into
consideration once more, although from another side, some objects which we
have discussed in treating of the relation of the Darwinian ideas to
theism, on account of the specific part which theism has in Christianity.
This is especially the case with those Christian facts which belong to the
first article of the Apostolic Creed, and immediately also with the
doctrine of the creation of the world. {291}

At first sight it seems that the evolution theory and Christianity are in
no other place more sharply opposed to each other than in that of the
history of creation. Darwinism claims for its theory immense periods of
time; and geology seems to furnish them according to its demand. The Holy
Scripture, on the other hand, teaches a creation of the world in six days.

With the attempt to find the right way to end this conflict, we enter upon
that part of the border-land between theology and natural science, which,
among all others, is most contested, and which has offered to the most
luxuriant fancy the widest field of action and the one most profitably
taken advantage of.

We confess at the outset that we sympathize with those who try to keep the
peculiar realms of religion and natural science apart in such a way that a
collision between the two is impossible. We quietly leave the investigation
of the temporal succession in creation--especially the investigation of all
that belongs in the finite causal connection of natural processes--to
natural science; we also do not look to the source of our Christian
religion, to the Holy Scripture, for a scientific manual, least of all for
the communication of a knowledge of nature, supernaturally manifested and
claiming divine authority, the acquisition of which is especially the task
of scientific labor. But we bestow just as decidedly upon religion the
specific task of showing man the way to communion with God, especially the
way of salvation; a task in which it can as little permit itself to be
hindered by natural science, as the latter in the pursuit of its peculiar
tasks can allow an objection from any source. On the side of religion, the
bond of unity which brings {292} into harmony the two activities of the
human mind--the religious and the investigating--in the realm of nature,
and, in general, in the whole realm of exact science, consists in the fact
that in all which exact science offers to religion as the result of its
investigation, the latter perceives and shows the