concilable, but necessary to one another. His development,
scientific, intellectual and moral, was itself of high significance; and
its record is of unique value to our own generation, so near the age of
that doubt and yet so far from it; certainly still much in need of
the caution and courage by which past endurance prepares men for
new emergencies. We have little enough reason to be sure that in the
discussions awaiting us we shall do as well as our predecessors in
theirs. Remembering their endurance of mental pain, their ardour
in mental labour, the heroic temper and the high sincerity of
controversialists on either side, we may well speak of our fathers in
such words of modesty and self-judgment as Drayton used when he sang the
victors of Agincourt. The progress of biblical study, in the departments
of Introduction and Exegesis, resulting in the recovery of a point
of view anciently tolerated if not prevalent, has altered some of the
conditions of that discussion. In the years near 1858, the witness of
Scripture was adduced both by Christian advocates and their critics as
if unmistakeably irreconcilable with Evolution.

Huxley ("Science and Christian Tradition". London, 1904.) 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 seventeenth
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