XVII.

_THE FIRST CHAPTER OF GENESIS._

There is in many people's minds a painful uneasiness about the relation

of the Bible to modern science and philosophy. The appearance of each

new theory is deprecated by believers with pious timidity, and hailed by

sceptics with unholy hope. On neither side is this a dignified or a

wholesome attitude. Its irksome and intrusive pressure promotes neither

a robust piety nor a sober-minded science. It is worth while inquiring

whether there is any sufficient foundation for either alarm or

expectancy in the actual relations of the Bible to scientific thought.

We shall work out our answer to the question on the historical

battle-field of the 1st chapter of Genesis. Results reached there will

be found to possess a more or less general validity.

There are two records of creation—one is contained in the Bible, which

claims to be God's Word; the other is stamped in the structure of the

world, which is God's work. Both being from the same Author, we should

expect them to agree in their general tenour; but in fact, so far from

being in harmony, they have an appearance of mutual contradiction that

demands explanation.

In studying the problem certain considerations must be borne in mind.

There is a loose way of talking about antagonism between the natural and

the revealed accounts of creation. That is not quite accurate. Conflict

between these there cannot be, for they never actually come into

contact. It is not they, but our theories, that meet and collide. The

discord is not in the original sources, but in our renderings of them.

That is a very different matter, and of quite incommensurate importance.

The Bible story is very old. It is written in an ancient and practically

dead language. The meaning of many of the words cannot be fixed with

precision. The significance of several fundamental phrases is at best

little more than conjecture. Since it was penned men's minds have grown

and changed. The very moulds of human thought have altered. Current

impressions, conceptions, ideas are different. It is hard to determine,

with even probability, what is said, still harder to realise what was

thought. Certainty is impossible. No rendering should be counted

infallible, not even our own. Every interpretation ought to be advanced

with modest diffidence, held tentatively, revised with alacrity, and

adjusted to new facts without timidity and without shame. This has not

been the characteristic attitude of commentators. The exegesis of the

1st chapter of Genesis presents a long array of theories, propounded

with authority, defended dogmatically, and ignominiously discredited and

deserted. Had a more lowly spirit presided over their inception,

maintenance, and abandonment, the list would perhaps not have been

shorter, but the retrospect would have been less humiliating. As it is,

we can hardly complain of the sting of satire that lurks in Kepler's

recital of Theology's successive retreats: "In theology we balance

authorities; in philosophy we weigh reasons. A holy man was Lactantius,

who denied that the earth was round. A holy man was Augustine, who

granted the rotundity, but denied the antipodes. A holy thing to me is

the Inquisition, which allows the smallness of the earth, but denies its

motion. But more holy to me is truth. And hence I prove by philosophy

that the earth is round, inhabited on every side, of small size, and in

motion among the stars. And this I do with no disrespect to the doctors."

The physical record is also very old. Its story is carved in a script

that is often hardly legible, and set forth in symbols that are not easy

to decipher. The testimony of the rocks embodies results of creation,

but does not present the actual operations. Effects suggest processes,

but do not disclose their precise measure, manner, and origination. You

may dissect a great painting into its ultimate lines and elements, and

from the canvas peel off the successive layers of colour, and duly

record their number and order; but when you have done you have not even

touched the essential secret of its creation. In determining the first

origin of things the limitation of science is absolute, and even in

tracing the subsequent development there is room for error, ignorance,

and diversity of explanation. Of certainties in scientific theory there

are few. For the most part, all that can be attained is probability,

especially in speculative matters, such as estimates of time,

explanations of formation, and theories of causation. As in exegesis, so

in geology, all hypotheses ought to be counted merely tentative,

maintained with modesty, and held open at every point to revision and

reconstruction. The necessity of caution and reserve needs no enforcing

for any one who knows the variety and inconsistency of the phases

through which speculative geology has passed in our own generation. In

this destiny of transitoriness it does but share the lot of all

scientific theory. Professor Huxley was once cruel enough to call

attention to the fact that "extinguished theologians lie about the

cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of

Hercules." The statement is a graphic, if somewhat ferocious, reminder

of a melancholy fact, and the fate of these trespassing divines should

warn their successors—as the Professor means it should—not to stray out

of their proper pastures. But has it fared very differently with the

mighty men of science who have essayed to solve the high problems of

existence and to make all mysteries plain? Take up a history of

philosophy, turn over its pages, study its dreary epitomes of defunct

theories, and as you survey the long array of skeletons tell me, are you

not reminded of the prophet who found himself "set down in the midst of

the valley which was full of dry bones: and, behold, there were very

many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry"?

If it is human to err, theology and geology have alike made full proof

of their humanity. That in itself is not their fault, but their

misfortune. The pity of it is that to the actual fact of fallibility

they have so often added the folly of pretended infallibility. The

resultant duty is an attitude of mutual modesty, of reserve in

suspecting contradiction, of patience in demanding an adjustment, of

perseverance in separate and honest research, of serenity of mind in

view of difficulties, coupled with a quiet expectation of final fitting.

The two accounts are alike trustworthy. They are not necessarily

identical in detail. It is enough that they should correspond in their

essential purport. It may be that the one is the complement of the

other, as soul is to body—unlike, yet vitally allied. Perchance their

harmony is not that of duplicates, but of counterparts. They were made

not to overlap like concentric circles, but to interlock like toothed

wheels. In the end, when partial knowledge has given way to perfect,

they will be seen to correspond, and nothing will be broken but the

premature structures of adjustment with which men have thought to make

them run smoother than they were meant to do.

To attempt anew a task that has proved so disastrous, and is manifestly

so difficult, must be admitted to be bold, if not even foolhardy. But

its very desperateness is its justification. To fall in a forlorn hope

is not ignoble. To miss one's way in threading the labyrinth of the 1st

chapter of Genesis is pardonable, a thing almost to be expected. If in

seeking to escape Scylla the traveller should fall into Charybdis, no

one will be surprised—not even himself. It is in the most undogmatic

spirit that we wish to put forward our reading of the chapter. It is

presented simply as a possible rendering. What can be said for it will

be said as forcibly as may be. It is open to objection from opposite

sides. That may be not altogether against it, since truth is rarely

extreme. Difficulties undoubtedly attach to it, and defects as well. At

best it can but contribute to the ultimate solution. Perchance its share

in the task may be no more than to show by trial that another way of

explanation is impossible. Well, that too is a service. Every fresh

by-way proved impracticable, and closed to passage, brings us a step

nearer the pathway of achievement. For the loyal lover of truth it is

enough even so to have been made tributary to the truth.

The business of a theologian is, in the first instance at least, with

the Scriptural narrative. To estimate its worth, and determine its

relation to science, we must ascertain its design. Criticism of a

church-organ, under the impression that it was meant to do the work of a

steam-engine, would certainly fail to do justice to the instrument, and

the disquisition would not have much value in itself. Before we exact

geology of Genesis we must inquire whether there is any in it. If there

be none, and if there was never meant to be any, the demand is as absurd

as it would be to require thorns of a vine and thistles of the fig-tree.

Should it turn out, for instance, that the order of the narrative is

intentionally not chronological, then every attempt to reconcile it with

the geological order is of necessity a Procrustean cruelty, and the

venerable form of Genesis is fitted to the geological couch at the cost

of its head or its feet. Either the natural sense of the chapter is

sacrificed or the pruned narrative goes on crutches. If we would deal

fairly and rationally with the Bible account of creation, our first duty

is to determine with exactness what it purposes to tell, and what it

does not profess to relate. We must settle with precision, at the outset

of our investigation, what is its subject, method, and intention. The

answer is to be found, not in _à priori_ theories of what the contents

ought to be, but in an accurate and honest analysis of the chapter.

The narrative of creation is marked by an exquisite symmetry of thought

and style. It is partly produced by the regular use of certain rubrical

phrases, which recur with the rhythmical effect of a refrain. There is

the terminal of the days—"and there was evening, and there was morning,

day one," etc.; the embodiment of the Divine creative will in the

eightfold "God said;" the expression of instant fulfilment in the swift

responsive "and it was so;" and the declaration of perfection in the

"God saw that it was good." But the symmetry of the chapter lies deeper

than the wording. It pervades the entire construction of the narrative.

As the story proceeds there is expansion, variety, progression. Yet each

successive paragraph is built up on one and the same type and model.

This uniformity is rooted in the essential structure of the thought, and

is due to the determination with which one grand truth is carried like a

key-note through all the sequences of the theme, and rings out clear and

dominant in every step and stage of the development. Our first duty is

to follow, and find out with certainty, this ruling purpose, and then to

interpret the subordinate elements by its light and guidance.

The narrative distributes the operation of creation over six days, and

divides it into eight distinct acts or deeds. This double divergent

arrangement of the material is made to harmonise by the assignment of a

couple of acts to the third day, and another couple to the sixth—in each

case with a fine and designed effect. We shall take a bird's-eye view of

the contents of these divisions.

The chapter opens with a picture of primeval chaos, out of which God

commands the universe of beauty, life, and order. Nothing is said of its

origin. The story starts with it existent. It is painted as an abyss,

dreary and boundless, wrapped in impenetrable darkness, an inextricable

confusion of fluid matter, destitute of character, structure, or value,

without form and void. It is the raw material of the universe, passive

and powerless in itself, but holding in it the promise and potency of

all existence. For over it nestles, like a brood fowl, the informing,

warming, life-giving Spirit of God, sending through its coldness and

emptiness the heat and parental yearnings of the Divine heart, that

craves for creatures on which to pour out its love and goodness. This

action of the Spirit is, however, no more than preparative, and waits

its completion in the accession of a personal fiat of God's will, in

which the Divine Word gives effect and reality to the Divine Wish. This

is a feature of supreme importance, for in it consists the uniqueness of

the Bible narrative. In the Pagan accounts of creation we find the same

general imagery of dull, dead matter, stirred and warmed into life and

development by the action of an immaterial effluence of "thought,"

"love," or "longing." But in them the operation is cosmic, impersonal,

often hardly conscious; in the Bible it is ethical and intensely

personal. In them the language is metaphysical, materialistic, or

pantheistic; here it is moral, human, personal, to the point of

anthropomorphism. They show us creative forces and processes; the Bible

presents to us, in all His infinite, manifold, and glorious personality,

the thinking, living, loving "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven

and earth."

The result of the first day and the first Divine decree is the

production of light. The old difficulty about the existence of light

before the sun was made, as it was invented by science, has been by

science dispelled. The theory of light as a mode of motion, which for

the present holds the field, knows no obstacle to the presence of light

in the absence of the sun. But this harmony is not due to any prescience

of modern science in the writer of Genesis. His idea of light is not

undulatory, and not scientific, but just the simple popular notion found

everywhere in the Bible. Light is a fine substance, distinct from all

others, and it appears first in the list of creation, as being the first

and noblest of the elements that go to make up our habitable world. The

emergence of the light is presented as instantaneously following the

Divine decree. That is manifestly the literary effect designed in the

curtness of the sequence, "Let there be light, and there was light." The

light is pronounced good, is permanently established in possession of

its special properties and powers, and is set in its service of the

world and man by having assigned to it its place in the "alternate mercy

of day and night." There is a very fine touch in the position of the

declaration of goodness. It stands here earlier than in the succeeding

sections. Darkness is in the Bible the standing emblem of evil. It would

have been discordant with that imagery to make God pronounce it good,

though as the foil of light it serves beneficent ends. The jarring note

is tacitly and simply avoided by introducing the assertion of the

goodness of light before the mention of its background and negation,

darkness. The picture of the first day of creation is subscribed with

the formula of completeness—"There was evening, and there was morning,

one day," or "day first"—and has for its net result the production of

the element or sphere of light.

The second day and the second Divine decree are devoted to the formation

of the firmament. All through the Old Testament the sky is pictured as a

solid dome or vaulted roof, above which roll the primeval waters of

chaos. The notion is of course popular, a figment of the primitive

imagination, and quite at variance with the modern conception of space

filled by an interastral ether; though it is well to remember that this

same ether is no more ascertained fact than was the old-world firmament,

and is in its turn simply an invention of the scientific imagination. It

is of more moment to note that the real motive and outcome of the day's

work is not the firmament. That is not an end, but a means, precisely as

a sea-wall is not an object in itself, but merely the instrument of the

reclamation of valuable land. What the erection of the firmament does

towards the making of our world is the production of the intervening

aërial space and the lower expanse of terrestrial waters. Since this

last portion of the work is not complete prior to the separation of the

dry land, the declaration of goodness or perfection is, with exquisite

fineness of suggestion, tacitly omitted. The net result of the day is,

therefore, the formation of the realms of air and water as elements or

spheres of existence.

The third day includes two works—the production of the solid ground, and

of vegetation. The dead, inert soil, and its manifold outgrowth of plant

life, are strikingly distinct, and yet most intimately related. Together

they make up the habitable earth. They are therefore presented as

separate works, but conjoined in the framework of one day. Two sections

of the vegetable kingdom are singled out for special mention—the cereals

and the fruit-trees. It is not a complete or a botanical classification,

and manifestly science is not contemplated. Those divisions of the

plant-world that sustain animal and human life, and minister to its

enjoyment, are drawn out into pictorial relief and prominence. The

intention is practical, popular, and religious. The net result of the

day is the production of the habitable dry land.

The fourth day and the fifth decree call into being the celestial

bodies—the sun, moon, and stars. They are called luminaries; that is to

say, not masses or accumulations of light, but managers and distributers

of light, and the value of this function of theirs, for the religious

and secular calendar, for agriculture, navigation, and the daily life of

men, is formally and elaborately detailed. Were this account of the

heavenly bodies intended as a scientific or exhaustive statement of

their Divine destination and place in the universe, it would be

miserably inadequate and erroneous. But if the whole aim of the

narrative be not science, but religion, then it is absolutely

appropriate, exact, and powerful. In the teeth of an all but universal

worship of sun, moon, and stars, it declares them the manufacture of

God, and the ministers and servants of man. For this practical religious

purpose the geocentric description of them is not an accident, but

essential. It is not a blunder, but a merit. It is true piety, not

cosmical astronomy, that is being established. In the words of Calvin,

"Moses, speaking to us by the Holy Spirit, did not treat of the heavenly

luminaries as an astronomer, but as it became a theologian, having

regard to us rather than to the stars." The net result of the fourth day

is the production of the heavenly orbs of light.

The fifth day and the sixth work issue in the production of birds and

fishes, or, more accurately, all creatures that fly or swim. It is

evidently a classification by the eye—the ordinary popular division—and

it makes no attempt at scientific pretension or profundity. As having

conscious life, these new creatures of God's love are blessed by Him,

and have their place and purpose in the order of being defined and

established. The net result of the day is the formation of fowls and

fishes.

The sixth day, like the third, includes two works—the land animals and

man. The representation admirably expresses their intimate relationship,

and yet essential distinction. The animals are graphically divided into

the domestic quadrupeds, the small creatures that creep and crawl, and

the wild beasts of the field. The classification is as little scientific

in intention or substance as is the general arrangement into birds,

fishes, and beasts, which of course traverses radically alike the

historical order of palæontology and the physiological grouping of

zoology. The narrative simply adopts the natural grouping of observation

and popular speech, because that suffices, and best suits its purpose.

With a wonderful simplicity, yet with consummate effect, man is

portrayed as the climax and crown of creation. Made in the image and

likeness of God, he is clothed with sovereign might and dominion over

all the elements and contents of Nature. The personal, conscious

counterpart and child of God, he stands at the other end of the chain of

creation, and with answering intelligence and love looks back adoringly

to his great Father in the heavens. Mention is made of lesser matters,

such as sex and food; but manifestly the supreme interest of the

delineation is ethical and religious. Science is no more contemplated as

an ingredient in the conception than prose is in poetry. With the making

of man the circle of creation is complete, and the finished perfection

of the whole, as well as the parts, is expressed in the superlative

declaration that "God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it

was very good." The net result of the sixth day is the formation of the

land animals and man.

The six days of creative activity are followed by a seventh of Divine

repose. On the seventh day God rested; or, as it is more fully worded in

Exodus (xxxi. 17), God "rested and was refreshed." It is a daring

anthropomorphism, and at the same time a master-stroke of inspired

genius. What a philosophical dissertation hardly could accomplish it

achieves by one simple image. For our thought of God the idea performs

the same service as the institution of the Sabbath does for our souls

and bodies. The weekly day of rest is the salvation of our personality

from enslavement in material toil. During six days the toiler is tied,

bent and bowed, to his post in the vast machinery of the world's work.

On the seventh all is stopped, and he is free to lift himself erect to

the full stature of his manhood, to expand the loftier elements of his

being, to reassert his freedom, and realise his superiority over what is

mechanical, secular, and earthly. What in the progressive portraiture of

creation is the effect of this sudden declaration that the Creator

rested? Why, an intensely powerful reminder of the free, conscious, and

personal nature of His action. And this impression of such unique value

is secured precisely by the anthropomorphism, as no philosophical

disquisition could have done it. The blot and blemish of all

metaphysical delineation is that personalities get obliterated and

swallowed up in general principles and impersonal abstractions. In all

other cosmogonies of any intellectual pretension the process of creation

is presented as passive, or Necessitarian, or Pantheistic, and

invariably the free personality of the Creator becomes entangled in His

work, or entirely vanishes. By this stroke of inspired imagination the

Bible story rescues from all such risks and degradations our thought of

the Creator, and at its close leaves us face to face with our Divine

Maker as free, personal, living, loving, and conscious as we are

ourselves.

We have now got what is, I trust, a fairly accurate and complete summary

of the contents of the narrative. It is not necessary for our purpose to

discuss its relations to the Pagan cosmogonies. From the sameness

everywhere of the human eye, mind, and fancy, certain conceptions are

common property. There is probably a special kinship between the

Biblical and the Babylonian and Phœnician accounts. But with all respect

for enthusiastic decipherers, we make bold to believe, with more

sober-minded critics, that the 1st chapter of Genesis owes very little

to Babylonian mythology, and very much indeed to Hebrew thought and the

revealing Spirit of God. The chapter strikingly lacks the characteristic

marks of myth, and is on the face of it a masterpiece of exquisite

artistic workmanship and profound religious inspiration. Proof of this

has appeared in plenty during our brief study of its structure and

contents. Let us proceed to use the results of our analysis to determine

some more general characteristics of its structure and design.

The process of creation is portrayed in six great steps or stages. Is

this order put forward as corresponding with the physical course of

events? and, further, does it tally with the order stamped in the record

of the rocks? Replying to the second question first, it must be admitted

that, _primâ facie_, the Bible sequence does not appear to be in unison

with the geological. Of attempted reconciliations there is an almost

endless variety, but, unfortunately, among the harmonies themselves

there is no harmony. At the present moment there is none that has gained

general acceptance: a few possess each the allegiance of a handful of

partisans; the greater number command the confidence only of their

respective authors, and some not even that. It is needless to discuss

these reconciliations, because if geology is trustworthy in its main

results, and if our interpretation of the meaning of Genesis is at all

correct, correspondence in order and detail is impossible. If the order

of Genesis was meant as science, then geology and Genesis are at issue;

but, on the other hand, if the sequence in Genesis was never meant to be

physical the wrong lies with ourselves, who have searched for geology

where we should have looked for religion, and have, with the best

intentions, persisted in trying to turn the Bible bread of life into the

arid stone of science. Now, we venture to suggest that in drafting this

chapter the ruling formative thought was not chronology. It must be

remembered that the narrative was under no obligation to follow the

order of actual occurrence, unless that best suited its purpose. Zoology

does not group the animals in the order of their emergence into

existence, but classifies and discusses them in a very different

sequence, adopted to exhibit their structural and functional affinities.

If the design of Genesis was not to inform us about historical geology,

but to reveal and enforce religious truth, it might well be that a

literary or a logical, and not a chronological, arrangement might best

serve its end. As a matter of fact, the order chosen is not primarily

historical. Another quite different and very beautiful idea has

fashioned, and is enshrined in, the arrangement. Looking at our analysis

of their contents, we perceive that the six days fall into two parallel

sets of three, whose members finely correspond. The first set presents

us with three vast empty tenements or habitations, and the second set

furnishes these with occupants. The first day gives us the sphere of

light; the fourth day tenants it with sun, moon, and stars. The second

day presents the realm of air and water; the fifth day supplies the

inhabitants—birds and fishes. The third day produces the habitable dry

land; and the sixth day stocks it with the animals and man. The idea of

this arrangement is, on the face of it, literary and logical. It is

chosen for its comprehensive, all-inclusive completeness. To declare of

every part and atom of Nature that it is the making of God, the author

passes in procession the great elements or spheres which the human mind

everywhere conceives as making up our world, and pronounces them one by

one God's creation. Then he makes an inventory of their entire furniture

and contents, and asserts that all these likewise are the work of God.

For his purpose—which is to declare the universal Creatorship of God and

the uniform creaturehood of all Nature—the order and classification are

unsurpassed and unsurpassable. With a masterly survey, that marks

everything and omits nothing, he sweeps the whole category of created

existence, collects the scattered leaves into six congruous groups,

encloses each in a compact and uniform binding, and then on the back of

the numbered and ordered volumes stamps the great title and declaration

that they are one and all, in every jot, and tittle, and shred, and

fragment, the works of their Almighty Author, and of none beside.

With the figment of a supposed physical order vanishes also the

difficulty of the days. Their use is not literal, but ideal and

pictorial. That the author was not thinking of actual days of

twenty-four hours, with a matter-of-fact dawning of morning and

darkening of evening, is evident from the fact that he does not bring

the sun (the lord of the day) into action till three have already

elapsed, and later on he exhibits the sun as itself the product of one

of them. Neither is it possible that the days stand for geological

epochs, for by no wrenching and racking can they be made to correspond.

Moreover, it is quite certain that the author would have revolted

against the expansion of his timeless acts of creative omnipotence into

long ages of slow evolution, since the key-note of the literary

significance and sublimity of his delineation is its exhibition of the

created result following in instantaneous sequence on the creative fiat.

The actual meaning underlying the use of the days is suggested in the

rubrical character of the refrain, as it appears rounding off and ending

each fresh stage of the narration—"And there was evening, and there was

morning—day one, day two, day three," and so on. The great sections of

Nature are to be made pass in a panorama of pictures, and to be

presented, each for itself, as the distinct act of God. It is desirable

to enclose each of these pictures in a frame, clear-cut and complete.

The natural unit and division of human toil is a day. In the words of

the poet—

"Each morning sees some task begin;

Each evening sees it close."

In Old Testament parlance, any great achievement or outstanding event is

spoken of as "a day." A decisive battle is known as "the day of Midian."

God's intervention in human history is "the day of the Lord." When the

author of Genesis i. would present the several elements of Nature as one

and all the outcome of God's creative energy, the successive links of

the chain are depicted as days. Where we should say "End of Part I.," he

says, "And there was evening, and there was morning—day one." Moreover,

it is needless to point out how finely, from this presentation of the

timeless fiats of creation in a framework of days, emerges the majestic

truth that not in the dead order of nature, nor in the mere movement of

the stars, but in the nature and will of God, Who made man in His image,

must be sought the ultimate origin, sanction, and archetype of that

salutary law which divides man's life on earth into fixed periods of

toil, rounded and crowned by a Sabbath of repose.

If this understanding of the structural arrangement of the chapter be

correct, we have reached an important and significant conclusion

regarding the author's method and design. He does not suppose himself to

be giving the matter-of-fact sequence of creation's stages. His interest

does not lie in that direction. His sole concern is to declare that

Nature, in bulk and in detail, is the manufacture of God. His plan does

not include, but _ipso facto_ excludes, conformity with the material

order and process. He writes as a theologian, and not as a scientist or

historian. Starting from this fixed point, let us note the outstanding

features and engrossing interests of his delineation. We shall find them

in the phrases that, like a refrain, run through the narrative and form

its key-notes, and finally in the resultant impression left by its

general tenour and purport.

The recurrent key-notes of the narrative are three—God's naming His

works, His declaration of their goodness, and the swift formula of

achievement—"and it was so." The naming is not a childish triviality,

nor a mere graphic touch or poetical ornament. It does not mean that God

attached to His works the vocables by which in Hebrew they are known.

Its significance appears in the definition of function into which in the

later episodes it is expanded. Name in Hebrew speech is equivalent to

Nature. When the story pictures God as naming His works, it vividly

brings into relief the fixed law and order that pervade the universe.

And by the picturesque—if you will, anthropomorphic—fashion of the

statement, it attains an effect beyond science or metaphysics, inasmuch

as it irresistibly portrays this order of Nature as originating in the

personal act of God, and directly inspired by and informed with His own

effluent love of what is good, and true, and orderly. Thus the great

truth of the fixity of Nature is presented, not as a fact of science or

a quality of matter, but as rooted in and reflecting a majestic

attribute of the character of God. The interest is not scientific, but

religious. In like fashion, the unfailing declaration of goodness,

though it might seem a small detail, is replete with practical and

religious significance. The Pagan doctrines of creation are all more or

less contaminated by dualistic or Manichean conceptions. The good

Creator is baffled, thwarted, and impeded by a brutish or malignant

tendency in matter, which on the one hand mars the perfection of

creation, and on the other hand inserts in the physical order of things

elements of hostility and malevolence to man. It is a thought that at

once degrades the Creator, and denudes Nature, as man's abode, of its

beauty, comfort, and kindliness. How different is it in the Bible

picture of creation! This God has outside Himself no rival, experiences

no resistance nor contradiction, knows no failure nor imperfection in

His handiwork; but what He wishes He wills, and what He commands is

done, and the result answers absolutely to the intention of His wisdom,

love, and power. In its relation to its Maker the work is free from any

flaw. In its relation to man it contains nothing malevolent or

maleficent. It is good. And once again, mark with what skill in the

delineation the light is thrown, not on the work, but on the Worker, and

the goodness of creation becomes but a mirror to drink in and flash

forth the infinite wisdom, might, and goodness of its Divine Maker. Here

also the interest is not metaphysical, but practical and religious. A

third commanding aim of the narrative appears in the significant and

striking use of the formula "and it was so." With absolute uniformity

the Divine fiat is immediately followed by the physical fulfilment.

There is no painting of the process, no delineation of slow and gradual

operations of material forces. Not once is there any mention of

secondary causes, nor the faintest suggestion of intermediate agencies.

The Creator wills; the thing is. In this exclusion from the scene of all

subordinate studies there is artistic design—profound design. The

picture becomes one, not of scenery, but of action. It is not a

landscape, but a portrait. The canvas contains but two solitary objects,

the Creator and His work. The effect is to throw out of sight methods,

materials, processes, and to throw into intense relief the act and the

Actor. And the supreme and ultimate result on the beholder's mind is to

produce a quite overpowering and majestic impression of the glorious

personality of the Creator.

Here we have reached the sovereign theme of the narrative, and have

detected the false note that is struck at the outset of every attempt to

interpret it as in any degree or fashion a physical record of creation.

In very deed and truth the concern of the chapter is not creation, but

the character, being, and glory of the Almighty Maker. If we excerpt

God's speeches and the rubrical formulas, the chapter consists of one

continuous chain of verbs, instinct with life and motion, linked on in

swift succession, and with hardly an exception, the subject of every one

of them is God. It is one long adoring delineation of God loving,

yearning, willing, working in creation. Its interest is not in the work,

but the Worker. Its subject is not creation, but the Creator. What it

gives is not a world, but a God. It is not geology; it is theology.

Why do we so assert, accentuate, and reiterate this to be the central

theme of the chapter? Because through the scientific trend and bias of

modern inquiry the essential design of the chapter has got warped,

cramped, and twisted till its majestic features have been pushed almost

clean out of view, and all attention is concentrated on one trivial,

mean, and unreal point in its physiognomy. Its claim to be accounted an

integral part of a real revelation is made to hinge on its magical

anticipation of, and detailed correspondence with, the changeful

theories of modern geology. The idea is, in our humble but decided

opinion, dangerous, baseless, and indefensible. The chapter may not

forestall one single scientific discovery. It may not tally with one

axiom or dogma of geology. Nevertheless, it remains a unique,

undeniable, and glorious monument of revelation, second only in worth

and splendour to the record of God's incarnation of His whole heart and

being in the person of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Redeemer. Consider

what this chapter has actually accomplished in the world, and set that

against all theories of what it ought to be doing. For our knowledge of

the true God and the realisation of mankind's higher life it has done a

work beside which any question of correspondence or non-correspondence

with science sinks into unmentionable insignificance. Place side by side

with it the chiefest and best of the Pagan cosmogonies, and appreciate

its sweetness, purity, and elevation over against their grotesqueness,

their shallowness, and their degradation alike of the human and the

Divine. Realise the world whose darkness they re-echo, the world into

which emerged this radiant picture of God's glory and man's dignity, and

think what it has done for that poor world. It found heaven filled with

a horde of gods, monstrous, impure, and horrible, gigantic embodiments

of brute force and lust, or at best cold abstractions of cosmical

principles, whom men could fear, but not love, honour, or revere. It

found man in a world dark and unhomelike, bowing down in abject worship

to beasts and birds, and stocks and stones, trembling with craven

cowardice before the elements and forces of Nature, enslaved in a

degrading bondage of physical superstition, fetishism, and polytheism.

With one sweep of inspired might the truth enshrined in this chapter has

changed all that, wherever it has come. It has cleansed the heaven of

those foul gods and monstrous worships, and leaves men on bended knees

in the presence of the one true God, their Father in heaven, who made

the world for their use, and them for Himself, and whose tender mercies

are over all His works. From moral and mental slavery it has emancipated

man, for it has taken the physical objects of his fear and worship, and

dashing them down from their usurped pre-eminence, has put them all

under his feet, to be his ministers and servants in working out on earth

his eternal destiny. These conceptions of God, Man, and Nature have been

the regeneration of humanity; the springs of progress in science,

invention, and civilisation; the charter of the dignity of human life,

and the foundation of liberty, virtue, and religion. The man who, in

view of such a record, can ask with anxious concern whether a revelation

carrying in its bosom such a wealth of heavenly truth does not also have

concealed in its shoe a bird's-eye view of geology must surely be a man

blind to all literary likelihood, destitute of any sense of congruity

and the general fitness of things, and cannot but seem to us as one that

mocks. The chapter's title to be reckoned a revelation rests on no such

magical and recondite quality, but is stamped four-square on the face of

its essential character and contents. Whence could this absolutely

unique conception of God, in His relation to the world and man, have

been derived, except from God Himself? Whence into a world so dark, and

void, and formless did it emerge fair and radiant? There is no answer

but one. God said, "Let there be light; and there was light."

The specific revelation of the 1st chapter of Genesis must be sought in

its moral and spiritual contents. But may there not be, in addition,

worked into its material framework, some anticipation of scientific

truths that have since come to light? What were the good of it, when the

Divine message could be wholly and better expressed by the sole use of

popular language, intelligible in every age and by all classes? Is it

dignified to depict the Spirit of Inspiration standing on tiptoe, and

straining to speak, across the long millenniums and over the head of the

world's childhood, to the wise and learned scientists of the nineteenth

century? It is never the manner of Scripture to anticipate natural

research or to forestall human industry. God means men to discover

physical truth from the great book of Nature. What truth of science,

what mechanical invention, what beneficent discovery in medicine,

agriculture, navigation, or any other art or industry, has ever been

gleaned from study of the Bible? Not one. These things lie outside the

scope of revelation, and God is the God of order. Moreover, in Scripture

itself the framework of the chapter is not counted dogmatic nor

uniformly adhered to. In the 2nd chapter of Genesis, in Job, in the

Psalms, and in Proverbs there are manifold deviations and variations.

The material setting is handled with the freedom applicable to the

pictorial dress of a parable, wherein things transcendental are depicted

in earthly symbols. In truth, this is essentially the character of the

composition. We have seen that the delineation, classification, and

arrangement are not scientific and not philosophical, but popular,

practical, and religious. It is everywhere manifest that the interest is

not in the process of creation, but in the fact of its origination in

God. While science lingers on the physical operation, Genesis designedly

overleaps it, for the same reason that the Gospels do not deign to

suggest the material substratum of Christ's miracles. Creation is a

composite process. It begins in the spiritual world, and terminates in

the material. It is in its first stage supernatural, in its second

natural. It originates in God desiring, decreeing, issuing formative

force; it proceeds in matter moving, cohering, moulding, and shaping.

Revelation and science regard it from opposite ends. The one looks at it

from its beginning, the other from its termination. The Bible shows us

God creating; geology shows us the world being created. Scripture deals

solely with the first stage, science solely with the second. Where

Scripture stops, there science first begins. Contradiction, conflict,

collision are impossible. In the words of the Duke of Argyll, "The 1st

chapter of Genesis stands alone among the traditions of mankind in the

wonderful simplicity and grandeur of its words. Specially

remarkable—miraculous, it really seems to me—is that character of

reserve which leaves open to reason all that reason may be able to

attain. The meaning of these words seems always to be a meaning ahead of

science, not because it anticipates the results of science, but because

it is independent of them, and runs, as it were, round the outer margin

of all possible discovery."

May we not safely extend this finding to the entire Bible, and on these

lines define its relation to modern thought? Its supernatural revelation

is purely and absolutely ethical and spiritual. In questions physical

and metaphysical it has no concern and utters no voice. With the

achievements of science it never competes, nor can it be contradicted by

them. It encourages its researches, ennobles its aspirations, crowns and

completes its discoveries. Into the dead body of physical truth it puts

the living soul of faith in the Divine Author. Like the blue heaven

surrounding and spanning over the green earth, revelation over-arches

and encircles science. Within that infinite embrace, beneath that

spacious dome, drawing from its azure depths light, and life, and

fructifying warmth, science, unhampered and unhindered, works out its

majestic mission of blessing to men and glory to God. Collision there

can be none till the earth strike the sky. The message of the Bible is a

message from God's heart to ours. It cannot be proved by reason, nor can

it be disproved. It appeals, not to sight, but to faith, and belongs to

the realm of spirit, and not to that of sense. Science may have much to

alter in our notions of its earthly embodiment, but its essential

contents it cannot touch.

That is not theory, but reality. It is not philosophy, but life; not

flesh, but spirit. It is the living, breathing, feeling love of God

become articulate. It needs no evidence of sense. In the immutable

instincts of the human heart it has its attestation, and in a life of

responsive love it finds an unfailing verification. It rests on a basis

no sane criticism can undermine nor solid science shake. Happy the man

whose faith has found this fixed foundation, and whose heart possesses

this adamantine certainty: he shall be likened "unto a wise man, which

built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods

came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for

it was founded upon a rock."

Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.

_In 8vo, with Etched Portrait by Manesse. Price 12s._

JAMES MACDONELL,

JOURNALIST.

By W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.

Daily Telegraph.

"Sincere, sympathetic, loyal, and artistic.... This masterly

monograph."

Graphic.

"James Macdonell was one of the most accomplished and brilliant

journalists of the day.... We have a full record of Macdonell's

life, and it forms one of the most interesting of recent books of

biography."

Academy.

"An admirable portrait, ... so carefully and so judiciously

written that the example it sets is likely to be followed."

Scotsman.

"An admirably written life."

Star.

"The story is told by Mr. Nicoll with admirable perfection and

a real sense of the value of such a record."

Church Times.

"The biographer has performed his task with eminent success."

Pall Mall Gazette.

"In many ways an attractive biography."

Spectator.

"Interesting and valuable."

Guardian.

"We are likely to have, for some time to come, no more light

thrown upon the mysteries of the 'leading journal' than there is

given in this account of James Macdonell.... The life of him

which Mr. Nicoll has given to the world is full of interest, and we

lay it down with sincere regret for the brilliant career which was

cut short midway."