Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/228

224 the man has never lived who took every word of the Bible literally. When St. Paul said: 'I am crucified with Christ,' and when David said, 'The little hills skipped like rams,' neither expected that what he wrote would be taken literally. The sense of Scripture is Scripture. That sense is conveyed to us sometimes in a story and sometimes in a poem. The higher and truer meaning would often be lost if we held ourselves exclusively to the letter and rejected that which it suggests or figures. The story of Abraham's two sons, as contained in Genesis, is interesting and valuable: but in his epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul does not hesitate to say that it is an allegory, and that its true value is its teaching as to the two convenants or testaments.

"I am thoroughly convinced that God created the heavens and the earth, but I do not know how he proceeded. I am sure that He made man in His own image, but I find nothing in the Scriptures that tells me His method. Since God is not subject to the categories of time and space a thousand years being in His sight as a single day, I am unable to see that there is any incompatibility between evolution and religion. Some evolutionists are irreligious, but so are some who are not evolutionists. I myself hold with the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews that 'God, who at sundry times and in diversdiverse [sic] manners, spoke in time past nntounto [sic] the fathers by the prophets hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, by whom He made the world'". That would be the testimony of Dr. Whitaker.

We expect to prove by Dr. Shailer Mathews, dean of the Divinity school of the University of Chicago, and one of the leading American authorities on the Bible, author of the book on "Contribution of Science to Religion," that "a correct understanding of Genesis shows that its account of creation is no more denied by evolution than it is by the laws of light, electricity and gravitation. The Bible deals with religion.

There are two accounts in Genesis of the creation of man. They are not identical and at points differ widely. It would be difficult to say which is the teaching of the Bible. The aim of both, however, is clear and wonderfully inspired. Each shows how God created man and how man differs from beasts.

In the first account in Genesis, Chapter 1 to Chapter 2, Verse 3, it is said that God made beasts, cattle and all creeping things by having the earth bring them forth as living creatures. The Hebrew expression here used to quote Nephesh Shayah is the same as that used in Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 7, to describe man when created. The first story then continues with the creation by God of man in the divine image, male and female being created on the sixth day. In the second account Genesis, Chapter 2, Verses 2 to 24, God is said to have formed man from the dust of the ground and to have breathed into him the breath of life. Man thus became a living soul. In the Hebrew the same word is used as that previonslypreviously [sic] used to describe the animals which the earth brought forth.

This living creature, Adam, its placed by God in a garden, which he is to till. He is forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He, however, disobeys and eats the fruit. God then declares that man has become "one of us knowing good and evil." Genesis thus says that an animal life, produced by God from the earth by his spirit, came to be like God through a developmnetdevelopment [sic] born of experience. Thus so far from opposing the Genesis account of the creation of man, the theory of evolution in some degree resembles it.

But the book of Genesis is not intended to teach science, but to teach the activity of God in nature and the spiritual value of man. It is a religious interpretation, its writers use the best of the then current knowledge of the universe to show how God was in the creative process, and how that process