If the reader happens to be familiar with the objections to the doctrine of final causes, or teleology, in nature, urged in our day by Spencer, Haeckel, and others, he will have seen from the foregoing statements that these objections are in themselves baseless, or inapplicable to this doctrine as maintained in the Bible. There is no consistency in the position of men who, when they dig a rudely chipped flint out of a bed of gravel, immediately infer an intelligent workman, and who refuse to see any indication of a higher intelligence in the creation of the workman himself. It is a blind philosophy which professes to see in primal atoms the "promise and potency of mind," and which fails to perceive that such potency is more inconceivable than the evidence of primary and supreme mind. The men who maintain that wings were not planned for flight, but that flight has produced wings, and thousands of like propositions, are simply amusing themselves with paradoxes to which may very properly be applied the strange word devised by Haeckel to express his theory of nature—Dysteleology, or purposelessness. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the teleology of the Bible is not of that narrow kind which would make man the sole object of nature, and the supreme judge of its adaptations. Inasmuch as God's plan goes over all the ages past and future, and relates to the welfare of all sentient beings known or unknown to us, and also to his own sovereign pleasure as the supreme object, we may not be in a position either to understand or profit by all its parts, and hence may expect to find many mysteries, and many things that we can not at present reconcile with God's wisdom and goodness. We know but "parts of his ways," the "fullness of his power who can understand." "His judgments are unsearchable," "his ways are past finding out."
4. The law of type or pattern in nature is distinctly indicated in the Bible. This is a principle only recently understood by naturalists, but it has more or less dimly dawned on the minds of many great thinkers in all ages. Nor is this wonderful, for the idea of type is scarcely ever absent from our own conceptions of any work that we may undertake. In any such work we anticipate recurring daily toil, like the returning cycles of nature. We look for progress, like that of the growth of the universe. We study adaptation both of the several parts to subordinate uses, and of the whole to some general design. But we also keep in view some pattern, style, or order, according to which the whole is arranged, and the mutual relations of the parts are adjusted. The architect must adhere to some order of architecture, and to some style within that order. The potter, the calico-printer, and the silversmith must equally study uniformity of pattern in their several manufactures. The Almighty Worker has exhibited the same idea in his works. In the animal kingdom, for instance, we have four or more leading types of structure. Taking any one of these—the vertebrate, for example—we have a uniform general plan, embracing the vertebral column constructed of the same elements; the members, whether the arm of man, the limb of the quadruped, or the wing of the bat or the bird, or the swimming-paddle of the whale, built of the same bones. In like manner all the parts of the vertebral column itself in the same animal, whether in the skull, the neck, or the trunk, are composed of the same elementary structures. These types are farther found to be sketched out—first in their more general, and then in their special features—in proceeding from the lower species of the same type to the higher, in proceeding from the earlier to the later stages of embryonic development, and in proceeding from the more ancient to the more recent creatures that have succeeded each other in geological time. Man, the highest of the vertebrates, is thus the archetype, representing and including all the lower and earlier members of the vertebrate type. The above are but trite and familiar examples of a doctrine which may furbish and has furnished the material of volumes. There can be no question that the Hebrew Bible is the oldest book in which this principle is stated. In the first chapter of Genesis we have specific type in the creation of plants and animals after their kinds or species, and in the formation of man in the image and likeness of the Creator; and, as we shall find in the sequel, there are some curious ideas of higher and more general types in the grouping of the creatures referred to. The same idea is indicated in the closing chapters of Job, where the three higher classes of the vertebrates are represented by a number of examples, and the typical likeness of one of these—the hippopotamus—to man, seems to be recognized. Dr. McCosh has quoted, as an illustration of the doctrine of types, a very remarkable passage from Psalm cxxxix.:
"I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Marvellous are thy works,
And that my soul knoweth right well.
My substance was not hid from Thee,
When I was made in secret,
And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth:
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect;
And in thy book all my members were written,
Which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them."
It would too much tax the faith of many to ask them to believe that the writer of the above passage, or the Spirit that inspired him, actually meant to teach—what we now know so well from geology—that the prototypes of all the parts of the archetypal human structure may be found in those fossil remains of extinct animals which may, in nearly every country, be dug up from the rocks of the earth. No objection need, however, be taken to our reading in it the doctrine of embryonic development according to a systematic type.
Science, it is true, or rather I should perhaps say philosophical speculation, has sometimes pushed this idea of plan into that of a spontaneous genetic evolution of things in time, without any creative superintendence or definite purpose. This way of viewing the matter is, however, as we shall have occasion to see, both bald and irrational, and wants the symmetry and completeness of that style of thought which grasps at once progress and plan and adaptation, as emanating from a Supreme Will. The question of how the plan has been worked out will come up for detailed consideration farther on. In the mean time we have before us the fact that the Bible represents the cosmos as not the product of a blind conflict of self-existent forces, but as the result of the production and guidance of these forces by infinite wisdom.
It is more than curious that this idea of type, so long existing in an isolated and often depised form, as a theological thought in the imagery of Scripture, should now be a leading idea of natural science; and that while comparative anatomy teaches us that the structures of all past and present lower animals point to man, who, as Professor Owen expresses it, has had all his parts and organs "sketched out in anticipation in the inferior animals," the Bible points still farther forward to an exaltation of the human type itself into what even the comparative anatomist might perhaps regard as among the "possible modifications of it beyond those realized in this little orb of ours," could he but learn its real nature.
Under the foregoing heads, of the object, the structure, the authority, and the general cosmical views of the Scripture, I have endeavored to group certain leading thoughts important as preliminary to the study of the subject; and, in now entering on the details of the Old Testament cosmogony, I trust the reader will pardon me for assuming, as a working hypothesis, that we are studying an inspired book, revealing the origin of nature, and presenting accurate pictures of natural facts and broad general views of the cosmos, at least until in the progress of our inquiry we find reason to adopt lower views; and that he will, in the mean time, be content to follow me in that careful and systematic analysis which a work claiming such a character surely demands.