434- THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



they hold a most prominent place in the various sacred books of 

 the world. In nearly all these there is revealed the conception of 

 a Creator, of whom man is an imperfect image, and who literally 

 and directly created the visible universe with his hands and fin- 

 gers or voice. 



Among these theories, of especial interest to us are those which 

 controlled theological thought in Chaldea. The Assyrian inscrip- 

 tions which have been recently recovered and given to the Eng- 

 lish-speaking peoples by such scholars as Layard, George Smith, 

 Oppert, Sayce, and others, show that in the ancient religions of 

 Chaldea and Babylonia there was elaborated a narrative of the 

 creation which, in its most important features, must have been 

 the source of that in our own sacred books. Or, at least, it has 

 now become perfectly clear that from the same sources which 

 inspired the accounts of the creation of the universe among 

 the Chaldeo-Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Phoenician, and other 

 ancient civilizations came the ideas which hold so prominent a 

 place in the sacred books of the Hebrews. In the two accounts 

 imperfectly fused together in Genesis, and also in the third ac- 

 count of which we have indications in the book of Job and in the 

 Proverbs, there is presented, often with the greatest sublimity, 

 that same early conception of the Creator and of the creation the 

 conception, so natural in the childhood of civilization, of a Creator 

 who is an enlarged human being working literally with his own 

 hands, and of a creation which is " the work of his fingers." To 

 supplement this view there was then developed the belief in this 

 Creator as one who, having 



" from his ample palm 

 Launched forth the rolling planets into space," 



sits on high, enthroned "upon the circle of the heavens," perpetu- 

 ally controlling and directing them.* 



Among the early fathers of the Church this view of creation 

 became fundamental ; they impressed upon Christendom more 

 and more strongly the belief that the universe was created in a 

 perfectly literal sense by the hands or voice of God. Here and 



* A somewhat similar series of sculptures representing the Almighty creating the heav- 

 ens and the earth is also to be seen at the cathedral of Upsala and elsewhere. For an ex- 

 act statement of the resemblances which have settled the question among the most eminent 

 scholars in favor of the derivation of the Hebrew cosmogony from that of Assyria, see 

 Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 304, 306 ; also, Franz 

 Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmographien der alten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, pp. 35- 

 46 ; also George Smith's Chaldean Genesis, especially the German translation with addi- 

 tions by Delitzsch, Leipsic, 1876, and Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testa- 

 ment, Giessen, 1883, pp. 1-54, etc. See also Renan, Histoire du peuple d'Israel, vol. i, 

 chap, .i, L'antique influence babylonienne. 



