The Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science. Sir John William Dawson
and ethnological relations of the races of men, and a narrative of the fortunes of his own people; intimating not only that they were a favored and chosen race, but that of them was to arise a great Deliverer, who would bless all nations with pardon and with peace, [7] and would solve once for all those great problems of the relations of man to God and the unseen world, which in the time of Moses as in our own were the most momentous of all, and gave to questions of origins all their practical value.
The lawgiver passed to his rest. His laws and literature, surviving through many vicissitudes, have produced in each succeeding age a new harvest of poetry and history, leavened with their own spirit. In the mean time the learning and the superstition of Egypt faded from the eyes of men. The splendid political and military organizations of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Macedon arose and crumbled into dust. The wonderful literature of Greece blazed forth and expired. That of Rome, a reflex and copy of the former, had reached its culminating point; and no prophet had arisen among any of these Gentile nations to teach them the truth of God. The world, with all its national liberties crushed out, its religion and its philosophy corrupted and enfeebled to the last degree by an endless succession of borrowings and intermixtures, lay prostrate under the iron heel of Rome. Then appeared among the now obscure remnant of Israel, one who announced himself as the Prophet like unto Moses, promised of old; but a prophet whose mission it was to redeem not Israel only, but the whole world, and to make all who will believe, children of faithful Abraham. Adopting the whole of the sacred literature of the Hebrews, and proving his mission by its words, he sent forth a few plain men to write its closing books, and to plant it on the ruins of all the time-honored beliefs of the nations—beliefs supported by a splendid and highly organized priestly system and by despotic power, and gilded by all the highest efforts of poetry and art.
The story is a very familiar one; but it is marvellous beyond all others. Nor is the modern history of the Bible less wonderful. Exhumed from the rubbish of the Middle Ages, it has entered on a new career of victory. It has stimulated the mind of modern Europe to all its highest efforts, and has been the charter of its civil and religious liberties. Its wondrous revelation of all that man most desires to know, in the past, in the present, and in his future destinies, has gone home to the hearts of men in all ranks of society and in all countries. In many great nations it is the only rule of religious faith. In every civilized country it is the basis of all that is most valuable in religion. Where it has been withheld from the people, civilization in its highest aspects has languished, and superstition, priestcraft, and tyranny have held their ground or have perished under the assaults of a heartless and inhuman infidelity. Where it has been a household book, education has necessarily flourished, liberty has taken root, and the higher nature of man has been developed to the full. Driven from many other countries by tyrannical interference with liberty of thought and discussion, or by a short-sighted ecclesiasticism, it has taken up its special abode with the greatest commercial nations of our time; and, scattered by their agency broadcast over the world, it is read by every nation under heaven in its own tongue, and is slowly but surely preparing the way for wider and greater changes than any that have heretofore resulted from its influence. Explain it as we may, the Bible is a great literary miracle; and no amount of inspiration or authority that can be claimed for it is more strange or incredible than the actual history of the book. Yet no book has ever thrown itself into so decided antagonism with all the great forces of evil in the world. Tyranny hates it, because the Bible so strongly maintains the individual value and rights of man as man. The spirit of caste dislikes it for the same reason. Anarchical license, on the other hand, finds nothing but discouragement in it. Priestcraft gnashes its teeth at it, as the very embodiment of private judgment in religion, and because it so scornfully ignores human authority in matters of conscience, and human intervention between man and his Maker. Skepticism sneers at it, because it requires faith and humility, and threatens ruin to the unbeliever. It launches its thunders against every form of violence or fraud or allurement that seeks to profit by wrong or to pander to the vices of mankind; all these consequently are its foes. On the other hand, by its uncompromising stand with reference to certain scientific and historical facts, it has appeared to oppose the progress of thought and speculation; though, as we shall see, it has been unfairly accused in this last respect.
With its antagonism to the evil that is in the world we have at present nothing to do, except to caution the student of this venerable literature against the prejudices which interested and unscrupulous foes seek to cultivate. Its doctrine of the origin of man and of the world, and the relation of this to modern scientific and historical results, is that which now claims our attention; and this more especially in the relation which the Mosaic cosmogony, considered as an early revelation from God, may be found to bear to the facts which modern scientific research has elicited from the universe itself. The aspects in which apparent conflicts present themselves are threefold. At one time it was not unusual to impugn the historical accuracy of the Pentateuch on the evidence of the Greek historians; and on many points scarcely any corroborative evidence could be cited in favor of the Hebrew writers. In our own time much of this difficulty has been removed, and an immense amount of learned research has been reduced to waste paper, by the circumstance that the monuments of Egypt and Assyria have risen up to bear testimony in favor of the Bible; and scarcely any sane man now doubts the value of the Hebrew history. The battle-ground has in consequence been shifted farther back, to points concerning the affiliation of the races of men, the absolute antiquity of man's residence on the earth, and the condition of prehistoric men; questions on which we can scarcely expect to find, at least for a long time, any decisive monumental or scientific evidence. Secondly, the Bible commits itself to certain cosmological doctrines and statements respecting the system of nature, and details of that system, more or less approaching to the domain which geology occupies in its investigations of the past history of the earth; and at every stage in the progress of modern science, independently of the mischief done by smatterers and skeptics, earnest bigotry on the one hand, and earnest scientific enthusiasm on the other, have come into collision. One stumbling-block after another has, it is true, been removed by mutual concession and farther enlightenment, and by the removal of false traditional interpretations of the sacred records, as well as by farther discoveries in relation to nature. But the field of conflict has thereby apparently only changed; and we still have some Christians in consequence regarding the revelations of natural science with suspicion, and some scientific men cherishing a sullen resentment against what they regard as an intolerant intermeddling of theology with the domain of legitimate investigation. Lastly, the great growth of physical science, and the tendency to take partial views of the universe as if it were comprehended in mere matter and force, with similarly partial views of the doctrines of continuity and the conservation of forces, along with the growth of a belief in spontaneous evolution as a philosophical dogma, have placed many scientific minds in a position which makes them treat the whole question of the origin and destiny of man and of the world with absolute indifference.
There can nevertheless be no question that the whole subject is at the present moment in a more satisfactory state than ever previously; that much has been done for the solution of difficulties; that many theologians admit the great service which in many cases science has rendered to the interpretation of the Bible, and that most naturalists feel themselves free from undue trammels. Above all, there is a very general disposition to admit the distinctness and independence of the fields of revelation and natural science, the possibility of their arriving at some of the same truths, though in very different ways, and the folly of expecting them fully and manifestly to agree in the present state of our information. The literature of this kind of natural history has also become very extensive, and there are few persons who do not at least know that there are methods of reconciling the cosmogony of Moses with that obtained from the study of nature. For this very reason the time is favorable for an unprejudiced discussion of the questions involved; and for presenting on the one hand to naturalists a summary of what the Bible does actually teach respecting the early history of the earth and man, and on the other to those whose studies lie in the book which they regard as the Word of God, rather than in the material universe which they regard as his work, a view of the points in which the teaching of the Bible comes into contact with natural science at its present stage of progress. These are the ends which I propose to myself in the following pages, and which I shall endeavor to pursue in a spirit of fair and truthful investigation; having regard on the one hand to the claims and influence of the venerable Book of God,