Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 November 1884 — Evolution and Religion. [ARTICLE]

Evolution and Religion.

We have a big meeting going on here, and I heard a man, say, “Well, I’m not going. I’ve got no confidence in these preachers. What I want to know first of all is, where did Cain get his wife. That’s what bothers me. ” And so he is going about loose, and every time anybody talks to him about religion he says: “ Where did Cain get his wife ?” But I think the new doctrine of evolution that has got into the church is a right fair compromise, for it maintains that while old Father Adam evoluted and came from a monkey old Mother Eve didn’t She was made all of a sudden and all at once, pure and beautiful and lovely, and had no monkey ancestors, and I reckon that is the reason why woman is to this day so much better than man. There is no gorilla blood in her—no taint of the brute or the beast to crop out like it does in a man. What a pity that she yoked on such a feller as Adam. What a splendid stock would have filled the world if Adam hadn’t evoluted, and had been created fresh like Eve. As it is, we have got a graded stock that is a sort of a cross between angels and monkeys, and it keeps up a powerful commotion. But the trouble about the whole business is that we can’t help it, and what troubles me more than all is that lam one of ’em. I always knew there was some devilment in me, some original sin that made me meaner than I want to be, and now I know just where it came from. That apple-eating business had nothing to do with it, but it is in the stock—the baboon cross—and ever and anon it crops out. All my good desires and noble aspirations, all my amiability and tenderness, comes from Eve, and my meaness from Adam. The old rascal! I wish she hadn’t have married him, and then maybe 1 would have been a better man. But still, notwithstanding and nevertheless, I would like to know, just as a matter of curiosity, what become of old Adam’s brothers and sisters, and all the rest of the old monkey stock that evoluted, for I reckon he didn’t evolute by himself. Maybe they didn’t marry angels, but just kept on in the monkey breed, and that accounts for the other races—the Hottentots pnd Indians and such like. There is a difference, a great difference, and it had a beginning somewhere. Science has a power of work to do in unraveling these questions, and I hope she will do it, but she hasn’t done it yet to my satisfaction, and I’m going to wait patiently.— Bill Arp.