The Story of Creation as Told By Theology and By Science Part 1

The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science.

by T. S. Ackland.

CHAPTER I.

THE CASE STATED.

The History of the Creation with which the Bible commences, is not a mere incidental appendage to G.o.d's Revelation, but const.i.tutes the foundation on which the whole of that Revelation is based.

Setting forth as it does the relation in which man stands to G.o.d as his Maker, and to the world which G.o.d formed for his abode, it forms a necessary introduction to all that G.o.d has seen fit to reveal to us with reference to His dispensations of Providence and of Grace.

It is, however, not uncommonly a.s.serted that this history cannot be reconciled with a vast number of facts which modern science has revealed to us, and with theories based on observed facts, and recommended by the unquestioned ability of the men by whom they have been brought forward. At first sight there does seem to be some ground for this a.s.sertion. Geology, for instance, makes us acquainted with strata of rock of various kinds, arranged in exact order, and of an aggregate thickness of many miles, which are filled with the remains of a wonderful series of plants and animals, these remains not being promiscuously collected, but arranged in an unvarying order. It seems impossible that all these plants and animals could have lived and died, and been imbedded in the rocks in this exact succession, in six of our ordinary days.

Astronomy directs our attention to changes now going on in the starry heavens which occupy ages in their development, and points to traces in the const.i.tution of our own world which seem to indicate that it was formed by a.n.a.logous means. Physiology reveals to us the fact that the different varieties of plants and animals now in existence are not separated from each other by well defined lines of demarcation, but shade into each other by almost imperceptible gradations; and geological researches show that while the existing species of animals are the representatives of those which lived and died at a period in which we can find no traces of man, they are not identical with them, but that either the old species must have died out, and been replaced by a fresh creation, or a considerable change must have taken place in the course of ages. These facts are held to be incompatible with the account of creation given by Moses, and hence it is inferred that a record, which appears to be so widely at variance with admitted facts, cannot be ent.i.tled to the authority which is claimed for it, as a fundamental portion of a Revelation made by the Creator Himself.

This difficulty is sometimes met by the a.s.sertion that the Bible was not given to us to teach us Science, but to convey to us certain information which was essential to our moral welfare, and which we could not obtain by any other means; that these discrepancies do not in any way interfere with that portion of those truths which is involved in the History of Creation, but that, however the narrative may be viewed as far as regards its details, the facts that G.o.d is the Creator of all things visible and invisible, that He is a Being of infinite Wisdom, Power, and Love, and that He has placed man in a peculiar relation to Himself, remain unaffected. On this ground it is often urged that we may pa.s.s over scientific inaccuracies as matters of no great importance.

Theologians are by no means agreed as to the nature and limits of that inspiration by which Holy Scripture was written. There are many who think that in matters purely incidental to its main object, and lying within the reach of human faculties, the sacred writers were left to the ordinary sources of information, and that many alleged difficulties may be removed by this view.

But whatever may be thought of the application of this hypothesis to some parts of the Bible, there are others to which it is plainly inapplicable, and of these the narrative of the Creation is evidently one. No theory of limited inspiration can be admitted to explain any supposed inaccuracies in that narrative. It cannot be liable to those imperfections which are inevitable when men have to obtain knowledge by the ordinary means, because there were no ordinary means by which such information could be obtained. The most carefully preserved records, the oldest traditions could not extend backwards beyond the moment when the first man awoke to conscious existence. For every thing beyond that point the only source of knowledge available was information derived from the Creator Himself. It may be that a revelation of this character was made to Adam in the days of his innocence, that it was carefully handed down to his descendants, and that Moses, under the divine direction, incorporated it into his history; or it may have been directly communicated to Moses by special inspiration--that matters not--but a divine revelation it must have been, or it is nothing; the dream of a poet, or the theory of a philosopher, if we can believe that such a philosopher existed at such a time. But if it be indeed a revelation from the Creator Himself, we cannot imagine that He could fall into any error, or sanction any misrepresentation with reference even to the smallest detail of His own work.

If then there are really any errors in this record--any a.s.sertions which the discoveries of science have proved to be untrue, we cannot account for them on any theory of limited inspiration. A single proved error would be fatal to the authority of the whole narrative. But, on the other hand, we are not justified in expecting such an account of the Creation as would commend itself to the scientific intellect of the present day. When we attempt to form a judgment upon it. We must look not only to its alleged author, but also to the purposes for which, the circ.u.mstances under which, and the persons to whom it was given. In these we may expect to meet with many limitations. It was not designed for the communication of scientific knowledge, it was necessarily conveyed in human language, and addressed to human intelligence, that language and that intelligence being, not as they are now, but as they were, taking the latest possible date that can be a.s.signed to it, considerably more than three thousand years ago.

This last consideration affects not only the record itself, but also our facilities for understanding and forming a judgment upon it. We have to contend with difficulties of interpretation arising from our inability fully to realize the circ.u.mstances under which it was given, and to place ourselves in the mental position of its original recipients. Owing to our want of this power it may well happen, that though we are in possession of vastly increased knowledge, we may be far more liable to fall into error in some directions, in the interpretation of it, than those to whom it was originally addressed.

An additional difficulty arises from the circ.u.mstance that our knowledge, wonderfully as it has been increased of late, is yet very far from complete, and is probably in many cases still mixed with error. Hence it may very well happen that where there is complete harmony between the history and the facts, we may suspect discord owing to our misunderstanding of the record, or our misconception of the facts. In order that the harmony may be recognized in its fulness, there must be a perfect understanding of the record, and a perfect knowledge of the facts. But from both of these we are probably at present very far removed.

If a person who was a thorough master of some science undertook to write a treatise for the purpose of teaching children the rudiments of that science, we should expect, and the more strongly if the author were a master of language as well as of science, that his work should contain indications of a master's hand. We should expect that while the book conveyed clearly and simply to the minds of those for whom it was written, the truths which it was intended to teach, it should also convey to the more educated reader some intimations of a deeper knowledge on the part of its author. The choice of a word, the turn of a phrase, the order in which facts were arranged, the occurrence here and there of a sentence which an ordinary reader would pa.s.s over as unimportant, would to such a person be indications of trains of thought far more profound than those which appeared on the surface. And this recognition would be proportional to two things--the amount of scientific knowledge possessed by the reader, and his mastery of the language in which the book was written.

Such, then, are the characteristics which we may expect to find in the Record of Creation, if it be indeed, as we believe, a revelation from G.o.d, made to men in a very low stage of intellectual development. In order that we may be able to form a satisfactory judgment of it, it will be well for us to consider a little in detail two cla.s.ses of difficulties. 1. Those which belong to the Revelation itself, arising from the limitations to which it was necessarily subject in its delivery. 2. Those which arise from our imperfect knowledge of the language in which it is written, and from our inability to place ourselves in the intellectual position of those to whom it was originally given.

1. When this record was committed to writing, language was in a very different condition from that in which it is now. We have an account of the first recorded exercise of the faculty of speech in Gen. ii. 19. Adam first used it to give names to all the living creatures as they pa.s.sed in review before him. In accordance with this statement it appears, from the researches of philologists, that language in its earliest state was entirely, or almost entirely limited to words denoting sensible objects and actions.

It seems probable that these names were derived from radicals expressing general ideas [Footnote: Max Muller's Lectures on the Science of Language, First Series Lect. viii. ix.]; but there is reason to doubt whether these radicals ever had a formal existence as words--they seem rather to have been the mental stock out of which words were produced. But the human mind had from the first powers for the exercise of which this limited vocabulary was insufficient. Even in the outer world there was much which was the object of reason and inference rather than of sense, while the whole world of consciousness was entirely unprovided with the means of expression. To meet this difficulty words, which originally denoted objects of sense, were used figuratively to express ideas which bore some resemblance or a.n.a.logy, real or fancied, to their original significance. As time pa.s.sed on this difficulty was gradually diminished: synonyms crept into all languages from various sources, and when once adopted, they were in many cases gradually differentiated, the various senses which the original word had borne were portioned off among them, and increased precision was thus obtained.

But in the infancy of mankind the figurative system was in full operation. Hence, all early doc.u.ments have a strong tinge of the poetic element. Poetry, strictly so called, probably had not as yet a separate existence; but the whole spoken and written language was permeated by that poetic spirit which delights in tracing subtle a.n.a.logies, and in expressing the invisible by means of the visible. The translation of the Sanscrit Hymns, which has recently appeared [Footnote: Hymns of the Big Veda Sanhita, translated by Max Muller, vol. i.], furnishes a most valuable ill.u.s.tration of this state of thought and of language. These hymns are probably nearly coeval with the Pentateuch. They were the production of a different branch of the human family, and indicate a different tone of thought, but they bring out very clearly the figurative character of primitive language, abounding in fanciful descriptions of natural phenomena, which, when their metaphorical, character was forgotten, pa.s.sed by an easy transition into the graceful myths and legends of early Greece.

Then there was a poverty in these primitive vocabularies even in reference to sensible objects, which in many cases rendered it necessary to employ the same word in more or less extensive significations, and in the Semitic languages the power of inflexion was in some directions very limited. This limitation is most remarkable in the forms used for the expression of time. One form alone was available to express those modifications which are indicated by the imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and aorist tenses of the cla.s.sical languages.

Instances of all these sources of uncertainty meet us very early in Genesis. In the very first verse we have a word, [Hebrew script], which has great lat.i.tude of meaning. It is either the earth as a whole (ver. 1), or the land as distinguished from the water (ver. 10), or a particular country (ii. 11). In many cases, as in all these, the context at once determines the sense to be chosen; but there are other cases in which considerable difficulty arises. The whole question of the universality of the deluge turns, in a great degree, upon the signification which is a.s.signed to this same word in the sixth and following chapters. In the second verse we have another word, [Hebrew script], which is capable of various interpretations. It is used throughout the Bible in the three distinct meanings of "wind," "breath," and "spirit." Where we read, "And the Spirit of G.o.d moved upon the face of the waters," the Jewish paraphrase is, "And a wind of G.o.d (i.e. a great wind) moved," &c. Here there is nothing in the context to a.s.sist us in determining the sense to be chosen; but, as will be seen in the sequel, modern science indicates that the Jewish interpretation is untenable, and that our translation is, consequently, the correct one. As an instance of confusion of time, we may refer to ii. 19. In our translation this verse seems to place the creation of animals after that of man; but in xii. 1, the very same form is translated by the pluperfect, "Now the Lord had said unto Abram." It ought evidently to be translated in the same way here: "And out of the ground the Lord G.o.d had formed,"

&c. In ii. 5, on the other hand, the pluperfect might with advantage have given place to another form: "For the Lord G.o.d did not cause it to rain." The phenomenon referred to appears to have been local and temporary. Had the pluperfect been omitted in one case and supplied in the other two sources of apparent difficulty would have been removed.

It is very clear, then, that there could be no approach to scientific accuracy in a narrative written in such a language as this. Such accuracy is, in fact, attainable only in proportion, as science has moulded language for its own purposes. But language is at all times an index of the general mental condition of the people who use it, and so the knowledge and the ideas of the men of these primitive times must have been extremely limited in all those directions with which we have to do. Accordingly, we find no trace of any doubt whether the information with reference to external objects which was received through the senses was in all cases to be depended on. There can be little doubt that to those early observers the sky was a solid vault, on the face of which the sun, moon, and planets moved in their appointed courses; the stars were points of light, golden studs in the azure canopy; the sun and moon were just as large as they appeared to be, and the earth was a solid immovable plane of comparatively small extent.

At the time of the Exodus, it seems clear that, even among a people so far advanced as the Egyptians, all that lay beyond the mountains which bounded their land on the west was believed to belong not to living men, but to disembodied spirits. It was the terrible country through which the souls of the departed made their arduous way to the Hall of Judgment [Footnote: "The Nations Around," pp. 49, 50.] Accordingly, we find that the Egyptians made no attempt to extend the limits of their empire in this direction, while the monarchs of the Mesopotamian region seem to have been equally unambitious of conquest beyond the mountain ranges which bounded the valley of the Tigris on the east. Mesopotamia, then, on the east, Egypt on the west, Armenia and Asia Minor on the north, and Arabia on the south, seem, in the view of the contemporaries of Moses, to have been the utmost regions of the world. Ignorant as they were of any countries beyond these, they were, of course, equally ignorant of the numberless varieties of plants and animals that were to be found in them, and with which we are familiar. Mining was not unknown, but the mines were few and superficial; they could not reveal much of the structure of the earth, and what little they did reveal pa.s.sed unnoticed.

Nothing was known of the successive beds of rock which form the crust of the earth, of the fossils with which they abound, or of the gradual changes to Which they are still subject. If any one had told the men of that generation that the solid earth on which they stood, or the everlasting hills which surrounded them, were undergoing slow but steady modifications, he would have been looked upon as a madman.

A revelation, then, addressed to men whose language, whose intellectual powers, and whose stock of ideas were thus limited, must of itself also necessarily have been both limited and dest.i.tute of precision. It could only deal with things with which they had some acquaintance, or of which they could form some idea, while, from the character of the language, and the extreme brevity of the record, the treatment of even these few subjects must have been of a vague and indefinite character. Traces of a deeper knowledge there might be, but they would not lie upon the surface.

They must be carefully sought for, and then they would be discernible only by those who were in possession of the key which would unlock their hidden secrets.

Such are the limitations under which the revelation was necessarily given. We have now to consider our own especial difficulties, the obstacles which stand in our way when we would discover for ourselves all the information which the record is capable of conveying. For if this record be, as we believe, the work of the Great Architect of the Universe, then it is probable that its every detail is significant; that wherever it was possible words were chosen which, when scrutinized, would convey much more information than appeared on the surface. The great problem for us to solve is, What are the difficulties which stand in our way when we would seek this knowledge, and what are the means by which those difficulties may be surmounted, and the hidden treasure displayed?

Our first difficulty arises from a matter which, viewed in another light, is one of our greatest blessings. We are familiar with the Record through the medium of our own n.o.ble version. Probably it is impossible for any translation more exactly to represent the original as it presented itself in the first instance to the minds of those to whom it was addressed. Accordingly we learn it in our earliest childhood; its majestic phrases imprint themselves on our memory; our undeveloped minds seem capable of taking in all that it was intended to convey, and so the impressions formed of it in our infancy abide with us all our days. We are contented with them, and do not trouble ourselves to inquire whether there is not something beyond, which we have not realized.

All this time we forget that, excellent as it is, it is after all only a translation, and that the very best translation cannot represent in their fulness the ideas embodied in the original.

Etymological relations between words often give a force and meaning to a sentence which it is impossible to transfuse into another language, because the same relations do not exist between the words which we are constrained to employ. Then there is an intimate relation between men's thoughts and the language which they habitually use, so that those thoughts cannot be perfectly expressed in a language whose character is different. Again in every language there are many words which bear several cognate senses, which may be represented by as many different words in the language of the translation; so that if the best word is chosen, much of the fulness of the original must be lost; while it may so happen that the selected word has also a variety of significations, which do not correspond with the varying meanings of the original word, and thus senses may be ascribed to the original which it will not bear, because the reader annexes to the word in the translation a sense different from that in which it corresponds to the original word. To all these sources of imperfection must be added the fact that our translation was made at a time when science was not yet sufficiently developed to exercise any influence upon it. There was nothing to induce the translators to attempt, where it was possible, to preserve any indications of a deeper meaning, because they had no reason to suspect that any such deeper meaning existed, or that any indications of such a meaning were to be found.

To the difficulties of translation must be added the difficulties of acc.u.mulated tradition. The characteristics which mark our own childish intellect are apparent also in the collective intellect of the human race in its earlier and ruder development. There are two characteristics of the human mind in this condition, which have had a very great effect on the interpretation of this portion of the Bible.

The first of these is the impatience of doubt and uncertainty. The power of recognizing the imperfection of our knowledge, and the consequent necessity of suspending our judgment, is a power which is only gradually acquired with the acc.u.mulation of experience.

The young untrained mind finds it difficult to realize the truth that any information communicated to it is not altogether within the grasp of its faculties. It must attach some definite meaning to the words; it must image to itself some way in which great events were brought about, great works were accomplished. It finds it difficult to realize a fact as accomplished, unless it can also picture to itself some way in which it might have been effected.

For this purpose such knowledge as it has at its command is employed, and where that fails recourse is had to the imagination to supply the deficiency. Thus it has been with ourselves in our childhood, and thus it was in the childhood of the world.

Knowledge was indeed sought, but it was not sought in the right way, and so the search often resulted in error, and this error produced its effect in the interpretation of the pa.s.sage in question. The old school of inquirers started from certain abstract principles, and endeavoared to reduce the results of observation to conformity with those principles. This was the case with astronomy. The old astronomers taking as axioms the two a.s.sumptions that everything connected with the heavenly bodies must be perfect, and that the circle is the only perfect figure, easily satisfied themselves that the orbits of all the heavenly bodies must be circles. Hence came the

"Cycle on epicycle, orb on orb,"

by which they sought to account for the phenomena which they observed. When once the method was changed, when once it had occurred to Kepler that, as it seemed to be impossible to account for the apparent motion of Mars by any theory of circular orbits, it might be worth while to try to ascertain by observation what its...o...b..t really was, a few years of patient labour sufficed to solve the problem.

It was science such as this, then, that our forefathers brought to the interpretation of the Mosaic Record, and the consequence was that when, from time to time, facts were casually brought to light which might have led the way to vast discoveries, their true significance was never discerned; all that was sought from them was some additional support to the old views. Thus sometimes gigantic bones were exhumed: without investigation, it was at once a.s.sumed that they were human bones, and they were brought forward to prove the truth of the statement, "There were also giants in the earth in those days." Sea-sh.e.l.ls were found on mountain sides, far from and high above the sea--they were evidences of the Deluge.

The second characteristic of that state of mind is its admiration of the startling and the vast. In these alone it recognizes the tokens of unlimited power. It is unable to appreciate those more majestic manifestations of power which are discerned by the enlightened eye, when a stupendous scheme is developed, gradually and imperceptibly, but without pause or hesitation through a long succession of ages; when a mult.i.tude of seemingly discordant elements are at last brought together in a perfect work; when a power, unseen and unnoticed, slowly but surely overrules the working of ten thousand apparently independent agents, through a thousand generations, and moulds their separate works into one harmonious whole. Such a manifestation of power as this was beyond the grasp of the untrained mind; but to such intellects there was something irresistibly fascinating in the idea of a world rising into perfect existence in a moment, of innumerable hosts of living creatures called into being at a word. Such was the meaning of the account of creation which naturally suggested itself to the untrained mind, and there was nothing in science in those early days to throw any doubt upon it, and so this belief was unhesitatingly and almost universally adopted. Here and there, indeed, some man of deeper thought than his brethren, such as St.

Augustine [Footnote: See St. Augustine, "De Genesi ad Literam,"

Liber Imperfectus, and Libri Duodecim, and also "Confessionum"

Liber xiii.], suspected that there might be more in that seemingly simple record than was generally acknowledged; but such men had no means of verifying their conjectures, and their number was very small. For three thousand years the old view was practically unquestioned, it received the tacit sanction of the Church, it gradually became identified in the minds of all with the record itself, and was as much an article of faith as the very Creed.

This was the state of things, when at last science awoke from its long slumber, and began for the first time to employ its energies in the right direction. Very soon discoveries were made which startled the minds of all believers in the Bible. The first shock which the old belief sustained was from the establishment of the Copernican view of the Solar System. That the world was the immovable centre of the universe, around which sun, moon, and planets moved in their appointed courses, was universally held to be the express teaching of the Bible; and when Galileo ventured to maintain the new views in Italy, the Roman Curia took up the question, and by the agency of the Inquisition wrung from him a reluctant retractation of his so-called heresy. But it was of no avail. The new doctrine was true, and it could not be crushed.

Fresh evidence of its truth was continually coming forward, till at last it was universally received. Then the defenders of the Bible had recourse to the suggestion that as the Bible was not intended to teach us science, such errors were of no consequence, But this argument, though perfectly sound with reference to such pa.s.sages as Joshua x. 12-14, where an event is described as it appeared to those who witnessed it, is not admissible in such a pa.s.sage as Psalm xcvi. 10, where the supposed immobility of the earth is alleged as a proof of G.o.d's sovereignty, and is made the foundation of the duty of proclaiming that sovereignty among the heathen. When the supposed proof was found to be a fallacy, the statement in support of which it was alleged would be more or less shaken. In such a pa.s.sage, then, the theory of limited inspiration is evidently untenable. At last the only sensible course was adopted. Recourse was had to the original, and it was at once apparent that the supposed difficulty had no real existence, but that there was a very trifling inaccuracy in the translation; for that the word translated "shall not be moved" really signified "shall not be shaken or totter." The same word is used in Psalm xvii. 5, "Hold up my goings in Thy paths, that my footsteps SLIP NOT." Instead, then, of an error, we have an exact description of the earth's motion--a motion so steady and equable, that for thousands of years no single individual out of the myriads who were continually carried along by it had ever suspected its existence.

Well had it been for all if the lesson thus taught had been deeply laid to heart. But unhappily it was entirely unnoticed. Science pursued its way with increasing energy, and more facts were year by year brought to light which seemed entirely to contradict the teaching of the Bible, and again alarm and distrust sprung up in the minds of what, for want of a better name, we may perhaps be allowed to designate as the "Theological Party." The power of the Church of Rome was by this time so far curtailed that the old means of repression were no longer available; but the old spirit survived, and not in Rome only. There was the same blind distrust, the same mistaken zeal for supposed truth, the same indignation which naturally arises when things which we hold precious are attacked, and, as it seems to us, without any sufficient reason.

There was indeed much to account for and even to justify the feelings of anger and alarm which were excited, for the time when these discoveries began to be brought prominently forward was the latter half of the last century. At that time the famous French Academy was doing its deadly work, and the new discoveries were gladly hailed by the infidel philosophers of France, as weapons against the Bible. But the reception given to these discoveries by the theological party, though partially justified by the circ.u.mstances of the times, was nevertheless very mischievous in its results. For though the new discoveries were hailed enthusiastically by the infidel school, a very large portion of the men by whom they were made, and of those who were convinced of their truth, were men of a very different character. They were simple earnest seekers after truth as it is displayed in G.o.d's works. Their belief in the Bible rested in most cases on the authority of others. They had not investigated for themselves its external evidences; in many cases they had neither the ability nor the opportunity to do so; nor had many of them as yet become practically familiar with that internal evidence which the faithful Christian carries within him, though in time they might have become so, had they not been driven into infidelity by the reception which was given to their discoveries. When men of this character were informed by those to whom they were accustomed to look up as teachers in religious matters, that the discoveries, of the truth of which they were so firmly convinced, and in which they took such justifiable pride, were contradictory to the teaching of the Bible, they were placed in a position of extreme difficulty. For this statement was, in fact, a demand made upon them that they should give up these discoveries as erroneous, or else renounce their belief in the Bible. But their belief in the Bible rested in the main on the authority of others; they felt themselves incompetent judges of the evidence on which it rested, while they were fully acquainted with, and competent judges of, the grounds on which their own discoveries were based. The evidence on which they acted was, to their minds, quite as convincing as the Biblical evidence was to the minds of their antagonists. Two things, then, were p.r.o.nounced incompatible by what seemed to be a competent authority; they could not adhere to both, and the natural consequence was that their a.s.sent was given to those statements which rested on evidence which they thoroughly understood, and the Bible was rejected. Thus it has come to pa.s.s that many of our scientific men, if not professed unbelievers, have yet learnt to look upon the Bible with suspicion and distrust. To some of them, as is evident from their writings, their position is a matter of profound sorrow.

There have, indeed, been many n.o.ble exceptions to this state of things. Many men whose pre-eminence in scientific knowledge and research is admitted by all, have yet clung in childlike trust to the Bible. They have recognized its authority, they have been satisfied that G.o.d's Word could not be in opposition to His Work, and they have been content to wait in unquestioning faith for the day when all that now seems dark and perplexing shall be made clear. But there have also been very many with whom this has not been the case, and their unbelief has not affected themselves alone. The knowledge of it has had a deadly effect upon thousands who were utterly incompetent to form any judgment on either theological or scientific subjects, but who gladly welcomed anything which would help to justify them to their own consciences in their refusal to submit themselves to a law which, in their ignorance, they deemed to be harsh and intolerable. There has also been another cla.s.s of sufferers. Many persons who loved the Bible, but whose education, and, consequently, whose powers of judgment in the matter were very limited, have received very great injury from the doubt which has been thrown on its authority. Unable of themselves to form a judgment on the subject, they could not be unmoved by the opinion expressed by those whom they regarded as better informed than themselves. Hence their faith has received a shock always painful and dangerous, often perhaps fatal.

Many attempts have been made to overcome the difficulty which has thus arisen. When geologists first began to study the lessons which are to be learnt from fossils, a suggestion was made which, though it was soon shown to be untenable, has still perhaps a few supporters. It was said that these fossils were not what they seemed to be, the remains of creatures which once lived, but simple stones, fas.h.i.+oned from the first in their present form by the will of the Creator. But such an idea is at variance with all that either Nature or Revelation teaches us concerning G.o.d. All those who have any familiarity with the subject cannot but feel that the suggestion of such a solution of the difficulty is little short of a suggestion that the Almighty has stamped a lie upon the face of His own Work.

Another proposed solution, which for a time seemed satisfactory, a.s.sumed several successive creations and destructions of the world to have taken place in the interval between the first and second verses of Genesis. To these all the fossil remains were ascribed, while the present state of things was supposed to be the result of the operations recorded in the remainder of the chapter. But as geological knowledge advanced, it soon became clear that there were no breaks in the chain of life; no points at which one set of creatures had died out, while another had not yet arisen to fill up the void, but that all change had been gradual and progressive, and that species still living on the earth are identical with some which were in existence when the lowest tertiary strata were in process of formation--a time which must have been many thousand years prior to the appearance of man.

Other attempts have been made upon literary grounds. Hugh Miller [Footnote: Testimony of the Rocks.] carefully worked out a suggestion derived from a German source, that the history of Creation was presented to Moses in a series of six visions, which appeared to him as so many days with intervening nights. More recently Dr. Rorison [Footnote: In Answers to "Essays and Reviews."] has maintained that the first chapter of Genesis is not a history at all, but a poem--"the Hymn of Creation." There is, however, nothing in the chapter itself to confirm either of these views. When visions are recorded elsewhere we are told that they are visions, but no such hint is given us here. Nor do we find in the pa.s.sage any of the characteristics of Hebrew poetry. It is inserted in an Historical doc.u.ment, and in the absence of any proof to the contrary, it is plainly itself also to be regarded as History.

But there remains yet one method to be attempted. If there is reason to believe that the Bible is the Word of G.o.d, just as the universe is His Work, then we may well expect that each of them will throw light upon and help us to a right understanding of the other. And if there be one part beyond all others in which this may be confidently looked for, it is that part in which the Divine Architect describes His own work. We know how difficult it is to understand a complicated process, or a complex piece of machinery, from a mere written description; and how our difficulty is lessened if we have the opportunity of inspecting the machinery or the process. Just in the same way we may expect to encounter difficulties, and to form erroneous conclusions when we study by itself such a doc.u.ment as the history of Creation, and we may well expect that those difficulties will be diminished, and those errors corrected by an examination of that material universe, the production of which it describes. And, on the other hand, if science--the study of the universe--is found to throw light upon and to receive light from the Bible, this is a fresh proof that the Bible and the universe are from the same source; the authority of the Bible is more firmly established, and the conclusions arrived at by men of science are confirmed.

But before this can be done to any good purpose, something is required from both the contending parties. The theological party must be prepared to sacrifice many an old opinion, many a cherished belief. Great care must be taken to discriminate between the genuine statements of the Mosaic Record, and the old interpretations which have been incorporated into and identified with those statements. Some, perhaps, may fear lest, in rejecting those interpretations, they may be setting at nought an authority to which they ought to submit, since these interpretations seem to have the sanction of the Church. But it can hardly be maintained that those promises of Divine guidance and protection from error which were given to the Church extended to such matters as this.

No question of faith or duty is involved in the interpretation which we may give to the details of Creation. If there are some parts of the Bible in which the earliest interpretation is unquestionably the true one, there are also other parts, such as many of the prophecies, which became intelligible only when light was thrown upon them by subsequent events. And so it seems to be with the Record of Creation: it can only be rightly understood in proportion as we become acquainted with the details of the matters to which it refers. Any interpretation which was put upon it before those details were brought to light must of necessity be liable to error.

But something is also required of the opposite party. At the very threshold of the investigation they must be asked to lay aside, so far as is possible, those prejudices against the Bible which have naturally arisen in their minds from the obstinacy with which views, which they knew to be untenable, have been forced upon their acceptance as the undoubted teaching of G.o.d, so that they may enter upon the investigation with unbia.s.sed minds. Then they must be careful to distinguish between established facts, and theories however probable. There is something very fascinating in a well constructed theory. Theories have again and again done such good service in opening the way, first, to the discovery, and then to the arrangement of facts, that we are very apt to a.s.sign to them an authority far beyond that to which they are really ent.i.tled. When, for instance, we have ascertained that a certain number of facts are explained by some particular theory, we are apt to a.s.sume prematurely, that the same theory must account for and be in harmony with all similar and related facts; or, if we have satisfied ourselves that certain results MAY have been produced in a particular way, we are in great danger of being led to conclude that they MUST have happened in that way. No mere theory can have any weight against a statement resting on solid evidence, but where the evidence is weak, or, what is practically the same thing, where the knowledge of that evidence is defective, a probable theory must carry great weight in influencing our judgment. Care must therefore be taken to keep theories in their proper place. Where we have to deal with well-established facts, any interpretations to which those facts may lead us may be taken as also established, but interpretations which are suggested by theories only must be regarded as provisional, and liable to future modification or rejection, as our knowledge increases.

The Mosaic Record itself, when carefully examined, seems to be peculiarly open to the process suggested. No doubt there is yet much work for Philology to do in its interpretation [Footnote: Such words, for instance, as [Hebrew script:],[Hebrew script:], [Hebrew script], used of different creative acts, may imply some difference of which we are ignorant. So again the uses of the words [Hebrew script], [Hebrew script:], and [Hebrew script:] for "man," may have a bearing on some of those questions which now seem most perplexing.], but one thing seems certain--there is in it an absence of all detail. The facts to which it has reference are stated in the briefest and most simple manner, without the slightest reference to the means by which they were effected, or, apart from the question of the days, the time which was occupied in their accomplishment. When stripped of all that is traditional, and examined strictly by itself, the narrative seems greatly to resemble one of those outline maps which are supplied to children who are learning geography, on which only a few prominent features of the country are laid down, and the learner is left to fill in the details as his knowledge advances. Only in this case the details have already been filled in by the light of very imperfect knowledge, aided by a fertile imagination. These we must obliterate if we would restore the possibility of a faithful delineation, and we must be careful, in future, to avoid a similar error. We must put down nothing as certain which has not been conclusively shown to be so.

This last caution is specially needed at the present time, for, proud as we are of our advance in science, the amount of what is certainly known is probably very much less than we imagine. A great deal that was received as certain a few years ago, is now considered to be doubtful, or even recognized as a mistake and abandoned. This is especially the case with Astronomy, which seems to be almost in a state of revolution. Dependent, as it is almost entirely, upon mechanical and optical aid, every improvement and discovery in these departments changes its position, bringing to light new facts, and modifying the aspect of those which were previously known. The very basis of all astronomical calculations, the standard of time, is now no longer relied upon as invariable.

It is suspected of a change resulting from a gradual r.e.t.a.r.dation in the rate of the earth's rotation on its axis, produced by tidal friction. When the binary stars were discovered, the discovery was hailed as a proof of the universal prevalence of the law of gravitation. Later observations have thrown doubt upon that conclusion, as many pairs are known to exist, which, though they have what is termed a "common proper motion," or are journeying through s.p.a.ce together, have no relative motion, which they must show, if they were moving under the influence of their mutual attractions. The supposed simplicity of the solar system has given place to extreme complexity. A century ago, six planets, ten satellites, and a few comets, were supposed to const.i.tute the whole retinue of the sun: now, instead of this, we have two groups of four planets each, the individual members of each group closely resembling each other in all points within our knowledge, while in all these points the groups differ greatly. Between these two groups lies a belt of very small planets, of which the 1st was discovered on the first day of the present century, and the 124th this year, and the number of known satellites has increased from 10 to 17. Add to this the meteoric groups, and their suspected connexion with certain comets, and the perplexing questions suggested by the Solar Corona and the Zodiacal light, and it will be seen that our knowledge is in a transitional state; that with so many problems unsolved, any apparent contradiction to the sacred record will require a careful scrutiny to ascertain that the grounds on which it is brought forward are well established.