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view, I must give my own experience. I read Mr. Darwin s book with much 
pleasure. I felt the weight of his arguments, and it never occurred to me that 
there was anything unchristian about it ; but afterwards there arose a ghost, 
and hearing of it, I took a candle, and it seemed to me the ghost was made of 
nothing. I could not find out that the first account of creation and the sub- 
sequent revelations tell anything as to the way in which God created different 
beings. The second account gives a specific and detailed history, as fax at least 
as man is concerned. It is unnecessary for us to extend Darwin’s hypothesis 
to man ; and we may accept some of Mr. Manners’s remarks, and suppose 
that God acted in a different way in bringing man into the world. But sup- 
pose, with our inexorable logic, we were to consider man’s body to have been 
produced in a similar way, we should find no difficulty in this respect with the 
first account of creation. With the second account, we have merely to con- 
sider that God, in revealing past history, adopted that poetic and figurative 
style which he always did adopt in revealing future history, and that the 
analogue of the second chapter of Genesis is not the book of Chronicles or 
the Acts of the Apostles, but rather the book of Daniel and the Apocalypse. 
Allow me to finish my remarks with a parable. I took a little child, who 
had been bred up in a city among houses, for a walk into the country ; and 
there stood before us a majestic oak. The child said to me, “ Who made 
that tree ? ” I said, “ God made the tree ; ” and in order to give the child, 
as I thought, some information as to natural objects, and also to raise his 
ideas of the wisdom and power of God, I explained how that tree was once a 
little acorn planted in the ground ; that it shot forth and developed leaves 
and stalks ; and the stalks rose higher and higher, sending out stems and 
branches, and in this way the whole tree was developed. . During all this 
process, the materials for building the tree were brought to it ; the water m 
the earth dissolved salts and brought them to the roots of the tree, and so 
they were sucked up ; and the winds brought carbonic acid and water, and 
thus the tree grew. But the child turned away and said, “ Oh ! I thought 
God had built up the whole tree at once ; and you say it is being gradually 
developed, and made out of some other things. I do not think much of God 
now . 
Mr. Reddie. — I think the child was so far right. The tree it saw was not 
created ; it grew. 
Dr. Gladstone.— Well, the child got accustomed to the thought, that it 
might believe in the development of a tree from the seed without being 
atheistic ; and then, in another walk, I showed the child that the acorn 
planted was really the fruit of another tree, that had grown from another 
acorn, and so on ; and then the child, instead of having (as I thought it 
would) a higher appreciation of the wisdom of God, thought that I had fur- 
ther reduced the idea of God, because this acorn was made from another tree. 
But gradually it became accustomed to the idea of generation, and that that 
was not atheistic ; and then, in another walk, I began to explain that as 
this tree grew from an acorn, and the acorn came from another oak, and tree 
preceded tree, the trees were not always exactly alike, but that there were 
