ent openness of mind to make possible a wider extension of
the knowledge which scholars have been accumulating. The only candid
thing to do is to class these Hebrew stories of the creation with the
myths which grew up in other parts of the world. All represent
attempts to picture a beginning of things as they are, by appeal to a
magnified and magical personal agency. Those early thinkers did the
best they could do with the ideas they had at hand. They were innocent
of our modern understanding of nature as a scene of impersonal, causal
processes. To try to find science in mythology is like looking upon
Dante's _Divine Comedy_ as a tale of real adventure.

It is interesting to study the speculations which Christian thinkers
have evolved upon the question of creation. Usually, the idea of a
creation of the physical world out of nothing by a fiat has been
favored. "I am the Lord, that maketh all things; that stretches forth
the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth." Such is the
natural goal of the idea of a creation. Yet a moment's reflection
makes us realize that the position is entirely deductive and without a
shred of evidence. To assign to a hypothetical agent called God powers
sufficient to produce what experience tells us exists explains nothing.
The primary assumption, of course, is that there must have been a
creation. But the conception of evolution has attacked that assumption
at its very foundation.

Of late, there have been attempted compromises with the idea of
evolution. May not God guide the course of natural change? But this
outlook meets with certain difficulties. In the first place, was the
physical {42} world created? If so, it must have been the best of all
possible physical worlds, or else God is either not omnipotent or not
omniscient or not ideally good. And when these questions are raised,
we pass immediately into a field of mere speculation. The centuries
have been witnesses of disputes between advocates of different dogmas.
At present, there seems to be a revival of interest in the idea of a
limited and youthful deity struggling against odds to make the world
livable. But God becomes a part of the universe in every sense, and so
we are led to the idea that the physical world was not created but is,
rather, co-existent with deity. Of course, there are many possible
variations on the theme, and human ingenuity will exhaust itself in
combining these possibilities in vario