their sojourn in the valley of the Nile, hardly had force to stamp even 80 much as their name upon the history of the world at large, and only then began to be admitted to the general communion of mankind when their Scriptures assumed the dress which a Gentile tongue was needed to supply? It is more rational, I contend, to say that these astonishing anticipations were a God-given supply, than to suppose that a race, who fell uniformly and entirely short of the great intellectual development[1] of antiquity, should here not only have equaled and outstripped it, but have entirely transcended, in kind even more than in degree, all known exercise of human faculties.
Whether this was knowledge conveyed to the mind of the Mosaic author, I do not presume to determine. There has been, in the belief of Christians, a profound providential purpose, little or variously visible to us, which presided, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, over the formation of the marvelous compound, which we term the Holy Scriptures. This we wonderingly embrace without being much perplexed by the questions which are raised on them; for instance, by the question. In what exact relation the books of the Apocrypha, sometimes termed deutero-canonical, stand to the books of the Hebrew Canon. Difficulties of detail, such as may (or ultimately may not) be found to exist in the Proem to Genesis, have much the same relation to the evidence of revealed knowledge in this record, as the spots in the sun to his all-unfolding and sufficing light. But as to the Mosaic writer himself, all I presume to accept is the fact that he put upon undying record, in this portion of his work, a series of particulars which, interpreted in the growing light of modern knowledge, require from us, on the whole, as reasonable men, the admission that we do not see how he could have written them, and that in all likelihood he did not write them, without aid from the guidance of a more than human power. It is in this guidance, and not necessarily or uniformly in the consciousness of the writer, that, according to my poor conception, the idea of Revelation mainly lies.
And now one word on the subject of Evolution. I can not follow Mr. Huxley in his minute acquaintance with Indian sages, and I am not aware that Evolution has a place in the greater number of the schools of Greek philosophy. Nor can I comprehend the rapidity with which persons of authority have come to treat the Darwinian hypothesis as having reached the final stage of demonstration. To the eye of a looker-on their pace and method seem rather too much like a steeplechase. But this may very well be due to their want of appropriate knowledge and habits of thought. For myself, in my loose and uninformed way of looking at Evolution, I feel only too
- ↑ I write thus bearing fully in mind the unsurpassed sublimity of much that is to be found in the Old Testament. The consideration of this subject would open a wholly new line of argument, which the present article does not allow me to attempt.
