In a note at the end of the second essay, “Mr. Gladstone and Genesis,” there is an excellent exposition of the “Proper Sense of the ‘Mosaic’ Narrative of the Creation.” Among other points, Huxley, of course, notices how the stars are, as it were, thrown in—“He made the stars also.” These words have always struck me as making it peculiarly clear that the “Mosaic” narrative originated from man, and not from God. The unknown authors of the Hexateuchal compilation were almost as ignorant of the nature of the stars and of their unthinkable distance away from us as a camel-driver in Sind, who gravely informed a friend of mine that the stars were once quite close to the earth, until one fine day a certain woman (it is always the woman who causes the mischief) grabbed hold of one and used it for cleaning her child, whereupon the gods, much annoyed at such presumption on the part of mankind, moved them far enough off to be safe from further desecration.
That the order of Creation as given in the Bible cannot be maintained will be clearly seen if we take the particular case of the birds and creeping things. Science does not affirm that the birds were made before “everything that creepeth upon the earth.” Mr. Gladstone tries to get over the difficulty by excluding reptiles, lizards, etc., from the category of creeping things. This will appear in the course of the following quotations from Professor Huxley’s essay on “Mr. Gladstone and Genesis”:—
“Mr. Gladstone’s views as to the proper method of dealing with grave and difficult scientific and religious problems had permitted him to base a solemn ‘plea for a revelation of truth from God’ upon an error as to a matter of fact, from which the intelligent perusal of a manual of palæontology would have saved him.... He does, indeed, make a great parade of authorities, and I have the greatest respect for those authorities whom Mr. Gladstone mentions. If he will get them to sign a joint memorial to the effect that our present palæontological evidence proves that birds appeared before the ‘land population’ of terrestrial reptiles, I shall think it my duty to reconsider my position—but not till then.... I have every respect for the singer of the Song of the Three Children (whoever he may have been); I desire to cast no shadow of doubt upon, but, on the contrary, marvel at, the exactness of Mr. Gladstone’s information as to the considerations which ‘affected the method of the Mosaic writer’; nor do I venture to doubt that the inconvenient intrusion of these contemptible reptiles—‘a family fallen from greatness,’ a miserable, decayed aristocracy reduced to mere ‘skulkers about the earth,’ in consequence, apparently, of difficulties about the occupation of land arising out of the earth-hunger of their former serfs, the mammals—into an apologetic argument, which would otherwise run quite smoothly, is in every way to be deprecated. Still, the wretched creatures stand there, importunately demanding notice; and, however different may be the practice in that contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses and laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really is of no avail whatever to shut one’s eyes to facts, or to try and bury them out of sight under a tumulus of rhetoric.... However reprehensible, and, indeed, contemptible, terrestrial reptiles may be, the only question which appears to me to be relevant to my argument is whether these creatures are or are not comprised under the denomination of ‘everything that creepeth upon the ground.’... Hence I commend the following extract from the eleventh chapter of Leviticus to Mr. Gladstone’s serious attention:—
And these are they which are unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth: the weasel, and the mouse, and the great lizard after its kind, and the gecko, and the land-crocodile, and the sand-lizard, and the chameleon. These are they which are unclean to you among all that creep (v. 29–31).
The merest Sunday-school exegesis, therefore, suffices to prove that, when the Mosaic writer in [Genesis 1. 24] speaks of ‘creeping things,’ he means to include lizards among them. This being so, it is agreed on all hands that terrestrial lizards and other reptiles allied to lizards occur in the Permian strata. It is further agreed that the Triassic strata were deposited after these. Moreover, it is well known that, even if certain footprints are to be taken as unquestionable evidence of the existence of birds, they are not known to occur in rocks earlier than the Trias, while indubitable remains of birds are not to be met with till much later. Hence it follows that natural science does not ‘affirm’ the statement that birds were made on the fifth day, and ‘everything that creepeth on the ground’ on the sixth, on which Mr. Gladstone rests his order; for, as is shown by Leviticus, the ‘Mosaic writer’ includes lizards among his creeping things.”[20]
The crust of the earth is a book having for its pages strata that have, fortunately, been upturned for our perusal, and the story it tells must be true. The series of fossiliferous deposits which contain the remains of the animals which have lived on the earth in past ages of its history afford the evidence required concerning the order of appearance of the different species. As Professor Huxley says elsewhere[21]: “When we consider these simple facts, we see how absolutely futile are the attempts that have been made to draw a parallel between the story told by so much of the crust of the earth as is known to us and the story which Milton tells.” Still, the story which Milton tells is in accord with the story which the Bible tells to those who are not given to playing conjuring tricks with the plain meaning of words.
Finally, we must remember that “hundreds of thousands of animal species, as distinct as those which now compose our water, land, and air populations, have come into existence and died out again.” “If the species of animals have all been separately created, then it follows that hundreds of thousands of acts of creative energy have occurred, at intervals throughout the whole time recorded by the fossiliferous rocks; and, during the greater part of that time, the ‘creation’ of the members of the water, land, and air populations must have gone on contemporaneously.”[22]
The common-sense view of the Creation story, and one that is now widely accepted even by orthodox Christians, is that it is a myth. Many of us will, therefore, agree with Professor Huxley when he says: “I suppose it to be an hypothesis respecting the origin of the universe which some ancient thinker found himself able to reconcile with his knowledge, or what he thought was knowledge, of the nature of things, and therefore assumed to be true. As such, I hold it to be not merely an interesting, but a venerable, monument of a stage in the mental progress of mankind; and I find it difficult to suppose that any one who is acquainted with the cosmogonies of other nations—and especially with those of the Egyptians and the Babylonians, with whom the Israelites were in such frequent and intimate communication—should consider it to possess either more or less scientific importance than may be allotted to these.”[23]
It may not be inappropriate to conclude this section with Milton’s conception of the last act of creation, so charmingly simple and so strictly according to the Bible and what Christ Himself believed, and yet so completely untrue:—
The sixth, and of creation last, arose