264 
age. Each separate statement or phenomenon is true : the 
human arrangement is necessarily imperfect in some of its 
parts. Each additional discovery modifies the previous 
human arrangement. Astronomy, geology, and chemistry are 
continually furnishing us with examples. So our Lord says of 
the Bible : “ Every scribe which is instructed unto the king- 
dom of heaven, is like unto a man that is an householder, 
which bringeth out of his treasure things new and old.” The 
new things had always been in his exhaustless treasury ; they 
are gradually brought out. The positive statements of the 
earlier knowledge are not contradicted by new discoveries. 
They are seen in new lights, and are filled with new lessons. 
In this aspect of the Bible, it is most blessed for the mass of 
mankind that the believer may be perfect in his faith, although 
unskilled in dogmatic theology. He who comes to the Holy 
Communion with a loving, trusting heart may be utterly un- 
skilled in the doctrine of the Beal Presence and yet realize in 
his happy experience Incarnate Deity in the depths of his 
spiritual consciousness. 
Laying aside all thoughts of deriving a system of natural 
philosophy from the Bible, it is most interesting and instructive 
to examine its innumerable suggestive hints. I shall select a 
few examples. 
Ps. lxxviii. 15, 16 . — u He clave the rocks in the wilderness, and gave 
them drink as out of the great depths. He brought streams also out 
of the rock, and caused waters to run down like rivers.” 
In a poetic passage such as this one would hardly expect 
the strictness of scientific phraseology, and yet it is here, with 
marvellous correctness. 
We have two words for rock - 
O'H'S ( tzureem ), the generic word for rocks as lying in strata. 
( selang ), a projecting rock. 
The great source of the waters was from the underground 
strata, which contain such abundant reservoirs of water, 
described here as the great depths, ni^hri (the-hd-moth 
rabbdli ), a noun plural, feminine, with an adjective singular * 
the feminine plural indicating their multitudinousness, the 
adjective singular their collectiveness. The strata were cloven 
that these waters might rise up. This is the principle of the 
modern Artesian well. The other word [selang) is a projecting 
rock such as Moses could strike. From that rock flowed the 
smaller streams, from which they drank immediately, and 
the larger river which followed them : “ They drank of that 
Spiritual Bock that followed them : and that Bock Was 
Christ.^ (1 Cor. x. 4.) 
