The Narrower Tradition 487 
Huxley’ found the path of the blameless naturalist everywhere 
blocked by “Moses” : the believer in revelation was generally held to 
be forced to a choice between revealed cosmogony and the scientific 
account of origins. It is not clear how far the change in Biblical 
interpretation is due to natural science, and how far to the vital 
movements of theological study which have been quite independent of 
the controversy about species. It belongs to a general renewal of 
Christian movement, the recovery of a heritage. “Special Creation” 
—really a biological rather than a theological conception,—seems in 
its rigid form to have been a recent element even in English biblical 
orthodoxy. 
The Middle Ages had no suspicion that religious faith forbad 
inquiry into the natural origination of the different forms of life. 
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth 
century, was a mutationist in his way, as Aristotle, “the Philosopher” 
of the Christian Schoolmen, had been in his. So late as the seven- 
teenth century, as we learn not only from early proceedings of the 
Royal Society, but from a writer so homely and so regularly pious as 
Walton, the variation of species and “spontaneous” generations had 
no theological bearing, except as instances of that various wonder 
of the world which in devout minds is food for devotion. 
It was in the eighteenth century that the harder statement took 
shape. Something in the preciseness of that age, its exaltation of law, 
its cold passion for a stable and measured universe, its cold denial, 
its cold affirmation of the power of God, a God of ice, is the occasion 
of that rigidity of religious thought about the living world which 
Darwin by accident challenged, or rather by one of those movements 
of genius which, Goethe’? declares, are “elevated above all earthly 
control.” 
If religious thought in the eighteenth century was aimed at a fixed 
and nearly finite world of spirit, it followed in all these respects the 
secular and critical lead. “La philosophie réformatrice du XVIII* 
siécle? ramenait la nature et la société & des mécanismes que la 
pensée réfiéchie peut concevoir et récomposer.” In fact, religion in a 
mechanical age is condemned if it takes any but a mechanical tone. 
Butler’s thought was too moving, too vital, too evolutionary, for the 
sceptics of his time. In a rationalist, encyclopaedic period, religion 
also must give hard outline to its facts, it must be able to display its 
secret to any sensible man in the language used by all sensible men. 
Milton’s prophetic genius furnished the eighteenth century, out of the 
1 Science and Christian Tradition. London, 1904, 
2 “No productiveness of the highest kind...... is in the power of anyone.”’”—Conversa- 
tions of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret. London, 1850. 
3 Berthelot, Evolutionisme et Platonisme, Paris, 1908, p. 45. 
