For its purpose what could be a finer, or even a more true, account of the matter than this? Without a word of literal truth in it, it would convey to the child's mind exactly the right impression. Now conceive of the head nurse banishing it from the nursery as calculated to mislead the children as to the origin of blue eyes. Or imagine the nursery governess who has passed the South Kensington examination in Mr. Huxley's "Physiology" informing her pupils that ears never "came out" at all, and that hearing was really done inside, by the fibers of Corti and the epithelial arrangements of the maculæ acusticæ. Is it conceivable, on the other hand, that the parish clergyman could defend the record on the ground that "the everywhere" was a philosophical presentation of the Almighty, or that "God thought about me" contained the Hegelian Idea? And yet this is precisely what interpreters of Genesis and interpreters of science do with the Bible. Genesis is a presentation of one or two great elementary truths to the childhood of the world. It can only be read aright in the spirit in which it was written, with its original purpose in view, and its original audience. "What did it mean to them?" What would they understand by it? What did they need to know and not to know?
To expand the constructive answers to these questions in detail does not fall within our province here. What we have to note is, that a scientific theory of the universe formed no part of the original writer's intention. Dating from the childhood of the world, written for children, and for that child-spirit in man which remains unchanged by time, it takes color and shape accordingly. Its object is purely religious, the point being, not how certain things were made, but that God made them. It is not dedicated to science, but to the soul. It is a sublime theology, given in view of ignorance or idolatry or polytheism, telling the worshipful youth of the world that the heavens and the earth and every creeping and flying thing were made by God. What world-spirit teaches men to finger its fluid numbers like a science catalogue, and discuss its days in terms of geological formations? What blindness pursues them, that they mark the things he made only with their museum-labels, and think they have exhausted its contribution when they have never even been within sight of it? This is not even atheism. It is simple illiterateness.
The first principle which must rule our reading of this book is the elementary canon of all literary criticism, which decides that any interpretation of a part of a book or of a literature must be controlled by the dominant purpose or motif of the whole. And, when one investigates 'that dominant purpose in the case of the Bible, he finds it reducing itself to one thing—religion. No matter what view is taken of the composition or authorship of the several books, this feature secures immediate and universal recognition.
