GEE-HAW OF THE MODERN JEHU

This is not meant to be a battle of brains.

It may be fortunate for me that it does not need to be.

Herein I call attention to the contradictions of a man of intellectual brilliance and I would not leave the impression that it is a battle of giants, unless we assume that this man is twins under one hat and is at war with himself.

Let me waive any claim to equal scholarship; IT IS YOUR BRAIN THAT I WOULD USE IN THIS DISCUSSION. Because there are some who scold at my presumption in daring to review the utterances of great men, let us concede that these men have twice as many encyclopedias and have read them three times as much.

If a great man teaches one theory on Sunday and an opposite theory on Monday, very ordinary people may contrast BOTH theories on Tuesday.

THIS IS WRITTEN ON TUESDAY; YOU CAN SEE THE INCONSISTENCY OF HUMAN GREATNESS ANY DAY.

It appears that the bigger the brain, the more places there are for cracks in it and the longer the dog, the more likely it is that one end will be coming back before the other end gets there. Really, there is no reason why common folks should be overawed by any imposing wisdom that is made out of bread and meat. Let me point out some basic facts.

WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF SLAUGHTER.

It requires no array of scholarship to decide that this is a world of KILL OR BE KILLED. We may make it stronger and say it is a world of kill AND be killed. Some man has written a book entitled, "The Lives of the Hunted," without telling his readers that everything from louse to elephant is hunted. Every leaf and blade of grass is hunting ground for killers and if one considers the uncounted millions of crawling, hopping, buzzing creatures in one stretch of meadow, two questions may arise.

How many of the babies of these creatures will live to maturity?

How many of those that are mature will live out the year?

Then if you are not too busy smelling the flowers, a third question may persist.

WHAT KIND OF GOD OR DEVIL IS DELIGHTED WITH THESE CONDITIONS OF LIFE?

Of course, I believe the sixth chapter of Genesis and if you do not, at least your common sense can decide that if this is the method that God has loved and brooded over for a billion years, then fawning mercy is not in his make-up; HE IS A GOD TO BE AFRAID OF.

If, as the Book says, God is grieved with this murderous world and if Jesus is a part of God’s plan to make earth like heaven, then no flights of foggy eloquence can sanctify any alleged evolution, nor can rushing optimism make God to truckle with sin.

Because this man is just one among thousands, and not the first one, to insist on an animal hell for the past and presume on a public heaven for the future, I do not make it personal by announcing his name. The reader can find a man in almost every community to whom this discussion will apply.

I am told that an ardent evolutionist who is a leader in the "modern" religious movement, recently broadcasted the following: "I do not believe that God will ever strike down the hand raised to him for mercy, either in this world or the next." Dramatically stated, isn’t it?

Calls to mind Uncle Tom before Simon Legree, or Antonio at the mercy of Shylock. It poses the characters in such a way that God will lose the applause of the galleries, if He denies it. It borrows the methods of the criminal lawyer who plays upon the maudlin sympathies of a jury to make them believe the criminal is the one who is being wronged.

On the surface, it looks like a pretty compliment paid to a God who has been too modest to speak for himself, but really it amounts to an announcement of what the speaker would do if he had charge of God’s mercy. It is so easy for politicians to be generous with other people’s money, and for obliging preachers to vote large appropriations of mercy that is not at their disposal.

Most of us are the descendants of people, who, in the degenerate past, worshipped idols of some sort, and there is yet in many of us a proneness to risk our eternity on the guess-so or hope-so of some man who has been nighty exalted by his fellows. I freely concede the greatness of this man’s intellect, but I remind you that the bigger the belfry, the more places there are for bats. In saying this, I mean no disrespect for this or any other great man; I am thinking of that wisest of men—Solomon—who proved that he was also equipped for being about as big a fool as any. Many times in history, great wisdom and great folly have played tag under the same hat. Sometimes a bee knows the wav home better than a philosopher. I concede the wide sweep of those intellects that have such an expanse that there is room enough for cat-fight-ism and dove-love-ism to amble about in the same brain and not bump into each other.

There is nothing really new about this eagerness to quiet the fears of uneasy sinners and some who would like to take on a little more sin. It seems that Mother Eve had a visitor who convinced her that the penalty for sin was greatly overstated. The novelty of this movement to unscare sin lovers is that it comes from people who offer us one kind of God to get us here and another kind to get us away.

Heresy is always inconsistent, but oh what an intellectual straddle it requires to believe that man can ride in with the apes, snap his fingers at God, and ride out with the angels. One needs to be a mental acrobat to believe that God planned the survival of the fittest for the jungle and a survival of the misfits for heaven. It is no wonder that atheists are jubilant. No wonder a bunch of college boys made a throne for a stuffed ape with Bibles in the year of our Lord 1927.

If you think they can explain all this, loan them the book and see.

(Reader: We have coaxed them, dared them, even tried to hire them to explain their contradictions and the only answer I can get is that we are not scientists and they refuse to discuss it with us.)

Well, to some of us who had only human ancestors, it looks like a hopeless contradiction to assume that God skimmed the cream or scum of a lower order of life to make a higher order, and skimmed and skimmed and skimmed the skimmings until he had a super-ape that knew enough to tie a stone on the end of a stick and cook his neighbor before eating him; then when His masterpiece degenerates until it is hell for the man to live with himself, He promotes him to fellowship with the angels in thirty seconds, if he knows how to swindle God.

It takes an education that is beyond me to understand how the same God would make every drop of water a crystal slaughter house and every leaf an altar dedicated to death in a billion year process to push man’s brain two inches farther from his "gill-slits" than is the ape’s; and then jump the man who resists HIM to angel level because He cannot bear to see anyone unhappy.

You need not expect them to explain it. It is easier to assume that we are ignorant.

Five million centuries to lift simple plasm to the level of rats and weasels and torturing insects and man, and after all the evolution and culture and science and legislation, it is not safe for a ten-year-old girl to walk the streets of a great city alone after dark. Then, after man has hardened himself by refusing mercy and has damned himself by resisting God, to sell him heaven for a gesture, is a sort of mercy that utterly spoils the theory of evolution.

Evidently Jesus was not satisfied with what the supposed evolution has done for man or what the supposed fawning mercy will do for him. If there was an evolution, he ought to have known it; if there are complimentary tickets that will admit heaven-haters to heaven, he ought to have known it, yet He said, "Ye must be born again."

It is said that a mother oyster may produce as many as sixty million eggs in one season. By the law of averages, not one in a million can come to maturity, and those that do, soon come to grief. If we consider all the creatures, visible and invisible, that have met death in the supposed process that finally vexed the earth with a man (Gen. 6:6), then evolution has cost more lives than there are sands on the shore, drops in the sea and leaves in the forest.

And look at the mess we have!

Geological ages go to the bloody path from amoeba to God-defying man so that all the mercy unknown to the process may be lavished on such a man after he has lost the place to put it.

I know the earth is "filled with violence;" God said so. Unless the statements of Gen. 6 are true and the appalling waste of life is contrary to his original plan—that is to be restored some day (Is. 11:6)—then there is nothing in the struggle of life among the brutes to suggest mercy either here or hereafter. Death is an enemy to be destroyed (I Cor. 15:26). If God will let the world suffer for its corruption now, there is nothing in experience to argue that He will not let wilfully impenitent rebels live with themselves when His kingdom comes—a kingdom that will be as unlike the carnival of horrors that they call "evolution," as it will be unlike the hoped-for heavenly anarchy that they call "mercy."

Of course, this easy-escape doctrine will be popular with sin-lovers. I had planned to relate the revolting stories of two arch villians who would be comforted by this doctrine of truckling mercy, but a literary friend asks one to leave them out because they are too horrible to be believed. Suppose in their stead, I refer to the "Sons of Belial" described in Judges 19 and ask if such men are any evidence of evolution, and if we should change the words of Jesus to read, "Blessed are the unmerciful: for they shall obtain mercy?" Could any mercy make them fit company for angels?

Be well advised that the people so generous with mercy that costs them nothing, have no notion of disturbing their own peace with fawning mercy. It requires only a mushy sentiment to coddle crime and be prodigal with a mercy that involves other people’s comfort and safety. Ex-Gov. "Ma" Ferguson of Texas is said to have turned loose more than 3,000 criminals to live neighbors to other people. She is not likely to taint the exclusive circle of her presence with the menace of their society. Let the common people be plagued with their rascality. If there was a law that all pardoned criminals must live near the ones who pardoned them, there would be fewer pardons. It is so easy and seems so generous to pardon all hell into heaven, even if the man who plans it would rather have a cur dog in his family than any one of half the poor people in his city. Would it not distress these generous teachers who are so willing to fill heaven with "sons of Belial," if they had to live with them for eternity, or even keep them overnight?

The popular excuse offered for such doctrinal bushwhacking is that "Everyone has a right to his own opinion." Some people take it for granted that any sort of mental dugout of opinion confers an ownership and sacred immunity that even God is bound to respect.

Stop and think!

When an opinion is offered as a substitute for the revelation of God, the man behind the opinion is hereby offered, to the same extent, as a substitute for God. He who inhabits eternity does not submit his revelations to popular referendum nor to the veto of self-appraised scholarship. People who follow a man who does not know, rather than the God who does know, may find that they have gambled, with their souls at stake, and have lost all they had that would hold mercy, even if mercy deluged them.

Can mercy change the memory of one who has rotted his own soul, while infecting others, so that he can remember how saintly he was? Can God be honest and write into a man’s eternity a false record of what he never was and never wished to be, a righteousness that he hated as much as he loved sin? There is only one way to escape the logic that "We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the deeds done in his body;" that is to assume that God can say to the sinner who shrinks from the hell within himself, "You are not yourself; you are someone else." Milton makes one of his characters say, "Myself am hell."

If there is no limit to mercy, why make it depend on a gesture? Limitless mercy is unconditioned mercy, is it not? If there is some condition to mercy, then how could a well fed, tastily dressed, highly honored guesser, know what the conditions are? You are not safely guided by such a man unless he has a superior kind of a brain-pot that stews out an infallible brain-fog on which one may stake his soul.

Great wisdom and great folly may take turns in the same brain. Such folly is not easily seen if it is hidden in a fog of words or a wilderness of speculation. This eminent leader offers uneasy souls the comfort of his opinion and with two dozen words he presents a theory of time and eternity to be taken with one gulp. If he had stopped with "this world" the folly would have been apparent. If he had said, "I do not believe God will let people suffer for sin in the next world, because he does not allow it in this world," the nonsense of the statement would have been on the surface.

Not only do people suffer for their sins in this world, but they suffer for the sins of the race in ages past. The fact that an innocent child may suffer for the sins of its parents, witnesses that sin begets its own hell, and sin in the stream of life becomes penalty in the eddying pool. Sin is more than some slight discourtesy to a whimsical God, to be cured with excuse-me-please mercy; it taints and warps the sinner and begets a hatred for good. All the poetical blarney about mercy that waits like a funky for a beckoning hand, loses its charm when you hold it up against the tragedy of life.

The truth sticks up like a rock in the froth and spume of human theories-GOD DOES LET THE WORLD SUFFER FOR THE SINS OF THE WORLD.

Far be it from me to deny that God answers prayer or that his mercy has any limitations other than what He has himself imposed. My contention is that it ill becomes a man to blame God for the cruelties of a billion years of supposed evolution, and then hedge in his eternity with a limitless mercy that would make an angel out of a devil.

Does the same mouth blow hot and cold?

This sinner-soothing doctrine does not fit the facts of nature. There are some who profess to see God in nature. Such persons must know that there is nothing in nature that will dawdle and flirt and play the coquette with those who despise her laws. The man who breaks nature’s laws needs to pray, not to nature, but to a doctor. Science may be able to baffle nature in some ways and parry the stroke of the avenger, but, left to itself, the stern old world maintains no mercy seat for belated wheedlers. If nature offers any prophecy of the judgment that awaits those who trifle with God, it is pronounced with four letters—d-o-o-m.

Note: When the type was set for this book, another page was needed to fill it out and I offer a catechism for children that seems to fit in here.

In the public press of Jan. 30, 1928, a column writer discusses a question of "Creative Evoltuion" and its "driving force" that is credited with having "evolved the amoeba into Plato." The versatile columnist says for the Christian, "He too ‘sees God in gardens, forests, animals or mountain tops....’ " Certainly there is much in nature that, like a rainbow of promise, displays God’s pledge that the World’s hurt shall be cured (Isa. 11:6-9), but the man who can see God in the Juggernaut of creature struggle, ought to tremble in His presence. I cannot explain it to those whose brains are preempted to deny Eden, but some will understand. I give an imaginary conversation with a child.

Are bull-fights, dog-fights, cock-fights and such sports naughty?

Yes. The people who make creatures fight are put in jail (sometimes).

How can such fights in nature please God?

My teacher says God plans such things to make amoebas into men.

Why does God keep it going after his men are made?

I will ask my teacher.

If men see God in all creatures, why do they spray fields, swamps, and orchards with poison?

Maybe it is to help God kill more.

When a mammy cat gives a live mouse to her kittens to torture, can the mouse see that it is a divine arrangement?

My papa will not allow anything tortured.

What kind of little boys would stick poison needles in people and animals?

They would not be God’s little boys.

Would they be God’s little boys if they had wings like blood-sucking insects and could hum like mosquitoes?

Oh no! God wants little boys to be good.

If little boys killed mother birds and let the baby birds starve, like a hawk does, would God be pleased?

Their mammas would spank them and send them to bed without supper.

What would happen to little boys who pushed sharp hooks through little birds like owls do?

The Humane Society would put them in jail.

If the Humane Society could get what evolutionists call God, would they put Him in jail?

Oh no! They would go to heaven with Him.

(The author follows here the commonly accepted theory of heaven but does not vouch for it.)

Will everybody get to heaven?

Not unless God forgives them.

Must all people be forgiven before they can go to heaven?

Yes indeed.

How long does it take God to forgive people? Only a minute.

How do people get to heaven? The angels carry them.

How long does it take? They get there the same day.

If it took God many millions of years to fight man’s ancestors past trillions of foes and over mountains of bones to get a man that is such a failure that he needs to be forgiven, is it not a reversal of morals and methods and a panic of speed, to let the unfit survive, by forgiveness in one day and heaven in another?

Please ask my teacher.

Do animals need forgiveness?

Oh no! Animals do not sin.

Does evolution change animals that are fittest to survive, into men who are not fit to survive, so that God can forgive the unfitness and make the failures his own children?

It must be God’s way.

What if the unfit men who have been made of the fittest animals and are then made fitter for heaven than animals, should sin after they get to heaven?

No one can sin in heaven.

Why not? Did not angels sin? If a billion years of evolution cannot make man sin-proof, fool-proof, and failure-proof, how can one minute of heaven do it?

My teacher never told me that.

Would it not be better to believe that God made man in His own image, that man fell, and that God would restore the man to that likeness?

My teacher says that is not scientific.

Is heaven or forgiveness or the resurrection of Jesus scientific?

My teacher says science stops before it gets that far.

So it does but the pupils go right on to logical conclusions.

LOOK ABOUT YOU AND SEE.

Soliloquy: "We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now . waiting .. . Rom. 8:22-23. Surely scholarship must be tipsy with the ferment of its own conceit when it hangs a halo of sanctity on the blood-lust of nature and undertakes to fit the steppings of God into the footprints of Satan.

Whatever else nature may reveal, it surely testifies that something has gone wrong with "all flesh," just as the book says. It is impossible to make a world of pillage and slaughter fit into the plan of a God who is good enough for heaven, unless something has happened that has utterly displeased Him. Will someone tell us why He taught us to pray, "Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven," if everything is evolving here according to his plan?

One needs to be a lopsided poet to see beckoning love in a sunset and ignore the villainy of the mosquitoes. Long ago God said, "The earth also was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with violence." Even if it upsets all the theories of men who would make the stalking death of the jungle His plan for earth and the coddling of sin His plan for heaven, we may just as well recognize the truth that creature life is in a fervor of struggle ending in a welter of death that others may live and die.

Since Jesus warned us that there would arise false Christs, it is only fair to ask concerning the God who is touted to be so indulgent: WHAT GOD? Certainly not the God of the Bible.

Heb. 10:28 says, "He that despised Moses’ law died without mercy. . . Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God ... ?"

Of course, there are people who very cheerfully discredit anything in the Bible not to their liking, but people who call themselves Christians ought to accept the teachings of Jesus. Did he teach the endless, limitless, forbearance of God?

He warned men of an unpardonable sin. Six times He described the doom of the wicked as "weeping [or wailing] and gnashing of teeth." Matt. 23 records about forty epithets, accusations or words of doom that He used on some people of social and educational prominence. He asked one question that it takes a popular modern preacher to answer: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell [gehenna]?" He called some people dogs, wolves, swine, goats, serpents, bad fish, tares, spoiled salt, and He never hinted that lifting a claw or a hoof would make them what they were not. If God has any plan for admitting shut-out virgins, feeding the guest without a wedding garment, renewing rejected invitations, excusing wicked servants or giving murderous husbandmen another chance, Jesus kept it a secret. If the unmerciful can obtain mercy, the spoiled salt be resalted, the fixed gulf unfixed and God can be trifled with safely, Jesus had ample opportunity to tell us.

I would not leave the impression that anyone is finally shut out until he has silenced the wooing whisper of God in his heart. Indeed, I have no notion of making any program for God to follow, but I would warn any reader not to presume on gratuitous mercy of God beyond what his word warrants. I protest that I am not eager to have anyone damned. Not one child of God but would be glad to know that no soul will be so hopelessly warped that God must say, "Depart from me." If Jesus could have saved Jerusalem, He would not have wept over it and pronounced its doom. Before we veto the decrees of God, we ought to know, or be conceited enough to think we know, how He could do it better. If there are fountains of mercy that God has not told us about, I hope I shall be one to rejoice when they are revealed; on the other hand, it is cruelty limited only by eternity, to put a poultice on the festering sore of the world’s sin when only a knife will cure. There are more than 31,000 verses in the Bible in which God could have told us that sin is only a delay or a detour on the way to glory. I find it impossible to believe that He has delegated the job of amending His revelations, to any brain stuff that reckons itself to be only six inches away from its "gill-slits."

It requires a sublime conceit to presume to do God’s thinking for Him, but what adjectives will describe the arrogance that will try to pass off the fog of a human brain for the afterthought of God or the thought of an after-God?
I have been asked to explain what I mean by the expression, "the afterthought of God or the thought of an after-God." I mean that the God who would plan a help-yourself heaven for incorrigibles is so different from the God of the pitiless struggle of a theoretical evolution, that He must be a more recent God or He has had a more recent thought, Of course, I do not accept either theory.

When a man believes that he is an amoeba plus a great many amendments, he is apt to show scant patience with any God that was good enough for mankind before Darwin classified us.

Any narcotic teaching that benumbs man’s feeling that eternity will be the crop of his own sowing, will encourage sin. If one little gesture after death will change the harvest of a lifetime of "sowing to the flesh," then it will do more than human efforts can do before death. David sinned grievously and after a soul wracking repentance, found mercy, but did not escape the harvest. The prophet said to him, "The sword shall never depart from thine house," and shame, treachery, and bereavement dogged his path until the end. If death brings cheaper mercy, why not wait for cut rates?

If mercy is unlimited, one need not cease from iniquity even in heaven. This would assume that when God said, "He that is filthy, let him be more filthy still," He meant that there would be nothing in a "modern" heaven to make a filth-lover uneasy, more than there is in the preaching of a "modern" gospel.

The dreadful tragedy of this gates-ajar doctrine is wrapped up in the supposition that when one has trampled on mercy, all he needs is more mercy. Many who trust in this false hope are blind to the fact that they have resisted mercy till it has warped and festered their souls and they hate what God loves and love what He hates. The scheme is based on crude shortsighted selfishness. It seeks only the comfort of the moral pervert and ignores the rights of God. It would provide endless mercy and eternal forbearance without changing facts that are everlastingly loathsome to God.

Eternity is not a question of what God will do with a naughty child; it turns on the finality of a choice that links one up with the friends or foes of God. There may be some temporary comfort in believing that sin is only the outcroppings of our brute ancestry; it may quiet one’s fears of the wrath of God to believe that God is so committed to mercy that he cannot help himself, but "THE DEVILS BELIEVE AND TREMBLE."

LATEST STYLES IN CREED

I have lived longer than Methuselah, if life be measured not by the revolutions of the earth but by those of society and philosophy. The latest "trend of thought" is about as permanent as hoop skirts. ANYTHING FOR A CHANGE.

When I broke with freethinkers and Darwinism, the church was so careful to make the cure complete that they stood me up six times to pledge allegiance to the faith "ONCE FOR ALL DELIVERED." Now I have lived to see my outcasts come in the front door of the church and berate me because I do not REINTERPRET my vows.

In those days the creation story was considered either history or hoax; sacred truth or a hoary headed lie. Now, the reigning styles in "new conception" infer that it started somewhere as a lie and, like a persimmon, improves with age. After many centuries, it is now sacred folklore and tradition. God could have corrected it any time but He let it go as about THE BEST HE COULD DO for a people so RECENTLY CREATED IN HIS IMAGE.

Later on, according to high salaried men, Mary lied to the angel or the angel lied to Mary, or the Bible lies about both. (Luke 1:34-35) and the tale of a Virgin birth got started. While God was inspiring ANY of the BIBLE He could have corrected this, but the church was not far enough from Pentecost and needed a miracle yarn to enable them to compete with other half baked religions.

In the days of Ingersoll, the church believed that God was grieved that "all flesh had corrupted his way," as Genesis 6:12 says. Now, one of the few theories that Bible-repair-men can agree on, is that a protracted carnival of horrors that they call evolution, was the delight of whoever, whatever, however God is, and that He gave prizes of survival and mates to the best killers and made them His proxies in refining the mud to make a man.

If Ingersoll had lived now, he would find many that Jesus said would come in His name, such congenial imitators, that, like Darrow and Lindsey, he would be forced to resurrect some new abomination of heathenism in order to keep ahead of his brethren of more pius phrases, who hanker to head some pilgrimage to some new deliverance,

DR. CADMAN APOLOGIZES FOR THE BIBLE

Someone has written this learned man about the capture of Jericho by Israel and asks, "Does a just Deity ever injure one nation for the good of another?"

I quote some sentences from the doctor’s reply that appeared in the public press Oct. 19, 1927. "God often appears in an unfavorable light in Old Testament narratives because its earlier writers persisted in attributing to him deeds which were entirely man’s." "According to their point of view, Jehovah commanded the capture of Jericho; according to ours, He did not." "The God Christ revealed had to slowly educate the nations to His standards." "He is not the tribal Deity of outworn conception, but the universal Father of present knowledge."

In these fastidious days there are many eminent people trying to fix up the reputation of God so that He can go in fashionable society. They fear that people interested in prize-fights, murder trials, and the destruction of potential life might be shocked at Scripture severities.

Many students of history understand that God has blessed the nations that believed the Bible and visited His displeasure on those who nullified any part that interfered with their opinions. Jesus said, "YE DO ERR, NOT KNOWING THE SCRIPTURES." Now we have men in intellectual authority and many thousands of echo-men who say, "Ye do err, not knowing BETTER than the Scriptures."

Most of them are too cautious to say it out boldly, that Jesus is a back number; that will hardly be a popular apology in most churches, until the public is educated up to it.

If Joshua was deceived in supposing God had commissioned him to destroy Jericho, then of course Moses was deceived in supposing God kept him busy for forty years getting ready for it, and Abraham was deceived in believing God had deeded this land to Abraham’s children. If it was all a mistake, then Stephen was deceived in believing that God drove out these nations before Israel (Acts 7:45).

Psalms 103:7, says "He made known his ways unto Moses." Isaiah 63: 12 says that God "led them by the right hand of Moses." Jesus said, "The Scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: all therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do." Also, "Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me." The New Testament testifies that Moses came from the unseen world to commune with Jesus about the program of God (Luke 9:31). If Dr. Cadman’s apology is good, then much of the Bible is not good and the next logical step will be to apologize for Jesus as having an "outworn conception."

If the Old Testament puts God "in an unfavorable light," then this honored churchman puts Him in a worse. If the Old Testament is the Word of God, it puts some prominent people in unfavorable light.

One way to show the folly that lurks in such a question and answer, is to ask it in an amended form. Let me try it?

Does a just Deity ever preserve strict neutrality while one nation is injured for the good of another?

Jericho was destroyed.

"Modernists" do not overwork their Deity with miracles and such things, and they cannot presume that He was too far behind with His work to concern Himself with this battle. Was He unable to interfere? Would not neutrality discredit Him more than to foster "the survival of the fittest?" Would not a God who supervised the killing of the weak by the strong (if evolution is God’s method) be bored with too much peace? Why not? Seeing Dr. Cadman is an evolutionist, it may be pertinent to ask if a God who delighted in the slaughter of multiplied billions every second of the day of every year for a million ages, would be squeamish about the overthrow of a nation of unspeakable nastiness by a nation that stood for decency?

Though I believe God could not be entertained with the needless horrors of a system that would evolve a fish out of the sea to struggle for existence on the land and after ages of hardship, evolve it back into the sea as a whale, or the scheme that would evolve a horse out of an insect eating reptile and then evolve stinging flies to torture it; I do believe that a sin-hating God would be as likely to dispossess a depraved nation as a farmer is likely to clear a field of briars when he wishes more wheat and fewer thorns. I can easily believe that a kind hearted farmer might decide to have more chickens and fewer weasels.

The doctor explains that God "had to slowly educate the nations to his standards." Well, it appears that about the time he finishes the education of a nation, it is dead. I quite agree that God does try to teach living nations with the object lessons of dead ones and it is a slow process.

If this is not God’s method of educating the nations, then one wonders WHO IS TEACHING THE SCHOOL THAT MAKES BERTHS FOR THE BATS AND BANQUETS FOR BUZZARDS?

Dr. Cadman’s "point of view" seems to be that during the 4,000 years of Old Testament history God could not make his dear children understand that they were killing his dear children. This is evident from his remark that "He loves all men and all are His children." It argues that He is not a fortunate Father in having such stupid children, so utterly unlike Him that for 40 centuries either He could not make Himself heard or the children understood Him to mean exactly the opposite from what He taught them.

If a human father had sons who understood everything he said, to mean exactly the opposite, would he not, after a while, decide to stop talking or tell them not to do what he wished them to do? Dare we presume that Dr. Cadman’s "point of view" is that God could have told Joshua to kill and Joshua understanding the orders to mean the opposite, as usual, would have stopped the killing, or are we to suppose that God could not or did not speak Joshua’s language?

Will someone show me the way out of the fog?

What kind of general would it be who would let his armies fight 4,000 years because every time he thought they ought to retreat, they imagined he wished them to charge?

It might be an evolutionary general who had loved combat for a hundred million years and being tongue-tied, his soldiers did not know he had changed his mind.

If Old Testament writers put God in an "unfavorable light," in what kind of light do modern luminaries put Him?

One needs to be under-witted or water-logged with profundity, to believe that God would work with His dirt a hundred million years, mixing and remixing, sifting and resifting, skimming and reskimming to make a man that He cannot talk to and be understood.

If God succeeds, after a while, in educating the fight out of man, when will He begin on the brutes and how soon will the mites of the "seven-year" itch learn that they were designed to promote sleep? From the conditions in the world today, it would seem that we are "getting no better fast." The utter failure of the educational "viewpoint" needs no better testimony than the words of Dr. Cadman himself in the public press Jan. 18, 1928. Speaking, of the French Revolution he said, "The naked realism of an obsession for ‘liberty’ took possession of them and drove them far below the levels of the brute. . . The lesson is that human nature has in it vile potentialities which some of its eulogists ignore. These potentialities emerge in chaotic moments when the restraints of law and order are thrown off."

Where would human nature get "vile potentialities" to enable men to go "far below the level of the brute?" Jesus gave us the answer. He said to the devil’s children, "Ye do the deeds of your father." "Really, it is easier to believe that man fell as the Book says, and that he did not fall UP. The world needs SALVATION more than it needs EDUCATION.

Fundamentalists are eager to admit that God’s will is often misunderstood and defied by wayward men. Certainly men have thought they were doing God’s will when they were doing the opposite, because sin has blinded spiritual eye, deafened spiritual ears, and warped the thinking of the nations.

Dr. Cadman flounders in the same tangle that has snared every Bible expositor who tries to formulate a consistent theology on the theory that all men are the children of God. Jesus knew better. He said to some, "I know that ye are Abraham’s seed... If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham... If God were your Father, ye would love me. . . Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do" (John 8: 37-44). In Matt. 13: 38, He contrasts "the children of the kingdom" and "the children of the wicked one." In that wonderful prayer before He entered Gethsemane, He said, "I pray for them [disciples] I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are Thine."

This will not convince anyone who nullifies every Scripture not to his notion. Men who wear out Scriptural conceptions of God are not likely to say, "This verse does not agree with me, but I believe it."

If I cannot convince Theistic-Evolutionists that their double-barreled name shoots in opposite directions, perhaps some farmer’s boy can explain it to them. I offer a lesson in the form of question and answer that only a clever man can befog with words.

LESSON FOR BEGINNERS

Children, how do poultry men develop a laying strain of hens?

By selecting the best layers from which to breed.

How do they develop a fighting strain of chickens? By selecting the best fighters from which to breed.

In a fighting world, what is meant by "survival of the fittest?"

The survival of the fighting-est.

If, for a hundred million years, God was pleased to give survival to the best fighters and the ones that looked out for themselves, what would it indicate?

That such a God wanted fighters and self-seekers.

Since man is the supposed masterpiece of a supposed evolution that is supposed to have taken many millions of years to breed a man by a supposed survival of the fittest, how shall we arrive at super-man level?

By killing off pacifists, weaklings and unselfish people.

Perhaps some reader will demur to this with the suggestion that survival depended also upon speed and ability to hide. Certainly, but even pigeons and rabbits settle their matings and tenant rights by combat. When weaker creatures all escape from a fox, they really kill him with starvation, do they not? Is there anything unselfish in a rabbit running away from a fox and leaving the hungry brute to feast on a whole nest of partridges?

One wonders just what Israel could have done to fit into the new "viewpoint." They could have gone back to Egyptian slavery or perished in the desert. They might have merged with the Canaanites and participated in the unprintable deviltry of heathen worship as some of them did. The modern "viewpoint" has been unable to prevent the world’s greatest slaughter-fest, but it is easy to sit in an armchair and indulge one’s leadership, like a child directing the animals into a toy "Noah’s ark," improving on Noah’s arrangement.

There is no evidence that God filed a protest before Jericho was destroyed or rebuked the victors after it happened. Though God had scores of prophets—men willing to die for the truths they proclaimed—not one of them ever repudiated the "viewpoint" of Joshua. Jesus whose name was the New Testament form of "Joshua"—Jesus the descendant of the woman who betrayed Jericho—evidently had the same "viewpoint," for He never offered any apology for the unpleasantness that the Canaanites or any other degenerates suffered, but He promised more trouble to more sinners than any man who ever lived.

As for "tribal Deity," it pleased God to reveal Himself to later nations through the Hebrews. Jesus said, "Salvation is of the Jews," also, He said in the presence of a Canaanitish woman, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Fundamentalists are children of Abraham by faith.

The expression, "outworn conception," indicates that conceptions wear out and by the same token, the doctor’s conception must go sooner or later, depending on how many have used it before him. If this is true, I am comforted with the reflection that my Old Testament conception wears out only a little while before his and future generations will pity the ignorance of both. However, I fear we stake our souls upon our conceptions for it is not at all clear to me that when "the great day of His wrath is come," God will send the "outworn conceptions" to hell and the worn-out conception incubators to heaven. If I wrap my soul in conceptions that wear out, I fear my rags will go with me where I go. If I believe as much and nullify as little of the Holy Scriptures as Jesus did (I believe He accepted all), I shall be in good company. God will not upbraid me for believing the Bible TOO MUCH.

If Dr. Cadman spanks with one hand and pats with the other, the pats are worse than the spanks. After putting God in an "unfavorable light," he offers Him the compliment of "universal Father of present knowledge."

What present knowledge?

Could it be the knowledge of T. N. T., poison gas, bombing planes, submarines, habit-forming drugs and [abortions]?

Since the major portion of eminent scientists have rejected the "viewpoint" and the not-yet-worn-out conception of Dr. Cadman, we may well ask if it is the "present knowledge" that manifests itself in the propaganda for atheism, goat marriage, behaviorism, prenatal destruction of life, monkey-grafting, displays of nakedness, smutty books and plays, or perhaps the knowledge of how to live without work and not be bored.

Could it be the knowledge that has lifted our nation to where 50,000,000 people listen in on a prize fight that in newspaper space, time given and money lost, would keep every needy orphan on earth in school for a year?

Is it the knowledge that stimulated the students of a great university to celebrate a football victory by mauling the police and burning school buildings?

There is a march of world events that moves great statesmen to warn us that another world war will destroy civilization. But for the mercy of God, this is true, but it is not new knowledge. IF THE PROPHECIES OF JESUS WERE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT, SUCH STATESMEN COULD BE PROSECUTED. See Matt. 24:21.

Even if the ghosts of our alleged REPTILE ancestors came back to crawl on our beds and force us to own them with a good night kiss, not even that could give us a conception of a better educated or more indulgent God.

When the doctor says, "The God Christ revealed had to slowly educate the nations to His standards," I am moved to ask as humbly as I may,

WHAT ARE HIS STANDARDS?

WHAT STANDARDS IS HE EDUCATING THEM AWAY FROM?

If man has been evolving UPWARD for hundreds of millions of years, where did he get the standards that need to be reversed? The amoeba is a very gentle creature; who educated into it a standard that needs to be educated out? Will it take as long to educate it out as it did to educate it in?

What different God did Christ reveal?

Jesus (the New Testament name for Joshua) said, "Woe unto thee Chorazin! . . . Bethsaida! ... And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shall be brought down to hell [Hades] ... it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the Day of Judgment than for thee." (Matt. 11: 21-44).

Of Jerusalem, he said, "Thine enemies . . . shall lay thee even with the ground ... and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation." (Luke 19:43-44).

Speaking of reckoning day, he said, "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me." (Luke 19:27).

To Pilate He said, "If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight . . Now read the last three verses of Joshua 5th and decide for yourself whether or not the Field Marshal of Jehovah directed the battle of Jericho.

If there lingers in the mind of the reader any fancy that Jesus abandoned the "outworn conception" that "modernists" have worn out, once more I call attention to His words, when He spoke of the doom of the nations in the days of Noah, "Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed." (Luke 17:30).

Any dallying process that is relied upon to "slowly educate the nations," must be working in reverse; if the Bible does not reveal this, the newspapers do. The folly of such philosophy may be illustrated by

A PARABLE OF FOLLY

Once there was a woman who loved cats and birds.

She pitied all cats that were sick, deserted, forlorn.

From the alleys of a great city, she gathered homeless cats and gave them a home with the colored cook on her park-like estate.

This same woman was much distressed with cat fights, but the cats disregarded her lectures. Many kittens were born on this cat ranch and were promptly destroyed by uneducated Toms. Many birds nested in the trees and bushes and many baby birds went to fatten the cats. All this added to the yearnings of the governess of cats.

(Thus far, the parable is based on actual facts; what follows is fiction).

Being a lover of both cats and birds, she decided that cat morals would respond to a slow process of education, believing that if the cats were allowed to fight and eat birds they would, after many thousands of years, come to love each other, eat grass and dig worms for the birds.

EVEN GREAT MEN WITH ELASTIC DEFINITIONS AND HYPNOTIC ELOQUENCE CANNOT RECONCILE A CAT-FIGHT PAST WITH A DOVE-LOVE FUTURE AS THE WHIM OF A CHANGEABLE GOD.

THE FOOLISHNESS OF GOD

Some months ago, I attended a meeting without my glasses and asked the Bible students present to help me quote a verse of Scripture. I told them it was something about the foolishness of God or man and would be something near one of four statements:

"The foolishness of God is wiser than men."

"The wisdom of men is foolishness with God."

"The foolishness of man is wiser than God."

"The wisdom of God is foolishness with men."

It was unanimously agreed that I was trying to quote I Cor. 3:19 and there was much surprise when I asked them to read I Cor. 1:25. It seemed unthinkable that the Bible would speak of the foolishness of God.

Call it irony, hyperbole, or covert sarcasm, yet it is evident that there are no words in human language to adequately express God’s contempt for any bowl of brains that appoints itself a kind of Board of Review to pass upon the conduct of God.

If the Word had said that only one in ten thousand could hopefully weigh their wisdom against the foolishness of God, every cult and college and newspaper might furnish a candidate, but it made no provision for any man to do God’s thinking for Him. It must mean that if I were a double witted man, I could not qualify as a half-wit in the parliament of God. If God needs an apology or a new revelation of Himself, let Him make it.

How rich we are in having a God so great that a thinking level that would be foolishness for Him, is so far above man’s strutting conceit that no brain-brewed philosophy can reach high enough "to touch bottom." The A B C of wisdom is to realize that an infinite God might do many things that a finite mind would not approve. It is a good preventative of mental auto-intoxication, to remind ourselves that what we think we would have done, if God had left it to our judgment, cannot determine what God might have done before we arrived.

"BIG MEDICINE"

When there was trouble in the wigwams of the American Indians, it was their custom to "make medicine" with various ceremonies and performances. When the trouble was wide spread, as a famine or pestilence, the tribe was likely to be called to a pow wow of some magnitude, and they made "Big Medicine.’’ The idea seemed to be that the Great Spirit or some lesser spirits were disgruntled about something, and the tribe must take some action to cure the spirits of their grouch.

If the plan will work, it has many advantages. Back in the days of youth and castor oil, it would have been a happy way out of trouble if a boy could have eaten green apples and escaped discomfort by giving the medicine to the doctor.

Some pagans have gods who may be pacified with chicken entrails waved before them, or punk burned under their noses. One great nation, for centuries, along with other troubles, has had ancestors that make trouble after they are dead, unless proper sacrifices are made for them. In India, people may be pestered by relatives who die and then come back as a cat or a goat or perhaps a snake. Some pagan nations have had gods that could be appeased only by the sacrifice of some innocent maiden.

It is the malpractice of paganism and some isms not classified as pagan, to give the medicine to the gods instead of changing the behavior of those who displease the gods.

IS GOD SICK?

Certainly not, in any usual meaning of the word, but God is distressed with man’s behavior. This is clear from many statements of Scripture. It is just as certainly clear that God refuses to take treatment from unrepentant sinners. Is. 1: 11-17 is too long for quotation here, but one verse is enough to reveal God’s attitude. "Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them."

With few exceptions, all pagan nations have interpreted calamity, as famine, pestilence, defeat in battle, as evidence that their gods were displeased in some respect. This would be sound logic, whether the pagan is a philosopher or a moron, if only the pagan recognized an alternative. How much happier the world would be if pagans everywhere in all ages, when prayers and sacrifices and ceremonies were unavailing, had fostered a great doubt, "Maybe we have the wrong gods."

Nebuchadnezzar did many foolish things, but I would help buy a tombstone for him, if I could write the epitaph. After reading the second chapter of Daniel, I would write on his tomb, "IN HIS KINGDOM THE GODS HAD TO MAKE GOOD OR GET OUT." It is a pathetic weakness of nations that they keep on for centuries as devotees of religions that utterly fail them in every crisis of life. Consider any nations of the earth that for a thousand years have known little more than hunger, ignorance, disease, and conditions bordering on slavery. One would think they would suspect a swindle and be looking for other gods.

Just now (1942) we are passing through the second World War, and only a comparatively few people among nominal Christian are convinced that God is displeased with the world, and that a great wave of repentance would be the quickest way out. Instead of that conviction, many feel that God is sorry for the world and perhaps sorry for Himself, but He must preserve a pitying and benevolent neutrality. I have seen a hen with a brood of chicks about four weeks old. Two young roosters would get into a fight, and each time either fuzzy warrior was hurt, he would scream for help. The mother hen was distressed and eager to help, but they were both her children, and she could not knock either one out of the battle.

To make sure that all the gods are kept in good humor, we are exhorted over radio and through the press, "Go to the church of your choice next Sunday." At least, that is playing fair with all the gods and isms and heresies between the oceans. The idea seems to be that whoever is the real God of time and eternity will be pleased that His rivals are recognized. Can you imagine Moses or Daniel or Paul giving such an exhortation?

Some hopeful church leaders have suggested that if every church was filled to the doors with worshippers one day in seven, the war would speedily end, Certainly I would like to see the number of the worshippers of the God of the Bible greatly multiplied, but I suggest that God would be better pleased with the nation if instead of every church being filled one day in seven, the saloons, gambling joints, dirty shows and magazines, and brothels were closed seven days in the week. That would really be "BIG MEDICINE."