Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/101

Rh speak the language of science; and the other attempts to falsify science to meet the supposed requirements of the Bible. The "seventy," finding that the hare was described as chewing the cud, inserted the word "not;" and on the other hand, the Jesuits, in editing Newton's "Principia," announced in the preface that they were constrained to treat the theory of gravitation as a fictitious hypothesis, else it would conflict with the decrees of the popes against the motion of the earth.

But there is another reconciliation of a higher kind, or rather not a reconciliation, but an acknowledgment of the affinity and identity which exist between the spirit of science and the spirit of the Bible. First, there is a likeness of the general spirit of the Bible truths; and, secondly, there is a likeness in the methods. For instance, the geological truth which our illustrious student was the chief instrument in clearly setting forth and establishing was the doctrine, wrought out by careful, cautious inquiry in all parts of the world, that the frame of this earth was gradually brought into its present condition not by sudden and violent convulsions, but by the slow and silent action of the same causes which we see now, but operating through a long succession of ages beyond the memory and imagination of man. There need be no question whether this doctrine agrees or not with the letter of the Bible. We do not expect it should. For, had there been no such scientific conclusions, we now know perfectly well, from our increased insight into the nature and origin of the early biblical records, that they were not and could not be literal, prosaic, matter-of-fact descriptions of the beginning of the world, of which, as of its end, no man knoweth or can conceive except by figures or parables. It is now clear to all students of the Bible that the first and second chapters of Genesis contain two narratives of the creation side by side, differing from each other in almost every particular of time and place and order. It is now known that the vast epochs demanded by scientific observation are incompatible both with the 6,000 years of the Mosaic chronology and the six days of the Mosaic Creation. No one now infers from the Bible that the earth is fixed, that it cannot be moved, that the sun does literally go forth as a bridegroom from his chamber, or that the stars sung with an audible voice in the dawn of the creation. But when we rise to the spirit, the ideal, the general drift and purpose of the biblical accounts, we find ourselves in an atmosphere of moral elevation which meets the highest requirements-philosophy can make.

The discoveries of geology are found to fill up the old religious truths with a new life, and to derive from them in turn a hallowing glory. When the historian of our planet points out that the successive layers of the earth's surface were formed by such agencies as we know of now, by the constant action of wind and wave, of floating ice and rolling stones—that there were not separate centres of creation, but one primeval law which formed and governed all created things—what is this but the echo of those voices which of old