the Church, emphasized
the distinction between animals which spring from carrion and those
which are created from earth and water; the former he holds to have been
created "potentially" the latter "actually."

In the century following, this idea was taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas
and virtually received from him its final form. In the Summa, which
remains the greatest work of medieval thought, he accepts the idea that
certain animals spring from the decaying bodies of plants and animals,
and declares that they are produced by the creative word of God either
actually or virtually. He develops this view by saying, "Nothing was
made by God, after the six days of creation, absolutely new, but it was
in some sense included in the work of the six days"; and that "even
new species, if any appear, have existed before in certain native
properties, just as animals are produced from putrefaction."

The distinction thus developed between creation "causally" or
"potentially," and "materially" or "formally," was made much of by
commentators afterward. Cornelius a Lapide spread it by saying that
certain animals were created not "absolutely," but only "derivatively,"
and this thought was still further developed three centuries later by
Augustinus Eugubinus, who tells us that, after the first creative energy
had called forth land and water, light was made by the Almighty, the
instrument of all future creation, and that the light called everything
into existence.

All this "science falsely so called," so sedulously developed by the
master minds of the Church, and yet so futile that we might almost
suppose that the great apostle, in a glow of prophetic vision, had
foreseen it in his famous condemnation, seems at this distance very
harmless indeed; yet, to many guardians of the "sacred deposit of
doctrine" in the Church, even so slight a departure from the main
current of thought seemed dangerous. It appeared to them like pressing
the doctrine of secondary causes to a perilous extent; and about the
beginning of the seventeenth century we have the eminent Spanish Jesuit
and theologian Suarez denouncing it, and declaring St. Augustine a
heretic for his share in it.

But there was little danger to the older idea just then; the main
theological tendency was so strong that the world kept on as of old.
Biblical theology continued to spin its own webs out of its own bowels,
and all the lesser theological flies continued to be entangled in them