THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 57 



were necessarily the only direct creative acts, and 

 that all other created beings are the result of 

 evolution, directed by laws which the Creator, 

 of course, would have placed in nature. 



Orthodox commentators, as Father Hull quite 

 rightly states, are prepared to accept evolution 

 as soon as it can be verified and to whatever 

 extent it can be verified, but the following prin- 

 ciples, he adds, will still remain axiomatic and 

 untouched by science, to whose sphere they in no 

 sense belong: 



(1) That even if the whole formation of the physical world 

 was achieved by a process of evolution according to natural 

 laws, still the elements of the universe were originally created 

 by God in their totality, and had a beginning at some point 

 of time measurable backwards from the present. 



(2) That all the laws of nature by which evolution took 

 place were imprinted on these elements by God, whose mind 

 first conceived the whole scheme of evolution, and then ar- 

 ranged the laws in such a way that they would issue in the 

 foreseen realization of His plan. 



(3) That life even plant life belongs to an order higher 

 than that of matter and could not be produced by any mere 

 combination of material particles arranged by mechanical 

 forces; and therefore the first beginnings of plant life must 

 have been directly introduced into lifeless matter, at least in 

 a germinal form, superior in nature to anything merely electric, 

 atomic or molecular. 



(4) That as the animals, again, belong to an order essen- 

 tially superior to mere plant life, the same necessity arises for 

 a direct creative action depositing in the water, or in the land, 

 the first germs of animal life. 



(5) As the rational soul of man is also of an essentially 

 higher order than animal life, this again postulates a direct 

 act of creation on the part of God to bring the first man into 



