The following remarks appeared in Lehre und Wehre V. 17 (1871) p. 217.

There is a real rage among the false believers of our time to bring the Bible and the results of the so-called exact sciences into harmony with each other. In “The Present Age” (a spiritualist journal published in Chicago) we see that a professor at Yale College even goes so far as to claim in a pamphlet that even the theory that man is descended from an ape is in no way in conflict with the account in Holy Scripture regarding the origin of man! The professor cites Genesis 2, 7: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” and then adds: “The fact that man is the result of the modification of an ape-like ancestor is in no way in conflict with the above account.”–We would like, however, to call the attention of such interpreters of Scripture to a more suitable passage for the biblical proof of their descent; we mean this one: “Ye are of your father the devil.” Joh. 8, 44. Yes, without a doubt, he is their progenitor. Hopefully, they will also not resist much longer to acknowledge him as such, since he is–as is well known–God’s ape.

W[alther].