I have been astonished at the number and variety of sermons and newspaper articles that have been written on Dr. Abbott's recently published views about evolution and the Book of Jonah. From every point of the compass, and almost from ocean to ocean, I have received clippings from newspapers, religious and secular, sent by kind friends to show me what others have said while I was saying something myself. The variety of the views expressed in these clippings is more surprising than their number. Some are very sensible, but some on both sides are so far otherwise as to indicate on the part of religious writers and teachers a woeful deficiency in judgment and reflection. To judge by these specimens one would think that there is a deplorable amount of shallowness in the thinking of preachers and newspaper writers on such questions. To enter extensively into specifications would require more space than the [199] case would seem to justify; but I may be excused for noticing briefly a point or two made by Washington Gladden in a sermon delivered in Columbus, O., on Sunday, March 30.

      Referring to a large number of intelligent men and women "who are more or less familiar with the general results of modern scientific and historical and critical study," and to "many of the things that were commonly taught fifty years ago respecting science and literature and life," which these people can not now believe, he says:

      Thousands and tens of thousands of serious-minded, unselfish men and women have been driven from the churches by this failure to separate the essential Christian truth from the outworn theories with which it has been entangled.

      This may be true with respect to some of the extreme Calvinism once taught by the Congregationalists with whom Dr. Gladden is identified, but when he includes with this the long-established ideas of the origin of the world and truthfulness of the Bible--for these are the beliefs to which he more especially alludes--he was never more mistaken. If thousands and tens of thousands have been driven away from the churches in connection with these questions, it is the direct effect of propagating the very view respecting "science and literature and life," which Lyman Abbott advocates with the applause of Washington Gladden. It is the men and women who accept these views who are driven from the churches, and not those who oppose them. Who has ever heard of a man leaving the church because he still believes that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and that the narratives in Genesis are neither myths nor legends, but true records of actual events? No; the evil effects spring from the opposite cause; and Dr. Gladden, like a [200] passenger on a train when another near it begins to move, sees the wrong train in motion.

      Again, speaking of the critics of Dr. Abbott, he says:

      There are precious few of them who do not know that the traditional theory of the Bible is no longer tenable; yet their attack on him is understood to maintain that theory. It is high time for some of these censors to cease from their assaults on Dr. Abbott and the higher critics long enough to tell the congregation the simple truth about the Bible.

      This is all open charge of hypocrisy made against censors of Dr. Abbott, or at least against a majority of them, and these the more intelligent. A man of his opportunities ought to know that no cause ever wins by such charges. If he can not defend his companion in misery by argument, it would be more commendable in him to give up the contest than to turn to maligning the other side. The fact that a man is sincere or devout should never be used, though it often is, as evidence that his positions are sound or his arguments valid; it is still worse to parry the arguments of an opponent by charging him with insincerity.

[SEBC 199-201]