that the cerealia, which produce bread-corn, on which the human race so depends for subsistence, exist only as cultivated products of the soil. They perish, as far as concerns usefulness to man, without man's care. In correspondence with this necessity for cultivation, we find, in both these accounts, almost incidentally, and certainly with no direct statement of its necessity, that Adam, even before the fall, is admonished to cultivate the vegetable kingdom. And God blessed them; and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and now in view. From v. 8, 9, it might otherwise seem that the trees did not grow in the garden till after man was placed in it; whereas v. 15 proves that that was not the case. [I may here say, that the Hebrew has only one past tense; it has no pluperfect. Hence, v. 8 might just as well be translated,' And the Lord God had planted a garden and there He put the man whom He formed.' I would also observe that the English reader must not be misled by the words, เ So,' Thus,' But,'' Therefore,'' Now,'' For,' with which some of the verses in these three chapters begin; for they are all Vau in the Hebrew, the word translated' And 'in all the other verses.] 3. Gen. i. 20, the fowls that fly are made out of the waters; Gen. ii. 19, out of the ground. Answer.—This is a blunder which a Hebrew scholar would not make. In Gen. i. 20, 'fowl,' is not in the accusative but in the nominative, and the words should be, and let the fowl fly above the earth;' nothing is said there of what the fowls were made of. 6 4. Gen. i. 27, man is created in the image of God; Gen. ii. 7, he is made of the dust of the ground, and merely animated with the breath of life, and only after eating of the forbidden fruit is it said (iii. 22) that he was become like God. Answer.-Here is no contradiction. We are not told in chap. i. what man's body was made of. By the breath of life cannot be meant simply animal life; for in the narrative before the eating, Adam is described as intelligent, free, moral, lord over other creatures. Is not this to be more than a mere living creature? Is not this to be like God, to have the stamp of His likeness? 5. Gen. i. 25, man is made the lord of the whole earth; Gen. ii. 8, 15, he is placed only in the garden of Eden to dress it. Answer.-In the first God speaks of man as of the whole human race and its destiny ; multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it' (Gen. i. 28). And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it' (ii. 15).* 6. Another instance in which Science has been looked upon as inimical to Scripture, is the asserNo known traces tion, now universally made by geologists, of the Deluge. that no known traces exist of the Noachian Deluge. The disappointment which this has occasioned in the second chapter, the particular circumstances of the individual, Adam, are related. 6. Gen. i. 27, man and woman are created together, and, as is implied, in the same kind of way. Gen. ii. the beasts and birds are created between the man and the woman. Answer.-Gen. i. 26-28 indicates that man and woman were not created together, i. e. simultaneously. 'And God said, Let us make man' [Adam, without the article]. Here the language is indefinite, and refers to the whole human race. But then follows, And God created the man [Adam, with the article] in His image; in the image of God created He HIM [masculine]; male and female created He them.' This is perfectly consistent with the more extended narrative of the second chapter. * In connexion with this I quote the following striking remarks: 'Not a stalk of corn remains where man is not. If corn cannot now live without man's aid, it is an unavoidable inference that man was instructed from the first to cultivate corn. So strong has been the conviction of all ages, that the cereals are not spontaneously produced, that the mythologies of India, Egypt, and Greece ascribe their cultivation to direct Divine interference. The Medes, who were the descendants of Medai, a son of Japhet (Gen. x. 2), and among the earliest of recorded nations, certainly anterior to the Chaldæans, connected their notions of piety with the cultivation of the earth as a duty enjoined on them by God. . . . As Mr. Vicien stated at the meeting of the British Association in Birmingham (1865), no trace of the existence of the cereals can be discovered in geological formations that can be imagined more than 6000 years old.'—The First Man, and His Place in Creation, by George Moore, Esq. M.D. p. 310. See also Rev. Hugh Macmillan's Bible Teachings in Nature, chapter on Corn. has been felt all the more severely, because the advocates of Revelation had long been in the habit of pointing triumphantly to the rocks in all parts of the earth as containing shells even to the highest peaks, and so being infallible witnesses to the fact of the Deluge. Geologists used to support this view. One of their number, eminent both for his eloquent expositions and thorough acquaintance with the science, had even written a work upon the subject, describing a cave at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, where bones of numerous animals had been accumulated, it was supposed, by the waters of the Deluge. But it is now acknowledged by all geologists that these conclusions were premature. In a subsequent work this author publicly renounced his former views upon the subject, and recalled his book. Further consideration has shown, that the Deluge cannot have been the occasion of embedding shells and other fossils in solid rocks, and to such a depth as they are found. Nor are the superficial deposits-those, for instance, in the Yorkshire cavern-such as a temporary deluge could have produced. + The more the progress of scientific discovery has brought to light the varied agencies which are perpetually at work in changing the aspect of the earth's surface, the more is it seen, that it was unreasonable to expect to find traces of the great cataclysm at the present day, so many ages after its occurrence. Any marks it left must have been long since obliterated, or so mixed up * Reliquiae Diluviana. † See this subject fully discussed in Testimony of the Rocks, Lect. 8 on the Noachian Deluge. history, and that many primary chapters, stretching back to a time immeasurably more remote even than existing fossils, have been burnt, and with them all the records of life we may presume that they contained! The analogy which our period theorists draw between existing fossils and the account in Genesis would be, in this case, altogether thrown out. The subject is too vast and too unsettled, to allow us to base any trustworthy conclusions upon such comparisons. I have no desire to disparage the study of this noble science; but I would rather promote it. But when its results, which are, after all, only approximations, and often very uncertain approximations, to the true history and condition of this wonderful globe on which we live, are turned into arguments against the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, I stand amazed at the temerity of the men, who, knowing anything of their relative claims, will doubt, for one instant, on which side the error must lie, if any real discrepancy is found to exist. Death before 4. Besides the three points of apparent difference between Scripture and Science which I have been considering at such length, geology gave rise to another formidable difficulty regarding the existence of Death in the world before the fall of Adam. The myriads of creatures which the strata have brought the Fall. to light lived and died ere Adam came: and yet St. Paul has said, 'By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin' (Rom. v. 12). unanswerable has this objection appeared to some, that blindfold they condemn the whole science of Geology, and ignore the universal testimony of the greatest and So best men. And no doubt, while ignorant of the facts which the Book of Nature reveals, we should conclude from the Apostle's words that it was the sin of Adam that had brought Death upon the irrational as well as the rational creation. But is this the necessary meaning of the passage? By no means. Science here comes to our aid to correct the impressions we gather from Scripture; and the lesson we learn from the Apostle is, not that Death had never appeared, even in the irrational world before the Fall of Man, but that in that fearful event sin had degraded God's intellectual creature to the level of the brutes in his animal nature, and in his spiritual to that of a lost and fallen being. Death received its horrors when its sentence fell upon man, who alone was made in the image of God.* * Two hundred years ago-long before the science of Geology called for the belief that mortality had been stamped on creation and had manifested its proofs in the animal races previously to Adam's appearance-Jeremy Taylor could write as follows regarding Adam himself before the Fall. He considers him to have been created mortal-not merely liable to become mortal, but actually mortal. "For "flesh and blood," that is, whatsoever is born of Adam, "cannot inherit the kingdom of God." And they are injurious to Christ, who think, that from Adam we might have inherited immortality. Christ was the giver and preacher of it; "He brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel." Again:- For that Adam was made mortal in his nature, is infinitely certain, and proved by his very eating and drinking, his sleep and recreation," &c.-Works of Jeremy Taylor, by Bishop Heber, vol. ix. pp. 74, 76. And in another passage quoted by Professor Hitchcock :-That death which God threatened to Adam, and which passed upon his posterity, is not the going out of this world, but the manner of going. If he had stayed in innocence he should have gone placidly and fairly, without vexatious and afflictive circumstances; he should not have died by sickness, defect, misfortune, or unwillingness.' These senti |