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