NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 441 



Among the Romans Lucretius caught much from it, extend- 

 ing the evolutionary process virtually to all things. 



In the early Church, as we have seen, the idea of a creation 

 direct, material, and by means like those used by man, was all- 

 powerful for the exclusion of conceptions based on evolution. 

 From the more simple and crude of the two views of creation 

 given in the Babylonian legends, and thence incorporated into 

 Genesis, rose the stream of orthodox thought on the subject, 

 which grew into a flood and swept on through the middle ages 

 and into modern times. Yet here and there in the midst of this 

 flood were to be seen high grounds of thought held by strong 

 men. Scotus Erigena and Duns Scotus, among the schoolmen, 

 bewildered though they were, had caught some rays of this an- 

 cient light, and passed on to their successors, in modified form, 

 doctrines of an evolutionary process in the universe. 



In the latter half of the sixteenth century these evolutionary 

 theories seemed to take more definite form in the mind of Giordano 

 Bruno, who evidently divined the fundamental fact of what is 

 now known as the " nebular hypothesis " ; but with his murder 

 by the Inquisition at Rome this idea seemed utterly to disappear 

 dissipated by the flames which in 1600 consumed his body on the 

 Campo del Fiore. 



Yet within a generation after Bruno's death the world was 

 introduced into a new realm of thought in which an evolution 

 theory of the visible universe was sure to be rapidly developed. 

 For there came, one after the other, five of the greatest men our 

 race has produced Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and 

 Newton and when their work was done the old theological concep- 

 tion of the universe was gone ; " the spacious firmament on high/' 

 "the crystalline spheres," the Almighty enthroned upon the 

 circle of the heavens, and with his own hands, or with angels as 

 his agents, keeping sun, moon, and planets in motion for the bene- 

 fit of the earth, opening and closing the " windows of heaven," 

 letting down upon the earth the " waters above the firmament," 

 setting his bow in the cloud, hanging out signs and wonders, 

 hurling comets, casting forth the lightnings to scare the wicked, 

 and shaking the earth in his wrath all this has disappeared. 



These five men had given a new divine revelation to the 

 world ; and through the last, Newton, had come a vast new concep- 

 tion, destined to be fatal to the old theory of creation, for he had 

 shown throughout the universe, in place of almighty caprice, all- 

 pervading law. The bitter opposition of theology to the first 

 four of these men is well known ; but the fact is not so widely 

 known that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious spirit, was 

 also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged against him that 

 by his statement of the law of gravitation he " took from God 



