He says: "I confess I am ignorant why mice and frogs were created, or flies and worms....

All creatures are either useful, hurtful, or superfluous to us....

As for the hurtful creatures, we are either punished, or disciplined, or terrified by them, so that we may not cherish and love this life." As to the "superfluous animals," he says, "Although they are not necessary for our service, yet the whole design of the universe is thereby completed and finished." Luther, who followed St.Augustine in so many other matters, declined to follow him fully in this.

To him a fly was not merely superfluous, it was noxious--sent by the devil to vex him when reading.
Another subject which gave rise to much searching of Scripture and long trains of theological reasoning was the difference between the creation of man and that of other living beings.
Great stress was laid by theologians, from St.Basil and St.Augustine to St.Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet, and from Luther to Wesley, on the radical distinction indicated in Genesis, God having created man "in his own image." What this statement meant was seen in the light of the later biblical statement that "Adam begat Seth in his own likeness, after his image." In view of this and of well-known texts incorporated from older creation legends into the Hebrew sacred books it came to be widely held that, while man was directly moulded and fashioned separately by the Creator's hand, the animals generally were evoked in numbers from the earth and sea by the Creator's voice.
A question now arose naturally as to the DISTINCTIONS OF SPECIES among animals.

The vast majority of theologians agreed in representing all animals as created "in the beginning," and named by Adam, preserved in the ark, and continued ever afterward under exactly the same species.
This belief ripened into a dogma.