The Narrower Tradition 4S7 



Huxley^ found the path of the blameless naturalist everywhere 

 blocked by " Moses " : the believer in revelation was generally held to 

 be forced to a choice between revealed cosmogony and the scientific 

 account of origins. It is not clear how far the change in Biblical 

 interpretation is due to natural science, and how far to the vital 

 movements of theological study which have been quite independent of 

 the controversy about species. It belongs to a general renewal of 

 Christian movement, the recovery of a heritage. "Special Creation " 

 — really a biological rather than a theological conception, — seems in 

 its rigid form to have been a recent element even in English biblical 

 orthodoxy. 



The Middle Ages had no suspicion that religious faith forbad 

 inquiry into the natural origination of the different forms of life. 

 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth 

 century, was a mutationist in his way, as Aristotle, "the Philosopher" 

 of the Christian Schoolmen, had been in his. So late as the seven- 

 teenth century, as we learn not only from early proceedings of the 

 Royal Society, but from a writer so homely and so regularly pious as 

 Walton, the variation of species and "spontaneous" generations had 

 no theological bearing, except as instances of that various wonder 

 of the world which in devout minds is food for devotion. 



It was in the eighteenth century that the harder statement took 

 shape. Something in the preciseness of that age, its exaltation of law, 

 its cold passion for a stable and measured universe, its cold denial, 

 its cold affirmation of the power of God, a God of ice, is the occasion 

 of that rigidity of religious thought about the living world which 

 Darwin by accident challenged, or rather by one of those movements 

 of genius which, Goethe^ declares, are "elevated above all earthly 

 control." 



If religious thought in the eighteenth century was aimed at a fixed 

 and nearly finite world of spirit, it followed hi all these respects the 

 secular and critical lead. "La philosophic reformatrice du XVIIP 

 si^cle^ ramenait la nature et la soci^t^ 5. des mecanismes que la 

 pensee reflechie pent concevoir et r^composer." In fact, religion in a 

 mechanical age is condemned if it takes any but a mechanical tone. 

 Butler's thought was too moving, too vital, too evolutionary, for the 

 sceptics of his time. In a rationalist, encyclopaedic period, religion 

 also must give hard outline to its facts, it must be able to display its 

 secret to any sensible man in the language used by all sensible men. 

 Milton's prophetic genius furnished the eighteenth century, out of the 



* Science and Christian Tradition. London, 1904. 



2 "No productiveness of the highest kind ia in the power of anyone." — Conversa- 

 tion* of Goethe with Eckemiann and Soret. London, 1850. 

 ^ Berthelot, Evolutionisme et Platonisme, Paris, 1908, p. 45. 



