The futility and absurdity of false systems do not prevent them from keeping their hold on men.
At the present day, men are apt to find it strange that the prophets should spend so much time, employ so many words, in confuting idolatry and showing it to be utter and absolute folly. To us of the present age the absurdity seems palpable and gross—therefore not worth arguing against. But systems of religion or of irreligion, whenever they have become established and have got possession of men's minds, are very hard to root out. Those who have been brought up in them, who have been accustomed all their lives to bear them spoken of as undoubtedly true, who have found all those about them of one mind respecting them, can with difficulty be persuaded that there is any absurdity in notions with which they have been from infancy familiar. The force of prejudice is in most minds stronger than the force of reason, and often renders men impervious to all argument which runs counter to their long-cherished opinions. Still, as nothing but argument can shake such opinions, it has to be used, nay, to be insisted on, to be reiterated, to be dinned into people's ears, whether they will hear or whether they will forbear. Many systems quite as absurd as idolatry have been accepted by men, and have stood them in the stead of true religion for centuries: some such are accepted even at the present day. An instance of the former kind may be found in the system of Democritus and Epicurus; instances of the latter in the pantheism of India and the more fashionable theory of evolution.
I. THE SYSTEM OF EPICURUS AND DEMOCRITUS. TO suppose the universe nothing but a congeries of minute atoms, existing from all eternity, and moving as chance directs, combining accidentally into forms more or less permanent and after a while falling apart, ungoverned by any mind, without object, intention, or cause; and to suppose life, intelligence, thought, the accidental results of certain positions or combinations of the atoms;—is a theory so intrinsically absurd and ridiculous, that it might have seemed impossible for the wildest fancy to have conceived it, much more of any man of sane mind to have persuaded himself of its truth. Yet this theory, elaborated by Democritus and Leucippus about b.c. 430-400, embraced by Epicurus about b.c. 300-270, and recommended by the genius of Lucretius about b.c. 75, became the favourite creed of educated Greeks and Romans in the century before and the century after our era. St. Paul found two sects predominant at Athens—Stoics and Epicureans. Epicureans preponderated in Italy, where their treatises are found to have been the favorite reading of the rich men who built their villas on the soft shores of the bay of Naples, at the fashionable watering-place of Herculaneum. Among the adversaries which Christianity had to meet and subdue, this Epicurean philosophy was one of the most formidable.
II. THE PANTHEISM OF INDIA. That God exists and nothing else; that he is "the One without a second;" that individual men are God, duplications of him, imagining themselves separate; that the material world is absolutely non-existent; and that all sights and sounds and actions are "illusions," cheats, nonentities with a semblance of being;—this, which is the creed of the educated Hindoo, is another belief so contradictory to common sense, that it might have been supposed impossible of acceptance by any considerable number el men. It is held, however, by thousands, who see no absurdity in it, and arc convinced that it is the only rational theory of existence; and, so far as present appearances go, there seems to be no probability that either Christianity or modern science will succeed in shaking the belief, however absurd it may be and however mischievous.
III. THE MODERN THEORY OF EVOLUTION. The spontaneous origin of life from inorganic matter, the development of protoplasm from molecules, of vegetable life from protoplasm, of animal life from vegetable life, and of humanity from advanced animals, which, though a pure hypothesis, has been accepted almost universally by physicists in the present day, is intrinsically as absurd and unthinkable a theory as either Epicureanism or Hindoo pantheism. But its absurdity is not seen by those who have been taught it from the time that they first turned their attention to physical science, who find it accepted by all their teachers, and assumed as a basis by every book that is put into their hands, who live as it were in an atmosphere saturated with evolutionism, and absorb it with every breath that they inhale. The time will probably come, perhaps after no great delay, when a reaction will set in, and the ability of unintelligent matter to improve itself and advance to perfection will be seen to be as absurd and as self-contradictory as the ability of images carved out of wood and stone to affect the course of events—to "do good or to do evil." Meanwhile, however, the existing false system is almost as impervious to argument and criticism as was the system of heathen idolatry. It has possession of the field (the so-called scientific field), as that had of the general field of human society; it supports itself by a number of interconnected propositions, no one of which rests upon any sure basis; and it does not even perceive the force of the arguments which are brought against it. Thus it may keep its hold upon men for some considerable time, before it takes its final place as "a chapter in the history of human error."
HOMILIES BY E. JOHNSON