It corresponds with the beautiful Greek
myth of Prometheus, who is fabled to have made a human image from
the dust of the ground, and then, by fire stolen from heaven, to
have animated it with a living soul. So man, as to his body, is
made of earthly clay; but the Promethean spark that forms his soul
is the fresh breath of God. There is no objection to the real
ground and essence of this theory, only to its form and
accompaniments. It is purely anthropomorphitic; it conceives God
as working, after the manner of a man, intermittently,
arbitrarily. It insulates the origination of souls from the fixed
course of nature, severs it from all connection with that common
process of organic life which weaves its inscrutable web through
the universe, that system of laws which expresses the unchanging
will of God, and which constitutes the order by whose solemn logic
alone He acts. The objection to this view is, in a word, that it
limits the creative action of God to human souls. We suppose that
He creates our bodies as well; that He is the immediate Author of
all life in the same sense in which He is the immediate Author of
our souls. The opponents of the creation theory, who strenuously
fought it in the seventeenth century, were accustomed to urge
against it the fanciful objection that "it puts God to an invenust

2 Augustine, De Anima et ejus Origine, lib. iv.

employment scarce consistent with his verecundious holiness; for,
if it be true, whenever the lascivious consent to uncleanness and
are pleased to join in unlawful mixture, God is forced to stand a
spectator of their vile impurities, stooping from his throne to
attend their bestial practices, and raining down showers of souls
to animate the emissions of their concupiscence"3

A fourth reply to the inquiry before us is furnished in
Tertullian's famous doctrine of Traduction, the essential import
of which is that all human souls have been transmitted, or brought
over, from the soul of Adam. This is the theological theory: for
it arose from an exigency in the dogmatic system generally held by
the patristic Church. The universal depravity of human nature, the
inherited corruption of the whole race, was a fundamental point of
belief. But how reconcile this proposition with the conception,
entertained by many, that each new born soul is a fresh creation
from the "substance," "spirit," or "breath" of God? Augustine
writes to Jerome, asking him to solve this question.4 Ter