MASTER NEGATIVE NO. 92-80771 MICROFILMED 1993 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the WMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions Is that the photocopy or other reproduction Is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research." If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. « This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order If, in Its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR. GLADSTONE, W. E. TITLE: THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURE PLACE: PHILADELPHIA DATE: 1892 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT BIBLIOGRAPHir MI CROFORM TARHFT Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record ■ Philosophy ! D220 G45 Restrictions on Use: Gladstone, WilHam^-gii^ffee^^gg, 1809-1898. 1XM'%M''7r""^'' 'o^k of Holy Scripture, by the Rt Hon 1J . . (.la.lstone. m. ... Rev. :,„.l p„1. e d. Philadelnl h J d' »i>(lles&co., 1896; 10D2. ^ '"'"ueiimi.i, j. u. 2 P. I., vu-xlx. 424 p. front (port.) 2 facshu. ,1 fo,u.) loj ^m ,„re.-TMrci-7aMon\toVT Thii'nn,'""''*'.?"'""^ '"''^'^ »' ""'y Scrlp- lu on.lino.-The Psa;, i^Z?f.^ ZLTZZ^ ?,' ""* *^"^ TestaS corroborations of Scripture from .ho ll '"eislatlon.— On the recent 8cU.nce.-Con.luHlon': N.rof.Tn; sn^n^'^.'lIiTaci:' ""'°^*' ""'* "»'""»' a.iriT;,Ht'v.'^^'''^'TTitr"*"- '"^'"'•'"- -^'^""«- O. T.-Ev.dence«. Virfflnla. Univ. 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PREFA CE, In direct confutation of those who conceive that down to the present generation theology has per- mitted of no dispute or doubt as to any of the minutiae of the sacred volume, Dean Milman ob- serves that in his early days — that is to say, wlien the centuiy began— Paley's "Evidences" (from which the foregoing citation is taken) furnished a text -book for important seats of learning and of religious education. After citing the opinion of Evvald, that the whole Pentateuch was pre-Exilic, the Dean* declares this assertion not to be adequate to the entire breadth of the case. " I am persuaded that the written law, even Deu- teronomy, was of far earlier date : indeed existed, if not in the absolutely perfect form as it now exists, yet as the recognized, well-known, statute law of the people." The integrity and authority, then, of the Old Testament in its substance, need not and do not suffer from the recognition of a latitude, even if » •• Hist. Jews, • I, 43, note. PREFACE, XI It be a wide latitude, as to its literary form. But that which perplexes and may even alarm a sober- minded reader is, that we have suffered controversy on the form perhaps almost to hide the substance from our view, certainly to lower and enfeeble the living sense, which the body of believers has always entertained, of its authority, its majesty, its strin- gency, ay of the terrors of the law for those who will not accept its blessings. It really too often seems as if, when we are arguing about the authen- ticity of Genesis or Exodus, we had no weightier task in hand than if we were discussing the Epistles of Phalaris, or the letters of Ganganelli, or the authorship of Junius. And yet there they stand, these great facts and doctrines, in all the primitive severity of their outline, unshaken and august. There we find, now as heretofore, the doctrines of creation, of life, of human life, of the introduction of sin into the world, of the havoc which it wrou^rht of the simultaneous promise of redemption, of the selection of a special race for special purposes, and of the gradual preparation of the nations until the Xll PRE FA CE. fulness of time had come. I have here said nothing of that exhibition of preternatural power, which is supph'ed by prophecy and by wonder. These I forbear to dwell on, not so much because they can- not add to the marvel of Creation, as because they seem to make a presupposition or postulate of religious faith, while facts of the class of those above recited, and of those before quoted from Paley, rest in general upon grounds of known fact, or of evidence cognizable by all. More particularly I own does it appear as if there had now spread among many of the teachers of religion an apprehension of fully unfolding and strongly enforcing on their hearers of to-day the doctrine of sin, and of its moral and judicial conse- quences, such as it is taught in the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures. But this I have no doubt is due in part to an enemy very far more powerful than what is called the higher criticism, namely, the world and its increasing power over our minds and lives. Finally: It is good without doubt to place our PRE FA CE. xm views of the venerable Torah in harmony with sound research and with the best understood con- ditions of historical experience and of Providential action ; but it is anything rather than good, if, in our debates about the setting, we become blind to the lustre of the jewel it enshrines. In the present issue of this work, the text has been revised throughout, and the argument has been enlarged by additions at various points. In " The Creation Story " I have more largely and explicitly declined to take my stand upon the plea that it is concerned only or mainly with physi- cal adjustments. I have endeavored to set forth more fully the immense importance of the announce- ment concerning Creation with which the sacred volume opens; and I have supplied for popular purposes an account of the contents of the great chapter, which must, I fear, fall far short of scien- tific precision. I have also prefixed to this essay a remarkable statement from Hackel's "History of Creation." In " Mosaic Legislation " I have inserted some XIV PREFACE. PRE FA CE. remarks on the Prophets and their mission ; and at the close I have endeavored to exhibit the sin- gularly marked evidences of Providential action in the final catastrophe of the Temple and of Je- rusalem. And lastly, I have added to the volume a note on the Swine Miracle of the Synoptic Gospels, which appeared to be called for by a criticism of Profes- sor Huxley's on a portion of the text of the first edition. Since these chapters were sent to press, I have read the work ^ of Dr. Warring on " Genesis I. and Modern Science." This acute and comprehensive criticism appears to proceed from a gentleman of recognized scientific attainments. But not less re- markable than his talent or his knowledge is his courageous tone. He is no " reconciler ; " for Gen- esis and science according to him are already at one by what they respectively testify. He thinks it has been the halting and shifting state of science > •• Genesis I. and Modern Science." New York : Hunt and Eaton. 189a. XV in former days which has helped to prevent a due appreciation of the inestimable treasures contained in this great chapter. Instead of taking refuge in half-hearted pleas of poetry and vision, he is struck especially by the *' intense literalism " ^ of the Mo- saic account. Dr. Warring needs no sponsorship from me, and I am far from supposing that he has supplied the last word on this great subject, or that every word of his treatise can be perfect. But the closeness and fulness of his minute examination is extremely valuable, were it only for this, that it affords to op- ponents all that they can desire in amplitude and definiteness of opportunity for criticism or for con- futation, and that it helps to put out of countenance and drive off the field what I have termed the half- hearted method of defense. In his contentions there are some few that offer an aspect of novelty ; as, for example, his most in- teresting exposition 2 of the function of the heavenly * " Genesis I. and Modem Science," p. 189. ' Pages 114, seqg. •^ XVI PRE FA CE. bodies (vs. 14-18), and his restricting the verses on plant and animal life to " present genera," or that " culmination of plant-life," and those highly developed organisms, which he refers to the latter part of the tertiary period.^ No doubt there may be some differences of inter- pretation even among those who unite in maintain- ing the authenticity of the record. But I cannot help remarking that even these differences, subsist- ing in a scientific period, illustrate the wonderful efficacy with which the Mosaic narrative did its practical work among the Hebrews, to whom, to- gether with the other Scriptures, it was intrusted. That practical aim was not the work of expound- ing the nebular theory, or the deposition of the rocks. It was the moral and spiritual work of inculcating the grand doctrine of Creation, of ex- hibiting as the operations of God the grand phys- ical conditions of our life, and thereby of opening to the chosen race that great Book of Nature which other races of higher intellectual gifts failed to open * " Genesis I. and Modern Science," pp. io6, 183. FREE A CE, xvu for any moral purpose, but which has so long been recognized, and is now to be acknowledged more than ever, as one of the principal vehicles for con- veying a knowledge of the Most High to his rational creatures. London, May, i8g2. •\/ CONTENTS. I* PAGB First View of the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture i 11. The Creation Story 36 III. The Office and Work of the Old Testament in Outline 128 IV. The Psalms 183 V. The Mosaic Legislation 239 VI. On the Recent Corroborations of Scripture from the Regions of History and Natural Science . . . .31a VII. Conclusion 353 Note on the Swine Miracle 418 xix I. FIRST VIEW OF THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK OF HOLY SCRIPTURE. It is a serious question how far one ignorant, like myself, of Hebrew, and having no regular practice in the study and explanation of the text of the Old Testament, is entitled to attempt representations concerning it, which must present more or less the character of advice, to any portion of his fellow- men. It is clear that he can draw no sufficient warrant for such a course from the mere warmth of his desire to arrest a prevailing mischief, or from his fear lest any portion of the British pub- lic should lose or relax unawares their hold upon the book which Christendom regards as an inesti- mable treasure, and thereby bring upon themselves, as well as others, an inexpressible calamity. But, on the other hand, he has some better pleas to urge. J 2 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK The first is, that there is a very large section of the community, whose opportunities of judgment have been materially smaller than his own. The second ^is, that though he is greatly wanting in the valuable qualifications which grow out of special study in this field, he has, for more than forty years (believ- ing that change of labor is to a great extent the healthiest form of recreation), devoted the larger part of all such time as he could properly withdraw from political duties to another, and m several respects a similar, field of specialism. I mean hereby the earnest study of prehistoric antiquity and of its documents in regard to the Greek race- whose destinies have been, after those of the He- brews, the most wonderful in themselves, and the most fertile of results for us, among all the races of mankind. As between this field, which has for its central point the study of Homer, and that of the early Scriptures, which may, in the mass, be roughly called contemporary with the Homeric period, much Hght is, and with the progress of research more can hardly fail to be, given and received. Moreover, I OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE, have there had the opportunity of perceiving how, among specialists as with other men, there may be' fashions of the time and school, which Lord Bacon called idols of the market-place, and currents of prejudice running below the surface. These, it is obvious, may detract somewhat from the authority which each inquirer might justly claim in his own field, and from his title to impose his own conclu- sions upon mankind. As a judicious artist likes to know the opinion even of one not an expert on his picture, and sometimes derives benefit from it, so in all studies lights may be thrown inwards from without. Such a process is likely to be particularly needful in cases where the special branch deals with a subject-matter that both takes deep root in our nature, and is the source of profoundly interesting controversies for mankind at large. Yet I do not feel sure that these considerations would have led me to make the present attempt, were they not capped with another of great importance. It appears to me that we may grant, for argu- ment's sake, to the negative or destructive special- i 4 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK ist in the field of the ancient Scriptures all which as a specialist he can by possibility be entitled to ask, respecting the age, text, and authorship of the books ; and yet may hold firmly — as firmly as of old — to the ideas justly conveyed by the title I have adopted for these papers, and may invite our fellow-men to stand along with us on "the im- pregnable rock of Holy Scripture." These words sound like a challenge. And they are a challenge to some extent, but not in the sense that might be supposed. They are a challenge to accept the Scriptures on the moral and spiritual and historical ground of their character in them- selves, and of the work which they, and the agen- cies associated with them, have done in the world for some thousands of years, and are doing still. We may, without touching the domain of the critics, contend for them as corresponding by their con- tents to the idea of a divine revelation to man. We are entitled to attempt to show that they afford that kind of proof of such a revelation which is analogous to tlie known divine operations in other OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE. 5 spheres ; which binds us as to conduct ; and which in other matters, from the simple fact that we are rational beings, we recognize as entitled so to bind us. And again. I hold that the other documents of historic and prehistoric religions are precious in various ways. But we may legitimately ask whether the Scriptures do not differ in such a manner and degree from those other documents, as to leave to them only the office of witnesses and buttresses to Holy Scripture, rather than sharers m it, although in their degree they may be this also. But all these assertions lie within the moral and spiritual precinct. No one of them begs any liter- ary question of Old Testament criticism. They leave absolutely open every issue that has been or can be raised respecting the origin, date, author- ship and text of the sacred books, which for the present purpose we do not require even to call sacred. Indeed, it may be that this destructive criticism, if entirely made good, would, in the view of an inquiry really searching, comprehensive, and 6 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK philosophical, leave as its result not less but greater reason for admiring the hidden modes by which the great Artificer works out his designs. For, ixi proportion as the means are feeble, perplexed,' and to all appearance confused, is the marvel of the results that are made to stand before our ^y^^. And the upshot may come to be that, on this very ground, we may have to cry out, with the Psalmist absorbed in worshiping admiration, " Oh that men would therefore praise the Lord for his goodness, and declare the wonders that he doeth for the chil- dren of men ! '* (Psa. 107 : 8.) For " how unsearch- able are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!'* (Rom. 11:33.) For the memories of men, and the art of writing, and the care of the copyist,' and the tablet and the rolls of parchment, ari but the secondary or mechanical means by which the Word has been carried down to us along the river of the ages ; and the natural and inherent weakness of these means is in reality a special tribute to the grandeur and vastness of the end, and of Him that wrought it out. OF HOL V SCRIPTURE. So, then, these high-sounding words have been placed in the foreground of the present observa- tions, because they convey in a positive and defi- nite manner the conclusions which the observations themselves aim at sustaining, at least in outline, on general grounds of reason, and at enforcing as a commanding rule of thought and life. They lead upwards and onwards to the idea that the Scrip- tures are well called Holy Scriptures ; and that, though assailed by camp, by battery, and by mine, they are nevertheless a house builded upon a rock, and that rock impregnable ; that the weapon of offense, which shall impair their efficiency for aid- ing in the redemption of mankind, has not yet been forged ; that the Sacred Canon, which it took (perhaps) two thousand years from the accumula- tions of Moses down to the acceptance of the Apocalypse to construct, is like to wear out the storms and the sunshine of the world, and all the wayward aberrations of humanity, not merely for a term as long, but until time shall be no more. s THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK And yet, upon the very threshold, I embrace, in what I think a substantial sense, one of the grlat canons of modern criticism, which teaches us that the Scriptures are to be treated like any other book in the trial of their title. The volume, which is put into our hands when young under that ven- erated name, is, like any other volume, made with paper, types, and ink, and has been put together as a material object by human hands. The many and diversified utterances it contains proceeded from the mouth or pen of men; and the question, whether and in what degree, through supernatural guidance, they were, for this purpose, more than men, is to be determined, like other disputable questions, by the evidence. The books have been transmitted to us from their formation onwards in perishable materials, and from remote dates. They were so transmitted, until four hundred years ago, by the agency of copyists, as in the case of other literary productions, and presumably with a like liability to casual error, nay, even to fraudulent handling. That in some sense the Holy Scriptures OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE, contain something of a human, or uncertain, ele- ment is clear, as to the New Testament, from diversities of reading, from slight conflicts in the narrative, and from an insignificant number of con- troverted cases as to the authenticity of the text. We have also the Latin Vulgate partially competing with the Greek original, on the ground that it has been more or less based on manuscripts older than any we now possess. As regards the Old Testa- ment, we find the established Hebrew Text to be mostly founded on manuscripts of a date not earlier than (I believe) the tenth century ^ of our era. It is, moreover, at variance in many points with the Greek version, commonly termed the Septuagint ; which is considered to date, if not wholly, yet as to very important portions of the work, from the third century before the advent of our Saviour; the framers of which had before them copies older by more than a thousand years; and which appears 1 I understand that, in the case of the Pentateuch, the British Mu- seum has a manuscript which is certainly not later than of the eighth century, and which is in the closest correspondence with the present text. lO THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK to have received a certain amount of recognition from our Lord and the Apostles in the citations which they make from it. Thus the accuracy of the text, the age and authorship of the books, open up a vast field of purely literary controversy ; and such a question as whether the closing verses of St. Mark's GospeP have the authority of Scripture must be determined by literary evidence, as much as the genuineness of the pretended preface to the ^neid, or of a particular stanza which appears in an ode of Catullus.^ Towards summing up these observations, I will remind the reader that those who believe in a divine revelation, as pervading or as contained in the Scrip- tures, and especially those who accept the full doc- trine of literalism as to the vehicle of that inspira- tion, have to lay their account with the followmg (among other) considerations, which it is hard for ^ I have never seen a confutation of the reasonings of Dean Burgon in his treatise on this subject. He supports the text as it stands The marginal note in the Revised Version is surely unsatisfactory, for it does not tell the whole case, but only a part, and that on one side, about the manuscripts, a Carm. Lll. 13-16. OF HOL V SCRIPTURE, II them to repudiate as inadmissible. There may pos- sibly have been — 1. Imperfect comprehension of that which was divinely communicated. 2. Imperfect expression of what had once been comprehended. 3. Lapse of memory in oral transmission. 4. Errors of copyists in written transmission. 5. Changes with the lapse of time in the sense of words. 6. Variations arising from renderings into differ- ent tongues, especially as between the Hebrew text and the Septuagint. 7. The inspired writers of the New Testament varied in the text they used for citations from the Old Testament, and did not regard either the He- brew or the Greek as of exclusive authority. 8. There are three variant chronologies of the Old Testament, according to (i) the Hebrew, (2) the Septuagint, and (3) the Samaritan Pentateuch, respectively. It would apparently be unwarrant- able to claim for any one of them, as against the 12 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK others, the absolute sanction of a divine revelation; while an historical argument of some importance may be deducible, on the other hand, from the fact that their variations lie within certain limits. No doubt there will be those who will resent any association between the idea of a divine revelation and the possibility of even the smallest intrusion of error into its vehicle. This idea, however, is by no means altogether a novelty. It is manifestly included as a likelihood, if not a certainty, in the fact of continuous transmission by human means without continuous miracle to guarantee it. But further, ought they not to bear in mind that we are bound by the rule of reason to look for the same method of procedure in this great matter of a writ- ten provision of divine knowledge for our needs, as in the other parts of the manifold dispensation under which Providence has placed us? Now, that method or principle is one of sufficiency, not of perfection ; of sufficiency for the attainment of practical ends, not of conformity to ideal standards; and the question what constitutes that sufficiency OF HOL V SCRIPTURE. 13 is a matter on which we have no more authority to pass judgment in relation to the Scriptures, than in relation to any other part of the divine dispensa- tions ; on all of which the Almighty appears to have reserved this matter to himself. Bishop Butler, I think, would wisely tell us that we are not the judges, and that we are quite unfit to be the judges, of what may be the proper amount and the just conditions of any of the aids to be afforded us in passing through the discipline of life. I will only remark that this default of ideal perfection, this use of twilight instead of a noonday blaze, may be adapted to our weakness, and may be among the appointed means of exercising, and by exercise of strengthening, our faith. But what properly belongs to the present occasion is to point out that if proba- bility, and not demonstration, marks the divine guidance of our paths in life as a whole, we are not entitled to require a different rule in the present case. When the Almighty, in his mercy, makes a special addition by revelation to what he has already given to us of knowledge in Nature and in 14 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK Providence, we cannot justly ask that this special gift should be unlike his other gifts, and should have all its lines and limits drawn out with mathe- matical precision. I have then admitted, I hope in terms of suffi- cient fulness, that my aim in no way embraces a controversy with the moderate, or even with the extreme, developments of textual criticism. Dr Driver, the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford ^ personally, as well as officially, a champion of the doctrine that there is a divine revelation, has recently shown, with great clearness and ability, that the basis of such criticism is sound and undeniable whatever be its liability to aberration either in method or in details. It compares consistencies and mconsistencies of text, not simply as would be done by an ordinary reader, but with all the lights of collateral knowledge. It pronounces on "the meaning of terms with the authority derived from thorough acquaintance with a given tongue, or with language at large. It investigates and applies those » Contemporary Review. February. 1890. pp. 215.231. OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE, 15 laws of growth, which operate upon language as they operate in regard to a physical organism. It has long been known, for example, that por- tions of the historical books of the Old Testament, such as the Books of Chronicles, were of a date very far later than most of the events which they record, and it is widely believed that a portion of the prophecies included in the Book of Isaiah were later than his time.^ It is now pressed upon us that, according to the prevailing judgment of the learned, the form in which the older books of the Old Testament have come down to us does not correspond as a rule with their titles, and is due to later though still, as is largely held, to remote periods ; and that the law presented to us in the Pentateuch is not an enactment of a single date, but has been enlarged by a process of growth, and by gradual accretions. To us who are without original means of judgment these are, at first hear- 1 I am not aware, however, what is the reply to the arguments (for example) of Mr. Urwick, who contends for the unity of author- ship. ("The Servant of Jehovah." Edinburgh : Clark. 1877.) i6 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK ing, without doubt, disturbing announcements. Yet common sense requires us to say, let them be fought out by the competent, but let not us who are incompetent interfere. I utterly, then, eschew for myself the responsibility of conflict' with these properly critical conclusions. But this acquiescence is subject to the following remarks. First, the acceptance of the conclusions of the critics has reference to the present liter- ary form of the works, and leaves entirely open every question relating to the substance. Any one who reads the books of the Pentateuch, from the second to the fifth, must observe how litde they present the appearance of consecutive, coherent and digested record. But their several portions' must be considered on the evidence applicable to them respectively. And the main facts of the his- tory they contain have received strong confirma- tion from Egyptian and Eastern research. With regard to the Book of Genesis, the admission which has been made implies nothing adverse to the truth of the traditions it embodies, nothing adverse to OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE, 17 their antiquity, nothing which excludes or dis- credits, as to the older among them, the idea of their having originally formed part of a primitive revelation, simultaneous or successive. The forms of expression may have changed, yet the substance may remain with an altered literary dress ; as some scholars have thought (not, I believe, rightly) that the diction and modeling of the Homeric Poems is comparatively modern, and yet the matter they embody may belong to a remote antiquity. It is also conceivable that the diction of Chaucer, for example, might be altered so as to conform to the usage of the nineteenth century, and to leave little apparent resemblance to the original, and yet that the whole substance of Chaucer might remain. Further, our assent to the conclusions of the critics ought to be stricdy limited to a provisional and revocable assent ; and this on practical grounds of stringent obligation. For, firstly, these conclu- sions appear to be in a great measure floating and uncertain, to be the subject of manifold contro- versy. Secondly, they seem to shift and vary with '51 i8 r/i£ IMPREGNABLE ROCK rapidity in the minds of those who hold them Considering the terms in which he announced on the title-page, his reproduction of the work of Bleek |n 1878,' VVellhausen may fairly be held to accept' m the main, the genuineness of those Davidic Psalms which are contained in the First Book of the Psalter. But I understand that this position has of late years been abandoned, and that, stand- •ng. as he appears to do, at the head of the negative P^men. [The ed.t.on published and adopted by Wellhausen , 11 «"*'■ ^''^"^•'•'^^'^ "-'-e boo^had bee^Xd „ Wellhausen work assigns n,„ch weigh. ,o .he Davidic ,i. s- giv^ ,o it-w so jate. (bections 220-222. nap-es act .fk. r r. ' " Einleituntr •• \ T„ ♦», j- • ^-'t P^ges 457-464. of the x^^inieitung. ) Jn the edition of 1878 rnotp n ^.^^ u raise the question whether -ill th. P 7 ^' ^ ^' ^ ''^"^' ^^ decidine it ■ and T ' ^'"^ Post-Exihc. but without deciding 1 and this note was subsequently dropped. In March 1866 Ewald wrote thus his final opinion on the Psalms- " Notl: can be more untrue and perverse than the opinion that t e r! r::: ^nV'; r^- '''-'-''^ ^^"^^- ^-'-w even tie rl es par of the Psalter is derived from that source! indeed, songs from the last century before Christ, and of the utterly degeneratf Has mon.an king Jann.os!- ('.Commentary on tL 2^1^" son's Translation. Preface, p. iv.) He thinl the re enT t ^i^^ perverse as the -Hengstenbergs and Puseys.'. (/,,v/ ;;7'^^°"^^ 01^ HOL V SCRIPTURE, 19 critics, he now brings down the general body of the Psalms to a date very greatly below that of the Babylonic Exile. It is certainly unreasonable to hold a critic to his conclusions without exception. But, on the other hand, it may be asked whether, in order to warrant confidence, they ought not to exhibit some element of stability. The open- ing of new sources of information may justify all changes fairly referable to such sources; and in minor matters the finer touches of the destructive, as well as the constructive, artist, may be needed to complete his work. But if reasonable grounds for change do not determine its bounds, there must be limits, on the other hand, to the duty of deference and submission on the part of the outer and unin- structed world, with respect to these literary con- clusions. It seems doubtful how far they present to us that aggregate continuity and steadiness in the matter of progression, which the whole world recognizes in the case of the physical sciences ; and the most liberal estimate can hardly carry them farther than this, that we should keep an open 20 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK mind till the cycle of change has been run through, and till time has been given for the detection of flaws, and for the hearing of those whose researches may have led them to different results. In the present instance we have an example, which may not be without force, in support of this warning. Mr. Margoliouth, the Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, and a gentleman of early academical distinctions altogether extraordinary, has published his Inaugural Lecture,^ in which he states his belief that, from materials and by means which he lucidly explains, it will be found possible to reconstruct the Semitic original, hitherto un- known, ot the Book of Ecclesiasticus. It was written, as he states, by Ben Sira, not in the Hebrew of the Prophets, but in the later Hebrew of the Rabbis (p. 6). I understand that there are three great stages, or states, of the Hebrew tongue : the Ancient, the Middle, and the New; and that of these the earlier or classical Scriptures belong to *"On the place of 'Ecclesiasticus' in Semitic Literature." Clarendon Press, 1890. OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE, 21 the first, and the Book of Nehfemiah (for example) to the second. The third is the Rabbinical stage. The passage from one to another of these stages is held, under the laws which determine the move- ment of that language, to require a very long time. Professor Margoliouth finds that Ben Sira wrote in Rabbinical Hebrew, and the earlier we find Rab- binical Hebrew in use, the farther we drive into antiquity the dates of books written in Middle and in Ancient Hebrew. Suppose, by way ot illus- tration, that Professor Margoliouth shows Rab- binical Hebrew to have come into use two hundred years earlier than had been supposed, the effect is to throw backwards by two hundred years the latest date to which a book in Middle or in Ancient Hebrew could be assigned. No wonder, then, that Professor Margoliouth observes (p. 22) — *' Some students are engaged in bringing down the date of every chapter in the Bible so late as to leave no room for prophecy and revelation.'* But he goes on to add that if, by the task which he has undertaken, and by those who may follow 22 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK and improve upon him, this Book shall be prop- erly restored, " Others* will endeavor to find out how early the professedly post-Exilian books can be put back, so as to account for the divergence between their awkward Middle Hebrew and the rich and elo- quent New Hebrew of Ben Sira. However this may be, hypotheses, which place any portion of the classical or Old Hebrew Scriptures between the Middle Hebrew of Nehemiah and the New Hebrew of Ben Sira, will surely require some reconsideration, or at least have to be harmonized in some way with the history of the language, be- fore they can be unconditionally accepted.'* Hence the spectator from without, perceiving that there is war, waged on critical grounds, in the critical camp itself, may surmise that what has been wittily called the order of disorder is more or less menaced in its central seat ; and he may be the more hardened in his determination not to rush prematurely to final conclusions on the serious, though not as I suppose vital, question respecting OF HOL V SCR/PrdkE. 23 the age and authenticity of the early books of the Old Testament in their present literary form. There is such a thing as mistaking the indifferent for the essential, and as a slavish adherence to traditions insufficiently examined. But the liabili- ties of human nature to error do not all lie on one side. It may on the contrary be stated with some confidence that, when error in a certain direction, after a long and quiet sway, is effectively called to account, it is generally apt, and in some cases certain, to be followed by a reign of prejudices, or biassed judgments, more or less extended, and in a contrary direction. There is such a thing as a warping of the mind in favor of disintegration. Often does a critic bring to the book he examines the conclusion which he believes that he has drawn from it. Often, when he has not thus imported it, yet the first view, in remote perspective, of the proposition to which he leans will induce him to rush at the most formidable fences that lie straight ahead of him, instead of taking his chances of arriving at it by the common road of reason. And 24 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK often, even when he has attained his conclusion without prejudice, he will after adopting defend it against objectors, not with argument only, but with all the pride and pain of wounded self-love. And every one of these dangers is commonly enhanced in something like the same proportion in which the particular subject-matter embraces the highest interests of mankind. What I would specially press upon those to whom I write is, that they should look broadly and largely at the subject of Holy Scripture, especially of the Scriptures of the older dispen- sation, which are, so to speak, farther from the eye. They should never allow themselves to be drawn away from that broad and free contemplation into discussions which, though in their own place legiti- mate, nay, needful, yet are secondary, and there- fore, when substituted for the primary, become worse than frivolous. I do not ask this from them as philosophers or as Christians, but as men of sense. I ask them to look at the subject as they would look at the British Constitution, or at the OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE, 25 poetry of Shakespeare. Under our existing laws, any one branch of the British Legislature can stop the proceedings of the whole. Again, the House of Commons can reduce to beggary the whole army, navy, and civil service of the country. Neither law nor usage makes any provision for meeting the case, and this although there would ensue from it nothing less than a frustration of the purposes for which men join together in society. We might be pressed by glowing representations of these apparent absurdities. Still there are prob- ably not ten men in the country whose estimate of the Constitution they live under would be affected by these supererogatory objections. And if we are in any measure to grasp the office, dignity, and authority of the Scriptures, we must not suppose we are dealing adequately with that lofty subject by exhausting thought and time in examining whether Moses either edited or wrote the Pentateuch just as it stands, or what was the book of the law found in the temple in the time of Josiah, or whether it is possible or likely that any changes of addition 26 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK or omission may have crept into the text. If the most greedily destructive among all the theories of the modern critics (rather seriously at variance with one another) were established as true, it would not avail to impair the great facts of the history of man with respect to the Jews, and to the nations of the worid ; nor to disguise the light which those facts throw upon the pages of the sacred volume ; nor to abate the commanding force with which, bathed, so to speak, in the flood of that light, the Bible invites, attracts, and commands the adhesion of mankind. Even the moral problems, which may be raised as to particular portions of the volume, and which may not in all cases have found any absolute and certain solution, are surely lost in the comprehensive contemplation of its general strain, its immeasurable loftiness of aim, and the vastness of the results which it, and its immediate accom- paniments in institution and event, have wrought for our predecessors in the journey of life, for our- selves, and for the most forward, dominant, and responsible portions of our race. But these moral OF HOL V SCRIPTURE, 27 problems, which really form the most important part of the case, have not been dug out of the ground by the recent criticism. They have at all times been present to the mind of the serious reader. Whatever difficulty they present to us is not a new, but an old difficulty. In a passage which rises to the very highest level of British eloquence, Dr. Liddon,^ exhausting all the resources of our language, has described, so far as man may describe it, the ineffable and unap- proachable position held by the sacred volume. It is too long to quote, too special to appropriate ; and to make extracts would only mangle it. The commanding eminence of the great preacher of our metropolitan Cathedral will fasten the public atten- tion on the subject, and will powerfully serve to show that the Scriptures, in their substantial tissue, rise far above the region of criticism, which gives no sign of being about to do anything permanent 1 Sermon preached at St. Paul's on the Second Sunday in Advent, December, 1889, pp. 28-31. [Since this was written, death has extin- guished in Dr. Liddon a light of the English Church, singularly bright and pure.] mmmHmmmtm 26 TI/E IMPREGNABLE ROCK or omission may have crept into the text. If the most greedily destructive among all the theories of the modern critics (rather seriously at variance with one another) were established as true, it would not avail to impair the great facts of the history of man with respect to the Jews, and to the nations of the world ; nor to disguise the light which those facts throw upon the pages of the sacred volume ; nor to abate the commanding force with which, bathed, so to speak, in the flood of that light, the Bible invites, attracts, and commands the adhesion of mankind. Even the moral problems, which may be raised as to particular portions of the volume, and which may not in all cases have found any absolute and certain solution, are surely lost in the comprehensive contemplation of its general strain, its immeasurable loftiness of aim, and the vastness of the results which it, and its immediate accom- paniments in institution and event, have wrought for our predecessors in the journey of life, for our- selves, and for the most forward, dominant, and responsible portions of our race. But these moral OF HOL V SCRIPTURE. 27 problems, which really form the most important part of the case, have not been dug out of the ground by the recent criticism. They have at all times been present to the mind of the serious reader. Whatever difficulty they present to us is not a new, but an old difficulty. In a passage which rises to the very highest level of British eloquence, Dr. Liddon,^ exhausting all the resources of our language, has described, so far as man may describe it, the ineffable and unap- proachable position held by the sacred volume. It is too long to quote, too special to appropriate ; and to make extracts would only mangle it. The commanding eminence of the great preacher of our metropolitan Cathedral will fasten the public atten- tion on the subject, and will powerfully serve to show that the Scriptures, in their substantial tissue, rise far above the region of criticism, which gives no sign of being about to do anything permanent 1 Sermon preached at St. Paul's on the Second Sunday in Advent, December, 1889, PP- 28-31. [Since this was written, death has extin- guished in Dr. Liddon a light of the English Church, singularly bright and pure,] 28 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK or effectual to lower their moral and spiritual grandeur, or to disguise or intercept their gigantic work. I turn to a cognate topic. The impression pre- vails that, in this and other countries, the operative classes, as they are termed, have at the great cen- ters of population, here and elsewhere, largely lost their hold upon the Christian creed. There may be exaggeration in this belief; but, all things taken together, there is evidently more or less (let us hope less) of foundation for it. It does not mean, at least among us, that they have lost respect for the Christian religion, or for its ministers ; or that they desire their children to be brought up otherwise than in the knowledge and practice of it ; or that they themselves have snapped the last ties which, on the cardinal occasions of existence, associate them with its ordinances; or that they have re- nounced or modified the moral standards of conduct, which its conspicuous victory after an obstinate contest of many centuries, and its long possession of the social field, have established for the benefit OF HOL V SCRIPTURE. 29 of mankind. It may mean no more, but also no less, than this: that their positive, distinct, and conscious acceptance of the articles of the Creed, and their sense of the dignity and value of the sacred record, are blunted, or in some cases even effaced.* In passing, I may be permitted to offer a remark. If assent be more or less largely withheld by the less well-to-do segment of society, it is still, not- withstanding the skeptical movement of the day, very generally yielded in this country by the leisured and better provided classes in most, though not all, of their branches. I simply state this as fact, without drawing, in this case, any inference from it. There seems thus to be, within certain limits, an 1 As I write in the general interests of befief, and on no narrower ground, it is with deep regret that I extract the following statement from the excellent compilation of Messrs. Macmillan, termed the Statesman's Year-Book. for 1890. In France, account is taken at the census of religious belief, and in 1881, for the first time, a column was provided for those who declined to make any declaration of belief. The number of persons returned under this head is no less than 7,684,906. 30 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK approach to a reversal of the respective attitudes which prevailed in the infancy of our religion. Then the "poor" were the principal objects of the personal ministry of Christ our Lord, and it was their glory to be the readiest receivers of the gos- pel.^ They were then " the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him." ^ They Lad fewer obstacles, especially within themselves, to prevent their accepting the new religion. It was less hard for them to become ** as little children." They had, to all appearance, more palpable interests in the promise of the life to come, as compared with the possession of the life that now is. The seeming change in their comparative facility of access to the Saviour, as respects belief, is one to afford much matter for meditation. The present purpose is to deal, in slight outline at least, with one of its causes. For one such cause certainly is the wide, though more or less vague, disparagement of the Holy 1 Graetz, " History of the Jews," Vol. II., Chap. VI. (1891). » James 2 : 5, OF HOL V SCRIPTURE, 31 Scriptures recently observable in the surface cur- rents of prevalent opinion, as regards their title to supply, in a supreme degree, food for the religious thought of man, and authoritative guidance for his life. Amongst the suppositions, I believe erroneous, which tend to produce this disparagement, are the following : 1. That the conclusions of science as to natural objects have shaken or destroyed the assertions of the early Scriptures with respect to the origin and history of the world, and of man, its principal in- habitant. 2. That their contents are in many cases offen- sive to the moral sense, and unworthy of an en- lightened age. 3. That our race made its appearance in the world in a condition but one degree above that of the brute creation, and only by slow and painful but continual progress has brought itself up to the present level of its existence. 4. That men have accomplished this by the ^AJsti-'*.;* "*ir t ..... '4yi**^ -"•■ #- 4 ^■. ■ ' > •(•',>-) a / 4 30 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK approach to a reversal of the respective attitudes which prevailed in the infancy of our religion. Then the "poor" were the principal objects of the personal ministry of Christ our Lord, and it was their glory to be the readiest receivers of the gos- pel.» They were then " the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him." « They Lad fewer obstacles, especially within themselves, to prevent their accepting the new religion. It was less hard for them to become ** as little children." They had, to all appearance, more palpable interests in the promise of the life to come, as compared with the possession of the life that now is. The seeming change in their comparative facility of access to the Saviour, as respects belief, is one to afford much matter for meditation. The present purpose is to deal, in slight outline at least, with one of its causes. For one such cause certainly is the wide, though more or less vague, disparagement of the Holv » Graetz, " History of the Jews." Vol. II., Chap. VI. (1891). * James 2 : 5. OF HOL V SCRIPTURE. 31 Scriptures recently observable in the surface cur- rents of prevalent opinion, as regards their title to supply, in a supreme degree, food for the religious thought of man, and authoritative guidance for his life. Amongst the suppositions, I believe erroneous, which tend to produce this disparagement, are the following : 1. That the conclusions of science as to natural objects have shaken or destroyed the assertions of the early Scriptures with respect to the origin and history of the world, and of man, its principal in- habitant. 2. That their contents are in many cases offen- sive to the moral sense, and unworthy of an en- lightened age. 3. That our race made its appearance in the world in a condition but one degree above that of the brute creation, and only by slow and painful but continual progress has brought itself up to the present level of its existence. 4. That men have accomplished this by the 32 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK exercise of their natural powers; and have never received the special teaching and authoritative guidance, which is signified under the name of divine revelation. 5. That the more considerable among the dif- ferent races and nations of the world have devised, and have established from time to time, their re- spective religions; and have also in many cases accepted the promulgation of sacred books, which are to be considered as essentially of the same character with the Bible. 6. That the books of the Bible, in many most important instances, and especially those books of the Old Testament which purport to be the earliest, so far from being contemporary with the events which they record, or with the authors to whom they are ascribed, are comparatively recent com- pilations from uncertain sources, and are therefore without authority. Most of the foregoing remarks relate to the last of these assumptions; and I shall proceed in due course to observe upon others among them. OF HOL V SCRIPTURE, 33 There are propositions wider still, but wholly foreign to the present purpose ; such as that God is essentially unknowable, that we have no reason- able evidence of a life beyond the grave, and that rational certainty is confined to material objects and to the testimony of the senses. Passing by these propositions, I confine myself wholly to what preceded them ; and I shall endeavor, from some points of view, to present an opposing view of the spiritual field. Moreover, as each of these is the subject of a literature of its own which may be termed scientific, I here premise that what I have to say will, though I hope rational and true, be not systematic or complete, but popular and partial only. It will have for its immediate aim to show that there are grave reasons for questioning every really destructive proposition that has been ad- vanced, and for withholding our assent from them until these reasons (and, as I conceive, many others) shall be confuted and set aside. I shall, however, as being in duty bound to follow the truth so far as I can discern it, have to make 3 34 THE IMPREGNABLE ROCK many confessions in the course of my argument. These confessions will be to the prejudice, not, as I trust, of Christian belief or of the sacred volume, but only of us, who as its students have failed gravely, and at many points, in the duty of a tem- perate and cautious treatment of it Just as, un- happily, we have also failed, and often more grossly failed, in every other duty. But, as the lines and laws of duty at large remain unobscured, notwith- standing the imperfections everywhere diffused among those bound to follow it, so we may trust that sufficient light yet remains for us, if duly fol- lowed, whereby to establish the authority and sufficiency of Holy Scripture for its high moral and spiritual purposes. For the present, I have endeavored to point out that the operations of criticism properly so called, affecting as they do the literary form of the books, leave the questions of substance, namely, those of history, miracle, and revelation, substantially where they found them. I shall, in some of the succeeding chapters, strive to show, at least by specimens, that science and OF HOL Y SCRIPTURE, 35 research have done much to sustain the historical credit of the books of the Old Testament : that in doing this they have added strength to the argu- ment which contends that in them we find a divine revelation : and that the evidence, rationally viewed, both of contents and of results, binds us to stand where our forefathers have stood, upon the im- pregnable rock of Holy Scripture. II. THE CREATION STORY. " The nsing birth Of Nature from the unapparent deep." Paradise Lost, B. VII. As respects the general character of the narrative which I have called the Creation Stor>^ I begin by reminding the reader that it has awakened the warm admiration of many who refuse to allow to it a divine origin. Hackel, in his "History of Creation," excludes entirely the idea of revelation. He also says (I think incorrectly) that the Mosaic narrative erro- neously asserts the earth to be the central point of the whole universe; and again, that man was the final aim of the creation of the earth. But upon the narrative he bestows a high eulogium. "Two great and fundamental ideas, common also to the non-miraculous theory of development, meet us in 36 THE CREA TION STOR V. 37 this Mosaic hypothesis of creation, with surprising clearness and simplicity: the idea of separation or differentiatioti, and the idea of progressive develop- ment or perfecting. Although Moses looks upon the results of the great laws of organic develop- ment (which we shall later point out as the neces- sary conclusions of the doctrine of Descent) as the direct actions of a Constructing Creator, yet in his theory there lies hidden the ruling idea of a pro- gressive development of the originally simple mat- ter. We can therefore bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into Nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a so-called "divine revelation."^ The negative unequivocally conveyed in the last words of this remarkable pas- sage embodies the very question which I now seek to try upon the evidence before us. In recent controversies on the trustworthiness of the Scripture record, much has been thought to I From the translation of Hackel's " History of Creation," Lon- don, 1876, Chap. II. p. 33. So Professor F. P. Lesley, in the Forum (New York) for October, 1890, at p. 211, eulogizes the pre-Abrahamic 38 THE CREA TION STOR Y, turn on the Creation Story; an J the special and separate importance thus attached to it has given it a separate and prominent position in the public view. This constitutes in itself a reason for address- ing ourselves at once to the consideration of it, apart from any more general investigation touch- ing either the older Scriptures at large, or any of the books which collectively compose them. But there are broader and deeper reasons for this separate consideration. It is suggested, first, by the form which has been given to the relation itself The narrative, given with wonderful suc- cinctness in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis and in the first three verses of the second chapter, stands distinct, in essential points, from all that follows in the Scriptures. It is a solitary and strik- ing example of the detailed exposition of physical facts. For such an example we must suppose a purpose ; and we have to inquire what that purpose was. Next, it seems as it were to trespass on the story (at the same time pushing negation unto its highest extrava- gance) as " a product of the genius of the last and most splendid age of the nation, just before its dispersion on the face of the earth." THE CREA TION STOR K 39 ground of science, and, independently of investiga- tion and of evidence, to assert a rival, nay, a para- mount authority. And further, forming no part, unless towards its close, of the history of man, and nowhere touching directly on human action, it severs itself from the rest of the sacred volume, and at first sight appears rather as a preface to the history than as a part of it. And yet there are signs, in subsequent portions of the volume, that this Tale of the Creation was regarded by the Hebrews as both authoritative and important. For it gave form and shape to portions of their literature in the central department of its devotions. Nay, traces of it may, perhaps, be found in the Book of Job (Job 38), where the Almighty challenges the patriarch on the primordial works of creation. More clearly in Psalm 104, where we have light, the firmament, the waters and their severance and confinement within bounds ; a suc- cession the same as in Genesis. Then follow mixedly the animal and vegetable creations, and man as the climax crowns the series in verse 23. 40 THE CREA TION STOR Y. So in Psalm 148 we have first (1-6) the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and the atmosphere; then, again mixedly, the earth and the agents affecting it, with the animate population (7-10), and lastly man. If there be some variations in the order of the details, still the idea of consecutive develop- ment, or evolution, which struck so forcibly the intelligence of Hackel, is clearly impressed upon the whole. At a later date, and only (so far as is known) in the Greek tongue, we find a more nearly exact resemblance in the Song of the Three Chil- dren. The heavenly bodies and phenomena occupy the first division ot the Song; then the earth is invoked to bless the Lord, with its mountains, vegetation, and waters ; then the animate popula- tion of water, air, and land follows in the order pursued by the first chapter of Genesis; while, as in Genesis, there is no separate mention of the great kingdom of the Reptiles. Then follow the children of men ; and these fill the closing portion of the Song. The most noteworthy di/Tferences (which, however, are quite secondary) seem to be that there THE CREA TION STOR V. 41 is no mention of the first beginnings of vegetation, and no supplemental notice, as in Genesis i: 24-30, of any reptiles. But also the sun, moon, and stars, which are cate- gorically placed later in Genesis than vegetation, precede in the Song any notice of the earth. Let not this difference be hastily called a discrepancy. Each mode is to be explained by considering the character and purpose of the composition. In Genesis, it is a narrative of the action ; in the Song, it is a panorama of the spectacle. Genesis, as a rule, refers each of the great factors of the visible world to its due order of origin in time ; the Song enumerates the particulars as they are presented to the eye in a picture, where the transcendent eminence of the heavenly bodies as they are, and especially of the sun, gives to this group a proper priority. Each co-ordination would have been improper in the other place, but is proper in its own. But a yet more remarkable proof of the influence exercised by this great chapter is found in the fact 42 THE CREATION STORY, that it conveyed to the Hebrews the idea of Crea- tion pure and simple. But this Creation Story may have an importance for us even greater than it had for the Hebrews ; nay, greater than it could have in any of those ages when all men believed, perhaps even too freely, in special modes of communication from the Deity to man, and had not a stock of courage or of audacity sufficient to question the possibility of a divine revelation. For we have now to bear in mind that the Book of Genesis generally contains a portion of human history, and that all human history is a record of human experience. It is not so with the introductory recital ; for the contents of it lie out- side of, and anterior to, the very earliest human experience. How came, then, this recital into the possession of a portion of mankind ? It is conceivable that a theory of Creation, and of the ordering of the world, might be bodied forth in poetry, or might, under given circumstances, be, as now, based on the researches of natural science. But, in the first place, this recital cannot be due THE CREA TION STOR V. 43 to the mere imagination of a poet. It is in a high degree, considering its brevity, methodical and elaborate. And there is nothing either equaling or within many degrees approaching it, which can be set down to the account of poetry in other spheres of primitive antiquity, whatever their poeti- cal opulence may have been. Further, the early Hebrews do not appear to have cultivated or de- veloped any poetical faculty at all, until we come down to that which was exhibited in strictly reli- gious work, such as the devotions of the Psalms, and (principally) the discourses and addresses of the Prophets. As they were not, in a general sense, poetical, so neither were they in any sense scientific. By tradi- tion, and by positive records, we know pretty well what kinds of knowledge were pursued in veiy early ages. They were most strictly practical. Take, for example, astronomy among the Chaldees, or medicine among the Egyptians. The necessities of life then, as now, pressed upon man. We may say with much confidence that in remote antiquity 44 THE CREA TION STOR Y. THE CREA TION STOR Y, 45 there existed no science like geology, aiming to give a history of the earth. So, again, there was no cosmogony, professing to convey a history of the kosmos, as it was then understood; which would have included, together with the earth, the sun, moon, planets, and atmosphere. When, at a later date, speculation on physical origins began, it was rather on the primary idea than on any systematic arrangement or succession. With the Ionic, which was the earliest school of philosophy, the human intelligence was mainly busied in contending for one or other of the known material elements, as entitled to the honors of the primordial cause. Nor had even the Greeks or Romans formulated any scheme in any degree ap- proaching that of Genesis for order and method, so late as the time when they became acquainted with the Hebrew Scriptures, through their translation into Greek. The opening statement of Ovid in the " Metamorphoses " is remarkable ; * but at the 1 Ov. " Met." I., 1-31. It is noteworthy that in the verses which follow (32-88). where the poet adheres less closely to the lines of Genesis, he also travels farther from scientific results. time when he wrote, the Book of Genesis had long been accessible to educated persons in what was then the chief literary language of the Romans. There is not, then, the smallest ground for treating the Mosaic cosmogony, whether in the way of original or copy, as the offspring of scientific inquiry. Again, to speak of it as guesswork would be irrational. There were no materials for guessing. There was no purpose to be served by guessing. For a record of the formation of the world we find no purpose in connection with the ordinary neces- sities or conveniences of life. Not to mention that, down to this day, there exists no cosmogony which can be strictly called scientific, though there are theories both ingenious and beautiful, which appar- ently are coming to be more and more accepted ; these, however, being of an origin decidedly late even in the history of modern physics. But, further, as the Tale of Creation is not poetry nor is it science, so neither, according to its own aspect or profession, is it theory at all. The method 46 THE CREA TION STOR K here pursued is that of historical recital. The per- son, who composes or transmits it, seems to believe, and to intend others to believe, that he is dealincr with matters of fact. But these matters of fact were, from the nature of the case, altogether inaccessible to inquiry, and impossible to obtain by our ordinary mental faculties of perception or reflection, inas- much as they da^-e before the creation of our race. If it is, as it surely professes to be, a serious con- veyance of truth, it can only be a communication from the Most High; a communication to man and for the use of man, therefore in a form adapted to his mind and to his use. If, thus considered, it is true, then it carries stamped upon it the proof of a divine revelation; an assertion which cannot com- monly be sustained from the nature of the contents as to this or that minuter portion of Scripture at large. If, when thus considered, it proves not to be true, we then have to consider what account of it we are in a condition to give. I cannot say that to me this appears an easy undertaking. " If," says Pro- T//E CREA TION STOR Y. 47 fessor Dana with much reason, " it be true that the narration in Genesis has no support in natural science, it would have been better for its religious character that all the verses between the first and those on the creation of man had been omit- ted." ^ It has indeed been advanced by some, as a mode of obviating any difficulty arising from supposed conflict with scientific results, that the credit of Holy Scripture is not involved in statements which have reference to physical adjustments, but only in moral or spiritual subject-matter and purpose; to which, as a revelation from God, it is exclusively related. This is a highly important proposition ; especially when it is considered that we are professors of a religion which rests not so much on abstract princi- ples, as on matters of fact. It may be true that the Bible is not a revelation upon physics ; and yet it may be also true that physical facts may stand in immediate connection with other facts in the high- * •• Creation." By Professor Dana. Oberlin, O., 1S85 ; p. 202. 48 THE CREA TION STOR Y, est sense moral and spiritual, and that this connec- tion cannot be severed. Let us suppose a case such as the Incarnation, or the Resurrection. Here there is a spiritual power declared to have been at work, which lies at the very heart of our religion ; but its operation issues in a physical fact. In such cases the credit of the revelation is attached to a physical fact, because that fact is inseparable from the revelation itself. It is plain, therefore, that the proposition cannot be accepted in its full breadth. It has at once to undergo an important limitation, and to be confined to physical facts which are not annexed to a moral or spiritual pur- pose. But then arises the further question, are there, in the Holy Bible, apart from mere phrases and forms of expression, any announcements of physical fact, except such as are associated with a purpose of that nature? It must be borne in mind that we have not now to do with errors incidental to transmission or translation. Or with the use of poetical figure, such as when it is said that " God is gone up with i I THE CREA TION STOR V. A9 a shout" (Psa. 47 : 5). Nor with familiar phrases which have only a relative truth, such as the sun- rise and the sunset. Nor with the case of parable, such as the magnificent vision of the dry bones in Ezekiel : for, in a parable, no truth is understood to be conveyed in the parts, but only in their relation to one another. In none of these cases, speak- ing generally, do we understand the sacred writer to be recording matters of fact. It may almost be said that it is of the nature of a parable to be allegorical, that is to say to borrow its particulars from a foreign subject-matter. If so, the great chapter which opens the Bible would be a strangely incongruous parable, for there is no lesson to be taught except the lesson that is conveyed in and by the particulars themselves. It will be generally felt that none of the parallels or illustrations which have been cited will avail for the purpose of covering the Creation Story, which forms in itself an elaborate and carefully con- structed whole, dealing throughout with matters of fact, and bearing every mark that as a whole it \ t-*JMl*lii''>l^"*-'""SJ«' ■ *■" 50 THE CREATION STORY. was meant by those who recorded it to be beh'eved. I will presently endeavor to show its inseparable association with moral and religious purpose. At present I will only contend that if we found physical expositions of this kind in Scripture which were not thus associated we should have to ask ourselves how and why they came there; and should, with Professor Dana, wish them away. If then there be difficulties presented to us, as I admit that of late years has been extensively sup- posed, I for one must decline to accept a mode of escape which is hardly susceptible of definition, and which will hardly bear a close examination. We may find a happier issue to the argument in the truth, as well as the majesty, of the narrative itself But the truth, or trueness, of which I speak, is truth or trueness as conveyed to and comprehended by the mind of man; and, further, by the mind of man in a comparatively untrained and infant state. I cannot, indeed, wholly shut out from view the possibility that casual imperfections may have crept into the record. Setting aside, however, that possi- THE CREA TION STOR K 51 bility, let us consider the conditions of the case, in its heart and substance, as they are exhibited to us by reasonable likelihood; for, if the communication were divine, we may be certain that it would on that account be all the more strictly governed by the laws of the reasonable. In an address^ of smgular ability, on " The Dis- cord and Harmony between Science and the Bible," Dr. Smith, of the University of Virginia, has drawn some very important distinctions. In the depart- ment of natural science, and in the department of Scriptural record, the question lies " between the present interpretation of certain parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the present interpretation of certain parts of nature." 2 "We must not too hastily as- sume that either of these interpretations is absolute and final." " The science of one epoch is to a large extent a help, which the science of the next uses and abandons." Dr. Smith points out as an exam- ple that, down to the early part of the present cen- 1 New York : Hatcham. The Address is dated July 27, 1882. * /did., p. 3. 52 THE CREA TION STOR K tury, Newton's projectile theory of light seemed to be firmly established, but that it has given place to the theory of undulation, "which has now for fifty years reigned in its stead." Hence, he observes, we should not be too much elated by the discovery of harmonies, nor should we receive with impatience the assertion of contradictions. Throughout, it is probable, and not demonstrative, evidence with which we are dealing. There should always be a certain element of reserve in our judgments on par- ticulars ; yet probable evidence may come indefi- nitely near to demonstration ; and even as, while fall- ing greatly short of it, it may morally bind us to action, so may it, on precisely the same principles, bind us to belief. What we have to do is, to deal with the evidence before us according to a rational appreciation of its force. It may show on this or that particular question the concord, or it may show the discord, between alleged facts of nature and alleged interpretations of Scripture ; or it may leave the question open, for want of sufficient evidence, either way, on which to ground a conclusion. TJ/E CREA TION STOR Y. 53 It is by these principles, and under these limita- tions, that L desire to see the question tried in the terms in which I think it ought to be stated; namely, not whether the recitals in Genesis at each and every point have an accurately scientific form, but whether the detailed statements of the Creation Story, as a whole, appear to stand in such a rela- tion to the facts of natural science, so far as they have been ascertained, as to warrant or require our concluding that the statements have proceeded, in a manner above the ordinary manner, from the Au- thor of the creation itself.^ Those who maintain the affirmative of this propo- sition have, by opponents, been termed Reconcilers; and it is convenient, in a controverted matter, to have the power of reference, by a single word, to the proposers of any given opinion. The same » See the attractive paper of Professor Pritchard. in his " Occasional Thoughts," Murray, 1889. He says, on p. 261, " I cannot accept the Proem as being, or even as intended to be, an exact and scientific account of Creation," but adds that it "contains within it elements of that same sort of superhuman aid or superintendence, which is gene^ rally understood by the undefined term of inspiration" 54 THE CREA TION STOR Y. rule 01 convenience may perhaps justify me in des- ignating those who would assert the negative by the name of Contradictionists. The recorder of the Creation Story in Genesis I may designate by the name of Moses himself, or the Mosaist, or the Mo- saic writer. This would not be reasonable, if there were anything extravagant in the supposition that there is a groundwork of fact for the tradition which treats Moses as the author of the Pentateuch. But such a supposition, in whole or in part, is sustained by many and strong presumptions, and I bear in mind that even the modern criticism does not always refuse to acknowledge that there is a strong Mosaic element in the Pentateuch.' It does not seem too much to say, that the con- veyance of scientific instruction as such would not, under the circumstances of the case, be a reason- able object for the Mosaic writer of this chapter to pursue; for the condition of primitive man, as it is hAvnt' " ^'"'f ""£ '" das Alte Testament (1878), sec. ,8 ; edited by Wellhausen, who contributes introductory sections (1-3) and other pass..ges, sometimes of dissent, without expressing any dissent from this fundamental proposition. THE CREA TION STOR V. 55 ,l portrayed in the Book of Genesis, did not require, perhaps did not admit of, scientific instruction. On the other hand, it could not but be a reasonable object then to convey to the mind of man, such as he actually was, a moral lesson drawn from and founded on that picture, that assemblage of created objects, which was before his eyes, and with which he lived in perpetual contact. We have, indeed, to consider both what lesson it would be most rational to convey, and by what method it would be most rational to stamp it, as a living lesson, on the mind by which it was to be received. And the question finally to be decided is not, whether, according to the present state of knowledge, the recital in the Book of Genesis is at each several point altogether precise or complete. It may be like the construc- tion of the human eye, which is said not to con- form with absolute strictness to the pure theory of science, but which is still held to be the construction best adapted to the service which the organ has to perform. It may here be general, there particular; it may here describe a continuous process, and it / 56 THE CREA TION STOR K may there make large omissions, if the things omitted were either absolutely or comparatively immaterial to its purpose; it may be careful of the actual succession in time, or may deviate from it, according as the one or the other best subserved the general and principal aim; so that the true question, I must repeat, is no more than this : Do the propositions of the Creation Story in Genesis appear to stand in such a relation to the facts of natural science, so far as they are ascertained, as to warrant or require our concluding that these propo- sitions proceeded, in a manner above the ordinary manner, from the Author of the visible creation ? What, then, may we conceive to have been the moral and spiritual lessons which the Mosaist had to communicate, and not only to communicate, but to infuse or to impress ? I do not presume to attempt an exhaustive enumeration. But it is not difficult to specify a variety of purposes which the narrative was calculated to promote, and which were of great and obvious value for the education of mankind. Some important distinctions have to be drawn THE CREA TION STOR V. S7 between the first verse of the chapter, and the nar- rative which follows. Much of that narrative falls within the compass of the thought of man. It also may be said to fall within the sphere of his experi- ence; inasmuch as the facts of the material creation are before us. Reasoning upon them, with various degrees of probability or certainty we travel on parallel lines with the Mosaic story, and have to examine whether what we thus learn confirms or impugns it. These considerations do not apply to the sublime announcements conveyed in the first verse of the chapter. Creation in itself is eminently (to use a modern phrase) unthinkable. And it can- not be tested or called to account by any knowl- edge we have obtained, or may obtain, of things created, being essentially anterior to them all. The more we contemplate, the more we examine, this proem to the Book of Genesis, the more we shall perceive it to be the great foundation-chapter of the entire Scripture, New as well as Old. But the first verse seems to be the foundation of this foundation-chapter. We may well ask, why it is * [iM tSM ' I; JinUtutm^ti^i {»»><' ..^ |-llfe«i-»^i..r«.--.-. MikLi^i 56 THE CREATION STORY. may there make large omissions, if the things omitted were either absolutely or comparaUvely immaterial to its purpose; it may be careful of the actual succession in time, or may deviate from it. according as the one or the other best subserved the general and principal aim; so that the true question, I must repeat, is no more than this : Do the propositions of the Creation Story in Genesis appear to stand in such a relation to the facts of natural science, so far as they are ascertained, as to warrant or require our concluding that these propo- sitions proceeded, in a manner above the ordinary manner, from the Author of the visible creation ? What, then, may we conceive to have been the moral and spiritual lessons which the Mosaist had to communicate, and not only to communicate, but to infuse or to impress ? I do not presume to attempt an exhaustive enumeration. But it is not difficult to specify a variety of purposes which the narrative was calculated to promote, and which were of great and obvious value for the education of mankind. Some important distinctions have to be drawn THE CREA TION STOR Y. 57 between the first verse of the chapter, and the nar- rative which follows. Much of that narrative falls within the compass of the thought of man. It also may be said to fall within the sphere of his experi- ence; inasmuch as the facts of the material creation are before us. Reasoning upon them, with various degrees of probability or certainty we travel on parallel lines with the Mosaic story, and have to examine whether what we thus learn confirms or impugns it These considerations do not apply to the sublime announcements conveyed in the first verse of the chapter. Creation in itself is eminentiy (to use a modern phrase) unthinkable. And it can- not be tested or called to account by any knowl- edge we have obtained, or may obtain, of things created, being essentially anterior to them all. The more we contemplate, the more we examine, this proem to the Book of Genesis, the more we shall perceive it to be the great foundation-chapter of the entire Scripture, New as well as Old. But the first verse seems to be the foundation of this foundation-chapter. We may well ask, why it is 58 THE CMEA TION STOR Y. that the objections of the sceptical school, covered with the name and the profession of natural science, have been taken in detail to geological or biological particulars, and have not been aimed at the chal- lenge conveyed in the opening words : "In the beginning, God created the heavens AND THE earth." For here is enunciated a proposition of which it may be justly said that, if it be false, we have no need either to impugn it or to defend the statements of a document discredited ab initio. But on the other hand that, if it be true, its truth includes in principle and carries along with it the truth of all those statements of the Holy Scriptures which most seriously strain the enfeebled faculty of modern belief, for there is no conceivable manipu- lation of, or transaction with, matter, neariy so marvellous as the stupendous conception of calling it out of nothing into existence. This idea, made familiar by revelation to Jews and Christians, was the one idea that the unaided intellect of man proved totally incompetent to conceive. Of rela- THE CREA riON STOR Y. 59 tions between matter and spirit, and of every sort of change ensuing upon those relations, it could conceive in a measure, and that readily enough ; but to the idea of pure and sheer creation it does not seem to have been at any time able to ascend. Why should belief in the transformation of water into wine be difficult for those who believe already that there was once a condition of things, when none of the elements out of which each is com- pounded had any existence at all ? And we may observe that, in this matter of creation, there is no room for the fallacy often applied to the things which God did not (as such) create, but only made : the fallacy which beguiles men into thinking that by graduating a process we alter its essential char- acter, and into thus establishing a false antithesis between evolutionary and creative power. One single step in the work of creating out of nothing is equal to a thousand. It is an operation unfathom- able in idea, but so definite in result that it stands ever before us in its virgin integrity. It must be accepted or refused : it cannot be tampered with. 6o THE CREA TION STOR K And if accepted it draws after it, as far as regards possibility, not only what may be called the minor miracles of Scripture, but also those greatest miracles which are the corner stones of the Chris- tian Creed, the Resurrection, and, above all, the Incarnation. He, who calls out of nothing both matter and life, must surely be beyond questioning by us as to the conditions which his wisdom may be pleased to establish between them and his own Divine Essence, or the manner in which he may determine to impress himself upon them. Not that such high processes are hereby brought within the reach of our understanding, for no one of the count- less operations either of material or immaterial change can radically enter within those narrow bounds: but no rational objection can lie against them from those who have already admitted into their categories of belief what lies above and be- yond them all. Thus, then, the first chapter of Genesis is the foundation-chapter of the Bible, and the first verse is its foundation-verse. Let us now pass on to the detailed narrative. T//E CREA TION STOR K 6i I have said that the mind of man did not, by its unaided powers, ascend to the idea of creation out of nothing. This conception, maintained all along by the Jewish and the Christian tradition, has be- come to us part of the very alphabet of religious thought, and taken its place among those ele- mentary and familiar ideas which, like certain vital functions of the body, remain within our knowl- edge, but pass beyond our habitual consciousness. Yet this idea, now the property of " babes and sucklings," was entirely beyond the competency of the most instructed heathen to embrace. Not only before, but after, the publication of the Hebrew Scriptures to the world through the vehicle of the Greek language, the mind of cultivated man failed to grasp the idea of Creation, and was unable to advance beyond the manipulation of pre-existing matter. It seems obvious that Ovid, when he wrote the proem to his Metamorphoses, had himself been drawing, whether directly or through others, from the Septuagint. He evidently conceives the first making of the world to have been only a modifica- 62 THE CREA TION STOR Y. tion of forms, and hence finds it to be an appropriate preamble to the scries of transformations which fur- nished the subject of his poem. And hence the Greek tongue, with all its wealth and resource, had no word to express creating as distinct from moulding, shaping, or framing; and while our Bible, following the Hebrew in its primitive record, tells' us (Gen. 2:3) that God rested from "all he had created and made," the Greek version drops the distinction, and speaks only of the things that he fashioned. But, on the one hand, if our translators have been faithful to their original, it is worthy of remark with what uniformity the sacred books apply the word ''create" to the origin, and not to any mere modification of existence. And, on the other hand, the Greek tongue itself applied dis- tinctively one of its own words, different from that which signifies moulding or fashioning, to discharge imperfectly the oflfice which is perfectly fulfilled (as we are told) by the Hebrew in the first chapter of Genesis. It is probable that that chapter, and even the -i^:imm^^m>m- 't<»~**t^s^wmm,Mmim,mm«mfiM THE CREA TION STOR Y. ^l first words of that chapter, are absolutely the parents of the idea of Creation, that is to say of summoning into existence: unless it can be shown that it came into the possession of man from some other source also. Into the possession of the most intellectual and cultivated portion of man we know that it did not so come. And I own it ap- pears to me that those believers in revelation who depose the opening chapter from the position of authoritative Scripture because it relates to phys- ical matters, place themselves in this dilemma, that the great conception of Creation properly so called, although it has been humanly announced, has never been revealed. Yet it is the idea, which lies at the very root of the relation between the Al- mighty and mankind, and supplies the basis and the measure of the duties which we owe to the Fountain of our being. Secondly, it is plain that this chapter presented to the mind of man the fact that he had a common origin with the rest of Nature, both animate and inanimate, and thereby that he was constituted in 64 THE CREA TION STOR Y. a definite relation to all created things. As we know through subsequent communications from the same high source, this is a relation partly of dominion. But is of dominion regulated by duty : and duty governing our conduct generally governs that part of it which concerns the animal creation by an appropriate law. We are to use those which are appointed to our use, whether for labor or for food, with the obligation to avoid excess in the one, and infliction of unnecessary pain in the other. We are to destroy those which are noxious to human subsistence. And we are to avoid all wanton injury, as to the greatest, so also to the least among them. In those men or women who are by nature tenderly disposed. Nature itself may supply the needful dispositions. But one of the sad and afflicting incidents in our nature as it actually stands is the widespread proneness, even in childhood, to cruelty : to a cruelty not syste- matic or reasoned, but what may be termed a cruelty of indifference, which treats the inferior creatures as without any interest or feeling that THE CREA TION STOR Y. 6S should be taken into account, and which instinc- tively feels delight in the exercise of power although without an object. And among the consequences probably due to this proclamation of fellowship between man and beast are those enactments of the Mosaic law which make provision on behalf of laboring animals. " Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn" (Deut. 25 : 4). A thing probably unexampled in the early history of man. There is, however, a larger sense of the fellow- ship with Nature in which it extends to the in- animate, and has a positive and no longer a merely negative character. There is no idea I think more foreign to classical literature than that God is the God of animals as well as of man, and the God of lifeless nature as well as of animals. But these noble ideas took root in the comparatively un- developed minds of the Hebrews. "The lions, roaring after their prey, do seek their meat from God," and " When thou hidest thy face they are troubled; when thou takest away their breath 5 (£ THE CREA TION STOR V. they die, and are turned again to their dust" (Psa. 104 : 21, 22). Then we may pass to things inanimate, which not only amaze, but also gladden the soul of the Psalmist. "Thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy works: and I will rejoice in giving praise for the operations of thy hands. O Lord, how glorious are thy works: thy thoughts are very deep." And again, " I will consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained" (Psa. 92 : 4, 5, and 8 : 3). Thus the train of ideas, which flowed downward through the ages from the great chapter, opened to the Hebrews a rich treasury of thoughts by placing them in communion with uni- versal Nature, a great book of God. And it is a singular reflection that this book of Nature was opened to them alone, so far as we know, among the kindred races of the ancient world; at any rate, it was absolutely closed to Greeks and Romans as regarded any duty or piety con- nected with it. Some have even gone so far as to contend that the ancients of the two classic penin- T/TE CREA TION STOR K ^7 sulas had no perception at all of beauty in the landscapes, which were so lavishly spread before their ^y^s. And if this statement cannot be sus- tained in its full breadth,^ yet it is I believe undeni- able that they most rarely and feebly touched that boundless field of observation which has not only added a vast department to modern art, but has enriched our literature in prose and verse, and has found food for the nurture of such a genius as Wordsworth, never to be forgotten while British poetry holds its place in the grateful recollection of our race. It was not then for nothing that primitive tradi- tion was directed into a divergence from the usual course ordained for it, and that in this one place only of all the Bible it supplies us with a detailed and systematic statement of a great series of physical facts, with which we cannot lightly tamper, inasmuch as they hold on to high educative pur- * We seem to find instances in Virgil such as (probably) in Georg. II. ; more certainly in ^n. I. But we have the same idea conveyed a thousand or more years before Virgil in the Odyssey of Homer (IV. 606) with reference to the scenery of Ithaca. 68 THE CREA TION STOR Y. poses closely akin to the general aims of the sacred volume. To the foregoing considerations we may subjoin some further lessons conveyed to the primitive man by the Creation Story as it stands in Genesis. It presented to his mind, and by means of detail made him know and feel, what was the beautiful and noble home that he inhabited, and with what a fatherly and tender care Providence had prepared it for him to dwell in. There was a picture before his eyes. That picture was filled with objects of Nature, animate and inanimate. I say, one of its great aims may have been to make him know and feel by means of detail ; for wholesale teaching-, teaching in the lump, or abstract teaching, mostly ineffective even now, would have been wholly futile then. It was needful to use the simplest phrases, that the primitive man might receive a conception, thoroughly faithful in broad outline, of what his Maker had been about on his behalf So the Maker condescends to partition and set out his work, in making it a picture. THE CREA TION STOR Y. 69 But He proceeds further (and this is the climax) to represent himself as resting after it. This declaration is in no conflict with any scientific record. It, however, implies a license in the use of language, which for its boldness was never ex- ceeded in any interpretation, reconciled or other, which has been applied to any part of the text of Genesis. But it draws its ample warrant from the strong educative lesson that is to be learned from it ; for it invests both with majesty and authority the doctrine of a day of rest. Now, this doctrine was of the highest importance to the higher and inner life of man, while it was one which the daily cares of his existence were but too likely, as experi- ence too amply proved, to efface from his recol- lection. I contend then, finally, that the Creation Story was intended to have a special bearing on the great institution of the day of rest, or Sabbath, by exhib- iting it in the manner of an object lesson. Paley, indeed, has said that God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it (Gen. 2 : 3), not at that time but 70 THE CREA TTON STOR Y. for that reason. He is a writer much to be re- spected, and for many reasons ; but, in deahng with Holy Scripture, he was somewhat apt tp rest upon the surface. And now we have learned from Assyrian researches how many and how sharply traced are the vestiges, long anterior to the delivery of the law, of some eariy institution or command, which in that region evidently had given a special sanctity to the number seven, and, in particular, to the seventh day. Man then, child-like and sinless, had to receive a lesson which was capable of gradual development, and which spoke to something like the following effect : It has not been by a slight or single effort that the nature, in which you are moulded, has been lifted to its present level ; you have reached it by steps and degrees, and by a plan which, stated in rough outline, may stir your faculties, and help them onwards to the truth through the genial ac- tion of wonder, delight, and gratitude. This was a lesson on the facts of creation, perhaps quite large enough, so it seems to me, for the primitive man; THE CREA TION STOR V. 71 and one which, when he had heard and had begun to digest it, might well be followed by a rest for generations. And it further seems to have been vital to the efificiency of this lesson, from such a point of view, that it should have been sharply broken up into parts, although there might be in nature nothing, at any precise points of breakage or transition, to correspond physically with those divisions. They would become intelligible, significant, and useful on a comparison of the several processes in their developed state, and of the vast and measureless differences, whic!. in that state they severally present to contemplation. As, when a series of scenes are now made to move along before the eye of a spectator, his attention is not fixed upon the joints which divide them, but on the scenes them- selves, yet the joints constitute a framework as it were for each, and the idea of each is made more distinct and Hvely than it would have been if, with- out any note of division, they had run into one another. 72 THE CREA TION STOR K There is, however, another purpose, not yet named, and more remote yet perhaps even more vital, which appears to be powerfully served by the Creation Story of the Bible. In the prehistoric time, polytheism was very largely engendered by national distinctions, rivalries, and amalgamations By a ready and ingenious compromise each people became habituated to recognize a deity all-sufficient for its own wants, but unconcerned with those of others. In the course of time and of successive change, many of these deities might find themselves inducted into one and the same thearchy, or my- thological system, such as that of Assyria or of Olympus, and sitting there side by side. When this happened, the polytheistic idea had reached its full development. But the road to it lay princi- pally through the erection of separate thrones, each for the god of some particular national organi- zation ; and it was narrowed within the limits thus imposed upon the earlier and more proper con- ception of a Divine Governor. But, wherever the Creation Story of Genesis was truly received, the THE CREA TION STOR Y. 71 door was effectually closed for all thinking men against these co-equal and purely national gods. And how ? Because the God of Israel was the Maker of the world, and so of all the nations in it. It was his creation; and its inhabitants, whether terrestrial or celestial, were his creatures. Thus the narrative of this great chapter was nothing less than a Great Charter of monotheism; and though, in Israelitish practice, Baal and Ashtoreth might find their way into popular worship, and spread around them an infinity of corruption, the lines of the dogma, as a dogma, never were ob- scured, and the standard of authoritative reform still lifted up its head to heaven from the first day of idolatry to the last, when, under the pressure of the Exile, that form of mischief was finally submerged.^ This great idea, the universal authorship of crea- tion, lost rather than dilapidated elsewhere, was impressed upon the Hebrew mind with a force which found its way into the solemn worship of » For the further elucidation of the subject of this paragraph, see the Postscript to " The Creation Story." 74 THE CREATION STORY, the temple. It was not in Palestine alone that the orders of animals depended upon the providence of God, and that hill and valley, land and water, showed forth his image. It was the entire heavens which declared the glory of God, the entire firma- ment which showed forth his handiwork. The sun proclaimed the glory of its Maker from the utter- most part of the heavens unto the end of it again ; and the sound of things created is gone out into all lands, and their words into the ends of the world. . . . The sun cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course (Psa. 19 : 1-6). But this glorious sun, in his predestined course, was himself doing homage to his Lord and Maker. And the great chapter visibly reappears in the verse "One day telleth another, one night certifieth another " (Psa. 24 : i). This is without doubt noble poetry, but it is also nobler than any poetry. Mute Nature is instinct with life and vocal with worship, and all Creation, in its humblest orders giving a lesson to its loftiest, ministers to the glory of the Most High. THE ORE A TION STOR Y, 75 In order, then, to approach any attempt at com- parison between the record of Scripture and the record of Natural Science, we must consider first, as far as reasonable presumption carries us, what is the proper object of the scientist, and what was the proper object of Moses, or of the Mosaic writer, in the first chapter of Genesis. The object of the scientist is simply to state the facts of nature in the cosmogony as and so far as he can find them. The object of the Mosaic writer is broadly distinct ; it is, surely, to convey moral and spiritual training. This training was to be im- parted to human beings of child-like temperament and of unimproved, unopened understanding. It was his business to use those words which would best carry home the lessons he had to teach, which would carry jnost truth into the minds of those he taught. This observation has not the honors of originality. "He emphasized," says Rabbi Grossman,* in his interesting tract on Mai- monides, "as very proper and wise, the Talmudic 1 Page 12. Putnam : New York and London. 1890. 76 THE CREATION STORY. THE CREATION STORY. maxim, that the Torah employs such diction as is likely to be most communicative." In speaking of the Mosaic writer, I would, with- out presumption, seek to include any divine impulse which may have prompted him, or may have dic- tated any communication from God to man, in whatever form it may have been conveyed. With this aim in view, words of figure, though literally untrue, might carry more truth home than words of fact; and words less exact will even now often carry more truth than words superior in exactness. The truth to be conveyed was, indeed, in its basis physical ; but it was to serve moral and spiritual ends, and accordingly by these ends the method of its conveyance behooved to be shaped and pic- tured. I submit, then, that the days of Creation are neither the solar days of twenty-four hours, nor are they the geological periods which the geologist himself is compelled popularly, and in a manner utterly remote from precision, to describe as mil- lions upon millions of years. To use such language 77 as this is simply and properly to tell us that we have no means of forming a determinate idea upon the subject of the geologic periods. I set aside both these interpretations, as I do not think the Mosaist intended to convey an idea like the first, which would seem to be false, or like the second, which for his auditory would have been barren and unmeaning. Unmeaning, and even confusing in the highest degree ; for large statements in figures are well known to be utterly beyond comprehension for man at an early intellectual stage ; and I have myself, I think, shown ^ that, even among the Achaian or Homeric Greeks, the limits of numeri- cal comprehension were extremely narrow, and all large numbers were used, so to speak, at a venture, and with only a clouded comprehension. It seems to me that the " days " of the Mosaist are more properly to be described as chapters in THE HISTORY OF THE CREATION. That is to Say, the purpose of the writer, in speaking of the days, was * " Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age," Vol. III., Section on Number. 78 THE CREA TION SJ-QR Y. the same as the purpose of the historian is, when he divides his work into chapters. His object is to give clear and sound instruction. So that he can do this, and in order that he may do it, the periods of time assigned to each chapter are longer or shorter, according as the one or the other may minister to better comprehension of his subject by his readers. Further, in point of chronology, his chapters often overlap. He finds it needful, always keeping his end in view, to pursue some narrative to its close, and then, stepping backwards, to take up some other series of facts, although their exor- dium dated at a period of time on which he has already trespassed. The resources of the literary art, aided for the last four centuries by printing, enable the modern writer to confront more easily these difficulties of arrangement, and so to present his material to a reader's eye, in text or margin, as to place the texture of his chronology in harmony with the texture of the action he has to relate. The Mosaist, in his endeavor to expound the ordi- nary development of the physical worid, had no THE. CREA TION STOR Y. 79 such resources. His expedient was to lay hold on that which, to the mind of his time, was the best example of complete and orderly division. This was the day ; an idea at once simple, definite, and familiar. As one day is divided from another, not by any change visible to the eye at a given moment, yet effectually, by the broad chasm of the inter- vening night, so were the stages of the creative work several and distinct. Even if, like the lapse of time, they were without breach of continuity, yet the work of each, when viewed in its completeness, was broadly separated from that of every other. E^ch had its work, each had the beginning and the completion of that work, even as the day is begun by its morning, and completed and concluded by its evening. And now to sum up. In order that the narrative might be intelligible, it was useful to subdivide the grand operation. This could most effectively be done by subdividing it into periods of time. And further, it was well to choose that particular circum- scription or period of time which is the most definite So THE CREA TION STOR V. and best understood. Of all these, the day is clearly the best, as compared with the month or the year: first, because of its small and familiar compass ; and, secondly, because of the strong and marked division which separates one day from the days which precede and follow it, while the months and the years run into one another. Hence, we may reasonably argue, it is that not here only, but throughout the Scripture, and even down to the present time in familiar human speech, the day is figuratively used to describe periods of time, perfectly undefined as such, but defined, for practical purposes, by the lives or events to which reference is made. And if it be said there was a danger of its being misunderstood in this particular case, the answer is that such danger of misapprehension attaches in various degrees to all use of figurative language ; but figurative language is still used. And with reason, because the miV chiefs arising from such danger are rare and trivial, in comparison with the force and clearness which it lends to truth on its passage, through a thickened T//E CREA TION STOR K 8i atmosphere of folly, indifference, and prejudice, in- to the mind of man. In this particular case, the danger and inconvenience are at their minimum, the benefit at its zenith; for no moral mischief .ensues because some have supposed the days of the creation to be pure solar days of twenty-four hours, while the benefit has been that the grand conception of orderly development, and ascent from chaos to man, became among the Hebrew people a universal and familiar truth, of which other races appear to have lost sight. I may now part from the important and long- vexed discussion on the Mosaic days. But I shall further examine the general question, what is the true method, what the reasonable spirit, of interpretation to be applied to the details of the Creation Story? I will state frankly my opinion that, in this important matter, too much has some- times been conceded in modern days to the scientist and to the Hebraist, just as in former days too much was allowed to the unproved assumptions of the theologian. Now it is evident that the proper 6 82 THE CREA TION STOR Y, ground of the scientist and of the Hebraist respec- tively is unassailable, as against those who are nei- ther scientists nor Hebraists. On the meaning of the words used in the Creation Story, I, as an igno- ramus, have only to accept the statements of Hebrew, scholars, with gratitude for the aid received ; and in like manner the pronouncements of men skilled in natural science on the nature and succession of the orders of being, and on the transitions from one to the other. Not because their statements are inerr- able, but because they constitute the best working? material in our possession. Still they are the state- ments of men whose tide to speak with authority is confined to their special province ; and if we allow them without protest to go beyond it, and still to claim that authority when they are what is called at school " out of bounds," we are much to blame, and may suffer for our carelessness. I will now endeavor to illustrate and apply what has been said. The Hebraist says, I will con- duct you safely (as far as the case allows) to the meaning of the Hebrew words. And the scientist THE CREA TION STOR V. 83 makes the same promise in regard to the facts of the created orders, so far as they are exhibited by geological investigations into the crust of the earth. At first sight it may seem as if these two authori- tative witnesses must cover the whole ground, each setdng out from his own point of departure, the two then meeting in the midst, and leaving no un- occupied space between them. But my contention is that there is a ground which neither of them is entided to occupy in his character as a specialist, and on which he has no warrant for enterino- except in so far as he is a just observer and rea- soner in a much wider field. And what is the residuary subject-matter still to be disposed of? Not the meaning of the Hebrew words. The Hebraist has already given us their true equiva- lents in English. We now learn, for example, that the "whales" of Genesis i : 21 are not whales at all, but that they are aquatic monsters^ or great crea- » Rev. Ver., the great sea-monsters. " It seems.'on the whole, most probable, that the creatures here said to have been created were ser- pents, crocodiles, and other huge saurians, though possibly any large monsters of sea or river may be included" (Bp. Browne in /oc. 84 THE CREA TION STOR Y. tures; while we learn from the biologist that the whale is a late mammal. So geology has acquainted us what are the relative dates of the water and of the land populations, and has supplied much infor- mation as to reptiles, birds, and beasts. But there remains a great uncovered ground, and a great unsolved question. It is this. Given the facts as the geologist is led to state them, given the Hebrew tongue as the instrument through which the relator has to work, what are the terms, and what is the order and adjustment of terms, through which he can convey most of truth and force, with least of incumbrance and of impediment, to the mind of man, in the condition in which he had to deal with it ? Let me be permitted to say that the only spe- cialism, which can be of the smallest value here, is that of the close observer of human nature; of the student of human action, and of the methods which •• Speaker's Commentary "). Possibly a word signifying, whether wholly or inter alia, crocodiles, would convey a pretty clear idea to the mind of the Hebrews, after their sojourn in Egypt. On the other hand, it may be asked what reason can be given for construing the word in this limited sense. THE CREA TION STOR K 85 Divine Providence employs in the conduct of its dealings with men. Certainly I can lay no claim to be heard here more than any other person. Yet will I say, that any man whose labor and duty, whether for several scores of years or for a shorter term, has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is J>ro tanto perhaps in a better posi- tion to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of natural sciences as such. I will now endeavor to try some portions of the case which turn upon verbal difficulty. At the outset of the narrative the relator says, that "the earth was without form and void" (Gen. 1 : 2) and that " the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Nay, how is this? says the Hebraist. The Hebrew word for earth means earth, and the word used for water never means anything except water. But according to the beautiful theory, which has during the last half- S6 THE CREA HON STOR Y. century won so largely the adhesion of the scientific world, and which seems to be mainly called the nebular theory, at the commencement of the pro- cess which Genesis describes, and in its early stages, there was no earth, and there were no waters. Is the relator here really in fault? It seems to me that it might be quite as easy to cavil at the phrase nebular theory, though it be one in use among scientific men, as it is to find fault with these words of Genesis. For nothing can be more different than a nekila or cloud from a vast expanse of incandescent gaseous matter. In truth, we seem to have for our point of departure a time when all the elements and all the forces of the visible uni- verse were in chaotic mixture, whereas there could hardly be any sort of nebula until they had begun to be disengaged from one another. How then are we to judge of the employment of the word "earth" by the Mosaic writer? Is it not thus? He is dealing with an Adam, or with a primitive race of men, who have the earth under their eyes. He wants to give them an idea of its coming into THE CREA TION STOR K 87 existence. And he says what we may fairly para- phrase in this way: that which has now become earth, and was then becoming earth, the sohd well- defined form you see, was as yet without form and void ; epithets which I am told might be improved upon, but this is a matter by the way. So again with respect to water. The men for whom the relator wrote knew, perhaps, of no fluid except water, at any rate of none vast and practi- cally measureless in volume. What was the idea he had to convey ? It was not the special and dis- tinctive character of the liquid called water; it was the broad separation between solid as such, familiar, firm, immovable under his feet, and fluid as such, movable and fluctuating at large in space. No doubt the idea conveyed by the word "waters" is an imperfect idea, although waters are still waters at times when they may be holding vast quantities of solid in solution. But it was an idea easy, clear, and familiar up to the point of expressing forcibly the contrast between the ancient state of things, with its weltering waste, and the recent and defined 88 THE CREA TION STOR Y, conditions of the habitable earth. Could we ask of the relator more than that he should employ, among the words at his disposal, that which would come nearest to conveying a true idea ? And had he any word so good as water for his purpose, though it was but an approximation to the actual fact ? Dr. Driver^ describes the scene as that of a " surging chaos." An admirable phrase, I make no doubt, for our modern and cultivated minds ; but a phrase which, in my judgment, would have left the pupils of the Mosaic writer exactly in the condition out of which it was his purpose to bring them ; namely, a state of utter ignorance and total darkness, with possibly a little ruffle of bewilder- ment to boot. Another description claiming high authority is, an " uncompounded, homogeneous, gaseous condition " of matter ; to which the same observation will apply. Even now, it is only by rude and bald approximations that the practiced intellects of our scientists can bring home to us a conception of the actual process by which chaos 1 In an articte contributed to the " Expositor," January, 1886. THE CREA TION STOR Y. 89 passed into kosmos, or, in other words, confusion became order, medley became sequence, seeming anarchy became majestic law, and horror softened into beauty. Before censuring the Mosaist, who had to deal with grown children, let the adverse critic try his hand upon some little child. I believe he will find that the method and language of this relator are not only good, but superlatively good, for the aim he had in view, if once for all we get rid of standards ofinterpretation other than the genuine and just one, which tests the means employed by their relation to the end contemplated and sought. I now approach a larger head of objection, which is usually handled by the Contradictionists in a tone of confidence rising into the paean of triumph. But let me, before presuming to touch on objec- tions to particulars of the Creation Story, guard myself against being supposed to put forward any portion of what follows as unconditional assertion, or final comment on the text. The general situa- tion is this : Objectors do not hesitate to declare dogmatically that the great chapter is in contradic- 90 THE CREA TION STOR K tion with the laws and facts of Nature, and that attempts to reconcile them are futile and irrational. It is thus sought to close the question. My aim is to show that the question is not closed, and that the condemnation pronounced upon the Mosaist is premature ; and that a very different contention has to be considered, namely, whether this chapter does not in itself supply proof of a divine revelation. For this purpose I offer conjecturally, and in absolute submission to all that biology and geology, or other forms of science, have established, replies which are strictly provisional ; yet replies which I consider that the Contradictionist ought, together with other and weightier replies, to confute, or legitimately to consider, before he can be warranted in asserting the contradiction. But I proceed. How hopeless, is the cry, to reconcile Genesis with fact, when, as a fact, the sun is the source of h'ght, and yet in Genesis light is the work of the first day, and vegetation of the third, while sun, moon, and stars appear only on the fourth ! Nay, worse still. Whereas the morning and the evening" THE CREA TION STOR K 91 depend wholly on the rotation of the earth upon its own axis, as it travels round the sun, the Mosaist is so ignorant that he gives us not days only, but the mornings and the evenings of days before the sun is created. And so his narration explodes, not by blows aimed at it from without, but by its own internal self-contradictions. It is hissed, Hke a blundering witness, out of court. Not that this is the opinion of astronomers in general. Mr. Lock- yer, ^ for example, cites, with apparent approval, a passage from his very distinguished predecessor in the science, Halley, who says that the diffused lucid medium he had found, disposed of the difficulty which some have moved against the description Moses gives of the Creation, alleging that light could not be created without the sun. The first triad of days, says Professor Dana,^ sets forth the events connected with the inorganic his- tory of the earth. The second triad, from the fourth day to the sixth, is occupied with the events 1 Nineteenth Century, Nov., 1889, P- 788. * Dana's " Creation," p. 207. 92 THE CREA TION STOR Y, THE CREA TION STOR Y, 93 m of the organic history, from the creation of the first animal to man. He finds in the general struc- ture of the narrative a considerable degree of elabo- ration, an arrangement full of art The passage from verse 14 to verse 19 is, in one sense, a quali- fication of the order he thinks to have been laid down, inasmuch as the heavenly bodies belong to the inorganic division of the history. From an- other point of view, however, this arrangement contributes in a marked manner to the symmetry of the narrative. The first triad of days begins with the first and gradual detachment of light from the ''surging chaos;" the second, at the stage in which light has reached its final distribution. The central mass had now assumed with a certain amount of regularity (for, according to heliologists, the process does not even yet appear to be absolutely com- pleted) its spherical and luminous figure, after shed- ding off from itself the minor masses, each to find for itself its own orbit of rotation. Or, if we are to assume that the photosphere or vapor-envelope of the earth itself had obstructed the vision of the sun, we have, further, to assume^ that this obstacle had now disappeared or ceased to be impervious, and that the visibility of the sun was established. So that light, or the light-power, while diffused, ushers in the first division of the mighty process; the same light-power, concentrated by the operation of the rotary principle, and for practical purposes become such as we now know it, is placed at the head of the second division, the division that re- lates to organic life. It is remarkable that the subject of light is the only one which is dealt with in two separate sec- tions of the narrative. The gradual severance, or disengagement, of the earth from its present vest- ure, the atmosphere, and of the solid land from the ocean, are continuously handled in verses 6-10. Each of these processes may have been gradual, and may have passed through many stages. But, at verses 6 and 9, they are respectively summed up by a few peremptory words of command, as if they had been convulsive or instantaneous. Only the »Guyot, " Creation," Chap. XL, p. 92. 94 THE CREA TION STOR Y. grand result is made known. The avoidance of all attempt to explain the process seems to me only a proof of the wisdom which guided the for- mation of the tale. To the primitive man it would have become a barren puzzle; the wood might have been lost in the trees. As it now stands, mental confusion is avoided, and definite ideas are con- veyed. There seems, however, to be a special reason for the introduction of the heavenly bodies at this particular place. It was evidently needful at some place or other to give a specific account of the day, or compartment of time, which is employed throughout the chapter to mark the severance of the different stages of creation from each other. At what point of the narrative could this account be most properly and most accurately introduced ? In order to answer this question, let us consider the situation rather more at laree. It may be convenient, before entering into the fuller discussion, to set out some brief and synop- tical account of the contents of the (detailed) Crea- THE CREA TION STOR Y. 95 tion Story properly so called, which begins with the commencement of the first chapter, and ends with the third verse of the second. It may be divided first into two portions, the first of six days and the second of the seventh day only : the first presenting an account of the creation and fashioning of the world, and dealing with work done. The second is negative with respect to work done, and simply records the issue of a command, together with the grand analogy on which that command is based. When we turn to the creative work of the six days, we cannot limit it to the earth, as the opera- tions of the fourth day are concerned with the heavenly bodies ; nor can we extend it to the kosmos properly so called, or material universe, for we cannot tell how far the signification of the word "stars" in verse 1 6 may be meant to extend. It may refer to the creation of our own solar system, but we are not warranted in propounding this as a definition of its extent. Keeping in view the man- ner in which the whole narrative addresses itself 96 THE CREA TION STOR K to practical ends, the word "stars " maybe thought to include all those heavenly bodies of which the earliest astronomy took note. But the terms em- ployed define nothing as to time, except as regards the sun and moon, making only the general asser- tion that the Almighty was also the Creator of the stars. When speaking of the creation of the world, I employ the phrase in the sense thus indicated. It does not appear that the six days can be sepa- rated into portions by any perfectly clean division. The first four are mainly cosmological, but they include the beginning of vegetation on the surface of the earth. The two last of the days are zoologi- cal. But the sixth day, like the third, is mixed, and contains operations not homogeneous. Of geology, as it is commonly understood, the chapter takes no notice. It is confined to the air, the sea, and the earth surface. But the researches of geology into the changes which that surface has undergone in the lapse of time have most bene- ficially enlarged our knowledge of the chapter, and our means of appreciating its wonderful construe- THE CREA TION STOR V. 97 tion. The mixture of cosmic with terrestrial his- tory in the third day, and the return to cosmic narrative on the fourth, are readily to be accounted for by the aim of the chapter which apparently governs its sequences. But on account of this mixture I do not attempt subdivision of the days of creation, and simply bring together the leading operations in what is, I hope, a simple and intelli- gible form. Verse i. First we have the creation of the material universe, described as "the heavens and the earth." This takes place in the beginning. But it is not stated of w/iat it was the beginning. This is in the first verse; and there is no link of time between it and the second, which resumes the narrative inde- pendently of the first. So far as form is concerned, the chapter might have commenced with verse 2. But then we should not have possessed the pronouncement or dogma of universal creation. Verse 2. This verse proclaims first the formless condition of the earth. Now, as no earth can prop- 7 98 THE CREA TION STOR Y, eriy be said to exist except with form, the words amount to a declaration that the materials for the formation of the earth existed, but that the earth was not yet formed. Motion is then announced, and assigned to the divine actuating power. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters! That motion was imparted to these *' waters" is not directly mentioned; but such a mention would have conveyed no rational conception to the primi- tive man, who had nothing in his experience to correspond with it. I shall assume that what is known as the nebu- lar theory of creation stands good as a working hypothesis. We have then to observe, not that the Mosaic narrative is tied to it so as to be consistent with no other, nor that it gives a complete exposi- tion of it, but that, moving as it were on parallel lines, one chapter is so constructed as at no point to clash with it. Verses 3-5. Accordingly motion is at once fol- lowed by the disengagement of light. And this light is divided from the darkness. According to THE CREA TION STOR V, 99 the nebular theory, the rotation is followed by the formation of a central mass, and the detachment from it of minor masses, which as they continue to rotate expose successively the different portions of their surface to, and then remove it from, the cen- tral light. Thus the light is parted from the dark- ness and the basis of diurnal division laid. Verses 6-S. The first grand severance havino- thus been made, and something in the nature of a globular figure constituted, by rotation and gravi- tation, which was to become the earth, and the next grand severance is that of the earth from its atmospheric vesture described as the firmament or expanse, a portion of space accommodated as we now know to the conditions of animal life. This firmament "divides the waters from the waters," humidity being gradually condensed beneath into what we know as water, and also above our heads collected without such condensation into the clouds from whence proceed our supplies of rain. Verses 9,10. The second grand severance is fol- lowed by a third. Moisture being no longer dif- lOO THE CREA TION STOR K fused through the parts of space without sensible distinction, and the principal part of it being con- densed into water, this water becomes a mass lim- ited to a certain portion of space, beneath the firma- ment of air. Then this mass, local, circumscribed, becomes the sea, filling the great cavities of the earth surface, and leaving the portions not thus occupied to become comparatively dry. Thus land and sea are constituted. This severance, like the others, is described so to speak in the large, and leaves unnoticed all the particular arrangements for the successive production and deposition of the rocks; for it adheres throughout to its principle, which confines its statements within the Hmits of what IS suitable for the instruction of the primitive man. Verses ii, 12. Land and sea being thus con- stituted, and light having been their precursor, with heat, its twin-brother, which from other sources we know to have been produced as its concomitant through motion, we are possessed of the necessary antecedents of vegetation and vegetation follows. THE CREATION STORY. lOI The mode in which it is described will be presently considered. The acts of the fourth day are cosmological in themselves ; but they form a chapter of cosmology which is here treated in reference to the earth, as the sun and moon are to be the time-markers for mankind. In this view then we may be justified in saying that from henceforward the narrative only concerns itself with terrestrial arrangements. Verses 14-19. These verses have evidently the making of the sun and moon for their principal subject. It is subjoined without any particulars that God made the stars also. They are in such conjunction with the moon that they seemed fit for mention ; but their relation to man at large is com- paratively slight, and accordingly the mention is without detail. Verses 2023. The fifth day introduces us to animated life : an onward stride in the evolution of the world of so distinct a character, that it is marked by the use for the second time only of the Hebrew word which we are told denotes creation. The I02 THE CREATION STORY. work of this day is in two stages, and it is ushered in by a double command. First it is ordained that the waters shall bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and in verse 20 the com- mand, as it is stated in the Authorized Version, seems to cover the fowl that were to fly in the firmament of heaven. But the Revised Version completely separates the two portions of the fiat, (i) that the waters should bring forth, and (2) that the fowl should fly. Thus verse 20 is placed in complete harmony with verse 21, where in the Authorized as well as in the Revised Version the successive divine acts that produce the water and the air populations respectively are placed in regu- lar sequence. Verses 24-28. The work of the sixth day em- braces in its entirety the earth-population of animals and men. Animals are described with some variation of phrase, but apparently none of meaning. In verse 24 they are " the living creature after his kind," " catde and creeping thing and beast of the earth after his kind." In verse 25 they are THE CREATION STORY. 103 " the beast of the earth after his kind," and "cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind." Such is in general out- line the animal kingdom of the earth-population. Verses 26-3 1 . We now come to the grand con- summating act, the creation of man ; and here, for the third time, the Hebrew term indicative of crea- tion proper is used. The production of man is an- nounced under a form of consultation; the distinc- tion of male and female is included in the opera- tions of the day ; this eminent being is created in the image of God (26, 27), is endowed with general dominion over all living creatures, and with a title to all seed-bearing herbs and fruit-hearing trees for food (29), while the grasses are assigned to the in- ferior orders. Finally, a solemn benediction from the Creator inaugurates the great mission of man (28) upon the earth, and so the work of the six days stands complete in outline before us. Then follows in 2:1-3 the benediction of the seventh day. Having the whole process placed thus synopti- I04 THE CREA TION STOR V. cally before us, we proceed to the discussion in detail. The supposition is, that we set out with a vast seething mass, of such a nature as to contain all the elements which are to become the solids and liquids, the moist and dry, the heat and the non- heat or cold, the light and the non-light or darkness, that so largely determine the external conditions of our present existence. By degrees, according to the rarity or density of parts, the centripetal or the centrifugal force prevails. And accordingly, while the huge bulk of the sun con- solidates itself in the center, so likewise aggre- gations of matter (rings, according to Guyot,* which afterwards become, or may become, spheres), are detached from it to form the planets, under the agency of the same mechanical forces. All or some of these, in their turn, dismiss from their as yet ill-compacted surfaces other subaltern masses either to revolve around them as satellites, or other- wise, according to the balance of forces, to take * "Creation," pp. 67. 73. THE CREA TION STOR V. 105 their course in space. Meantime, the great cool- ing process, which is still in progress at this day, has begun. It proceeds at a rate determined for it by its particular conditions, among which mass and motion are of essential consequence ; for, other things being equal, a small body will cool faster and a large body will cool slower ; and a body moving more rapidly through space of a lower temperature than its own will cool more rapidly; while one which is stationary, or more nearly stationary, or which diffuses heat less rapidly from its surface into the colder space, will retain a high tempera- ture longer. Owing to these perhaps with other causes, the temperature of the earth-surface has been adapted to the conditions of human life, and of the more recent animal life, for a very long time. It had already been made suitable to those of the earlier animals, and of vegetation in a series of progressive orders, for we know not how much longer; while the sun, though gradually losing some part of his stock of caloric (whatever that may be), still remains at a temperature inordinately io6 THE CREA TION STOR V, high, and with a globular formation comparatively incomplete. Considering, then, what are the relations between the conditions of heat and those of moisture, and how the coatings of vapor, " the swaddling-band of cloud," ^ might affect the visibility of bodies, may it not be rash to affirm that the sun is, as a definite and compact body, older than the earth ? or that it is so old ? or that the Mosaist might not properly treat the visibility of the sun, in something like its present form, as best marking for man the practical inception of its existence ? or that, with heat, light, soil, and moisture ready to its service, primordial vegetation might not exist on the surface of a planet like the earth, before the sun had fully reached his matured condition of sufficiently com- pact, material, and well-defined figure, and of visi- bility to the human eye ? May not, once for all, the establishment of the relation of visibility be- tween earth and sun be the most suitable point for the relator in Genesis to bring the two into con- * Dana, p. 210. T//E CREATION STORK 107 nection? And here again I would remind the reader that the Mosaic days may be chapters in a history; and also that, not in despite of the law of series, but with a view to its best practi- cable application, the chapters of a histoiy may overlap. The priority of earth to sun, as given in the nar- rative, carries us so far as this: that vecretative work (of what kind I shall presendy inquire) is stated to be proceeding on the surface of the earth before any relation of earth with sun is declared. It is then declared in the terms, " and God made two great lights " (v. 16.) Now the making of earth is nowhere declared, but only implied. And who shall say that there is some one exact point of time in the continuous process which (according to the nebular theory) reaches from the first begin- ning of . rotation down to the present condition of the solar system, to which point, and to which alone, the term " making " must belong? But, un- less there be such a point, it seems very difficult to convict the Mosaic writer of error in the choice he io8 THE CREA TION STOR Y. has made of an opportunity for introducing the heavenly bodies into his narrative. I suppose that no apology is needed for his men- tioning the moon and (more shghtly) the stars as accessories m the train of the sun, and combining them all without note of time, although their sev- eral "makings" may have proceeded at different speeds. But here agam we find exhibited that principle of relativity to man and his uses, by which the writer in Genesis appears so wisely to steer his course throughout. We are told of "two great lights" (v. i6); and one of them is the moon. The formation of the stars is interjected soon after, as if comparatively insignificant. But the planet-stars individually are in themselves far greater and more significant than the moon, which is denominated a great light. In what sense is the moon a great light? Only in virtue of its relation to us. For its magnitude, as it is represented on the human retina, is far larger than that of the stars, and in certain states of atmosphere even seems to approach that of the sun. Its ofl^ce also THE CREA TION STOR V. 109 makes it the queen of the nocturnal heaven. So, then, the general upshot is, that the mention of the sun is introduced at that point in the cosmogonic process when, from the condition of our form and atmosphere, or of his, or of both, he had become so definite and visible as to be finally efficient for his office of dividing day from day, and year from year ; that the planets, being of an altogether sec- ondary importance to us, simply appear as his attendant company; and that to the moon, a body in itself comparatively insignificant, is awarded a rather conspicuous place, which, if objectively con- sidered, is out of proportion, but which at once falls into line when we acknowledge relativity as the basis of the narrative; by reason, first, of its visual magnitude in the heavens, and, next, of the great importance of the functions which this sat- ellite discharges on behalf of the inhabitants of the earth. Next, it is alleged that we have days with an evening and a morning before we have a sun to supply a measure of time for them. Doubtless no THE CREA TION STOR K there could be no approach to anything like an evening and a morning, so long as light was uni- formly diffused. But under the nebular theory the work of the first day implies an initial con- centration of light; and, from the time when light began to be thus powerfully concentrated, would there not be an evening and a morning, though imperfect, for any revolving solid of the system according as it might be turned towards, or from,' the center of the highest luminosity? To put it in the briefest words. When light begins, motion begms. When motion begins, there begins also a concentration of light. When light is concen- trated, a relation of day and night, and of evening and morning, or gradual night and gradual day IS established. So the distinction of days begins' at the right place (v. 5), and could not rightly have begun at any other place. But we have not yet emerged from the net of the Contradictionist, who lays hold on the vegetation verses (i i, 12) to impeach the credit of the Creation Story. The objection here becomes twofold. First, THE CREA TION STOR Y. Ill we have vegetation anterior to the sun ; and sec- ondly, this is not merely an aquatic vegetation for the support of aquatic life, nor merely a rude and primordial vegetation, such as that of and before the coal-measures, but a vegetation complete and absolute, including fern-grass, then the herb yield- ing seed, and lastly the fruit-tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself Here is the food of mammals and even of man provided, when neither of them was yet created. Nay, when neither of them was on the eve of existence, or was to take its place in the created order, until after many a long antecedent form of lower life had found its way into creation and undertaken its office there. First, as regards vegetation before the sun's per- formance of his present function in the heavens is announced. There were light and heat, atmos- phere with its conditions of moist and dry, soil prepared to do its work in nutrition. Can there be ground for saying that, with such provision made, vegetation could not, would not, take place? 112 THE CREA TION STOR K Let us, for argument s sake, suppose that the sun could now recede into an earlier condition, could go back by some few stages of that process through which he became our sun ; his material less com- pact, his form less defined, his rays more in- tercepted by the " swaddling-band " of cloud and vapor. Vegetation might be modified in character, but must it therefore cease? May we not say that a far more violent paradox would have been hazarded, and a sounder objection would have lain, had the Mosaic writer failed to present to us at least an initial vegetation before the era at which the sun had obtained his present degree of definiteness in spherical form, and the conditions for the transmission of his rays to us had reached substantially their present state ? But, then, it is fairly observed that the vegetation as described is not preparatory and initial, but full-formed; also, that any tracing of vegetation anterior to animal life in the strata is ambiguous and obscure. In the age of Protozoa, the earliest living creatures, the indications of plants are not fr r//E CREA TION STOR Y 113 determinable, according to the high authority of Sir J. W. Dawson. It is observed by Canon Driver "that the proof from science of the existence of plants before animals is inferential and a priori."^ Guyot, however, holds a directly contrary opinion, and says the present remains indicate a large pres- ence of infusorial protophytes in the early seas.^ But suppose the point to be conceded. Undoubt- edly, all a priori assumptions ought in inquiries of this kind to be watched with the utmost vigi- lance and jealousy. Still there are limits beyond which vigilance and jealousy cannot push their claims. Is there anything strange in the supposi- tion that the comparatively delicate composition of the first vegetable structures should have given way, and become indiscernible to us, amidst the shock and pressure of firmer and more durable material ? The flesh of the mammoth has, indeed, been preserved to us. and eaten by dogs in our own time, though coming down from ages which • •■ The Cosmogony of Genesis," in The Expositor. January, ,886, P' °'- • " Creation," X., p. 90. 8 114 THE CREA TION STOR Y. I we have no means of measuring; but then it was not exposed to the same pressure, and it subsisted under conditions of temperature which were ade- quately antiseptic. But has all palaeozoic life been ascertained by its flesh? or do we not owe our knowledge of many (perhaps of all) among the earlier forms of animated life altogether to their osseous structures? And, in cases where only bone remains, is it an extravagant use of argument a priori to hold that there must at some former time have been flesh also? And, if flesh, why should not vegetable matter also have subsisted, and have disappeared? Canon Driver, indeed, observes^ that from a very early date animals preyed upon animals. Still the first animal could not prey upon himself; there must have been veo-e- table pabtilum, out of which an animal body was first fed and so developed. " Before the beasts," says Sir George Stokes, " came the plants, plants which are necessary for their sustenance." ^ » The Expositor, January, 1886, p. 29. ' Letter to Mr. Elflein, Aug. 14. 1883. T//E CREA TION STOR V. 115 Next, with respect to the objection that the vege- tation of the eleventh and twelfth verses is a per- fected vegetation, and that there existed no such vegetation before animal life began. But why are we to suppose that the Mosaic writer intended to say that such a vegetation did exist before animal life began ? For no other reason than this : hav- ing mentioned the first introduction of vegetable life, he carries it on, without breaking his narrative, to its perfection. In so proceeding, he does exactly what the historian does when, for the sake of clearer comprehension, he brings one series of events from its inception to its close, although in order of time the beginning only, and not the completion, belongs to the epoch at which he introduces it. What I have called the rule of rela- tivity, the intention, namely, to be intelligible to man, seems to show the reason of his arrangement. If his meaning was, " The beautiful order of trees, plants and grasses which you see around you had its first beginnings in the area when living creatures were about to commence their movements in the ii6 THE CREATION STORY, waters and on the earth, and all this was part of the fatherly work of God on your behalf" — such meaning was surely well expressed, expressed after a sound and workman-like fashion, in the text of the Creation Story as it stands. I will next notice the objection that the Mosaic writer takes (according to the received version) no notice of the great age of reptiles, but proceeds at once from the creation of marine animals (v. 20) to the fowl that may " fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven." He thus passes over with- out notice the amphibians, the reptiles proper, the insects, and the marsupial or early mammals, on his way to the birds. It is added that he brackets the birds with the fishes, and thus makes them of the same date. It is requisite here to observe, with respect to birds, that Professor Dana* writes of the narrative in Genesis as follows: Speaking of the relation between the Mosaic narrative and the ascertained facts of science, he uses these words: **The accord- * "Creation," as before, p. 215. THE CREA TION STOR Y. 117 4. Birds. 5. Mammals. 6. Man. ance is exact with the succession made out for the earliest species of these grand divisions, if we except the division of birds, about which there is doubt." Owen, however, in his " Palaeontology," * places animal life in six classes, according to the following order, namely: 1. Invertebrates. 2. Fishes. 3. Reptiles. In the more recent " Manual " of Professor Prest- wich (1886), the order of seniority stands as fol- lows: 1. Cryptogamous Plants. 4. Mammals. 2. Fishes. 5. Man. 3. Birds. In the " Manual " ^ of Etheridge we are supplied with the following series, after fishes: i. Fossil reptiles. 2. Ornithosauria ; flying animals, which combined the character of reptiles with those of birds!' 3. The first birds of the secondary rocks, with * Second edition, 1861, p. 5. « Phillips's " Manual of Geology," Part II., by R. Etheridge, F.R.S., Chap. XXV., pp. 511-520. ii8 THE CREA TJON STOR Y. "feathers in all respects similar to those of existing birds." 4. Mammals. It thus appears that much turns on the definition of a bird, and that in this point, as in others, it is hard, on the evidence thus presented, seriously to impeach the character of the Creation Story. Largely viewed, the place of birds, as an order in creation, is given us by our scientific teachers, or, at the very least, as I have shown, by many and recognized authorities among them, between fislies and the class of mammals. It is a gratuitous assumption that the Mosaist intends to assign to them the same date as fishes ; he places them in the same day, but then we have to bear in mind that he more than once gives several actions to the same day. He sets them after the fishes ; and the fairer construction surely is, not that they were contem- poraneous, but that they were subsequent. In verse 21, if not in verse 20, the emergence into life of the one order is absolutely severed from that of the other. He forbears, it is true, to take separate notice of amphibious reptiles, insects, and marsu- THE CREATION STORY. 119 pials. And why ? All these, variously important in themselves, fill no large.place — some of them no place at all — in the view and in the concerns of primitive man ; and, having man for his object, he forbears, on his guiding principle of relativity, to encumber his narrative with them. If it be true that the demarcation of the order of birds in creation is less sharply drawn than that (for example) of fishes and of mammals, may we not be permitted to trace a singular propriety in the diminution, so to speak, of emphasis, with which the Mosaist gives to their introduction a more qualified distinctness of outline, by simply subjoin- ing them (v. 20) to the aquatic creation ? Does not that diminution of emphasis accompany, and corres- pond with, an inferior breadth of distinction in the things themselves? I must not, however, be understood to assert that the great reptile kingdom is omitted from the nar- rative. I find there are Hebraists who find nothing in the Tannin^ which seems to be unhappily ren- dered by the word " whales," to exclude the great I20 THE CREA TION STOR Y. reptiles from the scope of its meaning. In this view, this charge of omission, small as its signifi- cance would be if proven, falls to the ground I have now made bold to touch on the principal objections popularly known. They run into details wh.ch .t has not been possible fully to notice, but wh,ch seem to be without force, except such as they derive from the illegitimate process of holding down the Mosaic writer in his narration, so short so Simple, so sublime, by restraints which the ordi- nary historian, though he has plenty of auxiliary expedients, and is under no restraint of space, finds himself obliged to shake off if he wishes to be readily and popularly understood. On the intro- duction of the great or recent mammals, and of man. as the objector is silent. I remain silent also It would be uncandid. however, not to notice the "creeping thing" of verses 24. 25, and 26. In these verses the " creeping thing " is distinguished from cattle, and undoubtedly appears upon the scene as >f It were a formation wholly new. If the Mosaist really mtended to convey that this was the first THE CREA TION STOR Y. 121 appearance of any creeping thing in creation, there is. I suppose, no doubt that he is at war with the firmly established witness of natural science. Guyot, indeed, says' that these creeping things are not rep- tiles, but are the smaller mammals, rats, mice, and the like. If. however, the common rendering be maintained, it may be just worth while to susj^est a possible explanation. It is as follows. These creeping things were a very minor fact in the scheme of creation ; so that the purpose of the re- lator, and the comparative importance of the facts, may here, as elsewhere, have an influence upon the mode of handling them. It is fit to be observed that he never mentions insects at all, as if they were too insignificant to find a place among the larger items of his account; as if he advisedly selected his materials, and sifted off the less im- portant among them. And there does seem to be some license or looseness in his method of treat- ing these creeping things; for while he severs them from fish, fowl, and beast, in the verses I have * " Creation," p. 120. 122 THE CREA TION STOR K named, and again in verse 30 from fowl and from beast, yet in verse 28, when the great charter of dominion is granted to man, he sums up in three divisions only, and makes man the lord " over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Reptiles appear to have passed out of his view, either wholly, or so far as not to deserve sep- arate mention, and it may seem likely that he did not think their importance such as to call for a par- ticular and defined place, and, while according to them incidental mention, did not mean to give them such a place, in the chronological order of creation. Let the Contradictionist make the most he can out of this secondary matter: it will not greatly avail. If, on the whole, such be a fair statement of aro-u- ments and results, we may justly render our thanks to Dana, Guyot,^ Dawson, Stokes, and other scien- 1 In the preface to Guyot's " Creation " will be found some account of the recent literature of this subject. I must also mention a valu- able pamphlet entitled "The Higher Criticism," by Mr. Rust, Rector of Westerfield, Suffolk. It sets forth the scope of the negative criti- THE CREA TION STOR Y. 123 tific authorities, who seem to find no cause for sup- porting the broad theory of contradiction. I am well aware of my inability to add an atom of weight to their judgments. Yet I have ventured to at- tempt applying to this great case what I hold to be the just laws of a narrative intended to instruct and to persuade, and thus finding a key to the true con- struction of the chapter. For myself, I cannot but at present remain before and above all things im- pressed with the profound and marvellous wisdom, that has guided the human instrument, whether it were pen or tongue, which was first commissioned from on high, to hand onwards for our admiration and instruction this wonderful, this unparalleled relation. If I am a " reconciler," I shall not call myself a mere apologist, for I aim at a positive, not merely a defensive result, and claim that my reader should feel how true it is that in this brief relation he possesses an inestimable treasure. And I sub- cism at large, and recommends (p. 30) to " have patience for a while, and wail to see the issue." Similar advice has, I understand, been given in the recent Charge of the learned Bishop of Oxford. 124 THE CREA TION STOR Y. mit to those, who may have closely followed my remarks, that my words were not wholly idle words, when, without presuming to lay down any universal and inflexible proposition, and without questioning any single contention of persons spe- cially qualified, I said that the true question was whether the words of the Mosaic writer, in his opening chapter, taken as a whole, do not stand, according to our present knowledge, in such a rela- tion to the facts of Nature as to warrant and re- quire, thus far, the conclusion that the Ordainer of Nature, and the Giver or Guide of the Creation Story, are one and the same. Postscript to the Creation Story. Mankind have traveled not by one but by several roads into polytheism. It took a thousand years from the institution of the Mosaic legislation to place the chosen people, as a whole, in a state of security from this insidious mischief But all along a powerful apparatus of means had been at work, which was strengthened from time to time as THE CREA TION STOR Y, 125 Divine Providence saw fit. The foundation, how- ever, had been laid in the Creation Story. It was impossible for those who received it either to travel or to glide into polytheism by either of the two widest roads then open, the system of Nature-wor- ship, and the deification of Heroes. No one could make the sun his God, who really believed that there was a God who created the sun. Even more perhaps was it needful that the line should be clearly and sharply drawn between Deity and humanity, and that a barrier not capable of being surmounted should exclude kings and heroes from deification. In the Homeric or Olympian system, the worship of inanimate nature was studiously shut out; but the beginnings of deification are visible in the case of Heracles,^ whose very self (avrhq) sits at the banquets of the Immortals ; also of the twin brothers. Castor and Pollux, who live and die on alternate days, and who, when they live, receive honors like the gods. In the height of their civilization, the Romans set up their living 1 Od. XI., 302-305. 126 THE CREA TION STOR Y. emperors as divinities. But neither they nor the Greeks believed in" the creation of man by the Almighty. The old cosmogonies of the heathen placed matter and other impersonal entities in a position of priority to their gods, who merely take their turn to come upon the scene. Only (I be lieve) in the Hebrew stoo' is the Deity anterior without which condition he cannot be supreme. Besides being anterior, he is separate. Did we find m the pages of the Old Testament a stor^ of deification, we should at once know it to be spuri- ous, because in contradiction, alike as to letter and as to spirit, of the entire context It is. I hope, not presumptuous to proceed a step further, and to say that this broad and effectual severance was necessary, not only for the old dispensation, but for the new : not only for the exclusion of idolatry in all its forms, but for the establishment of the Incarnation. A marriage would be no marriage, unless the individuality of the parties to it were determinate and ineffaceable The Christian dogma of the two natures in one THE CREA TION STOR Y. 127 Person would be in no sense distinctive, if it had been habitual in the preparatory dispensation, as in some of the religions outside it, for man prop- erly so called to pass into proper deity. Reunion was to be effected between the Almighty and his prime earthly creature by the bridge to be con- structed over that flood, the flood of sin, which parted them; and, to sustain that bridge, it was needful that the natures to be brought into union should stand apart like piers perfectly defined, each on its own separate and solid foundation. And the firm foundations of those piers were laid, to endure throughout all time, by the great Creation Story. III. THE OFFICE AND WORK OF THE OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE. We may often hear it said, that the Old Testa- ment is an introduction to the New. Much more is contained in these words than an irreflective reci- tal may enable us to grasp. Yet they do not seem to cover the whole ground. It seems necessary to glance first at the conjoint function of the two Tes- taments, in order to measure fully the exalted mis- sion of the earlier. As the heavens cover the earth from east to west, so the Scripture covers and com- prehends the whole field of the destiny of man. The whole field is possessed by its moral and potential energy, as a provision enduring to the end of time. But it is marvellous to consider how large a portion of it lies directly within the domain of the Old Testament. The interval to be bridged I20 THE OLD TESTAMENT. ^^ over between the prophet Malachi and the Advent is not one of such breadth as wholly to abolish a continuity, which was also upheld by visible insti- tutions divinely ordained, and possibly even by the production of certain of the Psalms themselves. It is further narrowed in so far as something of a divine afflatus is to be found in the books which form the Apocrypha, which are esteemed by a large division of Christendom to be actually a part of the Sacred Canon, and which in the Church of England have a place of special, though secondary honor. At the more remote end of the scale, it is difficult to name a date for the beginning of the Sacred Scriptures. The corroborative legends of Assyria,* ascertained by modern research, concerning the Creation and the Flood, to which we know not what further additions may still progressively be made, carry us up,=i it may be roughly said, " To the FIRST syllable of recorded time." > These legends will be separately noticed later in the present series of essays. » See No. VI. of this series for the ground of the argument, which as here presented, can only have in a certain measure the character of an assumption. 9 I30 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE Historic evidence does not at present warrant our carrying backwards the probable existence of the Adamic race for more than some such epoch as from 4000 to 6000 years before the advent of Christ. And if, as appears likely, the Creation Story has come down from the beginning, and the Flood legend is also contemporary, the Christian may feel a lively interest in observing that, during by far the larger portion of human history, the refreshing rain of divine inspiration has descended, with compara- tively short intervals, from heaven upon earth, and the records of it have been collected and trans- mitted in the sacred volume. Apart from every question of literary form and of detail, we now trace the probable materials of the oldest among our sacred books far back beyond Moses and his time. And so we have a marvellous picture pre- sented to us, not only all-prevailing for the imagi- nation, the heart, and the conscience of man, but also, as I suppose, quite unexampled in its histori- cal appeal to the human intelligence. The whole human record respecting Adam and his descend- OLD TESTAMENT IN O UTLINE. j ants is covered and bound together in that same unwearied and inviolable continuity, which weaves into a tissue the six Mosaic days of gradually developed creation, and fastens them on at the hither end to the gradually advancing stages of Adamic, and, in due course, of subsequent history. We find then, that, apart from the question of moral purity and elevation, the Scriptures of the Old Testament appear to distinguish themselves from the sacred books possessed by various nations in several vital particulars. They deal with the Adamic race as a whole. They begin with the preparation of the earth for the habitation and use of mankind. They then, from his first origin, draw downwards a thread of properly personal history, with notices, most remarkable in their character' though contracted in space, of divergent families of men. As, from being personal, the narrative be- comes national-that is to say, from the Exodus onwards this thread is enlarged into a web ; and eventually it includes the whole race of man. Our Scriptures are not given once for all, as were the 132 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE works of Confucius or Zoroaster in their respective spheres. They do not deliver a mere code of morals or of legislation, but their character is pre- eminently historical, while they purport to disclose a penetrating and continuing superintendence from on high over human affairs. And the whole is doubly woven into one formation. First, by a chain of divine action, and of human instructors acting under divine authority, which is sustained and rep- resented by national institutions, and is never bro- ken until the time when political ser\'itude, like another Eg>^ptian captivity, has well-nigh become the fixed destiny of the Hebrew nation. Secondly, by the Messianic bond, by the light of prophecy shining in a dark place, and directing onwards the minds of devout men to the "fulness of time" and the birth of the wondrous Child, so as effectually to link the older sacred books to the dispensation of the Advent, and to carry forward their office through an action both of and in the Church, until the final day of doom. May it not boldly be asked, what parallel to such an outline as this can be OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE, 133 supplied by any of the sacred books preserved among any other of the races of the world ? So far, then, the office and work of the Old Testament, as presented to us by its own contents, is without a compeer among the old religions. It deals with the case of man as a whole. It covers all time. It is alike adapted to every race and region of the earth. And how, according to the purport of the Old Testament, may that case best be summed up? In these words : it is a history first of sin, and next of redemption. Our Lord has emphatically said, '^ They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick" (Matt. 9:12); and this saying goes to the root of the whole matter. Is there, or is there not, a deep disease in the world, which overflows it like a deluge, and submerges, in a great degree, the fruit- bearing capacities of our nature? Are we, as a race, whole, or are we sick, and profoundly sick ? I think that, to an impartial eye and to a thought- ful mind, it must seem strange that there should be 134 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE a doubt as to the answer to be given to this ques- tion. It seems more easy to comprehend the men- tal action of those whom the picture of the actual world, as it is unrolled before them, tempts, by its misery, guilt, and shame, into doubt of the being of God, than of persons who can view that picture, and who cannot fail to observe the dominant part borne by man in determining its character, and yet can make it a subject of question whether man is or is not morally diseased. Veils may have been cast between our vision and the truth of the case by the relative excellence of some select human spirits ; by the infinitely varied degrees and forms of the universal malady; by the exaggerations and the narrownesses of outlying schools of theology; and lastly by the remarkable circumstance, that races, above all the extraordinarily gifted race of the ancient Greeks, have lived on into large devel- opments of art, of intellect, and of material power, without creating or retaining any strong concep- tion of moral evil, under the only aspect which reveals its deeper features; that aspect, namely. OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE. 135 which presents it to the mind as a departure from the supreme and perfect standard, the will of God. But these disguises are pierced through and through by ever so little of calm reflection. We can conceive how generations, blinded by long abuse to the character of moral evil, could well contrive to blink and pass by the question. But we, who inherit the Christian tradition, ethical as it is not less than dogmatic, cannot, I think, deny the prevalence, perhaps not even the preponderance, of moral evil in the world, without some subtle and preliminary process of degeneracy in our own habit of mind. We shall find that, in renouncing that tradition, we return to a conception which admitted to be evil only that which was so vio- lently in conflict with the comfort of human society as to require condemnation and repression by its self-preserving laws. The gap between these two conceptions of our state, the one furnished by dis- ordered nature, the other by divine grace, is im- measurable. And I think it will not be denied that, in describ- 136 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE ing vividly the fact of sin in tlie world, the Scriptures of the Old Testament proceed upon lines, which have also been clearly drawn in the general con- sciousness at least of the Christian ages. This sense of sin. which lies like a huge black pall over the entire face of humanity, has been all along the point of departure for every preacher, writer, and thmker within the Hebrew or the Christian fold. And it is the gradual and palpable decline of it in the literature and society of to-day, that is ihe darkest among all the signs now overshadowing what is in some respects the bright and hopeful promise of the future. Nor can any one, who believes in the existence of God. wonder that sin is described as a deviation from the order of nature, as a foreign element, not belonging to the original creation of divine desi<.n but introduced into it by special causes. At this' point we come to what is known as the Fall of man. and to the narration of that fall as it is given in the' Book of Genesis. For the moment, let us simply note what is OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE, 137 unquestionable: that the Old Testament, from the beginning to the end, deals with the conception of sin, and of its opposite, as forming one side of its special work, and in this capital respect entirely differs from all the other documents of profane antiquity. Against the narrative of the Fall, the negative criticism has been actively employed. The action ascribed to the serpent is declared to be incredible ; the punishment of Adam, disproportioned to the offense, which consisted only in an action not essen- tially immoral, but only wrong because it was pro- hibited; the punishment of all mankind, for the fault of one, is denounced as intolerably unjust Now let us set entirely aside, for the moment, the form of this narrative, and consider only its substance. Let us deal with it as if it were a para- ble ; in which the severance between the form and the substance is acknowledged and familiar. In proposing this, I do not mean to make on my own part any definitive surrender of the form as it stands, or any admission adverse to it. There is. 138 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE it may be, high and early Christian authority even for surrendering the form. I only seek to pass within it, and to put the meaning and substance of the Fall Story upon their trial. In this relation, we find a certain aggregate of objects, which we are now asked to treat as if they were simply significant figures. There are pre- sented to us the man, with the woman, in a garden; the serpent, with its faculty of speech and subtle thought; the two trees, of knowledge and of life respectively; a fruit forbidden by divine command, but eaten in defiance of it; and, after certain re- proofs and intimations, ejectment from the garden in consequence. In this ejectment is involved a great deterioration of outward state. But it is not a matter of outward state alone. A deterioration of inward nature is also exhibited, in the derange- ment of its functions. A new sense of shame bears witness to the revolt^ of its lower against its higher 1 See Delitzsch, who, in accordance with patristic authorities, writes as follows: "The first consequence of the Fall was shame. The nakedness of mankind is no longer the appearance of their inno- cence. Their corporeity has fallen from the dominion of the spirit. OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE, 139 elements; and, for the first time, exhibits it to us as a disordered, and therefore a dishonored thing. Together with all this, there is the outline of a promise that, from among the progeny of the fallen pair a Deliverer, born of woman, shall arise, who, at the cost of personal suffering, shall strike at the very seat of intelligence in the creature set before us as the living emblem of evil, and so shall destroy its power. In this relation, on the one hand, many modern objectors have discovered an intolerable folly, and, on the other hand, the Christian tradition of eighteen centuries has acknowledged a profound philosophy, and a painful and faithful delineation of an indisputable truth. Now what is the substance conveyed under this form ? The Almighty has brought into existence a pair of human beings. He has laid upon them a law of obedience, not to a Decalogue or a code, setting forth things essentially good, and the re- verse of them, but simply to himself; and as Their beholding has become a sensuous imagining, and the flesh excites their fleshly passions " (" Old Testament History of Redemp- tion," p. 23. Edinburg: Clark, 1881). 140 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE Uttered by him, to a rule of feeding and not feed- ing. The point, at which this representation first brings into view an independent or objective law, lies in the prohibition to feed upon a tree which imparts the knowledge of good and evil. That is to say, the pair, as they then were, were forbidden to aspire to the possession of that knowledge. The dispensation under which for the time they lived, was a dispensation of pure obedience. The question whether this was reasonable or unreasonable cannot be answered upon abstract grounds, but resolves itself into another question, whether it was appropriate or inappropriate to the state of the beings thus addressed, and to their relation towards Him who gave the command. Some may assume that Adam was what so great a writer as Milton has represented him to be *• For contemplation he and valor formed/* » and not for contemplation only, but for intricate inquiry and debate on subjects such as tax all the powers of a cultivated intellect. And indeed, if we * •• Paradise Lost," IV. 297. OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE. 141 take the developed man, such as we know him in Christian and civilized society, it seems plain that to lay down for him a law of life which did not include the consideration of essential good and evil, would not only stunt and starve his faculties, but would shock his moral sense. It may be said that a single act of disobedience, even after full warning, could not so deprave a character as reasonably to entail upon the offender a total change of condition. Now, I observe, in the first place, that this objec- tion, so stated, unwarrantably assumes that the same rule must govern the case of the developed, and of the undeveloped or infant man. The effect of a single action upon the entire being may, for all we know, have been far greater when the moral organ- ism was simple and homogeneous, than it would be now when that organism has become highly complete, elaborate, and diversified. Further, I would observe that the school of critics which is apt to take this objection is the very school which, utterly rejecting the literal form 142 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE of the narrative, is bound to look at it as parable. When so contemplated, its lesson is that rebellion, deliberate and wilful (and this is nothing less), against just and sovereign authority, fundamentally changes for the worse the character of the rebel. It places him in a new category of motive and action, in which the repetition of the temptation ordinarily begets the repetition of the sin; and from this point of view it is mercy, not cruelty, which meets this deterioration of character, not with a final and judicial abandonment, but with a deteri- oration and reduction of state, such as to teach the lesson of retribution, and to serve as an emphatic warning against further sin. Scripture will lie before us in a true perspective, when we come to understand that eveiywhere the will of God is in accord with the righteousness of God. So that what is promised or inflicted by command is also, under an invariable law, prom- ised or inflicted by self-acting consequence, ac- cording to the constitution of the nature we have received. Religion and philosophy thus join hands. i OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE. 143 and never part them. When, therefore, we are told that Adam after his sin was shut out from Eden, we are not entitled to say, how hard that he could not be allowed to return, and then perhaps to amend. What is inflicted as penalty from with- out is acted and suflered in character within. There is no record of the repentance of Adam ; and even if there were, yet repentance is not innocence. There must be a remedial process; and, until that process has been faithfully accomplished, the ante- rior state and habit of mind cannot be resumed. I do not argue with those who say this is a bad constitution of things, under which sin engenders sinfulness ; some wiser one might surely have been devised. This is to say, "Had I been in the Creator's place, I would have managed the business of creation better." It is for us not merely as Christians, but as men of sense, to eschew specu- lations which, not to mention their overweening presumption, even their authors must see to be wholly devoid of practical effect. We shall do better to assume the great moral laws, and the 144 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE constitution of our nature, as ultimate facts, as boundaries which it is futile to attempt to overstep. To my mind, then, the narrative of the Fall is in accordance with the laws of a grand and compre- hensive philosophy, and the objections taken to it are the product of narrower and shallower modes of thought. Introducing us to Adamic man in his first stage of existence, a stage not of savagery but of childhood, it exhibits to us the gigantic drama of his evolution in its opening. In the Paradise of the Book of Genesis, it reduces to a practical form that noble legend of the Golden Age, which was cherished especially in prehistoric Greece. It wisely teaches us to look to misused freewill as the source of all the sin, and mainly of the accompanying misery, which still overflow the world, and environ human life like a moral deluge. It shows ua man in his childhood, no less responsible for disobedi- ence to simple command, than man in his manhood for contravention of those laws of essential right and wrong, which remain now and forever clothed with the majesty of divine authority. It teaches OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE. j.r us how sin begets sin ; how the rebellion of the creature against the Creator was at once followed by the rebellion of the creature's lower appetites against his higher mind and will. It impresses upon us that sin is not like the bird lightly flying past us in an atmosphere, which closes on it as it goes, and carries no trace of its passage. It alters for the worse the very being of the man that acts it, and leaves to him a deteriorated essence. This he in turn, by the inexorable laws of his constitu- tion, transmits to his descendants ; and this again in them exhibits, variably, yet on the whole with clear and even glaring demonstration, the evil bias, which it has received ; and which, in the course of nature, it retains until it shall be happily corrected and renewed by those remedial means, which it was the office of the Old Testament to foreshadow, and of the New to establish. Everywhere, then, in this narrative of the Fall, we find that it is instinct with the highest principles of the moral and judicial order. For the present I pass by the Flood (Gen. 6-8), 10 ' ^ 146 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE and the Dispersion (Gen. 10), which may be most conveniently considered in connection with what is termed profane history; and I touch next upon the call of Abraham. This call imports the selection of a peculiar and separate family, which was afterwards to grow into a people. They were to be in a special degree the subjects of God's care, the guardians of his Word, and the vehicles of his promises. Of all great and distinctive chapters in the Biblical history of the human race since Paradise, we have here perhaps the greatest and the most distinctive. The selection of a family may be regarded from many points of view. When sin had come into the world, it developed itself in the forms of infirmity and of apostasy: if it be allowable to describe rudely by these general terms the forms of character which distinguished the race of Cain from the race of Seth. What we see of the former is, as described in Genesis 4 : 16-24, its rapid advance, and apparently its marked pre- cedence, in arts and powers. It disappears entirely OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE, j.y with the story of the Flood ; and we are left to infer that it may have had a principal share in call- ing down that great retribution inflicted upon revolt from God. After the Deluge, in the time of Peleg, fifth from Noah, selection again appears, and is carried down in Genesis 1 1 to Abraham, from whom an unbroken thread runs onward into the period when the cho- sen family had become a chosen nation. This choice of a particular family or race maybe advantageously contrasted with the heathen meth- od of selection or preference, by the deification of individuals. Of the first, it is obvious that it reached over all time; that in this way it tended to assert the unity, alike of the divine revelation and of the Adamic race; and that it was never exclusive,^ as it from the first (not to mention other proofs) invited to partake of its benefits the » That is to say. never according to the Mosaic law as contained in the Old Testament. After the return from Babylon, the ruling authorities among the Jews gave a greatly enhanced stringency to the law of intermarriage. See Graetz, " History of the Jews " (1891), Vol. I., pp. 398-401. 148 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE "stranger" with whom it had come into contact. The rival method of deification broke communion rather than established it, and was based on no rational principle of choice. It was corrupt as well as arbitrary; for the deified were not the best. But what I would here chiefly press is, that the con- tinuous selection of a family was a bar to deifica- tion, because deification was essentially founded on individualities; instead of that headship in series, the members of which presented to humanity, as its chiefs, a lineage. Of this lineage every one had its destiny as it were locked into that of the rest by an essential parity. This kind of selection did not favor idolatry, like the other, but, on the con- trary, built up a wall against it; for it was not possible effectively to deify a race. And so it came about, as we have seen, that, even when idolatry invaded and possessed the people, it never tainted the traditional religion. This selection of Abraham and his progeny, if we speak after the manner of men, we might per- haps describe as follows: The original attempt to OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE, 149 plant a species upon our planet, which should be endowed with the faculty of free-will, but should always direct that will to good, had been frustrated through sin; and the tainted progeny had, after a trial of many generations, been destroyed by the Deluge. In the descendants of Noah, man was renewed upon a far larger scale. Different branches of the race (Gen. 10) were sent, or were allowed to go forth, and to people different portions of the earth, each carr>'ing with them different gifts, and different vocations according to those gifts; the notes of which, in various prominent cases, we cannot fail to discern written large upon the page of history. After a brief period, choice was made not of a nation, but of a person, namely, Abraham, who with his descendants became the subject of a special training. He and his posterity lived, according to the record in the Bible, not like other men generally, dependent upon the exercise of their natural faculties alone, but with the advantage from time to time, and with the continuing respon- sibility, of supernatural command and visitation. 148 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE "stranger" with whom it had come into contact. The rival method of deification broke communion rather than estabh'shed it, and was based on no rational principle of choice. It was corrupt as well as arbitrary; for the deified were not the best. But what I would here chiefly press is, that the con- tinuous selection of a family was a bar to deifica- tion, because deification was essentially founded on individualities ; instead of that headship in series, the members of which presented to humanity, as its chiefs, a lineage. Of this lineage ^v^ry one had its destiny as it were locked into that of the rest by an essential parity. This kind of selection did not favor idolatry, like the other, but, on the con- trary, built up a wall against it; for it was not possible effectively to deify a race. And so it came about, as we have seen, that, even when idolatry invaded and possessed the people, it never tainted the traditional religion. This selection of Abraham and his progeny, if we speak after the manner of men, we might per- haps describe as follows: The original attempt to OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE, 149 plant a species upon our planet, which should be endowed with the faculty of free-will, but should always direct that will to good, had been frustrated through sin; and the tainted progeny had, after a trial of many generations, been destroyed by the Deluge. In the descendants of Noah, man was renewed upon a far larger scale. Different branches of the race (Gen. 10) were sent, or were allowed to go forth, and to people different portions of the earth, each carrying with them different gifts, and different vocations according to those gifts; the notes of which, in various prominent cases, we cannot fail to discern written large upon the page of history. After a brief period, choice was made not of a nation, but of a person, namely, Abraham, who with his descendants became the subject of a special training. He and his posterity lived, according to the record in the Bible, not like other men generally, dependent upon the exercise of their natural faculties alone, but with the advanta^re o from time to time, and with the continuing respon- sibility, of supernatural command and visitation. ISO OFFICE AND WORK OF THE But this remarkable promotion to a higher form of life did not invest them with any arbitrary or selfish prerogative. On the contrary, as the legislation of Moses was distinguished from other ancient codes by its liberal and likewise elaborate care for the stranger; so also, from the very outset, and before the family could blossom into the nation, nay, even in the very person of Abraham, the ^it imparted to him was declared to be given for the behoof of mankind at large. "In thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed " (Gen. 2% : 14). The prerogative of the Jew was, from its very inception, bound up with the future elevation of the Gentile. This divine election doubtless carried with it the duty and the means of reaching a higher level of moral life than prevailed among the surrounding Asiatic nations. These nations, sharing with the chosen race a common infirmity and deterioration of nature, differed in this, that they at once carried the reflection of their own sinfulness into their creed respecting the unseen, and made religion OLD TESTAMENT IN O UTLINE. 1 1 1 itself a direct instrument of corruption. Yet those, whom we call the patriarchs, were not exempted from the general degeneracy of morals ; and even Abraham, the general strain of whose life appears to have been so simple and devout, on going down into Egypt to escape from famine, advisedly exposed his wife to the risk of an adulterous connection with the king of the country, lest, if she were known to be his wife, his personal safety should be com- promised. On the moral standing of the nation sprung from Abraham, as compared with that of contemporary races, there will be more to say here- after. Meantime, it may be observed that the sins and follies of the favored people, as well as of their priests and rulers, are told in the narrative frankly, and without attempting to excuse them. This frankness of narration extends also to the calamities which befell the Israelites ; and, as an evidence of the integrity of the Hebrew penmen, it suggests a presumption that such plain speaking, in the face of national and ancestral self-love, is, to say the least, highly in accordance with the belief that the record 1S2 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE generally was framed under special guidance from aoove. The selection of Abraham and his posterity was at the least a boon to some, while it was a privation to none. In its immediate effect, it withdrew noth- ing from the nations outside the Hebrew pale It bestowed, indeed, upon the parallel line of Ishmael a preferential but inferior blessing. This dispensa- •on, however, it is no part of the present purpose to consider, further than to say that the Moham- medan religion maybe regarded, in its conflict with the .dolato^ which it first confronted, and again in the present day among the tribes of Western Africa as having been, if not permanently yet for a time' the communication of a relative good. And the Old Testament abounds with passages which dem- onstrate the care, and even the special care, of the Almighty for nations other than the Jews' But the object, which now demands our attention •s the promise of a blessing in and by the seed of boi':; ;ir''' "-'= *"° •=- '-^''- - --. -d .^e .... :* OLD TESTAMENT IN O UTLINE, j . 3 Abraham to all the nations of the earth. The first- fruits of this blessing may be said to have been perceived in the translation of the books of the Old Testament into Greek during and after the third century before the Advent. At the time when the language of the Greeks was mounting to its supremacy, in the East through the conquests of Alexander the Great, and in the West through appreciation by the Roman and Italian genius, in some respects allied to their own, the Greek rice itself was on its decline, both as to its intellect and as to its practical energy. Such a decline may, perhaps, have rendered the world more receptive of the influences, which the substance of the Hebrew books was calculated to exercise. There can hardly be a doubt that, among all the forms of Hellenic thought exhibited in the differ- ent schools of philosophy, that of the Stoics was the highest in respect of its conception of the Deity, of its emancipation from idolatry, and of its capacity of moral elevation. In the hands of Seneca, of Epictetus, and of Marcus Aurelius, Stoic ideas 154 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE attained so high a level as to have been used by some in disparagement of the exclusive claim of the gospel to the promulgation of truths powerful enough to regenerate the world. Without assert- ing that the early Stoics derived their inspiration through the Greek version, called the Septuagint, from the Hebrew Scriptures, it may be observed that, as a matter of fact, philosophy rose to its highest level through the Stoics at a time when the Greek mind was declining; and further, that Stoicism made its first appearance, and began its advance at the epoch when those Scriptures had become accessible. Also it arose and flourished not in Greece itself, but at points such as Citium, in countries such as Pontus, in schools of Jearninc. such as Alexandria, which were seats of Jewish resort and influence.^ For my own part I cannot but incline to believe that both the translated Old » See" Encyclopaedia Britannica." 9th ed. Art. "Stoics."' It states that " the school is mainly to be considered as the first-fruits of that interaction between West and East, which followed the conquests of Alexander. Zeno was of Phoenician descent ; Cyprus. Silicia. Syria, the main countries of its origin. Citium. Alexandria. Heraclea,' OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE, 155 Testament, and the silently diffused ether, so to speak, of Christianity, in the Roman atmosphere, had to do with the high moral elevation of the later Stoicism. It was an advance of a different order, and of a wider range towards the fulfilment of the Abra- hamic promises, when the Apostles, charged with the commission of our Lord, went forth into all the world, and preached the gospel to every creat- ure (Mark 16: 15). Then, indeed, an enginery was set at work, capable of coping with the whole range of the mischiefs brought into the world by sin, and of completely redeeming the human being from its effects, and consecrating our nature to duty and to God. It is impossible here to do so much as even to skirt this vast subject. But at once these three things may be said as to the develop- ment, through the gospel, of the Abrahamic prom- ise. First, that in a vast aggregate of genuine Pontus. were prominent among the places furnishing and rearing its teachers. Most of the Stoics were from lands of Hellenistic (as distinct from Hellenic) civilization. It was the growth of the Hellenized East." Further, see Huidekoper's "Judaism at Rome." New York. 1877. 156 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE believers, the recovery of the divine image has been effectual, and the mainspring of their being has been set right before their quitting the world, by the dedication of the will to God. Secondly, that the social results of the change have been beneficial and immense, in the restriction of wars, in the abolition of horrible practices publicly sanc- tioned ; in the recognition of essential rights ; in the elevation of woman (whose case most and best of all represents the case of right as against force) ; in the mitigation of selfish and cruel laws; in the refinement of manners ; in the utter proscription of all extreme forms of sin ; and in the public acknowl- edgment of standards of action nearer to the true. I may perhaps add in the abolition of slave-trading and of slavery, and in the law of nations, and the mitigating rules of war. Thirdly, that Chris- tendom is at this moment undeniably the prime and central power of the world, and still bears, written upon its front, the mission to subdue it. In point of force and onward impulsion, it stands without a rival, while every other widely spread OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE, 157 religion is in decline. Critical, indeed, are the movements which affect it from within. Vast are the deductions which on every side are to be made from the fulness of the divine promises, when we try to measure their results in the world of facts. Indefinitely slow, and hard to trace in detail, as may be, like a glacier in descent, the march of the times, the Christianity of to-day has, in relation to the world non-Christian, an amount of ascendency such as it has never before possessed ; and, if only it can sufficiently retain its inward consistency, the sole remaining question seems to be as to the time, the circumstances, and the rate of its further, per- haps of its final, conquests. I know that it is far beyond the scope of a few pages such as these to make good in detail the claims of the great Abrahamic promise. Still, I think that even what has been said may in some measure suffice for the purpose which I have im- mediately in view. That purpose is to establish in outline the strictly exceptional character of the books of the Old Testament ; and with this aim to 158 OFFICE AND WORK OF THE show that they bear upon them the stamp of a comprehensiveness which concerns, which pene- trates, and which also envelops the history of the world as a whole. The promise, given to Abraham nearly two thousand years before the Advent, finds its correlative marks in the general train of subse- quent history. These marks demonstrate that it was given by a divine foreknowledge. And if so, then the venerable record in which it is enshrined surely seems here, as it did in the Creation Story, to carry the seal and signature of a divine author- ship. Now let us consider from another point of view the selection of the Hebrew race, and the peculiar standing of the Mosaic legislation, so intimately allied with the whole of its singularly checkered fortunes. And, in order to effect something to- wards ascertaining what was probably the cause determining the divine selection and procedure, we may do well first to refer to some aims which might at first sight have been thought probable. It might conceivably have been the design to OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE, 15^ provide a complete theology; or to reward with honor, wealth, and power a peculiarly virtuous people, whose moral conduct was to be of a nature likely to make them an edifying and attractive example to the nations of the earth. Human speculation might have been forward to anticipate that one or both of these aims might have been contemplated by a plan so exceptional as the selection and isolation of one particular line and people. But the facts appear to show that any such anticipation would have been entirely mis- taken. By a complete theology, I mean simply such a theology as would confront and make provision for all the leading facts of the moral situation. Among these a prominent place had from the date of the first traditions been given to the entrance of sin into the world, and to the promise of redemp- tion from its power. Now it is evident that there was no attempt, in the legislation of the Penta- teuch, at this theological completeness. Its the- ology is summed up in clear declarations of the i6o OFFICE AND WORK OF THE being of God, of his great attributes, and of duty and love to him and to our neighbor. With these are directly associated, in the Decalogue, the main items of man's duty to other men, and, both there and elsewhere, a doctrine of rewards and punishments. The race also inherited the narra- tive of what is termed in Christian theology the Fall of Man. This, however, was part of the an- terior tradition ; and, though implied in the Mosaic system, was neither directly set forth in its terms, nor made a common subject of allusion in the his- toric books, however it may have been involved in the sacrificial system. But these rewards and punishments are of a tem- poral nature ; and the Mosaic legislation is thought to give no indication of a future .state, or of an Underworld. This is the more remarkable, because, not to mention other indications, even the eariiest chapters of Genesis, although they usually contain but the merest outline of history, are not without such indication (Gen. 5 : 24). Enoch, at the end of his 365 years, " was not, for God took him." OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE. 15, These remarkable words are substituted for the formula given in the cases of the other patriarchs whose record closes with the phrase, "and he' d.ed •' (Gen. 5 : 5, and passim). Here there seems to be a clear manifestation of the state into which Enoch is declared to have entered, without passing, through the gate of death. It is indeed obvious to remark that, under the Mosaic system, lone, life was the reward of virtue, and that unless a future l.fe was believed in, the translation of Enoch would have been the record of a punishment inflicted on him for his superior goodness. Again, we now know, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and otherwise, that the religious sys- tem of that country not only included, but was greatly based upon, the conception of a future life It seems absolutely impossible that the Israelites even had they not been aware of it already, could have dwelt for many generations in the land of Egypt without coming to know of it. Our Lord himself affirms that they knew it in his time (Matt. 22:32; Mark 12:27). And we have it II 1 62 OFFICE AND WORK 0%^ THE presented to us in the Psalms (for example, Psalms i6: lo; 49: 15), which exhibit the interior and spiritual life of chosen souls. There are other indications to the same effect. I have stated the instances of belief in a future state among the early Hebrews somewhat more largely in an article published in the Nineteenth Centur>' for October, 1 89 1. But the argument is capable of still wider development. It has, perhaps, been too much the practice to assume that the Mosaic law is to be regarded as an enlargement of the patriarchal religion. With- out doubt it is at least a very large and important supplement to that religion. But a supplement differs from an enlarged and reconstructed edition : it is less, as well as more. It need not, and indeed it hardly can, contain everything contained in that to which it is a supplement. Here is a great and vital particular, in which the Mosaic law cannot be said even to have republished the patriarchal reli- gion; and which both preceded and survived the law, yet did not find a place in it. Accordingly, OLD TESTAMENT IN OUTLINE. 163 among the Jews of the Advent, the school which most rigidly adhered to the letter of the law, namely, that of the Sadducees (Acts 23 : 8). denied the future state, and held " that there is no resur- rection, neither angel nor spirit." We are not, therefore, to suppose that Israel was without the hope of a future life, which St. Peter on the Day of Pentecost himself demonstrated out of the sixteenth Psalm (Acts 2:25); but only to perceive that the Mosaic legislation was limited to its proper purpose; that, namely, of setting apart a nation from the rest of mankind, and providing it with peculiar means and guarantees for the fulfil- ment of its mission as a nation. It erected a walled precinct, within which the ancient belief of the fathers was to find shelter and to thrive, while it was wofully dwindling and perishing among all the kindred nations of the world. It supplied an im- pregnable home for personal religion. But per- sonal religion, taken by itself, is conspicuously weak in the means of transmission from a