The Reformed Presbyterian Standard and also 0\ir ... - Rparchives.org

December 23, 1914.
A FAMILY PAPEE.
E D I T O R I A L
John W. Pritchard, Editor.
THE USE FOR SODOM.
Sodom does not seem to have been any use
to the natives, since it made them unfit to
live anywhere. It was of no use to Lot, since
he was finallypulled out of the city bankrupt
in cattle and in morals. The real use of
Sodom was indirect; it brought out the faith
of Abraham and the wondrous mercy of God.
Without that ungodly city we could not have
had Abraham calling together his little band
to follow up the allies from the Euphrates
and force them to give up their captives and
their spoil. It must have made God rather
proud of Abraham when he heard him after
the victory refuse to take even a shoestring
from the spoil lest some one might claim
that Abraham owed his goods to some other
than God. Nothing self-made about Abraham.
Without Sodom we would never have
known how far God would go to please a
friend. Sodom needed to be wiped oft the
earth and the place to be disinfected to keep
the earth from spoiling. But God said he
could not do the thing without talking the
matter over with Abraham. It is in this affair
that Abraham brings God out as only
a friend could do. First he asks God to spare
the city for fifty, and then dropped the figures
down to ten, leaving off then because
he thought that surely ten could be found in
curse as a blessing.
such a city as that. Perhaps Abraham was
close enough to God to ask for a limit of
five and get it, but even then it would not
have been any use to Sodom. The only real
use for Sodom, or for any wicked man, or
city, is to bring out the character of God
and his friends.
LOYALTY.
Among the passions which bless or curse
mankind there are few more capable of both
results than loyalty. When it has a worthy
object it binds men together in the pursuit
of the highest ends; when the object is unworthy
it is capable of promoting great
wrongs. Also the time element must be considered,
since devotion to an institution may
be a blessing at one time and a curse at another.
In the days of the patriarchs the loyalty
of the race had no broader reach than
devotion to the family. Men divided into
families at Babel and it was centuries before
they learned any wider allegiance. Outside
the family the individual was an outlaw,
inside he found his place in being loyal
to family interests.
But loyalty to a family, however large,
could never satisfy the sympathy which God
meant that his creatures should lavish on
their fellows. For this reason we find the
families merging in tribes, and there arose
the social need that the old loyalty to the
family should be succeeded by the new loyalty
to the larger unit. Again we find the
In modern history one may date the rise
of nationalism when Joan of Arc inspired
and led her people, the French, in freeing
their land from English invaders. It was
not her banner, not the recognition that she
was called of God, not her faith in her mission,
that made it possible for her to lead
defeated armies to victory and crown the
king at Rheims. All these had a place, but
specially it was because Frenchmen had
learned somehow to be loyal to France.
During the recent centuries, loyalty to
country has done wondrous things for the
world. It has wrought into a common life
such diverse nationalities as America has
today. Nations that have warred ceaselessly
at home here live peaceably side by side.
But we have now reached the time when
loyalty to country is quite as likely to be a
What the nations now
need is the teaching in the Parable of the
Good Samaritan. Europe is cursed today
with loyalty to country, right or wrong. It
is that which has made it possible for a
half dozen men intoxicated with power to
plunge the world in an unholy strife. We
need a new and wider loyalty. As the
tribe succeeded the family and the nation
took the place of the tribe, the time has
come when humanity instead of the nation
should be the end we serve. Wilhelm Liebknecht,
as he votes against a war appropriation
in the Reichstag, is blazing the way to
the new internationalism. There is one thing,
and one alone, that will keep our loyalty
pure and beneficent. That is loyalty to
Christ. Is it too much to say that Liebknecht,
the Socialist, who denies his Lord in
speech, is more loyal to him at this hour than
Harnack and his fellow churchmen who are
backing up a mad ruler in his aim to dominate
the world. The loyalty which follows
the country right or wrong, is not loyalty to
Christ. It may cry, "Lord, Lord," but he
will say, "I never knew you." The loyalty
which demands hatred of men who live across
an imaginary line which some bloody battlefield
has drawn can have no place for the
follower of Christ. The hour of nationalism
has struck. It is time for us to welcome
a new internationaHsm in which our highest
earthly loyalty will be humanity, and over
all, to Jesus Christ.
tribe merging in the nation, as it did particularly
IS EVOLUTION TRUE III.
in the Wilderness under the leadership
By Rev. J. M. Coleman.
of Moses. Previously they must have lived
So far we have considered only one point
with a degree of separateness, but in the
in the evolutionist's hypothesis, the transmtttation
of one species into another. There is
trials of the forty years they were welded
together about the conception of one God
and the personality of Moses. But not altogether
a harder gulf than that to cross. How did
was this accomplished. Long after life begin We start with inorganic matter.
the tribes had been settled in Canaan did tribal
How get to organic life How did the first
jealousies threaten to wreck the national
life cell come into existence Unless the
life. Only in times of great external danger
forces resident in mud can produce a life cell
were they able to act together as a unit, and
not until after the captivity were tribal lines
evolution fails.
so lost as not to affect the unity of the Jewish
people.
"Protoplasm," says Professor Conn, "is not
a chemical compound, but a mechanism. Unorganized
protoplasm does not exist. It could
Liebig declares that flowers could no
more grow by chemical process than a book
concerning them.
Tyndall, after experimenting eight months,
said: "From the beginning to the end of the
inquiry, there is not, as you have seen, a
shadow of evidence in favor of the doctrine
of spontaneous generation."
Huxley said:
"The doctrine that life can come only from
life is victorious all along the line."
never have been produced by chemical process."
Professor
Conn says: "The doctrine of spontaneous
generation is universally given up." Wilson,
the great authority on the cell, says:
"The study of the cell has seemed to expand
rather than narrow the enormous gap that
separates even the lowest form of life from
the inorganic cell."
The evolutionist has failed to show a single
accepted case of a derived species. He
has failed to show a single instance of an intervening
link between the various species,
though if evolution was a fact these intervening
stages would be as plainly marked as
the species itself. Also he has failed to show
that life has ever developed from not-life and
has given up trying to show it. If he fails at
either point his theory falls and he fails at
both. The last point I wish to make to show
that evolution is unscientific in that there is
no evidence that mind has ever developed
from matter. Professor Fisk says that it is
inconceivable how man's mind should have
been produced from matter and it is inconceivable
that it should have been. Lord Kelvin
wrote in the London Times: "Every act
of man's free will is a miracle to physical, to
chemical and to mathematical science." At
three essential points for his theory, the evolutionist
fails to make good.
Professor WilHam Jones has put the matter
fairly and clearly in saying "Evolution is
a metaphysical creed." Yet upon this unproven
hypothesis of evolution men are attempting
to build a whole system of thought,
the chief argument being that all scholars
accept it. And this argument is no more
substantial than the others.
There is one more question. What does