the Mosaic writer, as interpreted by me, with the facts and presumptions of science, as I have endeavored to extract them from the best authorities, I answer that I have not endeavored to show either that any accordance has been demonstrated, or that more than a substantial accordance—an accordance in principal relevant particulars—is to be accepted as shown by probable evidence.
In the cosmogony of the Proem, which stands on a distinct footing as lying wholly beyond the experience of primitive man, I am not aware that any serious flaw is alleged; but the nebular hypothesis with which it is compared appears to be, perhaps from the necessity of the case, no more than a theory; a theory, however, long discussed, much favored, and widely accepted in the scientific world.
In the geological part, we are liable to those modifications or displacements of testimony which the future progress of the science may produce. In this view its testimony does not in strictness pass, I suppose, out of the category of probable into that of demonstrative evidence. Yet it can hardly be supposed that careful researches, and reasonings strictly adjusted to method, both continued through some generations, have not in a large measure produced what has the character of real knowledge. With that real knowledge the reader will now have seen how far I claim for the Proem to Genesis, fairly tried, to be in real and most striking accordance.
And this brings me to the point at which I have to observe that Mr. Huxley, I think, has not mastered, and probably has not tried to master, the idea of his opponent as to what it is that is essentially embraced in the idea of a Divine revelation to man.
So far as I am aware, there is no definition, properly so called, of revelation either contained in Scripture or established by the general and permanent consent of Christians. In a word polemically used, of indeterminate or variable sense, Professor Huxley has no title to impute to his opponent, without inquiry, anything more than it must of necessity convey.
But he seems to assume that revelation is to be conceived of as if it were a lawyer's parchment, or a sum in arithmetic, wherein a flaw discovered at a particular point is ipso facto fatal to the whole. Very little reflection would show Professor Huxley that there may be those who find evidences of the communication of Divine knowledge in the Proem to Genesis as they read it in their Bibles, without approaching to any such conception. There is the uncertainty of translation; translators are not inspired. There is the difficulty of transcription; transcribers are not inspired, and an element of error is inseparable from the work of a series of copyists. How this works in the long courses of time we see in the varying texts of the Old Testament, with rival claims not easy to adjust. Thus the authors of the recent Revision[1] have had to choose in the Massoretic text itself between
- ↑ Preface to the Old Testament, p. vi
