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more are inclusively bespattered with the charges, which he has launched against the pestilent tribe of Reconcilers.

My fourth and last observation on the 'method' of Professor Huxley is that, after discussing a part, and that not the most considerable part, of the Proem of Genesis, he has broadly pronounced upon the whole. This is a mode of reasoning which logic rejects, and which I presume to savour more of licence than of science. The fourfold succession is condemned with argument; the cosmogony is thrown into the bargain. True, Mr. Huxley refers in a single sentence to three detached points of it partially touched in my observations (p. 853). But all my argument, the chief argument of my paper, leads up to the nebular or rotatory hypothesis (N. C. 689-94 and 697-8). This hypothesis, with the authorities cited-of whom one is the author of Vestiges of the Creation—is inclusively condemned, and without a word vouchsafed to it.

I shall presently express my gratitude for the scientific part of Mr. Huxley's paper. But there are two sides to the question. The whole matter at issue is, 1, a comparison between the probable meaning of the Proem to Genesis and the results of cosmological and geological science; 2, the question whether this comparison favours or does not favour the belief that an element of divine knowledge-knowledge which was not accessible to the simple action of the human faculties-is conveyed to us in this Proem. It is not enough to be accurate in one term of a comparison, unless we are accurate in both. A master of English may speak the vilest and most blundering French. I do not think Mr. Huxley has even endeavoured to understand what is the idea, what is the intention, which his opponent ascribes to the Mosaic writer: or what is the conception which his opponent forms of the weighty word Revelation. He holds the writer responsible for scientific precision: I look for nothing of the kind, but assign to him a statement general, which admits exceptions; popular, which aims mainly at producing moral impression; summary, which cannot but be open to more or less of criticism in detail. He thinks it is a lecture. I think it is a sermon. He describes living creatures by structure. The Mosaic writer describes them by habitat. Both I suppose are right. I suppose that description by habitat would be unavailing for the purposes of science. I feel sure that description by structure, such as the geologists supply, would have been unavailing for the purpose of summary teaching with religious aim. Of Revelation I will speak by-and-by.

In order to institute with profit the comparison, now in view, the very first thing necessary is to determine, so far as the subject-matter allows, what it was that the Pentateuchal or Mosaic writer designed to convey to the minds of those for whom he wrote. The case is, in more ways than one, I conceive, the direct reverse of that which the Professor has alleged. It is not bringing Science to be tried at the

bar of Religion. It is bringing Religion, so far as it is represented by this part of the Holy Scriptures, to be tried at the bar of Science. The indictment against the Pentateuchal writer is, that he has written what is scientifically untrue. We have to find then in the first place what it is that he has written, according to the text, not an inerrable text, as it now stands before us.

First, I assume there is no dispute that in Genesis i. 20-27 he has represented a fourfold sequence or succession of living organisms. Aware of my own inability to define in any tolerable manner the classes of these organisms, I resorted to the general phrases-waterpopulation, air-population, land-population. The immediate purpose of these phrases was not to correspond with the classifications of Science, but to bring together in brief and convenient form the larger and more varied modes of expression used in verses 20, 21, 24, 25 of the Chapter.

I think, however, I have been to blame for having brought into a contact with science, which was not sufficiently defined, terms that have no scientific meaning: water-population, air-population, and (twofold)land-population. I shall now discard them and shall substitute others, which have the double advantage of being used by geologists, and perhaps of expressing better than my phrases what was in the mind of the Mosaic writer. These are the words-1, fishes; 2, birds; 3, mammals; 4, man. By all, I think, it will be felt that the first object is to know what the Pentateuchal writer means. The relation of his meaning to science is essential, but, in orderly argumentation, subsequent. The matter now before us is a matter of reasonable and probable interpretation. What is the proper key to this hermeneutic work? In my opinion it is to be found in a just estimate of the purpose with which the author wrote, and with which the Book of Genesis was, in this part of it, either composed or compiled.

If this be the true point of departure, it opens up a question of extreme interest, at which I have but faintly glanced in my paper, and which is nowhere touched in the reply to me. What proper place has such a composition as the first Chapter of Genesis in such a work as the Scriptures of the Old Testament? They are indisputably written with a religious aim; and their subject-matter is religious. We may describe this aim in various ways. For the present purpose, suffice it to say they are conversant with belief in God, with inculcation of duties founded on that belief, with history and prophecy obviously having it for their central point. But this Chapter, at the least down to verse 25, and perhaps throughout, stands on a different ground. In concise and rapid outline, it traverses a vast region of physics. It is easy to understand Saint Paul when he speaks of

I wish to be understood as speaking here of the higher or ordinary mammals, which alone I assume to have been probably known to the Mosaic writer.

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the world as bearing witness to God. What he said was capable of being verified or tested by the common experimental knowledge of all who heard him. Of it, of our Saviour's mention of the lilies -and may it not be said generally of the references in Scripture to natural knowledge?-they are at once accounted for by the positions in which they stand. But this first Chapter of Genesis professes to set out in its own way a large and comprehensive scheme of physical facts: the transition from chaos to kosmos, from the inanimate to life, from life in its lower orders to man. Being knowledge of an order anterior to the creation of Adamic man, it was beyond verification, as being beyond experience. As a physical expo-sition in miniature, it stands alone in the Sacred Record. And, as this singular composition is solitary in the Bible, so it seems to be hardly less solitary in the sacred books of the world. The only important resemblance of any ancient cosmogony with the Scriptural account, is to be found in the Persian or Zoroastrian: this Bishop Browne 7 proceeds to account for on the following among other grounds: that Zoroaster was probably brought into contact with the Hebrews, and even perhaps with the prophet Daniel; a supposition which supplies the groundwork of a recent and remarkable romance, not proceeding from a Christian school. Again, the Proem does not carry any Egyptian marks. In the twenty-seven thousand lines of Homer, archaic as they are and ever turning to the past, there is, I think, only one which belongs to physiology. The beautiful sketch of a cosmogony by Ovid 10 seems in considerable degree to follow the Mosaic outline; but it was composed at a time when the treasure of the Hebrew records had been for two centuries imparted, through the Septuagint, to the Aryan

nations.

Professor Huxley, if I understand him rightly (N. C. pp. 851-2), considers the Mosaic writer, not perhaps as having intended to embrace the whole truth of science in the province of geology, but at least as liable to be convicted of scientific worthlessness if his language will not stand the test of this construction. Thus the "water-population' is to include the innumerable hosts of marine invertebrated animals.' It seems to me that these discoveries, taken as a whole, and also taken in all their parts and particulars, do not afford a proper, I mean a rational, standard for the interpretation of the Mosaic writer; that the recent discovery of the Silurian scorpion, a highly organised animal (p. 858), is of little moment either way to the question now before us; that it is not an account of the extinct species which we should consider the Mosaic writer as intending to convey; that while his words are capable of covering

• Acts xiv. 17; Romans i. 20.

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Note on Gen. i. 5.

Zoroaster. By F. M. Crawford. Macmillan, 1885. 9 Il. vii. 99.

10 Ovid, Metam. i. 1-38.

11 Because my argument in no way requires universal accordance, what bearing the scorpion may have on any current scientific hypothesis, it is not for me to say.

them, as the oikoumenè of the New Testament covers the red and yellow man, the rules of rational construction recommend and require our assigning to them a more limited meaning, which I will presently describe.

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Another material point in Professor Huxley's interpretation appears to me to lie altogether beyond the natural force of the words, and to be of an arbitrary character. He includes in it the proposition that the production of the respective orders was effected (p. 857) during each of three distinct and successive periods of time; and only during those periods of time;' or again, in one of these, and not at any other of these;' as, in a series of games at chess, one is done before another begins; or as in a 'march-past,' one regiment goes before another comes. No doubt there may be a degree of literalism which will even suffice to show that, as every winged fowl' was produced on the fourth day of the Hexaemeron, therefore the birth of new fowls continually is a contradiction to the text of Genesis. But does not the equity of common sense require us to understand simply that the order of 'winged fowl,' whatever that may mean, took its place in creation at a certain time, and that from that time its various component classes were in course of production? Is it not the fact that in synoptical statements of successive events, distributed in time for the sake of producing easy and clear impressions, general truth is aimed at, and periods are allowed to overlap ? If, with such a view, we arrange the schools of Greek philosophy in numerical order, according to the dates of their inception, we do not mean that one expired before another was founded. If the archæologist describes to us as successive in time the ages of stone, bronze, and iron,12 he certainly does not mean that no kinds of stone implement were invented after bronze began, or no kinds of bronze after iron began. When Thucydides said that the ancient limited monarchies were succeeded by tyrannies, he did not mean that all the monarchs died at once, and a set of tyrants, like Deucalion's men, rose up and took their places. Woe be, I should say, to anyone who tries summarily to present in series the phases of ancient facts, if they are to be judged under the rule of Professor Huxley.

Proceeding, on what I hold to be open ground, to state my own idea of the true key to the meaning of the Mosaic record, I suggest that it was intended to give moral, and not scientific, instruction to those for whom it was written. That for the Adamic race, recent on the earth, and young in faculties, the traditions here incorporated, which were probably far older than the Book, had a natural and a highly moral purpose in conveying to their minds a lively sense of

12 I use this enumeration to illustrate an argument, but I must, even in so using it, enter a caveat against its particulars. I do not conceive it to be either probable or historical that, as a general rule, mankind passed from the use of stone implements to the use of bronze, a composite metal, without passing through some intermediate (longer or shorter) period of copper.

the wise and loving care with which the Almighty Father, who demanded much at their hands, had beforehand given them much, in the provident adaptation of the world to be their dwelling-place, and of the created orders for their use and rule. It appears to me that, given the very nature of the Scriptures, this is clearly the rational point of view. If it is so, then, it follows, that just as the tradition described earth, air, and heaven in the manner in which they superficially presented themselves to the daily experience of man-not scientifically, but

The common air, the sun, the skies

so he spoke of fishes, of birds, of beasts, of what man was most concerned with; and, last in the series, of man himself, largely and generally, as facts of his experience; from which great moral lessons of wonder, gratitude, and obedience were to be deduced, to aid him in the great work of his life-training.

If further proof be wanting, that what the Mosaic writer had in his mind were the creatures with which Adamic man was conversant, we have it in the direct form of verse 28, which gives to man for meat the fruit of every seed-yielding tree, and every seed-yielding herb, and the dominion of every beast, fowl, and reptile living. There is here a marked absence of reference to any but the then living species.

This, then, is the key to the meaning of the Book, and of the tradition, if, as I suppose, it was before the Book, which seems to me to offer the most probable, and therefore the rational guide to its interpretation. The question we shall have to face is whether this statement so understood, this majestic and touching lesson of the childhood of Adamic man, stands in such a relation to scientific truth, as far as it is now known, as to give warrant to the inference that the guidance under which it was composed was more than that of faculties merely human, at that stage of development, and likewise of information, which belonged to the childhood of humanity.

We have, then, before us one term of the desired comparison. Let us now turn to the other.

And here my first duty is to render my grateful thanks to Professor Huxley for having corrected my either erroneous or superannuated assumption as to the state of scientific opinion on the second and third terms of the fourfold succession of life. As one probable doctor sufficed to make an opinion probable, so the dissent of this eminent man would of itself overthrow and pulverise my proposition that there was a scientific consensus as to a sequence like that of Genesis in the production of animal life, as between fishes, birds, mammals, and man. I shall compare the text of Genesis with geological statements; but shall make no attempt, unless this be an attempt, to profit by a consensus of geologists.

I suppose it to be admitted on all hands that no perfectly com

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