devoted a good deal of study to it) was that it was unscientific. It was often illogical, founded on perversion or ignoring of the facts. Many arguments are deduced, not from facts but from omissions, which is bad criticism. As to nature and supernature, for us nature must mean all that God has created, and what are called the Laws of Nature are the laws which He has imposed on His creation. Men might try to eliminate the supernatural from the pages of Scripture, but they can never get rid of the Supernature which is the Creator. The AUTHOR'S reply: I feel myself so in agreement with what has been said by the last speaker that I should have done better to have avoided any reference to the New Testament use of the word "natural." For instance, the natural man or the natural body always in the Greek is derived from yuxikòs, so that it did bring a little ambiguity into my address which I plead guilty to. I am understanding by "nature," this great world of nature on which we look out and which is not man's creation. I am not considering the mental processes in the consideration of the subject. I trust that this answer to Mr. Coles will put the matter in a better light, and I substantially agree with his remarks. Let me come to Mr. Hamilton's remarks about criticism. I find it difficult to say in a few words all that I should like to, but certain things have come into my mind after reading some long German lives of Christ, and the first thing is that most of them are very dull. One German life of our Lord Jesus Christ goes into six volumes which are desperately prolix, and even though they contain quantities of learning, they show little imagination. German criticism originated with Britain and France. Voltaire went to the Court of Frederick the Great and introduced French rationalism. German students studied the English Theists. England and France set Germany at the work of criticism, and she worked upon it, generally, with a theory to which everything was subject. I say, get rid of that theory, and keep an open mind and admit the supernatural, and then, I think, we shall not stumble much over the difficult parts of the Bible. But is there anything we shall learn from these long lives of Jesus, and the interpretation of the Bible from the literary point of view and its more human side? Yes, we shall see better the Bible story in the context and perspective of human history. HELD IN COMMITTEE ROOM D, THE CENTRAL HALL, WESTMINSTER, S.W., ON MONDAY, MARCH 23RD, 1925, AT 4.30 P.M. WILLIAM DALE, ESQ., F.G.S., F.S.A., IN THE CHAIR. The Proceedings commenced by a statement from the CHAIRMAN, that Mr. W. Jennings Bryan, having failed to send in his paper, the Council had been obliged to substitute for it, at the last moment, the the Rev. Dr. M. G. Kyle had sent in for the 20th prox. paper which The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read, confirmed, and signed, and the HON. SECRETARY announced that Major H. Charlewood Turner, `a former Secretary of the Society, had been elected a Member, and also that the Langhorne Orchard Prize on "Can Revelation and Evolution be Harmonized?" had been adjudged to Professor George McCready Price, M.A., of Union College, Nebraska, U.S.A., a Member of the Institute. The CHAIRMAN then called on Lieut.-Colonel F. A. Molony, in the absence of the Rev. Dr. Kyle, to read the paper on "The Antiquity of Man According to the Genesis Account." THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN ACCORDING TO THE GENESIS ACCOUNT. A By the Rev. President M. G. KYLE, D.D., LL.D., Xenia NY adequate and satisfactory discussion of the antiquity of man according to the Genesis account, or any other source of materials, must not only present chronological data, but, and more especially, the stage of advancement in civilization; not merely the antiquity of man in time, but the man of antiquity in his time. Dates do not tell us very much; a mere calendar is not very illuminating. It is only when we are able to locate ourselves at some point indicated by a date and see, as in a camera obscura, life at that date streaming by us that we are much instructed. It is well to state in this case the presuppositions-necessary, indeed, to every discussion which does not propose to discuss everything by beginning at the very beginning the presuppositions, I say, which underly what is about to be said; let us get our feet upon a solid and clearly understood foundation before we attempt to build a superstructure representing the antiquity of man. The first presupposition of this discussion is the progressive creation set forth in the first chapter of Genesis, the progress that begins with the announcement of the creation of the materials of the whole heavens and earth and then proceeds in an orderly way to the arrangement of those materials for a suitable habitat for man. The mighty power of God goes forth over the waters imparting motion, followed immediately by the fiat, "Let there be light," a mode of motion; and then rotation at once sets up the succession of day and night. The waters above the earth lift to form the clouds and the open firmament of heaven appears. Upheavals of the earth thrust up the dry land, and the waters running down are gathered into the seas. The earth brings forth the herb bearing seed, and the permanence of species is proclaimed in the words, "After its kind." Then the waters of the sea brought forth the lowest forms of animated life, and the heavens cleared away so that the heavenly bodies came to be for signs and for seasons. The earth also brought forth the lowest forms of life upon land; all animate life was given procreative power, and each limited by the divine fiat, “After its kind." Last of all, the creation of man was in the image of God; In the image of God created He him, male and female created He them." The continuance of the race in a pure human character was not imperilled by leaving to mere chance to bring a man sport" and a woman "sport" together in the same age and the same land to set agoing a race of human beings; God made them male and female as he had made all the animals, that there might be no half species, so-called missing links. Thus was creation finished; not a theistic evolution, which will not evolve except when God comes in and gives it another turn, but a progressive creation that was never intended to run alone. 66 Another presupposition upon which we must take our stand securely is the trustworthiness of ancient documents. Creation had no historian; nobody was there to observe and relate; only God can tell us about it. Science may find out much concerning results; it is great in examining materials. But science is organized knowledge, organized always upon the principle of the continuity of nature. But the continuity of nature belongs only to that portion of eternity marked off as time, which began with creation and will end at the winding up of the affairs of this world. It can tell us nothing about creation, for creation brought the laws of nature into being; they could not preside over their own birth. Concerning man's starting off in the world, then, only God can tell us. But if the ancient documents which purport to tell us of the antiquity of man, back to his beginning, are not trustworthy, if these documents have been thrown together promiscuously and are mutilated and interpolated and incorrectly transmitted and are generally untrustworthy, then we know nothing reliable on the subject of creation. This trustworthiness of ancient documents is of transcendent importance. Criticism and archæology have proceeded along parallel but dissimilar lines; criticism starts from the assumption of the untrustworthiness of ancient documents, which therefore must be re-written and reconstructed -are composed, in fact, of scraps, filled with mistakes, and so are untrustworthy. Archæology, in both the Biblical and the classical fields, has started without assumption and has proceeded uniformly toward trustworthiness of ancient documents. The whole underlying Homeric stories, the account of the ruined palace and splendour of King Minos and the story of Menes, the first king in Egypt, all formerly regarded as legendary or mythical, have now taken their place in sober history. Herodotus and Strabo and Josephus, so often charged with inaccuracies, have again and again been found to be correct. In the Biblical field not a single statement of fact has been finally discredited. Thus men come more and more to believe in the trustworthiness of ancient documents, until with many it has become almost an axiom. With man, made in the image of God, as the crowning act of a progressive creation, and with the record of this sent down to us by trustworthy documents candidly presupposed, we are now ready to consider the antiquity of man according to the Genesis account, and also still more exactly and completely the man of antiquity according to that account. The Genesis account presents to us the real primitive man. Much is written on the subject of anthropology concerning primitive man, as found here and there in different parts and different ages of the world. The only real primitive man in the absolute sense of the word primitive was the first man, the progenitor of the human race; though some cling to the supposition that there were many different centres of population whence the race spread over the world, and so the race had many progenitors. Yet all the traceable lines of migration and of philological relationships as well as the physiological characteristics of the race point to a common original in a single progenitor sometime, somewhere, so that the most and the best investigators on different lines of scientific evidence consent to the statement of Scripture that presents to us, " All men of one blood to dwell on all the face of the earth." The plain intent of the Genesis account assumes this as a fact, and tells us of the first man, the one progenitor of the race. I. PHYSICAL CONDITIONS OF LIFE OF PRIMITIVE MAN. The physical conditions of life to which primitive man was subject as presented in the Bible are most interesting, and especially so when compared with the presuppositions of anthropologists on the subject. He is represented in Genesis as having capabilities; he was to subdue the earth and replenish it and rule over it, and was set in the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. But as yet he had not put these capabilities into exercise; he was able to do all things that men ever do, but he had not yet begun to do any of them. He had done nothing to subdue the earth or to keep the garden in order; he had done nothing for himself, had neither made clothes, built himself a house, nor done anything toward producing food. He was, as yet, only a food gatherer. Then, as he had done nothing, manifestly nothing had been done in the world. As he was an unskilled man as yet, so the world was an untouched world. There were no roads, no buildings, no implements. There was nothing that man has produced. It is true he was put in a garden, but it was not an Italian garden, nor a Japanese garden, nor any other kind of a made garden of flowers and vegetables with beds and paths and all things in order. It was one of God's gardens, a field of poppies, a lily marsh, a hillside of rhododendrons, a tangle of glorious fir trees and poplars. Thus, nothing that man has ever learned was as yet acquired, and nothing that civilization has given to the world was yet begun. This unskilled man in an untouched world was naked and in the woods. We seem to be given also in the Genesis account an illuminating note of philological beginnings. It used to be thought |