his mentioning the moon and the stars as accessories in the train of the sun, and combining them all without note of time, although their several "makings" may have proceeded at different speeds. But here again we find exhibited that principle of relativity to man and his uses, by which the writer in Genesis appears so wisely to steer his course. We are told of "two Great lights" (ver. 16); and one of them is the moon. The formation of the stars is interjected soon after, as if comparatively insignificant. But the stars individually are in themselves far greater and more significant than the moon, which is denominated a great light. In what sense is the moon a great light? Only in virtue of its relation to us. So, then, the general upshot is, that the mention of the sun is introduced at that point in the cosmogonic process when, from the condition of our form and atmosphere, or of his, or of both, he had become so definite and visible as to be finally efficient for his office of dividing day from day, and year from year; that the planets, being of an altogether secondary importance, simply appear as his attendant company; and that to the moon, a body in itself comparatively insignificant, is awarded a rather conspicuous place, which, if objectively considered, is out of proportion, but which at once falls into line when we acknowledge relativity as the basis of the narrative, by reason of the great importance of the functions which this satellite discharges on behalf of the inhabitants of the earth.

Next, it is alleged that we have days with an evening and a morning before we have a sun to supply a measure of time for them. Doubtless there could be no approach to anything like an evening and a morning, so long as light was uniformly diffused. But under the nebular theory, the work of the first day implies an initial concentration of light; and, from the time when light began to be thus powerfully concentrated, would there not be an evening and a morning, though imperfect, for any revolving solid of the system, according as it might be turned toward, or from, the centre of the highest luminosity?

But we have not yet emerged from the net of the Contradictionist, who lays hold on the vegetation verses (11, 12) to impeach the credit of the Creation Story. The objection here becomes twofold.

First, we have vegetation anterior to the sun; and secondly, it is not merely an aquatic vegetation for the support of aquatic life, nor merely a rude and primordial vegetation such as that of and before the coal-measures, but a vegetation complete and absolute, including ferngrass, then the herb yielding seed, and lastly the fruit-tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself. Here is the food of mammals and of man provided, when neither of them was created, or was about to exist, until after many a long antecedent stage of lower life had found its way into creation and undertaken its office there.

First, as regards vegetation before the sun's performance of his present function in the heavens is announced. There were light and heat, atmosphere with its conditions of moist and dry, soil prepared to do its work in nutrition. Can there be ground for saying that with such provision made vegetation made vegetation could not take place? Let us, for argument's sake, suppose that the sun could now recede into an earlier condition, could go back by some few stages of that process through which he became our sun; his material less compact, his form less well-defined, his rays more intercepted by the "swaddling band" of cloud and vapor. Vegetation might be modified in character, but must it therefore cease? May we not say that a more violent paradox would have been exhibited, and a sounder objection would have lain, had the Mosaic writer failed to present to us at least an initial vegetation before the era at which the sun had fully obtained the definite spherical form, and the conditions for the transmission of his rays had reached substantially their present state?

But then, it is fairly observed that the vegetation as described is not preparatory and initial but full formed, and that any tracing of vegetation anterior to life in the strata is ambiguous and obscure. In the age of Protozoa, the earliest living creatures, the indications of plants are not determinable, according to the high authority of Sir J. W. Dawson. It is observed by Canon Driver that the proof from science of the existence of plants before animals is inferential and à priori."* Guyot

66

*

holds a directly contrary opinion, and says the present remains indicate a large presence of infusorial protophytes in the early seas. But let the point be conceded. Undoubtedly all à priori assumptions ought in inquiries of this kind to be watched with the utmost vigilance and jealousy. Still there are limits beyond which vigilance and jealousy cannot push their claims. Is there anything strange in the supposition that the comparatively delicate composition of the first vegetable structures should have given way and become indiscernible to us, amid the shock and pressure of firmer and more durable material? The flesh of the mammoth has, indeed, been preserved to us, and eaten by dogs in our own time, coming down from ages which we have no means of measuring; but then it was not exposed to the same pressure, and subsisted under conditions of temperature which were adequately antiseptic. But has all palæozoic life been ascertained by its flesh, or do we not owe our knowledge of many among the earlier forms of animated life to their osseous structures? And, in cases where only bone remains, is it an extravagant use of argument à priori to hold that there must have been flesh also And, if flesh, why not vegetable matter? Canon Driver, indeed, observest that from a very early date animals preyed upon animals. Still the first animal could not prey upon himself; there must have been vegetable pabulum out of which an animal body was first constructed. "Before the beasts," says Sir George Stokes, came the plants, plants which are necessary for their sustenance."‡

Next, with respect to the objection that the vegetation of the eleventh and twelfth verses is a perfected vegetation, and that there existed no such vegetation before ani. mal life began. But why are we to suppose that the Mosaic writer intended to say such a vegetation did exist before animal life began ? For no other reason than this: having mentioned the first introduction of vegetable life, he carries it on without breaking his narrative to its completion. In so proceeding, he does exactly what the historian does when, for the sake of clearer comprehension, he brings one series of

*"Creation," x., p. 90. †The Expositor, p. 29.

Letter to Mr. Elflein, August 14th, 1883.

events from its inception to its close, although in order of time the beginning only, and not the completion, belongs to the epoch at which he introduces it. What I have called the rule of relativity, the intention, namely, to be intelligible to man, seems to show the reason of his arrangement. If his meaning was, "the beautiful order of trees, plants, and grasses which you see around you had its beginnings in the era when living creatures were about to commence their movements in the waters and on the earth, and all this was part of the fatherly work of God on your behalf”such meaning was surely well expressed, expressed after a sound and workmanlike fashion, in the text of the Creation Story as it stands.

I will next notice the objection that the Mosaic writer takes (according to the received version) no notice of the great age of reptiles, but passes at once from the creation of marine animals (verse 20) to the fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven." He thus passes over without notice the amphibians, the reptiles proper, the insects, and the marsupial or early mainmals, on his way to the birds. It is added that he brackets the birds with the fishes, and thus makes them of the same date.

It is requisite here to observe, with respect to birds, that Professor Dana* writes of the narrative in Genesis as follows: "The accordance is exact with the succession made out for the earliest species of these grand divisions, if we except the division of birds, about which there is doubt.”

Owen, however, in his "Palæontology," places animal life in six orders, namely

supplied with the following series, after fishes 1. Fossil reptiles. 2. Ornitho sauria; "flying animals, which combined the character of reptiles with those of birds." 3. The first birds of the secondary rocks, with "feathers in all respects similar to those of existing birds." 4. Mammals. It thus appears that much turns on the definition of a bird, and that it is hard, on the evidence thus presented, seriously to impeach the character of the Creation Story. Largely viewed, the place of birds, as an order in creation, is given us by our scientific teachers, or by many among them, between fishes and the bulk of mammals. It is a gratuitous assumption that the Mosaist intends to assign to them the same date as fishes; he places them in the same day, but then we have to bear in mind that he more than once gives several actions to the same day. He sets them after the fishes; and the fairer construction surely is, not that they were contemporaneous, but that they were subsequent. He forbears, it is true, to notice amphibious reptiles, insects, and marsupials. And why? All these, variously important in themselves, fill no large place, some of them no place at all, in the view and in the concerns of primitive man; and, having man for his object, he forbears, on his guiding principle of relativity, to incumber his narrative with them.

If it be true that the demarcation of the order of birds in creation is less sharply drawn than that (for example) of fishes and of mammals, may we not be permitted to trace a singular propriety in the diminution, so to speak, of emphasis with which the Mosaist gives to their introduction a more qualified emphasis, by simply subjoining them (v. 20) to the aquatic creation.

I have now made bold to touch on the principal objections popularly known. They run into details which it has not been possible fully to notice, but which seem to have no force, except what they derive from the illegitimate process of holding down the Mosaic writer in his narration, so short, so simple, so sublime, by restraints which the ordinary historian, though he has plenty of auxiliary expedients, and is under no restraint of space, finds himself obliged to shake off if he wishes to be understood. On the introduction of the great or recent mammals, and of man, as the objector is silent, I remain silent also.

If

It would be uncandid, however, not to notice the "creeping thing" of verses 24, 25, and 26. In these verses the " creeping thing" is distinguished from cattle, and undoubtedly appears upon the scene as if it were a formation wholly new. the Mosaist really intended to convey that this was the first appearance of the creeping thing in creation, there is I suppose no doubt that he is at war with the firmly established witness of natural science. Guyot, indeed, says* that these creeping things are not reptiles, but are the smaller mammals, rats, mice, and the like. If, however, the common rendering be maintained, it may be just worth while to suggest a possible explanation. It is as follows. These creeping things were a very minor fact for creation, so that the purpose of the relator, and the relative importance of the facts may here, as elsewhere, govern his mode of handling them. It is fit to be observed that he never mentions insects at all, as if they were too insignificant to find a place among the larger items of his account; as if he selected his materials, and sifted off the less important of them. And there does seem to be some license or looseness in his method of treating these creeping things; for while he severs them from fish, fowl, and beast, in the verses I have named, and again in verse 30 from fowl and from beast, yet in verse 28, when the great charter of dominion is granted to man, he sums up in three divisions only, and makes man the lord over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." the earth." Reptiles appear to have passed out of his view, either wholly, or so far as not to deserve separate mention, and it may seem likely that he did not think their importance such as to call for a particular and defined place, and did not mean to give them such a place, in the chronological order of creation.

If, on the whole, such be a fair statement of arguments and results, we inay justly render our thanks to Dana, Guyot,t

*"Creation," p. 120.

In the Preface to Guyot's "Creation" will be found some account of the recent literature of this subject. I must also mention a valuable pamphlet entitled "The Higher Criticism," by Mr. Rust, Rector of Westerfield, Suffolk. It sets forth the scope of the negative criticism, and recommends (p. 30) to "have patience for a while, and wait to see the issue."

Dawson, Stokes, and other scientific authorities, who seem to find no cause for supporting the broad theory of contradiction. I am well aware of my inability to add an atom of weight to their judgments. Yet I have ventured to attempt applying to this great case what I hold to be the just laws of a narrative intended to instruct and to persuade, and thus finding a key to the true construction of the chap ter. For myself, I cannot but at present remain before and above all things impressed with the profound and marvellous wisdom which has guided the human instrument, whether it were pen or tongue, which was first commissioned from on high, to hand onward for our admiration

and instruction this wonderful, this unparalleled relation. And I submit to my readers that my words were not wholly idle words, when, without presuming to lay down any universal and inflexible proposition, and without questioning any single contention of persons specially qualified, I said that the true question was whether the words of the Mosaic writer, taken as a whole, do not stand, according to our present knowledge, in such a relation to the facts of nature as to warrant and require thus far the conclusion that the Ordainer of Nature, and the Giver or Guide of the Creation Story, are one and the same.-Good Words.

I.

11.

DURING recent years there have been great and good news of the Talmud for those who

speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake ;

and yet they have not taken that hold of the general literary world which might have been expected. The labors of learned translators for the present undergo the fate of "Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-poet of Persia, rendered into English Verse," by the late Edward Fitzgerald, choice friend of the Poet Laureate. Exiled, like the nation of which

they speak, from the community of favored volumes of science, song, and sad imaginations, called novels, their first imprints are dispersed into those regions wherein Charles Lamb loved to wander : the shelves of second-hand booksellers.

The devoted student of Rabbinical lore has to be content with the gratitude and praise of friends, select—but few.

Nevertheless, this incomparable book, the Talmud, so full of minute details regulating religion, society, home, daily conduct-dear to the heart of Jewry-next to the Old Testament, sacred to all true sons of Israel-contains matter of wisdom suited to all faith's of the world, and to phases of intellectual mind outside the faiths, and abounds in narratives and legends of mythi

cal import which delight in every nation, in all ages and all climes.

It is held by the once Chosen People that, when the Ten Commandments were given to Moses upon Mount Sinai-or, as was said, in Heaven-" fast by the throne of God," in Milton's verse-notwith

standing the protest of the ministering angels, there were also given to the Great Lawgiver six hundred and thirteen precepts, which Moses delivered to Aaron, then to the select seventy, and so were passed on from age to age-precepts, known as the Oral Law, the Law of the Lip, which even to-day the true children of Jewry between six and seven years of age must commit to memory.

Around these precepts, the five books of Moses, and the other books of the Old Testament gradually clustered expositions thereupon by the Lights of Law in Israel, attached to which were singular traditions.

generally referring to the law and its observation. We must note, by the way, that the enthusiasm of the Jews for their Written Law and Oral Law was awakened lonians, the son of Israel might say : during the great captivity. Of the Baby

These are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am!
Sweet are the uses of adversity:
Which, like a toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.