In the Beginning: The Hebrew Story of the Creation in its Contemporary Setting
S.G.F. Brandon explains how, from the religious conceptions of the ancient Hebrew people, sprang the traditional idea of how mankind originated.
I
Michelangelo has adorned the walls of the Sistine Chapel with the most majestic presentation in linear art of the Hebrew story of the Creation; and his paintings manifest the mighty influence that this ancient legend had come to exercise on Christian thought. The continuance of that influence and its profundity were again singularly demonstrated, in the very different setting of Victorian England, some three centuries after the great Italian artist had finished his masterpiece.
The fierce and prolonged public controversy occasioned by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 was the natural, if unfortunate, reaction of Christian believers to the shock they received when the truth of the Biblical account of the Creation seemed to be impiously challenged by the new science.
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