own land was colonized at such a peculiar crisis in English history, and by men of such a peculiar character. His hand was in the discoveries of Newton and Laplace; in the invention of the telescope, microscope, steam-engine, powerloom, railroad, and electric telegraph; and in all the wonderful results of modern science. But inspiration has ever gone hand in hand with revelation; and both have been concerned only with the way of salvation contained in scripture. But there are limitations which the Divine Spirit has prescribed to himself in the sphere of revelation itself, and it is concerning these that we are now to inquire. We may say, at the outset, that, inasmuch as they have the Spirit of truth for their Author, they cannot be of such a nature as to frustrate, in any degree, the end of inspiration, which is to furnish men with a divinely authoritative and sufficient rule of faith and practice. Rather must their effect be to disentangle the truth from all needless complications, and thus make it available to all men, in all ages and in all grades of society. 1. The first limitation which we notice has respect to the phenomena of nature. The facts of the physical world are always described according to popular apprehension, not according to any scientific formula. For this there was an antecedent necessity, lying in the divine plan for the culture and training of the human family. God has committed to men the task of developing, under his providential guidance, all the truths of natural science by a slow process, involving many temporary mistakes and misapprehensions, but eminently adapted to elicit the best powers of the human intellect. Meanwhile, he has revealed to men, from time to time, as the way was prepared, truths pertaining to their salvation, in which the laws and operations of nature are described according to appearance; so that the descriptions hold good. for all ages, and are available for men of all degrees of culture. Thus the wisdom of God has, from the beginning, left to scientific investigation the largest liberty to press its inquiries in every direction, under the one comprehensive principle that "the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." In the domain of astronomy this principle is now fully recognized. No one would think, at the present day, of quoting the divine declaration, "The world, also, is stablished, that it cannot be moved," as an argument against the Copernican system, as was done once, not only by a congregation of cardinals, but also by Protestant theologians of the highest rank. Nor would any modern interpreter, admitting the truth of the Copernican system, feel himself constrained to bring the Psalmist's words, by a forced exegesis, into an agreement with the scientific teachings of astronomy, thus: "Is established, that is, made steady in its two motions; cannot be moved cannot be disturbed in its two revolutions." All expositors are agreed that the words mean that the earth is immovable to man's apprehension and uses. Thus science is brought into harmony with revelation, without the sacrifice of either. So far as the truth of scripture is concerned, it becomes altogether a superfluous question, whether the Psalmist did or did not understand the true physical system of the universe. The Holy Spirit understood it from the beginning; but there is no valid ground for the assumption that he revealed it to the sacred writer. Doubtless, he spoke in accordance not only with popular apprehension, but with his own belief also. Nor did this abate one jot or tittle from his infallibility as an inspired teacher. That God is the Creator of the world, and that all its arrangements, having him for their Author, have a stability high above the sphere of human power- this is the divine truth which the words above quoted inculcate; and it remains as valid for us as for the men of the Psalmist's day. The same broad principle applies to all the descriptions which the inspired writers give of nature and her operations. Whatever diversity of opinion there may be as to the inter pretation of the narrative of the creation, it is generally agreed that the author speaks not scientifically, but phenomenally that he describes the successive processes of the six days as they would have appeared to a human spectator had he been able to be present. It has, indeed, been suggested, not without probability, that the revelation was originally made in a panoramic way, that is, by a representation to the inward vision of the writer of the scenes of the six days' work of creation in regular order. But, not to insist on this, which lies beyond the sphere of human knowledge, let us look briefly at the record of the second day. The sacred narrative reads: "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters; and let it divide between waters and waters. And God made the firmament, and divided between the waters which were below the firmament, and the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so." The waters under the firmament are those upon the earth's surface. But what are the waters above the firmament? A common answer has been that they are the clouds. The clouds did, indeed, belong, according to the idea of the ancients, to the waters above the firmament; but the passage before us does not represent them as constituting, in and of themselves, these waters. The clouds are not a body of waters above the firmament, and coming down through the firmament to the earth. Rather are they fed, from age to age, by the waters above the firmament; so that they are never exhausted. That this was the popular conception of the Hebrews appears from the hundred and forty-eighth Psalm. Here the sacred writer begins with the heavenly intelligences" all his angels" and "all his hosts." From these he passes down to the ordinances of God which are above the firmament 66 -- sun and moon," "stars of light," "heaven of heavens," and "waters that are above the heavens." Then, after pausing to celebrate the power of God manifested in their creation and the stability which he has conferred upon them (vs. 5, 6), he passes (vs. 7 seq.) to the works of the Creator which are below the firmament: "Praise the Lord from the earth, dragons and all deeps; fire and hail, snow and vapor, stormy wind fulfilling his word," etc. The idea of water rising from the earth in the shape of mist,1 and perhaps of clouds also,2 was familiar to the Hebrews. But these belonged, with "fire and hail, snow and vapor, and stormy wind," to the category of things under the firmament. That the men of high antiquity referred the perpetual replenishing of the clouds to the vaporization of water from the earth's surface, as we now know to be the fact, cannot be proved, and is a supposition in itself very improbable. Though we need not take the word "windows,” in the account of the deluge, in a gross literal sense, any more than in two other passages, which speak of flour and barley as given through windows made in heaven, and God's blessing as poured down through the open windows of heaven, yet the essential idea holds good alike in all three cases, that what comes down to the earth through the windows of heaven comes from above the firmament. We, therefore, understand the sacred writer's conception of the firmament to be that of an outspread vault, above which are the waters whence the clouds are continually replenished. We have no desire to press this view unduly; but we ask what there is in it at which modern science can justly take offence? The inspired penman speaks simply according to appearance and popular apprehension. That God has such an inexhaustible reservoir of waters is certain; for he has been from the beginning pouring down rain from it, and yet it is not spent. What is the nature of this reservoir, how it is maintained, and how the clouds are replenished from itthese are scientific questions with which the author does not concern himself; nor is it necessary to suppose that he had 1 Gen. ii. 6. 21 Kings xviii. 44, where, however, the original words (ny, ascending from the sea) do not necessarily mean anything more than coming up from over the sea. 8 Gen. vii. 11; viii. 2. 2 Kings vii. 2-19. 6 Mal. iii. 10. information concerning them beyond the men of his age. If any one ask why the inspired writer did not represent this celestial storehouse of waters as diffused through the firmament, instead of placing it above it, the answer is: This would have been to convert the firmament of sense into the atmosphere of science, and phenomena into natural phi losophy. The essential facts represented by the narrative are, that these celestial waters are invisible to our senses; that the firmament sustains them in their place above the earth, so that they are kept separate from the waters on its surface; and that from them an exhaustless supply of rain is furnished facts that remain valid for all ages and all stages of science. In the same way is the narrative of the fourth day's work to be understood. It does not bind us to the necessity of believing that the sun, moon, and stars were created in their substance on that day, but only that then they appeared for the first time in the firmament. "The narrative only tells what sun, moon, and stars are in relation to the earth. When the clouds and mists are dispelled from its surface, the seas confined within their boundaries, and the first vegetation springs up; then the sky is cleared up; the sun, moon, and stars appear, and assume their natural functions, making days and nights, seasons and years; and God makes or appoints them, the sun to rule the day, and the moon to rule the night." 1 - The six days of creation are, in our view, symbolic of higher periods of time in the mind and purpose of God symbolic from the beginning, but not necessarily understood by men to be symbolic. As in the case of the seventy weeks of Daniel, and the thousand years during which Satan is to be bound, the terms employed might be taken literally, until their symbolic character should be made manifest.4 2. A second limitation has respect to the natural endowments of the sacred writers. By the gift of inspiration these 'Bible [Speaker's] Commentary in loco. 8 Rev. chap. xx. 2 Dan. ix. 24-27. |