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tions of science, as I have endeavoured to extract them from the best authorities, I answer that I have not endeavoured to show either that any accordance has been demonstrated, or that more than a substantial accordance-an accordance in principal relevant particulars-is to be accepted as shown by probable evidence.

In the cosmogony of the Proem, which stands on a distinct footing as lying wholly beyond the experience of primitive man, I am not aware that any serious flaw is alleged; but the nebular hypothesis with which it is compared appears to be, perhaps from the necessity of the case, no more than a theory; a theory, however, long discussed, much favoured, and widely accepted in the scientific world.

In the geological part, we are liable to those modifications or displacements of testimony which the future progress of the science may produce. In this view its testimony does not in strictness pass, I suppose, out of the category of probable into that of demonstrative evidence. Yet it can hardly be supposed that careful researches, and reasonings strictly adjusted to method, both continued through some generations, have not in a large measure produced what has the character of real knowledge. With that real knowledge the reader will now have seen how far I claim for the Proem to Genesis, fairly tried, to be in real and most striking accordance.

And this brings me to the point at which I have to observe that Mr. Huxley, I think, has not mastered, and probably has not tried to master, the idea of his opponent as to what it is that is essentially embraced in the idea of a Divine revelation to man.

So far as I am aware, there is no definition, properly so called, of revelation either contained in Scripture or established by the general and permanent consent of Christians. In a word polemically used, of indeterminate or variable sense, Professor Huxley has no title to impute to his opponent, without inquiry, anything more than it must of necessity convey.

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But he seems to assume that revelation is to be conceived of as if it were a lawyer's parchment, or a sum in arithmetic, wherein a flaw discovered at a particular point is ipso facto fatal to the whole. Very little reflection would show Professor Huxley that there may those who find evidences of the communication of Divine knowledge in the Proem to Genesis as they read it in their Bibles, without approaching to any such conception. There is the uncertainty of translation; translators are not inspired. There is the difficulty of transcription; transcribers are not inspired, and an element of error is inseparable from the work of a series of copyists. How this works in the long courses of time we see in the varying texts of the Old Testament, with rival claims not easy to adjust. Thus the authors of the recent Revision 15 have had to choose in the Massoretic text itself between different readings, and 'in exceptional cases' have given a pre15 Preface to the Old Testament, p. vi.

ference to the Ancient Versions. Thus, upon practical grounds quite apart from the higher questions concerning the original composition, we seem at once to find a human element in the sacred text. That there is a further and larger question, not shut out from the view even of the most convinced and sincere believers, Mr. Huxley may perceive by reading, for example, Coleridge's Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. The question whether this Proem bears witness to a Divine communication, to a working beyond that of merely human faculties in the composition of the Scriptures, is essentially one for the disciples of Bishop Butler; a question, not of demonstrative, but of probable evidence. I am not prepared to abandon, but rather to defend, the following proposition. It is perfectly conceivable that a document penned by the human hand, and transmitted by human means, may contain matter questionable, uncertain, or even mistaken, and yet may by its contents as a whole present such TίOTELS, such moral proofs of truth Divinely imparted, as ought irrefragably pro tanto to command assent and govern practice. A man may possibly admit something not reconciled, and yet may be what Mr. Huxley denounces as a Reconciler.

I do not suppose it would be feasible, even for Professor Huxley, taking the nebular hypothesis and geological discovery for his guides, to give, in the compass of the first twenty-seven verses of Genesis, an account of the cosmogony, and of the succession of life in the stratification of the earth, which would combine scientific precision of statement with the majesty, the simplicity, the intelligibility, and the impressiveness of the record before us. Let me modestly call it, for argument's sake, an approximation to the present presumptions and conclusions of science. Let me assume that the statement in the text as to plants, and the statement of verses 24, 25 as to reptiles, cannot in all points be sustained; and yet still there remain great unshaken facts to be weighed. First, the fact that such a record should have been made at all. Secondly, the fact that, instead of dwelling in generalities, it has placed itself under the severe conditions of a chronological order, reaching from the first nisus of chaotic matter to the consummated production of a fair and goodly, a furnished and a peopled world. Thirdly, the fact that its cosmogony seems, in the light of the nineteenth century, to draw more and more of countenance from the best natural philosophy; and fourthly, that it has described the successive origins of the five great categories of present life, with which human experience was and is conversant, in that order which geological authority confirms. How came these things to be? How came they to be, not among Accadians, or Assyrians, or Egyptians, who monopolised the stores of human knowledge when this wonderful tradition was born; but among the obscure records of a people who, dwelling in Palestine for twelve hundred years from their sojourn in the valley of the Nile, hardly had force to stamp even so much as their name upon the history of the world at large, and

only then began to be admitted to the general communion of mankind when their Scriptures assumed the dress which a Gentile tongue was needed to supply? It is more rational, I contend, to say that these astonishing anticipations were a God-given supply, than to suppose that a race, who fell uniformly and entirely short of the great intellectual development 16 of antiquity, should here not only have equalled and outstripped it, but have entirely transcended, in kind even more than in degree, all known exercise of human faculties.

Whether this was knowledge conveyed to the mind of the Mosaic author, I do not presume to determine. There has been, in the belief of Christians, a profound providential purpose, little or variously visible to us, which presided, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, over the formation of the marvellous compound, which we term the Holy Scriptures. This we wonderingly embrace without being much perplexed by the questions which are raised on them; for instance, by the question, In what exact relation the books of the Apocrypha, sometimes termed deutero-canonical, stand to the books of the Hebrew Canon. Difficulties of detail, such as may (or ultimately may not) be found to exist in the Proem to Genesis, have much the same relation to the evidence of revealed knowledge in this record, as the spots in the sun to his all-unfolding and sufficing light. But as to the Mosaic writer himself, all I presume to accept is the fact that he put upon undying record, in this portion of his work, a series of particulars which, interpreted in the growing light of modern knowledge, require from us, on the whole, as reasonable men, the admission that we do not see how he could have written them, and that in all likelihood he did not write them, without aid from the guidance of a more than human power. It is in this guidance, and not necessarily or uniformly in the consciousness of the writer, that, according to my poor conception, the idea of Revelation mainly lies.

And now one word on the subject of Evolution. I cannot follow Mr. Huxley in his minute acquaintance with Indian sages, and I am not aware that Evolution has a place in the greater number of the schools of Greek philosophy. Nor can I comprehend the rapidity with which persons of authority have come to treat the Darwinian hypothesis as having reached the final stage of demonstration. To the eye of a looker-on their pace and method seem rather too much like a steeplechase. But this may very well be due to their want of appropriate knowledge and habits of thought. For myself, in my loose and uninformed way of looking at Evolution, I feel only too much biassed in its favour, by what I conceive to be its relation to the great argument of design.17

16 I write thus bearing fully in mind the unsurpassed sublimity of much that is to be found in the Old Testament. The consideration of this subject would open a wholly new line of argument, which the present article does not allow me to attempt.

Views like these, when formulated by religious instead of scientific thought, make more of Divine Providence and fore-ordination, than of Divine intervention; but VOL. XIX.-No. 107. C

Not that I share the horror with which some men of science appear to contemplate a multitude of what they term sudden' acts of creation. All things considered, a singular expression: but one, I suppose, meaning the act which produces, in the region of nature, something not related by an unbroken succession of measured and equable stages to what has gone before it. But what has equality or brevity of stage to do with the question how far the act is creative? I fail to see, or indeed am somewhat disposed to deny, that the short stage is less creative than the long, the single than the manifold, the equable than the jointed or graduated stage. Evolution is, to me, series with development. And like series in mathematics, whether arithmetical or geometrical, it establishes in things an unbroken progression; it places each thing (if only it stand the test of ability to live) in a distinct relation to every other thing, and makes each a witness to all that have preceded it, a prophecy of all that are to follow it. It gives to the argument of design, now called the teleological argument, at once a wider expansion, and an augmented tenacity and solidity of tissue. But I must proceed.

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I find Mr. Huxley asserting that the things of science, with which he is so splendidly conversant, are susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension' (N.C. p. 859). Is this rhetoric, or is it a formula of philosophy? If the latter, will it bear examination? He preeminently understands the relations between those things which Nature offers to his view; but does he understand each thing in itself, or how the last term but one in an evolutional series passes into and becomes the last? The seed may produce the tree, the tree the branch, the branch the twig, the twig the leaf or flower; but can we understand the slightest mutation or growth of Nature in itself?.can we tell how the twig passes into leaf or flower, one jot more than if the flower or leaf, instead of coming from the twig, came directly from the tree or from the seed?

I cannot but trace some signs of haste in Professor Huxley's assertion that, outside the province of science (ibid.), we have only imagination, hope, and ignorance. Not, as we shall presently see, that he is one of those who rob mankind of the best and highest of their inheritance, by denying the reality of all but material objects. But the statement is surely open to objection, as omitting or seeming to omit from view the vast fields of knowledge only probable, which are not of mere hope, nor of mere imagination, nor of mere ignorance; which include alike the inward and the outward life of man; within which lie the real instruments of his training, and where he is to learn how to think, to act, to be.

perhaps they are not the less theistical on that account.' (From the very remarkable Lectures of Professor Asa Gray on Natural Science and Religion, p. 77. Scribner, New York, 1880.)

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I will now proceed to notice briefly the last page of Professor Huxley's paper, in which he drops the scientist and becomes simply the man. I read it with deep interest, and with no small sympathy. In touching upon it, I shall make no reference (let him forgive me the expression) to his damnatory clauses,' or to his harmless menace, so deftly conveyed through the Prophet Micah, to the public peace. The exaltation of Religion as against Theology is at the present day not only so fashionable, but usually so domineering and contemptuous, that I am grateful to Professor Huxley for his frank statement (p. 859) that Theology is a branch of science; nor do I in the smallest degree quarrel with his contention that Religion and Theology ought not to be confounded. We may have a great deal of Religion with very little Theology; and a great deal of Theology with very little Religion. I feel sure that Professor Huxley must observe with pleasure how strongly practical, ethical, and social is the general tenor of the three synoptic Gospels; and how the appearance in the world of the great doctrinal Gospel was reserved to a later stage, as if to meet a later need, when men had been toned anew by the morality and, above all, by the life of our Lord.

I am not, therefore, writing against him, when I remark upon the habit of treating Theology with an affectation of contempt. It is nothing better, I believe, than a mere fashion; having no more reference to permanent principle than the mass of ephemeral fashions that come from Paris have with the immovable types of Beauty. Those who take for the burden of their song 'Respect Religion, but despise Theology,' seem to me just as rational as if a person were to say 'Admire the trees, the plants, the flowers, the sun, moon, or stars, but despise Botany, and despise Astronomy.' Theology is ordered knowledge; representing in the region of the intellect what religion represents in the heart and life of man. And this religion, Mr. Huxley says a little further on, is summed up in the terms of the prophet Micah (vi. 8): 'Do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.' I forbear to inquire whether every addition to thissuch, for instance, as the Beatitudes-is (N. C. p. 860) to be proscribed. But I will not dispute that in these words is conveyed the true ideal of religious discipline and attainment. They really import that identification of the will which is set out with such wonderful force in the very simple words of the Paradiso

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and which no one has more beautifully described than (I think) Charles Lamb He gave his heart to the Purifier, his will to the Will that governs the universe.' It may be we shall find that Christianity itself is in some sort a scaffolding, and that the final building is a pure and perfect theism: when 18 the kingdom shall be delivered up

19 1 Cor. xv. 24, 28.

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