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When we reflect, therefore, on the fractional state of the annals which are handed down to us, and how little even these have as yet been studied, we may wonder that so many geologists should attribute every break in the series of strata and every gap in the past history of the organic world to catastrophes and convulsions of the earth's crust or to leaps made by the creational force from species to species, or from class to class.
A man may be a poet, aware of the highest truth of a thing, of that beauty which is the final cause of its existence; he may draw thence a notion of the creative loveliness that thought it out; he may be a man who would not tell a lie, or steal, or slander and yet he may not be a true man, inasmuch as the essentials of manhood are not his aim: having nowise come to the flower of his own being, nowise, in his higher degree, attained the truth of a thing namely, that for which he exists, the creational notion of him neither is he striving after the same.
Yet, if the pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient Hebrew writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and friends from whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter themselves against the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the two most important of all events, the origin of things and the palingenesis of terrestrial life, what historical credit dare any serious thinker attach to the narratives of the fabrication of Eve, of the Fall, of the commerce between the Bene Elohim and the daughters of men, which lie between the creational and the diluvial legends?
If we say man and woman differ in creational endowment, it is contrary to divine justice and intention. Both are human. If God has created one perfect and the other defective, He is unjust. But God is just; all are perfect in His intention and creative endowment. To assume imperfection in the creature is to presuppose imperfection in the almighty Creator.
And as the hypothesis of "specific centres," thus formulated, was heterodox from the theological point of view, and unintelligible under its scientific aspect, it may be passed over without further notice, as a phase of transition from the creational to the evolutional hypothesis.
Professor Owen says, that natural evolution, through secondary causes, "by means of slow physical and organic operations through long ages, is not the less clearly recognizable as the act of all adaptive mind, because we have abandoned the old error of supposing it to be the result of a primary, direct, and sudden act of creational construction." ... "The succession of species by continuously operating law, is not necessarily a 'blind operation. Such law, however discerned in the properties and successions of natural objects, intimates, nevertheless, a preconceived progress.
Inasmuch as in the creational world, which is phenomenal, difference of degree is an obstacle or hindrance to comprehension, how can the human being, which is a created exigency, comprehend the ancient divine Reality, which is essential? This is impossible because the reality of Divinity is sanctified beyond the comprehension of the created being, man.
Galsworthy is one of the best, if you except his concern for delicacy of style. Mrs. Ward has a very firm grasp of problems, but is not very creational. Caine's books are very edifying. I should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss Corelli, too, is very edifying. Glyn's novels addressed to the passions? and is in due form annihilated. Ward and Mr.
Their faith in the fullness of the annals leads them to regard all breaks in the series of organic existence, or in the sequence of the fossiliferous rocks, as proofs of original chasms and leaps in the course of nature signs of the intermittent action of the creational force, or of catastrophes which devastated the habitable surface.
That seemed to me to be no more than saying that species had succeeded one another, in the form of a vote-catching resolution, with "law" to please the man of science, and "creational" to draw the orthodox.
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