upreme folly of her entire history, for turning aside to
fight an unproven guess. A more vital reason is that the theory does not
stop with the natural realm, but goes right on up into the realm of
spiritual truth, and assumes to pronounce on the most vital spiritual
realities in such a way that the logic of the theory, if consistently
accepted, utterly destroys both the foundations of the Church and the
content of the Gospel. Indeed, evolution has been proclaimed to the world
as the ally of a philosophy which boasts of its capacity to drive
Christianity out of existence.

For the Church, therefore, to fail to fight a theory that strikes at her
very vitals would be to become a traitor to the Lord who bought her and
sent her into the world to preach His gospel. And so she is compelled to
choose between submitting to an unproven and destructive theory, which has
never saved =any= one who has believed it, and preaching the gospel of
God's grace, which has infallibly saved =every= one who has believed it.
The true Church is fighting the theory of evolution in order that the
message she is commissioned to preach may not be rendered of no effect
by a non-belligerent attitude toward it being mistaken for approval of it.

Not only the fact that the theory is entirely unproven, but also and more
particularly the nature of its influence on faith in the Bible compels the
Church to reckon with it. We will go into these two reasons for
antagonizing this speculative guess.

I. =The Theory of Evolution is Unproven.=

The reason we reflect on this for a few moments lies in what has already
been said. If evolution is a fact, then for the Church to refuse it and
fight against it would be to fight against God, which ought to bring her to
swift judgment for her mad folly. But if it is only an unproven theory,
then she is justified if she has good reasons for fighting its propagation.
We will therefore note what the scientists themselves have to say regarding
the theory.

1. Testimony =for= Evolution.

There are teachers of science who do not hesitate to assure us that the
doctrine of evolution is now no longer a theory but an assured fact. A few
representative quotations from that class will suffice.

Dr. P. C. Mitchell says, in a late edition of the "Encyclopedia
Britannica":

The vast bulk of botanical and biological work on living
and extinct forms published during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century increa