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| Darwin, A Sun of the 19th Century - Puck Magazine 1884 |
Deeply attuned to the progressive intellectual and social currents of the day, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher believed that religion must adapt to changing times. He extolled temperance, embraced women's suffrage, was a staunch abolitionist, and argued that Darwin's theory of evolution was compatible with the Bible.
The following is one of the famous "Evolution Sermons" preached by Beecher in 1885 at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York.
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| Henry Ward Beecher offering his “Evolution Sermons” across the science/religion divide to Herbert Spencer and other evolutionists - Puck Magazine 1885 |
From Henry Ward Beecher’s Evolution & Religion
SINFULNESS OF MAN
LESSON : Romans viii: 19–22.
“For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope; because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." -Romans viii: 19–22.
Animal vs. Spirit
If we consider man as a dual creature, — subordinately an animal, with a superinduced spiritual being, an animal at the bottom and a spiritual being at the top, and the two struggling together for supremacy, — the seventh chapter of Romans will be very thoroughly interpreted as a commentary on the facts set forth by science and history. If we enter into the eighth chapter of Romans with the understanding that men have advanced to a period in which the direction of the soul of God upon their souls has given them a victory over their animal nature, we shall begin to sound the depths of this wonderful chapter. And we shall see flashes of philosophy, strange to any Hebrew mind, strange in Paul's, — yet manifest here, revealing in some sort, an account of why the world has been made as it has been.
In that passage which I have selected for the gate through which to pass to my subject today, we have this simple declaration, that the whole of creation has been in a turmoil and trouble; that it was not man's fault that he was born “subject to vanity," to that change which carries him from stage to stage. It was a part of God's plan. The creature was made subject to diversity and change, not voluntarily or of his own will, but "by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope;" by reason of God, whose long foresight saw what was to take place, because the creature, — that is, man, the human creature, — shall be “delivered from the bondage of corruption."
Both Evolution and the New Testament show that sin springs from the struggle for the relative ascendency of animal and spiritual in man's double nature, and that the conflicts of life are simply the conflicts between the lower and upper man.
Mind Over Matter
Born an animal, he shall be delivered from animalism into the glorious liberty of the children of God; beginning at the bottom of the scale, he shall terminate at the top; beginning encircled by matter and largely subject to its inevitable laws, with instincts and appetites that ally him downwards, as well as tendencies that forecast an upward career, he shall pass through all these transitions, and in the end the human race shall be evolved into a glorious liberty. The beginnings are struggle and bondage; the issue is a sweeping and final victory.
This struggle for control of mind over matter is taught in Christianity; that is, when men are drawn up by the Spirit of God they come far into his presence as to be filled with his vitality. In a limited degree, what has been given to them is something of a divine power. Many of the mysterious and utterly unregulated spectacles which we are seeing now, which are without form and void, like the earth itself at the dawn of creation. This seems to be in that borderland of which Christ himself teaches us, asserting that it is in the power of men by fasting and prayer to rise to such a height that they can control not only demonic spirits, but external matter itself. We do not doubt that my spirit can control as much matter as I have in my body; but the control over matter exterior to one's self and not organized into one's self, is that a hard thing to accomplish? Christ says that it can be done. It can be done by those that rise, expanding in themselves to such a state that they are like God, and receive as it were a divine impulse and with it divine power.
Evolution of the Human Family
In sin lies the conflict between the lower elements in human nature and the higher, between the flesh and the spirit. An animal cannot sin. That is right in him which would be wrong in man. Appetites and passions, without reason or conscience, cannot sin. When social and moral vulnerabilities are developed, duty is developed, and conflict between the animal and spiritual elements; and sin is the disobedience of the inferior parts to the law of the superior. St. Paul's reasoning in the seventh chapter of Romans is conclusive to the effect that sin is the persistence of animal passions against the control of the moral sentiments.
This demonstrates that man is, and always has been an unfolding creature, beginning at simple and going towards the complex, beginning at the little and gathering and gaining more and more. In this evolution of the human family each step higher leaves it inferior to the station above.
History of the Human Race
Going forth with aspirations for the performance of every moral duty, a fountain of benevolence, and coming home stained through and through with conscious selfishness; going out in the morning with the splendid light of love on your brow, and coming back in the evening sullen with hatreds, or quarrels; going out full of power and faith against the temptation of evil, and coming back feeling that you have been soiled by gluttony, by drinking, or by illicit pleasures--pleasure, not duty; pride, not gentleness; self-indulgence, indolence, jealousy, envy these destroy my purposes, and carry me, like insidious currents, out of the course.
Is this history of man not taking place now? Has it not been his history since the beginning? In the development along that middle line where the animal man meets the spiritual man, there is an eternal storm, a cloud that never blows away, and thunder that never dies out of the horizon of time. Is this not confirmed, not only by this generally misunderstood voice of history but has it not been so from the very beginning?
"You have inherited from Adam a corrupt nature,” you may justly rise up and say, “I have not; I inherited from my father and mother as pure a nature as ever descended to a child. No drop of Adam's bad blood has come through to me.” But if I say to you, “God has made man a progressive creature, beginning at the very bottom, on the line of the material, first the animal, then the social, then the intellectual, the æsthetic, the spiritual; and every one of you should live so as to travel on and up; but you have not done it; you are living in the lower portions of your nature; you are not acting becomingly to yourself or your Creator”- if I say this, there is not a man here who can or will deny it.
Natural Selection Favors Repentance
The doctrine of sin, as reflected in the philosophy of Evolution, will carry more power, and have more effect upon the conscience and the aspirations of men, and upon the desires for a higher and better life, than any other. It will explain to them the road by which they are to travel, and the directions they are to take, away from appetites and passions, and will enable them to live more and more perfectly in the higher ranges of emotion and moral sensibility.
So, then, the Evolutionary philosophy expounds and fortifies the grand requirement on which Christ began his ministry — Repentance. To repent implies universally the need for repentance. That remains; but all those things that have been hinged upon this doctrine, to perplex and to make men revolt from it, will be purged away in the future. We shall simply have a clearer and better view of the indubitable fact that all mankind are sinful; that they need to cease to do evil and learn to do well.
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| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher |