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The following Paper was then read by the Author : 
THE BIBLE AND MODERN ASTRONOMY. By the 
Rev. Canon Birks, M.A., Knightbridge Professor of Moral 
Philosophy, Cambridge. 
I N the fifth of the Seven Essays, which attracted so much notice 
seventeen years ago, a broad contrast is said to exist between 
the statements of the Bible and modern discoveries both in 
Astronomy and Geology. The whole account of creation in the 
book of Genesis is given, it is affirmed, from a different point ot 
view from that which we now unavoidably take. Ihe order ot 
things as we now know them to be, is to a great extent reversed, 
although here and there we may pick out some general analogies 
and points of resemblance. Mr. Goodwin thus resumes the subject 
at the close of his remarks : — 
“ The treatment to which the Mosaic narrative is subjected by the theo- 
logical geologists is anything but respectful. The writers of this school 
a^ree in representing it as a series of elaborate equivocations, a story which 
palters with us in a double sense. But if we regard it as the speculation of 
some Hebrew Descartes or Newton, promulgated in all good faith as the 
best and most probable account that could be given of God’s universe, it 
resumes the dignity and value of which the writers in question have done 
their best to deprive it. It has been sometimes felt as a difficulty in taking 
this view of the case, that the writer asserts so solemnly that for which he 
must have known he had no authority. But this arises only from our 
modern habits of thought, and from the modesty of assertion which the 
spirit of true science has taught us. The early speculator was harassed by 
no such scruple, and asserts, as fact, what ho knew only as probabilities. 
But we are not on that account to doubt his perfect good faith.” 
2. The sacred writers, then, according to the Essayist, were as 
inferior to modern men of science in modesty and veracity as in 
scientific attainments. And the remedy he propounds for the blind- 
ness of theologians, who cannot receive this low estimate of God’s 
chosen messengers, is to accept frankly the principle that those 
things, for the discovery of which man has faculties specially pro- 
vided, are not the fit objects of Divine revelation ! 
In* chapter xv. of The Bible and Modern Thought, I have ex- 
amined this principle, and shown it to be fatally opposed to the 
very existence of such a revelation. It would confine it to those 
