Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/827

Rh rise again; outgrown, they are forever dead. And this is the hallmark of all true science, that it destroys by fulfilling.

However it may have escaped recognition, it is certain that theology has been at work for some time now with methods of inquiry similar to those employed by natural science. And it has already partially succeeded in working out a reconstruction of some important departments from the stand-point of development. If the student of science will now apply to theology for its Bible, two very different books will be laid before him.

The one is the Bible as it was accepted by our forefathers; the other is the Bible of modern theology. The books, the chapters, the verses, and the words are the same in each, yet in the meaning, the interpretation, and the way in which they are looked at, they are two entirely distinct Bibles. The distinction between them is one which science will appreciate the moment it is stated. In point of fact, the one is constructed like the world according to the old cosmogonies; the other is an evolution. The one represents revelation as having been produced on the creative hypothesis, the Divine-fiat hypothesis, the ready-made hypothesis; the other on the slow-growth or evolution theory. This last—the Bible of development—is the Bible of modern scientific theology. It is not less authoritative than the first, but it is differently authoritative; not less inspired, it is yet differently inspired.

From its stand-point the Bible has not been made in a day, any more than the earth; nor have its parts been introduced mechanically into the minds of certain men, any more than the cells of their brain. In uttering it they have not spoken as mere automata—the men, though inspired, were authors. This Bible has not been given independently of time, of place, or of circumstance. It is not to be read without the philosophic sense which distinguishes the provisional from the eternal; the historic sense, which separates the local from the universal; or the literary sense, which recognizes prose from poetry, imagery from science. The modern Bible is a book whose parts, though not of unequal value, are seen to be of different kinds of value; where the casual is distinguished from the essential, the subordinate from the primal end. This Bible is not an oracle which has been erected; it has grown. Hence it is no longer a mere word-book, nor a compendium of doctrines, but a nursery of growing truths. It is not an even plane of proof-texts without proportion or emphasis, or light and shade, but a revelation varied as Nature, with the divine in its hidden parts, in its spirit, its tendencies, its obscurities, and its omissions. Like Nature, it has successive strata, and valley and hilltop, and mist and atmosphere, and rivers which are flowing still, and hidden ores, and here and there a place which is desert, and fossils too, whose crude forms are the stepping-stones to higher things. In a word, this Bible is like the world in which it is found, natural, human, intelligible in form; mysterious, inscrutable, divine in origin and essence.