Here we have reached the sovereign theme of the narrative, and have detected the false note that is struck at the outset of every attempt to interpret it as in any degree or fashion a physical record of creation. In very deed and truth the concern of the chapter is not creation, but the character, being, and glory of the Almighty Maker. If we excerpt God's speeches and the rubrical formulas, the chapter consists of one continuous chain of verbs, instinct with life and motion, linked on in swift succession, and with hardly an exception, the subject of every one of them is God. It is one long adoring delineation of God loving, yearning, willing, working in creation. Its interest is not in the work, but the Worker. Its subject is not creation, but the Creator. What it gives is not a world, but a God. It is not geology; it is theology.
Why do we so assert, accentuate, and reiterate this to be the central theme of the chapter? Because through the scientific trend and bias of modern inquiry the essential design of the chapter has got warped, cramped, and twisted till its majestic features have been pushed almost clean out of view, and all attention is concentrated on one trivial, mean, and unreal point in its physiognomy. Its claim to be accounted an integral part of a real revelation is made to hinge on its magical anticipation of, and detailed correspondence with, the changeful theories of modern geology. The idea is, in our humble but decided opinion, dangerous, baseless, and indefensible. The chapter may not forestall one single scientific discovery. It may not tally with one axiom or dogma of geology. Nevertheless, it remains a unique, undeniable, and glorious monument of revelation, second only in worth and splendour to the record of God's incarnation of His whole heart and being in the person of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Redeemer. Consider what this chapter has actually accomplished in the world, and set that against all theories of what it ought to be doing. For our knowledge of the true God and the realisation of mankind's higher life it has done a work beside which any question of correspondence or non-correspondence with science sinks into unmentionable insignificance. Place side by side with it the chiefest and best of the Pagan cosmogonies, and appreciate its sweetness, purity, and elevation over against their grotesqueness, their shallowness, and their degradation alike of the human and the Divine. Realise the world whose darkness they re-echo, the world into which emerged this radiant picture of God's glory and man's dignity, and think what it has done for that poor world. It found heaven filled with a horde of gods, monstrous, impure, and horrible, gigantic embodiments of brute force and lust, or at best cold abstractions of cosmical principles, whom men could fear, but not love, honour, or revere. It found man in a world dark and unhomelike, bowing down in abject worship to beasts and birds, and stocks and stones, trembling with craven cowardice before the elements and forces of Nature, enslaved in a degrading bondage of physical superstition, fetishism, and polytheism. With one sweep of inspired might the truth enshrined in this chapter has changed all that, wherever it has come. It has cleansed the heaven of those foul gods and monstrous worships, and leaves men on bended knees in the presence of the one true God, their Father in heaven, who made the world for their use, and them for Himself, and whose tender mercies are over all His works. From moral and mental slavery it has emancipated man, for it has taken the physical objects of his fear and worship, and dashing them down from their usurped pre-eminence, has put them all under his feet, to be his ministers and servants in working out on earth his eternal destiny. These conceptions of God, Man, and Nature have been the regeneration of humanity; the springs of progress in science, invention, and civilisation; the charter of the dignity of human life, and the foundation of liberty, virtue, and religion. The man who, in view of such a record, can ask with anxious concern whether a revelation carrying in its bosom such a wealth of heavenly truth does not also have concealed in its shoe a bird's-eye view of geology must surely be a man blind to all literary likelihood, destitute of any sense of congruity and the general fitness of things, and cannot but seem to us as one that mocks. The chapter's title to be reckoned a revelation rests on no such magical and recondite quality, but is stamped four-square on the face of its essential character and contents. Whence could this absolutely unique conception of God, in His relation to the world and man, have been derived, except from God Himself? Whence into a world so dark, and void, and formless did it emerge fair and radiant? There is no answer but one. God said, "Let there be light; and there was light."
The specific revelation of the 1st chapter of Genesis must be sought in its moral and spiritual contents. But may there not be, in addition, worked into its material framework, some anticipation of scientific truths that have since come to light? What were the good of it, when the Divine message could be wholly and better expressed by the sole use of popular language, intelligible in every age and by all classes? Is it dignified to depict the Spirit of Inspiration standing on tiptoe, and straining to speak, across the long millenniums and over the head of the world's childhood, to the wise and learned scientists of the nineteenth century? It is never the manner of Scripture to anticipate natural research or to forestall human industry. God means men to discover physical truth from the great book of Nature. What truth of science, what mechanical invention, what beneficent discovery in medicine, agriculture, navigation, or any other art or industry, has ever been gleaned from study of the Bible? Not one. These things lie outside the scope of revelation, and God is the God of order. Moreover, in Scripture itself the framework of the chapter is not counted dogmatic nor uniformly adhered to. In the 2nd chapter of Genesis, in Job, in the Psalms, and in Proverbs there are manifold deviations and variations. The material setting is handled with the freedom applicable to the pictorial dress of a parable, wherein things transcendental are depicted in earthly symbols. In truth, this is essentially the character of the composition. We have seen that the delineation, classification, and arrangement are not scientific and not philosophical, but popular, practical, and religious. It is everywhere manifest that the interest is not in the process of creation, but in the fact of its origination in God. While science lingers on the physical operation, Genesis designedly overleaps it, for the same reason that the Gospels do not deign to suggest the material substratum of Christ's miracles. Creation is a composite process. It begins in the spiritual world, and terminates in the material. It is in its first stage supernatural, in its second natural. It originates in God desiring, decreeing, issuing formative force; it proceeds in matter moving, cohering, moulding, and shaping. Revelation and science regard it from opposite ends. The one looks at it from its beginning, the other from its termination. The Bible shows us God creating; geology shows us the world being created. Scripture deals solely with the first stage, science solely with the second. Where Scripture stops, there science first begins. Contradiction, conflict, collision are impossible. In the words of the Duke of Argyll, "The 1st chapter of Genesis stands alone among the traditions of mankind in the wonderful simplicity and grandeur of its words. Specially remarkable—miraculous, it really seems to me—is that character of reserve which leaves open to reason all that reason may be able to attain. The meaning of these words seems always to be a meaning ahead of science, not because it anticipates the results of science, but because it is independent of them, and runs, as it were, round the outer margin of all possible discovery."
May we not safely extend this finding to the entire Bible, and on these lines define its relation to modern thought? Its supernatural revelation is purely and absolutely ethical and spiritual. In questions physical and metaphysical it has no concern and utters no voice. With the achievements of science it never competes, nor can it be contradicted by them. It encourages its researches, ennobles its aspirations, crowns and completes its discoveries. Into the dead body of physical truth it puts the living soul of faith in the Divine Author. Like the blue heaven surrounding and spanning over the green earth, revelation over-arches and encircles science. Within that infinite embrace, beneath that spacious dome, drawing from its azure depths light, and life, and fructifying warmth, science, unhampered and unhindered, works out its majestic mission of blessing to men and glory to God. Collision there can be none till the earth strike the sky. The message of the Bible is a message from God's heart to ours. It cannot be proved by reason, nor can it be disproved. It appeals, not to sight, but to faith, and belongs to the realm of spirit, and not to that of sense. Science may have much to alter in our notions of its earthly embodiment, but its essential contents it cannot touch.
That is not theory, but reality. It is not philosophy, but life; not flesh, but spirit. It is the living, breathing, feeling love of God become articulate. It needs no evidence of sense. In the immutable instincts of the human heart it has its attestation, and in a life of responsive love it finds an unfailing verification. It rests on a basis no sane criticism can undermine nor solid science shake. Happy the man whose faith has found this fixed foundation, and whose heart possesses this adamantine certainty: he shall be likened "unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock."
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JAMES MACDONELL,
JOURNALIST.
By W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.