Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/892

872 in their final forms, when the completion of the process of light-collection and concentration in the sun, and the due clearing of the intervening spaces, had enabled the central orb to illuminate us both with direct and with reflected light (verses 14-19).

5. So far, we have been busy only with the adjustment of material agencies. We now arrive at the dawn of animated being; and a great transition seems to be marked OS a kind of recommencement of the work, for the name of creation is again introduced. God created—

(a) The water-population;

(b) The air-population.

And they receive His benediction (verses 20-23).

6. Pursuing this regular progression from the lower to the higher, from the simple to the complex, the text now gives us the work of the sixth "day," which supplies the land-population, air and water having already been supplied. But in it there is a subdivision, and the transition from (c) animal to (d) man, like the transition from inanimate to animate, is again marked as a great occasion, a kind of recommencement. For this purpose the word "create" is a third time employed, "God created man in His own image," and once more lie gave benediction to this the final work of His hands, and endowed our race with its high dominion over what lived and what did not live (verses 24-31).

I do not dwell on the cessation of the Almighty from the creating and (ii, 1 ) "finishing" work, which is the "rest" and marks the seventh "day," because it introduces another order of considerations. But, glancing back at the narrative which now forms the first chapter, I offer perhaps a prejudiced, and in any case no more than a passing, remark. If we view it as popular narrative, it is singularly vivid, forcible, and effective; if we take it as a poem, it is indeed sublime. No wonder if it became classical and reappeared in the glorious devotions of the Hebrew people, pursuing, in a great degree, the same order of topics as in the Book of Genesis.

But the question is not here of a lofty poem, or a skillfully constructed narrative: it is whether natural science, in the patient exercise of its high calling to examine facts, finds that the works of God cry out against what we have fondly believed to be His Word, and tell another tale; or whether, in this nineteenth century of Christian progress, it substantially echoes back the majestic sound which, before it existed as a pursuit, went forth into all lands.

First, looking largely at the latter portion of the narrative, which describes the creation of living organisms, and waiving details, on some of which (as in verse 24) the Septuagint seems to vary from the Hebrew, there is a grand fourfold division, set forth in an orderly succession of times as follows: on the fifth day—

1. The water-population;

2. The air-population;

and, on the sixth day,

3. The land-population of animals;

4. The land-population consummated in man.

Now this same fourfold order is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact. Then, I ask, how came Moses, or, not to cavil on the word, how came the author of the first chapter of Genesis, to know that order, to possess knowledge which natural science has only within the present century for the first time dug out of the bowels of the earth? It is surely impossible to avoid the conclusion, first, that either this writer was gifted with faculties passing all human experience, or else his knowledge was divine. The first branch of the alternative is truly nominal and unreal. We know the sphere within which human inquiry toils. We know the heights to which the intuitions of genius may soar. We know that in certain cases genius anticipates science; as Homer, for example, in his account of the conflict of the four winds in sea-storms. But even in these anticipations, marvelous, and, so to speak, imperial as they are, genius can not escape from one inexorable law. It must have materials of sense or experience to work with, and a ποὒ στῶ from whence to take its flight; and genius can no more tell, apart from some at least of the results