Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/640

622 it was intended to give moral, and not scientific, instruction to those for whom it was written. That for the Adamic race, recent on the earth, and young in faculties, the traditions here incorporated, which were probably far older than the Book, had a natural and a highly moral purpose in conveying to their minds a lively sense of the wise and loving care with which the Almighty Father, who demanded much at their hands, had beforehand given them much, in the provident adaptation of the world to be their dwelling-place, and of the created orders for their use and rule. It appears to me that, given the very nature of the Scriptures, this is clearly the rational point of view. If it is so, then, it follows, that just as the tradition described earth, air, and heaven in the manner in which they superficially presented themselves to the daily experience of man—not scientifically, but

so he spoke of fishes, of birds, of beasts, of what man was most concerned with; and, last in the series, of man himself, largely and generally, as facts of his experience; from which great moral lessons of wonder, gratitude, and obedience were to be deduced, to aid him in the great work of his life-training.

If further proof be wanting, that what the Mosaic writer had in his mind were the creatures with which Adamic man was conversant, we have it in the direct form of verse 28, which gives to man for meat the fruit of every seed-yielding tree, and every seed-yielding herb, and the dominion of every beast, fowl, and reptile living. There is here a marked absence of reference to any but the then living species.

This, then, is the key to the meaning of the Book, and of the tradition, if, as I suppose, it was before the Book, which seems to me to offer the most probable, and therefore the rational guide to its interpretation. The question we shall have to face is whether this statement so understood, this majestic and touching lesson of the childhood of Adamic man, stands in such a relation to scientific truth, as far as it is now known, as to give warrant to the inference that the guidance under which it was composed was more than that of faculties merely human, at that stage of development, and likewise of information, which belonged to the childhood of humanity.

We have, then, before us one term of the desired comparison. Let us now turn to the other.

And here my first duty is to render my grateful thanks to Professor Huxley for having corrected my either erroneous or superannuated assumption as to the state of scientific opinion on the second and third terms of the fourfold succession of life. As one probable doctor sufficed to make an opinion probable, so the dissent of this eminent man would of itself overthrow and pulverize my proposition that there was a scientific consensus as to a sequence like that of Genesis in the production of animal life, as between fishes, birds.