The Development Theory. 207 



3 "And God said, let the earth bring 

 forth the living creature after his kind, cattle 

 and creeping thing and beast of the earth 

 after his kind." 



If these passages simply assure us that our 

 Heavenly Father created life upon the earth 

 and in the waters around the earth by start- 

 ing its streams from a germ which he caused 

 the waters or the land to bring forth, then 

 the believer in special creations and the theis- 

 tic evolutionist have here a common ground. 



Beyond this their views separate, the evo- 

 lutionist claiming that God created the possi- 

 bility of the whole system in its first germ of 

 life, and so consigned it to the development of 

 the natural world. To him, then, these pas- 

 sages from Genesis open a vision of a vast 

 stream of life, beginning millions of years ago 

 in the dawn of the Paleozoic, increasing nat- 

 urally as it flowed on through the successive 

 additions to the continent, rapidly enlarging 

 as it flowed through the early Tertiary, till the 

 extending continents were overspread with 

 life in the wonderful variety of its higher forms 



