THE FIKST CHAPTEU OF GENESIS. 145 



master of public writing said to him, " Never mind that ; you have 

 to do scene painting." He did not tliink it was sufficiently realized 

 that whoever wrote this account of creation in 25 verses had to do 

 scene painting. It was impossible to be minutely complete and 

 accurate on every particular point. In scene painting a general 

 effect was produced ; and he took it that that was what had been 

 done here. He had sometimes been bold enough to ask himself 

 whether if some great master of science were put into a room with 

 a sheet of paper, and told to produce a general account of the 

 creation of the world within the limits of that sheet of paper, he 

 would produce anything very different from that first chapter of 

 Genesis. That was not a mere suggestion of his own, for a 

 great master of science in his day, Sir William Dawson, definitely 

 stated in one of his books that he did not think a more effectively 

 ti'ue account of the development of the earth could have been written, 

 in the same space, than that contained in the first chapter of 

 Genesis. Whether Sir William Dawson was absolutely right in that 

 statement or not, to his mind the amazing thing was that such an 

 observation should be possible with any approach to truth about a 

 chapter of a book written many thousands of years ago. In con- 

 nection with that, he should like to say one other word. It had 

 been the fashion for some time to talk of these accounts of creation 

 as having come from Babylon. For what reason 1 Merely 

 because there was some distant resemblance in them to things 

 contained in the Babylonian tablets. That did not prove that the 

 Babylonian records were prior to these. It was equally possible, 

 and more probable, that this was the original revelation, and that 

 the other accounts were corrupted from it. There was another 

 thing about this chapter, and the second chapter also, which ought 

 to take us far above the vulgar dispute between religion and science ; 

 namely, that it undoubtedly contained, apart from theological 

 questions, the most profound revelation of man's position on earth, and 

 of man's nature and relation to God. It was a very striking thing that 

 the germinal idea of Bacon's philosophy was derived from this chapter, 

 namely, that the function of man was to have dominion over nature, 

 so that it might to a certain extent be regarded as the original 

 starting point of the great ideas of modern science. One read a 

 great many philosophies, at least one did when one was young, but 

 in all philosophy, so far as he was acquainted with it, he never heard 



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