They would have found it almost impossible to
believe in a process of creation so utterly unlike all their own
experience. And it would have been quite useless to them besides, since
their science was not in such a condition as to enable them to
coordinate this doctrine with any other. As science it would have been
dead; and as spiritual truth it would have been a hindrance.
But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to communicate, and we can read
them still.
He had to teach that the world as we see it, and all therein contained,
was created out of nothing; and that the spiritual, and not the
material, was the source of all existence. He had to teach that the
creation was not merely orderly, but progressive; going from the
formless to the formed; from the orderless to the ordered; from the
inanimate to the animate; from the plant to the animal; from the lower
animal to the higher; from the beast to the man; ending with the rest of
the Sabbath, the type of the highest, the spiritual, life. Nothing,
certainly, could more exactly match the doctrine of Evolution than
this. It is, in fact, the same thing said from a different point of
view. All this is done by casting the account into the form of a week of
work with the Sabbath at the end.
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