COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HEXRY DRUMMOND. 807 



rise again ; outgrown, they are forever dead. And this is the hall- 

 mark of all true science, that it destroys by fulfilling. 



However it may have escaped recognition, it is certain that theol- 

 ogy has been at work for some time now with methods of inquiry 

 similar to those employed by natural science. And it has already pai'- 

 tially succeeded in working out a reconstruction of some important 

 departments from the stand-point of development. If the student of 

 science will now apply to theology for its Bible, two very different 

 books will be laid before him. 



The one is the Bible as it was accepted by our forefathers ; the 

 other is the Bible of modern theology. The books, the chapters, the 

 verses, and the words are the same in each, yet in the meaning, the 

 interpretation, and the way in which they are looked at, they are two 

 entirely distinct Bibles. The distinction between them is one which 

 science Avill appreciate the moment it is stated. In point of fact, the 

 one is constructed like the world according to the old cosmogonies ; 

 the other is an evolution. The one represents revelation as having 

 been produced on the creative hypothesis, the Divine-fiat hypothesis, 

 the ready-made hypothesis ; the other on the slow-growth or evolution 

 theory. This last — the Bible of development — is the Bible of modern 

 scientific theology. It is not less authoritative than the first, but it is 

 differently authoritative ; not less inspired, it is yet differently inspired. 



From its stand-point the Bible has not been made in a day, any 

 more than the earth ; nor have its parts been introduced mechanically 

 into the minds of certain men, any more than the cells of their brain. 

 In uttering it they have not spoken as mere automata — the men, 

 though inspired, were authors. This Bible has not been given inde- 

 pendently of time, of place, or of circumstance. It is not to be read 

 without the philosophic sense which distinguishes the provisional from 

 the eternal ; the historic sense, which separates the local from the 

 universal ; or the literary sense, which recognizes prose from poetry, 

 imagery from science. The modern Bible is a book Avhose parts, 

 though not of unequal value, are seen to be of different kinds of value ; 

 W'here the casual is distinguished from the essential, the subordinate 

 from the primal end. This Bible is not an oracle which has been 

 erected ; it has grown. Hence it is no longer a mere word-book, nor 

 a compendium of doctrines, but a nursery of growing truths. It is 

 not an even plane of proof-texts without proportion or emphasis, or 

 light and shade, but a revelation varied as Nature, with the divine in 

 its hidden parts, in its spirit, its tendencies, its obscurities, and its 

 omissions. Like Xature, it has successive strata, and valley and hill- 

 top, and mist and atmosphere, and rivers which are flowing still, and 

 hidden ores, and here and there a place which is desert, and fossils too, 

 whose crude forms are the stepping-stones to higher things. In a word, 

 this Bible is like the world in which it is found, natural, human, intelli- 

 gible in form ; mysterious, inscrutable, divine in origin and essence. 



