All this we can transfer by analogy only, to a Divine design. The design is in the Divine mind, and He utters it in no material plans or drawings: the forces of nature and the chemical elements, His obedient builders, have no hands to receive the plans or eyes to scan them; but we can perceive the analogy directly, and that is all that is necessary for Faith.
The origin of all we see in the world and in the entire Cosmos is, then, in God; and as regards the adjustments of our globe and its relations, and the actual life-forms in plant and animal, they came into existence pursuant to groups of types or designs, made by the Divine Mind, and declared by Him from His Throne in heaven, in six several days—periods of the rotation of our earth.
That is the message of Revelation. It requires no straining of the sacred text: it takes everything as it stands, and the seemingly lengthy explanation it requires is not to manipulate the text, but to clear away the heap of mistaken conceptions that have gathered round it:—to establish the idea, that the terms "God said, Let there be," and so forth, mean Heaven work, in the design and type—not earth work in its realization and building up. Establishing this by illustration and argument, nothing more is required in the way of textual exegesis except to argue for the rejection of perverse and unsustainable meanings long given to "days," to "expanse" or "firmament," and to "great whales" in the narrative.
It will be admitted readily that if this account of Creation is the true one, if the meaning assigned to the Genesis narrative is correct, it affords no hindrance to any conclusions that may progressively be demanded by the investigation of life-history on earth.
It requires us to believe that the forms which life assumes are not chance forms, nor the unpremeditated results of environment and circumstance. But we are not told positively which forms are transitory, which are final.
It is only a matter of probable opinion, which it is quite open to any one to dispute, that there is any indication of finality. I should personally be inclined to think that we have indications that carnivora, ungulates, and birds are final forms; that no evolution will ever modify a bird further into anything that is not a bird; that no transition between the ungulates and the carnivora is possible; that the proboscideae are not a final but a transitory type, dying out gradually—our elephants and similar forms will disappear as the mastodon did.
But I admit this is all mere speculation, in which I ask no one to follow me.
On one important point only is there a difference; and if the text is ever proved wrong on that, it must be given up. But it is here that all scientific knowledge fails, in any way whatever, to touch the sacred text. There is an unique and exceptional account of one "special creation." A man "Adam" is described as having been actually created, not born as an ultimately modified descendant of ancestors originally far removed from himself. That is not to be denied; not only was his bodily form specially created (conformably to the type created in Genesis i. 26), but a special spiritual and higher life was imparted—for I believe that no one disputes this as the meaning of the expression, "breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives, and man became a living soul."
It must be noted again—although I have before alluded to this in some detail—that it is not impossible that, pursuant to the general command "Let us make man," there may have been other human creations, perhaps not endowed with the higher life of Adam. If it is found difficult to realize this because the image of God is connected (from the very first) with the design of Man's life-form, still it is to be remembered as an undeniable fact, that the form, though one assumed by God Himself in the Incarnation, is connected in structure and function with the general animal (Mammalian) type, and that even the Adamic or spiritually endowed man may, by neglecting the higher and giving way to the lower nature, develop much of the purely bestial in himself. So that the bare possibility of a pre-Adamite and imperfect man cannot be à priori denied. More than that it is not necessary to say. Nor is it necessary that any origin of man should be limited to six or eight thousand years back. If the state of the text is such that a perfect chronology is possible,[[98]] then all that the Bible goes back to chronologically is the particular man Adam. And it is quite impossible that any scientific or historical contradiction can arise therefrom.