sin and a starting point from which to measure a very flattering progress, but keep it far enough in the past not to monkey-fy our caste. I have seen somewhere the intellectual offering of some theorist that some races evolved from a lower type of animal, or at least more recently. It will help to escape the evidence of human depravity, if they will fix up a sliding scale of remoteness, Some wealthy people who seek a basis for nobility would pay well to be rated among those who began to be cannibals 2,000,000 years before the riff-raff.

You may have observed that a man on trial fur murder, having no other defense, will hire scientists to swear that he was mentally unbalanced and that insanity runs in the family, but do not twit him of it after he is acquitted. For the same reason men with a conviction for sin fend relief in believing the God who stewed His material in a billion years of brutality before He fashioned it into a man, cannot be much displeased when He finds the product soggy with broth. If bestiality runs in the fish-reptile-man family by the will of God, how can such a God suddenly change His mind and expect heaven fruit on a limb fed with monkey sap!

I know, of course, that men seldom give to themselves a reason for their mental attitudes and few evolutionists know why they are so eager to prove their theory, but down in the sub-cellar of man’s moral consciousness there lurks a willingness to discredit anything that discredits him. Here is a sample of such a hankering for monkey kinship that amounts almost to a passion.

On the front page of the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph dated Sept. 30, 1926, there is a column written by one of our modern oracles who is equipped with such a diversified line of wares that he is a kind of intellectual Sears and Roebuck. He says, "Prof. Heberlein, excavating in Java, has discovered a complete skull of the prehistoric ape-like creature known as the Pithecanthropus Erectus, the ‘missing link’ between apes and man." Let the reader consider well the works "known as." They have a name for it before they find it. After making images and pictures of a theoretical creature and calling it "science," they comb the earth to find a bone that can be guessed into the supposition. Continuing, he says. "It is to be hoped that Professor Heberlein will hurry home with his find. If the evidence that man and the ape had the same great, great grandparents is now beyond dispute, bonfires should be built throughout the civilized world.’’

What is the hurry?

Why the hilarity? What shall we gain? From whence comes this craving to rob the ape of his exclusiveness and break into his pedigree? I think I know.

Do not deceive yourself by supposing that it is the ape’s pedigree that they are so eager to share; it is the ape’s escape from judgment that they covet. It is not so much where man came from as it is where he is going, that disturbs sinners. The front end of the Bible is not so offensive to the "modernist" as the last end. If God did not create man from the dust. He will not raise him from the dust (Dan. 12:21.

Comparatively few men read with comfort of a "White throne" and opening books on the reckoning day of God, and it will comfort many, if the first three chapters of the Book can be so emptied of meaning that the last three will upset with lopsidedness.

This does not apply to all evolutionists. Many have never thought it out, many accept the theory because it is reckoned to be a mark of intellectuality and many students have accepted evolution because it has been dinned into them at taxpayers’ expense and claims "the weight of scholarship." "The weight of scholarship" is always on the side of the ones who hold the scales, and agnostics and atheists are beginning to hold some of the scales.

Certainly I do not mean to say that the avowed purpose of all who deny Bible statements, is to excuse human depravity or assure themselves against a "day of wrath," but I do say that this is the logical outcome of the movement and the results are already on display. If I were a lunatic and could have five minutes of sanity, it would take only four to reason it out that to discredit the Bible, must loosen the moral restraints of the nation. Thinking people will not long be satisfied with a doubtful Bible nor with a half-breed religion that is a cross between a happen-so menagerie and a hope-so heaven. If man is better now than Adam, it needs no bloody cross to restore him to a God-likeness from which he never fell. If man fell UP and is yet falling UP, there is nothing for God to do but keep out of the way, and that is exactly what ultra "modernists" want him to do.

If this statement seems too strong, I offer a sample of such conceit I have on my table as I write, a paper called American Farming, dated February, 1926. and claiming a circulation of 700,000. Among the advertisements, I notice pictures of 19 pistols and 2 stills, also an offer to free "liberal" literature and some other literature that is "Daringly Different." On page 26, there is a signed article by a pastor at Cowden, Ill. I do not give his name; he may have a family. I quote just two sentences. "Some folks are standing today where God was a century ago wondering why He is not with them. He has moved on, expecting us to follow." There is a note of self-abasement in this, for he concedes the point that as late as February, 1926. God was somewhere in front.

HEAVEN A DREAM

Here is evidence that 100% "modernists" are consistent enough to deny the Garden of God at both ends of the Bible. This picture of Darwin appeared in a periodical that calls itself The Christian Century (I do not know what God calls it). The publication refused to advertise the JockoHomo series of books. but it did advertise this avowedly anti-Christian book. You will note that the advertisement says of "Darwin" by Gamaliel Bradford. "HE MADE HELL A LAUGHING STOCK AND HEAVEN A DREAM." More than this, "The life story of a gentle, tolerant and lovable man who overturned the world of though, shifted the whole structure of science and upheaved the very foundations of religion and morality."

Is that what evolution did?

Yes. It does all that for people who accept it and follow it to a logical conclusion, but why The Christian Century advertises that fact and calls itself "Christian" though it refuses to advertise books that defend the Bible, is beyond my comprehension, unless it is to fulfill the words of Jesus, "Many shall come in my name."

If Mr. Darwin’s theories could be demonstrated as fact and we could be sure that God could not or did not create one man and one woman, then it were better for humanity never to find it out. If we could know that life passed through trillions of loathsome bodies to came to us and if our brute ancestors buried side by side would make a field of bones reaching to the moon and the miseries they suffered would overwhelm the most literal hell, what good could come of teaching it to little children? If it were true and some man discovered our shame that God had kept covered for 6,000 years, he would be justified in saying. "I thought I bore the image of God, marred with sin, but I am nothing but the warmed over leavings of a billion generations of slimy crawling, creeping, climbing beasts, and if God will keep it from my children, I will."

Yet these ape-kin zealots will "compass land and sea" to convince the youth of the world that the apes are several hundred million years nearer to man in the matter of creation than is God. They say with a fine show of heroism that would almost convince one that they believe it, that science will be strangled if they are not permitted to teach little children that they are the spawn of reptiles much refined by many hatchings. They quote Jesus as though they were in league with Him. "The truth shall make you free." Free from what? Will this theory of evolution free the sinner from his sins? One is left to wonder how much greater the great saints and statesmen and reformers would have been if they could have been free from the notion of God-kinship. How much greater would the old prophets have been if they could have known about their "gill-slits?"

THE INDEPENDENT THINKER

Liberty is a word to conjure by. It is the rallying cry of heroes and demagogues. From truant school boy to anarchist, evil as well as good, clamor for freedom. Used as a battle cry against man’s real foes, it may move all heaven to "amens," but as a declaration of independence from Divine restraint and warning, it amounts to nothing more than the bombast of a slave.

THE UNFAIRNESS OF IT

Evolutionists plead for liberty to think.

Who has ever tried to cramp their thinking?

So far as I know, all the members of the Eden caste agree that if anyone wishes to put reptiles In his pedigree, he ought to be humored here or hereafter.

If I have ever denied their right to animal kinship, I apologize.

When I published "Puddle to Paradise." I asked the artist to make a composite picture of the ancestors they claim, and my information is that they do not like it. They argue for a frog-pond origin but resent any acceptance of the theory as applying to them.

Is freedom to be only for evolutionists? Will they accord us liberty to believe that we track back to God without going through a reptile wallow? Is there a greater crime against liberty than to compel Bible-believing parents to send their children to school and pay taxes to have their faith destroyed? Why are they not content to choose their own limb in the monkey tree and let us roost on another bush? Because evolution would crawl into its hole and die if it were generally accepted that ONLY its devotees are the upper end of a fish-reptile-marsupial-whatnot succession. They are happy in the contemplation of a kinship of belly-crawlers, only if they can daub us with the same smear.

I hope never to say as mean things about them as they have said about their ancestors.

A CHALLENGE

If liberty will die and science be strangled unless little children are taught that their pedigree came over from mudpuppy to an opossum-like animal in a bug-eating lizard (or some other combination), why not tell the whole brutal truth? Why keep the abysmal horrors of the theory hidden until the pupil has lost the direction of God? If present conditions on earth are the result of evolution instead of the corruption described in Genesis 6:12. then here is an unveiled lesson for beginners.

DO MEN GATHER GRAPES FROM THORNS?

The blood it has shed would make a river brimming the gorge of Niagara.

If every life it has taken could have a grain of sand dropped on the earth as a tombstone sent from the stars, we should be buried under a desert of sand 100 miles deep.

If every pain and pang it has caused could be wept over, it would take the hurricanes of the ages for sobs and drain the oceans for tears.

In describing the early home, H. C. Wells (evolutionist) says the children knocked the old mean in the head when they were old enough.

And why not?

Isn’t that exactly how undiluted evolution would behave?

Arthur Brisbane says. "Less than 50,000 years ago all human beings were cannibals except the lowest, most miserable specimens, too dull to kill anybody." Then we must have descended from the dull ones. Well, if we are to have evolution taught, let us have the whole brutal truth.

The logically alert evolutionists have found no place in the system for a compassionate God and many of them find no need for any kind of God if they can only have an amoeba to start with. The Humane Society would jail any man who entertained himself with the cruelties of evolution.

If God has been pleased with the way the world has been going, the devil might just as well resign. So far was Jesus from blaming either God or evolution for world conditions, that he called the evil one "the prince of this world," even as Paul called him, "the god of this world."

Evolution is presented to beginners as though it were some benevolent kind of process; as though an oyster is millions of years better off than an amoeba and a rabbit is much happier than a toad. They do not stress the point that a louse has an easier life than an elephant and that a stinging fly has the advantage of a horse. It seems to be the policy of teachers to omit the odious details until the pupils are inoculated. There are some who credit the sorry mess to God and think they pay Him a compliment.

While the captains of this drive are willing to weaken the authority of the Bible, most of them are willing to crossbreed evolution with any kind of religion and raise ethical maxims to save civilization. When "flaming youth" is loosed from the restraint of a wholesome fear of God, he is not likely to bow his head to a halter of ideals. Ideals are not in great demand. You can go where young men congregate and sell a basket of bull pups before you can give away one high ideal. Keen minded youth will not be slow to discover that evolution was never based upon morals, but worked best when its favorites obeyed the driving impulses of the flesh.

When youth loses faith in the religion of the fathers. what is there to hold them to the moral standards of the fathers?

If evolution worked because lives as numberless as star dust were sacrificed, and the winners were the ones that were brutishly alert, on what ground may an evolutionist rebuke brute standards in man?

Theistic evolution is an expression that, in its working clothes, means a divinely supervised breeding of reptiles and their ancestors and progeny, to arrive at man. Great evolutionists smile at the conceit but do not resent any faith in any God, if He will keep up. They are really generous to any church that is a camp-following church and will tag along in the wake of whatever passes for science. They even find the Bible convenient for mottoes and sentiments and enough moral doctrines to flavor and filter evolutionism so that its brute struggle will not remind people of a cat fight. Really, "modernism" has no quarrel with any church that will croon lullabies to a sin-loving world instead of warning men "to flee from the wrath to come."

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In their eagerness to discredit the Bible, evolutionists put a heavy strain on credulity. In the Scientific American for April. 1927, an article supports the theory that sometime after our ancestors passed the reptile age, they lived on insects. The writer speaks, of hitherto unknown skulls found in the Gobi Desert and with such fossils to guide him, proceeds to tell their fortune. so to speak.

They lived on insects.

They lived 100,000,000 years ago.

They layed eggs that were my ancestors or nearly so. When the eggs hatched, the young ones lived on milk.

The writer knows what they evolved from and what they evolved into.

God had made some marvelous creatures, and I do not deny that some have been of a Leghorn—Jersey type—a potential custard factory, but what bothers me is that all that information could come from two skulls, one of them dead for a hundred thousand centuries. I am increasingly amazed at what people doubt in the Bible and what they believe because it is labeled "science."

OUR INHERITANCE

I have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents and so on back until the ratio is reverse because of the marriage of relatives. I came into the world with the warp and bias and bent that was my heritage from thousands of ancestors in the 60 centuries of the life stream that flowed from Adam to me. I am a composite in varying proportions of all that these added to or subtracted from the stream that came to me. When I drew the first breath, what there was of me took up the burden of what there was in me—my legacy of human nature—planted with germs of toil and tears, sickness and sin. The life that throbbed in me though wrapped with a new individuality, was as old as my first ancestor and began then. Over my cradle there brooded the past, like a ghost from the great abyss of human failure and demanded reincarnation in me, but with the past, there hovered an angel waiting to whisper that within me was the marred image of the first Father—God—who called me back from a run-away world that He might refashion that image and make me His heir.

Glory hallelujah!

Hopeful kinsfolk magnified the nobility of the princely men and queenly women back of me and held them up as ideals—and I think God for traditions that beckon us to the heights—but better than sifted biographies that magnify the good and minimize the bad, is the faith that though my life came by way of cabin or cave, it began in the Garden of God.

Because I began in the Paradise described in Genesis, I am called to the Paradise revealed in Revelation. From Eden lost to Eden restored, this hope that spans the ruins of the ages is my rainbow of promise set against the background of God’s grief and man’s tears—the triumphal arch to welcome fallen men back to God.

BIRTHRIGHT OR POTTAGE

They would rob me of my birthright to a part in Adam who was the Son of God (Luke 3:58), and make me the heir of a succession of brutes that sinks lower and lower as it fades into the past. until it is lost somewhere in steaming swamps beyond my reptile sires.

God forbid!

Must I believe that millions of generations were necessary to bring life from amoeba to me and seek inspiration in the theory that the part of me that is life, lived in all those ancestors, and shudder at the mountain of bugs and flies I have eaten and the terrors I knew when I lived in the persons of my ancestors, among the snakes and lizards and sharks of a pitiless past?

Yet, they say science will be strangled if they are not permitted to thrust this nightmare upon little children who might otherwise believe that their ancestry went back to God without reptile detour.

If there as no other hell, God could make one by adopting such a system and running it backwards through all the creeping crawling slippery mess till all were deflated, evaporated and united in one amoeba washed up against a smoking shore. If that were hell, evolutionists would cry for mercy. If it was taught that only one race was evolved from reptiles, it would start a war.

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TWO METHODS—THIN AND THINNER

There are two guesses (with variations) as to how man came to the top of the evolutionary stew-pot. ready to be skimmed off for heaven, or any other place that evolutionists have not abolished. Neither guess is reasonable: one denies the other; both are "scientific." To make a man out of an ape in one generation would be a miracle, and no undiluted miracle can be tolerated by an undiluted evolutionist. Therefore, one theory divides its miracle into installments so small that they only tax the imagination; the other theory thins out the impossible so that it can percolate through geological ages.

What we may call the installment plan, depended upon a succession of freaks, each attended by overt kinds of persistent luck. It makes man the freak of a freak of a freak of the apes, or whatever the brute was that was farthest from reptiles and nearest man.

Note: Apparently there is something about apes and monkeys that makes them not exactly acceptable to fastidious evolutionists as ancestors. Many teachers chafe at the suggestion of this relationship and rebuke us for mistaking their cousins for their grandsires. Now it would be very easy to quote from eminent evolutionists that some sort of ape was our ancestor. In the Scientific American, May, 1923, there is a diagram that shows the Prophopithecus as the ancestor of man. They describe this forefather as a "man-formed" ape. However, I waive the point. Who cares whether we grew on the ape limb or the next one to it, if they insist that farther back we came from reptiles. If the reader knows just what brute did proceed man, let him substitute that "varmint" for ape in this discussion. Because that Proplio-person is so hard to spell, let me use the shorter word and accept my apology.

Every stockman knows that freaks appear in the herd and that by segregation he can modify color, size, shape and product of his animals. He knows that the freak, left to itself, will no more affect the future of the herd than a white blackbird will modify the color of the flock. He knows that he cannot breed his sheep backward or forward to be anything that is not a sheep. If freaks left to themselves could become other kinds of animals, we might expect two-headed calves and three-legged chickens to beget similar freaks. If freak added to freak could transform ape (or whatever it was) to man, the process would need a dallying providence surpassing a miracle.

Luck No. 1. Two similar freaks must be born about the same time.

Luck No 2. They must be born in nearly the same place.

Luck No 3. They must be male and female.

Luck No. 4. They must survive when the death rate was high.

Luck No. 5. The male must be enamored of the freak female.

Luck No. 6. He must vanquish all rivals, some older and more experienced

Luck No. 7. They must be segregated or the little apricots will mate back into the main brotherhood.

This multiplied luck or accident or providence must attend every eruption of freakishness. I find that the magazine quoted above, suggests very guardedly that it might be in this order—apes, man-like apes, ape-like men and men. As for me, I can believe that a God big enough for a universe could work a big enough miracle to create a man, but I cannot believe such a God would breed reptiles and marsupials and Propliopithecuses with a view to filling heaven by the way of freaks.

THINNER

The other "scientific" method is that it all happened so gradually that there was not in any generation a perceptible difference from what preceded or followed. We may indicate it this way. There appeared an ape (or whatnot) that was, let us say 99% ape and 1% man. Now in nature as we know it, this mannishness would disappear in subsequent generations just as a white feather in a sparrow’s tail fails to modify the sparrow multitude. However, if you wish evolution to work, you must give it the benefit of the doubt, and we will take it for granted that all the progeny maintained that 1%.

After 10,000 years (more or less) the 99-1 combination produced an individual that was 98% ape—2% man. Thus the freakishness percolated or percol-aped through hundreds of thousands of births until enough ape filtered out and enough man oozed in from nowhere, to enable the mixture to pass for human.

TROUBLESOME QUESTIONS

Who knows whether we arc yet 100% men?

If we are 100% men, can we go on to 110%?

Why did all the intermediate combinations die out?

Why do not more apes, or whatever they were, come a freaking heavenward?

Among the millions of kinds of creatures, why is there not one that evolutionists can freely predict its next evolutionary transformation?

OPOSSUM-LIKE ANCESTORS

The sponsors for this ancestral circus parade have made much of a few bones of theoretical "missing links" between brute and man, but there was one performer in the pageant that was so independent that it had nothing to hook a link on. In the succession of ancestors there is presumed to have been a marsupial. Somewhere back in the dissatisfied past, after our forefathers ceased to be reptiles, they were equipped like opossums. The female opossum has a large apron pocket into which she thrusts her new-born babies. In all nature there is no arrangement more useful for the creatures that have it. The theory of evolution cannot do without it and then cannot do anything with it. That pocket is so unique, complete, so independent that there is no way to hook a link that is less than a pocket or more than a pocket, into it. Before the animal had it, there was no possible process by which it could get it. After an animal had it, there would be no conceivable reason for getting rid of it. If our ancestors had this convenient pocket nursery, how could they get rid of it, leaving no trace, and hold on to "gill-slits" 50,000,000 years older? It would only be a nuisance unless it was in the right place, open the right way, and with a mother knowing exactly how to use it. Let the scientists remove this pouch from the mother opossum and sew it on a mother cat, and both litters will die. With the appearance of the first baby-pocket, there would have been no succeeding generation of that type, unless the mother knew exactly how to use it. There never could have been an almost marsupial with an almost instinct getting ready to use an almost pocket to hatch an almost egg or shelter an almost born litter. I mention the egg because some will say that the pouch was first used as a hatchery. If it were first used for eggs, there would need to be buttons on it unless the animal knew enough not to go down a tree head first. In all nature there is not a reptile getting a marsupium nor an animal getting rid of it. Would any process guided by intelligence, put such a convenience on our ancestors in one age and take it off in the next? Would evolution begin construction of an equipment 50,000 years before it could be used?

Why do evolutionists bluff their way past the obviously impossible? Why not be generous with us and admit two or three miracles.

Because even one miracle would prove the existence of an old fashioned God, able to raise us from the dead and bring us into judgment.

MIRACLE

God is a Spirit. He cannot have eyes, cars and brain as science understands these words. If God can see without such eyes, hear without such ears, think without such a brain. He is the transcendent miracle of the universe. To admit the existence of a non-material intelligent God is to admit that man—apart from revelation—can know as little about God as an oyster know about flowers and music. Once admit that God is a Spirit and you admit an empire of spirit vastly greater than the universe of stars.

REASON OF TREASON

The more limitations a man thinks he puts on God, the mare license he thinks is due to himself. If pushing his brain two inches farther from his "gill-slits" evolves a man from a beast, then three inches may stimulate a man to do the thinking for a God who has no brain. It was inevitable that the anti-Bible revolt that denied man was made in God’s image and fell, would be followed by the many detached finger-snappers, eating the bread of the church and denying its faith. We have recently had the spectacle of a popular writer occupying the pulpit of a Kansas City church and daring God to strike him dead.

Not many months ago a bishop classified Jesus along with Santa Claus. A dignitary of a great church has explained away a prophecy not to taste by saying it was Written by a Jew (Paul) who had been eating mince pie. Indeed, this book might be filled with stories of men paid to be leaders in institutions founded by Christians—men who bear the name of Christ and openly flout the teachings of the Bible.

WHAT SHALL THE HARVEST BE?

The writer has witnessed an ordination service where the candidates were required to give affirmative answer to the question. "Do you unfeignedly believe all the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments?" As a part of the ceremony, they knelt at the altar and placed their hands upon the open Bible. An aged minister who participated in the service, suggested that any who decided after years not to keep faith with the church, "ought to quit lying or quit preaching."

If the Bible is a collection of folk-lore, traditions, interpolations, exaggerations, worn-out doctrines, and an uncertain amount of inspired matter, then it follows that the less of it you believe, the less likely you are to be the victim of a hoax. When a man decides that the God portrayed in the first part of the Bible is a fictional character, there is no logical stopping place till he fixes up a God to his own notion.

A chick will not be bigger than the incubator; a casting will not be greater than the foundry and a brain-made god will not bulge the walls of its bone cradle.

If there is no everlastingly dependable revelation of the intelligence that makes playthings of burning worlds, then we must have as many figment-gods as there are god-fixing minds. If we have a national god, it must be a kind of symposium-god.

As for me, I want no Deity that is in any way subject to my criticism. I will have no chameleon god that takes on a color scheme from the background of the Sunday news paper. Let me shelter under the wings of Jehovah who never wrecked a nation that accepted Him and never for long preserved the nation that insulted Him.

THE KINGDOM OF SKULL

Recently, I heard the head of a great university speaking to about a thousand clergymen. The central thought of his message was, "I am not my body’s; my body is mine." If he had only said, "I am not the top of my body; the top of my body is mine." I should have understood that he regarded the brain as an accessory, not a dictator to censor revelation. Brain is only 4 degrees away from delirium, one bump from unconsciousness, one pint from intoxication, and one hypodermic removed from coma. It is a gift from God, meant to be worthy such a giver, but never meant to be self-sufficient or a rival of revelation. When it is weaned from a dependence on God. it is not so safe a guide for man as an ant’s brain is for ants. Without a fixed anchorage outside itself, man is no safer than a storm driven vessel on a lee shore with a crew that carries the anchor downstairs and hooks it in the coal pile. That soul is swindled that gives up the old faith to be guided by a skull—living or dead.

It is now considered quite proper to compliment Jesus. even if one discredits the Book of which he is the living embodiment. They think of Him and the Book as a peerless flower in a broken crock.

Some even acknowledge His Deity though they deny the reliability of the only record of His life. He said, "if ye believed Moses, ye would believe me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" This page could be covered with such quotations. but what is the use? The Bible sifter who can reject this. can reject them all. If no one knows how much of the Bible is true, how can anyone know that any of it is true that is not attested by outside evidence? If you can deny the authenticity of the Holy Scriptures and have left a consistent faith in Christ, you can take away the candle and leave the flame, destroy the harp and play on the strings, rub out the colors and keep the picture.

See John 5:39 46; Luke 16 31; Matt. 5-1s. 20

PROVING THE PUDDING

They say, "Me proof of the pudding is in the eating." Even so, but it takes a nation at least two generations to digest a pudding, and the nation has a high fever already. Toadstool puddings declare themselves in the obituaries, and it would be well for the zealous looseners of religious authority to read the obituaries of nations to some purpose. I have no doubt that "modernists" hope to save the world with high ideals, patriotism, education, public sentiment sold such by-products of religion, but to take away divine authority and expect high ideals is like expecting, the boys to build a high fence to keep themselves out of a melon patch. If we have only an indefinite uncertain some-how-orother God who will not call us to a stern reckoning. we are not likely to invent ideals to hinder our natural bent. Nations have piled up great fortifications, floated great navies, levied great armies, only to collapse because, like a great tree, they have displayed good bark and had a rotten heart.

In Deut. 31:16. God uses an unpleasant expression to upbraid the nation that wearied of its old fashioned God. God is not overly polite to traitors. There is a prophecy goes with it that is not yet too old to do business.

THE SECOND GENERATION

If a man develops his faith before he borrows his doubts as to the reliability of the Bible, he may retain a faith in the God of the Bible, but, WATCH THE SECOND GENERATION OF DOUBT COLLECTORS.

That is not original with me, Great men have said it in other words.

About once a week some man gets his name in the papers by announcing great improvement in the morals of the nation. That is "news" to a newspaper and needs many repetitions to be convincing. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dec. 22, 1927, says the inmates of penal institutions in Ohio have increased from 2,561 in 1919 to 9,144 in 1927. Our keen minded young people are following the current teachings of theatres, magazines, and schools to a logical conclusion.

An Alliance newspaper dated Dec. 5, 1927, reports an event at a near-by college that is under church auspices. It says that the students piled several thousand books in a room and "In the center of the chaos, Bibles had been stacked, with a stuffed ape taken from the college museum, seated on top holding in his outstretched paws a copy of Darwin’s origin of species.

Now where would they get such an idea?

In the same city it is reported that a high school student said to a public debate on evolution. "When the Bible was writen, God did not know anything about science."

How would the son of a clergyman get such a notion?

The Cleveland Plain Dealer of April 7, 1727, prints on the sport page, between prize-fight stories, the announcement that the alumni of a college (under church auspices) will have "their annual spring dinner dance." and that "A team of thirteen star swimmers, all girls from the college, will stage an exhibition of swimming and diving." In a previous issue, the paper said that leading members of the faculty were coming to the city for the event.

Have they no boy swimmers?

Certainly, but boy s do not stage an exhibition so interesting to gentlemen visitors.

Well, what of it? Was there anything in the alleged ages of evolution that made sex exhibitions undesirable? Are our nearest of kin among the brutes handicapped with clothing?

And yet. this school was built with the money of Christians who thought they descended from Adam.

A missionary writes me from South Africa that many young people have adopted the slogan, "Let yourself go!" Very acceptable advice to young or old who find religious restraint irksome.

The nation is fairly top-heavy with information that exalts human skill and tends to make God less and less necessary to people who know how to do for themselves, but we are slow to learn that a nation guided only by public sentiment is like a ship that follows the reflection of its own lights upon the water. For 6,000 years men have tinkered with laws, and nations have wabbled to and fro between democracy and despotism and they are not yet satisfied. I have lived long enough to see people glory in conditions that shocked them in the previous decade.

The world needs a permanent God that it believes in. No nation can long do business if every man rises a yardstick, a bushel measure, and a pound weight that is about what he thinks is fair. Society cannot long stay honest with dollars that are worth 90¢ to one man. 80¢ to another. 70¢ to another, and so on down the scale to nothingness. If one "Christian" accepts 90% of the Bible, another 80%, another 70%, where will it end? Already we have these samples of leaders on display who accept 100% of themselves and any fraction of the Bible that agrees with them. If the nation fellows such leadership, it will end not far from where the buzzards begin. A nation that turns its back on God, turns its face toward the junk-pile.

BIBLE OR BABEL

Blessed Book of God! Though it was written in man’s imperfect language and translations can only approximate the exact meaning, yet it has been the torchlight of Civilization. Have you noticed that the ambitious men who would dim the torch, are in the lightning-bug business? The man who specializes on the fallibility of the Bible never purposely advertise his own fallibility.

I could wish no greater national blessing than a revival in the halls of Congress with every member weeping because of the nation’s sins. If I could have another wish, it would be that our anti-Bible "Christians" might have an island of their own and take the birth control advocates with them.

THEY EXHORT US TO "WAKE UP"

This and preceding pages were written 15 years ago. Now in 1942 it appears that "New World builders, not Bible believers, were the ones asleep.

Thousands of our finest young people go from Christian: homes to so-called Christian Colleges, builded and maintained with Christian money and come back with their faith warped, perverted or shattered. One phase of this betrayal is camouflaged by the clever representation that it is the "REVOLT OF YOUTH," when it is only TEACHER PROPAGANDA come to the surface. They hope you are dull enough to believe that this "movement" just naturally HATCHED ITSELF OUT OF IT’S OWN EGG. Even these choice young people do not suspect that it is what in street parlance is called a "plant" and that old he-Miriams are hid in the bulrushes. A cute little slogan has been fixed up for them—"WAKE UP GRANDPA."

We hope grandpa wakes up.

The writer has a long letter from such a student from a Christian home. He asks. "Why are young people so apt to accept science and abandon faith?" Of course, it is for the same reason that a sailor’s parrot is apt to swear, but this fine lad thinks it happens because it HAS TO HAPPEN. He proceeds to show to his own satisfaction the superiority of science and evolution over the Bible. He makes it clear (to himself) that God Almighty must keep up with the latest trend of thought or be left behind.

The entire letter reveals a woeful ignorance of what the Bible really says and an amazing familiarity with what its critics have said. there was only one argument that the writer had not heard 30 years ago in the infidel home of his boyhood.

We are selling books, at the cost of printing, advertising and mailing. We know of no books on such subjects more eagerly read by young people and tired workers who shun the severely classical books that bristle with profound phrases. These books are doing much good or much harm. If it is good, why not order a supply to loan or give away; if they work mischief, please get someone to answer them. If you believe the author is ignorant, it will be a play-spell for some leader to answer one. Try it.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

An abridgment of a war-time address, delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston, May 15. 1942 when many world leaders feared the collapse of Civilization.

Where we are going depends much on where we have been.

If you know the beginnings of a caterpillar, you know where it is going, if the woodpeckers don’t get it.

1f the race came from some wriggling thing in a mud puddle and is now only six evolutionary levels above a toad, then the most we can hope for is that we may attain to the seventh level.

If you know where a comet came from, you know where it is going, unless the Ruler of the universe wills otherwise. If the race began in the Paradise of God, then the plans of God will reach consummation when God excuses all who prefer another destiny. People who believe the race reached its present level by a billion year process of the survival of the best killers, ought to be consistent and rejoice that the process continues.

Where do you want to go from here?

Everyone wants to go somewhere. No one wants to continue in the mess we are in. Since the beginning of history, the race has been trying to save itself, and here we are. Written history is the story of reforms, revivals, struggles, revolutions, upheavals, crusades and relapse.

When I was young enough to have long curls, a photographer promised me that if I would watch his camera, a little bird would come out. At home they told me that if I behaved well. Santa Claus would come down the chimney with rewards. Older folk fooled me so many times that I grew up to be amazed at my gullibility. For forty years I have heard pulpit propaganda, and political prophets promise that if we voted for reforms, gave more for schools, sponsored more sports and soup houses, and modernized Chrtstianity, we would help God out of the jam He is in. Twenty-live years ago, they promised our boys if they would die for democracy, we would get it. And here we are.

I remember when Congress outlawed the lottery, yet our gambling bill is now thirteen billion dollars a year. I remember when a polygamist was refused a seat in Congress, now the matings outnumber the marriage ceremonies by millions. Rockefeller gave millions to endow colleges, and now millions of youth are so educated that the faith of their fathers and the Bible are, for them. as outmoded as spinning wheels. Carnegie gave millions to build libraries, and now our youth have free access to literature that would have made their grandmothers blush. Before you decide that free libraries can save society, observe what type of books are read most. They promised that Woman’s suffrage would enable mothers, wives, and sisters to vote out drink and vice and soon after, some one voted for the return of the saloon, to lower our taxes.

Now, we have a new crop of pee wee prophets who promise that the world will kill and burn and blast itself into some new order of unselfishness.

Optimism is good, unless it is a mental disease. Perhaps it is good for anyone who is mentally crippled. If I had to be a lunatic, I would want to be an optimist. If I were a Modernist, I could more easily believe the world is getting better, if I were "cracked." I have heard of a man whose neighbors paid him a midnight visit and took him for a ride on a rail. His optimism cheered him in his discomfort. He said. "If it were not for the honor of the thing, I would rather walk." It was an optimist who lost both his legs and comforted himself with the reflection that he would never have arthritis in his knees and ankles.

Where do they hope we are going from here?

They say we are fighting to give the world "the American way of life." What is this American way? Before we were involved in this war, we had more prisons, more crime, more saloons and roadhouses, more asylums, more people maintained at public expense, more debt, and higher taxes than we had ever had.

In the matter of religion, we had more isms, more unbelief, more Sabbath desecration, more empty pews, more worldliness in the churches, than grandfather could have visualized in a bad dream, forty years ago.

Four-fifths of the women of the world are not so well treated as favored slaves. Millions of collie-level men get less for a year’s work than an American coal miner gets for one day, In the New World they promise us, it will take $5,000,000,000 a day to raise all wages to that level. Optimists need a deal of credulity to believe that this war will do what no war ever did, that is, make the race unselfish. It is easier to believe in God’s program.

Is the American way of life worth dying for?

It is, if the only alternative is the earthly hell that totalitarian tyrants have given to plundered nations, but it comes far short of the Bible program.

The more optimistic optimists promise us, as they did twenty-five years ago, that after this war, everything will be different, that is, everything but the devil and popular sin. No one has promised that he will resign or reform. As a matter of fact, the devil seems to have just as many friends as he ever had. That is one reason why the world cannot save itself in a thousand generations. Humans will work and fight and pray to be rid of troublesome sinners, and most of them will work and fight to keep their sin.

There is no nation on earth that I would rather be a part of than this nation, but I continue to pray, "Thy kingdom come . . . As in heaven, so on earth." If God had His way the dog on the boulevard would not have better pedigrees than the babies in the slums and the babies would displace some of the dogs. If God’s will was done on earth, Christian people would not be taxed to pay the devil’s bills. In my beloved America the boy who joins church, saves his money and health, and maintains a home, will be taxed to support the boy who "wasted his substance in riotous living." We have millions of "prodigal sons" today, and the "elder brothers" are drafted for war while the broken down profligates stay at home and, too often, are the fathers of the next generation. I am weary of being taxed to pay for the devil’s mischief, and I have an idea that God was weary before I was. See Is. 43:24.

The prophets foretold this carnival of horrors, and they told us what would happen after the nations harvested their crop—sow the wind; reap the whirlwind. Eminent churchmen accepted the theory that on His human side, Jesus was descended from reptiles. Now we have working examples of the supposedly divine method of uplift by the survival of the brutally fittest. We sold old stoves to Japan that wanted them for killing Chinamen, now Japan is killing us with them—the saps and the Japs.

Modern prophets have almost never been right; the Bible has never been wrong. Because, for 4,000 years it has foretold events before they happened. I can trust it the rest of the way. Some years ago, in the hills of West Virginia, I was sent by a higher-up of my denomination to conduct a meeting in a country church that was called Hephzibah. I traveled on what they called a "jerk-water" railroad to the end of the line. It ended where it did because there was not the remotest reason for going farther. When I left the train, I asked a coal miner. "Where is Hcpzibah?" "I don’t know her. She doesn’t live around here." he replied. No one else knew "her," till I asked a farmer. He said. "Get out your paper and pencil." and it is well that I did. His detailed directions were the most exact and fool-proof of any complicated directions ever given me. I was to go over a hill, follow an abandoned tram road (railroad with wooden rails), to its end, and from thence to a great pile of sawdust, From there I was to go some distance to a five-barred gate. Then follow the left boundary of a wheat field through another gate. In the distance would be an abandoned log house. From the log house there would be visible against the sky line of a ridge, many trees, but only one pine. Once at the pine there would be visible a farm house, where most likely a chicken supper would be waiting me. The path was at times difficult because of briars and undergrowth, and I followed it with misgivings. What if my informant had forgotten some detail or did not himself know the way? After I reached the log house and saw on the sky line one lone pine, I was filled with confidence. If the directions had been exact thus far, I could trust them for the balance of the journey. My directions proved to be dependable. As for the chicken supper, the man was a prophet.

Scores of Bible prophecies have been fulfilled; some are being fulfilled now. Prophecies of what must follow the "time of trouble" answer our question, if this is the "time of trouble" (Dan. 12:1: Matt. 24:21). If we are not in that tribulation, then worse trouble is coining.

Let us consider some prophecies as yet unfulfilled. The Master said, "The meek shall inherit the earth." He sponsored the prayer. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." If there is no answer to that prayer, then Satan could say "Amen!" to it. The stone has not yet smitten the image, nor has it filled the whole earth. (Dan. 2:24.35). The leopard and the kid do not yet lie down together (Is. 11:6). Christ has not yet taken the throne of his father David (Is. 9:7. Luke 1:32). Our Lord said (R. V. margin), "So shall it be in the consummation of the age. The Son of man shall send forth his angels and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that cause stumbling and them that do iniquity" (Matt. 13:40-41).

In my youth. I sometimes read fictional tales of frontier life, such as those written by James Fennimore Cooper. Sometimes, when bed time came, I was compelled to leave the hero or heroine in the grip of merciless foes. Death seemed unavoidable. I could not sleep until I turned the pages of the book to where the novelist had came to the rescue when all hope had been abandoned. A very ordinary fiction writer can extricate one hero from a desperate situation, but when the whole world is dizzy on the brink of a crumbling precipice, we cannot rely on well paid optimists to optimize us out of the holocaust (apologies to Webster). I like to turn the pages of the Book and read, "For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first."

That will be the gladdest shout this old suffering world will ever hear. I know of course, there is a man-made program. Many of our popular and highly honored church leaders would rather have the world go on a thousand or ten thousand years, upward, they hope, through blood and sweat and tears, to where life will have more hilarity and death more dignity, but I like God’s announced plan. I have heard the howl of a mob. I have heard a white slave asking mercy of her master, I have heard screams in the night that left scars on my memory: I want to hear that shout. If revised theology does not forbid it, I want to hear it, even if some Theological Seminaries don’t. If I did not know that God does things in "the fullness of time," I would think that shout is long overdue.

Some years ago. I lived near a horse barn that was infested with rats. Hundreds of them had tunnels underneath the floor. They were too well educated to eat poison or step into traps. To prevent them cutting feed sacks and spilling feed, the barn boss adopted a policy of appeasement, just as the nation licensed saloons to prevent bootlegging. He fed the rats. One day a visitor said, "I can rid the barn of rats." He was given the job and next day came with a ferret in his pocket. Men with brooms and dogs with an anti-rat complex, surrounded the barn. The ferret was put under the barn and in five minutes, the place was spouting rats. They would have prayed to the rocks and mountains (Rev. 6:16-17) if rats could pray.

Where do we go from here?

Eventually, we shall go into the time when "the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." (Is. 11:9).

How soon will it be and how closely will events follow preceding events?

I do not know. Twenty-five prophecies concerning our Lord were literally fulfilled in twenty-four hours. He said, ‘Behold I come quickly.’ It well becomes us to offer the last prayer of the Bible. "Even so, come, Lord Jesus."