These sentiments are not altogether our own. They have come to us, in great part, from an illustrious Doctor of the Church; and we are glad, at this early stage of our discussion, to be able to shelter our humble efforts under the authority of his venerable name. It is now more than fourteen centuries and a half since Saint Augustine set about the literal interpretation of Genesis, which he accomplished in a Treatise of twelve books. Toward the close of the first book he expatiates at some length on the difficulty of his undertaking, and on the variety of diverse interpretations, which prevailed even in his time. From this he takes occasion to warn his readers that, “if we find anything in Divine Scripture that may be variously explained without any injury to faith, we should not rush headlong by positive assertion either to one opinion or the other; lest, if perchance the opinion we have adopted should afterward turn out to be false, our faith should fall with it; and we should be found contending, not so much for the doctrine of the Sacred Scriptures as for our own; endeavoring to make our doctrine to be that of the Scriptures, instead of taking the doctrine of the Scriptures to be ours.”[113] And a little further on he again exposes the imprudence of such a proceeding, in words that cannot but be considered peculiarly applicable to our present subject:-- “It often happens that one who is not a Christian hath some knowledge derived from the clearest arguments or from the evidence of his senses about the earth, about the heavens, about the other elements of this world, about the movements and revolutions, or about the size and distances of the stars, about certain eclipses of the sun and moon, about the course of the years and the seasons, about the nature of animals, plants, and minerals, and about other things of a like kind. Now it is an unseemly and mischievous thing, and greatly to be avoided, that a Christian man speaking on such matters, as if according to the authority of Christian Scripture, should talk so foolishly that the unbeliever, on hearing him, and observing the extravagance of his error, should hardly be able to refrain from laughing. And the great mischief is, not so much that the man himself is laughed at for his errors, but that our authors are believed by people without the Church to have taught such things, and so are condemned as unlearned, and cast aside, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we are so much concerned. For, when they find one belonging to the Christian body falling into error on a subject with which they themselves are thoroughly conversant, and when they see him, moreover, enforcing his groundless opinion by the authority of our Sacred Books, how are they likely to put trust in these Books about the resurrection of the dead, and the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, having already come to regard them as fallacious about those things they had