Fourth, the spirit of brotherhood rests on a belief in God.  We trace our relationship to our fellowmen through the Creator, the Common Parent of us all.

Fifth, belief in the Bible depends upon a belief in God.  Jehovah comes first; His word comes afterward.  There can be no inspiration without a Heavenly Father to inspire.

Sixth, belief in God is also necessary to a belief in Christ; the Son could not have revealed the Father to man according to any atheistic theory.  And so with all other Christian doctrines:  they rest upon a belief in God.

If belief in God is necessary to the beliefs enumerated, then it follows logically that anything that weakens belief in God weakens man, and, to the extent that it impairs belief in God, reduces his power to measure up to his opportunities and responsibilities.  If there is at work in the world to-day anything that tends to break this mainspring, it is the duty of the moral, as well as the Christian, world to combat this influence in every possible way.

I believe there is such a menace to fundamental morality.  The hypothesis to which the name of Darwin has been given—­the hypothesis that links man to the lower forms of life and makes him a lineal descendant of the brute—­is obscuring God and weakening all the virtues that rest upon the religious tie between God and man.  Passing over, for the present, all other phases of evolution and considering only that part of the system which robs man of the dignity conferred upon him by separate creation, when God breathed into him the breath of life and he became the first man, I venture to call attention to the demoralizing influence exerted by this doctrine.

If we accept the Bible as true we have no difficulty in determining the origin of man.  In the first chapter of Genesis we read that God, after creating all other things, said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.  So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

The materialist has always rejected the Bible account of Creation and, during the last half century, the Darwinian doctrine has been the means of shaking the faith of millions.  It is important that man should have a correct understanding of his line of descent.  Huxley calls it the “question of questions” for mankind.  He says:  “The problem which underlies all others, and is more interesting than any other—­is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature and of his relation to the universe of things.  Whence our race has come, what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature’s power over us, to what goal are we tending, are the problems which present themselves anew with undiminished interest to every man born in the world.”