Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/797

Rh which he ascribes to two eminent divines of the Church of England are or are not fair and correct summaries of their teaching. Fortunately, on this subject we are not at the mercy of any individual divines whether living or dead. The Christian Church, with its long and varied history of nearly two thousand years, has never been committed to it. The doctrine indeed of verbal inspiration, though never defined and never authoritatively adopted by any Christian Church, has been often widely prevalent. But even this doctrine is exaggerated, distorted, and made ridiculous by its development in the hands of Prof. Huxley. As patronized by him, the law of interpretation applied to some of the most ancient records of our race would exclude all the elements of allegory and of metaphor, of imagery, of parable, and of accommodated presentation. And this, too, when some of these records purport to set before us an idea of the origin of things. The argument is not only illogical but grotesque, that because Christianity claims to be an historical religion, therefore it follows that any accepted narrative attempting to give us some conception of the creative work, must do so in words as literal and prosaic as an account of the execution of Charles I. Creation, strictly speaking, is inconceivable to us. And yet creation is a fact. The system of visible things in which we live was certainly not the author of itself. If we are capable at all of receiving any mental impression of its beginnings we can only do so through modes of representation which are charged with allegory. In his own special science no man has declared more clearly than Prof. Huxley that the limits of our observation are not the limits of our knowledge. Biology, for example, declares as its verdict, after much evidence has been taken, that, as matters now stand, the living is never generated by the not-living. Every form of organic life comes from some other older form which has already been established. But he points out that this has no adverse bearing upon the deductive conclusion that life must have had its first beginning otherwise. On the contrary, he admits that conclusion to be certain. "If," says he, "the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from not-living matter." I venture to add that whether the theory of evolution be true or false, or whether (as is more likely) it be partly true and partly false, the certainty of this conclusion is not affected. But if that beginning is to be rendered conceivable by us, it can not be expressed in the language of experience. We have no experience to go upon. Of necessity, therefore, the very idea of a beginning must be dealt with in the language of metaphor or allegory. Accordingly, even Darwin was compelled to have recourse to the