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Rev. W. C. Bartow, M.A.—I think that the account given in Genesis 
points to a fact which far more directly concerns the question dealt with 
by the paper before us, namely, that religion does not evolve itself by 
any natural, or mechanical, or other law, from the unaided human intelli- 
gence, but that there is within us the power of conceiving a Being—a 
consciousness of relationship to some power external to and higher than 
ourselves. To say nothing of ‘“‘the voice of the Lord God walking in the 
garden in the cool of the day,” the very command in the beginning implied, 
by man’s being in the garden “to dress it and to keep it,” that there was 
a faculty in him for perceiving obligations. Here we have the very element 
of religion ; and the Book, if it is to be brought into the argument, indicates 
in its first pages that religion begins in revelation, but that it must be cor- 
related to a faculty in man which can respond to that revelation. Of course, 
the next step in this backward argument would be to question the whole 
history that is beyond. I was glad to hear the Chairman correct an impres- 
sion that seemed to have been created by some of his remarks. The history 
of the Jewish people, after we once find them in possession of written docu- 
ments, is one of constant and strenuous endeavour on the part of the nation 
and Church as a whole to go further and further away from the truth, in 
agreement with the principle to which I think the author of the paper really 
did refer in his foot-note (Galatians v. 17) that there is that constant 
lusting of the flesh contrariwise to the spirit. I believe the whole history 
of the Jewish Church from the date of the written revelation is entirely of 
the character indicated by the author of the paper. But, then, we have to 
begin a good deal earlier than that with regard to the historical religion of 
the Jews, and we are confronted by recent discoveries with the fact of the 
so-called parallelism between certain early chapters in Genesis and certain 
Assyrian, Babylonian, and Chaldean legends. Does it not seem that these 
coincidences and differences strongly confirm the line of argument used by 
the essayist of this evening? We find in Chaldea traces of legends every 
one of which shows marks of progress downwards. Man’s view of nature 
tends entirely to unify that which he observes, until he begins to view from 
the standpoint of his own moral and immoral tendencies. The Chaldean 
legends all manifest diversity. If those legends existed in anything like the 
form in which we find them at the date when communication may be sup- 
posed to have taken place between the Chaldeans and the fathers of the 
Jewish nation, then we have to account for this, that in the Jewish nation 
the legends were entirely free from anything of the monstrous character 
indicated by the name Heabini. It seems to me that the earliest writers of 
the Jewish legends show that they are the re-affirmation of an old revelation, 
and not by any means an evolution by the ancestors of the Semitic race, 
who, when left to themselves, only managed, out of the simplest elements of 
truth and thought which they once possessed, to create such legends as those 
which are now being picked out from the Assyrian tablets. (Hear, hear.) 
The meeting was then adjourned. 
