Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

interpositions. But, supposing man to be purposely constituted, as we see he is, then the plan which involved a foresight of his wants and of his progressive improvement-a plan which provided all that was requisite to meet those wants, and stimulate that improvement, through a series of preparatory creations, each affording illustration of wisdom and power in a gradually ascending scale through interminable ages, becomes a far more elaborate proof of the wisdom of God, as well as of the eternity of his nature, than is furnished upon the hypothesis of the entire creation of the universe only six thousand years back. The counsel which has been pursuing its object through millions of ages, supplies a much more sublime proof of the infinite perfection of God, than one of which we have no demonstrative or sensible evidence prior to the last stage of its development in the production of all things, as was supposed, at the same period when it produced its noblest work. Moreover, the stepping-stones supplied by geology, back into the mysteries of the immeasurable ages past, may prove highly subservient to the cause of revealed religion in demonstrating, by a kind of physical approximation to the idea of an eternity past, the possibility and probability of an eternity to come. If it has required such a boundless course of ages to prepare the earth for man's abode, he can be destined to no ephemeral existence; his nature must have sublime and solemn destinies stretching beyond the date of his present life, and connecting him by a far closer and more sacred link with the yet unaccomplished counsels of the Deity; just as the past counsels and all the objects of them appear to be connected with those which are at present fulfilling.

6. It now only remains for us to observe, that it will ill become those persons who have paid but a slight attention to geology, or none at all, to doubt or dispute the conclusions of men of the most consummate skill, most patient research, and most unquestionable reverence for the authority of revelation. The cause of inspired truth can suffer only in the hands of rash, dogmatic, and ill-informed men. And, if its would-be advocates possess not the requisite science for judging in the present case, it will better beseem them to be still, and wait the growth of their own knowledge, than, by an overweening conceit of their ability, to pronounce upon one of the most complicated and mysterious questions that ever fell under their notice, and thus to injure the cause they are zealous to defend. They may be assured that, by such a procedure, they will do little else but afford learned unbelievers an opportunity for affirming upon the testimony of christians themselves, that the religion of the Bible can never be reconciled with the obvious testimony of the senses, and the undoubted verities of science. Many rash persons will no doubt appear upon both sides of this argument. Already the superficial infidel, on the one hand, has assumed a haughty tone of scientific defiance, and has eagerly as

serted that Moses cannot be right, and ought not to be believed; while on the other, not a few christian men, more forward than cautious, and more zealous than wise, have affirmed the infallibility of the vulgar interpretation, in contemptuous scorn of the senses and the reasonings of the most patient and trustworthy of the philosophers. We earnestly entreat all such persons to consider that the evidence could not have been slight, nor the induction narrow and hasty, which could have induced eminent christian philosophers to relinquish opinions which they had long and tenaciously-we might almost say devoutly, held, and to read their frank and full recantation before the world. Only let the objectors show themselves as patient, industrious, and candid as those whose opinions they may despise and decry; let them exhibit as much acquaintance with the subject, as much deference to the obvious lessons of truth, and they will then be entitled to be heard in abatement or refutation of opinions with which they may find occasion to be offended. What we supremely deprecate, in the discussion of this important subject, is the rashness of intemperate ignorance, dogmatic zeal for religion, and uncandid, unchristian suspicion of the philosophers. Nothing will be gained to the interest of christianity by arrogant assumptions of infallibility, contemptuous scorn of natural science, or personal defamation of its votaries. The cause of truth is one; its interests extend not only to time, but to eternity, past and yet future. They are universal and independent of us all. That cause has nothing to fear from the lapse of time, or the progress of science; nothing to gain by haste or concealment. Let none of its advocates discredit or wound it by violence or bad temper, and it will ere long amply vindicate itself.

We feel that an apology would here have been due for these protracted preliminary observations, had we been dealing with any common subject, or about to bring before our readers an ordinary work. The singularity of the case must plead our excuse, and the inexpressible importance of the volume in hand be accepted as our justification.

We now come, without further delay, to Dr. Smith himself, and must endeavor to present as compressed a view as we can of this highly interesting volume. We conceive we cannot do better, in the first place, than extract the Doctor's own summary of those difficulties which the conclusions of geology have arrayed against the received interpretation of the Mosaic record. The reader is reminded that the following is a mere statement of the conclusions without any of the reasonings that sustain them. It is quite impossible to present here any condensed view of the arguments. Those who wish for satisfaction upon these points must carefully consult the work itself.

In the second and third of these lectures, several facts were brought forward tending to place the natural history of the earth in a position of variance with the generally received belief concerning the DELUGE, which is so important a part of the scriptural history of the human race. As I cannot expect that these facts can be distinctly recollected. it will be proper to recapitulate them in the briefest manner consistent with making them intelligible.

That enumeration brought before us the following statements; that, through the whole process of stratification, from the most ancient to the latest, the mineral character of each stratum proves the existence of contemporaneous dry land, as well as of depressed areas filled with water; that the indubitable relics of once animated creatures, in a great variety of species, from the earlier formations to the latest, penetrate through one or more of the superincumbent strata, so that there never occur continuous beds of mineral deposit, which fail to be connected (if I may use the phrase, dovetailed) with each other; giving the result, that, from the unspeakably remote point of time in which vestiges of living nature first occur, there never was a period when life was extinct upon the surface of the globe; or, we might more properly say, when living creatures did not abundantly exist; that the vast masses of the rolled pebbles and stones of all sizes, which have been spread over large districts, especially of this northern hemisphere, belong not to any one transient flood, but to different eras of time, at great respective distances; some of the earliest never having been overflowed by a succeeding flood, and each for itself indicating the action of water through very long periods of time, in contradistinction to the idea of a deluge so brief as that of Noah, enduring but little more than three hundred days; that the cones of cinder and other volcanic products, over a considerable district in the south of France, are accompanied by evidences of an antiquity reaching much farther back than the date of Noah's deluge; and that these cones of loose, light materials have never been exposed to the action of a rush, or any even moderate force of water, or they would have been inevitably washed away. These geological facts stand thus powerfully in the way of our admitting that there ever was a universal deluge. Some other circumstances, also, were briefly alluded to, belonging to other departments of natural science. One of them was the impossibility of either the vegetable or the animal creations having all proceeded from one spot as a centre of ancestry; but that the surface of the earth, distributed into several distinct regions, each of which has its appropriate and exclusive tenantry, both vegetable and animal. It was also remarked how utterly impossible it would be for the inhabitants of many of those regions to have migrated to various others, or even to exist in them, if by an instantaneous miracle they were transported thither. We adverted to the difficulty, arising from the quantity of water requisite to cover the entire globe, and to overflow the highest mountains, which would be an addition to the present ocean of eight times its actual quantity. For both the production and subsequent removal of this body of water, we can imagine no cause but the miraculous intervention of Omnipotence; whereas the narrative in the book of Genesis assigns two natural

causes, raised to an extraordinary degree of action. Notice was also taken of the animals preserved with Noah in the ark; the number of existing species, so far exceeding what the commentators on the Bible have taken into their calculation; the very different kinds of receptacle which would be necessary; the amount of food; the necessity of ventilation, and the clearing out of the stables or dens; the provision for reptiles and insects; the fact that some fish and shell animals cannot live in salt water, and others not in fresh. The difficulty also was mentioned, if we suppose, that the resting-place of the ark was the Mount Ararat, pointed out by tradition, of conceiving how the eight human persons, and their accompanying animals, could descend adown the precipitous cliffs; a difficulty which amounts to an impossibility, unless we call in the aid of a divine power operating in the way of miracle.

'Another circumstance was adduced as proving that the deluge of Noah was not absolutely universal; the existence of trees in the equatorial regions of Africa and South America, which, by the known method of ascertaining the age of exogenous trees, are shown to be of an antiquity which goes further back than to the date of the deluge. What was said in that lecture, and will be advanced in the note on this subject, renders it needless to add any more.

I may also remind my auditors that the opinion which ascribes to the deluge the vast amount of animal and vegetable remains found in all parts of the earth, is flagrantly inconsistent with a correct attention to the circumstances in which they occur.

From many of these considerations, the probability of a universal contemporaneous flood is, to say the least, rendered very small; but their united force appears to me decisive of the negative to this question.

He

I cannot doubt but that some alarm and anxiety may be produced in the minds of many, by the hearing of these statements. They will be thought to be in direct contradiction to the sacred narrative; and we cannot justify to ourselves any twisting and wresting of that narrative in order to bring it into an apparent accordance with the doctrines of human philosophy. But let my friends dismiss their fears. The author of nature and the author of revelation is the same. cannot be at variance with himself. The book of his works and the book of his word cannot be contradictory. On the one hand, we find certain appearances in the kingdoms of nature, which stand upon various and independent grounds of sensible proof; and, on the other hand, are declarations of scripture which seem to be irreconcileable with those appearances which are indeed ascertained facts. But we are sure that truth is immutable; and that one truth can never contradict another. Different parts of its vast empire may and do lie far asunder; and the intermediate portions may be covered with more or less of obscurity; but they are under the same sceptre, and it is of itself antecedently certain, that the facts of nature, and the laws that govern them, are in perfect unison with every other part of the will of Him that made them. There are declarations of scripture which seem thus to oppose facts, of which we have the same kind of sensible evidence

that we have of the letters and words of the sacred volume; and which we understand by the same intellectual faculties by which we apprehend the sense of that volume. Now, those appearances-facts I must call them-have been scrutinized with the utmost jealousy and rigor ; and they stand impregnable; their evidence is made brighter by every assault. We must then turn to the other side of our research; we must admit the probability that we have not rightly interpreted these portions of scripture. We must retrace our steps; let us resort to this renewed examination in the great instance before us.'-pp. 299304.

We must now proceed to lay before our readers some specimens from that deeply-interesting lecture, in which the author proceeds to illustrate the principles of philology, by which the whole of the sacred records, and particularly the earliest and simplest should be interpreted; and which principles, though admitted and applied in reference to most other portions of the sacred book, have been overlooked in the interpretation of the first part of the book of Genesis.

1. All the methods of representation that may be employed to convey notions of the Deity to the mind of man, must, of absolute necessity, be designed to produce only analogical or comparative ideas; and must be adapted to that end. If we may so speak, they are pictures, which stand in the place of spiritual realities; but the realities themselves belong to the INACCESSIBLE LIGHT.

The materials of such comparison must be different, according to the varying states of mental improvement in which different minds are found. Let it, for a moment, be supposed, that it had pleased the Divine Majesty to grant an immediate revelation of his authority and his grace to the Athenians, in the age of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and for their use; we may reverentially believe that, in such a case, the communication would have been expressed in the terms and phrases to which they had habituated themselves, and moulded upon a system of references to the natural scenery around them, to their modes of action in social life, and to their current notions upon all other subjects. Not only would the diction have been pure Greek, but the figures, the allusions, and the illustrations of whatever kind, would also have been Attic. The Hebraized style which was adapted to the people of Israel, would have failed to convey just sentiments to the men of Greece; for, though it would not have been absolutely unintelligible, the collateral ideas would have been misapprehended, false bye notions would have insinuated themselves, and the principal sentiments, to inculcate which was the object of the whole process, would have been grievously distorted. Or, had the favor of a positive revelation been given to the ancient Britons, or to the Aborigines of America, it would have been clothed in another dress of representative imagery, and described in other and very different forms of speech.

Yet, in any such case, and under every variety that could occur, the enucleatip he representations, if it were fairly accomplished, would

[graphic]
« ElőzőTovább »