Note 53 — Chapter V · IRRECONCILABLE DIFFICULTIES CONNECTED WITH EVOLUTION

Dr. Gore, Bishop of Worcester, now of Birmingham, who is an adherent of Evolution, speaks mysteriously of a “fall from without.”53 As the question is of enormous importance to the truth of Christianity, I propose to examine Dr. Gore’s thesis at some length. He grants that the idea of special creation is inconceivable, and that our race has an animal ancestry, and then gives us the following description of primeval man, which (shades of our forefathers!) he assures us is according to the Bible and the enlightened ideas of early Christianity: “Man began at the bottom, immature, in the fullest sense of immaturity, totally undeveloped, but with a capacity for development.” A correspondent of Dr. Gore’s, anxious possibly to be let down gently in the matter of his ancestor, suggested “immature, but not deformed.” This Dr. Gore accepted as a good phrase. Most of us would think that when our ancestor was at the stage, say, of the ape-like man he would be deformed according to existing notions of the human form divine, while, if only at the protoplasm stage, the question of form would hardly matter.