e change in Biblical
interpretation is due to natural science, and how far to the vital
movements of theological study which have been quite independent of
the controversy about species. It belongs to a general renewal of
Christian movement, the recovery of a heritage. "Special
Creation"--really a biological rather than a theological
conception,--seems in its rigid form to have been a recent element
even in English biblical orthodoxy.

The Middle Ages had no suspicion that religious faith forbad inquiry
into the natural origination of the different forms of life.
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth
century, was a mutationist in his way, as Aristotle, "the Philosopher"
of the Christian Schoolmen, had been in his. So late as the
seventeenth century, as we learn not only from early proceedings of
the Royal Society, but from a writer so homely and so regularly pious
as Walton, the variation of species and "spontaneous" generations had
no theological bearing, except as instances of that various wonder of
the world which in devout minds is food for devotion.

It was in the eighteenth century that the harder statement took shape.
Something in the preciseness of that age, its exaltation of law, its
cold passion for a stable and measured universe, its cold denial, its
cold affirmation of the power of God, a God of ice, is the occasion of
that rigidity of religious thought about the living world which Darwin
by accident challenged, or rather by one of those movements of genius
which, Goethe[232] declares, are "elevated above all earthly control."

If religious thought in the eighteenth century was aimed at a fixed
and nearly finite world of spirit, it followed in all these respects
the secular and critical lead. "La philosophie reformatrice du
XVIII^{e} siecle[233] ramenait la nature et la societe a des
mecanismes que la pensee reflechie peut concevoir et recomposer." In
fact, religion in a mechanical age is condemned if it takes any but a
mechanical tone. Butler's thought was too moving, too vital, too
evolutionary, for the sceptics of his time. In a rationalist,
encyclopaedic period, religion also must give hard outline to its
facts, it must be able to display its secret to any sensible man in
the language used by all sensible men. Milton's prophetic genius
furnished the eighteenth century, out of the depth of the passionate
age before it, with the theological tone it was to need. In spite of
the