The hypothesis respecting the past history of Nature, which was formerly, and is still very largely, accepted by Christians, is the doctrine fully and clearly stated in the immortal poem of John Milton—the English Divina Commedia—Paradise Lost. There is the best of reasons for the popularity of this doctrine. It agrees literally with the plain words of the Bible. The hypothesis is briefly this: “That this visible universe of ours came into existence at no great distance of time from the present, and that the parts of which it is composed made their appearance, in a certain definite order, in the space of six natural days, in such a manner that on the first of these days light appeared; that on the second the firmament or sky separated the waters above from the waters beneath the firmament; that on the third day the waters drew away from the dry land, and upon it a varied vegetable life, similar to that which now exists, made its appearance; that the fourth day was signalised by the apparition of the sun, the stars, the moon, and the planets; that on the fifth day aquatic animals originated within the waters; that on the sixth day the earth gave rise to our four-footed terrestrial creatures, and to all variations of terrestrial animals except birds, which had appeared on the preceding day; and, finally, that man appeared upon the earth, and the emergence of the universe from chaos was finished.”18 This interpretation is that which has been instilled into most of us in our childhood; but, “if we are to listen to many expositors of no mean authority, we must believe that what seems so clearly defined in Genesis—as if very great pains had been taken that there should be no possibility of mistake—is not the meaning of the text at all. The account is divided into periods that we may make just as long or as short as convenience requires. We are also to understand that it is consistent with the original text to believe that the most complex plants and animals may have been evolved by natural processes, lasting for millions of years, out of structureless rudiments. A person who is not a Hebrew scholar can only stand aside and admire the marvellous flexibility of a language which admits of such diverse interpretations.”19

Furthermore, we are to understand that there is no disagreement between theology and science in the sequence of the six acts of creation. Here at least we are not asked to twist words round so that one may mean a million. We have a definite statement which science either supports or it does not. The reader who knows that the verdict of science is negative may ask: “What is the use of wasting my time over a Christian argument which has long since been exploded?” I crave his pardon and patience; but, however true it may be that Mr. Gladstone’s position was shown to be untenable, it is equally true that an enormous number of persons still persist in maintaining that there is a remarkable coincidence of the Pentateuchal story with the result of modern investigation, and that science supports them in this conclusion. The Very Rev. Henry Wace, D.D., Dean of Canterbury, in his address before the Christian Association of University College, London, on May 7th, 1903, reminded his hearers that a President of the British Association (Sir William Dawson) had stated that “it would not be easy even now to construct a statement of the development of the world in popular terms so concise and so accurate” as the first chapter of Genesis. And Dr. Wace asks: “From whence could have come this marvellous approximation, to say the least, to the facts which science has been slowly revealing but from the Divine wisdom which alone was cognizant of them, and could alone make them known to mankind?”

A short time ago a lady very kindly sent me a little pamphlet, entitled Roger’s Reasons; or, The Bible and Science, written by the Rev. John Urquhart. In this there is a resurrection pie of the old, old arguments, dished up again in such a guise as to take in the unwary and ill-informed, who would have no suspicion that the food thus given them for their refection was not only stale, but had been condemned as unfit for mental consumption by the whole of the scientific faculty. The lady above mentioned considered the reasoning perfectly convincing, and so possibly would ninety-nine Christian ladies out of a hundred. Mr. Urquhart is now much in evidence as a Christian apologist, and his pamphlet is being distributed broadcast (81,000 have already been issued), so that it does seem worth while taking some notice of the attempts that are still being made to treat the Creation myth as a Divine revelation. That modern science does not support either the interpretation put upon the Bible story of the Creation by Mr. Urquhart or by Mr. Gladstone, or any interpretation which is compatible with the general sense of the narrative, can be ascertained by anyone who will read Professor Huxley’s essays, “The Interpreters of Genesis” and “Mr. Gladstone and Genesis.” A few quotations from these essays may enable the reader to form a slight idea of the decisive manner in which the assertion that modern science supports the Bible narrative is controverted by science herself.

Speaking of Mr. Gladstone’s contention that the statements in the first two verses of Genesis are supported by the nebular hypothesis, Professor Huxley remarks: “But science knows nothing of any stage in which the universe could be said, in other than a metaphorical and popular sense, to be formless or empty; or in any respect less the seat of law and order than it is now. One might as well talk of a fresh-laid hen’s egg being ‘without form and void’ because the chick therein is potential and not actual, as apply such terms to the nebulous mass which contains a potential solar system.”

In a note at the end of the second essay, “Mr. Gladstone and Genesis,” there is an excellent exposition of the “Proper Sense of the ‘Mosaic’ Narrative of the Creation.” Among other points, Huxley, of course, notices how the stars are, as it were, thrown in—“He made the stars also.” These words have always struck me as making it peculiarly clear that the “Mosaic” narrative originated from man, and not from God. The unknown authors of the Hexateuchal compilation were almost as ignorant of the nature of the stars and of their unthinkable distance away from us as a camel-driver in Sind, who gravely informed a friend of mine that the stars were once quite close to the earth, until one fine day a certain woman (it is always the woman who causes the mischief) grabbed hold of one and used it for cleaning her child, whereupon the gods, much annoyed at such presumption on the part of mankind, moved them far enough off to be safe from further desecration.

That the order of Creation as given in the Bible cannot be maintained will be clearly seen if we take the particular case of the birds and creeping things. Science does not affirm that the birds were made before “everything that creepeth upon the earth.” Mr. Gladstone tries to get over the difficulty by excluding reptiles, lizards, etc., from the category of creeping things. This will appear in the course of the following quotations from Professor Huxley’s essay on “Mr. Gladstone and Genesis”:—

“Mr. Gladstone’s views as to the proper method of dealing with grave and difficult scientific and religious problems had permitted him to base a solemn ‘plea for a revelation of truth from God’ upon an error as to a matter of fact, from which the intelligent perusal of a manual of palæontology would have saved him.... He does, indeed, make a great parade of authorities, and I have the greatest respect for those authorities whom Mr. Gladstone mentions. If he will get them to sign a joint memorial to the effect that our present palæontological evidence proves that birds appeared before the ‘land population’ of terrestrial reptiles, I shall think it my duty to reconsider my position—but not till then.... I have every respect for the singer of the Song of the Three Children (whoever he may have been); I desire to cast no shadow of doubt upon, but, on the contrary, marvel at, the exactness of Mr. Gladstone’s information as to the considerations which ‘affected the method of the Mosaic writer’; nor do I venture to doubt that the inconvenient intrusion of these contemptible reptiles—‘a family fallen from greatness,’ a miserable, decayed aristocracy reduced to mere ‘skulkers about the earth,’ in consequence, apparently, of difficulties about the occupation of land arising out of the earth-hunger of their former serfs, the mammals—into an apologetic argument, which would otherwise run quite smoothly, is in every way to be deprecated. Still, the wretched creatures stand there, importunately demanding notice; and, however different may be the practice in that contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses and laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really is of no avail whatever to shut one’s eyes to facts, or to try and bury them out of sight under a tumulus of rhetoric.... However reprehensible, and, indeed, contemptible, terrestrial reptiles may be, the only question which appears to me to be relevant to my argument is whether these creatures are or are not comprised under the denomination of ‘everything that creepeth upon the ground.’... Hence I commend the following extract from the eleventh chapter of Leviticus to Mr. Gladstone’s serious attention:—

The merest Sunday-school exegesis, therefore, suffices to prove that, when the Mosaic writer in Genesis 1. 24 speaks of ‘creeping things,’ he means to include lizards among them. This being so, it is agreed on all hands that terrestrial lizards and other reptiles allied to lizards occur in the Permian strata. It is further agreed that the Triassic strata were deposited after these. Moreover, it is well known that, even if certain footprints are to be taken as unquestionable evidence of the existence of birds, they are not known to occur in rocks earlier than the Trias, while indubitable remains of birds are not to be met with till much later. Hence it follows that natural science does not ‘affirm’ the statement that birds were made on the fifth day, and ‘everything that creepeth on the ground’ on the sixth, on which Mr. Gladstone rests his order; for, as is shown by Leviticus, the ‘Mosaic writer’ includes lizards among his creeping things.”20

The crust of the earth is a book having for its pages strata that have, fortunately, been upturned for our perusal, and the story it tells must be true. The series of fossiliferous deposits which contain the remains of the animals which have lived on the earth in past ages of its history afford the evidence required concerning the order of appearance of the different species. As Professor Huxley says elsewhere21: “When we consider these simple facts, we see how absolutely futile are the attempts that have been made to draw a parallel between the story told by so much of the crust of the earth as is known to us and the story which Milton tells.” Still, the story which Milton tells is in accord with the story which the Bible tells to those who are not given to playing conjuring tricks with the plain meaning of words.

Finally, we must remember that “hundreds of thousands of animal species, as distinct as those which now compose our water, land, and air populations, have come into existence and died out again.” “If the species of animals have all been separately created, then it follows that hundreds of thousands of acts of creative energy have occurred, at intervals throughout the whole time recorded by the fossiliferous rocks; and, during the greater part of that time, the ‘creation’ of the members of the water, land, and air populations must have gone on contemporaneously.”22

The common-sense view of the Creation story, and one that is now widely accepted even by orthodox Christians, is that it is a myth. Many of us will, therefore, agree with Professor Huxley when he says: “I suppose it to be an hypothesis respecting the origin of the universe which some ancient thinker found himself able to reconcile with his knowledge, or what he thought was knowledge, of the nature of things, and therefore assumed to be true. As such, I hold it to be not merely an interesting, but a venerable, monument of a stage in the mental progress of mankind; and I find it difficult to suppose that any one who is acquainted with the cosmogonies of other nations—and especially with those of the Egyptians and the Babylonians, with whom the Israelites were in such frequent and intimate communication—should consider it to possess either more or less scientific importance than may be allotted to these.”23

It may not be inappropriate to conclude this section with Milton’s conception of the last act of creation, so charmingly simple and so strictly according to the Bible and what Christ Himself believed, and yet so completely untrue:—

—Paradise Lost, Book VII., 449–456, 505–510, 516–528.