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the light of revelation, connects itself with the idea of a promised redeemer or deliverer. In most religions we find some deity or hero who fills the place of a saviour and intercessor. Bel, Osiris, and Vishnu have this function, and this element enters largely into most systems of heathenism, in which it allies itself with sacrifice, a priesthood, and too often with base and venal priestly absolution. Let us not wonder that this was the case of old, when we see what has happened to Christianity in modern times. Jesus of Nazareth, who represented Himself as the fulfilment of all the ancient prophecies of a coming redeemer, and who stigmatizes all previous pretenders to that title as "thieves and robbers," instituted no priesthood, founded no temples or altars, required no special emblems, whether sculptured or pictorial, and no special vestments or ceremonies. Yet how soon there grew up among His professed followers all these things in as full development as in the more ancient systems! We may, therefore, ask, if Christianity now appears in this guise, can we detect any similar outgrowths in the ancient heathen religions? With this clew in our hands we can thread the labyrinth of primitive mythology, and shall find that the old idea of a coming hero and deliverer to remedy all human evils -that seed of the woman who was to bruise the serpent's head—is the root from which sprung many of the most perplexing features of the ancient cults. It would require too much space to follow this into details; but I may refer to a few leading points now coming out from the mass of recent discoveries and discussions.

Nothing is more certain than that throughout heathen antiquity a mother goddess-mother of men and also mother of a god, hero or deliverer-formed a central point of worship, and whatever adoration might be given to any other or higher god or gods, she was the favorite intercessor of the people, just as the Blessed Virgin now is in the Catholic and Greek churches. Sometimes she is absolutely a goddess, sometimes has very human attributes; sometimes she is identified with the moon or the evening star. Sometimes she has a pure and holy character, sometimes her worship is licentious and unchaste. Under all these forms, however, ner main attributes are the same, and it is now generally admitted that ishtar of Chaldea, Astarte or Ashtaroth of Syria, Athor and possibly Isis of Egypt, Artemis of Greece and Asia Minor, and some forms of Aphrodite, are modifications of the same original idea. Endless hypothetical solutions may be given of this ancient worship, but we have lately had an authoritative explanation in those interesting deluge tablets of ancient Chaldea first introduced to English readers by the late George Smith, and which, though known to us only in Assyrian copies of the time of the Hebrew kings, were probably taken from very ancient Chaldean originals. In these Ishtar appears in the character of the mother of men, and as mourning the death of her children devoured by the flood, and beseeching the gods to deliver them. This is the most ancient document in which the goddess appears, and we see at once that as the mother of men she

represents the biblical Isha or Eve; but we know more of her than this. She has a favorite son, Tammuz or Adonis, who is murdered by his brother Adar ;* she mourns his death and teaches her daughters annually to weep for Tammuz, and she even descends into Hades to rescue him from the under world. This is the ancient Chaldean and Syrian version of the pitiful story of Cain and Abel, though, in the legend as we have it, there seems to be a confusion between the murdered Abel and the surviving Seth of the Bible. In any case, Ishtar is the mother of a deity or redeemer, and as such she is worshipped, and is regarded as having a control over the destinies of her children in the spirit-world.

Thus we learn that a story of sin and suffering, which in Genesis is merely a family tragedy, becomes the source of an infinity of brilliant and poetical myths; that the promise of a redeemer for fallen man leads to the apotheosis of the first mother; that under these myths and allegories was originally hidden that promise of a Saviour whose future coming was announced and celebrated by Jewish prophets; that this blessed revelation became by gradual corruption and embellishment the nucleus of complex systems of idolatry; that under it were hidden nature-worship, ancestorworship, and the worship of humanity, the dealings of God with fallen man and the promise of a Redeemer. This may appear fanciful to some, but I think that an unbiassed study of the most recent results of investigation into ancient mythology will indicate its correctness. Let me now turn back to our original subject, and point out how remarkably such discoveries show the relation of the Bible to ancient history and archæology, as well as to the interpretation of physical nature.

The Bible, we are often told, was not intended to teach science. Certainly not; revealed science would be an impossibility, and it is of the very nature of science to work out its own results from its own data; but the fact that we have seen the human mind necessarily elaborating for itself a religion of nature and developing this into systems of idolatry, subversive of the true ends of religion, rendered it necessary that a revelation from God should take definite ground on this question. Hence we find at the outset that great fundamental doctrine of a beginning and a Creator, to which we have already referred.

But, starting from this doctrine, it follows that nature must be an ordered system or cosmos, not such a mere mixture and struggle of forces as might result from blind chance, or from the conflict of antagonistic demigods or spirits of good and evil; hence we have an order of the construction of the universe, given most naturally in the similitude of working days, with a rest at the end, a great Sabbath which furnishes the precedent for the weekly rest of man. This order of creation further gives a good opportunity for showing the higher and lower planes on which natural things exist, and that while merely natural and all lower than man they have their relative ranks in the works of God, and this not at all in

* This, according to Sayce (Hibbert Lectures), is the oldest form of the legend

the order of those myths which would place atmospheric phenomena and heavenly bodies in the front rank of gods. In like manner opportunity is taken of this orderly narration to group and include under the idea of monotheism the sea, the mountains, the groves, the powerful and ferocious wild beasts, and every other object that might give rise to the idea of local gods or of warring and discordant spirits of good or evil. Such thoughts constitute a full justification of the cosmogony and early history of the first book of the Bible.

Let it be noted here that such doctrine of creation, to be of value, must be not science but revelation, communicated, it may be, in vision to some primitive seer, and enlightening him as to the creative work sufficiently to serve the uses of primitive religion. What its relation might be to any scientific knowledge of nature subsequently worked out by man did not concern the early believers in one God the Creator; yet it is remarkable how nearly the short sketch in Genesis coincides with the results of the science of the earth as in more recent times it has grown up.

I have already referred to the orderly development first of physical and then of organic nature and of man, as remarkably in accordance with the testimony of the earth itself. Geology, properly so called, though the time it demands is long, goes back but a part of the way to the origin of the world, but physical astronomy carries us farther, and we may now with some certainty correlate the records of science and revelation from the condition of a mere dark formless mass of matter or form, an incandescent nebula to a finished world.

The following short statement, taken with a few verbal emendations from a recent paper by the writer,* may serve to show the general accordance as at present understood.

"1. In both we are struck by the evidence of an orderly process in which inorganic arrangements are first perfected, and then the organic world of plants and animals, culminating in man himself. In both we read the unity of nature and a grand uniformity of development and progression from the beginning onward.

"2. Though geology carries us only a part of the way to the genesis of the earth itself, yet when it joins its facts and conclusions to those of physical astronomy we reach a formless and void condition, a nebulous mixture of all materials, chaotic and undifferentiated, as the beginning of our planet and our system. Physical astronomy is also making plain to us the fact that the first stage in the conversion of dead and cold matter into worlds consists in the development of those vibrations which cause light, heat, and electricity. The only physical idea of a nascent planetary system is that of a self-luminous and condensing nebula. Light is the first demand of science, but such light can at first only be diffused. The next stage is its concentration around a central luminary, and then comes the distinction between light and darkness, day and night. This is clearly

* Prepared for the Convention of the Evangelical Alliance at Florence, 1891.

the conception of the writer of Genesis i. as much as of modern physicists.

"3. After the first formation of a crust on our nascent earth, the geologist postulates an ocean, and he finds that all the stratified rocks composing our continents bear evidence of having been deposited in the waters and elevated therefrom to constitute land. This also is the conception of Genesis. The fiat, "Let the dry land appear," implies its emergence from the ocean.

"4. Now, however, we find two apparent points of difference between Genesis and modern science. In Genesis the introduction of vegetation immediately follows the production of the continents, and precedes the creation of animals. In Genesis also the perfection of the arrangements of the solar system follows this early vegetation, constituting the work of the fourth creative day. Of all this geology professes to know nothing; yet it has some dim perception that the old historian must, after all, be right. Why should land have existed a long time without any vegetable clothing? Would it not be natural and even necessary that the plant should precede the animal? May not the great beds of carbon and ironore in the oldest rocks of the earth's crust be the residua of an exuberant vegetation otherwise unknown to us? Again, may not the final gathering of the luminous atmosphere around the sun, and the final regulation of the distance of our satellite-the moon-have been of later date than the origin of the first dry land? There is nothing to contradict this, and some things to make it probable. We know that in all the millions of years since the first crust formed on the earth the sun must have undergone great contraction, and reasons of at least a very plausible character have been assigned for the belief that in those early ages the moon may have been greatly nearer the earth than at present. Thus, while as astronomers and geologists we may consider these statements as yet unproven by science, we cannot condemn them as untrue or even improbable.

"5. When we come to the introduction of animal life, the parallelism becomes obvious. The great incoming of the sheretz or swarmer in the seas corresponds with those early palæozoic ages which have been emphatically called the ages of marine invertebrates. Not that land animals had not appeared, but they were altogether insignificant in numbers and importance. In no respect has the author of Genesis been more unfairly treated than in his reference to the Tanninim of the fifth day. The word has been translated' whales,' and still more absurdly monsters.' As used elsewhere in the Bible, the word Tannin seems invariably to denote a reptile, either serpent or crocodile. It first occurs as the name of Moses' rod when turned into a serpent. It is used afterward for a large predaceous animal inhabiting large rivers, armed with scales, and used as an emblem of Egypt and Babylon.* Evidently it is a generic name applied

* See the author's "Origin of the World," p. 405.

by the Hebrews to the larger serpents and to the crocodile. If, then, great Tanninim and flying creatures are represented as immediately succeeding the marine invertebrates, the writer means to picture an age in which reptiles and flyers, which may be either birds or flying reptiles, were dominant. He has before his eyes a picture exactly similar to that represented in the sketches of the Age of Reptiles,' by the late Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins. The quadrupeds of the land obviousì come into their proper place on the sixth day as immediate predecessors and contemporaries of man.

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6. The comparative recency of man is one of the best-established geological facts, and while, as in the second chapter of Genesis, man may be said to have made his appearance in the latest tertiary or quaternary period along with a group of land animals suited to him and to the condition of the earth when he appeared, on the other hand, his place in the general chronology of the animal kingdom is that of its latest member. Farther, even since the appearance and wide diffusion of man there has been a great continental depression, which is connected with the extinction of certain early tribes of men, and also of a great number of the quadrupeds of the land. It is, therefore, undeniable that we have in the geological history an equivalent of the biblical deluge."

When we are confronted with the current forms of agnostic and materialistic infidelity, we should bear in mind that these are not direct results of science, but rather of certain current forms of philosophical dogma which have been so presented as to be captivating to scientific men. We should also bear in mind that the scientific specialist is too apt to bury himself so deeply in his own researches that he can see little else, and that few theologians will take pains to make themselves familiar either with nature or with the interpretations of it given by modern science.

Still in the last resort men must have some religion, and we find even positivists and agnostics, though falling back on mere atoms and forces which are their substitute for God, desiring some ennobling influence for their own lives, and seeking for it either in the vastness of the universe, like some of the old physical religions, or in humanity itself, like those which were euhemeristic. Thus we find that man must have a religion, and that there can be no form of infidelity without some substitute for God, though this is necessarily less high and perfect than the Creator Himself, while destitute of His fatherly attributes. Further, our agnostic and positivist friends even admit their need of a Saviour, since they hold that there must be some elevating influence to raise us from our present evils and failures. Lastly, when we find the ablest advocates of such philosophy differing hopelessly among themselves, we may well see in this an evidence of the need of a divine revelation. Revelation informs us of the true end and significance of all that is to be found in the living God, while it has compassion on those who without its light "seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after and find Him, though He be not far from

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