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to give them a bad character without facts to justify him in doing so. He has, 
however, done this, I am sure unintentionally, in his paper, in using the classifi- 
cation which he adopted in dealing with his subject ; for he has called one theory 
a religious theory, and by doing so he has implied that the other theories are 
irreligious. (No, no.) Well, I think you will allow me to say that I do 
understand that it does imply that ; and that is the accusation which I have 
to bring against him. I have been curious to know what is the reason of the 
objection on religious grounds to the Darwinian theory. I am not going to 
speak now of the polygenous theory, or to defend it from the charge to which 
I think it lies open, of being irreligious ; but I am anxious to know what are 
the Scriptural grounds of objection to the Darwinian theory. The Bible 
declares that God created man. It tells us what sort of a being he was when 
he was created ; but it does not tell us how or by what process he was 
created. I have looked carefully into all the passages in which the Hebrew 
word for create ’ occurs, and I do not find that any one of them indicates any 
particular theory of creation. The word “ created ” is never used in the Old 
Testament except in reference to the works of God ; but it may indicate either 
the calling of things out of nothing, or the bringing together of various 
parts, and putting them in a form in which they were not known before. 
In several cases it distinctly refers to ordinary generation. It never im- 
plies that all that was created or made by God was not called out of some- 
thing that existed before. If we turn to the New Testament, we find that the 
equivalent Greek word has in only two instances been applied to the works of 
man. It is applied expressly to that which God makes ; so that, in the New 
Testament, as in the Old, there is no theory of creation laid down. I do not 
say we ought to accept the Darwinian theory ; but we have no other which 
gives us a possible solution as to how God made all those creatures He has 
placed in the world, and I do not see how it opposes any statement of Scripture. 
I think we ought to remove this impression, and consider the question upon 
its own merits. I am aware that Darwin himself not only never applies his 
theory to the creation of man, but that there are various expressions in his 
book which seem to indicate, by the idea of natural selection, the action of 
some kind of power independent of God. We are not, however, to suppose 
that some persons may not take this natural selection as in subordination to 
the will of God ; and it seems to me, that, if we were to come to the 
conclusion that God created great whales by natural selection, we should be as 
much in accordance with Scripture as if we supposed that He created them by 
some other process. We know the argument of Paley, that if a person going 
along the ground strikes his foot against a watch, and takes it up and looks at 
the various contrivances, and sees how it is made, he must come to the conclu- 
sion that it was the work of some intelligent being. But supposing, in 
continuing his walk across the common, he came upon a chronometer and a 
clock, he would arrive at the same conclusion as before ; but most likely he 
would think that different minds had been employed to create the different 
pieces of mechanism. But if it were revealed to him by some messenger 
from heaven or otherwise, that the clock was produced from the chronometer, 
