Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/798

778 familiar imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures when he had to express his idea of the origin of life. There were certain germs, he assumes, into which "life was first breathed." What should we think of the rationality of a man who interpreted Darwin to believe that there was some big Being who originated life by emptying his lungs into certain bits of protoplasmic jelly? Yet this is the law of interpretation which Prof. Huxley would impose upon the magnificent symbolism of Genesis. The events described—avowedly transcending the region of experience—must have happened "exactly as they are declared to have happened in the sacred books." When we are told that God said, "Let there be light," we are to interpret this sublime image as an assertion that the Almighty did actually address this sentence in a definite language to the brute elements of chaos. We are to understand that the words thus attributed to the Creator were actual words, like the words spoken by King Charles to Bishop Juxon on the scaffold at Whitehall. If we don't believe this, we are to believe nothing whatever coming from writers so unhistorical. In like manner, when we are told of the Almighty walking in an earthly garden "in the cool of the day," and when the narrative seems to imply that Adam saw him and hid, we are to understand this baldly and literally as an actual midday scene in a shady wood somewhere in western Asia. Such is the childish argument which is to destroy Christian theology—such is the kind of logic in which Prof. Huxley can not, for the life of him, see any flaw. St. John may perhaps be credited with knowing, at least as well as the professor, what would and what would not be fatal to Christian theology. Yet he does not seem to have been even conscious of the difficulty. Passages even stronger and more definite in the Old Testament, involving hyperbole, metaphor, and imagery, stood nothing in his way. He must have known the famous passage in Exodus in which Moses is represented as having spoken with God as a man speaketh with his friend. Yet the professor's canon of interpretation is unknown to him. "No man hath seen God at any time" is the grand sentence of the apostle. But the extension of this argument to destroy all authority as belonging to the writers in the New Testament is perhaps a still more remarkable illustration of the reasoning which the professor considers to be faultless. Men who accepted such narratives as those of Genesis are not to be trusted as themselves historically safe. If St. Paul did really believe in those primeval narratives we can not trust him when he tells us of the light which burst upon him on his way to Damascus, and which changed him from a persecutor of the faith into the great