Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/122

112 been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."

Haeckel and some other evolutionists would go further. They would believe, though all the experimental evidence is at present against such a view, that life ultimately arose from inorganic matter. But even here there is no suggestion as to the ultimate origin of that matter, out of which all the world, as we know it, came. In the language of technical theology, evolution deals with secondary (i. e., derivative), but does not touch primary, creation. In Haeckel's less exact way of stating the distinction it deals with "creation of form," but knows nothing about "creation of matter." Of the latter, i. e., original creation, Haeckel says: "The process, if indeed it ever took place, is completely beyond human comprehension; and can, therefore, never become a subject of scientific inquiry."

Prof. Tyndall, speaking of the "evolution hypothesis," says: "It does not solve—it does not profess to solve—the ultimate mystery of this universe. It leaves, in fact, that mystery untouched." Prof. Clifford again says: "Of the beginning of the universe we know nothing at all." Herbert Spencer, indeed, rejects primary creation, but not on the ground that evolution offers an alternative for it, but because it is "literally unthinkable"; and Prof. Huxley, on the ground that, as science knows nothing about it, nothing can be known. Q. E. D. But Mr. Darwin tells us that "the theory of evolution is quite compatible with the belief in a God"; that when he was collecting facts for the "Origin" his "belief in what is called a personal God was as firm as that of Dr. Pusey himself"; ; while even at the time when the "Origin of Species" was published, he deserved to be called a theist." Later on he says: "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic." Yet, three years later (1879), in a private letter, he writes, "In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God." These quotations, which of course might easily be multiplied, are enough to show that evolution neither is, nor pretends to be, an alternative theory to original creation. An evolutionist, therefore, who denies the fact of creation, goes as far beyond the evidence which science offers as if he had asserted his belief in "the Maker of heaven and earth."

2. But then evolution does clearly offer us a theory as to how the world came to be what it now is, and in this we are told it contradicts the Bible and the unvarying faith of Christendom. We have here a clear issue raised between two alternative