CREATION BY EVOLUTION
center of the universe; that in the universe we can “see no trace of a beginning nor prospect of an end,” and that “time is as long as space is wide”; that the antipodes are really inhabited by real people; that 20,000 air breathing animals (outside of insects) could not foregather in pairs in the Ark; that fossils are relics of once-living creatures; that fossil shells are not evidence of the flood; that the Lord is not appeased by burnt offerings of lambs or of men; that lunatics are not possessed by devils nor yet struck by moonbeams; that the cure for scrofula is not found in the touch of a king; that no divinity indeed doth hedge a king, nor even the state; that a comet has its orbit and appears on its own business, not ours; that the penalty for wrong-doing is ours now and is within us; that ignorance and superstition are perilous guides for conduct; and that only Truth makes us free!
All our present conclusions concerning these matters and a thousand more are results of scientific research, not of religion as that word is commonly defined. To give one more example, however: Does any educated person now respect the dictum ascribed to Archbishop Ussher, who said, 200 years ago, that “Heaven and earth, center and circumference, were created all together at the same instant, with the clouds full of water, on October 24, 4004 B.C., at 9 o’clock in the morning?” And yet time was when to discredit this baseless pronouncement may have been held to cast one into outer darkness.
By the coöperation of observers and investigators much of the débris of our grandfather’s science has already been cleared away, and with it necessarily the preconception of a special creation of the myriads of species of animals and plants and the assumed chasm between humanity and our lowly mammalian brothers. The collision of ideas which
[ 10 ]
