Furthermore, to the ancient writers of the Bible the idea of origin by birth from some antecedent form—­and this is the essential idea of evolution—­was perfectly natural.  They speak of the “generations of the heavens and the earth” as of the “generations” of the patriarchs.  The first book of the Bible is still called Genesis, the book of births.  The writer of the ninetieth Psalm says, “Before the mountains were born, or ever thou hadst brought to birth the earth and the world.”  And what satisfactory meaning can you give to the words, “Let the earth bring forth,” and “the earth brought forth,” in immediate proximity to the words, “and God made,” unless while the ultimate source was God’s creative power, the immediate process of formation was one of evolution.

The Bible is big and broad enough to include both ideas, the human mind is prone to overestimate the one or the other.  Traces, at least, of a similar mode of thought persisted by the Greek Fathers of the Church, and disappeared, if ever, with the predominance of Latin theology.  To the oriental the idea of evolution is natural.  The earth is to him no inert, resistant clod; she brings forth of herself.

But our ancestors lived on a barren soil beneath a forbidding sky.  They were frozen in winter and parched in summer.  Nature was to them no kind foster-mother, but a cruel stepmother, training them by stern discipline to battle with her and the world.  They peopled the earth with gnomes and cobolds and giants, and their nymphs were the Valkyre.  Their God was Thor, of the thunderbolt and hammer, and who yet lived in continual dread of the hostile powers of Nature.  A Norse prophet or prophetess standing beside Elijah at Horeb would have bowed down before the earthquake or the fire; the oriental waited for the “still small voice.”  And we are heirs to a Latin theology grafted on to the Thor-worship of our pagan ancestors.  The idea of a Nature producing beneficently and kindly at the word of a loving God is foreign to all our inherited modes of thought.  And our views of the heart of Nature are about as correct as those of our ancestors were of God.  A little more of oriental tendencies of thought would harm neither our theology nor our life.

What, then, is the biblical idea of Nature?  God speaks to the earth, in the first chapter of Genesis, and the earth responds by “giving birth” to mountains and living beings.  It is evidently no mere lifeless, inert clod, but pulsating with life and responsive to the divine commands.  While yet a chaos it had been brooded over by the Divine Spirit.  It is like the great “wheels within wheels,” with rings full of eyes round about, which Ezekiel saw in his vision by the river Chebar.  “When the living creatures went, the wheels went by them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.  Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted