more or less strong in different minds, giving life and vigour to all our earnest convictions, cherishing our highest aspirations, animating our dearest hopes. Without faith of this character, nothing great was ever achieved in this world.* This is a faith justified by our experience of the course of the world; and is not at variance with reason. It may be that what we accept by a faith of this rational kind is something that we have not actually experienced. We have, however, experienced so much that is like or analogous to it, whilst we have experienced nothing with which it is at variance, that we reasonably accept it as matter of faith until the contrary be shown; that is, until some reason is given for withholding our faith. The whole is in fact governed by reason. Faith has indeed no lasting power, and its fruits are never safe unless it flow from rational conviction.

What is the source from which this extraordinary view of the Deity and of His dealings with mankind is derived?

We find it as a supposed Divine revelation contained in the Bible-a collection of ancient writings, said to be divinely inspired, relating to the early history of the Jews, a very credulous and otherwise singular people, believing themselves to have been selected from among

* Aptly did the Times describe the construction of the Mont Cenis Tunnel as an immense effort of scientific faith, genius and patience.'

the nations of the earth as the objects of God's especial care, and to be under His direct and immediate government. The book itself abounds in marvellous stories of God's early dealings with His chosen people, which were no doubt believed by the Jews (as the Greek Mythology was believed by the Greeks) and accepted as their real history, although with our greater knowledge and more enlarged experience of the Divine government of the world, we can look upon them in no other light than as being incredible legends.

The book opens with an account of the creation of the world in six days, utterly at variance with what astronomy teaches us of the organisation of the universe, and with what geology teaches us of the history of the structure of our own portion of it, the earth. And the difficulty arising from this contradiction is not to be got over by the explanation, sometimes given, that it is a partial and imperfect account only of the creation, not intended to impart astronomical or geological truths. The account is not imperfect only, it is altogether erroneous; and the fact that it is so makes it impossible for us to believe that its author was divinely inspired. Writers divinely inspired, though they might not see fit to impart astronomical or geological truths, would, we may feel sure, have taken care to state nothing inconsistent with those truths.

Attempts are indeed made by our clerical instructors to reconcile the teachings of geology with the Mosaic

account of the creation, by the suggestion that days do not mean days but geological periods, and the like; but such devices are quite unworthy of their authors as ministers of the God of Truth. There can be no reasonable doubt that the author of the Book of Genesis meant to give a real account of the creation of the world.

In this book we have accounts of God walking bodily as a finite Being in the Garden of Eden and conversing with Adam and Eve. He visits and converses with Abraham, and on the occasion of the building of the Tower of Babel, before proceeding to the dispersion of the builders, He deems it proper to go in person to see whether the accounts that have reached Him are true.

Then we have angels familiarly visiting the earth, and there were giants in those days, and men living to the age of many hundreds of years.*

The story of the Flood and Noah's Ark it is impos

There is some curious speculation of the late Archbishop Whately, on the subject of the longevity of the early patriarchs, in a Latin pamphlet, published by him anonymously at Stuttgard in 1849, entitled Tractatus tres. (Metzler.) In the first of the three Tracts, the archbishop contends that the statements in the second and third chapter of Genesis as to Adam and Eve being naked and not ashamed are to be understood literally and not allegorically. Adam and Eve were in Paradise without sexual passion, and, eating of the tree of life, they would have lived on for ever. (Paradise, it is presumed, being peopled by some harmless mode of vegetation with a race of innocent and immortal beings.) They, however, sinned (being, as we are, liable to sin) by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the effect of which was to

sible to believe, consistently with our meteorological and engineering knowledge: a universal deluge; the building of the ark-a vessel, if the story of its contents be true, more capacious than one of our largest ships of war; the provisioning of it and getting together of the infinite variety of animals, to say nothing of how their stalls were to be cleansed; many of the animals, according to one account, in numbers of seven males and seven females of each species; according to the other account (for there are two accounts of the ark, differing from one another) all of them in pairs only; the whole accomplished by Noah and his family in a very

awaken within them the sexual passion, and they became ashamed that they were naked, and made themselves coverings of fig-leaves.

This was the fall; after which Adam knew his wife.

As to the knowledge of good and evil that was to follow on the eating of the fruit, the Archbishop supposes the good to have been the pleasures connected with the sexual passion; the evil the calamities to be produced by the operation of the principle of population as explained by Malthus. These evils would have been much aggravated had the race retained the power of living for ever. Adam and Eve were no longer

therefore to be allowed to eat of the fruit of the tree of life and live for ever, because the principle of population made death a necessity.

The longevity of the early races he explains from the fact that the virtues of the fruit of the tree of life inherent in Adam and Eve endured through many generations before they were worn out.

The Archbishop refers to the Tractatus in a letter to Mrs. Hill, published in his Life, and the authorship is there acknowledged by the editor. -Life, ii. p. 285.

In conversation with Mr. Senior (p. 400) he adverts to the longevity theory. The nature of the tree of life has not,' he says, 'been well explained. I suspect that the use of the fruit completely repaired the waste of the body, and that it imparted to the constitution of our first parents a vigour which gradually wore out.'

limited period of time. The difficulty might of course be got over, as all difficulties may, by the supposition of a miracle, but this would not be in accordance with the Scripture, which clearly refers to natural means only.*

Moreover the Jewish history is full of prodigies: the serpent moving erect and conversing with Eve; the ass of Balaam to which an angel appears, invisible to Balaam, and which is gifted with human speech; the story of Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt; Jonas swallowed by a whale (the small throat of the whale being, it is presumed, miraculously enlarged for the purpose), and living three days in its belly.

Of a higher order of the marvellous is the sun standing still above Gibeon,† and the moon over the valley of Ascalon; the passage of the Red Sea by Moses

* There is a moral difficulty connected with the question of the Flood. Why, it may reasonably be asked, was a family preserved in order to perpetuate the fallen race? And if this family found such favour in the sight of God as that it was proper that they should be rescued from the general doom, why was the curse revived in their descendants?

† To the Jews, in their ignorance of astronomy, it may well have appeared an ordinary miracle, by no means incredible, that the sun should stand still a whole day above Gibeon in order to afford time to complete the victory of Joshua over the Amorites; but to the man of science of the present day it is quite otherwise. To the former, as Professor Tyndall says, ‘the miracle probably consisted of the stoppage of a ball of fire less than a yard in diameter, whilst to the other it would be the stoppage of an orb fourteen hundred thousand times the earth in size. And even accepting the interpretation which instructed divines now put upon this text, that Joshua dealt with what was apparent merely, but that what really occurred was the suspension of the earth's rotation, I think a greater reserve in accepting the miracle, and a right to demand stronger

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