No. 1.] NATURE AND THE BIBLE. 49 



system of the Hebrews, where the moral phase of our nature 

 is alone developed. As Mr. Gladstone well puts it, " the beauty 

 and joyousness of life was entrusted to the Greeks as their 

 mission," while we moderns dwell mainly upon its utilities. 

 The teaching of Nazareth gathered up the truth from all sides, 

 so the Christian philosopher may be at once as monotheistic as 

 Joshua, as pantheistic as Spinoza, and as utilitarian as Bentham. 

 It will require more than one age or one race to show the whole 

 design of God, and the Hebrews are but one colour, dominant 

 though it may be, in the glorious and intricate web which He is 

 now weaving on the "loom of time." Crude though many of 

 the Greek speculations were, we owe to them our intellectual 

 freedom and our intellectual philosophy. We owe to them 

 even the last abstractions of our physics, and more than all, that 

 precious inheritance of ideal beauty in art which no purely He- 

 brew philosopher ever dreamed of. Dwelling, as we of this age 

 mainly do upon the methods of God, the secondary divinities, as 

 it were, of chemical and molecular force, we tend to lose our 

 way ; but the Hebrew, absorbed in the living and personal unity 

 underlying all, does not recognize sufficiently the beauty and 

 diversity of that outward nature which is well called the garment 

 of the' invisible God. 



As might be expected, our author strenuously, and we believe, 

 triumphantly maintains that the days of creation are not natural 

 days, but periods of time. He shows that the notion of days of 

 24 hours is a comparatively recent one. This any one may 

 verify for himself by reading the three last books of St. Augus- 

 tine's Confessions. It is, moreover, clear from the narrative ; 

 for the natural day, depending upon the sun, could not have had 

 any existence until the sun was created, upon the fourth day. 

 Clearly, whatever Moses meant by "day," it could not be the 

 usual period of 24 hours, but might well be a period of time 

 occupied by the events which he groups together, and which we 

 now know to have been of very great duration. The succession 

 of creation is shown, in the fourth lecture, to be indicated in the 

 Mosaic record according to the facts of Geology. One difficulty 

 alone appears, which is recognized with great candour, on p. 105 : 

 it is that Moses records a great development of vegetable life in 

 the same period when the dry land first appears, the third day, 

 whereas no corresponding fossils have as yet been discovered in 

 the rocks. 



