philology has thrown
on the unity of language, our growing knowledge of the uniformity of
the constructive and other habits of primitive men, and of the
condition of man in the earlier historic time, the greater
completeness of our conceptions as to the phenomena of life and their
relation to organizable matters--all these and many other aspects of
the later progress of science must tend to bring it back into greater
harmony with revealed religion.

On the other side, there has been a growing disposition on the part of
theologians to inquire as to the actual views of nature presented in
the Bible, and to separate these from those accretions of obsolete
philosophy which have been too often confounded with them. With
respect to the first chapter of Genesis more especially, there has
been a decided growth in the acceptance of those principles for which
I contended in 1860. In illustration of this I may refer to the fact
that in 1862 it was precisely on these principles that Dr. McCaul
conducted his able defence of the Mosaic record of creation in the
"Aids to Faith," which may almost be regarded as an authoritative
expression of the views of orthodox Christians in opposition to those
of the once notorious "Essays and Reviews." Equally significant is the
adoption of this method of interpretation by Dr. Tayler Lewis in his
masterly "Special Introduction" to the first chapter of Genesis, in
the American edition of Lange's Commentary, edited by Dr. Philip
Schaff; and the manifest approval with which the lucid statement of
the relations of Geology and the Bible by Dr. Arnold Guyot, was
received by the great gathering of divines at the Convention of the
Evangelical Alliance in New York, in 1873, bears testimony to the same
fact. The author has also had the honor of being invited to
illustrate this mode of reconciliation to the students of two of the
most important theological colleges in America, in lectures afterwards
published and widely circulated.

The time is perhaps nearer than we anticipate when Natural Science and
Theology will unite in the conviction that the first chapter of
Genesis "stands alone among the traditions of mankind in the wonderful
simplicity and grandeur of its words," and that "the meaning of these
words is always a meaning ahead of science--not because it anticipates
the results of science, but because it is independent of them, and
runs as it were round the outer margin of all possible discovery."[1