AMERICAN ON EVOLUTION

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 847, 16 December 1929, Page 14

AMERICAN ON EVOLUTION

EVANGELIST TALKS ABOUT APE-THEORY ATTACK ON MODERNISTS Anti-evolutionist and antimodernist, Dr. French E. Oliver, the evangelist from the United States of America, gave a one hundred per cent, fighting address in the Scots Hall last evening. He had a lot to say against the ape-theory and the modernist tendency 'as preached by some churchmen. His subject was “The Doom of Protestantism,’’ and as a prelude he pointed the line of cleavage between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Churches. He said the Protestant faith stood or fell on the question of the infallibility of the Bible. Here it differed from the Roman Catholic Church, which stood on the infallibility of the Church. That Church had been placed above the Scriptures, inasmuch as it was, in the view of its members, the highest court of appeal. “As Protestantism die's, so naturally does Romanism increase,” said Dr. Oliver. "The Roman Catholic hierarchy laughs at the increasing number of modernists who are getting into our pulpits and scoffing at the miracles,” he added. He made it clear that he was not denouncing the Roman Catholic Church. He was, dealing with “the frightful crimes which are being committed within the borders of the Protestant Churches.” The evangelist felt it useless to expect the Protestant Churches to live when men were being made evolutionists by utterances from the pulpits. A most pathetic thing was the statement that it was time for all churches to go back to the mother church. The Roman Catholic Church would not recognise any ordained Anglican, Methodist or Baptist as a minister of Christ. “You are denied the right to stand as an accredited minister, but men all over the world, for the sake of cheap politics, will endorse the very thing that challenges their integrity as ministers,” continued the speaker. “It is not Protestantism, but cringing, cowardly, puppyism. Modernism has never produced anything but mediocrity.” Coming to evolution, the evangelist remarked that if the average modernJ ist were put against such a man as [ the late Mr. W. E. Gladstone, he would look like a hedgehog in an elephant parade. There was not I enough science on the earth to twist simple truths; Dr. Oliver declared. There was a dignity and glory in the creation which he could not find in being related to the brutes and beasts of the jungle. “The man who boasts of an ape’s ancestry is apt to follow an ape's morality—let that soak in,” said Dr. Oliver. The speaker then displayed a small piece of tusk or bone which he claimed had confounded the evolutionists of his country. Scientists, he said, had definitely identified one fossil bone as being 150,000,000 years old. He had exhibited the tusk at a meeting attended by a number of professors, and no one had been able to classify it, and although he told them the exhibit was only 30 years old. no scientist would volunteer an opinion. He denied the capacity of such men to talk in millions of years. "The attitude of the modernist is a gross ingratitude to Jesus Christ, who died to save a bankrupt race,” said the speaker. EVANGELIST WELCOMED Leaders of Protestant Churches welcomed Dr. Oliver in the Grafton Library Hall on Saturday afternoon. The speakers were the Rev. A. S. Wilson, the Rev. H. S. Conway, the Rev. A. A. Murray, Dr. W. H. Pettit and Messrs. A. W. Campbell and Messrs. J. Mannlns. Replying, Dr. Oliver appealed for | team work among people who were sincere. He said that at a recent Palmerston North meeting nearly 200 people had indicated that they had been converted during his mission there six years ago.