74 KEY. A. IRVING, B.A., D.SC, ON EVOLUTTONAEY LAW 



a fallacy which, I think, Eomanes himself would be the first to 

 detect if he were still amono^st us in the flesh. " Male and 

 female created He them" (v. 27) is not mere rhetorical 

 iteration, but emphasis of the fact that the higher creation of 

 hiimanitii lifted the human anthropoidea as well as the 

 anthropoid eus to a higher plane of being. 



III. Perspective of the Dual Eevelation. 



In the Bible, and therefore in every biblical subject, we must 

 recognise the progressive cliaracter of the Revelation, as well as 

 the living power, with which its different parts or "books" — 

 its ^i^Xia — have spoken to the hearts and consciences of men 

 and women for so many generations, with its variations of 

 colour and perspective, as it has been transmitted to us through 

 many men and many minds, the Holy Spirit of God taking 

 hold, now of one, now of another type of human mind and 

 character, and compelling it to give utterance to the eternal 

 truths, which " the Father of our Spirits " would communicate 

 to His children for their good. As the great Bacon has tersely 

 expressed it — " The first creature of God in the works of the 

 days was the light of the sense, the last was the light of reason, 

 and His sabbath-work ever since is the illumination of his 

 spirit " (Essay on " Truth "). And if that illumination of the 

 human spirit has been, and is still progressive — whether we 

 regard on the one hand that revelation of the " eternal Power 

 and Godhead " given through " the things that are made " (as 

 man is gradually learning to spell it out), that " Lehre der 

 guten Mutter Natur (menschliche und abmenschliche)," of which 

 Goethe seems to have had a better grasp and insight than 

 either Spencer or Haeckel ; or, on the other liand, that word of 

 inspiration, which we maintain, runs through the Bible — we 

 must be prepared to find in the earlier stages — in the one case 

 and in the other — some crudeness of thought and expression. 

 We have no more right to expect to find the fully developed 

 " tree of knowledge " in its inceptive stages than we have to 

 look for the fully developed morphology and external con- 

 formation of the giant oak of the forest in the germinal bud of 

 the acorn, though potentially they are contained within it. 

 The application of the figure is plain enougli. The germ of all 

 revelation is contained in the statement, with which the 

 " Creation story " of Genesis opens — "In the beginning God 

 created the heaven and the earth." The contention of this paper 



