CREATION AND CREATIAN2SM. 77 



into God, refuses, as Creation does, to be ex- 

 plained as we explain evolution. 



Of course, Creatianism is open to all the diffi- 

 culties of Creation and more. It is crude, unphilo- 

 sophical, scholastic, old-fashioned, antiquated. For 

 every reason we want to get rid of it, and for that 

 very reason we ought to scrutinize the more 

 narrowly any attempt to do so. An overwhelming 

 balance of Christian authority is in favour of it. If 

 St. Augustine to the last refuses to decide between 

 Traducianism and Creatianism, he at least shrinks 

 from appealing to Traducianism, which would have 

 been a powerful weapon to use against Pelagius. 1 

 Tertullian, as everybody knows, was a traducianist, 

 and Professor Ray Lankester, in a little popular 

 treatise on " Evolution," thinks that he has quieted 

 any possible scruples on the subject by quoting 

 a traducianist sentence from Tertullian. But at 

 least Duns Scotus may be expected to be a tradu- 

 cianist, with his wonderful theory, as it is commonly 

 understood, of a great evolution in which man, the 

 perfect being, is the last term a being capable of 

 union with God. Now, as a matter of fact, Duns 

 Scotus is entirely at one with his great rival St. 

 Thomas on the subject of Creatianism. Not 

 only is the creation of the first man an act of 

 primary creation (i.e. a creative act which cannot 

 be expressed in terms of evolution), but there is a 



1 See Dr. Liddon's Some Elements of Religion, p. 100. 



