< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu
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DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH.

115

beech-tree when cut down will "put forth birch" because it is "a tree of a smaller kind which needeth less nourishment."[1] Elsewhere he suggests the experiment of polling a willow to see what it will turn into, he himself having seen one which had a bracken fern growing out of it! And he takes it as probable, though it is inter magnalia naturæ, that "whatever creature having life is generated without seed, that creature will change out of one species into another." Bacon looks upon the seed as a restraining power, limiting a variation which, in spontaneous generations, is practically infinite, "for it is the seed, and the nature of it, which locketh and boundeth in the creature that it doth not expatiate." Here the fact of transmutation is taken for granted, generation from putrefaction being sometimes called in as a deus ex machinâ to explain it. But Bacon certainly had no idea that the existing species of plants and animals represent those originally created by God, and this is what special creation means.

It might be supposed, however, that the doctrine of "special creation" was the private property of commentators, suggested by the account of creation given in Genesis. And there were, no doubt, those who so interpreted the words "after his kind." But Christianity was in no way committed to this view, while St. Augustine distinctly rejects it in favor of a view which, without any violence to language, we may call a theory of evolution. The greatest of the schoolmen deliberately adopted St. Augustine's views and rejected that of special creation. His words are so remarkable that they are worth quoting, especially as we have never seen them referred to in this connection:

As to the production of plants, Augustine holds a different view. For some expositors say that on this third day (of creation) plants were actually produced each in his kind—a view which is favored by a superficial reading of the letter of Scripture. But Augustine says that the earth is then said to have brought forth grass and trees causaliter—i. e., it then received the power to produce them. This view he confirms by the authority of Scripture, which says, "These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth, when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew." (Genesis, ii, 4.) Before then they came into being on the earth, they were made causally in the earth. And this is confirmed by reason. For in those first days God made creatures primarily or causaliter, and then rested from his work, and yet after that, by his superintendence of things created, he works even to this day in the work of propagation. For the production of plants from the earth belongs to the work of propagation.

Here, though there is no idea of the method by which the "kinds" were brought forth from the earth, or of their interrelations with one another, there is a clear conception of creation by

  1. ↑ "Natural History," Cent, vi, p. 523.
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