● ● ●  Mother and me, inviting, almost demanding, our criticisms and suggestions.”⁴⁴ And here at last we draw near to the real history of Mrs. Patterson in this period of her life. For if one thing is sure, it is this: the outward circumstances of her life, trivial and harassing as they might be at times, faded into insignificance beside the tremendous questions she was confronting, hour after hour and day after day, alone in her room. There, with what she later described as “fierce heart-beats,” she explored the vast new universe that was opening up to her gaze.⁴⁵

The manuscript on which she was probably working at that time was composed of rough notes for the first volume of a projected work of enormous scope, to be called “The Bible in its Spiritual Meaning.” Volume One was entitled “Genesis."⁴⁶

The science and theology of the midcentury had locked horns over the question of genesis, of beginnings. Darwin’s Origin of Species had, on the one hand, roused fundamentalist religion to furious defense of a literal interpretation of the two creation accounts in Genesis and had, on the other hand, inspired liberal religion to apply evolutionary analysis to the Bible.

In the famous Essays and Reviews, published in England in 1860, Benjamin Jowett and other prominent churchmen had reflected the new Darwinian pattern of thought in their treatment of religion as evolving from primitive origins to a purer monotheism and thence to the Christianity of the New Testament, and the book had roused a hurricane of controversy.

The sciences, too, were concerned with genesis in more respects than the origin of species. Darwin himself had drawn heavily on the extraordinary discoveries of Agassiz in embryology, discoveries illustrating that metamorphosis of the individual before birth which pointed  ● ● ●