September 1, 1888.] 



KNOW^LEDGE 



241 



ILLUSTRATED, l^iAGAZINE ^ 



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LONDON: SEPTEMBER 1, 1888. 



GOD'S WORK AND WORD. 



If for the FALL of man science comes to substitute the EISE of 

 man, sir, it means the utter disintegration of all the spiritual 

 pessimisms which have been like a spasm in the heart and a cramp 

 in the intellect of man for so many centuries. And yet, who dares to 

 sav that it is not a perfectly legitimate and proper question to be 

 discussed, without the slightest regard to the fears or the threats 

 of Pope or Prelate.— Wendell Holmes. 



ilT is surprising that, after the experience men 

 have had of its dangers, the Bible argument in 

 regard to matters scientific should be used by 

 any even pretending, still more by those who 

 actuallv desire, to be fiiithful and loyal servants 

 of true religion. Time and agiiin this unwise 

 argument has been employed to oppose scien- 

 tific discoveries, and time and again its futility has been 

 shown, and the mischief of employing it demonstrated. 

 Strange that some men should be so quick to perceive the 

 manifest truth that the word of God cannot be untrue, so bUnd 

 to what should be the equally obvious fact that that which 

 is untrue cannot be the word of God. Ready to denounce, 

 on the one hand, as blasphemy aught which seems to ques- 

 tion the truth of what they regard as the word of God, they 

 never seem to suspect the awful blasphemy of which they 

 themselves are unwittingly guilty in maintaining that to be 

 the word of God which has been shown to be, were it but in 

 the minutest detail, untrue. 



Let it be remarked that, with what seems to many the 

 bane, science has ever brought the antidote. If one depart- 

 ment of science in its quiet progress has sho«-n that many 

 statements once accepted without question cannot possibly be 

 true, another department of research has with equally calm 

 and patient inquiry shown that those statements never have 

 merited the reverential respect which had been accorded to 

 them in consequence of singular misapprehensions as to 

 their origin. If science has shown — to speak plainly — that 

 sayings regarded by some as the very word of God have 

 been wanting in scientific accuracy, science has been careful 

 to remove all trace of irreverence from such declarations by 

 showing not less unmistakably that there never has been 

 any real justification for regarding those sayings as other 

 than the words of men — thoughtful and earnest men, but 

 with no power of discovering those truths which have been 

 revealed under later scientific researches. 



To take one case alone, though I could fill column after 

 column with illustrative instances, it has been shown that 

 in one particular book of a certain heterogeneous collection 

 of ancient liooks and poems, there are mistakes in regard to 

 scientific matters, mis;ipprehensions as to the meaning of 

 passages in old Jewish poems, and details quite irrecon- 

 cilable with history as recorded in the pages of .Josephus, 

 Phdo-Jud-Tus, and other trustworthy writers of the history 

 of their own times. But at the same time that this has 



been done, it has been shown that that book was most 

 certainly not written by the man whose name has been con- 

 nected with it, but was compiled long after he was dead. 

 If the writer of that book speaks of the earth as a modern 

 paradoxist might, telling us of an exceeding high mountain 

 from which all the kingdoms of the earth and their glory 

 could be seen, and if the science of later years has been 

 responsible for showing this to be impossible, later science 

 has shown also that the Alexandrian Greek who, some- 

 where about the year 110, produced the work in which this 

 error (very natural in his time) appears, cannot reasonably 

 be supposed to h.ave been inspired. So with the strange 

 misapprehensions (also very natural, liowever, nearly 1800 

 years ago) respecting epileptic, cataleptic, and maniacal 

 seizures, and the elaborate ingenuity with which the 

 Alexandrian Greek displays his very natural ignorance 

 about Hebrew poetry — as in imagining that " the ass and 

 the colt the foal of an ass " were two distinct animals, iu 

 misinterpreting (overlooking or forgetting the context) 

 Isaiah's prophecy about Maher-shalal-hash-baz — and so 

 forth. The science of Biblical research has explained clearly 

 enough how natural all this was. And if, whereas science 

 recognises the human race as descended from a race already 

 multitudinous, two genealogies in the collection of Jewish 

 and Alexandrian books agree, though otherwise contradict- 

 ing each other, in assuming that man was descended from a 

 single pair (the first genealogy, though going back only to 

 the supposed single ancestor of the Jewish race — another 

 impossibility by the way — redly assumes the single pair of 

 P;\radise), science is at no pains to explain the very natural 

 mistake. Doubtless nothing but a succession of miracles 

 could save the descendants of a single pair from destruction, 

 to say nothing of the renewal of the miracles called for by 

 the destruction of all save four pairs by the tlood (each of the 

 three younger pairs starting, miraculously, a branch of the 

 human family), and of the multitudinous repetition of the 

 miracle in the case of all the paired animals of the ark, as 

 also in the supposed origin of distinct human races from 

 single pairs. Science has proved, again and again, that no 

 races descended from a single pair can thrive, if kept '• pure " 

 in the technical sense (though so far as certain .laws which 

 seem innate in man are concerned this would hardly be the 

 word we should apply to the imagined beginnings of human 

 races). Such races cannot escape degeneration and early 

 destruction. But science, to which the study of history and 

 Biblical research alike belong, has been able to show the 

 conditions under which those ancient writings were pro- 

 duced, and how unlikely it was that their winters should 

 possess knowledge in advance of the knowledge of their day. 

 [In passing I may remark that the first gospel was specially 

 the gospel of the Ebionites, and the only gospel they ac- 

 cepted ; yet even they (who probably knew more of their 

 own gospel and valued it more highly than any others) 

 regarded the genealogical record in it as interpolated.] 



In like manner, Biblical research has shown clearly on 

 what an essentially human basis— narrow too, being charac- 

 teristically Jewish— the teaching has been established that 

 the record in the e;irlier chapters of Genesis (a Jewish com- 

 pilation from Babylonian documents) is the very word of the 

 Infinite Power from whom all things throughout Infinite 

 Space and during Eternity of Time proceed. For my own 

 part, let me remark in passing, though I am ready to admit 

 the honesty of those who proclaim their belief in this essen- 

 tially blasphemous idea, I must confess I cannot re;idily 

 shake off the pain with which I contemplate a doctrine so 

 stupendously repugnant to all sense of reverence for the 

 Power Which— Infinite as It must be in "Wisdom, Omni- 

 present and Everlasting as well as Almighty— must also be 

 Absolute Truth. It is saddening that in our days of en- 



