indeed, there is a
resemblance. _The historian everywhere speaks as an optical observer
stationed on a point of our world, and surveying from this the heavens
and the earth, and speaking of them as seen in this manner by his bodily
eye._ The sun, and moon, and stars, are servants of the earth, lighted
up to garnish and to cheer it, and to be the guardians of its times and
seasons. Other uses he knows not for them: certainly of other uses he
does not speak. The distances, magnitudes, orbicular motions,
gravitating powers, and projectile forces of the planets and of the
stars, are all out of the circle of his history, and probably beyond his
knowledge. Inspiration does not make men _omniscient_. It does not teach
them the scientific truths of astronomy, or chemistry, or botany, nor
any science as such. Inspiration is concerned with teaching _religious_
truths, and such facts or occurrences as are connected immediately with
illustrating, or with impressing them on the mind." Thus far Dr. Stuart
and Mr. Penn,--men whose evidence on this special head must be
sufficient to show that it is not merely geologists who have recognized
an _optical_ or _visual_ character in the Mosaic history of creation.
And certainly the inference deduced from the admitted _fact_, that is,
the inference that the optical description must have been founded on a
revelation addressed to the eye,--a revelation by vision,--does seem a
fair and legitimate one. The revelation must have been either a
revelation in words or ideas, or a revelation of scenes and events
pictorially exhibited. Failing, however, to record its own history, it
leaves the student equally at liberty, so far as _external_ evidence is
concerned, to take up either view; while, so far as _internal_ evidence
goes, the presumption seems all in favor of revelation by vision; for,
while no reason can be assigned why, in a revelation by word or idea,
appearances which took place ere there existed a human eye should be
_optically_ described, nothing can be more natural or obvious than that
they should be so described, had they been revealed by vision as a piece
of _eye-witnessing_. It seems, then, at least eminently probable that
such was the mode or form of the revelation in this case, and that he
who saw by vision on the Mount the pattern of the Tabernacle and its
sacred furniture, and in the Wilderness of Horeb the bush burning but
not consumed,--types and symbols of the coming dispensation