THE FIKST CHAPTER OF GENEblS. 



155 



It is surely inconceivable that " Creative and Directive Power " 

 (Kelvin) should cease acting, or should "faint and be weary." 

 It smacks too much of the " carpenter " notion of creation ; and 

 the late Professor Driver long ago assured us that the sense of the 

 Hebrew is not " rested " but desisted, as I have pointed out else- 

 where. " God said," " God saw," cannot be taken literally as 

 implying use of lingual or optical organs, in a Being without ])ody, 

 parts, or passions ; and I feel much more confidence in the phrase 

 I have used for some years past in my papers in the Trans. J 'irforia 

 Institute, in my correspondence in the Guardian, in my British 

 Association Sermons, and elsewhere. The tense of the verb in the 

 original is the imperfect, and denotes fact or action in progress 



was saying," " was seeing "). In all and through all it was 

 surely nought else than " Creative Will and Thought realising 

 Itself in matter and life and form," to make up the totality of the 

 Cosmos. Hebraists of the first rank tell us that "God was 

 saying " implies no actual use of speech, but is a faron de imiier 

 to denote the absence of eftbrt on the part of the Creator. 



The author seems to me to narrow the idea of inspiration too 

 much. The quest we should be pursuing is, as to how the inspiration 

 (which we all recognise in the chapter) wrought itself into the 

 human mind. He inclines to the view of " visions of the night " 

 (favoured by "an evening and a morning ") ; but let us not forget 

 that He Who, presumably, gave the visions is also the Author of 

 the human mind — the instrument of transmission of the thoughts — 

 under the special ilhmiination of the Spirit, which seems so strangely 

 to be lost sight of. The author looks apparently with scant favour 

 on " Evolution " (even after the able papers of Professor Sims- 

 Woodhead and Professor Henslow) ; but he cannot get away from 

 it, for the idea of evolution, coupled with directivity — in other 

 words, " Creative Evolution " (Bergson) — bristles out in the essay 

 from beginning to end. 



The author looks at the question, on the scientific side, from the 

 point of view chiefly of the astronomer, who perforce thinks 

 mainly in quantitative terms of thought. I have approached it 

 along lines of study and research, mainly on geological and bio- 

 logical lines, with the theological idea always present in the mental 

 background. Our two perspectives, therefore, cannot be quite the 

 same, though they must overlap ; but I am glad to find that he, as 



