96 EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 



orator, Father Robert Kane, has eloquently 

 to say upon this subject: 



Evolution? It is an old story told by old men, long ago. 



Fourteen centuries ago, all the principles of evolution that 

 are not irrational were taught by the great St. Augustine. He 

 held that all things at first existed only as Semina rerum (the 

 seeds of what was to be), that there was at first in things only 

 the potency of what, under the action and reaction of strong 

 or slow forces, they should become; that during days which 

 were epochs of unmeasured duration and of cumulative result, 

 the Moulder of the world worked merely through natural 

 elements and uniform laws, until the universe crystallized into 

 order. He held indeed, as all who are not materialists must 

 hold, that man's spiritual soul was not made of mere mud nor 

 begotten of a monkey, but was created by the immediate 

 power of God. Since Augustine, this theory has been com- 

 monly accepted as a probable hypothesis by Christian theo- 

 logians. 



There is as much wonder in an acorn as in an oak. In that 

 bewildering world of interlocked atoms or rebounding vortices, 

 of subtle gas or seething vapor, of dizzy whirl or aeonic change, 

 of molten mass or adamantine ice, of eddying unison or of 

 titanic clash, there was the potency, the germ of all that is or 

 shall be. 



Now we look upon the branching forth of that 

 strange power which then was in the seed. But to go no further 

 than an acorn for ultimate explanation of an oak, is to stop 

 short upon the threshold of thought. To account for the oak, 

 the acorn, and the universe, by the virtue of some primitive 

 cell which held within it the potency of all worth and the 

 energy of all power, which, yet, had no cause, no reason other 

 than itself, is to change science into superstition, and to learn 

 history from the "Arabian Nights." * 



Is that facing the issue squarely? And of the 

 great patristic writer of the Church above re- 



*"God or Chaos," pp. 170, 171. 



