Chapter 1

THE CASE STATED.

The History of the Creation with which the Bible commences, is not a mere incidental appendage to God's Revelation, but constitutes the foundation on which the whole of that Revelation is based. Setting forth as it does the relation in which man stands to God as his Maker, and to the world which God formed for his abode, it forms a necessary introduction to all that God has seen fit to reveal to us with reference to His dispensations of Providence and of Grace.

It is, however, not uncommonly asserted that this history cannot be reconciled with a vast number of facts which modern science has revealed to us, and with theories based on observed facts, and recommended by the unquestioned ability of the men by whom they have been brought forward. At first sight there does seem to be some ground for this assertion. Geology, for instance, makes us acquainted with strata of rock of various kinds, arranged in exact order, and of an aggregate thickness of many miles, which are filled with the remains of a wonderful series of plants and animals, these remains not being promiscuously collected, but arranged in an unvarying order. It seems impossible that all these plants and animals could have lived and died, and been imbedded in the rocks in this exact succession, in six of our ordinary days. Astronomy directs our attention to changes now going on in the starry heavens which occupy ages in their development, and points to traces in the constitution of our own world which seem to indicate that it was formed by analogous means. Physiology reveals to us the fact that the different varieties of plants and animals now in existence are not separated from each other by well defined lines of demarcation, but shade into each other by almost imperceptible gradations; and geological researches show that while the existing species of animals are the representatives of those which lived and died at a period in which we can find no traces of man, they are not identical with them, but that either the old species must have died out, and been replaced by a fresh creation, or a considerable change must have taken place in the course of ages. These facts are held to be incompatible with the account of creation given by Moses, and hence it is inferred that a record, which appears to be so widely at variance with admitted facts, cannot be entitled to the authority which is claimed for it, as a fundamental portion of a Revelation made by the Creator Himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. When this record was committed to writing, language was in a very different condition from that in which it is now. We have an account of the first recorded exercise of the faculty of speech in Gen. ii. 19. Adam first used it to give names to all the living creatures as they passed in review before him. In accordance with this statement it appears, from the researches of philologists, that language in its earliest state was entirely, or almost entirely limited to words denoting sensible objects and actions. It seems probable that these names were derived from radicals expressing general ideas [Footnote: Max Muller's Lectures on the Science of Language, First Series Lect. viii. ix.]; but there is reason to doubt whether these radicals ever had a formal existence as words--they seem rather to have been the mental stock out of which words were produced. But the human mind had from the first powers for the exercise of which this limited vocabulary was insufficient. Even in the outer world there was much which was the object of reason and inference rather than of sense, while the whole world of consciousness was entirely unprovided with the means of expression. To meet this difficulty words, which originally denoted objects of sense, were used figuratively to express ideas which bore some resemblance or analogy, real or fancied, to their original significance. As time passed on this difficulty was gradually diminished: synonyms crept into all languages from various sources, and when once adopted, they were in many cases gradually differentiated, the various senses which the original word had borne were portioned off among them, and increased precision was thus obtained.

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

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

Instances of all these sources of uncertainty meet us very early in Genesis. In the very first verse we have a word, [Hebrew script], which has great latitude of meaning. It is either the earth as a whole (ver. 1), or the land as distinguished from the water (ver. 10), or a particular country (ii. 11). In many cases, as in all these, the context at once determines the sense to be chosen; but there are other cases in which considerable difficulty arises. The whole question of the universality of the deluge turns, in a great degree, upon the signification which is assigned to this same word in the sixth and following chapters. In the second verse we have another word, [Hebrew script], which is capable of various interpretations. It is used throughout the Bible in the three distinct meanings of "wind," "breath," and "spirit." Where we read, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," the Jewish paraphrase is, "And a wind of God (i.e. a great wind) moved," &c. Here there is nothing in the context to assist us in determining the sense to be chosen; but, as will be seen in the sequel, modern science indicates that the Jewish interpretation is untenable, and that our translation is, consequently, the correct one. As an instance of confusion of time, we may refer to ii. 19. In our translation this verse seems to place the creation of animals after that of man; but in xii. 1, the very same form is translated by the pluperfect, "Now the Lord had said unto Abram." It ought evidently to be translated in the same way here: "And out of the ground the Lord God had formed," &c. In ii. 5, on the other hand, the pluperfect might with advantage have given place to another form: "For the Lord God did not cause it to rain." The phenomenon referred to appears to have been local and temporary. Had the pluperfect been omitted in one case and supplied in the other two sources of apparent difficulty would have been removed.

It is very clear, then, that there could be no approach to scientific accuracy in a narrative written in such a language as this. Such accuracy is, in fact, attainable only in proportion, as science has moulded language for its own purposes. But language is at all times an index of the general mental condition of the people who use it, and so the knowledge and the ideas of the men of these primitive times must have been extremely limited in all those directions with which we have to do. Accordingly, we find no trace of any doubt whether the information with reference to external objects which was received through the senses was in all cases to be depended on. There can be little doubt that to those early observers the sky was a solid vault, on the face of which the sun, moon, and planets moved in their appointed courses; the stars were points of light, golden studs in the azure canopy; the sun and moon were just as large as they appeared to be, and the earth was a solid immovable plane of comparatively small extent. At the time of the Exodus, it seems clear that, even among a people so far advanced as the Egyptians, all that lay beyond the mountains which bounded their land on the west was believed to belong not to living men, but to disembodied spirits. It was the terrible country through which the souls of the departed made their arduous way to the Hall of Judgment [Footnote: "The Nations Around," pp. 49, 50.] Accordingly, we find that the Egyptians made no attempt to extend the limits of their empire in this direction, while the monarchs of the Mesopotamian region seem to have been equally unambitious of conquest beyond the mountain ranges which bounded the valley of the Tigris on the east. Mesopotamia, then, on the east, Egypt on the west, Armenia and Asia Minor on the north, and Arabia on the south, seem, in the view of the contemporaries of Moses, to have been the utmost regions of the world. Ignorant as they were of any countries beyond these, they were, of course, equally ignorant of the numberless varieties of plants and animals that were to be found in them, and with which we are familiar. Mining was not unknown, but the mines were few and superficial; they could not reveal much of the structure of the earth, and what little they did reveal passed unnoticed. Nothing was known of the successive beds of rock which form the crust of the earth, of the fossils with which they abound, or of the gradual changes to Which they are still subject. If any one had told the men of that generation that the solid earth on which they stood, or the everlasting hills which surrounded them, were undergoing slow but steady modifications, he would have been looked upon as a madman.

A revelation, then, addressed to men whose language, whose intellectual powers, and whose stock of ideas were thus limited, must of itself also necessarily have been both limited and destitute of precision. It could only deal with things with which they had some acquaintance, or of which they could form some idea, while, from the character of the language, and the extreme brevity of the record, the treatment of even these few subjects must have been of a vague and indefinite character. Traces of a deeper knowledge there might be, but they would not lie upon the surface. They must be carefully sought for, and then they would be discernible only by those who were in possession of the key which would unlock their hidden secrets.

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

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

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

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

The first of these is the impatience of doubt and uncertainty. The power of recognizing the imperfection of our knowledge, and the consequent necessity of suspending our judgment, is a power which is only gradually acquired with the accumulation of experience. The young untrained mind finds it difficult to realize the truth that any information communicated to it is not altogether within the grasp of its faculties. It must attach some definite meaning to the words; it must image to itself some way in which great events were brought about, great works were accomplished. It finds it difficult to realize a fact as accomplished, unless it can also picture to itself some way in which it might have been effected. For this purpose such knowledge as it has at its command is employed, and where that fails recourse is had to the imagination to supply the deficiency. Thus it has been with ourselves in our childhood, and thus it was in the childhood of the world. Knowledge was indeed sought, but it was not sought in the right way, and so the search often resulted in error, and this error produced its effect in the interpretation of the passage in question. The old school of inquirers started from certain abstract principles, and endeavoared to reduce the results of observation to conformity with those principles. This was the case with astronomy. The old astronomers taking as axioms the two assumptions that everything connected with the heavenly bodies must be perfect, and that the circle is the only perfect figure, easily satisfied themselves that the orbits of all the heavenly bodies must be circles. Hence came the

"Cycle on epicycle, orb on orb,"

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

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

The second characteristic of that state of mind is its admiration of the startling and the vast. In these alone it recognizes the tokens of unlimited power. It is unable to appreciate those more majestic manifestations of power which are discerned by the enlightened eye, when a stupendous scheme is developed, gradually and imperceptibly, but without pause or hesitation through a long succession of ages; when a multitude of seemingly discordant elements are at last brought together in a perfect work; when a power, unseen and unnoticed, slowly but surely overrules the working of ten thousand apparently independent agents, through a thousand generations, and moulds their separate works into one harmonious whole. Such a manifestation of power as this was beyond the grasp of the untrained mind; but to such intellects there was something irresistibly fascinating in the idea of a world rising into perfect existence in a moment, of innumerable hosts of living creatures called into being at a word. Such was the meaning of the account of creation which naturally suggested itself to the untrained mind, and there was nothing in science in those early days to throw any doubt upon it, and so this belief was unhesitatingly and almost universally adopted. Here and there, indeed, some man of deeper thought than his brethren, such as St. Augustine [Footnote: See St. Augustine, "De Genesi ad Literam," Liber Imperfectus, and Libri Duodecim, and also "Confessionum" Liber xiii.], suspected that there might be more in that seemingly simple record than was generally acknowledged; but such men had no means of verifying their conjectures, and their number was very small. For three thousand years the old view was practically unquestioned, it received the tacit sanction of the Church, it gradually became identified in the minds of all with the record itself, and was as much an article of faith as the very Creed.

This was the state of things, when at last science awoke from its long slumber, and began for the first time to employ its energies in the right direction. Very soon discoveries were made which startled the minds of all believers in the Bible. The first shock which the old belief sustained was from the establishment of the Copernican view of the Solar System. That the world was the immovable centre of the universe, around which sun, moon, and planets moved in their appointed courses, was universally held to be the express teaching of the Bible; and when Galileo ventured to maintain the new views in Italy, the Roman Curia took up the question, and by the agency of the Inquisition wrung from him a reluctant retractation of his so-called heresy. But it was of no avail. The new doctrine was true, and it could not be crushed. Fresh evidence of its truth was continually coming forward, till at last it was universally received. Then the defenders of the Bible had recourse to the suggestion that as the Bible was not intended to teach us science, such errors were of no consequence, But this argument, though perfectly sound with reference to such passages as Joshua x. 12-14, where an event is described as it appeared to those who witnessed it, is not admissible in such a passage as Psalm xcvi. 10, where the supposed immobility of the earth is alleged as a proof of God's sovereignty, and is made the foundation of the duty of proclaiming that sovereignty among the heathen. When the supposed proof was found to be a fallacy, the statement in support of which it was alleged would be more or less shaken. In such a passage, then, the theory of limited inspiration is evidently untenable. At last the only sensible course was adopted. Recourse was had to the original, and it was at once apparent that the supposed difficulty had no real existence, but that there was a very trifling inaccuracy in the translation; for that the word translated "shall not be moved" really signified "shall not be shaken or totter." The same word is used in Psalm