630 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



their sojourn in the valley of the Nile, hardly had force to stamp even 

 so much as their name upon the history of the world at large, and 

 only then began to be admitted to the general communion of man- 

 kind -when their Scriptures assumed the dress which a Gentile tongue 

 was needed to supply ? It is more rational, I contend, to say that 

 these astonishing anticipations were a God -given supply, than to 

 suppose that a race, who fell uniformly and entirely short of the 

 great intellectual development * of antiquity, should here not only 

 have equaled and outstripped it, but have entirely transcended, 

 in kind even more than in degree, all known exercise of human 

 faculties. 



Whether this was knowledge conveyed to the mind of the Mosaic 

 author, I do not presume to determine. There has been, in the belief 

 of Christians, a profound providential purpose, little or variously visi- 

 ble to us, which presided, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, over the 

 formation of the marvelous compound, which we term the Holy 

 Scriptures. This we wonderingly embrace without being much per- 

 plexed by the questions which are raised on them ; for instance, by 

 the question. In what exact relation the books of the Apocrypha, 

 sometimes termed deutero-canonical, stand to the books of the He- 

 brew Canon. Difficulties of detail, such as may (or ultimately may 

 not) be found to exist in the Proem to Genesis, have much the same 

 relation to the evidence of revealed knowledge in this record, as the 

 spots in the sun to his all-unfolding and sufficing light. But as to the 

 Mosaic writer himself, all I presume to accept is the fact that he put 

 upon undying record, in this portion of his work, a series of particu- 

 lars which, interpreted in the growing light of modern knowledge, re- 

 quire from us, on the whole, as reasonable men, the admission that we 

 do not see how he could have written them, and that in all likelihood 

 he did not write them, without aid from the guidance of a more than 

 human power. It is in this guidance, and not necessarily or uniformly 

 in the consciousness of the writer, that, according to my poor concep- 

 tion, the idea of Revelation mainly lies. 



And now one word on the subject of Evolution. I can not follow 

 Mr. Huxley in his minute acquaintance with Indian sages, and I am 

 not aware that Evolution has a place in the greater number of the 

 schools of Greek philosophy. Nor can I comprehend the rapidity 

 with which persons of authority have come to treat the Darwinian 

 hypothesis as having reached the final stage of demonstration. To 

 the eye of a looker-on their pace and method seem rather too much 

 like a steeplechase. But this may very well be due to their want of 

 appropriate knowledge and habits of thought. For myself, in my 

 loose and uninformed way of looking at Evolution, I feel only too 



* I write thus bearing fully in mind the unsurpassed sublimity of much that is to be 

 found in the Old Testament. The consideration of this subject would open a wholly new 

 line of argument, which the present article does not allow me to attempt. 



