Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/828

808 With so living a book, theology has again become living. A whole cloud of problems, perplexities, anomalies, and doubts fall before it. No formal indictment is drawn against older views; difficulties are not examined and answered in detail. Before the new stand-point they disappear of themselves. Men who are in revolt against many creeds breathe again in this larger atmosphere and believe afresh, satisfying their reason and keeping their self-respect. For scientific theology no more pledges itself to-day to the interpretations of the Bible of a thousand years ago than does science to the interpretations of Nature in the time of Pythagoras. Nature is the same to-day as in the time of Pythagoras, and the Bible is the same to-day as a thousand years ago. But the Pythagorean interpretation of Nature is not more impossible to the modern mind than are many ancient interpretations—those of Genesis among others—to the scientific theologian.

This is no forced attempt, observe, to evade a scientific difficulty by concessions so vital as to make the loss or gain of the position of no importance. This change is not the product of any destructive criticism, nor is this transformed book in any sense a mutilated Bible. It is the natural result of the application of ordinary critical methods to documents which, sooner or later, must have submitted to the process and from which they have never claimed exemption.

But to return to Genesis. Those modern critics, believing or unbelieving, who have studied the Biblical books as literature—studied them, for instance, as Professor Dowden has studied Shakespeare—concur in pronouncing the Bible absolutely free from natural science. They find there history, poetry, moral philosophy, theology, lives and letters, mystical, devotional, and didactic pieces; but science there is none. Natural objects are, of course, repeatedly referred to, and with unsurpassed sympathy and accuracy of observation; but neither in the intention of any of the innumerable authors nor in the execution of their work is there any direct trace of scientific teaching. Could any one with any historic imagination for a moment expect that there would have been? There was no science then. Scientific questions were not even asked then. To have given men science would not only have been an anachronism, but a source of mystification and confusion all along the line. The almost painful silence—indeed, the absolute sterility—of the Bible with regard to science is so marked as to have led men to question the very beneficence of God. Why was not the use of the stars explained to navigators, or chloroform to surgeons? Why is a man left to die on the hill-side when the medicinal plant which could save him, did he but know it, lies at his feet? What is it to early man to know how the moon was made? What he wants to know is how bread is made. How fish are to be caught, fowls snared, beasts trapped and their skins tanned—these are his problems. Doubtless there are valid reasons why the Bible does not contain a technological dictionary and a pharmacopoeia, or anticipate the