8io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



For its purpose what could be a finer, or even a more true, account 

 of the matter than this ? Without a word of literal truth in it, it 

 would convey to the child's mind exactly the right impression. Now 

 conceive of the head nurse banishing it from the nursery as calculated 

 to mislead the children as to the origin of blue eyes. Or imagine the 

 nursery governess who has passed the South Kensington examination 

 in Mr. Huxley's "Physiology" informing her pupils that ears never 

 "came out" at all, and that hearing was really done inside, by the 

 fibers of Corti and the epithelial arrangements of the macula? acusticse. 

 Is it conceivable, on the other hand, that the parish clergyman could 

 defend the record on the ground that " the everywhere " was a philo- 

 sophical presentation of the Almighty, or that " God thought about 

 me" contained the Hegelian Idea? And yet this is precisely what 

 interpreters of Genesis and interpreters of science do with the Bible. 

 Genesis is a presentation of one or two great elementary truths to the 

 childhood of the world. It can only be read aright in the spirit in 

 which it was written, with its original purpose in view, and its original 

 audience. AVhat did it mean to them ? What would they understand 

 by it? What did they need to know and not to know ? 



To expand the constructive answers to these questions in detail 

 does not fall within our province here. What we have to note is, 

 that a scientific theory of the universe formed no part of the original 

 writer's intention. Dating from the childhood of the world, written 

 for children, and for that child-spirit in man which remains unchanged 

 by time, it takes color and shape accordingly. Its object is purely re- 

 ligious, the point being, not how certain things were made, but that 

 God made them. It is not dedicated to science, but to the soul. It 

 is a sublime theology, given in view of ignorance or idolatry or poly- 

 theism, telling the worshipful youth of the world that the heavens 

 and the earth and every creeping and flying thing were made by God. 

 What w^orld-spii'it teaches men to finger its fluid numbers like a science 

 catalogue, and discuss its days in terms of geological formations? 

 What blindness pursues them, that they mark the things he made only 

 with their museum-labels, and think they have exhausted its contribu- 

 tion when they have never even been within sight of it ? This is not 

 even atheism. It is simple illiterateness. 



The first principle which must rule our reading of this book is the 

 elementary canon of all literary criticism, which decides that any in- 

 terpretation of a part of a book or of a literature must be controlled 

 by the dominant purpose or motif oi the whole. And, when one in- 

 vestigates "that dominant purpose in the case of the Bible, he finds it 

 reducing itself to one thing — religion. No matter what view is taken 

 of the composition or authorship of the several books, this feature 

 secures immediate and universal recognition. 



Mais s'il en est ainsi (says Lenormant), me demandera-t-on peut-fetre, Oii done 

 voyez-vous Tinspiration divine des ^crivains qui ont fait cette arch6ologie, le 



