5. Geology has been supposed to prove that there has been a long
succession of distinct types of life on the globe in a very definite
order extending through vast ages of time. This is now known to be a
mistake. Most living forms of plants and animals are also found as
fossils; but there is no possible way of telling that one kind of life
lived and occupied the world before others, or that one kind of life is
intrinsically older than any other or than the human race.


II

In view of such facts as these, what possible chance is there for a
scheme of organic evolution?

Must we not say that every possible form of the development theory is
hereby ruled out of court? There can be no thought of the gradual
development of organic nature by every-day processes in a world where
such facts prevail. Rather must we say, with the force of the
accumulated momentum of all that has been won by modern science, that,
instead of the animals and plants on our world having arisen by a
long-drawn-out process of change and development of one kind into
another, there must have been just such a literal Creation at the
beginning as the Bible describes. As we stand with uncovered head and
bowed form in the presence of this great truth, it would seem almost
like sacrilege to attempt by rhetoric to adorn it. Its inevitableness,
its majesty, its transcendent importance for our generation, would only
be obscured by so doing.

The essential idea of the Evolution theory is _uniformity_. It seeks to
show that the present orders of plant and animal life originated by