Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/221

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DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH.
209

even children. It is made from attush, the same material as was formerly used altogether for their clothing. One in my possession is eight feet long. The bark has been roughly hackled, and in the center of the strap is braided into four strands, the outer ones three quarters of an inch wide, being about twice the width of the inner ones. Just at the middle for five inches these are caught together by a cross-weaving of blue and white cotton yarn, in a regular lozenge pattern; this is the part which is placed over the forehead when carrying a load. About seven and a half inches from this, toward each end, the four strands are brought together into a round, double strand, by a seizing which crosses itself regularly. This seizing extends for nearly four inches, and then the braiding is continued in a single flat plait for about eighteen inches, when it runs out into frayed ends. In using, the bundle is slung upon the back, the broad part of the tara being brought over the forehead, so that, while the back bears the weight, the forehead keeps the bundle in place.

DARWINISM AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH.

II.

UP to the point at which we have arrived, a churchman, in accepting Darwinisn, finds no real difficulty. It neither gives nor suggests an alternative for God's primary creation of the world. And though in the "origin of species" it does not offer an alternative for "special creation," a Christian is only called upon to abandon a theory recently admitted into theology for one which is not only soluble in the Christian view of creation, but on grounds both scientific and theological is more in keeping with what we know of God in his present working. Those who have followed the argument of a previous paper will admit Prof. Huxley's statement, that, so far as the "origin of species" is concerned—

Evolution does not even come into contact with theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine. That with which it does collide, and with which it is absolutely inconsistent, is the conception of creation which theological [Quaere scientific?] speculators have based upon the history narrated in the opening of the book of Genesis.

We are prepared even to go further, and to say not only that theism does not lose, but that it actually gains by the exchange. If Darwinism has destroyed the "dogma of special creation," it has destroyed a "dogma" which was a scientific, or rather unscientific, theory, and from which Christianity, like science, should be glad to shake itself free.