778 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



familiar imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures when he had to ex- 

 press his idea of the origin of life. There were certain germs, he 

 assumes, into which " life was first breathed." What should we 

 think of the rationality of a man who interpreted Darwin to 

 believe that there was some big Being who originated life by 

 emptying his lungs into certain bits of protoplasmic jelly ? Yet 

 this is the law of interpretation which Prof. Huxley would im- 

 pose upon the magnificent symbolism of Genesis. The events 

 described avowedly transcending the region of experience 

 must have happened " exactly as they are declared to have hap- 

 pened in the sacred books." When we are told that God said, 

 " Let there be light," we are to interpret this sublime image as 

 an assertion that the Almighty did actually address this sentence 

 in a definite language to the brute elements of chaos. We are 

 to understand that the words thus attributed to the Creator were 

 actual words, like the words spoken by King Charles to Bishop 

 Juxon on the scaffold at Whitehall. If we don't believe this, we 

 are to believe nothing whatever coming from writers so unhis- 

 torical. In like manner, when we are told of the Almighty walk- 

 ing in an earthly garden " in the cool of the day," * and when 

 the narrative seems to imply that Adam saw him and hid, we 

 are to understand this baldly and literally as an actual midday 

 scene in a shady wood somewhere in western Asia. Such is the 

 childish argument which is to destroy Christian theology such is 

 the kind of logic in which Prof. Huxley can not, for the life of him, 

 see any flaw. St. John may perhaps be credited with knowing, 

 1 at least as well as the professor, what would and what would not 

 be fatal to Christian theology. Yet he does not seem to have been 

 even conscious of the difficulty. Passages even stronger and more 

 definite in the Old Testament, involving hyperbole, metaphor, and 

 imagery, stood nothing in his way. He must have known the 

 famous passage in Exodus f in which Moses is represented as 

 having spoken with God as a man speaketh with his friend. 

 Yet the professor's canon of interpretation is unknown to him. 

 " No man hath seen God at any time " is the grand sentence of 

 the apostle. J But the extension of this argument to destroy all 

 authority as belonging to the writers in the New Testament is 

 perhaps a still more remarkable illustration of the reasoning 

 which the professor considers to be faultless. Men who accepted 

 such narratives as those of Genesis are not to be trusted as them- 

 selves historically safe. If St. Paul did really believe in those 

 primeval narratives we can not trust him when he tells us of 

 the light which burst upon him on his way to Damascus, and 

 which changed him from a persecutor of the faith into the great 



* Genesis, iii, 8. f Exodus, xxxiii, 11. f John, i, 18. 



