THE Scottish Protestant League, it appears, recently sent out a questionnaire to the ministers of Edinburgh containing the following questions:—1. Do you believe that the Bible in its entirety is the Word of God; that the Holy Spirit is the Author of the Book; and that it is all true from Genesis to Revelation? 2. Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the only Saviour of man, and that those who reject the Lord Jesus are lost? 3. Do you believe in the Biblical account of the origin of man, and are you prepared to withdraw the hand of fellowship from those who endorse the Theory of Evolution as accounting for the origin of man?” These questions appear innocent enough, but they have stirred up the wrath of the Rev. James Black, D.D., U.F. St George’s, Edinburgh. We hold no brief for the Scottish Protestant League, but one could imagine that it would be quite easy for anyone who believed the Bible to answer the questions. Dr Black tells us, in the September “Record of the United Free Church of Scotland,” of the awful effect the circular had on him: he “was dazed with its audacity and impertinence,” and he can only interpret it as “a bare-faced attempt to introduce the Fundamentalist Controversy into the home area of our Church.” As we read his opening paragraphs we were prepared to come across something terrible, but when we read the questions that stirred up Dr Black’s wrath it was our turn to be dazed with his audacity. Dr Black tells us that the questions involved in the Fundamentalist Controversy were settled “in Scotland fifty years ago in great bitterness and pain.” In this he is entirely mistaken, for though the manse of Free St George’s was a nursery for Higher Critics, as the biograph of Dr Whyte only too plainly shows, Dr Black is not to go away with the idea that the critics have won the day. Near the end of his article Dr Black unconsciously makes it known how this circular put him into such a bad temper, so unbecoming in a charitably-minded man like Dr Black, and so out of keeping with the cultured atmosphere of St George’s. The third question seems to have hit harder than the questioner ever anticipated, and Dr Black smites him hip and thigh for daring to put such a question. The plain reason is that Dr Black believes in Evolution, and though he makes a lame attempt to defend it as in keeping with Christianity, he has taken a heavier task on hand than he is aware of. “All that our Christian faith demands—and it is the message of Genesis,” he says, “is that God is indeed the sole author of the world and life.” Our Christian faith demands us to believe that God made man in His image, after His likeness, and that He brought forth the living creatures “after their kind.” This is the message of Genesis, and it is directly in the face of Evolution.
In the August issue of “Morning Rays,” the junior Sabbath School magazine of the Established and United Free Churches of Scotland, there is an article written by a child of ten years, under the title, “The Beginning of Man,” in which it is stated “we may have been descended from reptiles or mammals, probably mammals. They may have gone into the trees to escape from their carnivorous enemies. . . . At any rate, they developed into apes, etc.” This child has drunk from the poisoned waters, but it is somewhat ominous to think that a place is given to the paper in a children’s magazine. Higher Criticism and Evolution are boon companions, and the United Free Church opened its doors long ago to the former, and now it seems in its Church magazines it is welcoming the latter.