448 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem, 

 chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect 

 this development of what is best in the onward march of human- 

 ity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a 

 flower or a tree or a planet is not true ; to scoff at them is to scoff 

 at the law of the universe. In welding together into noble form, 

 whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the book 

 of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting under 

 earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or India, or Per- 

 sia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to humanity a 

 possession ever becoming more and more precious ; and modern 

 science in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for the old 

 the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea of evolu- 

 tion for that of creation has added and is steadily adding a new 

 revelation divinely inspired. 



In the light of these two evolutions, then one of the visi- 

 ble universe, the other of a sacred creation-legend science and 

 theology have at last been reconciled. A great step in this 

 reconciliation was recently seen at the main center of theologi- 

 cal thought among English-speaking people, when, in the col- 

 lection of essays entitled Lux Mundi, emanating from the col- 

 lege established in these latter days as the fortress of orthodoxy 

 at Oxford, the legendary character of the creation accounts in 

 our sacred books was acknowledged, and when an archbishop 

 suggested that the "Holy Spirit may at times have made use 

 of myth and legend." * 



IN a communication to the Belgian Geological Society M. Dallo has called at- 

 tention to some truly scientific conceptions expressed or foreshadowed by Dante 

 in his great poem, including such truths as the moon the principal cause of the 

 tides; the level, except for the relief of the waves, of the surface of the sea; the 

 existence of a centripetal force, illustrated in the fall of bodies; the spherical 

 form of the earth ; that the land above the sea is simply a protuberance from the 

 surface of the globe ; that the continents are grouped in the northern hemisphere ; 

 the existence of universal attraction ; that the elasticity of vapors is a motive 

 power; that the continents have been upraised; and the existence of the chem- 

 ical elements, more or less as they were conceived by Lavoisier. 



* For the first citations above made, see The Cosmogony of Genesis, by the Rev. S. R. 

 Driver, D. D., Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, in The 

 Expositor for January, 1886 ; for the second series of citations, see The Early Narrations 

 of Genesis, by Herbert Edward Ryle, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, London, 

 1892. For evidence that even the stiffest of Scotch Presbyterians have now come to dis- 

 card the old literal biblical narrative of creation and to regard the declaration of the West- 

 minster Confession thereon as a " disproved theory of creation," see Principal John Tul- 

 loch, in Contemporary Review, March, 1877, on Religious Thought in Scotland especially 

 page 550. 



