quoting from these or Hesiod concerning the origin of things, says:
"Chaos was and Night, and Erebus black, and wide Tartarus. No earth,
nor air nor sky was yet; when, in the vast bosom of Erebus (or
chaotic darkness) winged Night brought forth first of all the egg,
from which in after revolving periods sprang Eros (Love) the much
desired, glittering with golden wings; and Eros again, in union with
Chaos, produced the brood of the human race." Here the formative
process is a birth, not a creation; it is evolution pure and simple.
"According to the ancient view," says Professor Lewis, "the present
world was a growth; it was born, it came from something antecedent,
not merely as a cause but as its seed, embryo or principium.
Plato's world was a 'zoon,' a living thing, a natural production."

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