ON THE DIRECTIVITY OF LIFE. 



273 



US in his analysis of every verse in Gen. i, fF., that, in the first place, 

 the first chapter is an adaptation from an Assyrian cosmogony, 

 but, " while the latter is grossly polytheistic, the former is 

 uncompromisingly monotheistic." The one begins with frank 

 materialism, in the other all is referred to the One omnipotent 

 and all-good God."^ 



In 1884 I published a work entitled Christian Beliefs Reconsidered 

 in the Light of Modern Thought, in which I gave the Babylonish 

 Cosmogony discovered by the late Mr. G. Smith, and compared the 

 tablets with Gen. i, showing the agreements and points of difFerence. 

 Sayce says the former w^as a comparatively late production of the 

 materialistic Philosophic age.f The second account, in Gen. ii, is 

 an earlier one. The two, therefore, in Genesis are monotheistic 

 compilations or adaptations from the far more ancient Babylonian 

 cosmogonies. 



With regard to the creation of man, Professor Sayce writes : " It 

 was in Semitic Babylonia that the gods were first conceived in 

 human form. From the outset, the deities of the Babylonian 

 Semites were human. They were represented as men and women, 

 being under a supreme lord, Bel or Baal, whose court resembled that 

 of his vicegerent, the human king, on earth. . . . This concep- 

 tion of the gods in human form involved the converse belief that 

 men were divine ; they were, accordingly, held to have been made 

 in the likeness of the gods — with the same physical features, and 

 the same mental and moral attributes — and the king himself was 

 deified,"}: just as, I may add, is the Emperor of Japan to-day. 



Professor Orchard makes much the same criticisms as the 

 preceding writers, to which I have already replied. As to varieties 

 and species, I repeat there is no absolute distinction between them. 

 Darwin called the former " incipient species " ; they really signify 

 the fact that less alteration was required to adapt them to changed 

 conditions. 



I unwisely, it appears, assumed that after more than forty years all 

 members of the Victoria Institute would have come to accept 

 evolution ; but my critics reproduce, almost verJjatim, what I 



^ Expository Times, vol. xix, p. 137. 



t The Religions of Ancient Egi/pt and Babylonia, p. 387. 



% Expository Times, vol. xix, p. 262. 



