“Oh! you indorse the development theory—do you?” said George. “I should hardly have expected that of you.”
“I do not think it has anything to do with what I said; no one disputes that this horse comes of many generations of horses. The development theory, if I understand aright, concerns itself with how his first ancestor in his own kind came to be a horse.”
“And about that there can be no doubt in the mind of any one who believes in the Bible!” said George.
“God makes beautiful horses,” returned Andrew; “whether He takes the one way or the other to make them, I am sure He takes the right way.”
“You imply it is of little consequence what you believe about it.”
“If I had to make them it would be of consequence. But what I think of consequence to us is—that He makes them, not out of nothing, but out of Himself. Why should my poor notion of God's how be of importance, so long as, when I see a horse like yours, Mr. Crawford, I say, God be praised? It is of eternal importance to love the animal, and see in him the beauty of the Lord; it is of none to fancy I know which way God took to make him. Not having in me the power or the stuff to make a horse, I can not know how God made the horse; I can know him to be beautiful.”
“But,” said George, “the first horse was a very common-looking domestic animal, which they kept to eat—nothing like this one.”
“Then you think God made the first horse, and after that the horses made themselves,” said Andrew.
Alexa laughed; George said nothing; Andrew went on.
“But,” he said, “if we have come up from the lower animals, through a million of kinds, perhaps—against which theory I have nothing to urge—then I am more than prepared to believe that the man who does not do the part of a man will have to go down again, through all the stages of his being, to a position beyond the lowest forms of the powers he has misused, and there begin to rise once more, haunted perhaps with dim hints of the world of humanity left so far above him.”