Chapter IX
Ome there are who will have read the preceding chapters with sympathy, who yet will feel that their own special difficulties remain unnoticed. They love the Bible, and are assured that it is in the main Divine, but there is much in the Old Testament which unduly tries their faith. ‘‘The creation story of Genesis,” they would say, “‘is discredited by science. The Book of Jonah is incredible. The Book of Daniel can no longer be defended. The history of Israel is marked by moral difficulties which cannot be explained away. And no one can now defend the correctness of Old Testament chronology. “Nor are these difficulties confined to the Old Testament. Whatever theoretical defence may be made for the inspiration of the Gospels, the fact remains that they are marked by errors which prove that, if they be inspired, inspiration affords no guarantee of truth.”
III
With these several questions I will now proceed to deal.! And first as to ‘‘the proem to Genesis.” If I were beginning an octavo volume, I should seek to recapitulate the controversy on this subject, and to define the stage it has at present reached. I should mark the various positions which have been successively occupied or abandoned by the disputants, as one or another of the fluctuating theories of science has gained prominence, or newly found fossils have added to “the testimony of the rocks.” But I will content myself with recalling the main incidents of the discussion between Mr. Gladstone and Professor Huxley some years ago in the pages of the Wineteenth Century.2
In Zhe Dawn of Creation and Worship Mr. Gladstone sought to show that the order of creation as recorded in Genesis has been ‘so affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact.” He averred that science was perfectly in accord with Moses in recognising that life appeared upon our globe in the order of,
* This chapter is based in part upon Chapter VIII. of the author’s Doubter’s Doubis about Science and Religion — a book long out of print.
* The articles in question appeared in the later months of 1885, and January and February, 1886.
Cu. IX.] THE CREATION STORY 113
first, the water population; second, the air population; and, third, the land population. To which Mr. Huxley replied as follows : —
“It is agreed on all hands that terrestrial lizards and other reptiles allied to lizards occur in the Permian strata. It is further agreed that the Triassic strata were deposited after these. Moreover, it is well known that, even if certain footprints are to be taken as unquestionable evidence of the existence of birds, they are not known to occur in rocks earlier than the Trias, while indubitable remains of birds are to be met with only much later. Hence it follows that natural science does not ‘affirm’ the statement that birds were made on the fifth day, and ‘everything that creepeth on the ground’ on the sixth, on which Mr. Gladstone rests his order; for, as is shown by Leviticus, the ‘ Mosaic writer’ includes lizards among his ‘creeping things.’”
The following is the quotation from Leviticus which Mr. Huxley “commended to Mr. Gladstone’s serious attention” : — ‘ And these are they which are unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the great lizard after its kind, and the gecko, and the land-crocodile, and the lizard, and the sand-lizard, and the chameleon. These are they which are unclean unto you among all that creep” (chap. xi. 29-31, R.V.). And he added, “The merest Sunday-school
9 exegesis, therefore, suffices to prove that when the Mosaic writer in Gen. i. 24 speaks of creeping things, he means to include lizards among them.”
A charming specimen this certainly is of “the merest Sunday-school exegesis.” The argument which so completely satisfied its author, and silenced his opponent, is nothing but an ad captandum appeal to the chance rendering of our English Bible. For the word translated “creeping thing” in Leviticus xi. has no affinity with the word so rendered in Genesis i. 24, whereas it is the identical word which our translators have rendered ‘moving creature” in the twentieth verse, which records the first appearance of animal life.!
Mr. Huxley’s answer was, therefore, an overwhelming refutation of his own position. Science proclaims the seniority of land reptiles in the genesis of life on earth, and the despised Book of Genesis records that ‘creeping things,” which, as Mr. Huxley insists, must include land reptiles, were the first ‘‘moving creatures” which the Creator’s fat called into existence.
* The word in verses 24 and 26, relating to the life of the sixth day, is remes; but in verse 20, relating to the fifth day, it is shereiz, which occurs ten times in Lev. xi.
Cu. IX.] HUXLEY’S ATTACK ON GENESIS II5
Some may think that if Mr. Huxley were still with us he could make short work of this. But the plea will not avail. In the Zzmes correspondence of ten years ago on The Bible and Modern Criticism, 1 put him on his defence on this very question. His only answer was to repeat his blunder. Thereupon Canon Girdlestone intervened to assure him that “he had been wholly misled by the English version,” and the Duke of Argyll challenged his representation “both of the contention of Mr. Gladstone and the narrative in Genesis.” My own rejoinder was to repeat his words in detail and to hold him to them.
Lawyers have a plea of “confession and avoiddance”; Mr. Huxley’s next letter was marked by avoidance without confession, and ended by a sneer at my reference to the spiritual side of Holy Scripture. To which the Duke of Argyll replied
as follows:
“In Professor Huxley’s letter in your issue of yesterday he completely shifts his ground. He now asserts that Genesis ascribes creation to acts which he calls ‘supernatural,’ whereas, he urges, science asserts that it originated in a ‘ process of natural evolution.’
“This antithesis is absolutely unknown to the literature both of the Old Testament and the New. It is equally unknown to science and also to philosophy. The Bible knows nothing of what men now call ‘the supernatural.” It regards all ‘natural processes’ as the work of a Divine Being. Professor Huxley asserts or implies that this is erroneous, and that wherever we can trace the operation of natural causes, we must exclude all idea of a Divine origin or direction. I venture to assert, on the contrary, that this is very bad science, and still worse philosophy.”!
The letter enlarges upon this, and ends by noting that the “broad issue” for which Mr. Huxley contended was, ‘“‘that in ascribing the creative working to a Divine Being the narrative of Genesis is in ‘irreconcilable antagonism’ with modern science,” an issue in which he would not have “the general support of the most eminent men of science in the United Kingdom.”
My own final reply appeared in the same issue of Zhe Times, as follows : —
My rejoinder to Mr. Huxley shall be brief. Any one who will be at the pains to turn to his Wzneteenth Century articles will see that “his argument from Leviticus,” instead of being, as he now pleads, “incidental” and “superfluous,” was vital to his attack upon Mr. Gladstone’s position. Upon it depended the only allegation of fact, as contrasted with theory, in his indictment of the Mosaic cosmogony. According to:
* The Times, February 8, 1892. Mr. Huxley’s letter here referred to is that which appeared in the Times of the 3rd, and which is reproduced in his Life (vol. ii., p. 297).
Cu. IX.] REFUTATION OF HUXLEY ITY
science reptiles existed before birds, but according to Genesis birds existed before reptiles. So he asserted. And the ground of his assertion was that, while birds belong to the fifth period of creation, “creeping things” belong to the sixth, and that “creeping things” are defined by “the Mosaic writer” himself in Leviticus xi. to include reptiles.
Now that this is proved to be merely an ad captandum appeal to the phraseology of the English Bible, Mr. Huxley takes refuge in the plea that the word used in Genesis i. 24 may include reptiles. But this, even if true, will not help him. The fact remains that the word in Leviticus xi. is wholly different from the word used in Genesis i. 24, whereas the validity of his argument depends on its identity with it. And the argument is his, not mine. He it is who insists that Genesis i must be interpreted by Leviticus xi.; and, adopting his canon of interpretation, I have shown that he is “hoist with his own petard.”
It is on petty points of this sort that the conventional attacks upon the Bible rest. But the foundations of faith are of a very different character. If facts be adduced to prove the Bible false, I shall give it up, and cease to be a Christian. But practical men and men of common sense care little for mere theories. In common with many other Christians I regard the Darwinian theory of evolution as being, within strictly defined limits, a reasonable hypothesis. But the peculiar biological theories with which Mr. Huxley’s name is prominently identified, are in a different category. JI am old enough to remember the time when they first gained currency in England. I am young enough to be warranted in hoping I may outlive their popularity. But these unproved, and possibly ephemeral, theories of the hour, dignified by the title of “natural science,” are put forward as the grounds on which the Book of all the ages. is to be rejected!
Mr. Huxley wrote another letter, but it contained nothing save pretentious phrases about science, and ungenerous sneers at those who believe the Bible. So far as this controversy is concerned he left his opponents in possession of the field. The fact asserted by Mr. Gladstone remains established by this searching test. It is asserted, and it will still be asserted as unblushingly as if this correspondence had not taken place, that Genesis is proved false by the facts of science; whereas the testimony of science, what- ’ ever it be worth, confirms the Biblical order of creation! In Zhe Ntneteenth Century Mr. Huxley wrote, “There is no one to whose authority on geological questions I am more readily disposed to bow than that of my eminent friend Professor Dana;” and Professor Dana’s decision was, “I agree in all essential points with Mr. Gladstone, and believe that the first chapter of Genesis and science are in accord.”
* And if any one now seeks to get rid of this by falling back on the “coincidence” theory, the mathematician will cut in to tell him that the order of any seven events can be given in no less than 5,040 ways.
For my part, I am willing to make the scientist a present of this conclusion. If Paleontology, instead of confirming, as it does, the Mosaic cosmogony, seemed to discredit it, the fact would only serve to strengthen the belief I entertain on independent grounds, that the fossils may be relics of an earlier economy of life, which was engulfed in the catastrophes which produced the present rock-formation of our earth.
Whether the origin of our globe was nebular or meteoric, it may have been the home of life for ages before the epoch of the Adamic creation. In the record of that creation the conception of a making-out-of-nothing has no place, The Bible is merely the history of the Adamic world, and even that, moreover, only as a background on which to display the great revelation of redemption. The opening verses of Genesis, therefore, mark the successive eras through which the Creator rescued our planet from its “‘ waste and void”! condition, and prepared it as a fitting home for man; but as to its origin and earlier history Holy Writ is silent. ‘lx the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” But
* Gen. i. 2. These same words are used in Jer. iv. 23 of the ruin brought upon the land by the judgment of “the Desolations.” That the earth was not originally “waste” Isa. xlv. 18 declares.
when the beginning was, we cannot even conjecture; and if we go on to inquire the meaning of “creation,” all that Scripture will tell us is that “things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” — a statement which will bear every test that can be applied to it. If in the past this earth ever suffered a catastrophe such as that which Scripture declares will engulf it in the future, the Mosaic narrative would be at once accounted for and explained.
That narrative is a part of the revelation upon which Christianity is based, and one essential portion of it — the recorded origin of the woman — is enshrined in the Christian system as typical ‘of the spiritual union between Christ and His Church. I accept that narrative as a Divine revelation. And I endorse Mr. Huxley’s dictum, “that it is vain to discuss a supposed coincidence between Genesis and science, unless we have first settled, on the one hand, what Genesis says, and, on the other hand, what science says.” The matter is not ripe for discussion. We are a very long way indeed from settling “what science says”; and while it seems to be taken for granted that ‘what Genesis says” is known to all, closer study and fuller pene s: will destroy all dogmatism here.
When it is said that God “made the firmament,” and the “two great lights,” and the “beasts of the earth,” the same word is used as when Noah “made” the ark, and Moses the tabernacle. If abiogenesis! were an ascertained ’ fact, and not an exploded error, the advocate of spontaneous generation might appeal to the language of the Creator’s fat, ‘‘Let the waters bring forth,” “Let the earth bring forth.” If evolution were an established truth, and not a mere theory, the evolutionist might turn to Genesis, and mark how order and life were slowly evolved in the world. Nor need he find any difficulty in supposing that mammals may have been developed among the ‘‘water population,” and the “air population” too, before animals of that order appeared upon the land. Mr. Huxley’s argument on this point is valid only as destroying the position to which his ‘‘ Sunday-school exegesis” forced Mr. Gladstone to retreat.
I turn to the narrative. The earth existed, but it was “desolate and empty,” a mere waste of waters, wrapped in impenetrable darkness. The changes recorded are, first, the dawn of light, and then the formation of an atmosphere followed by
: A term coined by Huxley himself to express spontaneous generation. BOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY LIBRARY the retreat of the waters to their ocean bed; then the dry land became clothed with verdure, and sun and moon and stars appeared.!
But the question remains, What was the creation day? No problem connected with the cosmogony has greater interest and importance. I own to a decided conviction that while the passage clearly indicates our ordinary day, the word is used in a purely symbolic sense. When dealing with a period before man existed to mark the shadow on the dial, and before the sun could cast that shadow, it is not easy to appreciate the reason, or indeed the meaning, of such a division of time as our natural day. seem plainly to belong to our present solar system, and this is the express teaching of the fourteenth verse.?
The problem may be stated thus: As man is to God, so his day of four and twenty hours is to “Days and years and seasons’
* The laughter formerly excited by the idea of light apart from the sun has died away with increasing knowledge (see Dr. Sinker’s Higher Criticism, p. 121); and, in our ignorance of that primeval life, it is idle to question the possibility of the third-day vegetation. It may possibly have been the “rank and luxuriant herbage” of which our coal-beds have been formed; for one statement in the narrative seems strongly to favour the suggestion that our present vegetation dates only from the fifth or sixth day (Gen. ii. 5, R.V.).
? That the earth is older than the sun may at one time have appeared impossible. But it seems to be involved in the meteoric hypothesis. the Divine day of creation. And here I would suggest that the “evening and morning” may represent the interval of the cessation from work, which succeeds and completes the day. The words are, “And there was evening, and there ‘was morning, one day.”! The symbolism is maintained throughout. As man’s working day is brought to a close by evening, which ushers in a period of repose, lasting till morning calls him back to his daily toil, so the great Artificer is represented as turning aside from His work at the end of each “day” of creation, and again resuming it when another morning dawned.
And is not this in keeping with the mode in which Scripture speaks of God? It tells us of His mouth and eyes and nostrils, His hand and arm. It speaks of His sitting in the heavens, and bowing Himself to hear the prayer ascending from the earth. It talks of His repenting and being angry. And if one cavils at this, he may fairly be asked, In what other language could God speak to men?
Nor let any one fall back on the common fallacy that a Divine day is a period of a thousand years. With God, we are told, a day is as a
* If the creation story was revealed by way of Apocalyptic visions, these words are fully explained.
1124 THE BIBLE AND MODERN CRITICISM
thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. In a word, the seeming paradox of the transcendental philosophy is endorsed by the express teaching of Scripture, that time is merely a law of human thought. When, therefore, God speaks of working for six days and resting on the seventh, we must understand the words in the same symbolic sense as when He declares that His: hand has made all these things.?
But the mention of the creation sabbath is the crowning proof of the symbolic character of the creation “day.” God “rested on the seventh day from all the work which He had made.” Are we, then, to suppose that He resumed the work when four and twenty hours had passed? Here, at least, revelation and science are at one: the creation sabbath has continued during all the ages of historic time. God is active in His universe, pace the atheist and the infidel, but the CREATOR rests. Scripture, indeed, tells of a supreme catastrophe that is yet to engulf our planet, and of a new creation which is to follow it, of which the resurrection of Christ is the earnest and pledge. But these are topics I must not enter upon. I content myself with noticing
* Isa. lxvi. 2. See p. 100 ante. the well-recognised fact that the creation sabbath is a vast period of time, and urging that the working days of creation must be estimated on the same system.
This must be borne in mind as we proceed. The water population and the air population belong to the same “day”; but ages of time may have intervened before the appearance of the latter.! So also with the land population of the sixth day. For aught that we can tell, the appearance of man may have been separated from that of other mammals by a period of time as prolonged as that which divides the present hour from the close of the creation “week.” 2
But all this is mere conjecture. And my object in suggesting it is not to frame a system of interpretation, but to enter a caveat against confounding the teaching of Scripture with any
: Of course the suggestion of the Authorised Version is erroneous that the water was the birthplace of the “feathered tribe.” The words are, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
2 The second chapter indicates that there was an interval between the formation of the man and of the woman. The Paleontologists’ proofs that earth was the dwelling-place of intelligent beings at a much earlier period, are not complete enough to justify any definite comparison between those earlier inhabitants and the Adamic race. Indeed, it is doubtful whether they afford certainty of being pre-Adamite at all.
system of interpretation whatever. I deprecate the idea that I am posing as a “reconciler.” I have no such ambitious aim as that of seeking to convince the scientists. I wish rather to warn the faithful against assaults upon the Mosaic cosmogony, based on “the merest Sunday-school exegesis” on the one hand, and on the ¢heortes of science on the other. The facts of science in no way clash with Scripture. They serve only to assist us in understanding it aright.
Of the origin of our world the first chapter of Genesis tells us nothing, save that “in the beginning,” whenever that was, God created it. It may be, as’ Mr. Tyndall said in his Belfast address, that ‘for ons embracing untold millions of years, this earth has been the theatre of life and death.” But as to this the Book of Genesis is silent. It deals merely with the renewing and refurnishing of our planet as a home for man. And this, moreover, as I have already urged, to prepare the foundation for the supreme revelation of redemption.
In conclusion, I would guard myself from any suspicion of seeking ‘“‘to prove the truth of the Mosaic narrative.’ My object here is to beat off attacks which stumble or distress ignorant and weak-kneed believers. And to this end I have
Cu. IX.] GENESIS AND SCIENCE 127
shown that Professor Huxley, the ablest and most bitter assailant of Genesis which this age has produced, has been met and routed upon ground of his own choosing. The first chapter of Genesis ‘‘was not written to teach science”; but not a single “fact of science” can be found to discreditit. This cannot be said of any one of “the religious books of the East’ — in this respect they are but a tangle of error and folly. Nether can ut be said of any scientific book published before recent years. The “science” of the last generation is discredited by the discoveries of our own times. Never until our own times have Scripture and science been in accord; but the changes which have harmonised them have been in science and not in Scripture. And this can only be explained on one of two hypotheses. Either science was more advanced when Genesis was written than at any time during all the Christian era, or else ‘‘ the Mosaic narrative” is a Divine revelation.!
* The Times correspondence quoted in this chapter originated with a “declaration on the truth of Holy Scripture,” signed by Dean Goulbourn and a number of other clergymen, which appeared in The Times of December 18, 1891. My object in intervening was to point out that these clergymen in taking their stand upon the ground that the Church was “the witness and keeper of Holy Writ,” betrayed the cause they sought to defend, and were false to the Church of England, which in Article XX. claims only to be “a witness,” &c. My second letter (The Times, January 23, 1892) was in reply to the letter of “A Beneficed English Clergyman of Twenty-five Years’ Standing,” who took infidel ground. Mr. Huxley’s reply appeared in The Times of January 26th. Letters from the Duke of Argyll, Canon Girdlestone, and myself appeared on February ist, and were answered by Mr. Huxley on February 3rd and 4th. My last letter (quoted above) appeared on February 8th, and Mr. Huxley’s rejoinder on the 11th. The title “The Bible and Modern Criticism” was assigned to the correspondence by the editor of The Times.