This idea of these great fathers of the Eastern Church took even stronger hold on the great father of the Western Church. For St. Augustine, so fettered usually by the letter of the sacred text, broke from his own famous doctrine as to the acceptance of Scripture and spurned the generally received belief of a creative process like that by which a toymaker brings into existence a box of playthings. In his great treatise on Genesis he says: "To suppose that God formed man from the dust with bodily hands is very childish.... God neither formed man with bodily hands nor did he breathe upon him with throat and lips." St. Augustine then suggests the adoption of the old emanation or evolution theory, shows that "certain very small animals may not have been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later from putrefying matter," argues that, even if this be so, God is still their creator, dwells upon such a potential creation as involved in the actual creation, and speaks of animals "whose numbers the after-time unfolded." In his great treatise on the Trinity--the work to which he devoted the best thirty years of his life--we find the full growth of this opinion. He develops at length the view that in the creation of living beings there was something like a growth--that God is the ultimate author, but works through secondary causes; and finally argues that certain substances are endowed by God with the power of producing certain classes of plants and animals.(19) (19) For the Chaldean view of creation, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 14,15, and 64-86; also Lukas, as above; also Sayce, Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, pp. 371 and elsewhere; as to the fall of man, Tower of Babel, sacredness of the number seven, etc., see also Delitzsch, appendix to the German translation of Smith, pp. 305 et seq.; as to the almost exact adoption of the Chaldean legends into the Hebrew sacred account, see all these, as also Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, Giessen, 1883, early chapters; also article Babylonia in the Encyclopedia Britannica; as to similar approval of creation by the Creator in both accounts, see George Smith, p. 73; as to the migration of the Babylonian legends to the Hebrews, see Schrader, Whitehouse's translation, pp. 44,45; as to the Chaldaean belief ina solid firmament, while Schrader in 1883 thought it not proved, Jensen in 1890 has found it clearly expresses--see his Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp.9 et seq., also pp. 304-306, and elsewhere. Dr. Lukas in 1893 also fully accepts this view of a Chaldean record of a "firmament"--see Kosmologie, pp. 43, etc.; see also Maspero and Sayce, the Dawn of Civilization, and for crude early ideas of evolution in Egypt, see ibid., pp. 156 et seq.