American Presbyterian minister Clarence Macartney was a prominent defender of orthodoxy in the 1920s. He was convinced that a culture indifferent or hostile to biblical truth was in grave moral peril. In his understanding, sound theology was the very lifeblood of society. In this selection from “Difficulty with Evolution,” he shows his high regard for the doctrine of creation and his alarm at its decline in the estimation of modern man. He blames Darwinism for erasing long-standing reverence for God and traces the ghastly lines of influence that secular humanism will follow. One may ask how Darwinism could have so great an effect, but it is equally fair to ask, “How could it not?” Ideas have consequences, and a worldview that offers a universe without a Creator is bound to send shock waves throughout civilization.

The world today, and a large portion of the Church, is running on the spiritual and moral capital of past generations. But even now we see much of the terrible fruitage from the sowing of the dragon’s teeth of evolution. We see it in the growing conviction among our young people that the moral ideals and principles of the older generation have no binding authority. We see it in the ghastly ravages of divorce, slowly disintegrating the American home. We see it in the appalling laxity of the relationship between the sexes, the sure forerunner of the breakdown of civilization. We see it in the nation-wide renaissance [of] paganism, the worship of pleasure and power, well-named in the Apocalypse, the Worship of the Beast. We see it in the almost complete de-Christianization of our great universities, a more truly pagan institution than which it would be hard to imagine. We see it in the sad secularization of our Protestant Churches. And if all this we can see today, in our own generation, a decline of faith in God and the hereafter, a crumbling in the public morality, then what will it be fifty years hence, when the leaven of evolution has had another half century in which to work? If this has happened to the green tree, what will it be in the dry? ¹

Footnotes: