day, and endeavours to explain its institution from the fact that God completed the work of creation in six days, and rested on the seventh day, himself.

As a scientific product the narrative has no value; for the writer had only a very defective knowledge of the construction of the universe to go upon. A moderately good school-boy of our days could easily find him out in mistakes. That the earth is a ball which is always turning upon its axis, and at the same time pursuing its rapid course round the sun; that the whole earth, which seems so great to us, is no more, in comparison to the universe, than a single grain of sand on a sea-beach miles in length, and that the sun alone is a million and a half times as large-all this was unknown to the Israelites. For them the earth was a disk, washed round by the ocean, over which the firmament rose like a giant cupola, while sun, moon, and stars moved on the inner surface of this vault.

An Israelite could easily imagine that, in six days of four and twenty hours each, the earth was changed from a chaos into a dwelling place for beasts and men. But now-a-days it does not take much learning to know that many ages elapsed between the time when the firm land gradually appeared and the day upon which a human being first drew breath upon it.

We shall not easily be convinced that the sun and moon announce God's judgments, or that they were made for the purpose of fixing man's reckoning of time. But we must place ourselves at the stand-point of an Israelite who was unacquainted with the causes of many of the phenomena of the heavens, for example of the eclipses of sun and moon, and who regulated his religious feasts principally by the reappearance of the moon after it had been for a time invisible without his being able to account for its disappearance.

We shall then find nothing unnatural in the rise of such beliefs, although they are altogether beside the truth.

If the value of the first account of the creation is very slight, when looked at from a scientific point of view, as a work of art, on the contrary, it is in the highest degree remarkable. If we compare our cosmogony with that of the Chaldees, which we just now glanced at, how far the latter falls short of it in beauty! The first chapter of Genesis has always been considered a masterpiece, and with good reason too! The tone of the narrative is simple and dignified. There are no extravagant conceptions, such as those of the Chaldee story, and this is certainly not the most grotesque which has been handed down from antiquity. There are no strange representations of the way in which God formed everything. God only speaks, and what he wishes to create exists. "He said: Let there be light! and there was light." That thought is nobly expressed!

The purity of taste with which our writer has composed his narrative bears testimony also to his reverence for God. The strange representations, which we meet elsewhere, did not rise, of course, from contempt for the Deity. The Chaldee saw nothing irreverent in the representation of the god Bel cutting his head off to make the dust into slime with his blood, and thence to shape a human form. It was only his way of expressing his belief that man is related to the Deity. We are in danger of being unfair towards those who express their feelings under forms which do not seem fitting to us. But yet there is something in these symbols which goes against our feelings. We can never speak of God in language dignified enough. Every representation, every description, is defective. And if we cannot keep silence on these matters, but must speak as best we can about Him and what He does, a sacred awe compels us to express our thoughts about God and his work in the simplest language

E

possible. From this point of view the first biblical account of the creation has a refreshing tone, which raises it above many of the stories and poems even of the Israelites. It seems to cry in our ears: Let honour be rendered to God!

We must not suppose, however, that the conception which the poet had formed of God was free from narrowness. That God rested from his work on the seventh day is an unworthy representation, for God is always working. Moreover, it sounds very strange to say that man was made after God's image. What, we ask, did the writer mean by this? Did he think of man as like God in soul or in body? It admits of no doubt that he meant in soul and body both. Of course man's spiritual characteristics, his intellect, his capacity for morality and piety, stood in the foreground of the writer's thoughts when he spoke of his being formed after God's image. But the Israelites of old times thought of God, as we shall often notice in other stories, as having a body like that of a man, and as enthroned above the heavenly sea; nor did they consider it impossible to see God. And so, too, our writer could think of man as being, even in body, God's likeness, just as a child is the likeness of his father.1

There are several things in the narrative which do not accord with our purer conception of God's being. We must not disguise this fact. If a man of our own time, brought up under Christianity, entertained such opinions, we could feel but small respect for the clearness of his understanding and the purity of his religious perceptions. But we must judge the writer by the times in which he wrote, and, so judged, he stands very high.

All the peoples of antiquity worshipped a number of superior beings, and made the powers of nature into gods. At

1 Genesis v. 3.

first the Israelites, like others, stood upon this level. They, too, once recognised the existence of numerous gods, and worshipped the powers of nature and the heavenly bodies, together with a great variety of other objects. It cost them much time and great efforts to shake themselves free from these ideas, and rise to the belief in one God, who is exalted above nature, and can be distinguished from her. Yet in the first account of the creation we find this belief. From the chastened simplicity of this poetical and childlike description of the formation of the universe, a voice falls upon our ear: There is one supreme being, whose plan is fulfilled, who must be adored as the creator, whose work praises its maker. And if upon the earth man has dominion over everything that is created, and all is subject to him, it is because he bears God's image.

O Lord! how great is thy name upon earth,

Whilst thou hast revealed thy glory in heaven!
When I look on thy heaven, the work of thy fingers,
The moon and the stars thou hast placed thereon,

What is man that thou art mindful of him?

And the son of man that thou carest for him?

Thou hast made him but little less than a deity,

And hast crowned him with honour and majesty.

Thou makest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands,
And thou puttest all things under his feet,

Small and great cattle together,

And the beasts of the field also,

The birds of the air, and the fish of the sea

That go by the paths of the seas.

Lord! how great is thy name above all the world!1

1 Psalm viii.

THE

CHAPTER II.

PARADISE.

GEN. II. 4-24.

HE first book of the Bible is generally called by a Greek name, Genesis, that is, Origin. It is the first of a group of five books called, in Hebrew, the Thorah (that is, the Law), and, in Greek, the Pentateuch (that is, the book in five parts), the writing of which is referred by tradition to Moses, since the laws which make up the greater part of it were ascribed to him. We have already told you how little ground there is for this tradition, in the Introduction, and by-and-by we shall establish the point more fully.

Now, this book of Genesis comprises a great number of legends, all of which take us back to a hoary antiquity, and make up a kind of preliminary history of Israel. In speaking of the earliest generations of mankind, and especially of the tribal fathers of the Israelites, they give us an insight into the modes of thought of the writers, and on that account are very precious contributions to our knowledge of the Israelite religion. Besides this, they give us a certain amount of information, though of a very vague description, as to the origin of the Israelite people and the tribes connected with it.

The book of Genesis was not written by one man, but was put together from works of very different dates; works, too, whose authors by no means all stood upon the same religious level. This very chapter will furnish us with illustrations of the fact, for immediately after the first account of the creation, which we have just examined, a second follows, which by no means agrees with it.

Here, then, is the second account of the creation :

When Yahweh made earth and heaven, no plants were