LECTURE II.

The Creation of Man.

26. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

29. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

31. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Gen. ii. 7. And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

THESE passages present to us the last stage in the creation, the creation of Man. Before proceeding to this topic, however, we will briefly recapitulate what was said in the previous lecture. It should be a fixed principle of interpretation that Genesis is written in popular and not in scientific language. Had it been written in scientific language it would have defeated its own object as a communication for the benefit of mankind at large. In that early period of the world it would have been as unintelligible as would a discourse upon the magnetic telegraph or the spectrum to the Feejee island

ers.

Had Moses described the Brachiopods, the Selacians, the Ophidians, the Saurians-Megalosaur, Palæosaur, Ichthyosaur, Iguanodon, etc.-the Palæotherium, Dinotherium. Mastodon, and so on through the whole nomenclature

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of modern Geology, his account of the creation would have remained for ages a sealed book, and have passed from the memory of mankind long before the key to its interpretation had been discovered. A revelation in such language would have defeated its own end. The same would have been true of a scientific description of the process of creation. But the account of the creation as actually given is presented optically, as the work might have appeared to an imaginary human observer.

It is equally important to keep in mind that the narrative was given mainly for a moral purpose-to set forth God in human history, and hence there is a grand principle of unity and order in the composition, notwithstanding diversities of phraseology and style. We have seen, also, that there is no contradiction between this narrative of creation and the established facts of science. There have been scientific theories, no doubt, which were contrary to the Mosaic account of creation; and certain interpretations of the book of Genesis have also been contrary to established facts of science; but setting aside merely speculative theories on the one hand, and erroneous interpretations on the other, we find in this narrative, as an outline of the creation, a general harmony with the geological order. The first two days describe chemical action upon inorganic matter; the third day announces the production of vegetative life;-the process of evaporation is still going forward, and the excess of moisture in the atmosphere would, up to this period, have obscured the planetary bodies; but on the fourth day the astronomical heavens are made visible in their relation to our globe; the fifth and sixth days introduce the successive gradations of animal life that culminate at last in man.

Two or three points in this narrative are worthy of more particular notice than was given in the previous lecture,

as illustrating the substantial harmony of Geology with Genesis. In the twentieth verse of the first chapter we read, "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life;" and in the succeeding verse we are told that "God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind." The "whales" were more properly monsters of the reptile species; the term is comprehensive, including fishes, serpents, dragons, crocodiles. Now, Geology has taught us that the earliest animals and plants of the globe were wholly water species. There was a long marine era, followed by an amphibian era, in which reptiles and birds were the dominant animal types. All this accords exactly with the statement in Genesis:-the rocks testify now to swarming myriads in the sea, and again to abundance of "flying things," whether insect, bird, or flying reptile, all of which occur in the era succeeding the marine. Here is a wondrous harmony. Again: we know that vegetation was a necessary prelude to animal life, vegetation being directly and largely the food of animals; and this accords with the statement in Genesis, that the plant kingdom was instituted before the creation of animals.

Two remarkable correspondences between the account in Genesis and the facts of Geology concerning the introduction of light are noted by Professor Dana. Science teaches that light is produced by a disturbed action or combination of molecules. It is a result of molecular change. Matter in an inactive state, without force, would be dark, cold, and dead. The first effect of the mutual action of its molecules would be the production of light. The command, "let light be," was, therefore, the summons to activity in matter, and here Genesis is in exact accordance with the teachings of science. The Spirit of God moved upon or breathed over the vast deep-else an abyss of

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everlasting night-and light, as the essential phenomenon of matter in action, flashed instantly through space. But, although the sun, moon, and stars must have had their places in the physical universe when the earth was established, for a long period the earth was shrouded in its own vapors and warmed with its own heat, and therefore there was no sun nor moon "for days and seasons." When the sun first broke through the clouds, it was a day of joy to the world, standing as one of the grand epochs of its history.

Now, mere human invention would naturally have placed the sun first in order as the source of light. The idea of the appearance of light on the first day, independently of the shining sun, and of the subsequent unvailing of the sun by dispersing the mists and clouds, is a result of modern scientific research, and so foreign to the natural conceptions of the human mind in the early period of its history, that we must ascribe this marvelously exact statement in the first of Genesis to some higher origin. Thus what, upon the face of it, was a seeming discrepancy in regard to the first appearing of the sun, becomes one of the highest confirmations of the truth of the record.

The absence of all puerility and absurdity from this account was also commented upon, and attention was directed to the principle of order which runs through it in describing the course of creation. This principle itself is scientific, as is also the recognition of the great first cause-the personal God. To sum up all on this point of the harmony of Geology and Genjesis-we may adopt the language of Professor Arnold Guyot: "The first thought that strikes the scientific reader is the evidence of Divinity, not merely in the first verse of the record, and the successive fiats, but in the whole order of creation. There is so much that the most recent readings of science have for the first time explained, that the idea of man as the author

becomes utterly incomprehensible. By proving the record true, science pronounces it divine, for who could correctly narrate the secrets of eternity but God himself? Moreover, the order or arrangement is not a possible intellectual conception, although we grant to man the intuition of a God. Man would very naturally have placed the creation of vegetation, one of the two kingdoms of life, after that of the sun, and next to that the other kingdom of life, especially as the sunlight is so essential to growth; and the creation of quadrupeds he would as naturally have referred to the fifth day, leaving a whole day to man, the most glorious of all creations. . . . . The creation consists, according to the record, of two great periods; the first three days constitute the inorganic history, the last three days the organic history, of the earth. Each period begins with light: the first light cosmical, the second light to direct days and seasons on the earth. Each period ends in a day of two great works. On the third day God divided the land from the waters, and He saw it was good. Then followed a work totally different, the creaation of vegetation, the institution of a kingdom of life. So, on the sixth day, God created quadrupeds, and pronounced His work good; and as a second and far greater work of the day, totally new in its grandest element, He created MAN."*

This act of creation, described in the twenty-sixth verse, opens a new chapter in this marvelous history. It is introduced with a new formula; instead of the phrase "And God said," or "And God made," with which the previous acts of creation were introduced, we now read "Let us make man in our image." Moreover, other forms of organic life were made, each "after its kind "— a phrase describing the several species of vegetable and animal life.

* Prof. Guyot, as cited with comments by Prof. Dana, in the Bibliotheca Sacra for January, 1856.