By William Jennings Bryan

Secretary of State Under President Wilson;

Three Times Democratic Candidate for President

I believe that this is a very good discourse on the Bible, evolution, and God. It brings up some very important points, it will leave you thinking! Ed.

I desire to present to you the greatest issue in the world. I am interested in the political issues, have been from my youth, but I have never discussed in politics any issue that approaches the issue I now present. I have been interested in international affairs for a quarter of a century, but no international gathering has ever had before it an issue so great as this question, Is the Bible true?

Do you know how much depends upon it? The Bible is either true or false; it is either the Word of God or the work of man. If the Bible is the work of man, then it is not the Word of God; and if the Bible is just the work of man, it is the greatest impostor this world has ever known. From its first page to its last, the Bible claims to be the revealed will of God; if it can be convicted of being a lie, it not only must come down from its high place to the level of man-made books, but it will sink lower than that. If it can be convicted of being an impostor, it never can survive the odium which that conviction will place upon it. But if it is true, then there is no other book to be mentioned in comparison with it. If it is true, then no guesses of any man can be substituted for the Word of God. Is it true or false? What does the issue mean? The Bible contains the conception of God that is held by the Christian world; if the Bible is not true, the Christian world has no conception of God.

The Bible gives us our own knowledge of Christ; if the Bible is not true, there is no Christ in the sense in which the Bible reveals Him to us. The Bible is the only infallible guide we have, the only one; if that infallible guide is taken away, we have no guide. If the parent cannot give the Bible to his child and say to the child, "It is true; you can trust it, you cannot be led astray if you will take it as a guide "--if the parent cannot say that to his child about the Bible, what can he say? Then he has no guide. That is the issue. Could there be any issue greater than that?

The Bible gives you the Christian's conception of God, the conception of God that rules the world today. Take away from the world the Christian's conception of God, and you leave man to search after God; but, can man, by searching, find God? The best evidence that you need divine truth and revelation to disclose God is that more than half the scientists of this country, according to Professor Leuba of Bryn Mawr, who deal with nature, do not believe in a personal God or a personal immortality; that is the best evidence I can give you that unless you have the Bible to reveal God, you are not sure to find Him. Not only, my friends, is it impossible for one to find God by searching blindly for Him, but it is harder for an educated man now to find God without the Bible than it was for the Indian to do it. I have been told that they never found a tribe of Indians that did not believe in God; but what the Indians could find, some of our professors cannot find. The head of the Department of Biology at Dartmouth recently told a body of students, in my presence, that he did not pray; he said he did not believe in revealed religion. But to come back to my question: Is the Bible true? We have a fight on our hands and I am on the defensive. I have been on the defensive all my life; but when I am defending a thing I do not wait for the enemy to come and attack; when I find there is to be an attack, I go over and do the fighting on the enemy's territory. The question of whether the Bible is true is the issue, and I am going to do the fighting on the enemy's ground. I shall not wait until he takes off his mask and comes out into the open; I shall shell him in the woods and make him come out.

I want now to present the case strongly; I will present it as strongly as I can; if you know of anybody who goes further, I will take what that somebody else says. The Bible has done more for the world than all the books that man ever wrote. Is that strong enough? If it were necessary to choose between the Bible all alone and all the other books without the Bible -- we do not have to take the choice, and we would not want to, but it shows relative values --I think it would be infinitely better to keep the Bible all by itself and build the world anew on it and let all the rest of the books go, than to keep all the rest of the books and let the Bible go. That is strong, but I have something stronger.

The Bible Account of Creations Most Important, Most Sensible, Most Believable Explanation. I now have a proposition, and I submit it to any professor in any school who is paid by taxation, and I submit it to any man who calls himself a Christian and then defends the modernist view of Christianity. Here is the proposition: I will give you three verses from one chapter of one book in the Old Testament that mean more to man than all the books men ever wrote, and we have all the rest of the Bible besides. Is that strong enough? The modernist who will not come out and fight that, might as well give up. Three verses, and they are in Genesis. I was speaking in Atlanta recently and a sophomore in a college there came to me and said, "Mr. Bryan, I can reconcile Darwinism and Christianity." I said, "You must have a better mind than Darwin then, for he could not." He replied, "All I have to do is to discard Genesis."

What are the three verses? First, "In the beginning God." I assert that that is the only verse ever written that explains creation in such a way that you can believe it and defend it -- the only one. We give the atheist too much latitude; we let him ask all the questions. Why? A five-year-old child can ask questions that no grown person can answer. Why give the atheist the child's task of asking questions? A question that requires for its answer infinite knowledge, cannot be answered by a finite mind.

Why not admit it? If we are to discuss Christianity with an atheist, he cannot ask more than that he and the Christian ask questions about: and if we let him ask the first one, we give him more than he can demand. There is no reason why an atheist should demand the right to ask the first question, but I will concede what he cannot claim and let him ask it.

What is his first question? There is only one first question. "Where do you begin?" My answer is, "I begin where the Bible begins." "And where does the Bible begin?" "In the beginning" -- where else could it begin? "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." We begin with a First Great Cause, all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving. We begin with a cause sufficient for anything that can come thereafter. Start with a God who is Infinite and nothing can be asked you that God's existence cannot explain. Having answered the atheist's first question, it is now our turn, and I ask our first question of the atheist , "Where do you begin?" And then his trouble begins. The atheist is all right as long as you let him ask question, but when you start to ask him questions, that is different. Where does the atheist begin? Have you ever tried to find out where he begins? He does not begin with God, for he denies that there is a God. He cannot commence back of that, for there is nothing back of God. Where does the atheist begin? He begins by assuming something that he cannot explain. If he starts with the nebular hypothesis, he assumes that matter and force were here, but he does not tell you where they came from or when they came or how they came or why. He just starts by saying, "Let us suppose two things -- matter and force. "If you let him suppose twice, he will suppose a third time without asking you and suppose that force working on matter created the world. That is the atheist.

I have as much right to suppose as he has; if the atheist has a right to commence by supposing two things that he does no explain, I certainly have half as much right; I have a right to commence my supposing one thing that I cannot explain -- God. I had rather begin with God and reason down, than commence with a piece of dirt and reason up. Which line of reasoning, my friends, do you like? Search all the libraries, read all the books, there are only two lines of reasoning in regard to the beginning. One is from God down, and the other is from inanimate matter up. Which is the more reasonable?

I affirm that there has never been proposed as a substitute for the Bible account of creation any account that is as reasonable, that is as easy to understand, that is as easy to believe, as easy to explain, and as easy to defend. Don't let them take away that first verse; it is the only solid rock there is all else is shifting sand. That is the first verse, the beginning of all things, including life. Where else can you find anything so important to man?

And the second verse of the three is the twenty-fourth verse; that is the only place you will find the most fundamental scientific fact. We do not call Moses a scientist, and we do not call the Bible a book of science, but Moses, in one sentence, stated a scientific fact, the greatest scientific fact in the world a scientific fact that means more to man than all the scientific facts that all the scientists have ever stated. What is that scientific fact? The law that governs the continuity of life. If life is to continue on this earth, it must be reproduced, and reproduction must be according to law, or lawless. In the twenty-fourth verse of the first chapter of Genesis, Moses states God's universal law of reproduction according to kind. No living thing has ever violated that law; no living thing in the animal or vegetable world has, so far as man can prove, ever violated that law. Every life is reproduced according to kind; even man, with all his power, has never been able to persuade or compel that intangible, invisible thing that we call life to violate the law laid down in the twenty-fourth verse, establishing reproduction according to kind. They have not found one single species that can be proven to have come from another. They have never found any kind of reproduction except according to kind; and yet, the only thing that has seriously menaced religion in nineteen hundred years is the effort to substitute man's guess for God's law, when there is nothing to support man's guess and every thing to support God's law.

The third verse of the three is the twenty-sixth, and what is that? It is the only explanation that can be found anywhere of man's presence here. No man, without revelation, ever solved the problem of life. Not one. No philosopher has done it, no scientist has ever attempted it. You will find the solution in the twenty-sixth verse, and there only. You will find that after God made all things, He made man not as He had made all other things, but in His own image. He puts him here as a part of the divine plan, and for a purpose; that is the only place you will find it. How can man, unaided from above, find out the reason for his own existence? He cannot do it.

Man comes into the world without his own volition; he has not a word to say about the age in which he will be born, or the land in which he will first see the light, or the race of which he will be a member, or the family environment that shall surround him in his youth. So far as he is concerned, it is a matter of chance. He comes by chance and he does not know, when he comes, how long he will stay. More than half of the little children born into the world die before their tongues can lisp the word "life" in any language, and the wisest of men cannot guarantee themselves for an hour against accident, disease or death. Do you think that man can control his own life? Think back a few weeks when a hundred thousand Japanese were ushered into eternity in a moment by the trembling of the earth; and only a few days after that twenty-two boys of our navy perished instantly as eleven destroyers piled one after another on the rocks of the Pacific coast.

This is man. How can you guess why he is here? But when you find that man is "the child of a King" and that the earth is his royal inheritance, then you know that his first duty (and it ought to be his greatest pleasure) is to find out what God's will is concerning him, and to do it. He finds that God has revealed His will to him; he finds that God says to him, "All this world is yours; even My sovereign will, will not restrain your will; do with these things just as you like but remember that for every ounce of your strength, for every atom of your influence, and for every moment of your life, I will hold you responsible. All I ask of you is that you obey the laws that I, in my infinite wisdom, have made for your happiness laws wiser than man can make for himself, laws that link his happiness to his virtue and his prosperity to his righteousness laws that make it possible for him to rise up to and live upon that exalted plane to which I call my children."

Here are the three verses; the first one gives us the origin of life; the second one gives us the law governing life's continuity; and the third one gives us the explanation of man's presence here. You can not find this anywhere else. Search your libraries, read your books, and among all the things that man has said, you cannot collect from them all anything equal in importance to man to that which you find in three verses of one chapter of Genesis, and we have all the rest of the Bible besides.

We have the record of God's dealing with a chosen people. We have the inspiration of the prophets; we have the consolation of the Psalms; and then we have the New Testament with the story of Jesus and His atoning blood; we have a code of morality that will endure for all time; we have a Gospel that is for every creature; and then we have Christ's promise, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world," and His assurance that in His hand is all power in Heaven and in earth. That is your Bible, and that is being attacked today. It ought to be defended by everybody who calls himself a Christian. Organic Evolution: Enemy of the Bible

What is it that is attacking the Bible today? There is only one thing. The Bible need not be afraid of crime, because the more crime there is, the more the need for the Bible. The Bible need not be afraid of sin, for the more sin there is, the more we need the Bible standard by which to measure it and condemn it. What is it that troubles Christianity today? It is a scientific excuse for discarding God, and for discarding His Word, and for discarding Christ. That is the only thing there is, and it is a menace to the Christian religion of the world; it is also a menace to society, and to civilization. That is why I am defending the Bible. It gives us that upon which the world must build, and there is no hope for the future if we give it up. I want, therefore, to speak of evolution, the idea that man, instead of being created by Almighty God by a separate act and put here for His purpose, is just an animal developed

Evolution is an hypothesis. What does hypothesis mean? Sometimes people use a word they do not understand and quit using it when they find out what the word means. I heard of a man whose wife called him a model husband. He thought it a great compliment, and quit work and went around among his neighbors bragging about it, until finally he came to one with a dictionary. This neighbor said, "It is nothing to brag about," and suggested that he look it up in the dictionary. So he went to the dictionary to find out what it meant, and what do you suppose he found? He found that the word "model" means a "small imitation of the real thing," and then he went back to work! Look up the word hypothesis. It means guess -- guess. It is a scientific synonym for "guess." If Darwin had called it a guess, it would not have lived a year; but guess is to small a word for a "scientist," so he blew into it and inflated it until it had four syllables in it, "hypothesis," and then because it was empty it would float on the surface of public opinion. An hypothesis is all right if you know how to use it, so is a guess. We all have to guess; I suppose there is not a business that does not have more or less guessing in it. The farmer has to guess what kind of weather there is to be, when he plants his crops. If he guesses right, he has a good crop; if he guesses wrong, he may lose. And so with the water witch; you have seen the water witch take a forked switch and go around and watch it until it turns down; then he says, "I guess it is there"; and you dig a hole but it is not a well until you find the water. It is just a guess until it is verified. Have you ever been out in the mountains where they were looking for precious metal? The prospector looks around for the signs, then says, "I guess there is ore there. " And they dig a hole, but it is not a mine until they find the precious metal. And so it is all right for the scientist to guess. He can guess so and so, but it is just a guess until he finds it is true. A Sensible Person Without College Education Can Judge Evolution Guess. We have not a word to say against any truth that there is in the world. Do no let them deceive you; although if you take away their powers to deceive, you destroy their only chance to defend themselves. I have been in this fight for some time and I have never found an opponent who dared to state the real issue and state his side of it. He deceives you if he cannot say anything else, he questions your intelligence. I have had more epithets hurled at me since I entered this fight than I ever had in politics. I ran for president three times and supposed I had a complete collection of all the hard things that could be said, but I never had any hard things said about me until the preachers and professors got after me.

We have a Presbyterian paper down East called The Continent. The editor was a very good friend of mine until he found that I would not let my ancestry be hung on his family tree. When he found that I denied having any brute blood in my veins and took the Bible doctrine instead of the evolutionary hypothesis, he wrote an editorial about me in which he said that I never was rated as high intellectually as I was morally. Think of it! Even the Republicans did not question my intelligence. I had to wait for a Presbyterian to do that; and not a single one of these men has referred to me who did not discount my intelligence. Well, I had rather have one of these professors attack my intelligence and say I am not an educated man than have him make any other charge against me; that is the only charge he could make that I could defend myself against in language that he can understand, for when they say I am not educated I can prove my education by the same documents that they prove theirs- -degrees and diplomas. I have them to burn. It is not my fault either: my education was a gift, not an accomplishment. If I had lived a thousand years ago, I suppose I would not have been educated the average man was not, and I have never claimed to be more than an average man. If I had been born in some sections of this country and in some families, I might not have been educated; but it just happened that my father was a classical scholar. He had to work his way through school and college. They sent me, but he worked his way, and he did not graduate until he was twenty-seven; but when he did graduate he had the highest education his generation afforded. He was an enthusiastic scholar and believed in education; when he wrote his will, every member of his family was to have the highest education obtainable, no matter whether it left any estate for anybody after that or not. My mother shared his enthusiasm; I never decided to go to college at all; they decided and told me I was going. I did not select my course they selected it and informed me what course I would take. I did not decide when I would go they got me ready and said, "Now is the time to start."

I had two years in a preparatory school and then four years in college and two years in law school, and my father had planned a period of study in Europe- -that is the kind of family I was born into. When I was about to start to school at fifteen, my father gave me two books, the biggest books in his library, and said, "William, these are yours." One was a Greek lexicon and the other a Latin lexicon. He said, "You will use the Greek lexicon six years and the Latin five years"-- and I did. I studied everything they put into that classical course, and they put in everything they could think of. I graduated, had the valedictory, and they gave me a piece of paper saying, "You are a Bachelor of Arts." Three years afterwards, I went back and made another speech and they made me a Master of Arts. I went to law school, studied everything they had there, and they gave me a piece of paper, saying, "You are a Bachelor of Law." Then four state universities sent for me and gave me a piece of paper, saying, "You are a Doctor of Laws." Three colleges have done the same thing. I have these degrees; I do not use them, but if these fellows do not quit calling me an ignoramus, I am going to have my card printed --name in full William Jennings Bryan and I am going to do what I never did before. I have never put a letter of the alphabet after my name, but I am going to add three letters-seven times--twenty-one letters; not to speak of the others. I will run the letters up and down the card, and then I will challenge any son of an ape to match cards with me.

If one must be educated to understand evolution, I am qualified, but it is not necessary that one shall graduate from college. Do you know that only about one of fifty of our boys and girls ever go to college or universities? Do you know that only about one in ten, taking the country over, goes to a high school? Do you mean to say that nobody can understand where he comes from unless he goes to college and gets a degree somewhere and calls himself a doctor or something? No, God was not so unkind to us as that. I want to show you that you can understand. We have juries and we do not require that they shall have diplomas. There is not a statute in this Union that requires that a man shall be a college graduate or even a high school graduate to serve on a jury, and yet those juries decide all the great questions. They decide the questions between the millionaire and the pauper; they decide the question of marriage and divorce, descent of property and the care of children. We use the experts; the expert gives his testimony, but the jury decides. We are not going to turn over the thinking of this country to a scientific soviet of five thousand members and let them tell us what to think about our ancestry or about our God.

Professor Leuba in his book entitled, Belief in God and Immortality, says that he found 5,500 names of scientists in a book which, he affirms, contained the name of practically every scientist of prominence. Just before Professor Steinmetz's death, I met him on the train coming down the west. He said that he did not think we had more than five thousand scientists in the United States.

The American Society for the Advancement of Science only claims eleven thousand, and they have no examination. One in one hundred of our people are graduates, and one graduate in one hundred is a scientist one in ten thousand of the population and yet they set themselves up and attempt to dictate the education and religion of the United States. The Silly Guesses on Which Evolution Dogma Is Based.

I want to show you that you do not have to be a scientist to be able to trace your ancestry; you can do it just as well as a college graduate can. I will give you the facts and you may sit in judgment on them. Some of these scientists are trying to get rid of Darwin; they even say that Darwin never taught that man came from the monkeys. I went down to speak in New Haven a year ago and a young student, a son of a college mate of mine, came to me and said that his professor said that Darwin never taught that men came up from the monkey. Ford's paper sent out a questionnaire to about twenty prominent educators, and eighteen out of the twenty said that Darwin never taught that man came up from the monkey. In a speech at Dartmouth not long ago I told them about this dispute and asked, "Is there anybody in this audience who says that Darwin never taught that man came up from a monkey?" One professor held up his hand. I said, "I thought there might be one, so I brought this book from your library." I read to him where Darwin, in his Descent of Man, went back as far as he could go to find life and then traced it down to the present, according to his guess. (He uses the phrase, "We may well suppose," eight hundred times in two volumes.) When he gets to the place where the tree branches into the Old World monkeys, he makes man come from the Old World monkey he does not even allow us to come from a good American monkey. Then I read where Darwin said that we probably came from the chimpanzee rather than the gorilla. Why? Because the gorilla is so big and strong that it would not be likely to cultivate the social instincts; it was therefore more likely that we came from one of the weaker branches. Then he located us in Africa; our first parents, he thought, were there. "But," he says "why speculate?" If he had thought of that before he wrote, he would not have written anything, because it is all speculation.

What was Darwin's guess? That about two hundred millions of years ago one or a few germs appeared on this planet. When he first announced his hypothesis, he said God put them here, but he was a Christian then; when he became an agnostic, he apologized and changed it and said they "appeared." That does not indicate where they came from: that pleased the atheist just as much as the theist because it does not indicate source. Two hundred millions of years ago that was his guess; but his son's guess was that it was only fifty-seven millions. What would you think of a son who would knock seventy-five percent of his father's guess out at one blow? Some say it was twenty-four million years, some say three hundred million years. You can see how little accuracy has to do with this guessing when one can guess ten times as long as another and be equally credible as a guesser. Darwin said one or a few germs appeared; some say only one.

I read a book on evolution not long ago in which the author said that everything in the animal world came originally from one germ; and he spoke of it as positively as if he had been there. He said everything in the vegetable world came from one germ. There were two germs; from one all the animals came, and from the other all the vegetables came. He said that back of those two germs was one germ from which the two came. What a time in which to live, when one germ had two children, one an animal and the other a vegetable!

Darwin guessed that two hundred millions of years ago one or a few germs appeared on the planet and then, according to Darwin, they immediately went to work reproducing. Not quite according to kind, but with just enough variation to give us finally between two and three million. I am so conservative that I prefer the lowest estimate a million species in the animal and vegetable world but according to Darwin's guess, everything we now see came from one or a few germs of life. All the evolutionists believe this, whether they call themselves Christian, theist, or atheist. Our answer is that if it were true that all species came by slow development from one or a few germs, every square foot of the earth's surface would teem with evidences of change. If everything changed, we ought to find evidence of it somewhere, but because it is not true, never was true and seemingly cannot be true, they have not found one single thing, living or dead, in process of change. They have examined millions of specimens, from insects so small that you have to look at them with a microscope, up to mammals, but everything is perfect.

They have not found one in process of change, and they have not been able to show that a single species ever came from another. Darwin said so while he lived and expressed surprise that, with two or three million species, they had not found a single one that they could trace to another; but he thought we should accept his hypothesis, even though the "missing links had not been found" not the missing link, but the missing links (plural) had not been found. If we have a million different species, we must have at least a million connecting links, one to link each species to another, but a scientist, speaking in London not long ago, said that if evolution were true, it would not be one link between two species, but there would be a million links between two species, and yet, with a million times a million links that must have existed, if evolution be true, they have not found a single link.

Aside from the absence of proof, there is positive proof that there is no internal and eternal urge in nature no pushing power that raises anything to a higher place. Chemistry would find evolution if there were such a thing in nature, but chemistry has not found it and it is not there. All the formulas of chemistry are exact and unchanging. Water, for instance, was here before any form of life appeared. Water has not changed and nothing else has changed, so far as we can learn from nature.

Our first objection to Darwinism is that it is not true, I may add here, so I will not have to refer to it again, that I am answering theistic evolution as well as atheistic evolution; I do not make any difference between them. The evolutionists do themselves, but it is not much of a difference, for the theistic evolutionist and the atheistic evolutionist walk along hand in hand until they reach the beginning of life. They are nearer together than either one of them is to the Christian and they think more of each other than they do of the Christian. They travel together back to the beginning of life. When they get there, they politely separate; the theistic evolutionist affectionately bids his companion good bye and says, "At this point I must assume the existence of a God."

I am not afraid of an atheist; the atheist is not doing much harm, because when a man denies the existence of God, he puts himself outside the pale of reason. A man who can look at this universe and not believe that a God made it, cannot impress many people with the weight of his arguments. I don't worry about them; the man I am afraid of is the theistic evolutionist, who says he believes in God but leads the student who trusts him and follows him back step by step, until God is out of sight. He deceives the student; he tells him he does not have to give up God; that evolution is God's plan and a more sublime plan. And yet, when he gets to the beginning of evolution he has put God so far away that He has no influence on the life. I regard theistic evolution as simply an anesthetic which deadens the pain while atheism removes the religion. The theistic evolutionists are the ones who are doing the harm. No preacher can stand behind the pulpit and deny the existence of a God; but some stand behind the pulpit and preach things that cannot be true if the Bible is true. By concealing their real beliefs they can draw their salaries and impair the spiritual life of members and destroy evangelism among the churches.

The first objection to evolution is that it is not true; but that is not all. There are many things that are not true that you need not bother about. If I had tried to give my attention to everything that I have seen that I thought was not true, I could not have made much progress; I do not attack a thing that is false unless I think it is doing harm. Neither do I attack a thing because it is ridiculous. There are many ridiculous things, but unless they are doing harm, I pass them by.

More of Darwin's Funny Guesses Evolution is the most ridiculous thing you ever heard of. This hypothesis of evolution is the funniest thing that has ever been brought before the public; the books that teach it ought to be in the library of humor, not in the library of science. Nothing in Arabian nights can compare with the guesses of these men, but they guess seriously and state their guesses soberly and want you to take them as facts. Let us look at some of their guesses. Do you want to know what Darwin thought about man's mind? He thought man's mind superior to woman's. Poor Darwin! If he had lived now, he would not have thought that. But he thought that and thought he had to explain it. What was his explanation? He said that, when our ancestors were all animals (that is Darwinism, that is evolution that our ancestors were all animals at one time) the males fought for the females and fought so hard for the females they preferred that it increased their brain power. There must have been some very attractive females in those days. I do not notice that the young men who are fighting for mates now increase their brain power very much during the struggle. But Darwin thought they did then, and that this increased brain power descended not to males and females both, but just to males and finally came down to us. That is the way we men got our superior brains. Isn't it great? Do you know anything funnier than that?

I will give you something still funnier. When he had explained about our brain power, then he undertook to explain how the hair came off and man became a hairless animal. He said that away back yonder our ancestors were all hairy animals, and as man is now called the hairless animal, there must have been a change and a reason for the change, and he thinks he found it. He said he was more criticized for this guess than for any other guess he ever made.

What was his guess? You will find this in Darwin's Descent of Man. I have never made an argument against Darwin that I did not find in Darwin's own language; there is enough there read what he says. He says back when all our ancestors were animals, the females (he gives the females credit for this the males increased their brain power, but it was the females who took the hair off) all agreed in preferring the males with the least hair all of them. And this preference was so deep-seated and so universal that, when they selected their partners, they shunted the hairy ones off to one side, selected the least hairy ones and, in the course of ages bred the hair off, and man became a hairless animal. That is Darwin. Do not laugh, my friend, I am telling you what these people say seriously; it is funny though.

Now why did he not think that the two explanations could not be true because each destroyed the other. If the males selected the females and increased their brain power, the females could not select the males and breed the hair off. But I will show the evolutionists how to harmonize them. Let us suppose, as Darwin did, that the males selected I suppose we may as well suppose as to let them do all the supposing let us suppose the males selected for three years and increased their brain power, and then let us suppose that on leap year the females selected and bred the hair off. Don't you see how easy it is? But if it is true that this change from hairy to hairless came from a preference so deep-seated and universal if there ever was a time when all the females agreed on anything so important as that; if they had this universal preference and it was so deep-seated that it bred all the hair off, may we not well suppose, that it would persist, that is, continue until the present time so that a baldheaded man would have an advantage over a man with hair, because of this universal, deep-seated and unconscious preference? That is Darwin.

Do you know how the eye came? Those who believe that God made man as he is, have no difficulty in explaining how this wonderful orb, the eye, was made; a God who could make a world and man, could make an eye, and He could put it where he wanted it. I think God showed excellent taste when He put the eye where He did. But the evolutionists guess it just came. They guess do you know what they guess? They guess that an animal that did not have any eyes away back yonder had a piece of pigment of freckle on the skin it just happened and when the sun's rays were traveling over the animal's body and came to that piece of pigment or freckle, they converged there more than elsewhere and that made it warmer than elsewhere, and that irritated the skin there instead of elsewhere, and that brought a nerve there instead of somewhere else, and that nerve developed into an eye. And then another freckle, and another eye in the right place and at the right time. Can you beat it?

According to evolutionists the legs came by change in the same way. This is the guess. A little animal that did not have any legs was just wiggling along on its belly one day, when all at once without any notice in advance and without any premonitory symptom, a wart appeared on the belly if that wart had appeared on the back, the whole history of the world would have been different, but luckily that wart appeared on the belly and the little animal found it could use that little wart to work itself along a little and it worked itself along until it came to depend on that wart, and that developed the wart into a leg. People can believe this who cannot believe the Bible!

You want my authority? Harry Emerson Fosdick, the man who is making so much trouble in the Presbyterian Church a man so big that it takes two churches to hold him he is a member of one and preaches in another a Baptist preacher in a Presbyterian church; in a little book called The Meaning of Faith, on page 128 says that the biologists tell us that if a man has eyes, it is because the light waves beat on the skin and the eyes came out in answer; that if he has ears, it is because the sound waves were there first, and the ears came out to hear. He says that the evolutionists assert that all the powers that man has, came in response to an environment; that if there had been no water, there would have been no fins; if there had been no air, there would have been no wings; if there had been no land, there would have been no legs.

Think of a man believing that but not able to believe the miracles! The light rays beating on the skin and the eye coming out why did not the waves keep on beating, until we had eyes all over the body? And why did the waves stop beating when we had two eyes? And, if it is just accidental, why did not one eye come on the chin and the other on the back of the neck? Why did the eyes happen to come in the place they did? And yet, Dr. Fosdick can believe this, but he cannot believe the miracles! I read a recent sermon of his in which he said that the Orient could not be converted by a gospel resting on ax heads floating and fish swallowing men. Jesus could believe the story of Jonah, and Jesus, I submit, is a higher spiritual authority than Harry Emerson Fosdick.

These people say there can be no miracle. And why? Because it is not in harmony with evolution; they disregard everything inconsistent with the hypothesis of evolution.

I have not time to give you any more illustrations, except to say that down in Philadelphia two years ago last November, a professor in a university of Pennsylvania delivered an address (I read it in the afternoon paper) in which he explained why we dream of falling. He said it was because our ancestors fell out of trees fifty thousand years ago; it made such an impression upon them that we still dream of falling. But, he added, we never dream of being hurt when we fall why? He had an explanation of that, too; he says it is because those who fell and were killed had no descendants, and that, therefore, we must have descended from those that fell and were not killed; therefore, we do not dream of being hurt. That is the kind of tommy rot that is being taught to your children in the schools, and it is taught as the truth.

We do not object to truth; there is no truth that can disturb Christianity; I am not afraid that any truth will ever be discovered that will disturb Christianity. Why? Because God stands back of all truth; therefore, whether truth is revealed by God's Word or by nature, no two truths can conflict. What we object to is not the truth, but guesses not supported by facts.

All this talk about evolution rests upon resemblance's; they can put us on inquiry, but one fact can overturn all resemblance's. I will prove it to you. Suppose a man is charged with murder, and ten witnesses, it matters not how many testify to resemblance between the prisoner and the man who committed the crime; what difference does that make, if the man can prove he was a thousand miles away when the crime was committed? All the resemblance's that all the men on earth could testify to would be worth nothing in such a case. One fact answers them all. And so, my friends, when they talk about man's resemblance to animals, the fact that they have never been able to trace one single species to another, answers all the resemblance's.

When I was at Dartmouth, the editor of the student paper said, "Mr. Bryan must meet the facts; he must not dodge the facts." My answer was that it is not so much a dispute about facts; it is a dispute as to the conclusions to be drawn from facts. We can admit every fact that evolutionists ever found, and dispute the conclusions drawn from the facts. Let me illustrate: A cow gives milk, no doubt about that, that is one fact; a coconut has milk in it, no doubt about that, two facts; the milkweed has milk in it, nobody denies it. Here we have three facts, three undisputed facts milk in the cow, milk in the coconut, milk in the milkweed. But suppose a scientist tells me that because there is milk in the milkweed, milk in a cow, and milk in the coconut, therefore the coconut and the cow must have come from the milkweed, I dispute his conclusion.

And so all their resemblance's mean nothing. There is a gulf between man and any animal a wider gulf than can be found between any two animals. Until they can bridge the gulf between two animals much alike, such, for instance, as the cat and dog, they should not tell us that man and the monkey came from the same ancestry. Man has mind and man has soul; and yet Darwin tries to trace man up from the animal, every evolutionist does, although many of them will not trace themselves along Darwin's line. They cannot prove it.

Why do we object? Because, when a man thinks he is a descendant of a brute, he looks downward to the brute for interpretations of himself. When he believes he was made by the Almighty in the image of God and for a purpose, he looks upward for his inspiration. Man is weak enough when he looks upward; we must not drag him down to a brute level

The Harmful Effects of Evolution Doctrine

Now I will show you the harmful effects of the doctrine that is the main reason for opposing it. Darwin started in life a Christian; his father wanted him to be a minister. Before he turned to scientific lines, he believed in God and the Bible. You will find in his Life and Letters, a letter written just before he died in which he says, "I am an old man and in feeble health." In that letter he says that when he went south on the Beadle he was laughed at by some of the officers and called orthodox because he quoted the Bible as an unanswerable authority on a question of morals; but at the time he wrote the letter, he said, "I believe there never has been any revelation." That discarded the Bible as the Word of God and, with it, Christ as Son of God. He said that when he wrote the Origin of Species the thought of a First Great Cause was strong in his mind; he says it was after that that it weakened slowly and with many fluctuations. He concluded, "I must be content to remain an agnostic, the beginning of all things is a mystery insoluble by us."

That is Darwin; he gave up his belief in God and became agnostic; he gave up his belief in the revelation of God's will and discarded it in order to keep his hypothesis. That is what Darwin did, and I challenge any preacher who believes in evolution to tell the story of Darwin's life and then say to his congregation that he can harmonize Darwinism and Christianity. It cannot be done; Darwin could not do it. Following his evolutionary hypothesis, he gave up God, the Bible and Christ.

I have spoken to you about Leuba. He sent questions to the scientists and on their answers he declares that over half of them tell him that they do not believe in a personal God or personal immortality. Then he selected nine representative colleges and universities and sent questions to the students. On their answers, he declares that fifteen percent of the freshmen only had discarded Christianity; but that thirty percent of the juniors had done so, and that, when they came to graduate, forty to forty-five percent of the men had discarded the cardinal principles of the Christian faith. His explanation of increasing unbelief was "the influence of the cultured men" under whose instruction they passed. That is what is going on in our colleges.

One of our religious papers reported the other day a survey of a great university; it showed that sixty-two percent of the men drank, fifty percent gambled, and only ten percent went to church. Another college president said that college boys do not pray now, that if you asked about a personal God, they would not know what it meant. And we find these people teaching in our universities, we find them even in our theological seminaries. They are undermining the faith of the students. A survey of one university showed that only twenty-five percent of the boys and girls who went from Christian homes to that university went back to take up work in their churches and Sunday Schools. We cannot afford to turn over our children to be educated, and have their hearts robbed of their faith and spiritual life. You cannot put enough in the brain of a man to overcome the harm you do him if you take faith out of his heart. And that is what they are doing. Modernism, a Denial of Christ and Christianity

I desire now to speak of the church. We have this controversy in all our churches. We have it in the Presbyterian Church. The other day they had 150 Presbyterian preachers who signed a statement, protesting against what the Assembly did. Remember this Assembly voted on roll call (they called the roll, I think, the first time since 1906) and by a majority of eighty substituted a minority report with only one person signing it for a majority report signed by twenty-one. They had packed the committee in order to bring in a resolution favorable to Dr. Fosdick, but there was one man on there whom they could not keep off, and he brought in a minority report. A majority of the ministers voted for the minority report and a majority of all the laymen voted for it, but if there was a prominent official of the Presbyterian Church who voted for it, I do not know who it was. We had the whole organization against us; and now we have a protest led by the men who were talking about harmony ever since they were defeated on that roll call, they have done nothing but disturb the harmony of the church. But not one of these men stated in this protest what he himself believed; these protesting ministers who profess to believe in the doctrines of the church say that they are not material. They act as the body guard, rear guard and front guard, for those who discard the Bible. We have a right to judge them by their acts rather than by their words.

When a man tells me that he believes in the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ and His atonement, then adds, "But I can fellowship with those who do not," I tell him I do not believe he believes what he professes to believe, for a man who believes the doctrines of the church cannot count as a Christian brother a man who does not believe in these things. The virgin birth is the doctrine most disputed; it is the test question more than any other. I have men tell me, "Why, I believe in the virgin birth of Christ, myself, but I do not think it is necessary that one should believe in it, and I do not object to extending fellowship to those who do not believe in it." I say "Your actions speak louder than your words." What is the difference between the Son of God and the son of a man? It is infinite. Any man who believes that Christ was the Son of God, that He was with the Father before He came down to earth to save men from their sins, that He was God incarnate in the flesh, that by His blood we are saved, and that when He had finished His work on earth and had offered His life in atonement for the sin of the world, He broke the bonds of the tomb, rose from the dead, ascended into Heaven, and now sits beside the Father a man who thus believes cannot acknowledge as a fellow Christian one who believes that Jesus was the son of Joseph, without any divine mission and still is in the grave.

If you want to know what modernism would do for the church, you do not have to look forward look backward. Do you remember what the Bible says of the disciples when Christ was crucified? They did not understand what Christ had tried so hard to explain to them, viz., that He would rise from the dead; therefore, when He was put into the grave, their dream was ended, their hopes were shattered and they were about to go back to the occupations from which He called them. Then something happened that? He rose from the dead; that one fact changed this feeble group into a group of martyrs; His timid followers (one of these denied Christ three times as He was on His way to the trial) were ready to die for the faith, and most of them did die for it, but they laid the foundation of the Christian Church. What is going to be the result if the church gives up the doctrines that made the church possible? We would have had no church if Christ had not risen from the dead; and we will not have His Church long if we put Him back in the tomb, roll the stone before the door and say, "He was just a man."

Christians Demand Simple Honesty and Fair Play Now, what is our plan? It is to take the mask off. When we admit people into the church, we have a right to see their faces and know their hearts. They cannot sit beside us cloaked and hidden and claim to be our brethren. These men who signed this protest, after refusing to tell us what they themselves believe, find fault with all we believe. There can be no unity and harmony between those who discard Christ and those who worship Him as their crucified and risen Lord.

And so in the schools. They misrepresent our position. We do not deny anyone the right to think as he pleases; we believe in freedom of conscience. We do not deny to any man freedom of speech. I will go as far as anyone on defending freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. If anyone wants to reject God, let him do it. If he wants to reject the Bible, let him do it. If he wants to reject Christ, let him do it. We will leave God and the Savior to take care of themselves against those who deny them; we will invoke no law to punish them. But we insist that in this country the atheist and the agnostic have no higher rights than the Christian.

When the Christians want to teach Christianity, they do not do it in the public schools and state universities; they do it in Christian colleges that they have built with their own money and support out of their own pockets. As long as the Christians must build their own colleges in which to teach Christianity, then, my friends, the atheists must build their own colleges in which to teach atheism. If they say they are not teaching atheism but only a scientific interpretation of Christianity, we reply that nine-tenths of the Christians believe the orthodox interpretation of Christianity, and if they cannot teach the views of the majority in the schools, supported by taxation, then a few people cannot teach at public expense their scientific interpretation that attacks every vital principle of Christianity.

These men are teaching the children in the schools that there is no such thing as a miracle; no such thing as the supernatural. And that means that Christ was not conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary; it means that he did not come down from Heaven to save men from their sins; it means that he did not rise from the dead. that is their scientific interpretation of the bible; they ought not to be allowed to do it and draw pay from the public while they do it. Boys and girls go to these colleges from Christian homes and Christian churches and return with their faith destroyed. There is not a Christian father and mother who would not rather that the child should be without education than to come back with his faith destroyed. The modernists do not understand that "out of the heart are the issues of life."

There never was a time when we needed religion more than today. We need it in the world; we need it in this country. Look at the sin and crime in our own country. I might speak especially of the violation of the Eighteenth Amendment, but I am speaking of wrong doing in general. I saw a statement the other day showing that burglars stole sixty-five million dollars last year in this country; it stated how much the pickpockets got, how much the train bandits got, and how much the bank robbers got. After describing the sums that these ordinary criminals got, it said the swindlers stole two billions and they were all educated. A man may pick a pocket without education, but he cannot swindle on a large scale without being educated. There are seven thousand college men in our prisons; how much good has education done them? The country spent its money to educate them, but their hearts went wrong, and their hearts took their brains with them. Brains that were trained for the good of the country were turned to the plunder of society and there is no hope unless we can get back to a religion that makes men believe in God and a future life and gives them a sense of responsibility. The world needs Christ.

To whom can the world turn? There is only One the One reared in a carpenter shop is the one hope of the world. Christ must save a world that godless intelligence has almost ruined. Do not belittle Christ as He undertakes the task.

Evolution, theistic and atheistic, carried to its logical conclusion, robs Christ of the glory of a virgin birth, of the majesty of His deity, and of the triumph of His resurrection. That kind of Christ cannot save the world. We need the full stature Christ of whom the Bible tells; the Christ whose blood has colored the stream of time, the Christ whose philosophy fits into every human need, the Christ whose teachings alone can solve the problems that vex our hearts and perplex the world.

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