We ask how the Nature created by a good God comes to be in this [depraved] condition? By which question we may mean either how she comes to be imperfect-- to leave 'room for improvement' as the schoolmasters say in their reports-- or else, how she becomes positively depraved. If we ask the question in the first sense, the Christian answer (I think) is that God, from the first, created her such as to reach her perfection by a process in time. He made an earth at first 'without form and void' and brought it by degrees to its perfection. In this, as elsewhere, we see the familiar pattern-- descent from God to the formless Earth and reascent from the formless to the finished. In that sense a certain degree of 'evolutionism' or 'developmentalism' is inherent in Christianity.
--from Miracles
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