ies were formed and fixed once for all and long ago.

What is the theological import of such a statement when it is regarded
as essential to belief in God? Simply that God's activity, with respect
to the formation of living creatures, ceased at some point in past time.

"God rested" is made the touchstone of orthodoxy. And when, under the
pressure of the evidences, we found ourselves obliged to acknowledge and
assert the present and persistent power of God, in the maintenance and
in the continued formation of "types," what happened was the abolition
of a time-limit. We were forced only to a bolder claim, to a theistic
language less halting, more consistent, more thorough in its own line,
as well as better qualified to assimilate and modify such schemes as
Von Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious--a philosophy, by the way,
quite intolerant of a merely mechanical evolution. (See Von Hartmann's
"Wahrheit und Irrthum in Darwinismus". Berlin, 1875.)

Here was not the retrenchment of an extravagant assertion, but the
expansion of one which was faltering and inadequate. The traditional
statement did not need paring down so as to pass the meshes of a new and
exacting criticism. It was itself a net meant to surround and enclose
experience; and we must increase its size and close its mesh to hold
newly disclosed facts of life. The world, which had seemed a fixed
picture or model, gained first perspective and then solidity and
movement. We had a glimpse of organic HISTORY; and Christian thought
became more living and more assured as it met the larger view of life.

However unsatisfactory the new attitude might be to our critics, to
Christians the reform was positive. What was discarded was a limitation,
a negation. The movement was essentially conservative, even actually
reconstructive. For the language disused was a language inconsistent
with the definitions of orthodoxy; it set bounds to the infinite, and by
implication withdrew from the creative rule all such processes as could
be brought within the descriptions of research. It ascribed fixity and
finality to that "creature" in which an apostle taught us to recognise
the birth-struggles of an unexhausted progress. It tended to banish
mystery from the world we see, and to confine it to a remote first age.

In the reformed, the restored, language of religion, Creation became
again not a link in a rational series to complete a circle of the
sciences, but the mysterious and