British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871Various
History
British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871
Various
English periodicals
capacity, as an observing, reasoning being, to ascertain the processes
of nature, and use them for his own advantage.
The strongest objection in some minds to this scheme of reconciliation
between Genesis and geology will be that it does not harmonise with
the general method of Scripture. Miller was abreast of his time as a
geologist, but from his complete unacquaintance with the original
languages of Scripture and with the history of the canon, he could
form a judgment only at secondhand on fundamental questions in
theology. That the Bible is inspired--that it is pervaded by a Divine
breathing--we have upon apostolic authority. In no part of Scripture,
however, is the nature of this Divine breathing explained to us, or
information given as to what it implies and what it does not imply.
Without question, the inspired writers were neither turned into
machines nor wholly disconnected from the circumstances, the
prevailing scientific ideas, the modes of expression, of their time.
It would seem, therefore, to be in contradiction to the analogy of
Scripture that one of the most ancient books of the Bible should
contain an elaborately correct presentation, by means of its cardinal
facts, of the history of the world for hundreds of millions of years.
Many, therefore, while cherishing the firmest assurance that the Bible
is the religious code of man, the inspired Word which authoritatively
supplements man's natural light of reason and conscience, will believe
that the first chapter of Genesis is a sublime hymn of creation,
ascribing all the glory of it to God, wedding the highest knowledge of
the primitive age in which it was written to awe-struck reverence for
the Almighty Creator, but not containing any scientific account of the
processes or periods of creation. To many it will convey the
impression that its simplicity, childlike though sublime, and its
grouping of natural phenomena, exceedingly noble and comprehensive but
naïve and unsophisticated, are not inspired science, but inspired
religion. It will appear to them that, looking out and up into the
universe, feeling that it infinitely transcended the little might of
man, thrilling with the inspired conviction that God had made it all,
the poet-sage of that ancient time named in succession each
phenomenon, or group of phenomena, which most vividly impressed him,
and said or sang that God had called it into being. The beginning he
threw into the darkness of the unfathomable past. What first arrested
and filled his imagination in the present order of things, was that
marvel of beauty and splendour which bathes the world at noontide, and
lies in delicate silver upon the crags and the green hills at dawn,
that mystery of radiance which is greater than the sun, or moon, or
stars, greater than them and before them; and he uttered the words,
'God said, Let there be light, and there was light.' Then he thought
of the dividing of the land from the sea, and of the separation
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