It is true, all these expressions about religion are very general; but since in his works we do not find any utterance contrary to them and hostile to religion, we have a right to rank the celebrated originator of the whole agitation among those naturalists who are conscious of the limits of the realms of the natural and the religious, and are convinced of the possibility of a harmony between the two. For his casual utterances against a "creation" of single species always combine with the word creation the idea of that direct creation out of nothing, without intervening agencies, which is entirely correct for the idea of the first, origin of the universe, but which for the origin of the single formations within the universe is neither asked for by the religious view of the world, nor established by the Holy {219} Scriptures, nor by a cautiously reasoning theology, although it very often controls the conceptions of naturalists as well as of theologians. Now, while Darwin rejects the idea of a sudden appearance of a new species out of nothing--or, as he once expressed himself in his "Origin of Species," the idea "that at innumerable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues,"--and he is no doubt right in rejecting it,--still at the same time he does not deny the dependence of the successive origin of a new species on a divine author. But in calling that process creation and this one not, he gives the appearance of an opposition to the religious idea of creation--an appearance of which the greater part of the guilt is borne by those theologians who define the idea of the creation, even of a single form, in a manner which is only proper for the idea of the first origin of the universe.