this portion of Scripture history side by side with the best substitutes which antiquity and modern history can furnish. Their incongruities are so apparent as to be ludicrous. If you take the Chaldean, the Phoenician, and the Egyptian, as illustrative of ancient cosmogonies, and the varied delineations and beliefs of Northern Europe and India as illustrative of accepted records in more recent times, you cannot fail to recognise the wonderful pre-eminence of the Bible, and to be thankful for it. I. HEATHEN HISTORIES OF CREATION, COMPARED WITH 1. In the Chaldean myth, the "All" is represented as consisting of darkness and water, filled with monstrous creatures of compound form, and governed by a woman, whose name, Homoroka, signifies ocean. This woman was cut into two halves by Bel, the supreme deity: the one half formed the earth, the other heaven. Bel thereafter cut off his own head, and from the drops of his blood men were formed. 2. In the Phoenician cosmogony, the beginning of the "All" was a dark windy air, a turbid eternal chaos. By the union of the spirit with the "All," or universe, slime was formed, from which every seed of creation was educed. The heavens were made in the form of an egg, from which sprang sun, moon, and stars and constellations. By the meeting of the earth and the sea, winds arose, with clouds and rain, lightning and thunder. The noise of the tempests aroused sensitive beings, and henceforth living creatures, male and female, moved in the sea and on the earth. 3. The Egyptians had several myths, the chief of which was that the heaven and earth were at first commingled, but afterwards the elements began to separate. "The fiery particles, owing to their levity, rose to the upper regions; the muddy and turbid matter, after it had been incorporated with the humid, subsided by its own weight. By continued motion, the watery particles separated and became the sea, the more solid constituted the dry land. Warmed and fecundated by the sun, the earth, still soft, produced different kinds of creatures, which, according as the fiery, watery, or earthy matter predominated in their constitution, became inhabitants of the sky, the water, or the land.” Similar absurdities prevail in the myths of Greece and Etruria.1 Take the following quotation from the Laws of Menu, as illustrative of the strange beliefs of millions in India at the present day, who regard these laws as a revelation from Brahma :— "This universe existed only in darkness, imperceptible, undefinable, undiscoverable by reason,-undiscovered, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep. There, the self-existing power, himself undiscovered, but making this world discernible with fire-elements and other principles, appeared with undiminished glory, dispelling the gloom. He whom the mind alone can perceive, whose essence eludes the external organs, who has no visible parts, who exists from eternity, even he, the soul of all beings, whom no being can comprehend, shone forth in person. He having willed to produce various beings from his own substance, first, with a thought, created the waters, and placed in them a productive seed. The seed became an egg, bright as gold, blazing like the luminary with a thousand beams, and in that egg he was born himself in the form of Brahma, the great forefather of all spirits. The waters are called Nara, because they were the offspring of Nara, the supreme spirit; and as in them his first ayana (progress) in the character of Brahma took place, 1 See "Commentary on the Pentateuch," by Keil and Delitzsch, Vol. I., pp. 38-40, and "Creation and the Fall," by the Rev. D. MacDonald, pp. 48-60. с he is thence Narayana (he whose place of moving was the waters). From that which is the cause, not the object, of sense,-existing everywhere in substance, not existing to our perception, without beginning or end,-was produced the divine male, famed in all the worlds as Brahma. In that egg the great power sat inactive a whole year of the creator; at the close of which, by his thought alone, he caused the egg to divide itself, and from its two divisions he framed the heaven above and the earth beneath; in the midst, he placed the subtle ether, the eight regions, and the permanent receptacle of the waters. He gave being to time; to the stars also, and the planets; to rivers, oceans, and mountains; to level plains and uneven valleys; to devotion, speech, complacency, desire, and wrath; and to creation. For the sake of distinguishing action, he made a total difference between right and wrong. "That the human race might be multiplied, he caused the Brahman, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, and the Shudra (the four castes), to proceed from his mouth, his arm, his thigh, and his foot. Having divided his own substance, the mighty power became half male and half female, and from that female he produced Viraj. Know me, O most excellent Brahmans, to be that person whom the male power, Viraj, produced by himself,-me, the secondary framer of all this visible world."1 These are merely specimens of what millions have believed in bygone ages, or are still believing. Ancient and modern cosmogonies alike contradict the commonest and most elementary truths of physical science. In the most sacred writings of the Hindoos, there are at the present day state 1 See "What is Truth?" an Inquiry concerning the Antiquity and Unity of the Human Race, by Rev. E. Burgess, pp. 241,42. ments so ludicrous as to sadden us when we reflect that for millions they are the basis of religious beliefs. The moon is described as having inherent light, and as higher than the sun; and rational beings have for ages been taught and have believed that seven stories of the globe rest on the heads of elephants, whose movements are the cause of terrifying and calamitous earthquakes. And the Mahommedan is taught by his Koran to believe that the mountains are created to prevent the earth from moving, and to hold it as by anchors and cables,-" And God hath thrown upon the earth mountains firmly rooted, lest it should move with you." "1 Far removed from such incongruities as these, the Mosaic record shows also remarkable freedom from merely local or national peculiarities. To this fact too little importance has been attached. It is especially worthy of notice that such incidental details as the climate, the sky, and the configuration of the land, give, to a large extent, their own character to the locally prevailing ideas as to the whole universe. The Euphrates and the Mesopotamian plains influence the Babylonian cosmogony; the Nile gives character to the Egyptian; sunny slopes and contrasting heights determine the Grecian; and valley gloom, forest depths, and wintry storms, the Scandinavian. It is easy to trace the physical bases of distinct cosmogonies. The bases themselves may vary, but the connexion is uniform. The bases, indeed, have often varied. Even national myths as to creation have not preserved their original cast. They have varied with the history of the 1 Koran. Sale's Translation, Vol. II. p. 96 and p. 266. Note.-The Mahommedans suppose that the earth, when first created, was smooth and equal, and thereby liable to a circular motion as well as the celestial orbs: and that the angels, asking who would be able to stand on so tottering a frame, God fixed it next morning by throwing the mountains upon it.—Sale's Koran, Vol. II., p. 96. people. While the religious tendency of the national mind, and the traditional basis as to the mere fact of creation have remained, the form of the cosmogony has been completely changed; it has been so moulded as to suit the different physical conformation and the other different conditions of the new country in which the people have settled. These modifying processes Baron Bunsen himself acknowledges when he says, "Again, the dispersed tribes formed many of their myths anew when they settled in their later dwelling places. Thus, in the cosmogonic myths of the Icelander, as presented to us in the Edda, it is impossible not to perceive the influence of the peculiar locality of the Northern Scandinavian." "1 But then, no such process or influence is ever traceable in the Bible account. There is nothing local ; nothing contingent; nothing dependent on the traditions of any country; nothing incongruous or absurd. How account for this? Have you ever made the attempt? Was not Moses brought up in the learning of the Egyptians? How did he escape its influence? Was he not for many years a wanderer in the Arabian desert, and was he not familiar with all the traditions floating in the east and the west? If the Bible is no higher than other records, is it not strange that not a line appears which indicates in the least any such antecedent influence? Might we not reasonably count on the Leader and Lawgiver of Israel showing some disposition to associate Eden, man's birthplace, with the Land of Promise, which he longed to reach, and which he saw in the distance as Israel's future home? Yet, in this remarkable history, not one of these defects appears. Vast in its outline, it is yet so scrupulously strict in its minuter details that it may be read without dubiety, 1 Bunsen's Philosophy of Universal History. Vol. I. p. 80. |