Note 50 — Chapter V · IRRECONCILABLE DIFFICULTIES CONNECTED WITH EVOLUTION

The gravity of the situation and the divergence of the new from the old teaching are summed up by the Church Times in the following pertinent remarks:—“It is impossible for Christians to affect nonchalance as to the result of the controversy between anthropologists like Lubbock, Lyell, Huxley, Haeckel, and Fiske, who assert the human race to have continuously (with whatever relapses) progressed out of brutish and squalid barbarism, and those who, like the late Duke of Argyll, Lang, Tylor, Hartmann,50 Renouf, and most missionaries, maintain that savagery is a declension from higher things, and that ‘man’s natural state is civilisation’—not, of course, the civilisation of Paris and London, of trousers and half-penny papers, nor yet Rousseau’s anarchic golden age, but creation in God’s image after His likeness. It is said that we need believe no more about our first parents than that they were innocent—i.e., had not yet made trial of good and evil; that the ‘former Adam,’ even after he had ceased to be a pithecoid hanging by his tail from boughs, and long after his mollusc51 stage of existence, was still as primus homo, a demi-witted creature, burrowing in holes, gnawing roots, grunting, grimacing, snarling, shuddering; not even a noble savage, but bestial and grovelling. As moral consciousness slowly woke in him, he misused his powers; but such a ‘fall’ was really an advance. Such is the latest version of Paradise lost—of that great disinheritance, that moral and spiritual catastrophe, which, St. Paul avers, was the entrance of death into the world by one man, and which, he seems to say, dragged down the lower creation when the son of God, ‘paragon of animals, noble in reason, infinite in faculty,’ fell in Eden. We do not urge that the two teachings cannot be reconciled; but it is clear that the immense difficulty is not to be dismissed by saying that the Bible is a mosaic, not Mosaic, or that it does not profess to instruct us in anthropology.”52