I.  THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE.





Among those masses of cathedral sculpture which preserve so much

of medieval theology, one frequently recurring group is

noteworthy for its presentment of a time-honoured doctrine

regarding the origin of the universe.



The Almighty, in human form, sits benignly, making the sun, moon,

and stars, and hanging them from the solid firmament which

supports the "heaven above" and overarches the "earth beneath."



The furrows of thought on the Creator's brow show that in this

work he is obliged to contrive; the knotted muscles upon his arms

show that he is obliged to toil; naturally, then, the sculptors

and painters of the medieval and early modern period frequently

represented him as the writers whose conceptions they embodied

had done--as, on the seventh day, weary after thought and toil,

enjoying well-earned repose and the plaudits of the hosts of

heaven.



In these thought-fossils of the cathedrals, and in other

revelations of the same idea through sculpture, painting,

glass-staining, mosaic work, and engraving, during the Middle

Ages and the two centuries following, culminated a belief which

had been developed through thousands of years, and which has

determined the world's thought until our own time.



Its beginnings lie far back in human history; we find them among

the early records of nearly all the great civilizations, and they

hold a most prominent place in the various sacred books of the

world.  In nearly all of them is revealed the conception of a

Creator of whom man is an imperfect image, and who literally and

directly created the visible universe with his hands and fingers.



Among these theories, of especial interest to us are those which

controlled theological thought in Chaldea.  The Assyrian

inscriptions which have been recently recovered and given to the

English-speaking peoples by Layard, George Smith, Sayce, and

others, show that in the ancient religions of Chaldea and

Babylonia there was elaborated a narrative of the creation which,

in its most important features, must have been the source of that

in our own sacred books.  It has now become perfectly clear that

from the same sources which inspired the accounts of the creation

of the universe among the Chaldeo-Babylonian, the Assyrian, the

Phoenician, and other ancient civilizations came the ideas which

hold so prominent a place in the sacred books of the Hebrews.  In

the two accounts imperfectly fused together in Genesis, and also

in the account of which we have indications in the book of Job

and in the Proverbs, there, is presented, often with the greatest

sublimity, the same early conception of the Creator and of the

creation--the conception, so natural in the childhood of

civilization, of a Creator who is an enlarged human being working

literally with his own hands, and of a creation which is "the

work of his fingers."  To supplement this view there was

developed the belief in this Creator as one who, having







.  .  .  "from his ample palm

Launched forth the rolling planets into space."



sits on high, enthroned "upon the circle of the heavens,"

perpetually controlling and directing them.



From this idea of creation was evolved in time a somewhat nobler

view.  Ancient thinkers, and especially, as is now found, in

Egypt, suggested that the main agency in creation was not the

hands and fingers of the Creator, but his VOICE.  Hence was

mingled with the earlier, cruder belief regarding the origin of

the earth and heavenly bodies by the Almighty the more impressive

idea that "he spake and they were made"--that they were brought

into existence by his WORD.[1]



[1] Among the many mediaeval representations of the creation of

the universe, I especially recall from personal observation those

sculptured above the portals of the cathedrals of Freiburg and

Upsala, the paintings on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa,

and most striking of all, the mosaics of the Cathedral of

Monreale and those in the Capella Palatina at Palermo.  Among

peculiarities showing the simplicity of the earlier conception

the representation of the response of the Almighty on the seventh

day is very striking.  He is shown as seated in almost the exact

attitude of the "Weary Mercury" of classic sculpture--bent, and

with a very marked expression of fatigue upon his countenance and

in the whole disposition of his body.



The Monreale mosaics are pictured in the great work of Gravina,

and in the Pisa frescoes in Didron's Iconographie, Paris, 1843,

p. 598.  For an exact statement of the resemblances which have

settled the question among the most eminent scholars in favour of

the derivation of the Hebrew cosmogony from that of Assyria, see

Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, Strassburg, 1890, pp.

304,306; also Franz Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmographien

der alten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, pp. 35-46; also George Smith's

Chaldean Genesis, especially the German translation with

additions by Delitzsch, Leipsic, 1876, and Schrader, Die

Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, Giessen, 1883, pp. 1-54,

etc.  See also Renan, Histoire du peuple d'Israel, vol. i, chap

i, L'antique influence babylonienne.  For Egyptian views

regarding creation, and especially for the transition from the

idea of creation by the hands and fingers of the Creator to

creation by his VOICE and his "word," see Maspero and Sayce, The

Dawn of Civilization, pp. 145-146.





Among the early fathers of the Church this general view of

creation became fundamental; they impressed upon Christendom more

and more strongly the belief that the universe was created in a

perfectly literal sense by the hands or voice of God.  Here and

there sundry theologians of larger mind attempted to give a more

spiritual view regarding some parts of the creative work, and of

these were St.  Gregory of Nyssa and St.  Augustine.  Ready as

they were to accept the literal text of Scripture, they revolted

against the conception of an actual creation of the universe by

the hands and fingers of a Supreme Being, and in this they were

followed by Bede and a few others; but the more material

conceptions prevailed, and we find these taking shape not only in

the sculptures and mosaics and stained glass of cathedrals, and

in the illuminations of missals and psalters, but later, at the

close of the Middle Ages, in the pictured Bibles and in general

literature.



Into the Anglo-Saxon mind this ancient material conception of the

creation was riveted by two poets whose works appealed especially

to the deeper religious feelings.  In the seventh century Caedmon

paraphrased the account given in Genesis, bringing out this

material conception in the most literal form; and a thousand

years later Milton developed out of the various statements in the

Old Testament, mingled with a theology regarding "the creative

Word" which had been drawn from the New, his description of the

creation by the second person in the Trinity, than which nothing

could be more literal and material:



"He took the golden compasses, prepared

In God's eternal store, to circumscribe

This universe and all created things.

One foot he centred, and the other turned

Round through the vast profundity obscure,

And said, `Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds:

This be thy just circumference, O world!'"[2]





[2] For Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and the general subject of

the development of an evolution theory among the Greeks, see the

excellent work by Dr. Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, pp.33

and following; for Caedmon, see any edition--I have used

Bouterwek's, Gutersloh, 1854; for Milton, see Paradise Lost, book

vii, lines 225-231.





So much for the orthodox view of the MANNER of creation.



The next point developed in this theologic evolution had

reference to the MATTER of which the universe was made, and it

was decided by an overwhelming majority that no material

substance existed before the creation of the material

universe--that "God created everything out of nothing."  Some

venturesome thinkers, basing their reasoning upon the first

verses of Genesis, hinted at a different view--namely, that the

mass, "without form and void," existed before the universe; but

this doctrine was soon swept out of sight.  The vast majority of

the fathers were explicit on this point.  Tertullian especially

was very severe against those who took any other view than that

generally accepted as orthodox: he declared that, if there had

been any pre-existing matter out of which the world was formed,

Scripture would have mentioned it; that by not mentioning it God

has given us a clear proof that there was no such thing; and,

after a manner not unknown in other theological controversies, he

threatens Hermogenes, who takes the opposite view, with the woe

which impends on all who add to or take away from the written

word."



St.  Augustine, who showed signs of a belief in a pre-existence

of matter, made his peace with the prevailing belief by the

simple reasoning that, "although the world has been made of some

material, that very same material must have been made out of

nothing."



In the wake of these great men the universal Church steadily

followed.  The Fourth Lateran Council declared that God created

everything out of nothing; and at the present hour the vast

majority of the faithful--whether Catholic or Protestant--are

taught the same doctrine; on this point the syllabus of Pius IX

and the Westminster Catechism fully agree.[3]





[3] For Tertullian, see Tertullian against Hermogenes, chaps. xx

and xxii; for St. Augustine regarding "creation from nothing,"

see the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, lib, i, cap. vi; for St.

Ambrose, see the Hexameron, lib, i,cap iv; for the decree of the

Fourth Lateran Council, and the view received in the Church to-

day, see the article Creation in Addis and Arnold's Catholic

Dictionary.





Having thus disposed of the manner and matter of creation, the

next subject taken up by theologians was the TIME required for

the great work.



Here came a difficulty.  The first of the two accounts given in

Genesis extended the creative operation through six days, each of

an evening and a morning, with much explicit detail regarding the

progress made in each.  But the second account spoke of "THE

DAY" in which "the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."

The explicitness of the first account and its naturalness to the

minds of the great mass of early theologians gave it at first a

decided advantage; but Jewish thinkers, like Philo, and Christian

thinkers, like Origen, forming higher conceptions of the Creator

and his work, were not content with this, and by them was

launched upon the troubled sea of Christian theology the idea

that the creation was instantaneous, this idea being strengthened

not only by the second of the Genesis legends, but by the great

text, "He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood

fast"--or, as it appears in the Vulgate and in most translations,

"He spake, and they were made; he commanded, and they were

created."



As a result, it began to be held that the safe and proper course

was to believe literally BOTH statements; that in some

mysterious manner God created the universe in six days, and yet

brought it all into existence in a moment.  In spite of the

outcries of sundry great theologians, like Ephrem Syrus, that the

universe was created in exactly six days of twenty-four hours

each, this compromise was promoted by St. Athanasius and St.

Basil in the East, and by St. Augustine and St. Hilary in the

West.



Serious difficulties were found in reconciling these two views,

which to the natural mind seem absolutely contradictory; but by

ingenious manipulation of texts, by dexterous play upon phrases,

and by the abundant use of metaphysics to dissolve away facts, a

reconciliation was effected, and men came at least to believe

that they believed in a creation of the universe instantaneous

and at the same time extended through six days.[4]



[4] For Origen, see his Contra Celsum, cap xxxvi, xxxvii; also

his De Principibus, cap. v; for St. Augustine, see his De Genesi

conta Manichaeos and De Genesi ad Litteram, passim; for

Athanasius, see his Discourses against the Arians, ii, 48,49.





Some of the efforts to reconcile these two accounts were so

fruitful as to deserve especial record.  The fathers, Eastern and

Western, developed out of the double account in Genesis, and the

indications in the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the book of Job, a

vast mass of sacred science bearing upon this point.  As regards

the whole work of creation, stress was laid upon certain occult

powers in numerals.  Philo Judaeus, while believing in an

instantaneous creation, had also declared that the world was

created in six days because "of all numbers six is the most

productive"; he had explained the creation of the heavenly bodies

on the fourth day by "the harmony of the number four"; of the

animals on the fifth day by the five senses; of man on the sixth

day by the same virtues in the number six which had caused it to

be set as a limit to the creative work; and, greatest of all, the

rest on the seventh day by the vast mass of mysterious virtues in

the number seven.



St. Jerome held that the reason why God did not pronounce the

work of the second day "good" is to be found in the fact that

there is something essentially evil in the number two, and this

was echoed centuries afterward, afar off in Britain, by Bede.



St. Augustine brought this view to bear upon the Church in the

following statement: "There are three classes of numbers--the

more than perfect, the perfect, and the less than perfect,

according as the sum of them is greater than, equal to, or less

than the original number.  Six is the first perfect number:

wherefore we must not say that six is a perfect number because

God finished all his works in six days, but that God finished all

his works in six days because six is a perfect number."



Reasoning of this sort echoed along through the mediaeval Church

until a year after the discovery of America, when the Nuremberg

Chronicle re-echoed it as follows: "The creation of things is

explained by the number six, the parts of which, one, two, and

three, assume the form of a triangle."



This view of the creation of the universe as instantaneous and

also as in six days, each made up of an evening and a morning,

became virtually universal.  Peter Lombard and Hugo of St.

Victor, authorities of vast weight, gave it their sanction in the

twelfth century, and impressed it for ages upon the mind of the

Church.



Both these lines of speculation--as to the creation of everything

out of nothing, and the reconciling of the instantaneous creation

of the universe with its creation in six days--were still further

developed by other great thinkers of the Middle Ages.



St. Hilary of Poictiers reconciled the two conceptions as

follows: "For, although according to Moses there is an appearance

of regular order in the fixing of the firmament, the laying bare

of the dry land, the gathering together of the waters, the

formation of the heavenly bodies, and the arising of living

things from land and water, yet the creation of the heavens,

earth, and other elements is seen to be the work of a single

moment."



St. Thomas Aquinas drew from St. Augustine a subtle distinction

which for ages eased the difficulties in the case: he taught in

effect that God created the substance of things in a moment, but

gave to the work of separating, shaping, and adorning this

creation, six days.[5]



[5] For Philo Judaeus, see his Creation of the World, chap. iii;

for St. Augustine on the powers of numbers in creation, see his

De Genesi ad Litteram iv, chap. ii; for Peter Lombard, see the

Sententiae, lib. ii, dist. xv, 5; and for Hugo of St. Victor, see

De Sacrementis, lib i, pars i; also, Annotat, Elucidat in

Pentateuchum, cap. v, vi, vii; for St. Hilary, see De Trinitate,

lib. xii; for St. Thomas Aquinas, see his Summa Theologica, quest

lxxxiv, arts. i and ii; the passage in the Nuremberg Chronicle,

1493, is in fol. iii; for Vousset, see his Discours sur

l'Histoire Universelle; for the sacredness of the number seven

among the Babylonians, see especially Schrader, Die

Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, pp. 21,22; also George

Smith et al.; for general ideas on the occult powers of various

numbers, especially the number seven, and the influence of these

ideas on theology and science, see my chapter on astronomy.  As

to medieaval ideas on the same subject, see Detzel, Christliche

Ikonographie, Frieburg, 1894, pp. 44 and following.





The early reformers accepted and developed the same view, and

Luther especially showed himself equal to the occasion.  With his

usual boldness he declared, first, that Moses "spoke properly and

plainly, and neither allegorically nor figuratively," and that

therefore "the world with all creatures was created in six days."

And he then goes on to show how, by a great miracle, the whole

creation was also instantaneous.



Melanchthon also insisted that the universe was created out of

nothing and in a mysterious way, both in an instant and in six

days, citing the text: "He spake, and they were made."



Calvin opposed the idea of an instantaneous creation, and laid

especial stress on the creation in six days: having called

attention to the fact that the biblical chronology shows the

world to be not quite six thousand years old and that it is now

near its end, he says that "creation was extended through six

days that it might not be tedious for us to occupy the whole of

life in the consideration of it."



Peter Martyr clinched the matter by declaring: "So important is

it to comprehend the work of creation that we see the creed of

the Church take this as its starting point.  Were this article

taken away there would be no original sin, the promise of Christ

would become void, and all the vital force of our religion would

be destroyed."  The Westminster divines in drawing up their

Confession of Faith specially laid it down as necessary to

believe that all things visible and invisible were created not

only out of nothing but in exactly six days.



Nor were the Roman divines less strenuous than the Protestant

reformers regarding the necessity of holding closely to the

so-called Mosaic account of creation.  As late as the middle of

the eighteenth century, when Buffon attempted to state simple

geological truths, the theological faculty of the Sorbonne forced

him to make and to publish a most ignominious recantation which

ended with these words: "I abandon everything in my book

respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which

may be contrary to the narrative of Moses."



Theologians, having thus settled the manner of the creation, the

matter used in it, and the time required for it, now exerted

themselves to fix its DATE.



The long series of efforts by the greatest minds in the Church,

from Eusebius to Archbishop Usher, to settle this point are

presented in another chapter.  Suffice it here that the general

conclusion arrived at by an overwhelming majority of the most

competent students of the biblical accounts was that the date of

creation was, in round numbers, four thousand years before our

era; and in the seventeenth century, in his great work, Dr. John

Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and

one of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his time, declared, as

the result of his most profound and exhaustive study of the

Scriptures, that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference,

were created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full

of water," and that "this work took place and man was created by

the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B. C., at nine o'clock in the

morning."



Here was, indeed, a triumph of Lactantius's method, the result of

hundreds of years of biblical study and theological thought since

Bede in the eighth century, and Vincent of Beauvais in the

thirteenth, had declared that creation must have taken place in

the spring.  Yet, alas! within two centuries after Lightfoot's

great biblical demonstration as to the exact hour of creation, it

was discovered that at that hour an exceedingly cultivated

people, enjoying all the fruits of a highly developed

civilization, had long been swarming in the great cities of

Egypt, and that other nations hardly less advanced had at that

time reached a high development in Asia.[6]



[6] For Luther, see his Commentary on Genesis, 1545,

introduction, and his comments on chap. i, verse 12; the

quotations from Luther's commentary are taken mainly from the

translation by Henry Cole, D.D., Edinburgh, 1858; for

Melanchthon, see Loci Theologici, in Melanchthon, Opera, ed.

Bretschneider, vol. xxi, pp. 269, 270, also pp. 637, 638--in

quoting the text (Ps. xxiii, 9) I have used, as does Melanchthon

himself, the form of the Vulgate; for the citations from Calvin,

see his Commentary on Genesis (Opera omnia, Amsterdam, 1671, tom.

i, cap. ii, p. 8); also in the Institutes, Allen's translation,

London, 1838, vol. i, chap. xv, pp. 126,127; for the Peter

Martyr, see his Commentary on Genesis, cited by Zockler, vol. i,

p. 690; for articles in the Westminster Confession of Faith, see

chap. iv; for Buffon's recantation, see Lyell, Principles of

Geology, chap iii, p. 57. For Lightfoot's declartion, see his

works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822.





But, strange as it may seem, even after theologians had thus

settled the manner of creation, the matter employed in it, the

time required for it, and the exact date of it, there remained

virtually unsettled the first and greatest question of all; and

this was nothing less than the question, WHO actually created the

universe?



Various theories more or less nebulous, but all centred in texts

of Scripture, had swept through the mind of the Church.  By some

theologians it was held virtually that the actual creative agent

was the third person of the Trinity, who, in the opening words of

our sublime creation poem, "moved upon the face of the waters."

By others it was held that the actual Creator was the second

person of the Trinity, in behalf of whose agency many texts were

cited from the New Testament.  Others held that the actual

Creator was the first person, and this view was embodied in the

two great formulas known as the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds,

which explicitly assigned the work to "God the Father Almighty,

Maker of heaven and earth."  Others, finding a deep meaning in

the words "Let US make," ascribed in Genesis to the Creator, held

that the entire Trinity directly created all things; and still

others, by curious metaphysical processes, seemed to arrive at

the idea that peculiar combinations of two persons of the Trinity

achieved the creation.



In all this there would seem to be considerable courage in view

of the fearful condemnations launched in the Athanasian Creed

against all who should "confound the persons" or "divide the

substance of the Trinity."



These various stages in the evolution of scholastic theology were

also embodied in sacred art, and especially in cathedral

sculpture, in glass-staining, in mosaic working, and in missal

painting.



The creative Being is thus represented sometimes as the third

person of the Trinity, in the form of a dove brooding over chaos;

sometimes as the second person, and therefore a youth; sometimes

as the first person, and therefore fatherly and venerable;

sometimes as the first and second persons, one being venerable

and the other youthful; and sometimes as three persons, one

venerable and one youthful, both wearing papal crowns, and each

holding in his lips a tip of the wing of the dove, which thus

seems to proceed from both and to be suspended between them.



Nor was this the most complete development of the medieval idea.

The Creator was sometimes represented with a single body, but

with three faces, thus showing that Christian belief had in some

pious minds gone through substantially the same cycle which an

earlier form of belief had made ages before in India, when the

Supreme Being was represented with one body but with the three

faces of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva.



But at the beginning of the modern period the older view in its

primitive Jewish form was impressed upon Christians by the most

mighty genius in art the world has known; for in 1512, after four

years of Titanic labour, Michael Angelo uncovered his frescoes

within the vault of the Sistine Chapel.



They had been executed by the command and under the sanction of

the ruling Pope, Julius II, to represent the conception of

Christian theology then dominant, and they remain to-day in all

their majesty to show the highest point ever attained by the

older thought upon the origin of the visible universe.



In the midst of the expanse of heaven the Almighty Father--the

first person of the Trinity--in human form, august and venerable,

attended by angels and upborne by mighty winds, sweeps over the

abyss, and, moving through successive compartments of the great

vault, accomplishes the work of the creative days.  With a simple

gesture he divides the light from the darkness, rears on high the

solid firmament, gathers together beneath it the seas, or summons

into existence the sun, moon, and planets, and sets them circling

about the earth.



In this sublime work culminated the thought of thousands of

years; the strongest minds accepted it or pretended to accept it,

and nearly two centuries later this conception, in accordance

with the first of the two accounts given in Genesis, was

especially enforced by Bossuet, and received a new lease of life

in the Church, both Catholic and Protestant.[7]



[7] For strange representations of the Creator and of the

creation by one, two, or three persons of the Trinity, see

Didron, Iconographie Chretienne, pp. 35, 178, 224, 483, 567-580,

and elsewhere; also Detzel as already cited.  The most naive of

all survivals of the mediaeval idea of creation which the present

writer has ever seen was exhibited in 1894 on the banner of one

of the guilds at the celebration of the four-hundredth

anniversary of the founding of the Munich Cathedral.  Jesus of

Nazareth, as a beautiful boy and with a nimbus encircling his

head, was shown turning and shaping the globe on a lathe, which

he keeps in motion with his foot.  The emblems of the Passion are

about him, God the Father looking approvingly upon him from a

cloud, and the dove hovering between the two.  The date upon the

banner was 1727.





But to these discussions was added yet another, which, beginning

in the early days of the Church, was handed down the ages until

it had died out among the theologians of our own time.



In the first of the biblical accounts light is created and the

distinction between day and night thereby made on the first day,

while the sun and moon are not created until the fourth day.

Masses of profound theological and pseudo-scientific reasoning

have been developed to account for this--masses so great that for

ages they have obscured the simple fact that the original text is

a precious revelation to us of one of the most ancient of

recorded beliefs--the belief that light and darkness are entities

independent of the heavenly bodies, and that the sun, moon, and

stars exist not merely to increase light but to "divide the day

from the night, to be for signs and for seasons, and for days and

for years," and "to rule the day and the night."



Of this belief we find survivals among the early fathers, and

especially in St. Ambrose.  In his work on creation he tells us:

"We must remember that the light of day is one thing and the

light of the sun, moon, and stars another--the sun by his rays

appearing to add lustre to the daylight.  For before sunrise the

day dawns, but is not in full refulgence, for the sun adds still

further to its splendour."   This idea became one of the

"treasures of sacred knowledge committed to the Church," and was

faithfully received by the Middle Ages.  The medieval mysteries

and miracle plays give curious evidences of this: In a

performance of the creation, when God separates light from

darkness, the stage direction is, "Now a painted cloth is to be

exhibited, one half black and the other half white."   It was

also given more permanent form.  In the mosaics of San Marco at

Venice, in the frescoes of the Baptistery at Florence and of the

Church of St. Francis at Assisi, and in the altar carving at

Salerno, we find a striking realization of it--the Creator

placing in the heavens two disks or living figures of equal size,

each suitably coloured or inscribed to show that one represents

light and the other darkness.  This conception was without doubt

that of the person or persons who compiled from the Chaldean and

other earlier statements the accounts of the creation in the

first of our sacred books.[8]



[8] For scriptural indications of the independent existence of

light and darkness, compare with the first verses of the chapter

of Genesis such passages as Job xxxviii, 19,24; for the general

prevalence of this early view, see Lukas, Kosmogonie, pp. 31, 33,

41, 74, and passim; for the view of St. Ambrose regarding the

creation of light and of the sun, see his Hexameron, lib. 4, cap.

iii; for an excellent general statement, see Huxley, Mr.

Gladstone and Genesis, in the Nineteenth Century, 1886, reprinted

in his Essays on Controverted Questions, London, 1892, note, pp.

126 et seq.; for the acceptance in the miracle plays of the

scriptural idea of light and darkness as independent creations,

see Wright, Essays on Archeological Subjects, vol. ii, p.178; for

an account, with illustrations, of the mosaics, etc.,

representing this idea, see Tikkanen, Die Genesis-mosaiken von

San Marco, Helsingfors, 1889, p. 14 and 16 of the text and Plates

I and II.  Very naively the Salerno carver, not wishing to colour

the ivory which he wrought, has inscribed on one disk the word

"LUX" and on the other "NOX." See also Didron, Iconographie, p.

482.





Thus, down to a period almost within living memory, it was held,

virtually "always, everywhere, and by all," that the universe, as

we now see it, was created literally and directly by the voice or

hands of the Almighty, or by both--out of nothing--in an instant

or in six days, or in both--about four thousand years before the

Christian era--and for the convenience of the dwellers upon the

earth, which was at the base and foundation of the whole

structure.



But there had been implanted along through the ages germs of

another growth in human thinking, some of them even as early as

the Babylonian period.  In the Assyrian inscriptions we find

recorded the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of AN EVOLUTION of the

universe out of the primeval flood or "great deep," and of the

animal creation out of the earth and sea.  This idea, recast,

partially at least, into monotheistic form, passed naturally into

the sacred books of the neighbours and pupils of the

Chaldeans--the Hebrews; but its growth in Christendom afterward

was checked, as we shall hereafter find, by the more powerful

influence of other inherited statements which appealed more

intelligibly to the mind of the Church.



Striking, also, was the effect of this idea as rewrought by the

early Ionian philosophers, to whom it was probably transmitted

from the Chaldeans through the Phoenicians.  In the minds of

Ionians like Anaximander and Anaximenes it was most clearly

developed: the first of these conceiving of the visible universe

as the result of processes of evolution, and the latter pressing

further the same mode of reasoning, and dwelling on agencies in

cosmic development recognised in modern science.



This general idea of evolution in Nature thus took strong hold

upon Greek thought and was developed in many ways, some

ingenious, some perverse.  Plato, indeed, withstood it; but

Aristotle sometimes developed it in a manner which reminds us of

modern views.



Among the Romans Lucretius caught much from it, extending the

evolutionary process virtually to all things.



In the early Church, as we have seen, the idea of a creation

direct, material, and by means like those used by man, was

all-powerful for the exclusion of conceptions based on evolution.

From the more simple and crude of the views of creation given in

the Babylonian legends, and thence incorporated into Genesis,

rose the stream of orthodox thought on the subject, which grew

into a flood and swept on through the Middle Ages and into modern

times.  Yet here and there in the midst of this flood were high

grounds of thought held by strong men.  Scotus Erigena and Duns

Scotus, among the schoolmen, bewildered though they were, had

caught some rays of this ancient light, and passed on to their

successors, in modified form, doctrines of an evolutionary

process in the universe.



In the latter half of the sixteenth century these evolutionary

theories seemed to take more definite form in the mind of

Giordano Bruno, who evidently divined the fundamental idea of

what is now known as the "nebular hypothesis"; but with his

murder by the Inquisition at Rome this idea seemed utterly to

disappear--dissipated by the flames which in 1600 consumed his

body on the Campo dei Fiori.



Yet within the two centuries divided by Bruno's death the world

was led into a new realm of thought in which an evolution theory

of the visible universe was sure to be rapidly developed.  For

there came, one after the other, five of the greatest men our

race has produced--Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and

Newton--and when their work was done the old theological

conception of the universe was gone.  "The spacious firmament on

high"--"the crystalline spheres"--the Almighty enthroned upon

"the circle of the heavens," and with his own lands, or with

angels as his agents, keeping sun, moon, and planets in motion

for the benefit of the earth, opening and closing the "windows of

heaven," letting down upon the earth the "waters above the

firmament," "setting his bow in the cloud," hanging out "signs

and wonders," hurling comets, "casting forth lightnings" to scare

the wicked, and "shaking the earth" in his wrath: all this had

disappeared.



These five men had given a new divine revelation to the world;

and through the last, Newton, had come a vast new conception,

destined to be fatal to the old theory of creation, for he had

shown throughout the universe, in place of almighty caprice,

all-pervading law.  The bitter opposition of theology to the

first four of these men is well known; but the fact is not so

widely known that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious

spirit, was also strongly opposed.  It was vigorously urged

against him that by his statement of the law of gravitation he

"took from God that direct action on his works so constantly

ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material

mechanism," and that he "substituted gravitation for Providence."



But, more than this, these men gave a new basis for the theory of

evolution as distinguished from the theory of creation.



Especially worthy of note is it that the great work of Descartes,

erroneous as many of its deductions were, and, in view of the

lack of physical knowledge in his time, must be, had done much to

weaken the old conception.  His theory of a universe brought out

of all-pervading matter, wrought into orderly arrangement by

movements in accordance with physical laws--though it was but a

provisional hypothesis--had done much to draw men's minds from

the old theological view of creation; it was an example of

intellectual honesty arriving at errors, but thereby aiding the

advent of truths.  Crippled though Descartes was by his almost

morbid fear of the Church, this part of his work was no small

factor in bringing in that attitude of mind which led to a

reception of the thoughts of more unfettered thinkers.



Thirty years later came, in England, an effort of a different

sort, but with a similar result.  In 1678 Ralph Cudworth

published his Intellectual System of the Universe.  To this day

he remains, in breadth of scholarship, in strength of thought, in

tolerance, and in honesty, one of the greatest glories of the

English Church, and his work was worthy of him.  He purposed to

build a fortress which should protect Christianity against all

dangerous theories of the universe, ancient or modern.  The

foundations of the structure were laid with old thoughts thrown

often into new and striking forms; but, as the superstructure

arose more and more into view, while genius marked every part of

it, features appeared which gave the rigidly orthodox serious

misgivings.  From the old theories of direct personal action on

the universe by the Almighty he broke utterly.  He dwelt on the

action of law, rejected the continuous exercise of miraculous

intervention, pointed out the fact that in the natural world

there are "errors" and "bungles," and argued vigorously in favour

of the origin and maintenance of the universe as a slow and

gradual development of Nature in obedience to an inward

principle.  The Balaks of seventeenth-century orthodoxy might

well condemn this honest Balaam.



Toward the end of the next century a still more profound genius,

Immanuel Kant, presented the nebular theory, giving it, in the

light of Newton's great utterances, a consistency which it never

before had; and about the same time Laplace gave it yet greater

strength by mathematical reasonings of wonderful power and

extent, thus implanting firmly in modern thought the idea that

our own solar system and others--suns, planets, satellites, and

their various movements, distances, and magnitudes--necessarily

result from the obedience of nebulous masses to natural laws.



Throughout the theological world there was an outcry at once

against "atheism," and war raged fiercely.  Herschel and others

pointed out many nebulous patches apparently gaseous.  They

showed by physical and mathematical demonstrations that the

hypothesis accounted for the great body of facts, and, despite

clamour, were gaining ground, when the improved telescopes

resolved some of the patches of nebulous matter into multitudes

of stars.  The opponents of the nebular hypothesis were

overjoyed; they now sang paeans to astronomy, because, as they

said, it had proved the truth of Scripture.  They had jumped to

the conclusion that all nebula must be alike; that, if SOME are

made up of systems of stars, ALL must be so made up; that none

can be masses of attenuated gaseous matter, because some are not.



Science halted for a time.  The accepted doctrine became this:

that the only reason why all the nebula are not resolved into

distinct stars is that our telescopes are not sufficiently

powerful.  But in time came the discovery of the spectroscope and

spectrum analysis, and thence Fraunhofer's discovery that the

spectrum of an ignited gaseous body is non-continuous, with

interrupting lines; and Draper's discovery that the spectrum of

an ignited solid is continuous, with no interrupting lines.  And

now the spectroscope was turned upon the nebula, and many of them

were found to be gaseous.  Here, then, was ground for the

inference that in these nebulous masses at different stages of

condensation--some apparently mere pitches of mist, some with

luminous centres--we have the process of development actually

going on, and observations like those of Lord Rosse and Arrest

gave yet further confirmation to this view.  Then came the great

contribution of the nineteenth century to physics, aiding to

explain important parts of the vast process by the mechanical

theory of heat.



Again the nebular hypothesis came forth stronger than ever, and

about 1850 the beautiful experiment of Plateau on the rotation of

a fluid globe came in apparently to illustrate if not to confirm

it.  Even so determined a defender of orthodoxy as Mr. Gladstone

at last acknowledged some form of a nebular hypothesis as

probably true.



Here, too, was exhibited that form of surrendering theological

views to science under the claim that science concurs with

theology, which we have seen in so many other fields; and, as

typical, an example may be given, which, however restricted in

its scope, throws light on the process by which such surrenders

are obtained.  A few years since one of the most noted professors

of chemistry in the city of New York, under the auspices of one

of its most fashionable churches, gave a lecture which, as was

claimed in the public prints and in placards posted in the

streets, was to show that science supports the theory of creation

given in the sacred books ascribed to Moses.  A large audience

assembled, and a brilliant series of elementary experiments with

oxygen, hydrogen, and carbonic acid was concluded by the Plateau

demonstration.  It was beautifully made.  As the coloured globule

of oil, representing the earth, was revolved in a transparent

medium of equal density, as it became flattened at the poles, as

rings then broke forth from it and revolved about it, and,

finally, as some of these rings broke into satellites, which for

a moment continued to circle about the central mass, the

audience, as well they might, rose and burst into rapturous

applause.



Thereupon a well-to-do citizen arose and moved the thanks of the

audience to the eminent professor for "this perfect demonstration

of the exact and literal conformity of the statements given in

Holy Scripture with the latest results of science."  The motion

was carried unanimously and with applause, and the audience

dispersed, feeling that a great service had been rendered to

orthodoxy.  Sancta simplicitas!



What this incident exhibited on a small scale has been seen

elsewhere with more distinguished actors and on a broader stage.

Scores of theologians, chief among whom of late, in zeal if not

in knowledge, has been Mr. Gladstone, have endeavoured to

"reconcile" the two accounts in Genesis with each other and with

the truths regarding the origin of the universe gained by

astronomy, geology, geography, physics, and chemistry.  The

result has been recently stated by an eminent theologian, the

Hulsean Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge.  He

declares, "No attempt at reconciling genesis with the exacting

requirements of modern sciences has ever been known to succeed

without entailing a degree of special pleading or forced

interpretation to which, in such a question, we should be wise to

have no recourse."[9]



[9] For an interesting reference to the outcry against Newton,

see McCosh, The Religious Aspect of Evolution, New York, 1890,

pp. 103, 104; for germs of an evolutionary view among the

Babylonians, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Gensis, New

York, 1876, pp. 74, 75; for a germ of the same thought in

Lucretius, see his De Natura Rerum, lib. v,pp.187-194, 447-454;

for Bruno's conjecture (in 1591), see Jevons, Principles of

Science, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 36; for Kant's statement, see

his Naturgeschichte des Himmels; for his part in the nebular

hypothesis, see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i,

p.266; for the value of Plateau's beautiful experiment, very

cautiously estimated, see Jevons, vol. ii, p. 36; also Elisee

Reclus, The Earth, translated by Woodward, vol. i, pp. 14-18, for

an estimate still more careful; for a general account of

discoveries of the nature of nebulae by spectroscope, see Draper,

Conflict between Religion and Science; for a careful discussion

regarding the spectra of solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies, see

Schellen, Spectrum Analysis, pp. 100 et seq.; for a very thorough

discussion of the bearings of discoveries made by spectrum

analysis upon the nebular hypothesis, ibid., pp. 532-537; for a

presentation of the difficulties yet unsolved, see an article by

Plummer in the London Popular Science Review for January, 1875;

for an excellent short summary of recent observations and

thoughts on this subject, see T. Sterry Hunt, Address at the

Priestley Centennial, pp. 7, 8; for an interesting modification

of this hypothesis, see Proctor's writings; for a still more

recent view see Lockyer's two articles on The Sun's Place in

Nature for February 14 and 25, 1895.





The revelations of another group of sciences, though sometimes

bitterly opposed and sometimes "reconciled" by theologians, have

finally set the whole question at rest.  First, there have come

the biblical critics--earnest Christian scholars, working for the

sake of truth--and these have revealed beyond the shadow of a

reasonable doubt the existence of at least two distinct accounts

of creation in our book of Genesis, which can sometimes be forced

to agree, but which are generally absolutely at variance with

each other.  These scholars have further shown the two accounts

to be not the cunningly devised fables of priestcraft, but

evidently fragments of earlier legends, myths, and theologies,

accepted in good faith and brought together for the noblest of

purposes by those who put in order the first of our sacred books.



Next have come the archaeologists and philologists, the devoted

students of ancient monuments and records; of these are such as

Rawlinson, George Smith, Sayce, Oppert, Jensen, Schrader,

Delitzsch, and a phalanx of similarly devoted scholars, who have

deciphered a multitude of ancient texts, especially the

inscriptions found in the great library of Assurbanipal at

Nineveh, and have discovered therein an account of the origin of

the world identical in its most important features with the later

accounts in our own book of Genesis.



These men have had the courage to point out these facts and to

connect them with the truth that these Chaldean and Babylonian

myths, legends, and theories were far earlier than those of the

Hebrews, which so strikingly resemble them, and which we have in

our sacred books; and they have also shown us how natural it was

that the Jewish accounts of the creation should have been

obtained at that remote period when the earliest Hebrews were

among the Chaldeans, and how the great Hebrew poetic accounts of

creation were drawn either from the sacred traditions of these

earlier peoples or from antecedent sources common to various

ancient nations.



In a summary which for profound thought and fearless integrity

does honour not only to himself but to the great position which

he holds, the Rev. Dr. Driver, Professor of Hebrew and Canon of

Christ Church at Oxford, has recently stated the case fully and

fairly.  Having pointed out the fact that the Hebrews were one

people out of many who thought upon the origin of the universe,

he says that they "framed theories to account for the beginnings

of the earth and man"; that "they either did this for themselves

or borrowed those of their neighbours"; that "of the theories

current in Assyria and Phoenicia fragments have been preserved,

and these exhibit points of resemblance with the biblical

narrative sufficient to warrant the inference that both are

derived from the same cycle of tradition."



After giving some extracts from the Chaldean creation tablets he

says: "In the light of these facts it is difficult to resist the

conclusion that the biblical narrative is drawn from the same

source as these other records.  The biblical historians, it is

plain, derived their materials from the best human sources

available....The materials which with other nations were

combined into the crudest physical theories or associated with a

grotesque polytheism were vivified and transformed by the

inspired genius of the Hebrew historians, and adapted to become

the vehicle of profound religious truth."



Not less honourable to the sister university and to himself is

the statement recently made by the Rev. Dr. Ryle, Hulsean

Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.  He says that to suppose that

a Christian "must either renounce his confidence in the

achievements of scientific research or abandon his faith in

Scripture is a monstrous perversion of Christian freedom."  He

declares: "The old position is no longer tenable; a new position

has to be taken up at once, prayerfully chosen, and hopefully

held."  He then goes on to compare the Hebrew story of creation

with the earlier stories developed among kindred peoples, and

especially with the pre-existing Assyro-Babylonian cosmogony, and

shows that they are from the same source.  He points out that any

attempt to explain particular features of the story into harmony

with the modern scientific ideas necessitates "a non-natural"

interpretation; but he says that, if we adopt a natural

interpretation, "we shall consider that the Hebrew description of

the visible universe is unscientific as judged by modern

standards, and that it shares the limitations of the imperfect

knowledge of the age at which it was committed to writing."

Regarding the account in Genesis of man's physical origin, he

says that it "is expressed in the simple terms of prehistoric

legend, of unscientific pictorial description."



In these statements and in a multitude of others made by eminent

Christian investigators in other countries is indicated what the

victory is which has now been fully won over the older theology.



Thus, from the Assyrian researches as well as from other sources,

it has come to be acknowledged by the most eminent scholars at

the leading seats of Christian learning that the accounts of

creation with which for nearly two thousand years all scientific

discoveries have had to be "reconciled"--the accounts which

blocked the way of Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and

Laplace--were simply transcribed or evolved from a mass of myths

and legends largely derived by the Hebrews from their ancient

relations with Chaldea, rewrought in a monotheistic sense,

imperfectly welded together, and then thrown into poetic forms in

the sacred books which we have inherited.



On one hand, then, we have the various groups of men devoted to

the physical sciences all converging toward the proofs that the

universe, as we at present know it, is the result of an

evolutionary process--that is, of the gradual working of physical

laws upon an early condition of matter; on the other hand, we

have other great groups of men devoted to historical,

philological, and archaeological science whose researches all

converge toward the conclusion that our sacred accounts of

creation were the result of an evolution from an early chaos of

rude opinion.



The great body of theologians who have so long resisted the

conclusions of the men of science have claimed to be fighting

especially for "the truth of Scripture," and their final answer

to the simple conclusions of science regarding the evolution of

the material universe has been the cry, "The Bible is true."  And

they are right--though in a sense nobler than they have dreamed.

Science, while conquering them, has found in our Scriptures a far

nobler truth than that literal historical exactness for which

theologians have so long and so vainly contended.  More and more

as we consider the results of the long struggle in this field we

are brought to the conclusion that the inestimable value of the

great sacred books of the world is found in their revelation of

the steady striving of our race after higher conceptions,

beliefs, and aspirations, both in morals and religion.  Unfolding

and exhibiting this long-continued effort, each of the great

sacred books of the world is precious, and all, in the highest

sense, are true.  Not one of them, indeed, conforms to the

measure of what mankind has now reached in historical and

scientific truth; to make a claim to such conformity is folly,

for it simply exposes those who make it and the books for which

it is made to loss of their just influence.



That to which the great sacred books of the world conform, and

our own most of all, is the evolution of the highest conceptions,

beliefs, and aspirations of our race from its childhood through

the great turning-points in its history.  Herein lies the truth

of all bibles, and especially of our own.  Of vast value they

indeed often are as a record of historical outward fact; recen

researches in the East are constantly increasing this value; but

it is not for this that we prize them most: they are eminently

precious, not as a record of outward fact, but as a mirror of the

evolving heart, mind, and soul of man.  They are true because

they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing

the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem,

chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect

this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity.

To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a

flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to

scoff at the law of the universe.  In welding together into noble

form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the

book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting

under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or

India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to

humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and

modern science, in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for

the old--the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea

of evolution for that of creation--has added and is steadily

adding a new revelation divinely inspired.



In the light of these two evolutions, then--one of the visible

universe, the other of a sacred creation-legend--science and

theology, if the master minds in both are wise, may at last be

reconciled.  A great step in this reconciliation was recently

seen at the main centre of theological thought among

English-speaking people, when, in the collection of essays

entitled Lux Mundi, emanating from the college established in

these latter days as a fortress of orthodoxy at Oxford, the

legendary character of the creation accounts in our sacred books

was acknowledged, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury asked,

"May not the Holy Spirit at times have made use of myth and

legend?"[10]



[10] For the first citations above made, see The Cosmogony of

Genesis, by the Rev. S. R. Driver, D.D., Canon of Christ Church

and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford , in the Expositor for

January, 1886; for the second series of citations, see the Early

Narratives of Genesis, by Herbert Edward Ryle, Hulsean Professor

of Divinity at Cambridge, London, 1892.  For evidence that even

the stiffest of Scotch Presbyterians have come to discard the old

literal biblical narrative of creation and to regard the

declaration of the Westminster Confession thereon as a "disproved

theory of creation," see Principal John Tulloch, in Contemporary

Review, March, 1877, on Religious Thought in Scotland--especially

page 550.







II.  THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS AND MAN.



In one of the windows of the cathedral at Ulm a mediaeval

glass-stainer has represented the Almighty as busily engaged in

creating the animals, and there has just left the divine hands an

elephant fully accoutred, with armour, harness, and housings,

ready-for war.  Similar representations appear in illuminated

manuscripts and even in early printed books, and, as the

culmination of the whole, the Almighty is shown as fashioning the

first man from a hillock of clay and extracting from his side,

with evident effort, the first woman.



This view of the general process of creation had come from far,

appearing under varying forms in various ancient cosmogonies.  In

the Egyptian temples at Philae and Denderah may still be seen

representations of the Nile gods modelling lumps of clay into

men, and a similar work is ascribed in the Assyrian tablets to

the gods of Babylonia.  Passing into our own sacred books, these

ideas became the starting point of a vast new development of

theology.[11]



[11] For representations of Egyptian gods creating men out of

lumps of clay, see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of History, p.

156; for the Chaldean legends of the creation of men and animals,

see ibid., p. 543; see also George Smith, Chaldean Accounts of

Genesis, Sayce's edition, pp. 36, 72, and 93; also for similar

legends in other ancient nations, Lenormant, Origines de

l'Histoire, pp. 17 et seq.; for mediaeval representations of the

creation of man and woman, see Didron, Iconographie, pp. 35, 178,

224, 537.





The fathers of the Church generally received each of the two

conflicting creation legends in Genesis literally, and then,

having done their best to reconcile them with each other and to

mould them together, made them the final test of thought upon the

universe and all things therein.  At the beginning of the fourth

century Lactantius struck the key-note of this mode of

subordinating all other things in the study of creation to the

literal text of Scripture, and he enforces his view of the

creation of man by a bit of philology, saying the final being

created "is called man because he is made from the ground--homo

ex humo."



In the second half of the same century this view as to the

literal acceptance of the sacred text was reasserted by St.

Ambrose, who, in his work on the creation, declared that "Moses

opened his mouth and poured forth what God had said to him."  But

a greater than either of them fastened this idea into the

Christian theologies.  St. Augustine, preparing his Commentary

on the Book of Genesis, laid down in one famous sentence the law

which has lasted in the Church until our own time: "Nothing is to

be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is

that authority than all the powers of the human mind."  The

vigour of the sentence in its original Latin carried it ringing

down the centuries: "Major est Scripturae auctoritas quam omnis

humani ingenii capacitas."



Through the mediaeval period, in spite of a revolt led by no

other than St. Augustine himself, and followed by a series of

influential churchmen, contending, as we shall hereafter see, for

a modification of the accepted view of creation, this phrase held

the minds of men firmly.  The great Dominican encyclopaedist,

Vincent of Beauvais, in his Mirror of Nature, while mixing ideas

brought from Aristotle with a theory drawn from the Bible, stood

firmly by the first of the accounts given in Genesis, and

assigned the special virtue of the number six as a reason why all

things were created in six days; and in the later Middle Ages

that eminent authority, Cardinal d' Ailly, accepted everything

regarding creation in the sacred books literally.  Only a faint

dissent is seen in Gregory Reisch, another authority of this

later period, who, while giving, in his book on the beginning of

things, a full length woodcut showing the Almighty in the act of

extracting Eve from Adam's side, with all the rest of new-formed

Nature in the background, leans in his writings, like St.

Augustine, toward a belief in the pre-existence of matter.



At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was thrown in

favour of the literal acceptance of Scripture as the main source

of natural science.  The allegorical and mystical interpretations

of earlier theologians he utterly rejected.  "Why," he asks,

"should Moses use allegory when he is not speaking of allegorical

creatures or of an allegorical world, but of real creatures and

of a visible world, which can be seen, felt, and grasped?  Moses

calls things by their right names, as we ought to do....I hold

that the animals took their being at once upon the word of God,

as did also the fishes in the sea."



Not less explicit in his adherence to the literal account of

creation given in Genesis was Calvin.  He warns those who, by

taking another view than his own, "basely insult the Creator, to

expect a judge who will annihilate them."  He insists that all

species of animals were created in six days, each made up of an

evening and a morning, and that no new species has ever appeared

since.  He dwells on the production of birds from the water as

resting upon certain warrant of Scripture, but adds, "If the

question is to be argued on physical grounds, we know that water

is more akin to air than the earth is."  As to difficulties in

the scriptural account of creation, he tells us that God "wished

by these to give proofs of his power which should fill us with

astonishment."



The controlling minds in the Roman Church steadfastly held this

view.  In the seventeenth century Bossuet threw his vast

authority in its favour, and in his Discourse on Universal

History, which has remained the foundation not only of

theological but of general historical teaching in France down to

the present republic, we find him calling attention to what he

regards as the culminating act of creation, and asserting that,

literally, for the creation of man earth was used, and "the

finger of God applied to corruptible matter."



The Protestant world held this idea no less persistently.  In the

seventeenth century Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the

University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical scholar of his

time, attempted to reconcile the two main legends in Genesis by

saying that of the "clean sort of beasts there were seven of

every kind created, three couples for breeding and the odd one

for Adam's sacrifice on his fall, which God foresaw"; and that

of unclean beasts only one couple was created.



So literal was this whole conception of the work of creation that

in these days it can scarcely be imagined.  The Almighty was

represented in theological literature, in the pictured Bibles,

and in works of art generally, as a sort of enlarged and

venerable Nuremberg toymaker.  At times the accounts in Genesis

were illustrated with even more literal exactness; thus, in

connection with a well-known passage in the sacred text, the

Creator was shown as a tailor, seated, needle in hand, diligently

sewing together skins of beasts into coats for Adam and Eve.

Such representations presented no difficulties to the docile

minds of the Middle Ages and the Reformation period; and in the

same spirit, when the discovery of fossils began to provoke

thought, these were declared to be "models of his works approved

or rejected by the great Artificer," "outlines of future

creations," "sports of Nature," or "objects placed in the strata

to bring to naught human curiosity"; and this kind of

explanation lingered on until in our own time an eminent

naturalist, in his anxiety to save the literal account in

Genesis, has urged that Jehovah tilted and twisted the strata,

scattered the fossils through them, scratched the glacial furrows

upon them, spread over them the marks of erosion by water, and

set Niagara pouring--all in an instant--thus mystifying the world

"for some inscrutable purpose, but for his own glory."[12]



[12] For the citation from Lactantius, see Divin. Instit., lib.

ii, cap. xi, in Migne, tome vi, pp. 311, 312; for St. Augustine's

great phrase, see the De Genes. ad litt., ii, 5; for St. Ambrose,

see lib. i, cap. ii; for Vincent of Beauvais, see the Speculum

Naturale, lib. i, cap. ii, and lib. ii, cap. xv and xxx; also

Bourgeat, Etudes sur Vincent de Beauvais, Paris, 1856, especially

chaps. vii, xii, and xvi; for Cardinal d"ailly, see the Imago

Mundi, and for Reisch, see the various editions of the Margarita

Philosophica; for Luther's statements, see Luther's Schriften,

ed. Walch, Halle, 1740, Commentary on Genesis, vol. i; for

Calvin's view of the creation of the animals, including the

immutability of Species, see the Comm. in Gen., tome i of his

Opera omnia, Amst., 1671, cap. i, v, xx, p. 5, also cap. ii, v,

ii, p. 8, and elsewhere; for Bossuet, see his Discours sur

l'Histoire universelle (in his Euvres, tome v, Paris, 1846); for

Lightfoot, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822; for

Bede, see the Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, p.21; for

Mr. Gosse'smodern defence of the literal view, see his Omphalos,

London, 1857, passim.





The next important development of theological reasoning had

regard to the DIVISIONS of the animal kingdom.



Naturally, one of the first divisions which struck the inquiring

mind was that between useful and noxious creatures, and the

question therefore occurred, How could a good God create tigers

and serpents, thorns and thistles? The answer was found in

theological considerations upon SIN.  To man's first

disobedience all woes were due.  Great men for eighteen hundred

years developed the theory that before Adam's disobedience there

was no death, and therefore neither ferocity nor venom.



Some typical utterances in the evolution of this doctrine are

worthy of a passing glance.  St. Augustine expressly confirmed

and emphasized the view that the vegetable as well as the animal

kingdom was cursed on account of man's sin.  Two hundred years

later this utterance had been echoed on from father to father of

the Church until it was caught by Bede; he declared that before

man's fall animals were harmless, but were made poisonous or

hurtful by Adam's sin, and he said, "Thus fierce and poisonous

animals were created for terrifying man (because God foresaw that

he would sin), in order that he might be made aware of the final

punishment of hell."



In the twelfth century this view was incorporated by Peter

Lombard into his great theological work, the Sentences, which

became a text-book of theology through the middle ages.  He

affirmed that "no created things would have been hurtful to man

had he not sinned; they became hurtful for the sake of

terrifying and punishing vice or of proving and perfecting

virtue; they were created harmless, and on account of sin became

hurtful."



This theological theory regarding animals was brought out in the

eighteenth century with great force by John Wesley.  He declared

that before Adam's sin "none of these attempted to devour or in

any wise hurt one another"; "the spider was as harmless as the

fly, and did not lie in wait for blood."  Not only Wesley, but

the eminent Dr. Adam Clarke and Dr. Richard Watson, whose ideas

had the very greatest weight among the English Dissenters, and

even among leading thinkers in the Established Church, held

firmly to this theory; so that not until, in our own time,

geology revealed the remains of vast multitudes of carnivorous

creatures, many of them with half-digested remains of other

animals in their stomachs, all extinct long ages before the

appearance of man upon earth, was a victory won by science over

theology in this field.



A curious development of this doctrine was seen in the belief

drawn by sundry old commentators from the condemnation of the

serpent in Genesis--a belief, indeed, perfectly natural, since it

was evidently that of the original writers of the account

preserved in the first of our sacred books.  This belief was

that, until the tempting serpent was cursed by the Almighty, all

serpents stood erect, walked, and talked.



This belief was handed down the ages as part of "the sacred

deposit of the faith" until Watson, the most prolific writer of

the evangelical reform in the eighteenth century and the standard

theologian of the evangelical party, declared:   "We have no

reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in

any mode or degree until its transformation; that he was then

degraded to a reptile to go upon his belly imports, on the

contrary, an entire loss and alteration of the original form."

Here, again, was a ripe result of the theologic method diligently

pursued by the strongest thinkers in the Church during nearly two

thousand years; but this "sacred deposit" also faded away when

the geologists found abundant remains of fossil serpents dating

from periods long before the appearance of man.



Troublesome questions also arose among theologians regarding

animals classed as "superfluous."  St. Augustine was especially

exercised thereby.  He says:   "I confess I am ignorant why mice

and frogs were created, or flies and worms....All creatures are

either useful, hurtful, or superfluous to us....As for the

hurtful creatures, we are either punished, or disciplined, or

terrified by them, so that we may not cherish and love this

life."  As to the "superfluous animals," he says, "Although they

are not necessary for our service, yet the whole design of the

universe is thereby completed and finished."  Luther, who

followed St. Augustine in so many other matters, declined to

follow him fully in this.  To him a fly was not merely

superfluous, it was noxious--sent by the devil to vex him when

reading.



Another subject which gave rise to much searching of Scripture

and long trains of theological reasoning was the difference

between the creation of man and that of other living beings.



Great stress was laid by theologians, from St. Basil and St.

Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet, and from Luther to

Wesley, on the radical distinction indicated in Genesis, God

having created man "in his own image."  What this statement meant

was seen in the light of the later biblical statement that "Adam

begat Seth in his own likeness, after his image."



In view of this and of well-known texts incorporated from older

creation legends into the Hebrew sacred books it came to be

widely held that, while man was directly moulded and fashioned

separately by the Creator's hand, the animals generally were

evoked in numbers from the earth and sea by the Creator's voice.



A question now arose naturally as to the DISTINCTIONS OF SPECIES

among animals.  The vast majority of theologians agreed in

representing all animals as created "in the beginning," and named

by Adam, preserved in the ark, and continued ever afterward under

exactly the same species.  This belief ripened into a dogma.

Like so many other dogmas in the Church, Catholic and Protestant,

its real origins are to be found rather in pagan philosophy than

in the Christian Scriptures; it came far more from Plato and

Aristotle than from Moses and St. Paul.  But this was not

considered:  more and more it became necessary to believe that

each and every difference of species was impressed by the Creator

"in the beginning," and that no change had taken place or could

have taken place since.



Some difficulties arose here and there as zoology progressed and

revealed ever-increasing numbers of species; but through the

Middle Ages, and indeed long after the Reformation, these

difficulties were easily surmounted by making the ark of Noah

larger and larger, and especially by holding that there had been

a human error in regard to its measurement.[13]



[13] For St. Augustine, see De Genesis and De Trinitate, passim;

for Bede, see Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-

38, 42; and De Sex Dierum Criatione, in Migne, tome xciii, p.

215; for Peter Lombard on "noxious animals," see his Sententiae,

lib. ii, dist. xv, 3, Migne, tome cxcii, p. 682; for Wesley,

Clarke, and Watson, see quotations from them and notes thereto in

my chapter on Geology; for St. Augustine on "superfluous

animals," see the De Genesi, lib. i, cap. xvi, 26; on Luther's

view of flies, see the Table Talk and his famous utterance, "Odio

muscas quia sunt imagines diaboli et hoereticorum"; for the

agency of Aristotle and Plato in fastening the belief in the

fixity of species into Christian theology, see Sachs, Geschichte

der Botanik, Munchen, 1875, p. 107 and note, also p. 113.





But naturally there was developed among both ecclesiastics and

laymen a human desire to go beyond these special points in the

history of animated beings--a desire to know what the creation

really IS.



Current legends, stories, and travellers' observations, poor as

they were, tended powerfully to stimulate curiosity in this

field.



Three centuries before the Christian era Aristotle had made the

first really great attempt to satisfy this curiosity, and had

begun a development of studies in natural history which remains

one of the leading achievements in the story of our race.



But the feeling which we have already seen so strong in the early

Church--that all study of Nature was futile in view of the

approaching end of the world--indicated so clearly in the New

Testament and voiced so powerfully by Lactantius and St.

Augustine--held back this current of thought for many centuries.

Still, the better tendency in humanity continued to assert

itself.  There was, indeed, an influence coming from the Hebrew

Scriptures themselves which wrought powerfully to this end; for,

in spite of all that Lactantius or St. Augustine might say as to

the futility of any study of Nature, the grand utterances in the

Psalms regarding the beauties and wonders of creation, in all the

glow of the truest poetry, ennobled the study even among those

whom logic drew away from it.



But, as a matter of course, in the early Church and throughout

the Middle Ages all such studies were cast in a theologic mould.

Without some purpose of biblical illustration or spiritual

edification they were considered futile too much prying into the

secrets of Nature was very generally held to be dangerous both to

body and soul; only for showing forth God's glory and his

purposes in the creation were such studies praiseworthy.  The

great work of Aristotle was under eclipse.  The early Christian

thinkers gave little attention to it, and that little was devoted

to transforming it into something absolutely opposed to his whole

spirit and method; in place of it they developed the Physiologus

and the Bestiaries, mingling scriptural statements, legends of

the saints, and fanciful inventions with pious intent and

childlike simplicity.  In place of research came authority--the

authority of the Scriptures as interpreted by the Physio Cogus

and the Bestiaries--and these remained the principal source of

thought on animated Nature for over a thousand years.



Occasionally, indeed, fear was shown among the rulers in the

Church, even at such poor prying into the creation as this, and

in the fifth century a synod under Pope Gelasius administered a

rebuke to the Physiologus; but the interest in Nature was too

strong:  the great work on Creation by St. Basil had drawn from

the Physiologus precious illustrations of Holy Writ, and the

strongest of the early popes, Gregory the Great, virtually

sanctioned it.



Thus was developed a sacred science of creation and of the divine

purpose in Nature, which went on developing from the fourth

century to the nineteenth--from St. Basil to St. Isidore of

Seville, from Isidore to Vincent of Beauvais, and from Vincent to

Archdeacon Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises.



Like all else in the Middle Ages, this sacred science was

developed purely by theological methods.  Neglecting the wonders

which the dissection of the commonest animals would have afforded

them, these naturalists attempted to throw light into Nature by

ingenious use of scriptural texts, by research among the lives of

the saints, and by the plentiful application of metaphysics.

Hence even such strong men as St. Isidore of Seville treasured

up accounts of the unicorn and dragons mentioned in the

Scriptures and of the phoenix and basilisk in profane writings.

Hence such contributions to knowledge as that the basilisk kills

serpents by his breath and men by his glance, that the lion when

pursued effaces his tracks with the end of his tail, that the

pelican nourishes her young with her own blood, that serpents lay

aside their venom before drinking, that the salamander quenches

fire, that the hyena can talk with shepherds, that certain birds

are born of the fruit of a certain tree when it happens to fall

into the water, with other masses of science equally valuable.



As to the method of bringing science to bear on Scripture, the

Physiologus gives an example, illustrating the passage in the

book of Job which speaks of the old lion perishing for lack of

prey.  Out of the attempt to explain an unusual Hebrew word in

the text there came a curious development of error, until we find

fully evolved an account of the "ant-lion," which, it gives us to

understand, was the lion mentioned by Job, and it says:  "As to

the ant-lion, his father hath the shape of a lion, his mother

that of an ant; the father liveth upon flesh and the mother upon

herbs; these bring forth the ant-lion, a compound of both and in

part like to either; for his fore part is like that of a lion

and his hind part like that of an ant.  Being thus composed, he

is neither able to eat flesh like his father nor herbs like his

mother, and so he perisheth."



In the middle of the thirteenth century we have a triumph of this

theological method in the great work of the English Franciscan

Bartholomew on The Properties of Things.  The theological method

as applied to science consists largely in accepting tradition and

in spinning arguments to fit it.  In this field Bartholomew was a

master.  Having begun with the intent mainly to explain the

allusions in Scripture to natural objects, he soon rises

logically into a survey of all Nature.  Discussing the

"cockatrice" of Scripture, he tells us:  "He drieth and burneth

leaves with his touch, and he is of so great venom and perilous

that he slayeth and wasteth him that nigheth him without

tarrying; and yet the weasel overcometh him, for the biting of

the weasel is death to the cockatrice.  Nevertheless the biting

of the cockatrice is death to the weasel if the weasel eat not

rue before.  And though the cockatrice be venomous without remedy

while he is alive, yet he looseth all the malice when he is burnt

to ashes.  His ashes be accounted profitable in working of

alchemy, and namely in turning and changing of metals."



Bartholomew also enlightens us on the animals of Egypt, and says,

"If the crocodile findeth a man by the water's brim he slayeth

him, and then he weepeth over him and swalloweth him."



Naturally this good Franciscan naturalist devotes much thought to

the "dragons" mentioned in Scripture.  He says:  "The dragon is

most greatest of all serpents, and oft he is drawn out of his den

and riseth up into the air, and the air is moved by him, and also

the sea swelleth against his venom, and he hath a crest, and

reareth his tongue, and hath teeth like a saw, and hath strength,

and not only in teeth but in tail, and grieveth with biting and

with stinging.  Whom he findeth he slayeth.  Oft four or five of

them fasten their tails together and rear up their heads, and

sail over the sea to get good meat.  Between elephants and

dragons is everlasting fighting; for the dragon with his tail

spanneth the elephant, and the elephant with his nose throweth

down the dragon....The cause why the dragon desireth his blood is

the coldness thereof, by the which the dragon desireth to cool

himself.  Jerome saith that the dragon is a full thirsty beast,

insomuch that he openeth his mouth against the wind to quench the

burning of his thirst in that wise.  Therefore, when he seeth

ships in great wind he flieth against the sail to take the cold

wind, and overthroweth the ship."



These ideas of Friar Bartholomew spread far and struck deep into

the popular mind.  His book was translated into the principal

languages of Europe, and was one of those most generally read

during the Ages of Faith.  It maintained its position nearly

three hundred years; even after the invention of printing it

held its own, and in the fifteenth century there were issued no

less than ten editions of it in Latin, four in French, and

various versions of it in Dutch, Spanish, and English.  Preachers

found it especially useful in illustrating the ways of God to

man.  It was only when the great voyages of discovery substituted

ascertained fact for theological reasoning in this province that

its authority was broken.



The same sort of science flourished in the Bestiaries, which

were used everywhere, and especially in the pulpits, for the

edification of the faithful.  In all of these, as in that

compiled early in the thirteenth century by an ecclesiastic,

William of Normandy, we have this lesson, borrowed from the

Physiologus:  "The lioness giveth birth to cubs which remain

three days without life.  Then cometh the lion, breatheth upon

them, and bringeth them to life....Thus it is that Jesus Christ

during three days was deprived of life, but God the Father raised

him gloriously."



Pious use was constantly made of this science, especially by

monkish preachers.  The phoenix rising from his ashes proves the

doctrine of the resurrection; the structure and mischief of

monkeys proves the existence of demons; the fact that certain

monkeys have no tails proves that Satan has been shorn of his

glory; the weasel, which "constantly changes its place, is a

type of the man estranged from the word of God, who findeth no

rest."



The moral treatises of the time often took the form of works on

natural history, in order the more fully to exploit these

religious teachings of Nature.  Thus from the book On Bees, the

Dominican Thomas of Cantimpre, we learn that "wasps persecute

bees and make war on them out of natural hatred"; and these, he

tells us, typify the demons who dwell in the air and with

lightning and tempest assail and vex mankind--whereupon he fills

a long chapter with anecdotes of such demonic warfare on mortals.

In like manner his fellow-Dominican, the inquisitor Nider, in his

book The Ant Hill, teaches us that the ants in Ethiopia, which

are said to have horns and to grow so large as to look like dogs,

are emblems of atrocious heretics, like Wyclif and the Hussites,

who bark and bite against the truth; while the ants of India,

which dig up gold out of the sand with their feet and hoard it,

though they make no use of it, symbolize the fruitless toil with

which the heretics dig out the gold of Holy Scripture and hoard

it in their books to no purpose.



This pious spirit not only pervaded science; it bloomed out in

art, and especially in the cathedrals.  In the gargoyles

overhanging the walls, in the grotesques clambering about the

towers or perched upon pinnacles, in the dragons prowling under

archways or lurking in bosses of foliage, in the apocalyptic

beasts carved upon the stalls of the choir, stained into the

windows, wrought into the tapestries, illuminated in the letters

and borders of psalters and missals, these marvels of creation

suggested everywhere morals from the Physiologus, the Bestiaries,

and the Exempla.[14]



[14] For the Physiologus, Bestiaries, etc., see Berger de Xivrey,

Traditions Teratologiques; also Hippeau's edition of the Bestiare

de Guillaume de Normandie, Caen, 1852, and such medieaval books

of Exempla as the Lumen Naturae; also Hoefer, Histoire de la

Zoologie; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation Francaise,

Paris, 1885, vol i, pp. 368, 369; also Cardinal Pitra, preface to

the Spicilegium Solismense, Paris, 1885, passim; also Carus,

Geschichte der Zoologie; and for an admirable summary, the

article Physiologus in the Encyclopedia Britannica.  In the

illuminated manuscripts in the Library of Cornell University are

some very striking examples of grotesques.  For admirably

illustrated articles on the Bestiaries, see Cahier and Martin,

Melanges d'Archeologie, Paris, 1851, 1852, and 1856, vol. ii of

the first series, pp. 85-232, and second series, volume on

Curiosities Mysterieuses, pp. 106-164; also J. R. Allen, Early

Christian Symbolism in Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1887),

lecture vi; for an exhaustive discussion of the subject, see Das

Thierbuch des normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc,

herausgegeben von Reinisch, Leipsic, 1890; and for an Italian

examlpe, Goldstaub and Wendriner, Ein Tosco-Venezianischer

Bestiarius, Halle, 1892, where is given, on pp. 369-371, a very

pious but very comical tradition regarding the beaver, hardly

mentionable to ears polite.  For Friar Bartholomew, see (besides

his book itself) Medieval Lore, edited by Robert Steele, London,

1893, pp. 118-138.





Here and there among men who were free from church control we

have work of a better sort.  In the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries Abd Allatif made observations upon the natural history

of Egypt which showed a truly scientific spirit, and the Emperor

Frederick II attempted to promote a more fruitful study of

Nature; but one of these men was abhorred as a Mussulman and the

other as an infidel.  Far more in accordance with the spirit of

the time was the ecclesiastic Giraldus Cambrensis, whose book on

the topography of Ireland bestows much attention upon the animals

of the island, and rarely fails to make each contribute an

appropriate moral.  For example, he says that in Ireland "eagles

live for so many ages that they seem to contend with eternity

itself; so also the saints, having put off the old man and put

on the new, obtain the blessed fruit of everlasting life."

Again, he tells us:  "Eagles often fly so high that their wings

are scorched by the sun; so those who in the Holy Scriptures

strive to unravel the deep and hidden secrets of the heavenly

mysteries, beyond what is allowed, fall below, as if the wings of

the presumptuous imaginations on which they are borne were

scorched."



In one of the great men of the following century appeared a gleam

of healthful criticism:  Albert the Great, in his work on the

animals, dissents from the widespread belief that certain birds

spring from trees and are nourished by the sap, and also from the

theory that some are generated in the sea from decaying wood.



But it required many generations for such scepticism to produce

much effect, and we find among the illustrations in an edition of

Mandeville published just before the Reformation not only careful

accounts but pictured representations both of birds and of beasts

produced in the fruit of trees.[15]



[15] For Giraldus Cambrensis, see the edition in the Bohn

Library, London, 1863, p. 30; for the Abd Allatif and Frederick

II, see Hoefer, as above; for Albertus Magnus, see the De

Animalibus, lib. xxiii; for the illustrations in Mandeville, see

the Strasburg edition, 1484; for the history of the myth of the

tree which produces birds, see Max Muller's lectures on the

Science of Language, second series, lect. xii.





This general employment of natural science for pious purposes

went on after the Reformation.  Luther frequently made this use

of it, and his example controlled his followers.  In 1612,

Wolfgang Franz, Professor of Theology at Luther's university,

gave to the world his sacred history of animals, which went

through many editions.  It contained a very ingenious

classification, describing "natural dragons," which have three

rows of teeth to each jaw, and he piously adds, "the principal

dragon is the Devil."



Near the end of the same century, Father Kircher, the great

Jesuit professor at Rome, holds back the sceptical current,

insists upon the orthodox view, and represents among the animals

entering the ark sirens and griffins.



Yet even among theologians we note here and there a sceptical

spirit in natural science.  Early in the same seventeenth century

Eugene Roger published his Travels in Palestine.  As regards the

utterances of Scripture he is soundly orthodox:  he prefaces his

work with a map showing, among other important points referred to

in biblical history, the place where Samson slew a thousand

Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, the cavern which Adam and

Eve inhabited after their expulsion from paradise, the spot where

Balaam's ass spoke, the place where Jacob wrestled with the

angel, the steep place down which the swine possessed of devils

plunged into the sea, the position of the salt statue which was

once Lot's wife, the place at sea where Jonah was swallowed by

the whale, and "the exact spot where St. Peter caught one

hundred and fifty-three fishes."



As to natural history, he describes and discusses with great

theological acuteness the basilisk.  He tells us that the animal

is about a foot and a half long, is shaped like a crocodile, and

kills people with a single glance.  The one which he saw was

dead, fortunately for him, since in the time of Pope Leo IV--as

he tells us--one appeared in Rome and killed many people by

merely looking at them; but the Pope destroyed it with his

prayers and the sign of the cross.  He informs us that Providence

has wisely and mercifully protected man by requiring the monster

to cry aloud two or three times whenever it leaves its den, and

that the divine wisdom in creation is also shown by the fact that

the monster is obliged to look its victim in the eye, and at a

certain fixed distance, before its glance can penetrate the

victim's brain and so pass to his heart.  He also gives a reason

for supposing that the same divine mercy has provided that the

crowing of a cock will kill the basilisk.



Yet even in this good and credulous missionary we see the

influence of Bacon and the dawn of experimental science; for,

having been told many stories regarding the salamander, he

secured one, placed it alive upon the burning coals, and reports

to us that the legends concerning its power to live in the fire

are untrue.  He also tried experiments with the chameleon, and

found that the stories told of it were to be received with much

allowance:  while, then, he locks up his judgment whenever he

discusses the letter of Scripture, he uses his mind in other

things much after the modern method.



In the second half of the same century Hottinger, in his

Theological Examination of the History of Creation, breaks from

the belief in the phoenix; but his scepticism is carefully kept

within the limits imposed by Scripture.  He avows his doubts,

first, "because God created the animals in couples, while the

phoenix is represented as a single, unmated creature"; secondly,

"because Noah, when he entered the ark, brought the animals in by

sevens, while there were never so many individuals of the phoenix

species"; thirdly, because "no man is known who dares assert

that he has ever seen this bird"; fourthly, because "those who

assert there is a phoenix differ among themselves."



In view of these attacks on the salamander and the phoenix, we

are not surprised to find, before the end of the century,

scepticism regarding the basilisk:  the eminent Prof.

Kirchmaier, at the University of Wittenberg, treats phoenix and

basilisk alike as old wives' fables.  As to the phoenix, he

denies its existence, not only because Noah took no such bird

into the ark, but also because, as he pithily remarks, "birds

come from eggs, not from ashes."  But the unicorn he can not

resign, nor will he even concede that the unicorn is a

rhinoceros; he appeals to Job and to Marco Polo to prove that

this animal, as usually conceived, really exists, and says, "Who

would not fear to deny the existence of the unicorn, since Holy

Scripture names him with distinct praises?" As to the other great

animals mentioned in Scripture, he is so rationalistic as to

admit that behemoth was an elephant and leviathan a whale.



But these germs of a fruitful scepticism grew, and we soon find

Dannhauer going a step further and declaring his disbelief even

in the unicorn, insisting that it was a rhinoceros--only that and

nothing more.  Still, the main current continued strongly

theological.  In 1712 Samuel Bochart published his great work

upon the animals of Holy Scripture.  As showing its spirit we may

take the titles of the chapters on the horse:



"Chapter VI.  Of the Hebrew Name of the Horse."



"Chapter VII.  Of the Colours of the Six Horses in Zechariah."



"Chapter VIII.  Of the Horses in Job."



"Chapter IX.  Of Solomon's Horses, and of the Texts wherein the

Writers praise the Excellence of Horses."



"Chapter X.  Of the Consecrated Horses of the Sun."



Among the other titles of chapters are such as:  Of Balaam's Ass;

Of the Thousand Philistines slain by Samson with the Jawbone of

an Ass; Of the Golden Calves of Aaron and Jeroboam; Of the

Bleating, Milk, Wool, External and Internal Parts of Sheep

mentioned in Scripture; Of Notable Things told regarding Lions

in Scripture; Of Noah's Dove and of the Dove which appeared at

Christ's Baptism.  Mixed up in the book, with the principal mass

drawn from Scripture, were many facts and reasonings taken from

investigations by naturalists; but all were permeated by the

theological spirit.[16]



[16] For Franz and Kircher, see Perrier, La Philosophie

Zoologique avant Darwin, 1884, p. 29; for Roger, see his La Terre

Saincte, Paris, 1664, pp. 89-92, 130, 218, etc.; for Hottinger,

see his Historiae Creatonis Examen theologico-philologicum,

Heidelberg, 1659, lib. vi, quaest.lxxxiii; for Kirchmaier, see

his Disputationes Zoologicae (published collectively after his

death), Jena, 1736; for Dannhauer, see his Disputationes

Theologicae, Leipsic, 1707, p. 14; for Bochart, see his

Hierozoikon, sive De Animalibus Sacre Scripturae, Leyden, 1712.





The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two

thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the

sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different

method--the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically--the

method which seeks not plausibilities but facts.  At that time

Edward Wotton led the way in England and Conrad Gesner on the

Continent, by observations widely extended, carefully noted, and

thoughtfully classified.



This better method of interrogating Nature soon led to the

formation of societies for the same purpose.  In 1560 was founded

an Academy for the Study of Nature at Naples, but theologians,

becoming alarmed, suppressed it, and for nearly one hundred years

there was no new combined effort of that sort, until in 1645

began the meetings in London of what was afterward the Royal

Society.  Then came the Academy of Sciences in France, and the

Accademia del Cimento in Italy; others followed in all parts of

the world, and a great new movement was begun.



Theologians soon saw a danger in this movement.  In Italy, Prince

Leopold de' Medici, a protector of the Florentine Academy, was

bribed with a cardinal's hat to neglect it, and from the days of

Urban VIII to Pius IX a similar spirit was there shown.  In

France, there were frequent ecclesiastical interferences, of

which Buffon's humiliation for stating a simple scientific truth

was a noted example.  In England, Protestantism was at first

hardly more favourable toward the Royal Society, and the great

Dr. South denounced it in his sermons as irreligious.



Fortunately, one thing prevented an open breach between theology

and science:  while new investigators had mainly given up the

medieval method so dear to the Church, they had very generally

retained the conception of direct creation and of design

throughout creation--a design having as its main purpose the

profit, instruction, enjoyment, and amusement of man.



On this the naturally opposing tendencies of theology and science

were compromised.  Science, while somewhat freed from its old

limitations, became the handmaid of theology in illustrating the

doctrine of creative design, and always with apparent deference

to the Chaldean and other ancient myths and legends embodied in

the Hebrew sacred books.



About the middle of the seventeenth century came a great victory

of the scientific over the theologic method.  At that time

Francesco Redi published the results of his inquiries into the

doctrine of spontaneous generation.  For ages a widely accepted

doctrine had been that water, filth, and carrion had received

power from the Creator to generate worms, insects, and a

multitude of the smaller animals; and this doctrine had been

especially welcomed by St. Augustine and many of the fathers,

since it relieved the Almighty of making, Adam of naming, and

Noah of living in the ark with these innumerable despised

species.  But to this fallacy Redi put an end.  By researches

which could not be gainsaid, he showed that every one of these

animals came from an egg; each, therefore, must be the lineal

descendant of an animal created, named, and preserved from "the

beginning."



Similar work went on in England, but under more distinctly

theological limitations.  In the same seventeenth century a very

famous and popular English book was published by the naturalist

John Ray, a fellow of the Royal Society, who produced a number of

works on plants, fishes, and birds; but the most widely read of

all was entitled The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of

Creation.  Between the years 1691 and 1827 it passed through

nearly twenty editions.



Ray argued the goodness and wisdom of God from the adaptation of

the animals not only to man's uses but to their own lives and

surroundings.



In the first years of the eighteenth century Dr. Nehemiah Grew,

of the Royal Society, published his Cosmologia Sacra to refute

anti-scriptural opinions by producing evidences of creative

design.  Discussing "the ends of Providence," he says, "A crane,

which is scurvy meat, lays but two eggs in the year, but a

pheasant and partridge, both excellent meat, lay and hatch

fifteen or twenty."  He points to the fact that "those of value

which lay few at a time sit the oftener, as the woodcock and the

dove."  He breaks decidedly from the doctrine that noxious things

in Nature are caused by sin, and shows that they, too, are

useful; that, "if nettles sting, it is to secure an excellent

medicine for children and cattle"; that, "if the bramble hurts

man, it makes all the better hedge"; and that, "if it chances to

prick the owner, it tears the thief."  "Weasels, kites, and other

hurtful animals induce us to watchfulness; thistles and moles,

to good husbandry; lice oblige us to cleanliness in our bodies,

spiders in our houses, and the moth in our clothes."  This very

optimistic view, triumphing over the theological theory of

noxious animals and plants as effects of sin, which prevailed

with so much force from St. Augustine to Wesley, was developed

into nobler form during the century by various thinkers, and

especially by Archdeacon Paley, whose Natural Theology exercised

a powerful influence down to recent times.  The same tendency

appeared in other countries, though various philosophers showed

weak points in the argument, and Goethe made sport of it in a

noted verse, praising the forethought of the Creator in

foreordaining the cork tree to furnish stoppers for wine-bottles.



Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century the main

movement culminated in the Bridgewater Treatises.  Pursuant to

the will of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the President of the

Royal Society selected eight persons, each to receive a thousand

pounds sterling for writing and publishing a treatise on the

"power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the

creation."  Of these, the leading essays in regard to animated

Nature were those of Thomas Chalmers, on The Adaptation of

External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Condition of Man;

of Sir Charles Bell, on The Hand as evincing Design; of Roget,

on Animal and Vegetable Physiology with reference to Natural

Theology; and of Kirby, on The Habits and Instincts of Animals

with reference to Natural Theology.



Besides these there were treatises by Whewell, Buckland, Kidd,

and Prout.  The work was well done.  It was a marked advance on

all that had appeared before, in matter, method, and spirit.

Looking back upon it now we can see that it was provisional, but

that it was none the less fruitful in truth, and we may well

remember Darwin's remark on the stimulating effect of mistaken

THEORIES, as compared with the sterilizing effect of mistaken

OBSERVATIONS:  mistaken observations lead men astray, mistaken

theories suggest true theories.



An effort made in so noble a spirit certainly does not deserve

the ridicule that, in our own day, has sometimes been lavished

upon it.  Curiously, indeed, one of the most contemptuous of

these criticisms has been recently made by one of the most

strenuous defenders of orthodoxy.  No less eminent a

standard-bearer of the faith than the Rev. Prof. Zoeckler says of

this movement to demonstrate creative purpose and design, and of

the men who took part in it, "The earth appeared in their

representation of it like a great clothing shop and soup kitchen,

and God as a glorified rationalistic professor."  Such a

statement as this is far from just to the conceptions of such men

as Butler, Paley, and Chalmers, no matter how fully the thinking

world has now outlived them.[17]



[17] For a very valuable and interesting study on the old idea of

the generation of insects from carrion, see Osten-Sacken, on the

Oxen-born Bees of the Ancients, Heidelberg, 1894; for Ray, see

the work cited, London, 1827, p. 153; for Grew, see Cosmologia

Sacra, or a Discourse on the Universe, as it is the Creature and

Kingdom of God; chiefly written to demonstrate the Truth and

Excellency of the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the

College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of London, 1701;

for Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual editions;

also Lange, History of Rationalism.  Goethe's couplet ran as

follows:



"Welche Verehrung verdient der Weltenerschopfer, der Gnadig,

Als er den Korkbaum erschuf, gleich auch die Stopfel erfand."



For the quotation from Zoeckler, see his work already cited, vol.

ii, pp. 74, 440.





But, noble as the work of these men was, the foundation of fact

on which they reared it became evidently more and more insecure.

For as far back as the seventeenth century acute theologians had

begun to discern difficulties more serious than any that had

before confronted them.  More and more it was seen that the

number of different species was far greater than the world had

hitherto imagined.  Greater and greater had become the old

difficulty in conceiving that, of these innumerable species, each

had been specially created by the Almighty hand; that each had

been brought before Adam by the Almighty to be named; and that

each, in couples or in sevens, had been gathered by Noah into the

ark.  But the difficulties thus suggested were as nothing

compared to those raised by the DISTRIBUTION of animals.



Even in the first days of the Church this had aroused serious

thought, and above all in the great mind of St. Augustine.  In

his City of God he had stated the difficulty as follows:  "But

there is a question about all these kinds of beasts, which are

neither tamed by man, nor spring from the earth like frogs, such

as wolves and others of that sort,....as to how they could find

their way to the islands after that flood which destroyed every

living thing not preserved in the ark....Some, indeed, might be

thought to reach islands by swimming, in case these were very

near; but some islands are so remote from continental lands that

it does not seem possible that any creature could reach them by

swimming.  It is not an incredible thing, either, that some

animals may have been captured by men and taken with them to

those lands which they intended to inhabit, in order that they

might have the pleasure of hunting; and it can not be denied

that the transfer may have been accomplished through the agency

of angels, commanded or allowed to perform this labour by God."



But this difficulty had now assumed a magnitude of which St.

Augustine never dreamed.  Most powerful of all agencies to

increase it were the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama,

Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci, and other navigators of the period of

discovery.  Still more serious did it become as the great islands

of the southern seas were explored.  Every navigator brought home

tidings of new species of animals and of races of men living in

parts of the world where the theologians, relying on the

statement of St. Paul that the gospel had gone into all lands,

had for ages declared there could be none; until finally it

overtaxed even the theological imagination to conceive of angels,

in obedience to the divine command, distributing the various

animals over the earth, dropping the megatherium in South

America, the archeopteryx in Europe, the ornithorhynchus in

Australia, and the opossum in North America.



The first striking evidence of this new difficulty was shown by

the eminent Jesuit missionary, Joseph Acosta.  In his Natural and

Moral History of the Indies, published in 1590, he proved

himself honest and lucid.  Though entangled in most of the older

scriptural views, he broke away from many; but the distribution

of animals gave him great trouble.  Having shown the futility of

St. Augustine's other explanations, he quaintly asks:  "Who can

imagine that in so long a voyage men woulde take the paines to

carrie Foxes to Peru, especially that kinde they call `Acias,'

which is the filthiest I have seene?  Who woulde likewise say

that they have carried Tygers and Lyons?  Truly it were a thing

worthy the laughing at to thinke so.  It was sufficient, yea,

very much, for men driven against their willes by tempest, in so

long and unknowne a voyage, to escape with their owne lives,

without busying themselves to carrie Woolves and Foxes, and to

nourish them at sea."



It was under the impression made by this new array of facts that

in 1667 Abraham Milius published at Geneva his book on The Origin

of Animals and the Migration of Peoples.  This book shows, like

that of Acosta, the shock and strain to which the discovery of

America subjected the received theological scheme of things.  It

was issued with the special approbation of the Bishop of

Salzburg, and it indicates the possibility that a solution of the

whole trouble may be found in the text, "Let the earth bring

forth the living creature after his kind."  Milius goes on to

show that the ancient philosophers agree with Moses, and that

"the earth and the waters, and especially the heat of the sun and

of the genial sky, together with that slimy and putrid quality

which seems to be inherent in the soil, may furnish the origin

for fishes, terrestrial animals, and birds."  On the other hand,

he is very severe against those who imagine that man can have had

the same origin with animals.  But the subject with which Milius

especially grapples is the DISTRIBUTION of animals.  He is

greatly exercised by the many species found in America and in

remote islands of the ocean--species entirely unknown in the

other continents--and of course he is especially troubled by the

fact that these species existing in those exceedingly remote

parts of the earth do not exist in the neighbourhood of Mount

Ararat.  He confesses that to explain the distribution of animals

is the most difficult part of the problem.  If it be urged that

birds could reach America by flying and fishes by swimming, he

asks, "What of the beasts which neither fly nor swim?"  Yet even

as to the birds he asks, "Is there not an infinite variety of

winged creatures who fly so slowly and heavily, and have such a

horror of the water, that they would not even dare trust

themselves to fly over a wide river?"  As to fishes, he says,

"They are very averse to wandering from their native waters," and

he shows that there are now reported many species of American and

East Indian fishes entirely unknown on the other continents,

whose presence, therefore, can not be explained by any theory of

natural dispersion.



Of those who suggest that land animals may have been dispersed

over the earth by the direct agency of man for his use or

pleasure he asks:  "Who would like to get different sorts of

lions, bears, tigers, and other ferocious and noxious creatures

on board ship? who would trust himself with them? and who would

wish to plant colonies of such creatures in new, desirable

lands?"



His conclusion is that plants and animals take their origin in

the lands wherein they are found; an opinion which he supports

by quoting from the two narrations in Genesis passages which

imply generative force in earth and water.



But in the eighteenth century matters had become even worse for

the theological view.  To meet the difficulty the eminent

Benedictine, Dom Calmet, in his Commentary, expressed the belief

that all the species of a genus had originally formed one

species, and he dwelt on this view as one which enabled him to

explain the possibility of gathering all animals into the ark.

This idea, dangerous as it was to the fabric of orthodoxy, and

involving a profound separation from the general doctrine of the

Church, seems to have been abroad among thinking men, for we find

in the latter half of the same century even Linnaeus inclining to

consider it.  It was time, indeed, that some new theological

theory be evolved; the great Linnaeus himself, in spite of his

famous declaration favouring the fixity of species, had dealt a

death-blow to the old theory.  In his Systema Naturae, published

in the middle of the eighteenth century, he had enumerated four

thousand species of animals, and the difficulties involved in the

naming of each of them by Adam and in bringing them together in

the ark appeared to all thinking men more and more

insurmountable.



What was more embarrassing, the number of distinct species went

on increasing rapidly, indeed enormously, until, as an eminent

zoological authority of our own time has declared, "for every one

of the species enumerated by Linnaeus, more than fifty kinds are

known to the naturalist of to-day, and the number of species

still unknown doubtless far exceeds the list of those recorded."



Already there were premonitions of the strain made upon Scripture

by requiring a hundred and sixty distinct miraculous

interventions of the Creator to produce the hundred and sixty

species of land shells found in the little island of Madeira

alone, and fourteen hundred distinct interventions to produce the

actual number of distinct species of a single well-known shell.



Ever more and more difficult, too, became the question of the

geographical distribution of animals.  As new explorations were

made in various parts of the world, this danger to the

theological view went on increasing.  The sloths in South America

suggested painful questions:  How could animals so sluggish have

got away from the neighbourhood of Mount Ararat so completely and

have travelled so far?



The explorations in Australia and neighbouring islands made

matters still worse, for there was found in those regions a whole

realm of animals differing widely from those of other parts of

the earth.



The problem before the strict theologians became, for example,

how to explain the fact that the kangaroo can have been in the

ark and be now only found in Australia:  his saltatory powers are

indeed great, but how could he by any series of leaps have sprung

across the intervening mountains, plains, and oceans to that

remote continent? and, if the theory were adopted that at some

period a causeway extended across the vast chasm separating

Australia from the nearest mainland, why did not lions, tigers,

camels, and camelopards force or find their way across it?



The theological theory, therefore, had by the end of the

eighteenth century gone to pieces.  The wiser theologians waited;

the unwise indulged in exhortations to "root out the wicked heart

of unbelief," in denunciation of "science falsely so called," and

in frantic declarations that "the Bible is true"--by which they

meant that the limited understanding of it which they had

happened to inherit is true.



By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole theological

theory of creation--though still preached everywhere as a matter

of form--was clearly seen by all thinking men to be hopelessly

lost:  such strong men as Cardinal Wiseman in the Roman Church,

Dean Buckland in the Anglican, and Hugh Miller in the Scottish

Church, made heroic efforts to save something from it, but all to

no purpose.  That sturdy Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon honesty, which

is the best legacy of the Middle Ages to Christendom, asserted

itself in the old strongholds of theological thought, the

universities.  Neither the powerful logic of Bishop Butler nor

the nimble reasoning of Archdeacon Paley availed.  Just as the

line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had

destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the centre,

and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving

the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of

biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator

minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs

and purposes of man.  They had developed a system of a very

different sort, and this we shall next consider.[18]



[18] For Acosta, see his Historia Natural y moral de las Indias,

Seville, 1590--the quaint English translation is of London, 1604;

for Abraham Milius, see his De Origine Animalium et Migratione

Popularum, Geneva, 1667; also Kosmos, 1877, H. I, S. 36; for

Linnaeus's declaration regarding species, see the Philosophia

Botanica, 99, 157; for Calmet and Linnaeus, see Zoeckler, vol.

ii, p. 237.  As to the enormously increasing numbers of species

in zoology and botany, see President D. S. Jordan, Science

Sketches, pp. 176, 177; also for pithy statement, Laing's

Problems of the Future, chap. vi.







III.  THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES, OF AN

EVOLUTION IN ANIMATED NATURE.





We have seen, thus far, how there came into the thinking of

mankind upon the visible universe and its inhabitants the idea of

a creation virtually instantaneous and complete, and of a Creator

in human form with human attributes, who spoke matter into

existence literally by the exercise of his throat and lips, or

shaped and placed it with his hands and fingers.



We have seen that this view came from far; that it existed in

the Chaldaeo-Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, and probably

in others of the earliest date known to us; that its main

features passed thence into the sacred books of the Hebrews and

then into the early Christian Church, by whose theologians it was

developed through the Middle Ages and maintained during the

modern period.



But, while this idea was thus developed by a succession of noble

and thoughtful men through thousands of years, another

conception, to all appearance equally ancient, was developed,

sometimes in antagonism to it, sometimes mingled with it--the

conception of all living beings as wholly or in part the result

of a growth process--of an evolution.



This idea, in various forms, became a powerful factor in nearly

all the greater ancient theologies and philosophies.  For very

widespread among the early peoples who attained to much thinking

power was a conception that, in obedience to the divine fiat, a

watery chaos produced the earth, and that the sea and land gave

birth to their inhabitants.



This is clearly seen in those records of Chaldaeo-Babylonian

thought deciphered in these latter years, to which reference has

already been made.  In these we have a watery chaos which, under

divine action, brings forth the earth and its inhabitants; first

the sea animals and then the land animals--the latter being

separated into three kinds, substantially as recorded afterward

in the Hebrew accounts.  At the various stages in the work the

Chaldean Creator  pronounces it "beautiful," just as the Hebrew

Creator in our own later account pronounces it "good."



In both accounts there is placed over the whole creation a solid,

concave firmament; in both, light is created first, and the

heavenly bodies are afterward placed "for signs and for seasons";

in both, the number seven is especially sacred, giving rise to a

sacred division of time and to much else.  It may be added that,

with many other features in the Hebrew legends evidently drawn

from the Chaldean, the account of the creation in each is

followed by a legend regarding "the fall of man" and a deluge,

many details of which clearly passed in slightly modified form

from the Chaldean into the Hebrew accounts.



It would have been a miracle indeed if these primitive

conceptions, wrought out with so much poetic vigour in that

earlier civilization on the Tigris and Euphrates, had failed to

influence the Hebrews, who during the most plastic periods of

their development were under the tutelage of their Chaldean

neighbours.  Since the researches of Layard, George Smith,

Oppert, Schrader, Jensen, Sayce, and their compeers, there is no

longer a reasonable doubt that this ancient view of the world,

elaborated if not originated in that earlier civilization, came

thence as a legacy to the Hebrews, who wrought it in a somewhat

disjointed but mainly monotheistic form into the poetic whole

which forms one of the most precious treasures of ancient thought

preserved in the book of Genesis.



Thus it was that, while the idea of a simple material creation

literally by the hands and fingers or voice of the Creator

became, as we have seen, the starting-point of a powerful stream

of theological thought, and while this stream was swollen from

age to age by contributions from the fathers, doctors, and

learned divines of the Church, Catholic and Protestant, there was

poured into it this lesser current, always discernible and at

times clearly separated from it--a current of belief in a process

of evolution.



The Rev. Prof. Sayce, of Oxford, than whom no English-speaking

scholar carries more weight in a matter of this kind, has

recently declared his belief that the Chaldaeo-Babylonian theory

was the undoubted source of the similar theory propounded by the

Ionic philosopher Anaximander--the Greek thinkers deriving this

view from the Babylonians through the Phoenicians; he also

allows that from the same source its main features were adopted

into both the accounts given in the first of our sacred books,

and in this general view the most eminent Christian

Assyriologists concur.



It is true that these sacred accounts of ours contradict each

other.  In that part of the first or Elohistic account given in

the first chapter of Genesis the WATERS bring forth fishes,

marine animals, and birds (Genesis, i, 20); but in that part of

the second or Jehovistic account given in the second chapter of

Genesis both the land animals and birds are declared to have been

created not out of the water, but "OUT OF THE GROUND" (Genesis,

ii, 19).



The dialectic skill of the fathers was easily equal to explaining

away this contradiction; but the old current of thought,

strengthened by both these legends, arrested their attention,

and, passing through the minds of a succession of the greatest

men of the Church, influenced theological opinion deeply, if not

widely, for ages, in favour of an evolution theory.



But there was still another ancient source of evolution ideas.

Thoughtful men of the early civilizations which were developed

along the great rivers in the warmer regions of the earth noted

how the sun-god as he rose in his fullest might caused the water

and the rich soil to teem with the lesser forms of life.  In

Egypt, especially, men saw how under this divine power the Nile

slime brought forth "creeping things innumerable."  Hence mainly

this ancient belief that the animals and man were produced by

lifeless matter at the divine command, "in the beginning," was

supplemented by the idea that some of the lesser animals,

especially the insects, were produced by a later evolution, being

evoked after the original creation from various sources, but

chiefly from matter in a state of decay.



This crude, early view aided doubtless in giving germs of a

better evolution theory to the early Greeks.  Anaximander,

Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and, greatest of all, Aristotle, as we

have seen, developed them, making their way at times by guesses

toward truths since established by observation.  Aristotle

especially, both by speculation and observation, arrived at some

results which, had Greek freedom of thought continued, might have

brought the world long since to its present plane of biological

knowledge; for he reached something like the modern idea of a

succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the

fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature.



With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a

yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old

crude view remained, and as a typical example of it we may note

the opinion of St. Basil the Great in the fourth century.

Discussing the work of creation, he declares that, at the command

of God, "the waters were gifted with productive power"; "from

slime and muddy places frogs, flies, and gnats came into being";

and he finally declares that the same voice which gave this

energy and quality of productiveness to earth and water shall be

similarly efficacious until the end of the world.  St. Gregory

of Nyssa held a similar view.



This idea of these great fathers of the Eastern Church took even

stronger hold on the great father of the Western Church.  For St.

Augustine, so fettered usually by the letter of the sacred text,

broke from his own famous doctrine as to the acceptance of

Scripture and spurned the generally received belief of a creative

process like that by which a toymaker brings into existence a box

of playthings.  In his great treatise on Genesis he says:  "To

suppose that God formed man from the dust with bodily hands is

very childish....God neither formed man with bodily hands nor

did he breathe upon him with throat and lips."



St. Augustine then suggests the adoption of the old emanation or

evolution theory, shows that "certain very small animals may not

have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have

originated later from putrefying matter,"  argues that, even if

this be so, God is still their creator, dwells upon such a

potential creation as involved in the actual creation, and speaks

of animals "whose numbers the after-time unfolded."



In his great treatise on the Trinity--the work to which he

devoted the best thirty years of his life--we find the full

growth of this opinion.  He develops at length the view that in

the creation of living beings there was something like a

growth--that God is the ultimate author, but works through

secondary causes; and finally argues that certain substances are

endowed by God with the power of producing certain classes of

plants and animals.[19]



[19] For the Chaldean view of creation, see George Smith,

Chaldean Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 14,15, and 64-

86; also Lukas, as above; also Sayce, Religion of the Ancient

Babylonians, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, pp. 371 and elsewhere; as

to the fall of man, Tower of Babel, sacredness of the number

seven, etc., see also Delitzsch, appendix to the German

translation of Smith, pp. 305 et seq.; as to the almost exact

adoption of the Chaldean legends into the Hebrew sacred account,

see all these, as also Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte

Testament, Giessen, 1883, early chapters; also article Babylonia

in the Encyclopedia Britannica; as to simialr approval of

creation by the Creator in both accounts, see George Smith, p.

73; as to the migration of the Babylonian legends to the Hebrews,

see Schrader, Whitehouse's translation, pp. 44,45; as to the

Chaldaean belief ina solid firmament, while Schrader in 1883

thought it not proved, Jensen in 1890 has found it clearly

expresses--see his Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp.9 et seq., also

pp. 304-306, and elsewhere. Dr. Lukas in 1893 also fully accepts

this view of a Chaldean record of a "firmament"--see Kosmologie,

pp. 43, etc.; see also Maspero and Sayce, the Dawn of

Civilization, and for crude early ideas of evolution in Egypt,

see ibid., pp. 156 et seq.



For the seven-day week among the Chaldeans and rest on the

seventh day, and the proof that even the name "Sabbath" is of

Chaldean origin, see Delitzsch, Beiga-ben zu Smith's Chald.

Genesis, pp. 300 and 306; also Schrader; for St. Basil, see

Hexaemeron and Homilies vii-ix; but for the steadfastness of

Basil's view in regard to the immutability of species, see a

Catholic writer on evolution and Faith in the Dublin Review for

July, 1871, p. 13; for citations of St. Augustine on Genesis, see

the De Genesi contra Manichoeos, lib. ii, cap. 14, in Migne,

xxxiv, 188,--lib. v, cap. 5 and cap. 23,--and lib vii, cap I; for

the citations from his work on the Trinity, see his De Trinitate,

lib. iii, cap. 8 and 9, in Migne, xlii, 877, 878; for the general

subject very fully and adequately presented, see Osborn, From the

Greeks to Darwin, New York, 1894, chaps. ii and iii.





This idea of a development by secondary causes apart from the

original creation was helped in its growth by a theological

exigency.  More and more, as the organic world was observed, the

vast multitude of petty animals, winged creatures, and "creeping

things" was felt to be a strain upon the sacred narrative.  More

and more it became difficult to reconcile the dignity of the

Almighty with his work in bringing each of these creatures before

Adam to be named; or to reconcile the human limitations of Adam

with his work in naming "every living creature"; or to reconcile

the dimensions of Noah's ark with the space required for

preserving all of them, and the food of all sorts necessary for

their sustenance, whether they were admitted by twos, as stated

in one scriptural account, or by sevens, as stated in the other.



The inadequate size of the ark gave especial trouble.  Origen had

dealt with it by suggesting that the cubit was six times greater

than had been supposed.  Bede explained Noah's ability to

complete so large a vessel by supposing that he worked upon it

during a hundred years; and, as to the provision of food taken

into it, he declared that there was no need of a supply for more

than one day, since God could throw the animals into a deep sleep

or otherwise miraculously make one day's supply sufficient; he

also lessened the strain on faith still more by diminishing the

number of animals taken into the ark--supporting his view upon

Augustine's theory of the later development of insects out of

carrion.



Doubtless this theological necessity was among the main reasons

which led St. Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, to

incorporate this theory, supported by St. Basil and St.

Augustine, into his great encyclopedic work which gave materials

for thought on God and Nature to so many generations.  He

familiarized the theological world still further with the

doctrine of secondary creation, giving such examples of it as

that "bees are generated from decomposed veal, beetles from

horseflesh, grasshoppers from mules, scorpions from crabs," and,

in order to give still stronger force to the idea of such

transformations, he dwells on the biblical account of

Nebuchadnezzar, which appears to have taken strong hold upon

medieval thought in science, and he declares that other human

beings had been changed into animals, especially into swine,

wolves, and owls.



This doctrine of after-creations went on gathering strength

until, in the twelfth century, Peter Lombard, in his theological

summary, The Sentences, so powerful in moulding the thought of

the Church, emphasized the distinction between animals which

spring from carrion and those which are created from earth and

water; the former he holds to have been created "potentially"

the latter "actually."



In the century following, this idea was taken up by St. Thomas

Aquinas and virtually received from him its final form.  In the

Summa, which remains the greatest work of medieval thought, he

accepts the idea that certain animals spring from the decaying

bodies of plants and animals, and declares that they are produced

by the creative word of God either actually or virtually.  He

develops this view by saying, "Nothing was made by God, after the

six days of creation, absolutely new, but it was in some sense

included in the work of the six days"; and that "even new

species, if any appear, have existed before in certain native

properties, just as animals are produced from putrefaction."



The distinction thus developed between creation "causally" or

"potentially," and "materially" or "formally," was made much of

by commentators afterward.  Cornelius a Lapide spread it by

saying that certain animals were created not "absolutely," but

only "derivatively," and this thought was still further developed

three centuries later by Augustinus Eugubinus, who tells us that,

after the first creative energy had called forth land and water,

light was made by the Almighty, the instrument of all future

creation, and that the light called everything into existence.



All this "science falsely so called," so sedulously developed by

the master minds of the Church, and yet so futile that we might

almost suppose that the great apostle, in a glow of prophetic

vision, had foreseen it in his famous condemnation, seems at this

distance very harmless indeed; yet, to many guardians of the

"sacred deposit of doctrine" in the Church, even so slight a

departure from the main current of thought seemed dangerous.  It

appeared to them like pressing the doctrine of secondary causes

to a perilous extent; and about the beginning of the seventeenth

century we have the eminent Spanish Jesuit and theologian Suarez

denouncing it, and declaring St. Augustine a heretic for his

share in it.



But there was little danger to the older idea just then; the

main theological tendency was so strong that the world kept on as

of old.  Biblical theology continued to spin its own webs out of

its own bowels, and all the lesser theological flies continued to

be entangled in them; yet here and there stronger thinkers broke

loose from this entanglement and helped somewhat to disentangle

others.[20]



[20] For Bede's view of the ark and the origin of insects, see

his Hexaemeron, i and ii; for Isidore, see the Etymologiae, xi,

4,and xiii, 22; for Peter Lombard, see Sent., lib. ii, dist. xv,

4 (in Migne, cxcii, 682); for St. Thomas Aquinas as to the laws

of Nature, see Summae Theologica, i, Quaest. lxvii, art. iv; for

his discussion on Avicenna's theory of the origin of animals, see

ibid., i Quaest. lxxi, vol. i, pp. 1184 and 1185, of Migne's

edit.; for his idea as to the word of God being the active

producing principle, see ibid., i, Quaest. lxxi, art. i; for his

remarks on species, see ibid, i, Quaest. lxxii, art. i; for his

ideas on the necessity of the procreation of man, see ibid, i,

Quaest. lxxii, art. i; for the origin of animals from

putrefaction, see ibid, i, Quaest. lxxix, art. i, 3; for

Cornelius a Lapide on the derivative creation of animals, see his

In Genesim Comment., cap. i, cited by Mivart, Genesis of Species,

p. 282; for a reference to Suarez's denunciation of the view of

St. Augustine, see Huxley's Essays.





At the close of the Middle Ages, in spite of the devotion of the

Reformed Church to the letter of Scripture, the revival of

learning and the great voyages gave an atmosphere in which better

thinking on the problems of Nature began to gain strength.  On

all sides, in every field, men were making discoveries which

caused the general theological view to appear more and more

inadequate.



First of those who should be mentioned with reverence as

beginning to develop again that current of Greek thought which

the system drawn from our sacred books by the fathers and doctors

of the Church had interrupted for more than a thousand years, was

Giordano Bruno.  His utterances were indeed vague and

enigmatical, but this fault may well be forgiven him, for he saw

but too clearly what must be his reward for any more open

statements.  His reward indeed came--even for his faulty

utterances--when, toward the end of the nineteenth century,

thoughtful men from all parts of the world united in erecting his

statue on the spot where he had been burned by the Roman

Inquisition nearly three hundred years before.



After Bruno's death, during the first half of the seventeenth

century, Descartes seemed about to take the leadership of human

thought:  his theories, however superseded now, gave a great

impulse to investigation then.  His genius in promoting an

evolution doctrine as regards the mechanical formation of the

solar system was great, and his mode of thought strengthened the

current of evolutionary doctrine generally; but his constant

dread of persecution, both from Catholics and Protestants, led

him steadily to veil his thoughts and even to suppress them.  The

execution of Bruno had occurred in his childhood, and in the

midst of his career he had watched the Galileo struggle in all

its stages.  He had seen his own works condemned by university

after university under the direction of theologians, and placed

upon the Roman Index.  Although he gave new and striking

arguments to prove the existence of God, and humbled himself

before the Jesuits, he was condemned by Catholics and Protestants

alike.  Since Roger Bacon, perhaps, no great thinker had been so

completely abased and thwarted by theological oppression.



Near the close of the same century another great thinker,

Leibnitz, though not propounding any full doctrine on evolution,

gave it an impulse by suggesting a view contrary to the

sacrosanct belief in the immutability of species--that is, to the

pious doctrine that every species in the animal kingdom now

exists as it left the hands of the Creator, the naming process by

Adam, and the door of Noah's ark.



His punishment at the hands of the Church came a few years later,

when, in 1712, the Jesuits defeated his attempt to found an

Academy of Science at Vienna.  The imperial authorities covered

him with honours, but the priests--ruling in the confessionals

and pulpits--would not allow him the privilege of aiding his

fellow-men to ascertain God's truths revealed in Nature.



Spinoza, Hume, and Kant may also be mentioned as among those

whose thinking, even when mistaken, might have done much to aid

in the development of a truer theory had not the theologic

atmosphere of their times been so unpropitious; but a few years

after Leibnitz's death came in France a thinker in natural

science of much less influence than any of these, who made a

decided step forward.



Early in the eighteenth century Benoist de Maillet, a man of the

world, but a wide observer and close thinker upon Nature, began

meditating especially upon the origin of animal forms, and was

led into the idea of the transformation of species and so into a

theory of evolution, which in some important respects anticipated

modern ideas.  He definitely, though at times absurdly, conceived

the production of existing species by the modification of their

predecessors, and he plainly accepted one of the fundamental

maxims of modern geology--that the structure of the globe must be

studied in the light of the present course of Nature.



But he fell between two ranks of adversaries.  On one side, the

Church authorities denounced him as a freethinker; on the other,

Voltaire ridiculed him as a devotee.  Feeling that his greatest

danger was from the orthodox theologians, De Maillet endeavoured

to protect himself by disguising his name in the title of his

book, and by so wording its preface and dedication that, if

persecuted, he could declare it a mere sport of fancy; he

therefore announced it as the reverie of a Hindu sage imparted to

a Christian missionary.  But this strategy availed nothing:  he

had allowed his Hindu sage to suggest that the days of creation

named in Genesis might be long periods of time; and this, with

other ideas of equally fearful import, was fatal.  Though the

book was in type in 1735, it was not published till 1748--three

years after his death.



On the other hand, the heterodox theology of Voltaire was also

aroused; and, as De Maillet had seen in the presence of fossils

on high mountains a proof that these mountains were once below

the sea, Voltaire, recognising in this an argument for the deluge

of Noah, ridiculed the new thinker without mercy.  Unfortunately,

some of De Maillet's vagaries lent themselves admirably to

Voltaire's sarcasm; better material for it could hardly be

conceived than the theory, seriously proposed, that the first

human being was born of a mermaid.



Hence it was that, between these two extremes of theology, De

Maillet received no recognition until, very recently, the

greatest men of science in England and France have united in

giving him his due.  But his work was not lost, even in his own

day; Robinet and Bonnet pushed forward victoriously on helpful

lines.



In the second half of the eighteenth century a great barrier was

thrown across this current--the authority of Linnaeus.  He was

the most eminent naturalist of his time, a wide observer, a close

thinker; but the atmosphere in which he lived and moved and had

his being was saturated with biblical theology, and this

permeated all his thinking.



He who visits the tomb of Linnaeus to-day, entering the beautiful

cathedral of Upsala by its southern porch, sees above it, wrought

in stone, the Hebrew legend of creation.  In a series of

medallions, the Almighty--in human form--accomplishes the work of

each creative day.  In due order he puts in place the solid

firmament with the waters above it, the sun, moon, and stars

within it, the beasts, birds, and plants below it, and finishes

his task by taking man out of a little hillock of "the earth

beneath," and woman out of man's side.  Doubtless Linnaeus, as he

went to his devotions, often smiled at this childlike portrayal.

Yet he was never able to break away from the idea it embodied.

At times, in face of the difficulties which beset the orthodox

theory, he ventured to favour some slight concessions.  Toward

the end of his life he timidly advanced the hypothesis that all

the species of one genus constituted at the creation one species;

and from the last edition of his Systema Naturae he quietly left

out the strongly orthodox statement of the fixity of each

species, which he had insisted upon in his earlier works.  But he

made no adequate declaration.  What he might expect if he openly

and decidedly sanctioned a newer view he learned to his cost;

warnings came speedily both from the Catholic and Protestant

sides.



At a time when eminent prelates of the older Church were

eulogizing debauched princes like Louis XV, and using the

unspeakably obscene casuistry of the Jesuit Sanchez in the

education of the priesthood as to the relations of men to women,

the modesty of the Church authorities was so shocked by

Linnaeus's proofs of a sexual system in plants that for many

years his writings were prohibited in the Papal States and in

various other parts of Europe where clerical authority was strong

enough to resist the new scientific current.  Not until 1773 did

one of the more broad-minded cardinals--Zelanda--succeed in

gaining permission that Prof.  Minasi should discuss the Linnaean

system at Rome.



And Protestantism was quite as oppressive.  In a letter to

Eloius, Linnaeus tells of the rebuke given to science by one of

the great Lutheran prelates of Sweden, Bishop Svedberg.  From

various parts of Europe detailed statements had been sent to the

Royal Academy of Science that water had been turned into blood,

and well-meaning ecclesiastics had seen in this an indication of

the wrath of God, certainly against the regions in which these

miracles had occurred and possibly against the whole world.  A

miracle of this sort appearing in Sweden, Linnaeus looked into it

carefully and found that the reddening of the water was caused by

dense masses of minute insects.  News of this explanation having

reached the bishop, he took the field against it; he denounced

this scientific discovery as "a Satanic abyss" (abyssum

Satanae), and declared "The reddening of the water is NOT

natural," and "when God allows such a miracle to take place Satan

endeavours, and so do his ungodly, self-reliant, self-sufficient,

and worldly tools, to make it signify nothing."  In face of this

onslaught Linnaeus retreated; he tells his correspondent that

"it is difficult to say anything in this matter," and shields

himself under the statement "It is certainly a miracle that so

many millions of creatures can be so suddenly propagated," and

"it shows undoubtedly the all-wise power of the Infinite."



The great naturalist, grown old and worn with labours for

science, could no longer resist the contemporary theology; he

settled into obedience to it, and while the modification of his

early orthodox view was, as we have seen, quietly imbedded in the

final edition of his great work, he made no special effort to

impress it upon the world.  To all appearance he continued to

adhere to the doctrine that all existing species had been created

by the Almighty "in the beginning," and that since "the

beginning" no new species had appeared.



Yet even his great authority could not arrest the swelling tide;

more and more vast became the number of species, more and more

incomprehensible under the old theory became the newly

ascertained facts in geographical distribution, more and more it

was felt that the universe and animated beings had come into

existence by some process other than a special creation "in the

beginning," and the question was constantly pressing, "By WHAT

process?"



Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century one man was at

work on natural history who might have contributed much toward an

answer to this question:  this man was Buffon.  His powers of

research and thought were remarkable, and his gift in presenting

results of research and thought showed genius.  He had caught the

idea of an evolution in Nature by the variation of species, and

was likely to make a great advance with it; but he, too, was

made to feel the power of theology.



As long as he gave pleasing descriptions of animals the Church

petted him, but when he began to deduce truths of philosophical

import the batteries of the Sorbonne were opened upon him; he

was made to know that "the sacred deposit of truth committed to

the Church" was, that "in the beginning God made the heavens and

the earth" and that "all things were made at the beginning of the

world."  For his simple statement of truths in natural science

which are to-day truisms, he was, as we have seen, dragged forth

by the theological faculty, forced to recant publicly, and to

print his recantation.  In this he announced, "I abandon

everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and

generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of

Moses."[21]



[21] For Descartes and his relation to the Copernican theory, see

Saisset, Descartes et ses Precurseurs; also Fouillee, Descartes,

Paris, 1893, chaps. ii and iii; also other authorities cited in

my chapter on Astronomy; for his relation to the theory of

evolution, see the Principes de Philosophie, 3eme partie, S 45.

For de Maillet, see Quatrefages, Darwin et ses Precurseurs

francais, chap i, citing D'Archiac, Paleontologie, Stratigraphie,

vol. i; also, Perrier, La Philosophie zoologique avant Darwin,

chap. vi; also the admirable article Evolution, by Huxley, in

Ency. Brit.  The title of De Maillet's book is Telliamed, ou

Entretiens d'un Philosophe indien avec un Missionaire francais

sur la Diminution de la Mer, 1748, 1756.  For Buffon, see the

authorities previously given, also the chapter on Geology in this

work.  For the resistance of both Catholic and Protestant

authorities to the Linnaean system and ideas, see Alberg, Life of

Linnaeus, London, 1888, pp. 143-147, and 237.  As to the creation

medallions at the Cathedral of Upsala, it is a somewhat curious

coincidence that the present writer came upon them while visiting

that edifice during the preparation of this chapter.





But all this triumph of the Chaldeo-Babylonian creation legends

which the Church had inherited availed but little.



For about the end of the eighteenth century fruitful suggestions

and even clear presentations of this or that part of a large

evolutionary doctrine came thick and fast, and from the most

divergent quarters.  Especially remarkable were those which came

from Erasmus Darwin in England, from Maupertuis in France, from

Oken in Switzerland, and from Herder, and, most brilliantly of

all, from Goethe in Germany.



Two men among these thinkers must be especially

mentioned--Treviranus in Germany and Lamarck in France; each

independently of the other drew the world more completely than

ever before in this direction.



From Treviranus came, in 1802, his work on biology, and in this

he gave forth the idea that from forms of life originally simple

had arisen all higher organizations by gradual development; that

every living feature has a capacity for receiving modifications

of its structure from external influences; and that no species

had become really extinct, but that each had passed into some

other species.  From Lamarck came about the same time his

Researches, and a little later his Zoological Philosophy, which

introduced a new factor into the process of evolution--the action

of the animal itself in its efforts toward a development to suit

new needs--and he gave as his principal conclusions the

following:



1.  Life tends to increase the volume of each living body and of

all its parts up to a limit determined by its own necessities.



2.  New wants in animals give rise to new organs.



3.  The development of these organs is in proportion to their

employment.



4.  New developments may be transmitted to offspring.



His well-known examples to illustrate these views, such as that

of successive generations of giraffes lengthening their necks by

stretching them to gather high-growing foliage, and of successive

generations of kangaroos lengthening and strengthening their hind

legs by the necessity of keeping themselves erect while jumping,

provoked laughter, but the very comicality of these illustrations

aided to fasten his main conclusion in men's memories.



In both these statements, imperfect as they were, great truths

were embodied--truths which were sure to grow.



Lamarck's declaration, especially, that the development of organs

is in ratio to their employment, and his indications of the

reproduction in progeny of what is gained or lost in parents by

the influence of circumstances, entered as a most effective force

into the development of the evolution theory.



The next great successor in the apostolate of this idea of the

universe was Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.  As early as 1795 he had

begun to form a theory that species are various modifications of

the same type, and this theory he developed, testing it at

various stages as Nature was more and more displayed to him.  It

fell to his lot to bear the brunt in a struggle against heavy

odds which lasted many years.



For the man who now took up the warfare, avowedly for science but

unconsciously for theology, was the foremost naturalist then

living--Cuvier.  His scientific eminence was deserved; the

highest honours of his own and other countries were given him,

and he bore them worthily.  An Imperial Councillor under

Napoleon; President of the Council of Public Instruction and

Chancellor of the University under the restored Bourbons; Grand

Officer of the Legion of Honour, a Peer of France, Minister of

the Interior, and President of the Council of State under Louis

Philippe; he was eminent in all these capacities, and yet the

dignity given by such high administrative positions was as

nothing compared to his leadership in natural science.  Science

throughout the world acknowledged in him its chief contemporary

ornament, and to this hour his fame rightly continues.  But there

was in him, as in Linnaeus, a survival of certain theological

ways of looking at the universe and certain theological

conceptions of a plan of creation; it must be said, too, that

while his temperament made him distrust new hypotheses, of which

he had seen so many born and die, his environment as a great

functionary of state, honoured, admired, almost adored by the

greatest, not only in the state but in the Church, his solicitude

lest science should receive some detriment by openly resisting

the Church, which had recaptured Europe after the French

Revolution, and had made of its enemies its footstool--all these

considerations led him to oppose the new theory.  Amid the

plaudits, then, of the foremost church-men he threw across the

path of the evolution doctrines the whole mass of his authority

in favour of the old theory of catastrophic changes and special

creations.



Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire stoutly withstood him, braving

non-recognition, ill-treatment, and ridicule.  Treviranus, afar

off in his mathematical lecture-room at Bremen, seemed simply

forgotten.



But the current of evolutionary thought could not thus be

checked:  dammed up for a time, it broke out in new channels and

in ways and places least expected; turned away from France, it

appeared especially in England, where great paleontologists and

geologists arose whose work culminated in that of Lyell.

Specialists throughout all the world now became more vigorous

than ever, gathering facts and thinking upon them in a way which

caused the special creation theory to shrink more and more.

Broader and more full became these various rivulets, soon to

unite in one great stream of thought.



In 1813 Dr. Wells developed a theory of evolution by natural

selection to account for varieties in the human race.  About 182O

Dean Herbert, eminent as an authority in horticulture, avowed his

conviction that species are but fixed varieties.  In 1831 Patrick

Matthews stumbled upon and stated the main doctrine of natural

selection in evolution; and others here and there, in Europe and

America, caught an inkling of it.



But no one outside of a circle apparently uninfluential cared for

these things:  the Church was serene:  on the Continent it had

obtained reactionary control of courts, cabinets, and

universities; in England, Dean Cockburn was denouncing Mary

Somerville and the geologists to the delight of churchmen; and

the Rev. Mellor Brown was doing the same thing for the

edification of dissenters.



In America the mild suggestions of Silliman and his compeers were

met by the protestations of the Andover theologians headed by

Moses Stuart.  Neither of the great English universities, as a

rule, took any notice of the innovators save by sneers.



To this current of thought there was joined a new element when,

in 1844, Robert Chambers published his Vestiges of Creation.

The book was attractive and was widely read.  In Chambers's view

the several series of animated beings, from the simplest and

oldest up to the highest and most recent, were the result of two

distinct impulses, each given once and for all time by the

Creator.  The first of these was an impulse imparted to forms of

life, lifting them gradually through higher grades; the second

was an impulse tending to modify organic substances in accordance

with external circumstances; in fact, the doctrine of the book

was evolution tempered by miracle--a stretching out of the

creative act through all time--a pious version of Lamarck.



Two results followed, one mirth-provoking, the other leading to

serious thought.  The amusing result was that the theologians

were greatly alarmed by the book:  it was loudly insisted that it

promoted atheism.  Looking back along the line of thought which

has since been developed, one feels that the older theologians

ought to have put up thanksgivings for Chambers's theory, and

prayers that it might prove true.  The more serious result was

that it accustomed men's minds to a belief in evolution as in

some form possible or even probable.  In this way it was

provisionally of service.



Eight years later Herbert Spencer published an essay contrasting

the theories of creation and evolution--reasoning with great

force in favour of the latter, showing that species had

undoubtedly been modified by circumstances; but still only few

and chosen men saw the significance of all these lines of

reasoning which had been converging during so many years toward

one conclusion.



On July 1, 1858, there were read before the Linnaean Society at

London two papers--one presented by Charles Darwin, the other by

Alfred Russel Wallace--and with the reading of these papers the

doctrine of evolution by natural selection was born.  Then and

there a fatal breach was made in the great theological barrier of

the continued fixity of species since the creation.



The story of these papers the scientific world knows by heart:

how Charles Darwin, having been sent to the University of

Cambridge to fit him for the Anglican priesthood, left it in 1831

to go upon the scientific expedition of the Beagle; how for five

years he studied with wonderful vigour and acuteness the problems

of life as revealed on land and at sea--among volcanoes and coral

reefs, in forests and on the sands, from the tropics to the

arctic regions; how, in the Cape Verde and the Galapagos

Islands, and in Brazil, Patagonia, and Australia he interrogated

Nature with matchless persistency and skill; how he returned

unheralded, quietly settled down to his work, and soon set the

world thinking over its first published results, such as his book

on Coral Reefs, and the monograph on the Cirripedia; and,

finally, how he presented his paper, and followed it up with

treatises which made him one of the great leaders in the history

of human thought.



The scientific world realizes, too, more and more, the power of

character shown by Darwin in all this great career; the faculty

of silence, the reserve of strength seen in keeping his great

thought--his idea of evolution by natural selection--under silent

study and meditation for nearly twenty years, giving no hint of

it to the world at large, but working in every field to secure

proofs or disproofs, and accumulating masses of precious material

for the solution of the questions involved.



To one man only did he reveal his thought--to Dr. Joseph Hooker,

to whom in 1844, under the seal of secrecy, he gave a summary of

his conclusions.  Not until fourteen years later occurred the

event which showed him that the fulness of time had come--the

letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, to whom, in brilliant

researches during the decade from 1848 to 1858, in Brazil and in

the Malay Archipelago, the same truth of evolution by natural

selection had been revealed.  Among the proofs that scientific

study does no injury to  the more delicate shades of sentiment is

the well-known story of this letter.  With it Wallace sent Darwin

a memoir, asking him to present it to the Linnaean Society:  on

examining it, Darwin found that Wallace had independently arrived

at conclusions similar to his own--possibly had deprived him of

fame; but Darwin was loyal to his friend, and his friend

remained ever loyal to him.  He publicly presented the paper from

Wallace, with his own conclusions; and the date of this

presentation--July 1, 1858--separates two epochs in the history,

not merely of natural science, but of human thought.



In the following year, 1859, came the first instalment of his

work in its fuller development--his book on The Origin of

Species.  In this book one at least of the main secrets at the

heart of the evolutionary process, which had baffled the long

line of investigators and philosophers from the days of

Aristotle, was more broadly revealed.  The effective mechanism of

evolution was shown at work in three ascertained facts:  in the

struggle for existence among organized beings; in the survival

of the fittest; and in heredity.  These facts were presented

with such minute research, wide observation, patient collation,

transparent honesty, and judicial fairness, that they at once

commanded the world's attention.  It was the outcome of thirty

years' work and thought by a worker and thinker of genius, but it

was yet more than that--it was the outcome, also, of the work and

thought of another man of genius fifty years before.  The book of

Malthus on the Principle of Population, mainly founded on the

fact that animals increase in a geometrical ratio, and therefore,

if unchecked, must encumber the earth, had been generally

forgotten, and was only recalled with a sneer.  But the genius of

Darwin recognised in it a deeper meaning, and now the thought of

Malthus was joined to the new current.  Meditating upon it in

connection with his own observations of the luxuriance of Nature,

Darwin had arrived at his doctrine of natural selection and

survival of the fittest.



As the great dogmatic barrier between the old and new views of

the universe was broken down, the flood of new thought pouring

over the world stimulated and nourished strong growths in every

field of research and reasoning:  edition after edition of the

book was called for; it was translated even into Japanese and

Hindustani; the stagnation of scientific thought, which Buckle,

only a few years before, had so deeply lamented, gave place to a

widespread and fruitful activity; masses of accumulated

observations, which had seemed stale and unprofitable, were made

alive; facts formerly without meaning now found their

interpretation.  Under this new influence an army of young men

took up every promising line of scientific investigation in every

land.  Epoch-making books appeared in all the great nations.

Spencer, Wallace, Huxley, Galton, Tyndall, Tylor, Lubbock,

Bagehot, Lewes, in England, and a phalanx of strong men in

Germany, Italy, France, and America gave forth works which became

authoritative in every department of biology.  If some of the

older men in France held back, overawed perhaps by the authority

of Cuvier, the younger and more vigorous pressed on.



One source of opposition deserves to be especially

mentioned--Louis Agassiz.



A great investigator, an inspired and inspiring teacher, a noble

man, he had received and elaborated a theory of animated creation

which he could not readily change.  In his heart and mind still

prevailed the atmosphere of the little Swiss parsonage in which

he was born, and his religious and moral nature, so beautiful to

all who knew him, was especially repelled by sundry

evolutionists, who, in their zeal as neophytes, made

proclamations seeming to have a decidedly irreligious if not

immoral bearing.  In addition to this was the direction his

thinking had received from Cuvier.  Both these influences

combined to prevent his acceptance of the new view.



He was the third great man who had thrown his influence as a

barrier across the current of evolutionary thought.  Linnaeus in

the second half of the eighteenth century, Cuvier in the first

half, and Agassiz in the second half of the nineteenth--all made

the same effort.  Each remains great; but not all of them

together could arrest the current.  Agassiz's strong efforts

throughout the United States, and indeed throughout Europe, to

check it, really promoted it.  From the great museum he had

founded at Cambridge, from his summer school at Penikese, from

his lecture rooms at Harvard and Cornell, his disciples went

forth full of love and admiration for him, full of enthusiasm

which he had stirred and into fields which he had indicated; but

their powers, which he had aroused and strengthened, were devoted

to developing the truth he failed to recognise; Shaler, Verrill,

Packard, Hartt, Wilder, Jordan, with a multitude of others, and

especially the son who bore his honoured name, did justice to his

memory by applying what they had received from him to research

under inspiration of the new revelation.



Still another man deserves especial gratitude and honour in this

progress--Edward Livingston Youmans.  He was perhaps the first in

America to recognise the vast bearings of the truths presented by

Darwin, Wallace, and Spencer.  He became the apostle of these

truths, sacrificing the brilliant career on which he had entered

as a public lecturer, subordinating himself to the three leaders,

and giving himself to editorial drudgery in the stimulation of

research and the announcement of results.



In support of the new doctrine came a world of new proofs; those

which Darwin himself added in regard to the cross-fertilization

of plants, and which he had adopted from embryology, led the way,

and these were followed by the discoveries of Wallace, Bates,

Huxley, Marsh, Cope, Leidy, Haeckel, Muller, Gaudry, and a

multitude of others in all lands.[22]



[22] For Agassiz's opposition to evolution, see the Essay on

Classification, vol. i, 1857, as regards Lamark, and vol. iii, as

regards Darwin; also Silliman's Journal, July 1860; also the

Atlantic Monthly, January 1874; also his Life and Correspondence,

vol. ii, p. 647; also Asa Gray, Scientific Papers, vol. ii, p.

484.  A reminiscence of my own enables me to appreciate his deep

ethical and religious feeling. I was passing the day with him at

Nahant in 1868, consulting him regarding candidates for various

scientific chairs at the newly established Cornell University, in

which he took a deep interest.  As we discussed one after another

of the candidates, he suddenly said: "Who is to be your Professor

of Moral Philosophy?  That is a far more important position than

all the others."







IV.  THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY.



Darwin's Origin of Species had come into the theological world

like a plough into an ant-hill.  Everywhere those thus rudely

awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth

angry and confused.  Reviews, sermons, books light and heavy,

came flying at the new thinker from all sides.



The keynote was struck at once in the Quarterly Review by

Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.  He declared that Darwin was

guilty of "a tendency to limit God's glory in creation"; that

"the principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible

with the word of God"; that it "contradicts the revealed

relations of creation to its Creator"; that it is "inconsistent

with the fulness of his glory"; that it is "a dishonouring view

of Nature"; and that there is "a simpler explanation of the

presence of these strange forms among the works of God":  that

explanation being--"the fall of Adam."  Nor did the bishop's

efforts end here; at the meeting of the British Association for

the Advancement of Science he again disported himself in the tide

of popular applause.  Referring to the ideas of Darwin, who was

absent on account of illness, he congratulated himself in a

public speech that he was not descended from a monkey.  The reply

came from Huxley, who said in substance:  "If I had to choose, I

would prefer to be a descendant of a humble monkey rather than of

a man who employs his knowledge and eloquence in misrepresenting

those who are wearing out their lives in the search for truth."



This shot reverberated through England, and indeed through other

countries.



The utterances of this the most brilliant prelate of the Anglican

Church received a sort of antiphonal response from the leaders of

the English Catholics.  In an address before the "Academia,"

which had been organized to combat "science falsely so called,"

Cardinal Manning declared his abhorrence of the new view of

Nature, and described it as "a brutal philosophy--to wit, there

is no God, and the ape is our Adam."



These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical fashion

for several years.  One distinguished clerical reviewer, in spite

of Darwin's thirty years of quiet labour, and in spite of the

powerful summing up of his book, prefaced a diatribe by saying

that Darwin "might have been more modest had he given some slight

reason for dissenting from the views generally entertained."

Another distinguished clergyman, vice-president of a Protestant

institute to combat "dangerous" science, declared Darwinism "an

attempt to dethrone God."  Another critic spoke of persons

accepting the Darwinian views as "under the frenzied inspiration

of the inhaler of mephitic gas," and of Darwin's argument as "a

jungle of fanciful assumption."  Another spoke of Darwin's views

as suggesting that "God is dead," and declared that Darwin's work

"does open violence to everything which the Creator himself has

told us in the Scriptures of the methods and results of his

work."  Still another theological authority asserted:  "If the

Darwinian theory is true, Genesis is a lie, the whole framework

of the book of life falls to pieces, and the revelation of God to

man, as we Christians know it, is a delusion and a snare."

Another, who had shown excellent qualities as an observing

naturalist, declared the Darwinian view "a huge imposture from

the beginning."



Echoes came from America.  One review, the organ of the most

widespread of American religious sects, declared that Darwin was

"attempting to befog and to pettifog the whole question";

another denounced Darwin's views as "infidelity"; another,

representing the American branch of the Anglican Church, poured

contempt over Darwin as "sophistical and illogical," and then

plunged into an exceedingly dangerous line of argument in the

following words:  "If this hypothesis be true, then is the Bible

an unbearable fiction;...then have Christians for nearly two

thousand years been duped by a monstrous lie....Darwin requires

us to disbelieve the authoritative word of the Creator."   A

leading journal representing the same church took pains to show

the evolution theory to be as contrary to the explicit

declarations of the New Testament as to those of the Old, and

said:  "If we have all, men and monkeys, oysters and eagles,

developed from an original germ, then is St. Paul's grand

deliverance--`All flesh is not the same flesh; there is one kind

of flesh of men, another of beasts, another of fishes, and

another of birds'--untrue."



Another echo came from Australia, where Dr. Perry, Lord Bishop

of Melbourne, in a most bitter book on Science and the Bible,

declared that the obvious object of Chambers, Darwin, and Huxley

is "to produce in their readers a disbelief of the Bible."



Nor was the older branch of the Church to be left behind in this

chorus.  Bayma, in the Catholic World, declared, "Mr. Darwin is,

we have reason to believe, the mouthpiece or chief trumpeter

of that infidel clique whose well-known object is to do away with

all idea of a God."



Worthy of especial note as showing the determination of the

theological side at that period was the foundation of

sacro-scientific organizations to combat the new ideas.  First to

be noted is the "Academia," planned by Cardinal Wiseman.  In a

circular letter the cardinal, usually so moderate and just,

sounded an alarm and summed up by saying, "Now it is for the

Church, which alone possesses divine certainty and divine

discernment, to place itself at once in the front of a movement

which threatens even the fragmentary remains of Christian belief

in England."  The necessary permission was obtained from Rome,

the Academia was founded, and the "divine discernment" of the

Church was seen in the utterances which came from it, such as

those of Cardinal Manning, which every thoughtful Catholic would

now desire to recall, and in the diatribes of Dr. Laing, which

only aroused laughter on all sides.  A similar effort was seen in

Protestant quarters; the "Victoria institute" was created, and

perhaps the most noted utterance which ever came from it was the

declaration of its vice-president, the Rev. Walter Mitchell,

that "Darwinism endeavours to dethrone God."[23]



[23] For Wilberforce's article, see Quarterly Review, July, 1860.

For the reply of Huxley to the bishop's speech I have relied on

the account given in Quatrefages, who had it from Carpenter; a

somewhat different version is given in the Life and Letters of

Darwin.  For Cardinal Manning's attack, see Essays on Religion

and Literature, London, 1865.  For the review articles, see the

Quarterly already cited, and that for July, 1874; also the North

British Review, May 1860; also, F. O. Morris's letter in the

Record, reprinted at Glasgow, 1870; also the Addresses of Rev.

Walter Mitchell before the Victoria Institute, London, 1867; also

Rev. B. G. Johns, Moses not Darwin, a Sermon, March 31, 1871.

For the earlier American attacks, see Methodist Quarterly Review,

April 1871; The American Church Review, July and October, 1865,

and January, 1866.  For the Australian attack, see Science and

the Bible, by the Right Reverand Charles Perry, D. D., Bishop of

Melbourne, London, 1869.  For Bayma, see the Catholic World, vol.

xxvi, p.782.  For the Academia, see Essays edited by Cardinal

Manning, above cited; and for the Victoria Institute, see

Scientia Scientarum, by a member of the Victoria Institute,

London, 1865.





In France the attack was even more violent.  Fabre d'Envieu

brought out the heavy artillery of theology, and in a long series

of elaborate propositions demonstrated that any other doctrine

than that of the fixity and persistence of species is absolutely

contrary to Scripture.  The Abbe Desorges, a former Professor of

Theology, stigmatized Darwin as a "pedant," and evolution as

"gloomy".  Monseigneur Segur, referring to Darwin and his

followers, went into hysterics and shrieked:  "These infamous

doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions.

Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring

revolutions.  They come from hell and return thither, taking with

them the gross creatures who blush not to proclaim and accept

them."



In Germany the attack, if less declamatory, was no less severe.

Catholic theologians vied with Protestants in bitterness.  Prof.

Michelis declared Darwin's theory "a caricature of creation."

Dr. Hagermann asserted that it "turned the Creator out of doors."



Dr. Schund insisted that "every idea of the Holy Scriptures, from

the first to the last page, stands in diametrical opposition to

the Darwinian theory"; and, "if Darwin be right in his view of

the development of man out of a brutal condition, then the Bible

teaching in regard to man is utterly annihilated."  Rougemont in

Switzerland called for a crusade against the obnoxious doctrine.

Luthardt, Professor of Theology at Leipsic, declared:  "The idea

of creation belongs to religion and not to natural science; the

whole superstructure of personal religion is built upon the

doctrine of creation"; and he showed the evolution theory to be

in direct contradiction to Holy Writ.



But in 1863 came an event which brought serious confusion to the

theological camp:  Sir Charles Lyell, the most eminent of living

geologists, a man of deeply Christian feeling and of exceedingly

cautious temper, who had opposed the evolution theory of Lamarck

and declared his adherence to the idea of successive creations,

then published his work on the Antiquity of Man, and in this and

other utterances showed himself a complete though unwilling

convert to the fundamental ideas of Darwin.  The blow was serious

in many ways, and especially so in two--first, as withdrawing all

foundation in fact from the scriptural chronology, and secondly,

as discrediting the creation theory.  The blow was not

unexpected; in various review articles against the Darwinian

theory there had been appeals to Lyell, at times almost piteous,

"not to flinch from the truths he had formerly proclaimed."  But

Lyell, like the honest man he was, yielded unreservedly to the

mass of new proofs arrayed on the side of evolution against that

of creation.



At the same time came Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, giving new

and most cogent arguments in favour of evolution by natural

selection.



In 1871 was published Darwin's Descent of Man.  Its doctrine had

been anticipated by critics of his previous books, but it made,

none the less, a great stir; again the opposing army trooped

forth, though evidently with much less heart than before.  A few

were very violent.  The Dublin University Magazine, after the

traditional Hibernian fashion, charged Mr. Darwin with seeking

"to displace God by the unerring action of vagary," and with

being "resolved to hunt God out of the world."  But most notable

from the side of the older Church was the elaborate answer to

Darwin's book by the eminent French Catholic physician, Dr.

Constantin James.  In his work, On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape,

published at Paris in 1877, Dr. James not only refuted Darwin

scientifically but poured contempt on his book, calling it "a

fairy tale," and insisted that a work "so fantastic and so

burlesque" was, doubtless, only a huge joke, like Erasmus's

Praise of Folly, or Montesquieu's Persian Letters.  The princes

of the Church were delighted.  The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris

assured the author that the book had become his "spiritual

reading," and begged him to send a copy to the Pope himself.  His

Holiness, Pope Pius IX, acknowledged the gift in a remarkable

letter.  He thanked his dear son, the writer, for the book in

which he "refutes so well the aberrations of Darwinism."  "A

system," His Holiness adds, "which is repugnant at once to

history, to the tradition of all peoples, to exact science, to

observed facts, and even to Reason herself, would seem to need no

refutation, did not alienation from God and the leaning toward

materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this

tissue of fables....And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the

Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing

him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God--pride

goes so far as to degrade man himself to the level of the

unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless matter, thus

unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration, WHEN PRIDE

COMETH, THEN COMETH SHAME.  But the corruption of this age, the

machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand

that such fancies, altogether absurd though they are,

should--since they borrow the mask of science--be refuted by true

science."  Wherefore the Pope thanked Dr. James for his book, "so

opportune and so perfectly appropriate to the exigencies of our

time," and bestowed on him the apostolic benediction.  Nor was

this brief all.  With it there came a second, creating the author

an officer of the Papal Order of St. Sylvester.  The cardinal

archbishop assured the delighted physician that such a double

honour of brief and brevet was perhaps unprecedented, and

suggested only that in a new edition of his book he should

"insist a little more on the relation existing between the

narratives of Genesis and the discoveries of modern science, in

such fashion as to convince the most incredulous of their perfect

agreement."  The prelate urged also a more dignified title.  The

proofs of this new edition were accordingly all submitted to His

Eminence, and in 1882 it appeared as Moses and Darwin:  the Man

of Genesis compared with the Man-Ape, or Religious Education

opposed to Atheistic.  No wonder the cardinal embraced the

author, thanking him in the name of science and religion.  "We

have at last," he declared, "a handbook which we can safely put

into the hands of youth."



Scarcely less vigorous were the champions of English Protestant

orthodoxy.  In an address at Liverpool, Mr. Gladstone remarked:

"Upon the grounds of what is termed evolution God is relieved of

the labour of creation; in the name of unchangeable laws he is

discharged from governing the world"; and, when Herbert Spencer

called his attention to the fact that Newton with the doctrine of

gravitation and with the science of physical astronomy is open to

the same charge, Mr. Gladstone retreated in the Contemporary

Review under one of his characteristic clouds of words.  The

Rev. Dr. Coles, in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review,

declared that the God of evolution is not the Christian's God.

Burgon, Dean of Chichester, in a sermon preached before the

University of Oxford, pathetically warned the students that

"those who refuse to accept the history of the creation of our

first parents according to its obvious literal intention, and are

for substituting the modern dream of evolution in its place,

cause the entire scheme of man's salvation to collapse."  Dr.

Pusey also came into the fray with most earnest appeals against

the new doctrine, and the Rev. Gavin Carlyle was perfervid on

the same side.  The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

published a book by the Rev. Mr. Birks, in which the evolution

doctrine was declared to be "flatly opposed to the fundamental

doctrine of creation."  Even the London Times admitted a review

stigmatizing Darwin's Descent of Man as an "utterly unsupported

hypothesis," full of "unsubstantiated premises, cursory

investigations, and disintegrating speculations," and Darwin

himself as "reckless and unscientific."[24]



[24] For the French theological oppostition to the Darwinian

theory, see Pozzy, La Terre at le Recit Biblique de la Creation,

1874, especially pp. 353, 363; also Felix Ducane, Etudes sur la

Transformisme, 1876, especially pp. 107 to 119.  As to Fabre

d'Envieu, see especially his Proposition xliii.  For the Abbe

Desogres, "former Professor of Philosophy and Theology," see his

Erreurs Modernes, Paris, 1878, pp. 677 and 595 to 598.  For

Monseigneur Segur, see his La Foi devant la Science Moderne,

sixth ed., Paris, 1874, pp. 23, 34, etc.  For Herbert Spencer's

reply to Mr. Gladstone, see his study of Sociology; for the

passage in the Dublin Review, see the issue for July, 1871. For

the Review in the London Times, see Nature for April 20, 1871.

For Gavin Carlyle, see The Battle of Unbelief, 1870, pp. 86 and

171.  For the attacks by Michelis and Hagermann, see Natur und

Offenbarung, Munster, 1861 to 1869.  For Schund, see his Darwin's

Hypothese und ihr Verhaaltniss zu Religion und Moral, Stuttgart,

1869.  For Luthardt, see Fundamental Truths of Christianity,

translated by Sophia Taylor, second ed., Edinburgh, 1869.  For

Rougemont, see his L'Homme et le Singe, Neuchatel, 1863 (also in

German trans.).  For Constantin James, see his Mes Entretiens

avec l'Empereur Don Pedro sur la Darwinisme, Paris, 1888, where

the papal briefs are printed in full.  For the English attacks on

Darwin's Descent of Man, see the Edinburgh Review July, 1871 and

elsewhere; the Dublin Review, July, 1871; the British and Foreign

Evangelical Review, April, 1886.  See also The Scripture Doctrine

of Creation, by the Rev. T. R. Birks, London, 1873, published by

the S. P. C. K.  For Dr. Pusey's attack, see his Unscience, not

Science, adverse to Faith, 1878; also Darwin's Life and Letters,

vol. ii, pp. 411, 412.





But it was noted that this second series of attacks, on the

Descent of Man, differed in one remarkable respect--so far as

England was concerned--from those which had been made over ten

years before on the Origin of Species.  While everything was

done to discredit Darwin, to pour contempt upon him, and even, of

all things in the world, to make him--the gentlest of mankind,

only occupied with the scientific side of the problem--"a

persecutor of Christianity," while his followers were represented

more and more as charlatans or dupes, there began to be in the

most influential quarters careful avoidance of the old argument

that evolution--even by natural selection--contradicts Scripture.



It began to be felt that this was dangerous ground.  The

defection of Lyell had, perhaps, more than anything else, started

the question among theologians who had preserved some equanimity,

"WHAT  IF, AFTER ALL, THE DARWINIAN THEORY SHOULD PROVE TO BE

TRUE?" Recollections of the position in which the Roman Church

found itself after the establishment of the doctrines of

Copernicus and Galileo naturally came into the minds of the more

thoughtful.  In Germany this consideration does not seem to have

occurred at quite so early a day.  One eminent Lutheran clergyman

at Magdeburg called on his hearers to choose between Darwin and

religion; Delitszch, in his new commentary on Genesis, attempted

to bring science back to recognise human sin as an important

factor in creation; Prof. Heinrich Ewald, while carefully

avoiding any sharp conflict between the scriptural doctrine and

evolution, comforted himself by covering Darwin and his followers

with contempt; Christlieb, in his address before the Evangelical

Alliance at New York in 1873, simply took the view that the

tendencies of the Darwinian theory were "toward infidelity," but

declined to make any serious battle on biblical grounds; the

Jesuit, Father Pesch, in Holland, drew up in Latin, after the old

scholastic manner, a sort of general indictment of evolution, of

which one may say that it was interesting--as interesting as the

display of a troop in chain armour and with cross-bows on a

nineteenth-century battlefield.



From America there came new echoes.  Among the myriad attacks on

the Darwinian theory by Protestants and Catholics two should be

especially mentioned.  The first of these was by Dr. Noah

Porter, President of Yale College, an excellent scholar, an

interesting writer, a noble man, broadly tolerant, combining in

his thinking a curious mixture of radicalism and conservatism.

While giving great latitude to the evolutionary teaching in the

university under his care, he felt it his duty upon one occasion

to avow his disbelief in it; but he was too wise a man to suggest

any necessary antagonism between it and the Scriptures.  He

confined himself mainly to pointing out the tendency of the

evolution doctrine in this form toward agnosticism and pantheism.



To those who knew and loved him, and had noted the genial way in

which by wise neglect he had allowed scientific studies to

flourish at Yale, there was an amusing side to all this.  Within

a stone's throw of his college rooms was the Museum of

Paleontology, in which Prof. Marsh had laid side by side, among

other evidences of the new truth, that wonderful series of

specimens showing the evolution of the horse from the earliest

form of the animal, "not larger than a fox, with five toes,"

through the whole series up to his present form and size--that

series which Huxley declared an absolute proof of the existence

of natural selection as an agent in evolution.  In spite of the

veneration and love which all Yale men felt for President Porter,

it was hardly to be expected that these particular arguments of

his would have much permanent effect upon them when there was

constantly before their eyes so convincing a refutation.



But a far more determined opponent was the Rev. Dr. Hodge, of

Princeton; his anger toward the evolution doctrine was bitter:

he denounced it as thoroughly "atheistic"; he insisted that

Christians "have a right to protest against the arraying of

probabilities against the clear evidence of the Scriptures"; he

even censured so orthodox a writer as the Duke of Argyll, and

declared that the Darwinian theory of natural selection is

"utterly inconsistent with the Scriptures," and that "an absent

God, who does nothing, is to us no God"; that "to ignore design

as manifested in God's creation is to dethrone God"; that "a

denial of design in Nature is virtually a denial of God"; and

that "no teleologist can be a Darwinian."  Even more

uncompromising was another of the leading authorities at the same

university--the Rev. Dr. Duffield.  He declared war not only

against Darwin but even against men like Asa Gray, Le Conte, and

others, who had attempted to reconcile the new theory with the

Bible:  he insisted that "evolutionism and the scriptural account

of the origin of man are irreconcilable"--that the Darwinian

theory is "in direct conflict with the teaching of the apostle,

`All scripture is given by inspiration of God'"; he pointed out,

in his opposition to Darwin's Descent of Man and Lyell's

Antiquity of Man, that in the Bible "the genealogical links

which connect the Israelites in Egypt with Adam and Eve in Eden

are explicitly given."  These utterances of Prof. Duffield

culminated in a declaration which deserves to be cited as showing

that a Presbyterian minister can "deal damnation round the land"

ex cathedra in a fashion quite equal to that of popes and

bishops.  It is as follows:  "If the development theory of the

origin of man," wrote Dr. Duffield in the Princeton Review,

"shall in a little while take its place--as doubtless it

will--with other exploded scientific speculations, then they who

accept it with its proper logical consequences will in the life

to come have their portion with those who in this life `know not

God and obey not the gospel of his Son.'"



Fortunately, at about the time when Darwin's Descent of Man was

published, there had come into Princeton University "deus ex

machina" in the person of Dr. James McCosh.  Called to the

presidency, he at once took his stand against teachings so

dangerous to Christianity as those of Drs. Hodge, Duffield, and

their associates.  In one of his personal confidences he has let

us into the secret of this matter.  With that hard Scotch sense

which Thackeray had applauded in his well-known verses, he saw

that the most dangerous thing which could be done to Christianity

at Princeton was to reiterate in the university pulpit, week

after week, solemn declarations that if evolution by natural

selection, or indeed evolution at all, be true, the Scriptures

are false.  He tells us that he saw that this was the certain way

to make the students unbelievers; he therefore not only checked

this dangerous preaching but preached an opposite doctrine.  With

him began the inevitable compromise, and, in spite of mutterings

against him as a Darwinian, he carried the day.  Whatever may be

thought of his general system of philosophy, no one can deny his

great service in neutralizing the teachings of his predecessors

and colleagues--so dangerous to all that is essential in

Christianity.



Other divines of strong sense in other parts of the country began

to take similar ground--namely, that men could be Christians and

at the same time Darwinians.  There appeared, indeed, here and

there, curious discrepancies:  thus in 1873 the Monthly Religious

Magazine of Boston congratulated its readers that the Rev. Mr.

Burr had "demolished the evolution theory, knocking the breath of

life out of it and throwing it to the dogs."  This amazing

performance by the Rev. Mr. Burr was repeated in a very

striking way by Bishop Keener before the Oecumenical Council of

Methodism at Washington in 1891.  In what the newspapers

described as an "admirable speech," he refuted evolution

doctrines by saying that evolutionists had "only to make a

journey of twelve hours from the place where he was then standing

to find together the bones of the muskrat, the opossum, the

coprolite, and the ichthyosaurus."  He asserted that

Agassiz--whom the good bishop, like so many others, seemed to

think an evolutionist--when he visited these beds near

Charleston, declared:  "These old beds have set me crazy; they

have destroyed the work of a lifetime."  And the Methodist

prelate ended by saying:  "Now, gentlemen, brethren, take these

facts home with you; get down and look at them.  This is the

watch that was under the steam hammer--the doctrine of evolution;

and this steam hammer is the wonderful deposit of the Ashley

beds."  Exhibitions like these availed little.  While the good

bishop amid vociferous applause thus made comically evident his

belief that Agassiz was a Darwinian and a coprolite an animal,

scientific men were recording in all parts of the world facts

confirming the dreaded theory of an evolution by natural

selection.  While the Rev. Mr. Burr was so loudly praised for

"throwing Darwinism to the dogs," Marsh was completing his series

leading from the five-toed ungulates to the horse.  While Dr.

Tayler Lewis at Union, and Drs. Hodge and Duffield at Princeton,

were showing that if evolution be true the biblical accounts must

be false, the indefatigable Yale professor was showing his

cretaceous birds, and among them Hesperornis and Ichthyornis with

teeth.  While in Germany Luthardt, Schund, and their compeers

were demonstrating that Scripture requires a belief in special

and separate creations, the Archaeopteryx, showing a most

remarkable connection between birds and reptiles, was discovered.



While in France Monseigneur Segur and others were indulging in

diatribes against "a certain Darwin," Gaudry and Filhol were

discovering a striking series of "missing links" among the

carnivora. In view of the proofs accumulating in favour of the

new evolutionary hypothesis, the change in the tone of

controlling theologians was now rapid.  From all sides came

evidences of desire to compromise with the theory.  Strict

adherents of the biblical text pointed significantly to the

verses in Genesis in which the earth and sea were made to bring

forth birds and fishes, and man was created out of the dust of

the ground.  Men of larger mind like Kingsley and Farrar, with

English and American broad churchmen generally, took ground

directly in Darwin's favour.  Even Whewell took pains to show

that there might be such a thing as a Darwinian argument for

design in Nature; and the Rev. Samuel Houghton, of the Royal

Society, gave interesting suggestions of a divine design in

evolution.



Both the great English universities received the new teaching as

a leaven:  at Oxford, in the very front of the High Church party

at Keble College, was elaborated a statement that the evolution

doctrine is "an advance in our theological thinking."  And

Temple, Bishop of London, perhaps the most influential thinker

then in the Anglican episcopate, accepted the new revelation in

the following words:  "It seems something more majestic, more

befitting him to whom a thousand years are as one day, thus to

impress his will once for all on his creation, and provide for

all the countless varieties by this one original impress, than by

special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what he had

previously made."



In Scotland the Duke of Argyll, head and front of the orthodox

party, dissenting in many respects from Darwin's full

conclusions, made concessions which badly shook the old position.



Curiously enough, from the Roman Catholic Church, bitter as some

of its writers had been, now came argument to prove that the

Catholic faith does not prevent any one from holding the

Darwinian theory, and especially a declaration from an authority

eminent among American Catholics--a declaration which has a very

curious sound, but which it would be ungracious to find fault

with--that "the doctrine of evolution is no more in opposition to

the doctrine of the Catholic Church than is the Copernican theory

or that of Galileo."



Here and there, indeed, men of science like Dawson, Mivart, and

Wigand, in view of theological considerations, sought to make

conditions; but the current was too strong, and eminent

theologians in every country accepted natural selection as at

least a very important part in the mechanism of evolution.



At the death of Darwin it was felt that there was but one place

in England where his body should be laid, and that this place was

next the grave of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.  The

noble address of Canon Farrar at his funeral was echoed from many

pulpits in Europe and America, and theological opposition as such

was ended.  Occasionally appeared, it is true, a survival of the

old feeling:  the Rev. Dr. Laing referred to the burial of

Darwin in Westminster Abbey as "a proof that England is no longer

a Christian country," and added that this burial was a

desecration--that this honour was given him because he had been

"the chief promoter of the mock doctrine of evolution of the

species and the ape descent of man."



Still another of these belated prophets was, of all men, Thomas

Carlyle.  Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him

to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick

the Great's generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant,

and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the

burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to

a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an "apostle of dirt

worship."



The last echoes of these utterances reverberated between Scotland

and America.  In the former country, in 1885, the Rev. Dr. Lee

issued a volume declaring that, if the Darwinian view be true,

"there is no place for God"; that "by no method of

interpretation can the language of Holy Scripture be made wide

enough to re-echo the orang-outang theory of man's natural

history"; that "Darwinism reverses the revelation of God" and

"implies utter blasphemy against the divine and human character

of our Incarnate Lord"; and he was pleased to call Darwin and his

followers "gospellers of the gutter."  In one of the intellectual

centres of America the editor of a periodical called The

Christian urged frantically that "the battle be set in array, and

that men find out who is on the Lord's side and who is on the

side of the devil and the monkeys."



To the honour of the Church of England it should be recorded that

a considerable number of her truest men opposed such utterances

as these, and that one of them--Farrar, Archdeacon of

Westminster--made a protest worthy to be held in perpetual

remembrance.  While confessing his own inability to accept fully

the new scientific belief, he said:  "We should consider it

disgraceful and humiliating to try to shake it by an ad

captandum argument, or by a clap-trap platform appeal to the

unfathomable ignorance and unlimited arrogance of a prejudiced

assembly.  We should blush to meet it with an anathema or a

sneer."



All opposition had availed nothing; Darwin's work and fame were

secure.  As men looked back over his beautiful life--simple,

honest, tolerant, kindly--and thought upon his great labours in

the search for truth, all the attacks faded into nothingness.



There were indeed some dark spots, which as time goes on appear

darker.  At Trinity College, Cambridge, Whewell, the

"omniscient," author of the History of the Inductive Sciences,

refused to allow a copy of the Origin of Species to be placed in

the library.  At multitudes of institutions under theological

control--Protestant as well as Catholic--attempts were made to

stamp out or to stifle evolutionary teaching.  Especially was

this true for a time in America, and the case of the American

College at Beyrout, where nearly all the younger professors were

dismissed for adhering to Darwin's views, is worthy of

remembrance.  The treatment of Dr. Winchell at the Vanderbilt

University in Tennessee showed the same spirit; one of the

truest of men, devoted to science but of deeply Christian

feeling, he was driven forth for views which centred in the

Darwinian theory.



Still more striking was the case of Dr. Woodrow.  He had, about

1857, been appointed to a professorship of Natural Science as

connected with Revealed Religion, in the Presbyterian Seminary at

Columbia, South Carolina.  He was a devoted Christian man, and

his training had led him to accept the Presbyterian standards of

faith.  With great gifts for scientific study he visited Europe,

made a most conscientious examination of the main questions under

discussion, and adopted the chief points in the doctrine of

evolution by natural selection.  A struggle soon began.  A

movement hostile to him grew more and more determined, and at

last, in spite of the efforts made in his behalf by the directors

of the seminary and by a large and broad-minded minority in the

representative bodies controlling it, an orthodox storm, raised

by the delegates from various Presbyterian bodies, drove him from

his post.  Fortunately, he was received into a professorship at

the University of South Carolina, where he has since taught with

more power than ever before.



This testimony to the faith by American provincial Protestantism

was very properly echoed from Spanish provincial Catholicism.  In

the year 1878 a Spanish colonial man of science, Dr. Chil y

Marango, published a work on the Canary Islands.  But Dr. Chil

had the imprudence to sketch, in his introduction, the modern

hypothesis of evolution, and to exhibit some proofs, found in the

Canary Islands, of the barbarism of primitive man.  The

ecclesiastical authorities, under the lead of Bishop Urquinaona y

Bidot, at once grappled with this new idea.  By a solemn act they

declared it "falsa, impia, scandalosa"; all persons possessing

copies of the work were ordered to surrender them at once to the

proper ecclesiastics, and the author was placed under the major

excommunication.



But all this opposition may be reckoned among the last expiring

convulsions of the old theologic theory.  Even from the new

Catholic University at Washington has come an utterance in favour

of the new doctrine, and in other universities in the Old World

and in the New the doctrine of evolution by natural selection has

asserted its right to full and honest consideration.  More than

this, it is clearly evident that the stronger men in the Church

have, in these latter days, not only relinquished the struggle

against science in this field, but have determined frankly and

manfully to make an alliance with it.  In two very remarkable

lectures given in 1892 at the parish church of Rochdale, Wilson,

Archdeacon of Manchester, not only accepted Darwinism as true,

but wrought it with great argumentative power into a higher view

of Christianity; and what is of great significance, these

sermons were published by the same Society for the Promotion of

Christian Knowledge which only a few years before had published

the most bitter attacks against the Darwinian theory.  So, too,

during the year 1893, Prof. Henry Drummond, whose praise is in

all the dissenting churches, developed a similar view most

brilliantly in a series of lectures delivered before the American

Chautauqua schools, and published in one of the most widespread

of English orthodox newspapers.



Whatever additional factors may be added to natural

selection--and Darwin himself fully admitted that there might be

others--the theory of an evolution process in the formation of

the universe and of animated nature is established, and the old

theory of direct creation is gone forever.  In place of it

science has given us conceptions far more noble, and opened the

way to an argument for design infinitely more beautiful than any

ever developed by theology.[24]



[24] For the causes of bitterness shown regarding the Darwinian

hypothesis, see Reusch, Bibel und Natur, vol. ii, pp. 46 et seq.

For hostility in the United States regarding the Darwinian

theory, see, among a multitude of writers, the following: Dr.

Charles Hodge, of Princeton, monograph, What is Darwinism?  New

York, 1874; also his Systematic Theology, New York, 1872,vol. ii,

part 2, Anthropology; also The Light by which we see Light, or

Nature and the Scriptures, Vedder Lectures, 1875, Rutgers

College, New York, 1875; also Positivism and Evolutionism, in the

American Catholic Quarterly, October 1877, pp. 607, 619; and in

the same number, Professor Huxley and Evolution, by Rev. A. M.

Kirsch, pp. 662, 664; The Logic of Evolution, by Prof. Edward F.

X. McSweeney, D. D., July, 1879, p. 561; Das Hexaemeron und die

Geologie, von P. Eirich, Pastor in Albany, N. Y., Lutherischer

Concordia-Verlag, St. Louis, Mo., 1878, pp. 81, 82, 84, 92-94;

Evolutionism respecting Man and the Bible, by John T. Duffield,

of Princeton, January, 1878, Princeton Review, pp. 151, 153, 154,

158, 159, 160, 188; a Lecture on Evolution , before the

Nineteenth Century Club of New York, May 25, 1886, by ex-

President Noah Porter, pp. 4, 26-29.  For the laudatory notice of

the Rev. E. F. Burr's demolition of evolution in his book Pater

Mundi, see Monthly Religious Magazine, Boston, May, 1873, p. 492.

Concerning the removal of Dr. James Woodrow, Professor of Natural

Science in the Columbia Theological Seminary, see Evolution or

Not, in the New York Weekly Sun, October 24, 1888.  For the

dealings of Spanish ecclesiastics with Dr. Chil and his Darwinian

exposition, see the Revue d'Anthropologie, cited in the Academy

for April 6, 1878; see also the Catholic World, xix, 433, A

Discussion with an Infidel, directed against Dr. Louis Buchner

and his Kraft und Stoff; also Mind and Matter, by Rev. james

Tait, of Canada, p. 66 (in the third edition the author bemoans

the "horrible plaudits" that "have accompanied every effort to

establish man's brutal descent"); also The Church Journal, New

York, May 28, 1874.  For the effort in favour of a teleological

evolution, see Rev. Samuel Houghton, F. R. S., Principles of

Animal Mechanics, London, 1873, preface and p. 156 and elsewhere.

For the details of the persecutions of Drs. Winchell and Woodrow,

and of the Beyrout professors, with authorities cited, see my

chapter on The Fall of Man and Anthropology.  For more liberal

views among religious thinkers regarding the Darwinian theory,

and for efforts to mitigate and adapt it to theological views,

see, among the great mass of utterances, the following: Charles

Kingsley's letters to Darwin, November 18, 1859, in  Darwin's

Life and Letters, vol. ii, p. 82; Adam Sedgwick to Charles

Darwin, December 24, 1859, see ibid., vol. ii, pp. 356-359; the

same to Miss Gerard, January 2, 1860, see Sedgewick's Life and

Letters, vol. ii, pp. 359, 360; the same in The Spectator,

London, March 24, 1860; The Rambler, March 1860, cited by Mivart,

Genesis of Species, p. 30; The Dublin Review, May, 1860; The

Christian Examiner, May, 1860; Charles Kingsley to F. D. Maurice

in 1863, in Kingsley's Life, vol. ii, p. 171; Adam Sedgwick to

Livingstone (the explorer), March 16, 1865, in Life and Letters

of Sedgwick, vol. ii, pp. 410-412; the Duke of Argyll, The Reign

of Law, New York, pp. 16, 18, 31, 116, 117, 120, 159; Joseph P.

Thompson, D. D., LL.D., Man in Genesis and Geology, New York,

1870, pp. 48, 49, 82; Canon H. P. Liddon, Sermons preached before

the University of Oxford, 1871, Sermon III; St. George Mivart,

Evolution and its Consequences, Contemporary Review, Jan. 1872;

British and Foreign Evangelical Review, 1872, article on The

Theory of Evolution; The Lutheran Quarterly, Gettysburg, Pa.,

April, 1872, article by Rev. Cyrus Thomas, Assistant United

States Geological Survey on The Descent of Man, pp. 214, 239,

372-376; The Lutheran Quarterly, July, 1873, article on Some

Assumptions against Christianity, by Rev. C. A. Stork, Baltimore,

Md., pp. 325, 326; also, in the same number, see a review of Dr.

Burr's Pater Mundi, pp. 474, 475, and contrast with the review in

the Andover Review of that period; an article in the Religious

Magazine and Monthly Review, Boston, on Religion and Evolution,

by Rev. S. R. Calthrop, September, 1873, p. 200; The Popular

Science Monthly, January, 1874, article Genesis, Geology, and

Evolution; article by Asa Gray, Nature, London, June 4, 1874;

Materialism, by Rev. W. Streissguth, Lutheran Quarterly, July,

1875, originally written in German, and translated by J. G.

Morris, D. D., pp. 406, 408; Darwinismus und Christenthum, von R.

Steck, Ref. Pfarrer in Dresden, Berlin, 1875, pp. 5,6,and 26,

reprinted from the Protestantische Kirchenzeitung, and issued as

a tract by the Protestantenverein; Rev. W. E. Adams, article in

the Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1879, on Evolution: Shall it be

Atheistic?  John Wood, Bible Anticipations of Modern Science,

1880, pp. 18, 19, 22; Lutheran Quarterly, January, 1881, Some

Postulates of the New Ethics, by Rev. C. A. Stork, D. D.;

Lutheran Quarterly, January, 1882, The Religion of Evolution as

against the Religion of Jesus, by Prof. W. H. Wynn, Iowa State

Agricultural College--this article was republished as a pamphlet;

Canon Liddon, prefatory note to sermon on The Recovery of St.

Thomas, pp. 4, 11, 12, 13, and 26, preached in St. Paul's

Cathedral, April 23, 1882; Lutheran Quarterly, January 1882,

Evolution and the Scripture, by Rev. John A. Earnest, pp. 101,

105; Glimpses in the Twilight, by Rev. F. G. Lee, D. D.,

Edinburgh, 1885, especially pp. 18 and 19; the Hibbert Lectures

for 1883, by Rev. Charles Beard, pp. 392, 393, et seq.; F. W.

Farrar, D. D., Canon of Westminster, The History of

Interpretation, being the Bampton Lectures for 1885, pp. 426,

427; Bishop Temple, Bampton Lectures, pp. 184-186; article

Evolution in the Dictionary of Religion, edited by Rev. William

Benham, 1887; Prof. Huxley, An Episcopal Trilogy, Nineteenth

Century, November, 1887--this article discusses three sermons

delivered by the bishops of Carlisle, Bedford, and Manchester, in

Manchester Cathedral, during the meeting of the British

Association, September, 1887--these sermons were afterward

published in pamphlet form under the title The Advance of

Science; John Fiske, Darwinism, and Other Essays, Boston, 1888;

Harriet Mackenzie, Evolution illuminating the Bible, London,

1891, dedicated to Prof. Huxley; H. E. Rye, Hulsean Professor of

Divinity at Cambridge, The Early Narratives of Genesis, London,

1892, preface, pp. vii-ix, pp. 7, 9, 11; Rev. G. M. Searle, of

the Catholic University, Washington, article in the Catholic

World, November, 1892, pp. 223, 227, 229, 231; for the statement

from Keble College, see Rev. Mr. Illingworth, in Lux Mundi.  For

Bishop Temple, see citation in Laing.  For a complete and

admirable acceptance of the evolutionary theory as lifting

Christian doctrine and practice to a higher plane, with

suggestions for a new theology, see two Sermons by Archdeacon

Wilson, of Manchester, S. P. C. K.. London, and Young & Co., New

York, 1893; and for a characteristically lucid statement of the

most recent development of evolution doctrines, and the relations

of Spencer, Weismann, Galton, and others to them, see Lester F.

Ward's Address as President of the Biological Society,

Washington, 1891; also, recent articles in the leading English

reviews.  For a brilliant glorification of evolution by natural

selection as a doctrine necessary to thenhighest and truest view

of Christianity, see Prof. Drummond's Chautaqua Lectures,

published in the British Weekly, London, from April 20 to May 11,

1893.