IN THE CREATION STORY OF GENESIS. 



75 



is that the rest of that story is intended to unfold to primitive 

 man the idea of an orderly procedure, whereby, under the 

 direction of a Power, which is not nature, the present order of 

 things has been brought to be what it is ; that in fact the 

 scientific doctrine of Evolutionary Law (as God's method of 

 working) runs through it all. And the evolution of Jiumanity (in 

 its fuller and higher sense) is the pivot on which it all turns, as 

 well as the goal to which it leads. For to man has been given 

 a higher nature carrying with it the possibility of moral 

 perfection on the one hand, and of moral failure on the other. 

 But outside tlie range of humanity we cannot fail to see the 

 truth of the inspired utterance — " God saw everything that He 

 had made, and behold it was very good," each creature fulfilling 

 the law of its being, while the inorganic world has its own laws 

 and powers subserving and maintaining tlie life of the organic 

 world, which controls them and directs them to its own ends 

 upon this planet. All this is thrown into the form of what is 

 as much a jm'??i as the 104th psalm, the 28th chapter of the 

 book of Job, or chapters 38 to 41 of that monumental book, 

 without the mysticism ascribed to it by Swedenborgians. 



In dealing with it we have a right to look at it in its professed 

 relation to Eevelation as a whole, as that culminates in Christ* 

 and the Xew Testament ; and we have to recollect that the 

 inculcation of spiritual truth, appealing to the spiritual perceptive 

 faculty, is from tirst to last the object of Eevelation, to provide 

 sustenance for the spiritual man through that perceptive faith 

 or spiritual appetite, which is not a mere intellectual faculty, 

 although it involves intellectual processes ; that perception of 

 things spiritual which " varies from man to man and depends 

 largely upon character."-t- To this faculty the teaching of Christ 

 and His Apostles appeals everywhere. Its exercise is intimately 

 connected with the right disposition of the will, and so with all 

 that goes to influence, or give direction to, volition. We recall 

 the words of the Great Teacher: "If any man willeth to do 

 the will of God, he will know of the doctrine whether it be of 

 God " ; and the spiritual side of faith is fully recognised by 

 St. Paul, when he tells us that — " with the heart man believeth 



^ That is to say, the Christ of hiMory avdof the Church, not such a mere 

 uebulous adumbration of, the divine-human image as a physicist may 

 lind suttioient for his own intellectual and spiritual needs. (See Prof. 

 Silvanus Thompson's address to the Victoria Institute, vol. xxxvii, 1905). 



t Archbishop 'ieraple, Bampton Lectures (viii), 1884. 



