established exposition of a passage to be given up, and a new mode of understanding the passage, such as is, or seems to be, required by new discoveries respecting the laws of nature, accepted in its place?" (!) He elsewhere speaks of "the language of Scripture being invested with a new meaning," quoting with approbation the sentiment of Bellarmine, that "when demonstration shall establish the earth's motion, it will be proper to interpret the Scriptures otherwise than they have hitherto been interpreted, in those passages where mention is made of the stability of the earth, and movement of the Heavens." "It is difficult," says Mr. Kenrick, "to understand this otherwise than as sanctioning the principle that the commentator is to bend the meaning of Scripture into conformity with the discoveries of science. Such a proceeding, however, would be utterly inconsistent with all real reverence for Scripture, and calculated to bring both it and its interpreter into suspicion and contempt."

Dr. Buckland's chapter (in his Bridgewater Treatise) on the "Consistency of Geological Discoveries with the Mosaic Cosmogony," is another melancholy specimen of the low arts to which the ablest intellects find it necessary to condescend, when they insist upon reconciling admitted truths with obvious and flagrant error. In this point of view the passage is well worth reading as a lesson at once painful and instructive. After commencing with the safe but irrelevant proposition, that if nature is God's work, and the Bible God's word, there can be no real discrepancy between them, he proceeds thus:-"I trust it may be shown, not only that there is no inconsistency between our interpretation of the phenomena of nature and of the Mosaic narrative, but that the results of geological inquiry throw important lights on parts of this history, which are otherwise involved in much obscurity. If the suggestions I shall venture to propose require some modification of the most commonly-received and popular interpretation of the Mosaic narrative, this admission neither involves any impeachment of the authenticity of the text, nor of the judgment of those who had formerly interpreted it otherwise in the absence of information as to facts which have but been recently brought to light; (!) and if, in this respect, geology shall seem to require some little concession from the literal interpretation

of Scripture, it may fairly be held to afford ample compensation (!) for this demand, by the large additions it has made to the evidences of natural religion, in a department where revelation was not designed to give information.”—(I. 14.) Then, although he "shrinks from the impiety of bending the language of God's book to any other than its obvious meaning," (p. 25,) this theological man of Science-this Pleader who has accepted a retainer from both the litigants -proceeds to patch up a hollow harmony between Moses on the one side, and Sedgwick, Murchison, and Lyell on the other, by a series of suppositions, artificial and strained interpretations, and unwarranted glosses, through which we cannot follow him. Instead of doing so, we will put into a few plain words the real statement in Genesis which he undertakes to show to be in harmony with our actual knowledge of astronomy and geology.

The statement in Genesis is this:-That in six days God made the Heavens and the Earth-(and that days, and not any other period of time, were intended by the writer, is made manifest by the reference to the evening and morning, as also by the Jewish Sabbath);-that on the first day of Creation (after the general calling into existence of the Heaven and Earth, according to Dr. Buckland')—God created Light, and divided the day from the night-that on the second day He created a firmament (or strong vault), to divide the waters under the Earth from the waters above the Earth-(a statement indicating a conception of the nature of the Universe, which it is difficult for us, with our clearer knowledge, even to imagine):-that on the third day, He divided the land from the water, and called the vegetable world into existence:-that on the fourth day, He made the Sun, Moon and Stars-(in other words, that He created on the first day the effect, but postponed till the fourth day the creation of that which we now know to be the cause):—that on the fifth day, fish and fowl, and on the sixth, terrestrial animals and man, were called into being. And this is the singular system of Creation which

1 Dr. B. imagines that the first verse relates to the original creation of all things, and that, between that verse and the second, elapsed an interval of countless ages, during which all geological changes preceding the human æra must be supposed to have taken place-in confirmation of which he mentions that some old copies of the Bible have a break or gap at the end of the first verse, and that Luther marked verse 3, as verse 1.

Dr. Buckland adopts as conformable to the discoveries of that Science which he has so materially contributed to advance;-in spite of the facts, which he knows and fully admits, that the idea of "waters above the firmament" could only have arisen from a total misconception, and is to us a meaningless delusion ;-that day and night, depending on the relation between earth and sun, could not have preceded the creation of the latter;-that as the fossil animals existing ages before Man-(and, as he imagines, ages before the commencement of the "first day" of Creation)-had eyes, light must have existed in their time-long, therefore, before Moses tells us it was created, and still longer before its source (our sun) was called into being;-and, finally, that many tribes of these fossil animals which he refers to the vast supposititious interval between the first and second verse of Genesis, are identical with the species contemporaneous with Man, and not created therefore till the 21st or 24th verse.

It will not do for Geologists and Astronomers, who wish to retain some rags of orthodoxy, however soiled and torn, to argue, as most do, "that the Bible was not intended as a revelation of Physical science, but only of moral and religious truth." This does not meet the difficulty; for the Bible does not merely use the common language, and so assume the common errors, on these points-it gives a distinct account of the Creation, in the same style, in the same narrative, in the same book, in which it narrates the Fall of Man, the Deluge, the Revelation to Abraham, the history of Jacob and Joseph. The writer evidently had no conception that when he related the Creation of the Earth, the Sea, and the Sun, he was perpetuating a monstrous error; and that when he related the Fall, he was revealing a mighty and mysterious truth; and when he narrated the promise to Abraham, he was recording a wondrous prophecy. The Bible professes to give information on all these points alike : and we have precisely the same Scriptural ground for believing that God first made the Earth, and then the Sun for the especial benefit of the Earth; that the globe was submerged by a flood which lasted forty days; and that everything was destroyed, except the Animals which Noah packed into his Ark

as we have for believing that Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise for a transgression; that God promised

Abraham to redeem the world through his progeny; and that Jacob and Moses were the subjects of the divine communications recorded as being made to them. All the statements are made in the same affirmative style, and on the same authority. The Bible equally professes to teach us fact on all these matters. There is no escape by any quibble from the grasp of this conclusion.

In unworthy attempts such as those which Dr. Buckland has perpetrated, and Dr. Whewell has advised, the grand and sublime truth at the basis of the Biblical Cosmogony has been obscured and forgotten,-viz. That, contrary alike to the dreams of Pagan and of Oriental philosophy, Heaven and Earth were not self-existent and eternal but created that the Sun and Moon were not Gods, but the works of God-Creatures, not Creators.

But another point of almost equal importance is gained by accepting the Historical books of the Old Testament as a collection of merely human naratives, traditions and speculations. We can now read them with unimpaired pleasure and profit, instead of shrinking from them with feelings of pain and repulsion which we cannot conquer, and yet dare not acknowledge. We need no longer do violence to our moral sense, or our cultivated taste, or our purer conceptions of a Holy and Spiritual God, by struggling to bend them into conformity with those of a rude people and a barbarous age. We no longer feel ourselves compelled to believe that which is incredible, or to admire that which is revolting'. And when we again turn to these Scriptures with the mental tranquillity due to our new-born freedom, and read them by the light of our recovered reason, it will be strange if we do not find in them marvellous beauties which before escaped us-rich and fertilizing truths which before lay smothered beneath a heap of contextual rubbish -experiences which appeal to the inmost recesses of our consciousness-holy and magnificent conceptions, at once simple and sublime, which hitherto could not penetrate through the mass of error which obscured and overlaid them, but which now burst forth and germinate into light and freedom. In the beautiful language of an often-quoted

1 See in Dr. Arnold's Sermons on the Interpretation of Scripture, to what straits the orthodox doctrine reduces the best and most honest men.

author (Coleridge, p. 59), "The Scriptures will from this time continue to rise higher in our esteem and affectionthe better understood, the more dear-and at every fresh meeting we shall have to tell of some new passage, formerly viewed as a dry stick on a rotten branch, which has budded, and, like the rod of Aaron, brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds."