of heaven and hell are taken away from popular conception, the reality of them soon follows. I confess to feeling decided sympathy with the Pope and the Cardinals; they all had a look through Galileo's telescope, they saw the four moons of Jupiter like a little diagram of the planetary system hanging up on the wall of heaven for all to see, they listened to the arguments, but they considered themselves the guardians of the Faith, and they decreed that these things must not be, and they wrote down that it was to be a part of the Catholic faith for ever that the earth was fixed and central, for anything less than this contradicted the whole tenor of the Bible. It was not till 1835 that heliocentric books were taken off the Index. The next conflict is coupled with the name of Sir Isaac Newton. His great work was not merely the discovery of the law of gravitation, but that every department of Nature, Light, Sound, and all else, was under the strict reign of law. Witchcraft, and a thousand superstitions fell at one stroke, and again there was an outcry that this view of the order of the world did away with both the power of Satan and the power of God, and tended to blank materialism. Yet Newton's discoveries have triumphed. The next battle was only a hundred years ago; Geology awoke and demanded time. Not a single week in the year 4004 B.C. but it cried out for thousands and millions of years, and would not be denied, so plain was the evidence of the rocks. The folly of the outcries against this claim makes us profoundly ashamed of ourselves, but there stands the documentary testimony to our stubborn blindness. Fifty years after this the doctrine of Evolution was propounded that creation is not sudden but very gradual, and that life begins in its lowest forms and works upward. Now with such a past history as we have behind us, was it wise that these theories were met with a violent denial? that sermons were preached and pamphlets were written by the hundreds, bringing forward torrents of abuse, or endeavouring to make the whole subject ridiculous? I myself remember such in plenty. Do we wish the three former conquests undone, and the conceptions of Space, Law and Time put back to where they stood five hundred years ago? Certainly not. Has not Religion gained rather than lost by them? "But, you add, this discovery is so uncertain, and many things disprove it." Well, perhaps you do not realize that the observed motion of the planets in the sky seemed to disprove the Copernican theory over and over again for a hundred and fifty years. Always wrong; the precalculated place and the actual place never coincided, till astronomers were nearly in despair. Copernicus had made the radical mistake of thinking the planetary orbits were circles; Kepler, a century and a half later, discovered they were ellipses, and the whole theory fell into beautiful and permanent order. We are waiting 66 for our Kepler, but meanwhile we can no more go back to the catastrophic view of Creation than the astronomers of those days could forsake Copernicus and go back to the old Ptolemaic theories. That is impossible. This is hardly the place to enter on this vast subject, but because it was to my own life the very watershed, the cross-roads, the division of thought, which, if accepted, all else followed naturally, I may perhaps be excused for dwelling for a few moments on the magnificent record in Genesis i. There it lies before us, a firm framework of truth, patient of interpretation, like ruled lines that we may fill in by our ignorance or our knowledge as we will. Milton filled it in with brilliant and grotesque designs, picturing full-grown lions and sheep coming clambering out of the earth, and we may fill it in with our Science. It bears both equally well, for the Bible was not given to save us trouble by teaching us Natural Science. If you read the ancient Cosmogonies of other lands, whether Hindu, Chaldean, Greek, or Scandinavian, you will find they cannot go beyond the first sentence without falling into errors, most of them absurd enough and even the best of them wholly insufficient, while in this our scanty record given us by the Spirit of God, the narrative is carried through to the very close, true and unblemished by even the least mistake. Israel knew no more Science than any other nation, and conceived of the solid earth as floating on an abyss of water, with sun, moon and stars set in a crystal dome above; yet the Spirit of God has guided the hand of the scribe to steer between his mental errors into the narrow safety of truth. In the first verse you have what Science demands as the five recessary presuppositions of Creation 1. Time-In the beginning. 2. Force-God. 3. Energy-Created. 4. Space-The heavens. 5. Matter-And the earth. The first day's work is the sweeping together of the wreaths of cosmic dust into fiery streams; heat is not observable to a spectator, so it is only the Light that is mentioned. The second day's work is the completion of the shape of the earth, when the dateless, formless ages are over, and the records of Geology can begin to tell their tale. Thus it goes on; the whole of the inorganic world is in good working order before life is introduced, and of the two great forms of life, it is that of the vegetable that first reaches to size and power. Of animal life, it is the lower and cold-blooded forms that preval first, and only at the very end of the Creation Period do the warm-blooded creatures appear, man, both male and female, being made at the same time. This is only the physical fact of sex, the mental and spiritual differences between man and woman coming on the scene later. Then, again, observe how the purpose of the whole is brought forward as existing before the completion, And God said . . . and God made "--and this formula is repeated eleven times in all, giving us a hint of the duration of time, as well as of an aim kept steadily in view. In four seconds a man may say deliberately, "I will build myself a house," and it may take him four years to accomplish his design. There are over 30 million seconds. in a year, so the work takes 30 million times longer than the speaking. Also look at the sparing use of the word "create.' To make is to modify existing materials, but to create is to originate. Now, there are three great bewildering questions in our minds-How did Matter, as we know it, come into being? How did Vitality spring out of the inorganic world? How did Man come out of the world of animal vitality? The gap in each case is unfathomable. See how the word create is reserved for these three gaps alone, and all else comes under the heading "made." The answer to our questions is in no mechanical process unfolding itself, but lies with God and God only, "Author and Finisher.' 66 It is tempting to go into further details, but we must pass on to Prof. Christlieb's third division of difficulty. This he considered most formidable, and yet we find that the questions solve themselves if once we admit the principle of gradual or evolutionary creation, for this surely applies to the mind and character of mankind as well as to the powers of his body. It is at this point that the parallel between the individual and the race is eminently instructive, and certain bright little diagrams illustrative of our long-past history are ever in our nurseries. When the age of actual infancy, the period of passivity, is past, we come into the age of self-will, when the babe grasps at everything, and is more prone to destroy than to build. Of this period we have hints in the evil of the world before the Flood, and in the old tyrannies of brute force such as Nineveh and Babylon. From five years old onward comes the age of chatter, the enchanted time of real childhood, when imagination is vivid, and the word "Why? is ever on our lips. Here we have the brilliant Greek, with his fairy-tales and his love of adventure; and in the Bible we have the beautiful figure of Abraham, the good and happy child at home living under no strict rule, but in direct and complete communication with his Father. We must all revert to the type of Abraham, and this is why spiritually he is called the father of the faithful." But looked at historically, as soon as the family develops into a nation the boy must go to school; sometimes this may appear to be a step downward, but it is inevitable. Then we have Sinai and the giving of the Law. Next comes the more silent period of adolescence, when we can begin to explain the reasons that lie behind the commands, and to show the noble purposes we have at heart for our sons; and these remonstrances and entreaties are represented by the Prophets. With the vivid pictures of childhood always before us, with the nursery and the schoolroom for ever reminding us of what Ethical Immaturity involves, surely, surely, we need not stumble over the strange stories of the book of Judges and elsewhere. We can admit the misconception that to us at first seems shocking, that our God with his heart of love to all mankind was, to begin with, thought of as a tribal deity, with Baal or Dagon (equally real, but evil powers) entering into conflict with Him. We who are fathers and mothers, spiritually if not physically, know how to praise exceedingly imperfect work if it is an advance on the work of the day before. We may call a bit of sewing very good," when, judged by our own standard, it is very poor indeed. The father may keep in his pocket a letter from his son at school, and count it a treasure, though it is blotted and misspelt, because it is by far the best yet accomplished, and expressive of thought and of affection. We need not go very far back, either, to see why the character of Jacob is approved and the deed of Jael praised, for we are still in Ethical Immaturity, though at a later stage. Only one century ago there was slavery. The conscience of mankind was not awaked to this great evil. St. Paul went to stay with Philemon in a house full of slaves, and this indifference went on for eighteen hundred years. The seed was sown- There is neither bond nor free, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus"-but it lay long dormant. Did God not bless His people while this blot remained upon them? He blessed them abundantly, because He never confuses immaturity with sin. Sin is "to know the better and choose the worse, as St. Paul explains with the utmost clearness of illustration, and it is sin and only sin that meets with condemnation. We too may be blind. To the evils of Drink and the conditions under which Labour exists our eyes are but half opened, and a century hence people will stand in this room and wonder at us. 66 When we study these things, we begin to see how beautiful is the Bible, how inspired from end to end-pitiful to our low estate, kind to ignorance and misconception, unflinchingly stern on sin, with a standard that is never lowered. To Abraham 66 God said, Walk before Me and be thou perfect, i.e., let your deeds keep pace with your knowledge of Me; and nothing higher can be aimed at in our Lord's own words, Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect." No need for "" excuses and apologies for our Bible. If I had space we should see how the cruel exterminating wars and the bitter words of the imprecatory Psalms are all explained, and how, given the circumstances, these are the best things that could have been recorded for our instruction and our encouragement. The great principle is that we are never to judge a thing, whether a plan, a work, or a person, by the primary stages-the inception but only by the final stage-the completion. If you look at a statue half made, it may seem to you very poor and rough, but if you are a sculptor you may see the perfect form in the block. If you are planting out an orchard, you ask to see and taste the ripened apple before you make your decision as to the trees. If you are writing the life of a man, and summing up his character, you do not put against him the screams and rebellions of his infancy. Our God has been infinitely tender with our age-long immaturity, and has never been so far in front of us that we cannot understand Him. As soon as He could, He sent us His Son, the perfect Word of God, the translation of the eternal Heart of the Father into a series of words and deeds, such as we can understand. Jesus of Nazareth lived for us, and then suffered and died for us, and is now in the place of power sending the regenerative Spirit to all who come to Him. That is our present position, and it is full of hope, for it holds out a prospect of completion. We are to go on "till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." No possible conception can go beyond that. We have now spent enough thought on the three classes of objection brought against the Bible-the Literary and Historical, the Scientific, and the Ethical. There is, as I have already mentioned, a fourth class, the Psychological, but this is aimed at the work of the Spirit of God in the heart of man rather than at the letter of the Bible. We may leave it aside as beyond the limits of our present discussion. Let us now turn to the entirely positive and constructive side of our subject. As early as 1852, a good twenty years before my day, there was an undergraduate of Oxford, who wrote these simple lines: "I have a life in Christ to live, But ere I live it must I wait I have a life in Christ to live, I have a death in Christ to die; And must I wait till science give |