THE BOOK OF GENESIS AND EVOLUTION.*

Tins is a very interesting and thoughtful book, whatever the geologist and physicist may think of its geological and physical criticisms and theories, of which the present writer, at all events, has no power or right to speak. The anonymous author of it, who appears to be well read on these subjects, makes an attempt, which is at least new to us, to reconcile the account of Creation in Genesis with the nebular hypothesis, by suggesting the pro- bable existence of the earth and of vegetable life upon it at a period anterior to that of the existence of the Sun in its present concentrated spherical shape. He connects the iso- lated verses in the second chapter of Genesis as to the time when there was no rain upon the earth, but only a vapour going up from it, which served the purpose of sustaining the vegetable life it contained, with this ante-solar period of the earth's exist- ence. Whether this be a tenable physical position or not,—on which, as we have said, the present writer can pretend to pass no kind of opinion,—there is a great deal in this little book well worth the study of those who are incompetent to pass opinions on points of this kind. For example, what ought we to say of the following criticism,—the book, we should say, is thrown into the form of dialogue,—on those who find false science in the Bible, and still accept it as an authority for their religions convictions " I am sorry,' he said, I cannot agree with you. It is true -enough, in the strict sense of the words, that the Bible was not in- tended to teach science ; no one supposes it was. But when you imply that if we find the most serious Bible statements false, or mis- taken, it is all no matter—to orthodoxy—I cannot help wondering whether you would feel so sure about the matter if you had not a

Nested interest in it.' Let us welcome anything that savouis of honesty and truth ; for this question is no mere child's play. Sup- pose scientific men really prove that man rose unaided from an ape,

• instead of falling from something little lower than an angel ; how can your orthodoxy possibly remain as it is, based as it is from first to last upon a Fall of some sort, and a Redemption therefrom ? Let us, at least, be honest men, and "If the Lord be God, follow him ; but if Baal, then follow him!" Do you know what Dr. Martineau says about this? I was reading him the other day, and one sentence I shall never forget :—" The new Book of Genesis, inasmuch as it dissipates the dream of paradise, and removes the tragedy of the fall, cancels at once the need and the scheme of redemption, and so leaves the his- torical churches of Europe crumbling away from their very founda- tions." You never read truer words. If the extreme statements of the Evolutionists are to be received as true, people will assuredly begin to feel that a Bible so totally mistaken about the beginning may not be more accurate concerning the end. Such arguments only make people reproach you with dishonesty. They may leave you with a bare shell of religion, but that will be all. Doubtless, even if all our old-established beliefs are to be overturned by fuller knowledge, it is still better to know the truth than to go on believing a lie. Let us have the truth at any risk, and at all hazards. But the new belief, however much better it may be than the old, will not be the same ; and it is just as well to see where you are being led by such wholesale concessions. No; if I am compelled by the stern majesty of truth to give up what I used to hold so dear, I will admit what 1 have lost, and that I have lost it. I shall, you will tell me, get hold of higher and better truth, and it may be so ; but till I have hold of higher and better than is taken from me, I will not cheat myself with mere phrases, or pretend it is no matter, when it is just all the matter in the workl.' "

Now, we should, for ourselves, distinguish between the two very different subjects here touched. We cannot see that

• Conversations on the Creation, and Chapters on Genesis and Evolution. By a layman, London: Sunday School Union, Old Bailey.

scientific error, in the Bible, if it exists, is at all more important than false numerical statements or historical errors, which certainly exist. That the religions truth revealed is re- vealed through all sorts of fallible human media, no one now doubts. That "Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of Eternity," is a truth which applies as much to revelation as it does to the natural reason of man. But it is quite one thing to say that a great spiritual revela- tion is perfectly conceivable and perfectly probable in com- bination with the erroneous scientific assumptions of the age

in which it is given, and quite another thing to say that such revelation is compatible with a totally false moral assump- tion, such as that of the fall or sinfulness of man and the need for his redemption. 'What we find in the Bible is the scattered

and sometimes fragmentary literature of a nation brought up under the especial teaching of God's moral and spiritual revelation. Some parts of that literature are of unknown origin, and relatively of very slight moral authority. It is hardly possible, for instance, to regard the dry little book of Nehemiah as con- taining anything like as important an element in the story of the divine education of Israel as the books of Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, or Kings. And, supposing it proved, as in our opinion it is not at all unlikely to be proved, that the physical science of Genesis is as incompatible with modern science, as the enumera- tion of the people of Israel contained in the early part of Exodus is inconsistent with the story of their wanderings in the Desert, we should find in this fact no more argument against the- reality of the revelation than we should find it to be an argu- ment against the authority of the Gospels and St. Paul's Epistles, that the Epistle of Jude were proved to be spurious..

The Bible surely is a composite literature, not a single book of homogeneous authority. It would be of vital im- portance to discover that one of the central ideas on which the moral and spiritual teaching of the Jewish people had been founded, was false. But it is no more vital to revelation to discover,—if it be trae,—that the account of Creation, though strictly revealed as regards the fact of the divine causation and. the relation of God to man, is inaccurate in its scientific chronology, than it is vital to the authority of a treatise on, mathematics to find interspersed through it a totally false body of doctrine on geology or chemistry.

All this, however, is not our main point. What has interested: us most in this book is its admirable preliminary criticism on, the curious anti-theistic bias of some of the great physicists of

the day,—by which our author means, not that these physicists either are, or would like to be regarded as, deliberate deniers of the existence of God, but that they treat all criticism which proceeds from belief in revelation with a fixed suspicion and contempt, while treating with respect far beyond what it de- serves, criticism which proceeds from the opposite or negative position, like Hackers and Buchner's. Here, for instance, is our author's admirable criticism on Hackers wonderful and almost unlimited arrogance :—

" Every one knows how Professor Ernst Haeckel refuses to admit that an animal is more 'alive' than a stone, and insists upon expell- ing the very idea of a Creator out of human thought. To borrow words from Vogt, his theory turns the Creator out of doors ;' but what is so specially instructive here, is to note the way he deals with all who refuse to accept it. He complains that few physiologists' look with favour on it, and, therefore, he calls them pedants.' Of Agassiz, because he opposed an automatic Evolution, Haeckel wrote : This great American was in reality gifted with too much genius actually to believe in the truth of the mystical nonsense which he preached. Crafty calculation and well-judged reliance on the want of understanding of his credulous followers, can alone have given him courage to pass the juggler's pieces of his anthropomorphic Creator as true coin.' In the same way, when Professor Virchow had made a stand at Munich against teaching the descent of man from apes as dogmatic fact—remember that Virchow himself is an Evolutionist, and considers such descent probable, though not proved —he impeached his honesty, as well as accused him of being a dualist and mystic. To take but one more instance, his treatment of Da Bois Reymond. Of him he writes 'He knows too well how to conceal the weakness of his argument and evidence, and the shallow- ness of his thought, by striking images and flowery metaphors, and by all the phraseology of rhetoric in which the versatile French nature is so superior to the sober German race ;' and elsewhere he terms Reymond's address in 1873 at Leipsic on the Limits of Natural Knowledge, a great denial of the history of Evolution,' which is simply false. Quotations of this kind could easily be multi- plied. Not a word need be said here, or is meant to be said, in dis- paragement of Haeckel's acquirements. Statements by himself as to what I have' done, and as to his complete and unexampled success in solving the most insoluble problems, abound in his books to an extent remarkable, even for works on biology. He almost says in so many words, that he alone has attained to any real knowledge of the subject ; and he certainly should know best. Granting all that

however, still the man's intellectual stature is of no such height as warrants him in speaking in such terms of men like these, because they refuse to accept the theory he propounds until he adduces proof of it. There are benighted beings who consider Da Bois Reymond the first naturalist in Europe ; and of Agassiz, to use such language as the above is simply and utterly disgraceful, whatever be, in his own or others' opinion, the amplitude of the man who uses it. I will not call it scientific dogmatism, for it is no such thing ; but it is anti- theistic dogmatism of the most unmistakable kind. And yet more, it is sheer terrorism : it is equivalent to saying to every one, Think as I do, or I will proclaim loudly that you are either knave or fool, or both ;' which, indeed, Haeckel does say with sufficient emphasis of all who, even though they reject Theism, refuse to accept his pedi- gree of man in all its details.'

And our author very justly says that, in spite of this extraordi- nary violence in nickel, and in others like Rickel amongst our English thinkers, some of the great biologists of England treat these violent men with far more respect than they do the thinkers whose bias it is, if they have a bias, to reconcile the teaching of science and revelation :—

"When we are pointed to the studious reverence in tone and moderation in language, which, as a rule, do distinguish English physicists, what can we reply but that, while we are thankful for it, they seem to us to especially cultivate desperately evil company, or at least company of another character. Mr. Darwin overwhelms Haeckel with compliment ; Mr. Huxley names his pet Bathybius after him ; and we look in vain, so far as I know, for any protest, on the part of any English Evolutionist, against the overbearing abuse of others by men like Haeckel and Clifford. On the very contrary, it is these very men who are honoured ; it is notorious that Clifford owed his influence as much, if not more, to his pronounced 'attitude' on these matters, as to the proper scientific work he has done ; while Maxwell, if he had been of the same way of thinking, would probably have been deemed the first man of his time. And there is more still which is somewhat significant. Though Professor Huxley has never made any protest against the wild absurdities of which a few have been mentioned—so wild and baseless that even German biologists refuse to call them Evolutionism, and use the term Haeckelism ' in referring to them—though such conclusions' have evoked no protest from him it is very different with conclusions of another sort, however modestly put forth. The first volume of the 'Challenger' reports has lately (Dec., 1880) been published, and in the Introduction to it Sir Wyville Thomson, whose reputation is world- wide, expresses the conviction, on the one hand that there does not seem to be a shadow of reason for supposing the floors of the deep oceans were ever raised above the level of the sea,' indeed that 'such an arrangement is inconceivable ; ' and on the other, that while the study of the abyssal fauna lends a powerful support to the doctrine of Evolution, it refuses to give the least support to the theory which refers the evolution of species to extreme variation guided only by natural selection.' That Professor Huxley with a quick instinct should object to both these conclusions, is natural enough : it is simply another and a striking proof of the instinctive feeling already referred to ; bat still it is very instructive to see how he now instantly points out that the value of the 'Challenger' work does not lie in the speculations which may be based upon it,' but in the mass and solidity of the newly ascertained facts. Quite true, doubtless, as Sir W. Thomson modestly acknowledges ; still it is somewhat strange that Haeckel's 'speculations' should not have been protested against, whilst the others are so quickly subjected to that process. And it is equally noteworthy that while, as Sir W. Thomson justly observes, the generalisations or impressions, or whatever they may be, of the few men selected to observe these facts [all of them of European celebrity] are as much a part of the result of the expedition as everything else,' and that it was his duty to offer them,'—their main impression was that while the close examination of the newer Tertiaries, and the careful examination of the fauna of the deep sea

promise to yield a mass of information in regard to the course of Evolution, as to the mode of the origin of species both seem as yet equally silent.'"

What is the explanation of this curious jealousy entertained to- wards scientific men who lean, if they lean at all, towards theistic views of science, as c,ompared. with this curious generosity towards men who, like Hackel, not only rave against theistic science, but rave against every one who does not accept their own passionately anti-theistic science? Why is the latter kind of impious prejudice benignantly tolerated where the former pious prejudice is re- garded almost as a sort of treason to science? Is it not at least as much, even from the scientific point of view, of a trea- son to science, to insist, without the shadow of a proof, that there is no divine purpose in creation, as to assume, on what our great biologists think inadequate grounds, that there is such a divine purpose visible in it Is it not quite as much of a sin against purely intellectual truth to insist on seeing only what tells against a doctrine of design, as it is to insist on seeing only what tells in its favour ? To take a famous controversy of the present day, for instance, has not the Materi- alistic assumption vitiated the view of those who strive to de- termine the question whether you can produce life without including vital germs in that from which you produce it, at least as much as the Theistic assumption has vitiated the view of other phenomena of ,life ? We cannot for a moment doubt that it is so. We suppose that the only conceivable apology to be made for the relative favour with which so many great scientific men treat the anti-theistic prejudice, as compared with the theistic, is that they are conscious of the great unpopularity attending such views in English middle-class society, and resent the suspicion and detraction which it has brought upon themselves ; nay, resent this all the more, that the middle-class society which inflicts this ostracism seems to them quite without the scientific means of judging of the matters with which it often too peremptorily deals. And this may be true as regards the scientific means of judging, but as re- gards the scientific means only. For even men of science ought to see that it is not a purely scientific question, after all ; that the moral side of life, on which all classes have the right to form a judgment, is of far more importance in relation to the home question of God or no God, than the character of any purely scientific argument whatever ; and that however false the particular scientific inference may be to which the moral belief in God may give rise among uncultivated per- sons, it is still no fault of theirs that they should incline strongly to that intellectual view which is most in sym- pathy with the teaching of their own consciences. We quite admit that uncultivated men with a deep moral belief in God will often translate that belief into very unsound and very mis- leading, sometimes perhaps even very injnrious, intellectual prin- ciples, against which it is natural that science should earnestly protest. But though scientific men have had much experience of this, they have hitherto had comparatively little experience of the disastrous effects of Hiickelism, or such principles as those of the late Professor Clifford, in perverting the tendencies of modern investigation; and could a middle-class as scientifically ignorant as our present, but saturated with Atheistic instead of with Theistic principles, ever arise, the results would be far more destructive than any which we are now able to conceive, not simply to the social life of man, but to the prospects of scientific thought itself, if the Philistinism which believes in God has sometimes scourged Science with whips, the Philistinism which should reject God would scourge it with scorpions. We cannot speak too highly of the introduction to this thoughtful little book.