is natural state is
=progress in corruption=. For total depravity, which is total spiritual
death, does not mean that the last limit of corruption has been reached,
but that while death is total, corruption may have just begun.

The reality of the natural man's spiritual death is abundantly illustrated
in human history. After man fell into sin, and died, he was given fullest
opportunity to recover himself and to demonstrate thereby that he was still
spiritually alive. But the corruption of spiritual death worked until man
was so far down in the filth of his moral putrefaction that the only way
God could save the race from extinction was to save the one family that had
accepted spiritual life from Him, and blot the rest of the race out in the
flood.

Then, starting out again under more favorable circumstances than before,
man went from bad to worse until, in one great universal brotherhood, he
rose up and defied God at the Tower of Babel, and God had to smash the
brotherhood into fragments by the confusion of languages.

Time after time God tried man and found his progress downward always, no
matter how favorable the circumstances that surrounded him, until finally
he came to earth Himself in the Person of His Son. This brought both the
reality and the completeness of man's spiritual death to a demonstration
that can never be refuted, for at the cross man displayed, to its eternal
uncovering, the awful corruption of that spiritual condition that could not
tolerate in its presence incarnate purity and holiness, even though he had
to become the murderer of God manifest in the flesh to get away from it.

Even in his worship man's progress is steadily downward. Beginning with
God, he progresses downward until he is worshipping birds, then beasts, and
then creeping things.

But evolution says that man is =coming up= from primitive conditions into
fuller life. And so the evolutionist cannot tolerate such doctrines as
these which the Word of God sets forth. To a consistent evolutionist, man
is not spiritually dead, for that would make progress out of the question.
And if progress upward is denied--if the only progress possible to the
natural man is progress in corruption, then the whole doctrine of evolution
is gone.

This is why it becomes necessary for Canon E. W. Barnes, of Westminster
Abbey, when he accepts evolution, to reject the Bible. He says:

The inevitable acceptance of evolution means giving up belief