Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/126

116 growth or evolution, which is quite contrary to what is known g-s special creation. And when we remember that the schoolmen held what is now called abiogenesis and generation from putrefaction, both in botany and zoölogy, we feel at once how infinitely more elastic their theory of Nature was than that implied in the doctrine of special creation. But if special creation is a doctrine unknown to Bacon and rejected by St. Thomas, it is not likely to be essential either to science or religion.

Where, then, did it come from? It includes elements both scientific and religious, and it is interesting to notice how the elements combined.

Half a century after Bacon's "Novum Organum" was published, a great poem appeared, which has since then, often unconsciously, influenced theologians and apologists. It is, no doubt, a thankless and ungenerous task to bring the heavy artillery of science to bear upon poetry, and it is only justifiable when truth is endangered. Some time ago Nasmyth, by the help of the "Nautical Almanac," discovered that, if Sir John Moore was buried "at dead of night," he could not have had the advantage of "the struggling moonbeam's misty light," because the moon must have been far below the horizon at the time. When this criticism was reported to the late President of the Royal Irish Academy by Sir R. S. Ball, he is said to have replied, "I'll tell you what it is, the time will come when that little poem will be taken as the sole authority about the matter, and all your astronomical calculations will go for nothing at all." This is very much what has happened in the case of "Paradise Lost." People have come to think of it as a sort of inspired gloss on the early chapters of Genesis. Yet there is a huge difference between the text and the commentary. In the Bible we have, "And God said, 'Let the earth bring forth,'" etc., words which are at least consistent with a gradual development. But Milton says:

 The grassy clods now calved: now half appeared The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce, The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks; the swift stag from underground Bore up his branching head," etc., etc.

This is literalism and realism with a vengeance! And yet it is hard to see why Milton should not do in poetry what Raphael in the Vatican had done in art.

But what gives such importance to the account of creation in