122 EVOLU TION A ND D OGMA . 



reference to the way in which houses were con- 

 structed in ancient times? What should we say to 

 the architect who could not directly form a museum 

 out of bricks and mortar, but was forced to begin 

 as if going to build a mansion ; and after proceeding 

 some way in this direction, altered his plan into a 

 palace, and that again into a museum ? Yet this is 

 the sort of succession on which organisms are con- 

 structed." On the theory of Evolution all this 

 recapitulation of ancestral forms, so characteristic of 

 higher organisms, admits of an explanation which is 

 as beautiful as it is consonant with fact and reason. 

 And, from the theistic point of view, it exhibits the 

 Deity creating matter and force, and putting them 

 under the dominion of law. It tells of a God who 

 inaugurates the era of terrestrial life by the creation 

 of one or more simple organisms, unicellular mon- 

 ads, it may be, and causing them, under the 

 action of His Providence, to evolve in the course of 

 time into all the myriad, complicated, specialized 

 and perfect forms which now people the earth. 

 Surely this is a nobler conception of the Creator 

 than that which represents Him as experimenting, 

 as it were, with crude materials, and succeeding, 

 only after numerous attempts, in producing the or- 

 ganism which He is supposed to have had in view 

 from the beginning. To picture the Deity thus 

 working tentatively, is an anthropomorphic view of 

 the Creator, which is as little warranted by Catholic 

 dogma as it is by genuine science. It is rather on 

 a par with the view of those theologians and scien- 

 tists who fancied fossils to be "rejected models" of 



