Only the knowledge of the genuine Christian tradition in the matter was needed to dispel the idea of any betwen the theory of evolution in the true scientific sense of the term and creation. It is just as much creation, if hut a single form of life were evoked from nothing, the great law of evolution being im pressed upon it so that it gradually grew more complex until the whole series of living beings that we see around us came into existence, as if each being were created by a special act. The creation of species would under that ex planation be the granting of power to any par ticular form of life to lift itself above what it was by inheritance from its progenitors. The special creation of man would then be the gradual formation of his body from the earth through a long series of ever-developing living beings until the organism had readied a stage of development capable of providing the mechanism suitable for a rational soul to act in association with matter. Only when this living matter had become suitable for co-ordi nate activities with man's spirit was the ra tional soul breathed into the body, which by this inspiration was made like to its Creator.
The Scriptural description of Creation is summed up in the words "Let the earth bring forth each living creature in its kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth accord ing to their kind, and it was so done." . . . "And He said let us make man to our own image and let him have dominion over the fishes of the seas and the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth and every creep ing creature that moveth upon the earth.° "And God created man to His own image." It is the rational spirit of man that is Divine and there is no good reason to forbid the thought that God may have created the body to receive that spirit by a lung succession of evolutionary steps. To many there would seem to he more reverence in that idea than if God took red earth (Adam, in Hebrew) and fashioned the body directly and then breathed the spirit into it. Wasmann in his 'Modern Biology and the Theory of Evolution> re minded us that the taunt that orthodox be lievers imagined the God of the Bible as a sort of potter in human form fashioning for Adam a body of clay was utterly unjustified by any real knowledge of Christian tradition. Saint Augustine described any such imagina tion as nimium puerilis cogitatio —"entirely too puerile for consideration.° Newman called attention to the Scriptural expression in Genesis (ii, 7): "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul," and comments: "Here are two acts on the part of the Creator — the forming the dust, and the breathing the life. . . . Man was made rational after he
was made corporeal" Wasmann said, quoting Saint Augustine once more, that "It would seem more fitting to be lieve that in producing the first man as in pro ducing all other creatures, God employed nat ural causes as far as they were capable of co operating toward this aim." Wasmann con tinues, °We must, therefore, admit that it be possible for anyone to account for the origin of the human body by assuming God to have created a primitive cell and to say that the earliest ancestors of man were organ isms living as simple cells; later on as the or gans were differentiated and the nervous sys tem was formed and a sensitive soul came into existence they developed into animals. The or ganism gradually increased in perfection and as the brain developed this soul in course of time prepared a human body suited to be the dwelling of a rational soul and, through pos sessing highly developed brain cells, able to satisfy the conditions of spiritual activity and its verbal expression. Assuming this theory to be true we may still say that man certainly only became man at the moment of the creation of his rational soul.° He adds that "any ob jection to this theory (on the score of lack of dignity in the procedure) may he met by a re minder that man's body even now is produced by germinal development from a fertilized ovum." The question as to whether man's body came by such a process of evolution through the animals still remains open. It is now con fessed by scientists to be quite absurd to sug gest that man is descended from the monkey, and Klaatsch went so far as to say that man is not descended from the monkey because the monkey is degenerate man. The generally ac cepted idea is that both the monkey and man came from a remote ancestor, one branch of whose progeny continued an upward course in the direction of the human body, while the other degenerated into that of the This is, however, entirely theory. There is no evidence for it and though Zittel gives no fe-wet than 30 genera of fossil pro-simm and 18 gen era of fossil apes not one connecting link has been found between their hypothetical and an cestral form and man of the present time "The whole hypothetical pedigree of man is not supported by a single fossil genus or a single fossil species." (Wasmann). The pithecan thropus erectus or so-called Trinil man of Java has all of his scientific relationship to man in the word anthropus, the name forced upon him at the beginning, for he does not belong to the pedigree of modern man, hut to that of the modern apes.