WG-20-21. EFFECTS OF EVOLUTION
21. EFFECTS OF EVOLUTION BUT evolution is seen at work not merely in forming social organizations as a whole, but in giving ever new and different shapes to the sub-divisions of the social mass; as if ever striving after an ideal and ever failing of its realization. Thus, evolution is seen in operation when we examine the history of all social sub-classes, such as the industrial groups, the ecclesiastical, the military, the medical, the legal, the artistic, scientific, etc.
Take, for instance, in the industrial class, the method of cultivating the ground. Not so many centuries ago the rudest kind of an implement served the purpose of plowing the soil, while the gathering of crops and threshing of grain were carried on by hand in the most primitive fashion. By successive and almost imperceptible stages men have evolved classes of exceedingly complex machines, whereby plowing, seeding, reaping, binding, threshing, etc., are performed automatically and with a minimum of human intervention and oversight. In this “evolution” each new member of the long series has made its way by the destruction of what went before, a characteristic of evolution being that it leaves in its wake a constantly accumulating mass of debris composed of obsolete links in the series.
If we look along other industrial lines, such as milling, locomotion, printing, paper-making, spinning and weaving, communicating intelligence to distant points, etc., etc., we see precisely the same kinds of changes going on from incoherence and homogeneity to coherence and heterogeneity, accompanied by the destruction of forms existing at previous stages.
These illustrations from the industrial world are most impressive, because, in that sphere, evolution is most active at present; but wherever we look in the realm of human affairs the evidences of evolution are seen in the greatest abundance; whereas the moment we pass the line of human affairs we strain our eyes in vain for a scrap of evidence to show that the process of evolution ever had a foothold. In the literary field, for example, we can readily trace the literary activity of man from its simple beginnings in oral recitation and manuscript copies to the manifold present-day output of books, newspapers, and periodicals in infinite variety.
Pictorial art has had a like development from crude outline drawing to the many different forms and methods of picture-making which are in vogue to-day.
Likewise in sciences, such as chemistry, and in the practice of medicine, an evolution is constantly going on, of precisely the same sort as exemplified by the above illustrations, involving integration and differentiation, and constantly erecting each new set of conditions upon the ruins of the old. Or to look in quite another direction, we may see in the man-made religions of the world the same sort of development, from the simple beginning made by Adam’s eldest son, in presenting to God the results of his own efforts and rejecting God’s way of salvation by vicarious sacrifice, to the manifold and complex religious systems of the present day, all of which are mere ramifications or evolutions of the original principle adopted by Cain—namely, that man can do something to save himself, or to render himself acceptable to God. The only religion which, in all man’s history, has not varied, is that based upon the atoning blood, and which recognizes that man can do nothing for himself, but is shut up to the grace of God; for— “By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and by it he being dead yet speaketh” (Heb 11:4). The reader may push this investigation as far as he likes, and will find everywhere in human affairs, and nowhere else, the evidences of the operation of the law of evolution from the moment Adam and Eve applied their newly-acquired power of discrimination and their thirst for progress to the invention of aprons, down to the present moment, without interruption. In the sphere of human affairs the evidences of this process are copious and even superabundant, insomuch that a lifetime would not suffice to examine them all. Outside that sphere they are non-existent. Has this remarkable fact no lesson for the unbelieving reader? Gen 3:1-7 contains an explanation of this fact. Can any other be brought forward?