HIS ANTIQUITY AND CHARACTERISTICS. 



21 



written when he was 90, in which he steadily retraces his steps from 

 a naturalistic to a Biblical view, adaptation and variation being 

 signs of the Divine mind. 



The Rev. Chancellor Lias, M.A. :— I have very great pleasm'e 

 in welcoming Mr. Dale's paper. There is no doubt that of late a 

 large number of men of science have felt constrained to allow that 

 the question whether the universe, and all things therein, be the 

 work of a Divine Creator, is no longer a matter of serious controversy. 

 They are of opinion that the laws He may have imposed upon 

 Himself in the development of things material in this planet, and 

 in the visible universe around it, are a proper subject for the intelligent 

 beings He has placed on it to study. Mr. Dale has expressed con- 

 demnation of those who " have dogmatically denied that with which 

 they were very imperfectly acquainted." It had been well for us 

 had the Bishop of Oxford imitated the wise reserve of the writer of the 

 paper. But a report of a speech by the Bishop (which appeared on the 

 morning on which Mr. Dale's paper was read) does not display such 

 a reserve. For although it may be quite lawful to speculate 

 freely on the evolution of the stars, and on the mode by which 

 the earth was prepared for man's appearance thereupon, it is not 

 lawful to fling aside with contempt the great spiritual truths which 

 the narrative of the first three chapters of Genesis contain. It is 

 most rash to lay down, without careful explanation, that " we must 

 purge " that narrative " from everything which gives the germinating 

 intellect of man the excuse for saying ' this is a ridiculous old 

 wives' fable.' " We have no right whatever to speak of anything 

 that is found there in contemptuous language — still less to apply 

 the terms " ridiculous old wives' fables " to the literal inter- 

 pretation of those early truths, nor yet to the fact of a Fall of Man, 

 which is a fundamental principle of all revealed religion. 



Mr. Dale has told us, and no doubt told us truly, that none of the 

 discoveries of " pre- Adamite man," as he is termed, can be said to 

 have proved him to be the direct ancestor of the first man of whom 

 we read in Scripture. But I will venture so far as to say that if 

 pre-Adamite man could be proved to be, in a physical sense, the 

 director ancestor of man as we know him, it need not make any 

 difference to us. For the question whether there may have been 

 men who, in a purely physical sense, were the direct progenitors of 



