Nobody was ever humiliated by the seventh verse of the second chapter of Genesis, which says, “God formed man of the dust of the ground.” But when Darwin wrote,[106] “There can ... hardly be a doubt that man is an offshoot from the Old World simian stems; and that, under a genealogical point of view, he must be classed with the catarrhine division,”--when Darwin wrote that the offense was general. Why? Certainly a catarrhine ape is higher in the scale of being than is the dust of the ground. But the Bible account had added, “And [God] breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Darwin left out any saving addition. So those who say today, “We came from the monkey,” invariably mean that we were contained in the monkey even as an oak is contained in an acorn. As a matter of fact, the oak is not contained in the acorn. An acorn is merely the means through which an oak may eventually become manifest. It is an instrument which enables an oak to become. The substance of the oak is still widely scattered when the acorn which is to be its parent falls from the tree. Some of it is in the soil; some of it is in the air; some of it is far off in the sun. The acorn is like a lens through which light bends to a focus. It is something which brings together parts of the earth, the air and the sun and welds them into the body of a tree. That something which we call life uses the acorn as a business man uses a little shop, a going concern which he buys as the foundation of a great department-store. But the shop could never become the store did the business man add nothing to it. The question therefore is, was the catarrhine ape the lens through which the elements of man were brought together? And what, if anything, was added which were not added in the case of the ape itself? So stated, Darwin’s theory loses most of its religious and therefore its popular significance. For the public in general is not interested in biology, it is interested only in God and in man’s relation to God. Even atheists are interested chiefly in God, or they would speak of other matters and spend less time in denying Him. Even biologists and psychologists are interested chiefly in God, not in their own subjects. Otherwise they would not be forever straining to make a theology, though but a negative or devil’s theology, out of what pretends to be science. Whether it is orthodox to believe that we number monkeys among our ancestors, theologians must decide. Certainly the Church would not have to alter a single one of its major tenets nor a line of its ritual in order to include Darwinism among the articles of faith. Whether the dust of the ground evolved into ape before it evolved into man during those long periods which the laconic poetry of Genesis allows to slip by between the lines, or whether the change from dust to man was immediate, is immaterial to the doctrine of the Fall of Man, which concerns man’s subsequent history alone.