Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/647

Rh different readings, and "in exceptional cases" have given a preference to the Ancient Versions. Thus, upon practical grounds quite apart from the higher questions concerning the original composition, we seem at once to find a human concerning in the sacred text. That there is a further and larger question, not shut out from the view even of the most convinced and sincere believers, Mr. Huxley may perceive by reading, for example, Coleridge's "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit." The question whether this Proem bears witness to a Divine communication, to a working beyond that of merely human faculties in the composition of the Scriptures, is essentially one for the disciples of Bishop Butler; a question, not of demonstrative, but of probable evidence. I am not prepared to abandon, but rather to defend, the following proposition. It is perfectly conceivable that a document penned by the human hand, and transmitted by human means, may contain matter questionable, uncertain, or even mistaken, and yet may by its contents as a whole present such πίστεις, such moral proofs of truth Divinely imparted, as ought irrefragably pro tanto to command assent and govern practice. A man may possibly admit something not reconciled, and yet may be what Mr. Huxley denounces as a Reconciler.

I do not suppose it would be feasible, even for Professor Huxley, taking the nebular hypothesis and geological discovery for his guides, to give, in the compass of the first twenty-seven verses of Genesis, an account of the cosmogony, and of the succession of life in the stratification of the earth, which would combine scientific precision of statement with the majesty, the simplicity, the intelligibility, and the impressiveness of the record before us. Let me modestly call it, for argument's sake, an approximation to the present presumptions and conclusions of science. Let me assume that the statement in the text as to plants, and the statement of verses 24, 25 as to reptiles, can not in all points be sustained; and yet still there remain great unshaken facts to be weighed. First, the fact that such a record should have been made at all. Secondly, the fact that, instead of dwelling in generalities, it has placed itself under the severe conditions of a chronological order, reaching from the first nisus of chaotic matter to the consummated production of a fair and goodly, a furnished and a peopled world. Thirdly, the fact that its cosmogony seems, in the light of the nineteenth century, to draw more and more of countenance from the best natural philosophy; and fourthly, that it has described the successive origins of the five great categories of present life, with which human experience was and is conversant, in that order which geological authority confirms. How came these things to be? How came they to be, not among Accadians, or Assyrians, or Egyptians, who monopolized the stores of human knowledge when this wonderful tradition was born; but among the obscure records of a people who, dwelling in Palestine for twelve hundred years from