Page:Evolution and Natural Selection in the Light of the New Church.djvu/6

6 human soul, with all its possibilities and capabilities of unending progress and development, its rationality and liberty, its conscience and aspirations after immortality, had an ape essence, an ape father (for the New Church teaches that the soul is from God mediately through the father). Even supposing that God, without the agency of a male ape, used the womb of a female ape (or of any other animal) merely as a matrix for the ﬁrst human germ, the "evolution" of man through such a medium involved as great or even a greater miracle than his "creation," without any such ape medium, in God's own "image."

Admitting, as all believers in New Church philosophy are supposed to do, the existence of an all-loving, all-wise Creator, surely it is not more difﬁcult to believe that distinct and successive species were created from distinct and succcssive spiritual causes, than it is to believe that a germ could be created capable of evolution or development into all other forms, including man; the latter would certainly be the greater miracle. Man alone, of all created forms, possesses the capability or possibility of containing within his nature all those spiritual affections and thoughts of which the varied forms of life are the representative types and patterns; all these created forms being types of something in man's soul, and, in the case of good and orderly forms, primarily, of something Divine in God.

Another argument against the Darwinian theory of Evolution is, that it is not founded upon proven scientiﬁc facts; that is, science has not yet discovered (and the writer believes mere natural science never can discover) the exact process or law whereby inorganic elements become organized into vegetable and animal forms. Neither does this theory of Evolution explain why vegetable and animal forms