THE TESTIMONY OF FACTS.

At the outset it will be seen to be foreign to our purpose to introduce here any evidence in proof of the reality of the process of Evolution. But the existing evidence that things have been brought to their present condition by a slow process of succession, in which the more simple forms preceded the more complex, is unanimously conceded by all who have investigated any branch of natural science, and effectually contradicts the sudden and separate origin of things deducible from the account in Genesis. With this, it will be sufficient, if we point out in a brief way the facts discovered by science which contradict the account of creation in Genesis, whether we accept the sequence of plants and animals revealed by a study of fossils and living kinds, as indicating a genetic connection, or as being insufficient grounds for such a conception.

The two ac

An origi- counts of Gene

From internal evidence, Genesis is not homogeneous in its composition, as we have already seen. nally detached portion having a different immediate sis and their source, terminates with the third verse of the second chapter, and it is quite evident that, in dividing the

contradictions

as to the Creation of Man.

text into chapters, a mistake has been committed in this instance; the second chapter should begin, if an arbitrary division into chapters is intended to help the comprehension of the text, at its fourth verse. That these two accounts contradict each other is plain. The first account affirms that when God created man, "male and female created he them." The second account as positively declares that man was created in the person of Adam as one sex and solitary. Finding that such a creation was incomplete and useless, the Deity made woman not out of the ground or dust, but of a bone of man himself. At one time one can readily conceive that such a belief could be seriously entertained when we read the accounts given by existing savages of their own origin. But it never, for one moment, occurs to us to credit such conceptions. The idealists have been busy with this account of the origin of woman. It is taken as symbolical of the marriage state, of the dependence of woman upon man, "bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh." But to the uncultured races their fairystories are real, they believe them as Roman Catholics. believe modern miracles, and Protestants, ancient miracles. Among the people who originated this fairytale of the origin of the first pair, the story passed for circumstantial fact. It satisfied their natural enquiry as to the origin of things, and it arose out of their mental status. But to ask us, who have gone beyond their mental condition, to still accept it as true, is unreasonable, and it is quite impossible that we should comply with such a request.

In the second account the events of creation are given in a different order from the first, and this account is throughout more circumstantial. The garden of Eden.

is described, and this has been lately identified with the mythological center of the ancient Chaldean Pantheon. Before both accounts were cast in their present fossil condition in the Hebrew Bible, they probably had a connection, as we have seen in a preceding chapter, and had undergone a development in which both had lost something of their original form, the first account more, the last less.

The first account in the first chapter of Genesis may be now compared with the facts ascertained by science. We must believe that the text should be understood literally when it speaks of "day" and "night," because with this reading it agrees with the context. From the alternation of light and darkness sprang "day" and "night," and "the evening and the morning were one day." To take these days as indefinite periods is a proof of a want of exact thought; it is an effort to reconcile an exploded statement with the new facts, rather than cut loose at once from demonstrated error. The Hebrew word Yom not only means a day of twenty-four hours, but it expressly means day in this connection.

It is something also that the translators of the Bible give us the word "day," and the onus is entirely on the opponents of this reading to show that these translators were not justified in translating "Yom" by the English word "day." It is clear also that it is only at the newer demands of science for more time in the creation of the world, that the "Harmonists" have been tampering with the word "Yom," and displaying an ingenuity and wisdom in their conjectures before which inspiration itself must "pale its ineffectual fires." The charge of blasphemy recoils on the heads of those

who unintelligently handle things, they themselve sd e-
clare in advance to be sacred. We read in the fifth
verse of Genesis I. that God called the darkness "night,"
which cannot refer to "cosmical" darkness, since the
Hebrew word for night, “La-y'lah," is derived from a
root "la-ah," to cease, to rest; and "La-y'lah
La-y'lah" means
rest-time, bed-time, hence our day and night are meant
on the very first day. Moreover, the Hebrew term for
day, "Yom," means "day," and nothing else in the
ordinary,acceptance of the word. And though, like
the English word "day," it may have a figurative value,
yet in an historical narrative, as Genesis is assumed to
be, the word has its natural, literal meaning, and all
attempts to interpret it differently do violence to the
spirit of the original Hebrew text and language. Both
the Talmud and the Christian Fathers (notably St.
Augustine) insist that the natural meaning of words in
the Scriptures shall not be dropped to give them a
fanciful and doubtful interpretation.

But even granted that we take the less natural meaning of the word "day" as the proper rendering, and that by this word "day" any conceivable measurement of time is intended, it is only on the fourth of these days that the sun appears. Astronomy, if it shows anything, proves that the satellites of a central orb, as separate masses of matter, must have been projected from it and at one time formed a part of such a body. The relation between the earth and the sun, as we Relation" be- gather it from astronomical sources, is a different one tween the Earth from that intended by the account in Genesis. We cannot conceive that the sun or the moon were created for the benefit of the earth or its inhabitants. Night and day are not necessities in the sense that we could

and the Sun.