glittering with golden wings; and Eros again, in union with
Chaos, produced the brood of the human race." Here the formative
process is a birth, not a creation; it is evolution pure and simple.
"According to the ancient view," says Professor Lewis, "the present
world was a growth; it was born, it came from something antecedent,
not merely as a cause but as its seed, embryo or principium.
Plato's world was a 'zoon,' a living thing, a natural production."

Furthermore, to the ancient writers of the Bible the idea of origin
by birth from some antecedent form--and this is the essential idea
of evolution--was perfectly natural. They speak of the "generations
of the heavens and the earth" as of the "generations" of the
patriarchs. The first book of the Bible is still called Genesis, the
book of births. The writer of the ninetieth Psalm says, "Before the
mountains were born, or ever thou hadst brought to birth the earth
and the world." And what satisfactory meaning can you give to the
words, "Let the earth bring forth," and "the earth brought forth,"
in immediate proximity to the words, "and God made," unless while
the ultimate source was God's creative power, the immediate process
of formation was one of evolution.

The Bible is big and broad enough to include both ideas, the human
mind is prone to overestimate the one or the other. Traces, at
least, of a similar mode of thought persisted by the Greek Fathers
of the Church, and disappeared, if ever, with the predominance of
Latin theology. To the oriental the idea of evolution is natural.
The earth is to him no inert, resistant clod; she brings forth of
herself.

But our ancestors lived on a barren soil beneath a forbidding sky.
They were frozen in winter and parched in summer. Nature was to them
no kind foster-mother, but a cruel stepmother, training them by
stern discipline to battle with her and the world. They peopled the
earth with gnomes and cobolds and giants, and their nymphs were the
Valkyre. Their God was Thor, of the thunderbolt and hammer, and who
yet lived in continual dread of the hostile powers of Nature. A
Norse prophet or prophetess standing beside Elijah at Horeb would
have bowed down before the earthquake or the fire; the oriental
waited for the "still small voice." And we are heirs to a Latin
theology grafted on to the Thor-worship of our pagan ancestors. The
idea of a Nature producing beneficently and kindly at the word of a
loving God is foreign to a