Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/637

Rh In order to institute with profit the comparison, now in view, the very first thing necessary is to determine, so far as the subject-matter allows, what it was that the Pentateuchal or Mosaic writer designed to convey to the minds of those for whom he wrote. The case is, in more ways than one, I conceive, the direct reverse of that which the Professor has alleged. It is not bringing Science to be tried at the bar of Religion. It is bringing Religion, so far as it is represented by this part of the Holy Scriptures, to be tried at the bar of Science. The indictment against the Pentateuchal writer is, that he has written what is scientifically untrue. We have to find then in the first place what it is that he has written, according to the text, not an inerrable text, as it now stands before us.

First, I assume there is no dispute that in Genesis i. 20-27 he has represented a fourfold sequence or succession of living organisms. Aware of my own inability to define in any tolerable manner the classes of these organisms, I resorted to the general phrases—water population, air-population, land-population. The immediate purpose of these phrases was not to correspond with the classifications of Science, but to bring together in brief and convenient form the larger and more varied modes of expression used in verses 20, 21, 24, 23 of the Chapter.

I think, however, I have been to blame for having brought into a contact with science, which was not sufficiently defined, terms that have no scientific meaning: water-population, air-population, and (twofold) land-population. I shall now discard them and shall substitute others, which have the double advantage of being used by geologists, and perhaps of expressing better than my phrases what was in the mind of the Mosaic writer. These are the words—1, fishes; 2, birds; 3, mammals; 4, man. By all, I think, it will be felt that the first object is to know what the Pentateuchal writer means. The relation of his meaning to science is essential, but, in orderly argumentation, subsequent. The matter now before us is a matter of reasonable and probable interpretation. What is the proper key to this hermeneutic work? In my opinion it is to be found in a just estimate of the purpose with which the author wrote, and with which the Book of Genesis was, in this part of it, either composed or compiled.

If this be the true point of departure, it opens up a question of extreme interest, at which I have but faintly glanced in my paper, and which is nowhere touched in the reply to me. What proper place has such a composition as the first Chapter of Genesis in such a work as the Scriptures of the Old Testament? They are indisputably written with a religious aim; and their subject-matter is religious. We may describe this aim in various ways. For the present purpose, suffice it to say they are conversant with belief in God, with inculcation of