110 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



miracles but for the laws of Nature. As Moore^ 

 says, Augustine distinctly rejected Special Cre- 

 ation in favor of a doctrine which, without any 

 violence to language, we may call a theory of 

 Evolution. 



Cotterill traces the history of Augustine's 

 thought upon Genesis. At first he found almost 

 insuperable difficulties in the literal, as con- 

 trasted with the allegorical, interpretation. It 

 seems that the account of Creation was a favor- 

 ite subject of ridicule with the Manichseans, who 

 denied the inspiration of the Old Testament. 

 Thus the outcome of Augustine's studies was a 

 volume entitled De Genesi contra Manichceos. 



Augustine took a sound philosophical position 

 upon natural causation, after considering the 

 question of time and saying that we ought not to 

 think of the six days of the Creation as being 

 equivalent to our solar days, nor of the working 

 of God itself as God now works anything in 

 time, but rather as He has worked from Whom 

 time itself had its beginning. In explaining the 

 passage, "In the beginning God created the 

 heaven and the earth," he says: "In the begin- 

 ning God made the heaven and the earth, as if 

 this were the seed of the heaven and the earth, 

 although as yet all the material of heaven and of 

 earth was in confusion; but because it was cer- 



1 Aubrey Moore: Science and the Faith, 1892, p. 176. 



