The housewife puts up canned fruit with the utmost
confidence because she believes in this great Law of Biogenesis. It is
because we all believe in it that we use antiseptics and fumigators and
fly screens.
III
But what are the lessons to be learned from this great fact, and what
bearing has this fact on the old Bible doctrine of a literal Creation?
Life comes now only from preexisting life. But at some time there was no
life on the globe. It does not take any great exercise of "philosophic
faith," as Huxley suggested, "to look beyond the abyss of geologically
recorded time" and recognize that at this beginning of things there must
have taken place a most wonderful event, essentially and radically
different from anything now going on, namely, the beginning of organic
life. But would not this be a real Creation in the old-fashioned sense
of this term? We cannot avoid this conclusion; nor is there anything in
either science or philosophy to indicate that this creation of the
living from the not-living was confined to _one mere speck_ of
protoplasm. It is absolutely certain that it required a real Creation to
produce life from the not-living at all; and it is just as reasonable
that this exercise of creative power may have taken place _in all parts
of the earth at the same general time_, as the Bible teaches.
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