Sermon Summary – Rev. Chaney “Evolution and Religion”
Church of Our Father—Unitarian.
Mr. Chaney preached in the morning a sermon appropriate to Palm Sunday. In the evening he discoursed on the relations of evolution to religion as they had been recently presented by Mr. Beecher. The texts chosen, rather as mottoes than guides for the sermon, were from Job 17, 14: ‘I have said to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister;” and Mark 3 35: “Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother and my sister and my mother.” Man’s spiritual and natural relations were indicated in these two passages. The coming of Mr. Beecher, and his discourse on evolution and religion was the foremost religions event of the times in this city. His clear statement of the much-abused and seldom understood doctrine of Darwinian evolution, and his frank acceptance of it, as the truth regarding man’s physical origin, was worthy of the man. He showed that he had the courage of his conviction, and was ready to stand alone, if need be, in his adoption of an opinion not popular in the churches, and often misrepresented as hostile to religion. Mr. Chaney took up the several divisions of the lecturer’s argument, and gave a running commentary upon them. He vindicated Beecher from the charge of loosely accepting the extremist views that go by the name of evolution, showing that be carefully separated himself from all the atheistic and agnostic schools. In modifying his view of the inspiration of the Bible to suit its repeated discrepancies with modern science, he only did what all prudent scholars in the church are fast doing for them. That difficulty removed, he took up the great essential verities of religion—God, man, design, providence, miracles, prayer, sin and immortality – and by a rare combination of spiritual and commonsense, lifted them all over the bar of popular prejudiced objects to evolution and left them to free to go upon their saving way.
Though asserting bravely at the very outset that evolution would work revolution in traditional Christianity and long current theology, Mr. Beecher did not full show in his own teaching a very new opinion or striking reform. The novelty was more in his illustration than in the doctrine. In this he failed to push his accepted theory of creation to all its consequences and implication and missed much of its finest service. Mr. Chaney showed what he meant by this criticism by explaining the new view of sin, as the survivor in man of passions belonging to hit lower ancestors – which elevation punished sin, he said, in the survival of the un-fittest. Other reforms in opinion equally radical and helpful were wrought out by the theory of evolution. Religion, then, in his opinion, had more to gain than lose in the establishment of this scientific doctrine, and certainly was not justified in opposing any probable truth, as it any truth could injure its cause.
The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, Georgia) – Mon, Mar 30, 1885 – Page 758
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