Church History - Part 8

You are listening to David Porson podcasts. This is a series of 11 talks covering church history. Part 8, 1850 to 1900, watch the Holy Spirit did. The great men of God Joshua was dying and he said to the people of Israel this, "I am about to go the way of all the earth and you know in your heart and souls all of you that not one thing has failed of all the good things which the Lord your God promised concerning you." Now he then called together all the tribes of Israel at check them and chapter 24 of the book of Joshua describes what this dying men said to all those who had gathered. Chapter 24 of the book of Joshua. Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to check him and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges and the officers of Israel and they presented themselves before God. And Joshua said to all the people, "Thus says the Lord the God of Israel, your fathers lived evoked beyond the Euphrates, terror the father of Abraham and Nehaw. And they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the river and led him through all the land of Kaylin and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac and to Isaac I gave Jacob and he saw and I gave he saw the hill country of Seah to possess but Jacob and his children went down to Egypt. And I sent Moses and Aaron and I played Egypt with what I did in the midst of it and afterward I brought you out. Then I brought your fathers out of Egypt and you came to the sea. And the Egyptians pursued your fathers with chariots and horsemen to the red sea. And when they cried to the Lord he put the darkness between you and Egyptians and made the sea come upon them and cover them and your eyes saw what I did to Egypt and you lived in the wilderness a long time. Then I brought you to the land of the Amorites who lived on the other side of the Jordan. They fought with you and I gave them into your hand and you took possession of their land and I destroyed them before you. Then bail out the son of Zipol king of Moab arose and fought against Israel and he sent an invited bailum the son of Beort to curse you. But I would not listen to bailum therefore he blessed you so I delivered you out of his hand and you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho and the men of Jericho fought against you. And also the Amorites the parasites the Canaanites the hitites the Gurgershites the Hivites and the Jebiusites and I gave them into your hand. And I sent the hornet before you which drove them out before you the two kings of the Amorites it was not by your sword or by your bow. I gave you a land on which you were not labored and cities which you had not built and you dwell therein. You eat the fruit of vineyards and all of yards which you did not plant. Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness put away the gods which your father served beyond the river and in Egypt and serve the Lord. And if you be unwilling to serve the Lord choose this day whom you will serve whether the gods your father served in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me in my house we will serve the Lord. Then the people answered far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our fathers out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage and who did those great signs in our sight and preserved us in all the way that we went and among all the peoples through whom we passed. And the Lord drove out before us all the peoples the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the Lord for he is our God. But Joshua said to the people you cannot serve the Lord for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God. He will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods then he will turn and do you harm and consume you after having done you good and the people said to Joshua and they but we will serve the Lord. Then Joshua said to the people you are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord to serve him and they said we are witnesses. He said then put away the foreign gods which are among you and incline your heart to the Lord the God of Israel and the people said to Joshua the Lord our God we will serve and his voice we will obey. So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day and made statutes and ordinances for them to check him and Joshua wrote these words in the book of the Lord of God and he took a great stone and set it up there under the open. The stone shall be a witness against us. So it has heard all the words of the Lord which he spoke to us. Therefore it shall be a witness against you, lest you deal falsely with your God. So Joshua sent the people away every man to his inheritance and after these things Joshua the Son of none the Seventh of the Lord died being 110 years old and they buried him in his own inheritance at Timnath's Syria which is in the hill country of Ephraim north of the mountain of G-ash. The last great sermon he preached. 1850 to 1900 was the age of women. It was reigned over by a woman who gave her name to the age the Victorian age and the period where going to consider tonight is really the reign of Queen Victoria. It was also the period of Florence Nightingale and many another famous woman. It was a church going era on a certain Sunday in 1851 a census was taken of church going in England and 40% of the population of England was in church on that Sunday an ordinary Sunday in the month of February. And I suppose that most of us realize that in the Victorian days far more people worshiped God than due today and we are a great deal to that age. A minister said to me a fortnight ago he had been in the church of England he is now Baptist minister and this is what he said to me he said when I made the change I moved from the Middle Ages to the Victorian era and I think I can understand what he meant. He had moved out of a denomination whose buildings were largely medieval or modeled on that style to a chapel or a denomination whose chapel is a largely Victorian and of course this was built right slap in the middle of our period. Our hymns of Victorian are buildings of Victorian and I'm afraid sometimes our outlook is Victorian but I think we can be excused for this a little because the Victorian age was undoubtedly the greatest age. In this country for the gospel and I want to describe why this was the age in which Britain was building an empire on which the sun would never set it all sounds a little strange to us today this was a day when Britain could perhaps be described as influence number one in the world this was a day when we counted. And this was a day when we influence the world for good in many ways because the Holy Spirit was at work in our land now I want to divide what I have to say into two kinds of chapters. First of all what the Holy Spirit did during these 50 years and second what the devil did during these 350 years and the second is one of the saddest parts of the story that I've been trying to unfold for you. But first let's look at the happy thing and looking at what the Holy Spirit did I want to ask what he did in the 1850s then the 60s then the 70s then the 90s and in every decade there was some outstanding work of the Holy Spirit for which we are still grateful to garden from which we still enjoy the benefits. In 1857 to start with the 50s revival broke out 1857 and the Holy Spirit swept in power and swept two million people into the church within a few years. Now it did not break out in England it broke out in America in 1857 and within a few years a million people in America had been converted and joined the church. From America the revival spread as a prayer fire does to Ulster in Northern Ireland and from Ulster it spread to England and by 1859 two years after it had started in America England was enjoying revival and in England as an America a million people were added to the body of Christ in a very few years. It's a very thrilling story and if you want to read about it, read the book. by Dr. J. Edwin Orl on the evangelical awakening. He got his doctorate for writing that up incidentally, but it's a wonderful account of God's Holy Spirit's moving in revival. Now the significance of this revival was this. For the first time, America was leading England spiritually and this has been a pattern since. For the previous 100 or 150 years, England took the initiative and sent the gospel to America. It was from England that life went across the Atlantic. Since 1857, it has been the other direction. This is sometimes resented in this country who say, why don't they stay and convert the hoodlums of New York and Chicago? Why send American evangelists over here? Funnily enough, the British didn't talk like that when they were sending evangelists over there and were so one directional in our thinking that we can't bet beyond the receiving end. But this is how it has come. And during the last 100 years, America has again and again stimulated our spiritual life. As during the previous 100, we stimulated theirs. And the 1857 revival started there, came through Northern Ireland, to England, and to Wales, and to Scotland, where wonderful things happened. Now in 1857, during the beginning of the revival, a 20-year-old young businessman was converted. And his name was Dwight Elmudi, the man I have already mentioned. And though he continued in his business for some years, he finally decided the Lord would have him go all out to preach the gospel. And finding this man who could sing called "Ira Dsinki," "Mudi and Sinki" set off on their travels. And I would say that in spite of the great things we have seen in this century, there has never been such a great evangelist from America as Dwight Elmudi in his day. And the results of his campaigns are with us still. I'll tell you more about them in a moment. Now that's what happened in the 1850s. Revival broke out, and it spread from America to Europe. Now the result was that in the 1860s, we had a crop of great men, men who owed their spiritual life to the previous decade, men who changed the course of Christian history. I just want to pick out three names to give you an idea of the quality of men that resulted from that revival. Number one, Dr. Thomas Bernardo. Dr. Bernardo was a medical man, training to go out as a missionary to China, but he never got further than London. Why? Because one night you remember he found a boy and said, "Why aren't you at home?" And the boy said, "I have no home to go to." And Dr. Bernardo was shocked and said, "But surely you have some home, no I haven't, no I have any of us, any of you, how many are there of you hundreds? Show me." And the little etching from the east end of London took Dr. Bernardo around the places, the warehouses, lifted tarp allens and showed him the boys. And Dr. Bernardo realized that God would have him stay in London and not go to China and meet the needs of those boys. I shouldn't think there's one of you who doesn't know the name of Dr. Bernardo. Or I shouldn't think there's one of you who hasn't heard of the homes he started for those boys, the motto of which was this. The motto was "No destitute child ever refused at Mishie." Or in popular language, the ever-opened door. Another man who was raised up by God in the 1860s, as the result of that revival in the 1850s, was a man called William Booth, who with his wife Catherine started something that is still with us to this day, the Salvation Army. William Booth was a Methodist minister, but by this time Methodism had got too respectable and was not winning souls as it used to do. And William Booth was so quick and by the revival that he went out into the streets and he got them converted. He preached, he would use any method, he would ban a drum, blow a trumpet, do anything to get through to people and get them one for the Lord. But this was not very acceptable to his superiors in the denomination. And they came a memorable conference of Methodism when William Booth was asked to stop this and not to do so much unconventional evangelism. And as he stood before them and waived a female voice from the gallery shouted "Never William, never." And Catherine really started the Salvation Army at that moment. They plunged into the east end of London and found indescribable need. About that time a great explorer whose name you know came back from Africa and published a book in darkest Africa, a year later William Booth published a book in darkest England. And the way out. And in that he uncovered the economic, the social and the moral needs of London. And he gathered around him a group of men and women and finally in the 1870s he said we must be an army for Christ and he organized this group as an army. With uniforms, with bends, with orders from above, with a rigid discipline. And he fought his battles. One of the great battles that I love to hear of is the battle he had for open air meetings. There were many local areas that didn't like open air meetings and one of them was a rather exclusive resort on the South Coast called East Bonn. And they didn't like religion in the streets. And so they had a battle or against it and that anybody would do it would be, well, would be taken to the police station. So the local group of soldiers of the army had their open air meeting and were taken to the police station. William Booth sent out an order to every available soldier all over England come to East Bonn and start an open air meeting. And every train that drew into East Bonn just gouged more soldiers and they had their meetings. The police station was full. They come in there to local school. They arrested more and they feel that. But he won his battle and East Bonn finally capitulated to the invasion of his army. So then he could go everywhere else and says, East Bonn doesn't mind open air meetings. And the battle was won. They were, they suffered violence. They were marked. They were misunderstood. But they went ahead. One thing that William Booth refused to do, which may or may not have been a mistake, I don't know, he refused to be a church. And that's why basically he refused either to baptize or to have the Lord's supper. Because his whole aim was to take people out of the streets, get them into Christ and put them in a church and finish with them then and let the church go on. Had that worked out, it would have been great. But of course it didn't work out the churches of his day as a century before in the case of the Methodist would not receive his converts. And so he had to provide fellowship for them. And to this day they have remained separately in their core, still without baptism in the Lord's supper. And it's interesting that I had a chat with General Coots, the present general just a few years ago, two or three years ago, and he told me that many offices feel that they should have these and that they're missing them. But they still haven't decided. They fully plunged into social activities and welfare work. And I would say that the outsider now knows them better for their social work than for their spiritual. But I believe that in the last 10 years, a new lease of life and a new approach to the problems and a desire to change methods of which the joy strings are a good example is going to use the army again in the future in a great way. Now the third man I'd like to mention from this period is a man called Hudson Taylor. All these great figures were thrown up by the revival of the 1850s and they appeared on the front of the stage in 1860s and the 1870s. Now Hudson Taylor, the date to remember there is 1865, I hardly dare to begin to give you anything of the life of this Yorkshire lad of his spiritual crisis on the shores of a southern coast resort as he battle with God and as God broke him and won the battle. Of this man who was so terribly troubled by the millions dying in China, even then China was a populated country and who went out because of that burn. Suffice to say that out of his work came the China inland mission which now a hundred years later is called the overseas missionary fellowship. Now the importance of that mission is this. It changed the pattern of missionary work quite decisively for a large part of the outreach into other lands. Two differences between his approach to missionary work and the approach of all the societies beforehand have affected everyone's thinking since. On the one hand he did something that was much broader than previous societies. On the other hand he did something that was much narrower. Now let me tell you the two things. On the broader scale he said I am prepared to have missionaries from any denomination in my machine. Now prior to that you'd have the Baptist Missionary Society, the Methodist Missionary Society, the Congregational or London Missionary Society, the Church or Church of England Missionary Society. They were denominational societies. Here for the first time was a new mission that was inter-denominational and broader in its basis. But the other thing that he did that was so outstanding was much narrower and is a thing that has caused a great deal of discussion and debate since and particularly now. And this was concerning the finance and the recruits. Prior to that, the need for money and recruits was always shared with the church at large and the whole church was expected to have the faith for the money and the men. So that the Baptist missionary society in India would send home and say to the whole church, "This is our need for money, for men, for anything else." And the church as the whole family of God would get under the burden and pray and seek to find what was needed. But from the start of the CIM onwards, it was decided that it was wrong to do this, that it was a breach of faith to do anything other than let the Lord know and the needs for men and money were kept within the machine and not shared with the church. In other words, the family that had to exercise the faith was now limited to those who were actually on the field or in the machine. And as some of you had on Friday night, Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, showing CIM's influence is exactly the same. Now in this sense, they were narrower, insharing their needs only with each other and the Lord and not with the church. Now we're not here to discuss the rightness or the wrongness of these decisions, I would say it's right for some to do one thing and some to do another as the Lord guides. But for these two principles and particularly the second, Hudson Taylor became nicknamed as a faith missionary. And the term faith mission came in at this point. I think it's a great pity it came in, it was a nickname, he didn't choose it and others chose it for him. But it implied that all the other societies beforehand were not faith missions. I would say faith was being exercised in a different way and they were led to this way as other societies had been led to the other. But from the CIM has come a whole host of other missionaries societies in the 1815, 1900 period, the Africa inland mission regions beyond missionary union and a host of others that you can mention. All of them were inter-denominational but limited their mentioning of needs to the mission and didn't feel free to mention the needs particularly of money to the church at large. Now that's the significance of Hudson Taylor and it changed missionary thinking in 1865 with the beginnings of that machine. Britain by the way during this period was still leading the world in missionary effort but was rapidly being overtaken by the Americans. And in the 20th century there's no doubt about it that the Americans are doing perhaps 20 times as much missionary work as anything that goes out from Britain. Now in the 1870s, in the 1870s I detect a movement for the deepening of spiritual life in this land. It started in 1870 in mild may in London where the Vicar was a man called William Penifede and he built a large hall to see 2,500 people and he opened that hall for meetings to make better Christians of people. And two years later he said to Mr. Moody, "Will you come over and preach for us?" And this was the point at which Moody and Sengi came into Britain. They came in 1873 and in that year, listen to this, they preach to 2 and a half million people in London alone. And that was without close television and without modern publicity agents and without any of the aids to large meetings that we have today. But they preached to 2 and a half million people in London in that year. They toured Ireland, England, Scotland and wherever they went, rich and poor, educated and the literate flock to hear this American evangelist. And we still use Sengi's hymns to this day. The music I think contributed as much as the preaching perhaps, the two were a perfect team. Now one of the results of that was that when Moody went back to the States, a group began to meet together to seek the spirit-filled life. And among them, a man who was the Vicar of Kessik, the Reverend TD half at Battersby and a Quaker called Mr. Robert Wilson. And they met together as a small group to be filled with the spirit. And out of that, the Vicar of Kessik said, why not have a convention in Kessik in the Lake District to help people to do justice? And in 1875, the first Kessik convention was held. Now you can go all over the world and you'll find this name. You can go to New Zealand and you can go to the Kessik convention. You can go to America and go to the Kessik convention. And there have been something like, I think someone guessed about 250 Kessik's, Kessik convention that have sprung up from 1875. In 1876, the next year, a group of Christian students got together in Cambridge and started what they called the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union, colloquially known as Kikyu. And if you've been to Cambridge, you'll know what Kikyu stands for and is. In 1879, or Kikyu, otherwise known as the Oxford Intercollegiate Christian Union began. And all over England, Christian unions sprang up. And ultimately became linked in what was then called the SCM student Christian movement. To those of you who only know Christian Union and SCM as two separate bodies, they originally were one. And the Christian unions met in the SCM. Now in the 1880s, the greatest thing that happened was that for the first time in over 200 years there was a new translation of the Bible, but unless it never proved popular and it's never really caught on. It was called the Revised Versi of 1880. And the Revised Version came out. Now I was fascinated on Friday night to see CT Sturds Bible, or one of them he had a new one every year because he used them up at that rate. And it was full of his notes and lines and comments. And in fact that book was the Revised Version of 1880, which he had used. But other things were happening in 1880, which concerns CT Sturds. In 1882, Moody went to Cambridge and people said a revivalist at Cambridge in that intellectual atmosphere never. It'll be a flop. But D.L. Moody came and tremendous things happened in that university among the intellectuals who were saying by this time Christianity is out of date, science has proved it wrong. And as the result of that two years later, seven famous students and sportsmen set off for China, among them the Cricketer, the Test Cricketer, CT Sturds. And so CT Sturds and all that is followed from his work and now the worldwide evangelization crusade with 1100 missionaries and its local headquarters at Bell Stroke Park. All that came out of Moody's visit to Cambridge ultimately. Now something was happening in America among the students at this time in Princeton University. In 1886 a student called Robert Wilder gathered another group of students around him and said let's pray for a thousand students to go overseas as missionaries to preach the gospel, 1000. And very soon they had got hundreds of students offering to go as missionaries. And they call themselves the student volunteer movement. This idea spread through the student world and at a meeting in Edinburgh in the next decade in 1892 the student volunteer movement was formally inaugurated with the motto above it the evangelization of the world in our generation. The evangelization of the world rather in this generation that was their object and very soon a thousand students were on the field. In 25 years 9000 students went overseas to preach the gospel, 9000 in 25 years and one of the leaders of this movement was a great man called John R. Mott. Some of you may have heard that name but he was converted humanist speaking by the brother of C.T. Stad. In 1895 the Christian Endeavour which it started as a small meeting in the congregational church in London became the world Christian Endeavour Union and another worldwide sweep of Christian activity was off. Now that's the kind of thing the Holy Spirit was doing in those 50 years. And as you would imagine out of this ferment of spiritual life there came hymns and preachers and all sorts of other things. Some of the greatest preachers came in this period. Charles hadn't spiritually was one. Keahade, the founder of the independent Labour Party was another great evangelist. And in the original Labour Party there were many many Christians as you probably know. Hugh Price Hughes, F.W. Robertson of Brighton and many another great preacher which maybe just names to you if that. But the hymns have stayed and as I've said already the hymns came from women primarily and this is why if you go to the average women's meeting in this country you'll find that they still use either sink as the relic than this number three. Those are hymn books written by women and therefore still for women. And still you'll find that this kind of book is one of the favorite books in women's meetings. Tari and Alexander were two more who came over from the States. Tari the preacher Alexander the singer. Another evangelist team came over and Alexander produced this as saying he produced his book earlier. Here are some of the hymns that came out of that period. Francis Van Elstein, that blind girl, wrote to God, "With the glory filled our our my life, praise him, praise him. Jesus, our blessed Redeemer, Jesus is tenderly calling, blessed assurance, Jesus is mine, rescuer the perishing. You know all those, don't you?" Francis Ridley Havagall, Master, Speak Thy Seventh Herewith. Lord, speak to me that I am His Speak. Take my life and let it be who is on the Lord's side. Cristina Rossetti in the bleak midwinter and none other lamb. Then we have a lady called Alexander once in Royal David's city. There is a green hill far away. All things bright and beautiful. We have Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stowe Stowe with thee, and a litigia wearing in heavenly love abiding, or my heart is resting. Oh my God, Aarebela Catherine Hanky, I love to tell the story. And all this even inspired the Prime Minister to have a go. And William Ewitt Gladstone was writing hymns. When you've got an English Prime Minister between cabinet meetings writing hymns, you really got something. And we've got one of his hymns in this very book, but I don't think it's very well known. It's called them, Where Are We? I can't even find it. It's called O lead my blindness, and I don't think it's a hymn you will ever have sung. I can't remember singing it, but there it is. And it was a great burst of hymns singing. When our it looked as if the church was going to sweep into the 20th century and make the world Christian in a very short time. And in 1900 many Christians believed the world would be Christian by about 1930 at the latest. They came into the 20th century believing the millennium was almost here. Such had been this flow of spiritual life from 1857 to 1900 that they thought nothing can stop the gospel now. Alas, the devil was very busy. And during these 50 years the devil had done five things which were going to bring the gospel almost to a standstill in some parts of the world. And we're going to help to kill the church in England to a remarkable degree. The devil was not going to sit and let this happen without putting up a fight. And though the devil's days are numbered, I do believe the devil is a lot so. I believe that he's lost the battle. Nevertheless, he's having a good fling before he lies down. And the devil was doing these things during this very 50 years. Let me just outline them briefly. Number one. From America, from the very area of America where the revival had started, he was raising up false cows who would come with a Bible in their hands to these shores and claim to be Christian. From the Eastern shores of America, this is what he planned. The Mormons with Joseph Smith's fantastic tales about finding a golden book which unfortunately the angel took away from him so he couldn't produce it later. The Mormons in 1830. The Seventh Day Adventist in 1831 the Spiritus in 1848. Christian science 1876, now nearly all of these cults and sects started on the Atlantic Sea world of America and often at the heart of them with a perverted view of the return of Christ. And you and I have to answer our door to brethren from over the Atlantic who are seeking to purvey this perverted Christianity. Now they vary. Some of them are much nearer to the Christian position than others. The Seventh Day Adventists are very much nearer than the Jehovah's Witnesses. By the way, I didn't mention them. They're the perhaps the biggest one that started up in this period. But the fundamental thing on which many of them fall down is this. They do not believe that Jesus is God. And yet they hold a Bible in their hands and can pick text out of it to bamboo, bamboozle you and think that they are the only ones who know the Bible. The only defense against that kind of thing is a person who knows their Bible better. And frankly most of their converts are made from church girls who have not had Bible teaching in their church. It's as simple as that. Now that was the devil's first fighting back. He said, "I'll fight you on this. Revival came from America doing the now send something else that will prevent what's come." And the last he's succeeded in many, many cases. You can find that Jehovah's Witnesses today in parts of the world where you cannot find missionaries. They're among the most cellars and ardent evangelists you'll ever come across. And indeed if I go to a door in a long raincoat and carrying a briefcase, I'll be certainly thought to be one of them. And we'll have to explain straight away this is the measure of the devil's mobilization of the forces at his disposal. And it is a tragedy that Sats Il is misguided. Now the second thing the devil did during this 50 years was to make the Roman church more Roman than ever and harden it in certain things. In the early part of the period Pope the Pope revived the order of the Jesuits which was a masterstroke and they established themselves in many lands. In 1850, 1896 rather, no where I'm at, in 1850 the Pope re-established the English hierarchy and said now we can pick up where England left off in the reign of Henry VIII. But in 1854 the Jesuits persuaded the Pope to start saying things about Mary that were not in the Bible. And in 1854 he said Mary was born without sin. Now that's what's meant by the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary and that was promulgated then. For centuries the Roman church believed that it was infallible but nobody knew where the infallibility lay. The church is infallible but where? And in 1870 the Pope called together the first Vatican Council since the Council of Trent hundreds of years earlier and almost shocked them all by announcing that the infallibility of the church resides in the Pope. And it was only in 1870 that the Pope was declared to be infallible when he sits on his throne, his cathedral and speaks ex-Cathedra from his seat about what we are to believe or how we are to behave. The funny thing is that not until 1950 was that prerogative ever exercised. The Pope said I can speak infallibly but he never did until 1950 when he proclaimed the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary namely that she went to heaven and ascended with her body. Now it is strange that they didn't use that and the reason why they didn't was because not all Roman Catholics agreed with it but he had said it and this hardened room and gave her a stronger desire than ever to bring everybody under the authority of an infallible papacy that was a stroke of Satan. The third stroke of Satan was in the scientific realm. Now I must be careful here I'm not against signs I spend as much years studying signs at the university as I did theology. But in 1859 a man called Charles Darwin who had been destined for the ministry, grandson of Josiah Wedchwood the pottery man and grandson of the man who first thought of evolution Erasmus Darwin who wrote about it many many years before and Charles Darwin was not original here he was simply producing his grandfathers scheme and ideas he published the origin of species. Just before he published it he found out that a man called Alfred Russell Wallace had published an essay on exactly the same thing and given the same conclusions and Charles Darwin decided to withdraw his book and let Wallace get all the credit however Wallace was a very humble man said no let your book go out it says the same thing and I'd like to guarantee most of you do not know the name of Alfred Russell Wallace but every one of you knows the name of Charles Darwin he got the credit for it because he his book went out but in this book he stated not that men come from monkeys if you've got the idea that Charles Darwin said that drop it because he never did say that his idea was this that monkeys and men have come from something else in common now that's a very different thing and it's very important to understand what he did say now it was a theory it was a guess and let me say it still is there is still utterly inadequate evidence to make this a scientific fact the tragedy is it's talked to our children has proved fact when it is still an interesting hypothesis and is nowhere near proved but what happened was this no I read Charles Darwin's origin of species or a digest of it a few days ago and this is how he finishes I see no reason no good reason why the view is given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone there is grandeur in this view of life within several pounds having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one in other words he believed in a creator and Charles Darwin was shattered When people all of the country says, "Char's Darwin proves there is no creator," he said, "I never proved that, and I never said that." I simply said that this was how the Creator made us. I do not rule out a Creator, but people began to say, "Well, if a Creator wasn't needed to make the various species, why is a Creator needed at all? It all made itself." And the view that the world created itself came sweeping in on this. No or less there were misunderstandings on both sides. This was seen as a direct contradiction of the book of Genesis, and a battle started which is most unfortunate. Neither side really understood what the other was saying. People said evolution has approved fact when it wasn't, and people said things that the Bible said that it didn't. And the result was there was a complete impasse. Only a few great Christians like Henry Drummond in Scotland tried to come to some kind of understanding that truth in science and truth in Scripture cannot contradict themselves each other because God is truth and He made both the world that science investigates and the Scripture that we read. Well, it's a battle that I'm afraid caused hundreds and thousands of people to leave the church. They believed that you couldn't believe in science and in Scripture. Thank God we've grown up a bit from those days and realized that there is a much more to be said on this. I then get started at the moment because it's a hobby horse of mine. Let's leave it and come to the fourth area of the devil's attack. But the third area was that the devil certainly got instilled into people's minds that you couldn't go on believing the Scripture without denying science or that you couldn't believe science without denying the Scripture. That is a false antithesis. He do not have to choose between two truths, truth is one, and whatever science proves are not just guesses or theorizes what ever science proves must line up with what God has said for God is truth. Now the fourth thing that devil did was to spread atheist and agnostic ideas. He did this through people like Thomas Carlisle who when he became an agnostic was training for the Church of Scotland ministry. He did it through such people as Mary and Evans better known for her pen name of George Elliott, the author of Mill and the Floss. He did it through John Stuart Mill and the skepticism at the heart of his philosophy. He did it through Herbert Spencer and agnostic. He did it through the Germans particularly through men like Schopenhauer, through men like Feuerbach who said that men has made God in his image and God is simply a dream. He did it through people like Nietzsche who said that the world to power is the only thing that drives men and that Jews and Christians have a slave mentality and the slave morality. It was on Nietzsche's ideas that Hitler came to power and built his life. And so many of these people came from Christian stock. One of the public lectures who went around England lecturing on atheism was a man called Robert Green Ingersoll. And he deliberately devoted his life to traveling around England and giving lectures on atheism and in those days if you wanted to be very naughty you went to one. Nowadays you go to a risque film in the West End but in those days you went to hear Robert Ingersoll and you were considered very daring if you went to that. He was the ex-certificate activity of those days. One day a great Christian saw Robert Ingersoll standing at a bus stop in the rain. And he went up to Ingersoll and he said, "Mr. Ingersoll, I have just seen the most terrible thing now." And Ingersoll said, "Wox that." He said, "I just saw an old lady staggering across the road leaning heavily on a stick and some young men rushed out and pulled the stick from under her and she fell and he left a flounder in the mud." And Robert Ingersoll said, "Where is he? Who did this dreadful thing?" And the Christian said, "It was you." You are traveling around this country knocking away the faith on which people have depended. And you leave them floundering with nothing in its place. It was a fitting rebuke about the devil was spreading these ideas. And one man who wrote in this period and published his major book in 1867 was a man whose a vowed atheism was to sweep religion out of a third of the world in the 20th century, his name Karl Marx. And the book does capital. And the sentence in the book which he borrowed from Charles Kingsley, the author of Tom and the Water Babies, was "Religion is the opiate of the people." And he saw that when capitalism went, religion must go to. And that book has been one of the devil's major weapons in bringing millions of people, a third of the world's population under atheists teaching. And the final weapon that the devil had in the most suckle of all. And the one with which he won the major battle in the early 20th century was this. People began to treat the Bible in a wrong way. And it's significant that the name given to this treatment was called criticism. It began in Germany, but it rapidly spread to English and Scottish universities. And the idea was that this book is nothing more than a human book. Subject to all the errors of a human book. Subject to all the mistaken ideas of imperfect human thinking. And that this book must be radically revised in the light of scientific and rational inquiry. What must go the miracles? Because science doesn't believe in the supernatural. What must go the predictions of the prophets? Because you cannot predict the future. What must go everything that is divine and in must stay what is human, fallible and mistaken? And some incredible ideas came out of this school. The idea that Moses never wrote anything has scribed him, that as I probably didn't, that all the books are in the wrong order and that in fact the first five books of the Bible were written last and the prophets were written first. And there began a spate of cutting the Bible to pieces and criticizing this and criticizing that, which crept right into the church. The devil knew what he was doing if he could shake people's faith in this book. He knew that he would have won a great battle and he did. At first the church fought hard. The man called Bishop Kalenzo was excommunicated because he said Moses probably never lived and Joshua was certainly a myth. He was turned out of his bishopric for saying it. Professor Robertson Smith in Edinburgh lost his chair of Hebrew in the University of Edinburgh for similar views. But they were the martyrs to a movement that became very widespread. By 1900 the professors teaching young men for the ministry had accepted to a remarkable degree, the critical school of the Bible, without realizing that these critics were not in fact scientific, but were reading their philosophical ideas into this book and that's the most easy and dangerous thing to do. It's easy for me to make up my mind first what I believe and then find it here. And criticize what doesn't fit in with my idea and that is what was happening. I'll explain how next week suffice it to say that when the 20th century opened the church, the man in the pure was thinking will get right through to our goal, the evangelization of the world in our generation. We'll see a Christian world in the next century as a Christian as a prime minister of Christian England said up and up and up and down and down and down. That's how the end of the 20th century. The idea of evolution was not just applied to the animals, it was now applied to men, we're getting veteran, veteran, better, we're on a moving escalator to utopia. And that idea did not finally collapse until the year 1914 when all the primitive bestiality of men once again reared its ugly head. And that idea that we were getting veteran, veteran, veteran that the new world was just around the corner collapsed in ruins with the shells of the First World War, but 1900 it was still held. Alas, the Christians had not realized how the devil had mobilized his forces and had them waiting. And they did not realize that church after church, chapel after chapel in this land would see declining congregations and would see empty buildings. Our men would go away to the wall and come back physically but not come back spiritually. Our preacher after preacher would lose confidence in this book and have nothing worth preaching. Our even views of Christ and the gospel would bid our looted until there was nothing much left. This they did not realize. And this part of the story I must leave for my final sermon in this series which will be a month to night. We shall have a Carol service next week and then another service the week after when I hope to preach on astrology and the star of Bethlehem. And then a baptismal service on January the 7th. But generally the 14th I hope to bring the story right up to date from the year 1900 to the year 1967. And just say a few words about what will happen to the church between 1967 and 1967. and 2000, if the Lord carries. Let us pray. Oh God, I have not father we realize tonight we are in a spiritual battle. And our hearts are set as we realize that the great spiritual momentum of last century has to such a large degree in lust that Satan has been able to undo so much. We realize as we've sung the hymns tonight and thought about the great men who lived there in the movements they began. How much has gone wrong? How much has gone? Lord, we pray that you will revive your work. We pray that your Holy Spirit may once again sweep through us. Lord, begin in us. Do and you work among us yet. Lord, do not write off this nation. A nation that has had all these privileges. A nation that has known all this. And yet a nation that is now so largely turning away from it all. Lord, have mercy upon us. In the name of Jesus, we seek to bind the devil. We are not ignorant of his devices. We've seen just how subtly he can use even human knowledge to fight against the gospel. We've seen how he can dress up as an angel of light and come to us with a Bible in his hand. O Lord, put us on our guard. Help us to be clothed in the whole armor and help us to fight and having done all to stand. Help us to preach the gospel that the Almighty preached. Help us to offer the Christ that Hudson Taylor offered. Help us to have the compassion that Thomas Bernardo had. Help us to be Christians in our days they were in theirs. And this we ask in the name of Jesus. Amen. You have been listening to David Porson. Other talks by David Porson can be found and downloaded free of charge by visiting www.DavidPorson.co.uk