154 HOMO V. DARWIN. 



we can rightly deduce from such language is this : man 

 Irs derived existence from God ; his body was formed by 

 Divine power from the mateiial of the earth which he 

 inhabits ; the life inspiring him has come from his 

 Creator. "We are told nothing -of the forces by which 

 Divine power wrought in building up the material structure 

 of man. Any such reference would have been unsuitable 

 for the time in which those writings were prepared, and for 

 those into whose hands they were first to come. Kingsley 

 has well remarked that, if Scripture had spoken of the 

 material world, and of its creation, in language that would 

 have been unintelligible to early man and it would have 

 done so, had it spoken in the langucge of modern science 

 it could not have spoken of unseen things so as to com- 

 mand his belief. 



The Darwinian notion of man's having had a series of 

 bestial progenitors is certainly irreconcilable with the sacred 

 narrative of Genesis, as it is also with tho^e fundamental 

 ideas of Revelation the Fall, and the Redemption of Man. 

 Whether it is consistent with any form of religion, I need 

 not here consider ; but it is utterly inconsistent with 

 Christianity. I am aware that an attempt has been made 

 to modify Mr. Darwin's hypothesis with respect to man. 

 It has been suggested that, though man's body may have, 

 for the most part, a brutish origin, yet that Divine power 

 may have miraculously interfered to strip it of its hairy 

 covering, to increase the size of the brain, and produce 

 other changes. Such an idea in itself ridiculous if it be 

 intended to reconcile Mr. Darwin's hypothesis with Christi- 

 anity, is useless and futile. Revelation clearly supposes 

 man's pristine, God-derived purity, and the possibility of 

 his being restored to that purity again. It teaches that 

 man was created in the image of God, and that that image 



