"Yet I Reserve Seven Thousand in Israel ..."

Declension in the Church has never gone unnoticed and without rebuke. This was just as much true when Darwinism commenced its onslaught on the public and Church scene in the Nineteenth Century. The following is an extract of a sermon preached at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, England, on 9 December 1860 by John Bergon, just thirteen months after the initial print of "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" by Charles Darwin.

"Learn to put away from your souls that vile indifferentism which is becoming the curse of this shallow and unlearned age. Be as forgiving as you please of indignities offered to yourselves; but do not be ashamed to be very jealous for the honour of the Lord of Hosts; and to resent any dishonour offered to Him, with a fiery indignation utterly unlike anything you could possibly feel for a personal wrong. Attend ever so little to the circumstance, and you will perceive that every form of fashionable impiety is one and the same vile thing in the essence of it: still Antichrist, disguise it how you will. We were reminded last Sunday that the sensualist, by following the gratification of his own unholy desires, in bold defiance of God's known Law, is in reality setting himself up in the place of God, and becoming a God unto himself. The same is true of the Idolatry of Human Reason; and of Physical Science: as well as of that misinformed Moral Sense which finds in the Atonement of our Lord nothing but a stone of stumbling and a snare. It is true of Popish error also; for what else is this but a setting up of the Human above the Divine - [Tradition, the worship of the Blessed Virgin, the casuistry of the Confessional, and the like] - and so, once more substituting the creature for the Creator ?-What again is the fashionable intellectual sin of the day, but the self-same detestable offence, under quite a different disguise ? The idea of Law - [that old idea which is declared to be only now emerging into supremacy in Science] - takes the hideous shape of rebellion against its Maker; and pronounces,' now Miracles, now Prophecy, now Inspiration itself, to be a thing impossible; or is content to insinuate that the disclosures of Revelation are at least untrue. What is this, I say, but another form of the self-same iniquity - a setting up of the creature before the Creator who is blessed for evermore; a substitution of some created thing in the place of God!

The true antidote to all such forms of impiety, believe me, is not controversy of any sort; but the childlike study of the Bible, each one for himself - not without prayer. Humble must we be, as well as assiduous; for the powers of the mind as well as the affections of the heart should be prostrated before the Bible, or a man will derive little profit from his study of it. Humble, I repeat, for mysteries (remember), are revealed unto the meek; and the fear of the Lord is the begiiming of Wisdom; and he that would understand more than the Ancients must keep God's precepts; and it is the commandments of the Lord which give light unto the eyes. The dutiful student of the Bible is permitted to see the mist melt away from many a speculative difficulty; and is many a time reminded of that saying of his Lord, 'Do ye not therefore err, because ye know not the Scriptures, neither the power of God ?' . . . The humble and attentive reader of the Bible becomes impressed at last with a sense of its Divinity, analogous I suppose to the conviction of Eleven of the Apostles that the Man they walked with was none other than the Son of God."

Theistic Evolutionists neither know the Scriptures or the power of God.

"Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel - all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and all whose mouths have not kissed him." (1 Kings 19:18)

Sam Drucker