The Bible story is very old. It is written in an ancient and practically dead language. The meaning of many of the words cannot be fixed with precision. The significance of several fundamental phrases is at best little more than conjecture. Since it was penned men's minds have grown and changed. The very moulds of human thought have altered. Current impressions, conceptions, ideas are different. It is hard to determine, with even probability, what is said, still harder to realise what was thought. Certainty is impossible. No rendering should be counted infallible, not even our own. Every interpretation ought to be advanced with modest diffidence, held tentatively, revised with alacrity, and adjusted to new facts without timidity and without shame. This has not been the characteristic attitude of commentators. The exegesis of the 1st chapter of Genesis presents a long array of theories, propounded with authority, defended dogmatically, and ignominiously discredited and deserted. Had a more lowly spirit presided over their inception, maintenance, and abandonment, the list would perhaps not have been shorter, but the retrospect would have been less humiliating. As it is, we can hardly complain of the sting of satire that lurks in Kepler's recital of Theology's successive retreats: "In theology we balance authorities; in philosophy we weigh reasons. A holy man was Lactantius, who denied that the earth was round. A holy man was Augustine, who granted the rotundity, but denied the antipodes. A holy thing to me is the Inquisition, which allows the smallness of the earth, but denies its motion. But more holy to me is truth. And hence I prove by philosophy that the earth is round, inhabited on every side, of small size, and in motion among the stars. And this I do with no disrespect to the doctors."