Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Bib. Sac., 6:715; 29:282—“Man as a moral being does not tend to
rise but to fall, and that with a geometric progress, except he be
elevated and sustained by some force from without and above
himself. While man once civilized may advance, yet moral ideas are
apparently never developed from within.” Had savagery been man’s
primitive condition, he never could have emerged. See Whately,
Origin of Civilization, who maintains that man needed not only a
divine Creator, but a divine Instructor. Seelye, Introd. to A
Century of Dishonor, 3—“The first missionaries to the Indians in
Canada took with them skilled laborers to teach the savages how to
till their fields, to provide them with comfortable homes,
clothing, and food. But the Indians preferred their wigwams,
skins, raw flesh, and filth. Only as Christian influences taught
the Indian his inner need, and how this was to be supplied, was he
led to wish and work for the improvement of his outward condition
and habits. Civilization does not reproduce itself. It must first
be kindled, and it can then be kept alive only by a power
genuinely Christian.” So Wallace, in Nature, Sept. 7, 1876, vol.
14:408-412.
Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 149-168, shows that
evolution does not necessarily involve development as regards
particular races. There is degeneration in all the organic orders.
As regards man, he may be evolving in some directions, while in
others he has degenerated. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the
Atonement, 245, speaks of “Prof. Clifford as pointing to the
history of human progress and declaring that mankind is a risen
and not a fallen race. There is no real contradiction between
these two views. God has not let man go because man has rebelled
against him. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” The
humanity which was created in Christ and which is upheld by his
power has ever received reinforcements of its physical and mental
life, in spite of its moral and spiritual deterioration. “Some
shrimps, by the adjustment of their bodily parts, go onward to the
higher structure of the lobsters and crabs; while others, taking
up the habit of dwelling in the gills of fishes, sink downward
into a state closely resembling that of the worms.” Drummond,
Ascent of Man: “When a boy’s kite comes down in our garden, we do
not hold that it originally came from the clouds. So nations went
up, before they came down. There is a national gravitation. The
stick age preceded the stone age, but has been lost.” Tennyson:
“Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever
dragging Evolution in the mud.” Evolution often becomes
devolution, if not devilution. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the
Spirit, 104—“The Jordan is the fitting symbol of our natural life,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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