CHAPTER II.

THE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS CONSIDERED IN RELATION TO THE INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

SECTION 1.

THE Bible, on the most favourable supposition now current in certain influential circles, is a mine containing some genuine and precious metal amidst an unknown amount of dross; the difference between the student of scripture and ordinary miners being this, that whereas the latter have tests by which they can determine with certainty whether that which they dig up is silver, or not; the Christian has no such test.

He who has watched the growth of scepticism in England for the last thirty or forty years, may have perceived that the primary and most powerful cause has been, the assumed contrariety between the indisputable facts of geological science and the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. The Rev. Baden Powell boldly affirmed that this chapter may be poetry, but cannot be history; and he shewed that he was fully aware of the inferences to which that opinion led, by writing in Kitto's Journal, of October, 1848, as follows:

"No one competently informed on the subject can seriously reflect on the remarkable and notorious contradiction existing between the facts disclosed at the present day by geological research, and the representations given of the creation in certain passages of the Old Testament, as literally understood, without perceiving that it is a subject which directly involves a train of consequences bearing on the entire view we must take of the nature and tenor of revelation;

and the discussion of which, the more we consider it, must be admitted to form a remarkable epoch in the history of theological opinions."

When the pass of Thermopyla was taken, the conqueror speedily overran Attica, and trod under foot the ruins of the Athenian acropolis. Could the French have dislodged the British soldiers from the château of Hougoumont, they would probably have won the battle of Waterloo. When the Malakoff was lost, Sebastopol fell. In every great conflict, there is some point which is a key to the whole position. As Professor Jowett has said,* the opening chapter of the Bible is a sort of advanced post to which theologians go out to meet the enemy; and, he might have added, to which the enemy go out to meet theologians. If that chapter be a merely human account of the creation, contradicted by the facts of science, it clearly follows that the Bible is, at best, a book of mingled error and truth. If that chapter may be-I do not say is, but may be literally accurate, no man has the right to use it, as bringing into doubt the inspiration of the scriptures generally. And, could it be proved that the chapter in question is literally true, then verily every one would see that the supernatural character and divine origin of the Bible are emblazoned on its opening page.

There are four ways of treating this important part of scripture. The first is that adopted by Mr. Powell, and very generally accepted by men of science. We have examined the world, say they, and are quite sure that it was not created in the manner here described. Admit their assumption, and all which Mr. Powell anticipated legitimately follows. If the first page be

a page of errors, our confidence in all following pages is shaken, not to say irrecoverably destroyed. The key to the entire position is lost.

The second mode of treating the record under consideration is this: An intelligent and devout man reads it, and is wholly unable to reconcile it with the facts of creation as known to him: but he finds it declared in the fourth Commandment that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth; in the eighth Psalm, he finds the narrative with which scripture opens, employed as a basis of adoration; elsewhere he reads of "the Lord who made heaven and earth," and of the Israelites as summoned to give thanks to him that stretched out the earth above the waters, and made the sun to rule by day, the moon and stars to rule by night; in the writings of Isaiah and Jeremiah he finds evidence which satisfies him that the first chapter in the Bible had a place in their faith; he thinks that the Apostles, when they lifted up their voice with one accord, and said, "Lord thou art God which hast made heaven and earth and sea and all that in them is," had learned their song from the same source; nor does he overlook the fact that the author of the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, regarded the first chapter of Genesis as a history most surely believed by Jews and Christians. He recoils from the supposition that the fourth Commandment and the sabbatic practice of the Jews were based on a fiction; and yet more from the supposition that Moses, and other Prophets, and Psalmists, and the writers of the New Testament, who said God spake by them, were all wrong: and adopts another conclusion which requires no great credulity, namely, that his own knowledge of the way in which the world was made is insufficient for the interpretation of the record; which thus becomes to

him a very effective test of faith.

but believes.

He does not see,

That this is a more intelligent, not to

say a more modest way of handling the subject, than the former, seems manifest.

Let us pass on to the third mode of viewing the scriptural account of creation. Suppose there can be presented a theory of creation, scientifically admissible, which is in harmony with the Biblical record; then, unless it can be shewn by evidence that the world was not framed according to that theory, the voice of the objector is silenced. He says the narrative cannot be history. We reply by shewing how it may be literally true. Whether this is practicable, we have to inquire presently.

A fourth mode of viewing the first pages of the Bible is conceivable, though not at present practicable. It may be proved hereafter, by scientific investigation, that the world was-not merely may have been but was-framed, according to the description in the book of Genesis. In which case it will be shewn, that the truth which clever men may succeed in searching out by the end of the nineteenth century of the Christian era, was revealed in the beginning. It will be made more than ever manifest that the foolishness of God is wiser than men: and they who now doubt, will be driven to confess that the Bible is not the word of men, but the word of God; the very chapter which has been perverted into a mighty instrument of scepticism, being accepted as the crowning proof of inspiration. For this result the time has not yet come. Whether in the present stage of scientific knowledge, it be practicable to treat the first chapter of the Bible in the third mode, and to advance a step or two in the treatment of it in the fourth mode, are the questions now to be discussed.

Let the reader imagine a round table, a lighted candle in the middle of it, and a man standing at its edge with his full face toward the candle. Let it be supposed further, that the man moves all round the edge of the table, keeping his full face all the while toward the candle. Such is the way in which the moon moves round the earth. She always keeps the same side turned toward us. So that if the moon depended on this world for light, the other side would be always in darkness, as is the back of the man moving round the table.

Among men of science the opinion is current, that the side of the moon we see, is the mountainous part; and the opposite hemisphere the low part: indeed that the side we see is so mountainous, as to be too high for either atmosphere or life: that it is a vast wilderness of rock, where nothing sings, or hisses, or flutters, or creeps, or lives. If this theory of science be sound, the moon is divisible into two parts, one of which is without form and void, and the other a deep: a deep, on which the light of this world never shines.

"Astronomical observations of undoubted accuracy compel us to admit that the hemisphere of the moon which is turned towards our earth is not surrounded by any atmosphere at all; or, at least, that any atmosphere which does exist must be so rare and so low as to be quite unfit for the support of animal and vegetable life. It now appears, however, that this circumstance is attributable rather to the peculiar constitution of the moon herself, than to a total want of any lunar atmosphere whatever. It is well known that the moon revolves once upon her own axis during one revolution round the earth, so that she would constantly turn the same hemisphere towards us, if it were not that, owing to the effect of a slight oscillation in her movement, which astronomers call her libration, there is a narrow marginal zone on either limb of her surface, which is sometimes visible and sometimes concealed. To account, on mechanical principles, for the permanence of this arrangement, it is necessary to assume either that the figure of the moon is that of a very irregular spheroid, or else that her mass is distributed very irregularly within her surface.