the holy Mount, Moses was seen glorified by the side of his glorified Lord. Could any greater attestation to the mission of Moses be given? What then must we say of those who, knowing all this, pretend to do homage to the Master whilst they reject the servant whom that Master avowedly and solemnly accredited? Shall we say that a blinding delusion, an evepуeia λavns, has fallen upon the minds of such, or do they consciously deceive?

The supposed discoveries of Geology are made, as in the Essay before us, one of the chief grounds of attack on the historic veracity of Moses. It is obvious that if his narrative respecting the creation of "the heavens and the earth, and all that in them is" be false, every thing else that he has written may be false. And seeing that the Scripture every where recognises the divine authority of Moses, if Moses be discredited the whole Scripture is discredited and so, no authoritative exponent of Truth remains on earth: for as to the muchvaunted "verifying faculty" that is said to exist in every man's bosom, who would be so mad as to confide in that which not only contradicts Scripture and contradicts facts, but also leads those who profess to follow its guidance to contradictory conclusions on the very same subjects?

Undeterred, however, by any such considerations as these, the Essay before us resolves to overthrow the authority of Moses. Throughout it, due care is taken to profit by every plausible occasion for sneering at any supposed instance of "the Hebrew writer's" ignorance; and at its conclusion, the writer plainly declares that the account given by Moses of creation is to be regarded "as the speculation of some Hebrew Descartes or Newton, promulgated in all good faith as the best and most probable account that could then be given of God's universe." (p. 252.) In this passage the Essayist seems willing to concede to Moses, "the man of God," the high privilege of being classed with other fallible human speculators; yet even this concession is immediately after modified and virtually withdrawn, for he adds: "it has been sometimes felt as a difficulty in taking this view of the case, that the writer asserts so solemnly and unhesitatingly that for which he must have known that he had no authority. But this arises only from our own modern habits of thought, and from the modesty of assertion which the spirit of true science has taught us. Mankind has learnt caution through repeated slips in the process of tracing out the truth." (p. 252.)

Let every one mark well the statement of this awful passage. It

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is plain, unequivocal, and incapable of being modified by explanation. Moses is first pronounced a philosophic speculator, but he has not the modesty of modern speculators; nay more, he has not their truthfulness. What they state, they state conditionally and with reserve, whereas Moses "asserts solemnly and unhesitatingly that for which he must have known that he had no authority." And what, if we add, as we should add, that Moses professed to state that which he stated on the authority of God. The charge against Moses really is, that he stated as on the authority of God things for which he must have known that he had no authority.

One feels such a shrinking from men who can deliberately pen such sentiments as these, that the first impulse of one's heart is to court disagreement with them in every thing that their lips ever utter. There are some men whose disapproval we covet. We feel their praise to be condemnation-their censure honour. We would rather find ourselves opposed to them in every thing, than even seemingly allied to them in one. The Essayists, however, allow us not the opportunity for totality of dissent. They weave a tangled web. Error makes her most secure and most triumphant advances when she contrives to shelter herself under the temporary companionship of Truth.

The Essayist, then, maintains (and would that Christian writers had ever done the same) that the narrative respecting creation given in the commencement of Genesis professes to be a plain, historic narrative of facts. "It has nothing in it which can properly be called poetical. It bears on its face no trace of mystical or symbolical meaning. Things are called by their right names with a certain scientific exactness widely different from the imaginative cosmogonies of the Greeks. In the first narrative none but a professed mystifier of the school of Philo could see anything but a plain statement of facts. There can be little reasonable dispute then as to the sense in which the Mosaic narrative was taken by those who first heard it, nor is it indeed disputed that for centuries, putting apart the Philonic mysticism, which after all did not exclude a primary sense, its words have been received in their genuine and natural meaning." (Page 223.)

Nothing can be more true than this, at least so far as concerns the great fact, that the first of Genesis does profess to be, what indeed it is, a plain, literal narrative of creation. Yet let it not be supposed that the motive of the Essayist in admitting this is a desire to accredit

Genesis. On the contrary, his object is to make its destruction, as an authoritative witness of Truth, the more certain and complete.

The Essayist proceeds to examine the systems that have been devised to avoid the force of the statements in the first of Genesis: and first he notices that of the late Dr. Buckland. The first verse of Genesis (which is in truth a heading or preface to the whole chapter, declaring to us the Author of that creation of which the subsequent verses treat)—that verse is by Dr. Buckland's theory detached from the narrative that follows, and assigned to another period, thousands, or it may be, millions of years previous to the present Adamic creation-which creation, moreover, is not by this system regarded as being in the full sense a creation, but rather a new formation out of the ruin of a previously created and destroyed world.

If Dr. Buckland had merely asserted that the first verse of Genesis referred to the original creation of the unformed matter out of which the existing earth and heavens, and sun, and moon, and stars, were subsequently formed-if he had been willing to allow that before the first of the six days mentioned in Genesis when God said, "Let there be light," no light had existed-if he had admitted that before the second day no firmanent had existed; and that before the fourth day no sun, moon, or stars had existed, his theory (although still incapable of being reconciled with the strict interpretation of Scripture) would yet have been comparatively innocent, and unincumbered by those great inconsistencies by which it necessarily destroys itself. For to admit (as Dr. Buckland does admit) that the first of Genesis speaks of a series of six literal days, and that on the first of these days light was made; and on the second, the firmament; and on the fourth, the sun; and afterwards to affirm that both light and the firmament, as well as sun and moon and stars, existed hundred of ages previously, involves a contradiction so glaring, that it is difficult to conceive the process by which any one could reconcile himself to the reception of a system so self-destructive. The Essayist justly exposes its inconsistency. "Dr. Buckland," (I quote from the Essay) "having thus endeavoured to make out that the Mosaic account does not negative the idea that the sun, moon, and stars had been created at the indefinitely distant time designated by the word 'beginning,' he is reduced to describe the primeval darkness of the first day as 'a temporary darkness, produced by an accumulation of dense vapours upon the face of the deep.' 'An incipient dispersion of these vapours may have readmitted light to the earth, upon the first day, whilst the

exciting cause of light was obscured, and the further purification of the atmosphere upon the fourth day, may have caused the sun, and moon; and stars to reappear in the firmament of heaven, to assume their new relations to the newly modified earth, and to the human race.'

"It is needless" (continues the Essayist) to discuss the scientific probability of this hypothesis, but the violence done to the grand and simple words of the Hebrew writer must strike every mind. mind. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.' Can any one sensible of the value of words suppose, that nothing more is here described, or intended to be described, than the partial clearing away of a fog? Can such a manifestation of light have been dignified by the appellation of day? Is not this reducing the noble description which has been the admiration of ages to a pitiful caput mortuum of empty verbiage ?" (Essays p. 227.)

"It is no part of the commentator's or interpreter's duty" (I still quote from the Essays) "to introduce obscurity or find difficulties where none exist, and it cannot be pretended that, taking it as a question of the use of words to express thoughts, there are any peculiar difficulties about understanding the first chapter of Genesis. The difficulties arise for the first time, when we seek to import a meaning into the language which it certainly never could have conveyed to those to whom it was originally addressed..

. . . Although language may be, and often has been used, for the purpose, not of expressing, but concealing thought, no such charge can fairly be laid against the Hebrew writer."

"It should be borne in mind," says Dr. Buckland, 'that the object of the account was, not to state in what manner, but by whom the world was made.' Every one must see (I still quote from the Essays) that this is an unfounded assertion, inasmuch as the greater part of the narrative consists in a minute and orderly description of the manner in which things were made. We can know nothing as to the object of the account, except from the account itself. What the writer meant to state is just what he has stated, for all that we can know to the contrary. Or can we seriously believe that if appealed to by one of his Hebrew hearers or readers as to his intention, he would have replied, My only object in what I have written is to inform you that

God made the world; as to the manner of His doing it, of which I have given so exact an account, I have no intention that my words should be taken in their literal meaning." (Essays p. 232.)

Such is the comment of the Essayist on Dr. Buckland's system, which was also the system advocated by Dr. Chalmers and others. Who will deny that the comment is just. Are we to be told that light, and heat, and organised life, existed ages before God said, "Let there be light;" and that the firmanent was made and set to divide the waters, ages before that second day on which Genesis affirms that it was made and that the sun, and moon, and stars, were made and set in the firmament and shone ages before that fourth day on which Genesis declares that they were made; are we to be told all this, and then asked to believe that the first of Genesis contains nothing that is at variance with such an interpretation-that it still may be received in its plain, natural sense? If such an interpretation be natural, I know not any that could be pronounced non-natural. The Essayist, as we have seen, pronounces such an interpretation of Genesis to be extravagant and impossible. Agreeing with Dr. Buckland in asserting that the sun, moon, and stars had, ages before the six-days-creation described in Genesis, "marked out seasons, and days, and years, and given light for ages before to the earth and to the animals which preceded man as its inhabitant," they hesitate not to avow that in holding this, they hold something utterly and hopelessly at variance with the statements of Genesis. Having to choose between their supposed facts and Scripture, they elect the former, and reject the testimony of the Word of God.

Amongst those who once adopted the theory of Dr. Buckland but afterwards abandoned it (not indeed on account of its being at variance with Scripture, but for other reasons) was the late Hugh Miller. In 1857 he writes as follows: "I certainly did once believe with Chalmers and with Buckland that the six days were simply natural days of twenty-four hours each-that they had comprised the entire work of the existing creation-and that the latest of the geologic ages was separated by a great chaotic gap from our own." Hugh Miller as quoted in Essays p. 228. After recounting some of his labours as a practical geologist, he states that extended research had brought him to a new conclusion. "The conclusion" (I again quote his words) "to which I have been compelled to arrive is, that for many long ages ere man was ushered into being, not a few of his humble contemporaries of the fields and woods enjoyed life in their