h any other. As science it would have been
dead; and as spiritual truth it would have been a hindrance.

But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to communicate, and we can read
them still.

He had to teach that the world as we see it, and all therein contained,
was created out of nothing; and that the spiritual, and not the
material, was the source of all existence. He had to teach that the
creation was not merely orderly, but progressive; going from the
formless to the formed; from the orderless to the ordered; from the
inanimate to the animate; from the plant to the animal; from the lower
animal to the higher; from the beast to the man; ending with the rest of
the Sabbath, the type of the highest, the spiritual, life. Nothing,
certainly, could more exactly match the doctrine of Evolution than
this. It is, in fact, the same thing said from a different point of
view. All this is done by casting the account into the form of a week of
work with the Sabbath at the end. In so constructing his account, the
writer made use of a mode of teaching used commonly enough in the Bible.
The symbolical use of the number seven is common in other inspired
writers. The symbolical use of periods of time is not without example.
That the purpose of the account was not to teach great truths, but to
give men information upon scientific questions, is incredible. And, in
fact, if we look in this account for literal history, it becomes very
difficult to give any meaning to what is said of the seventh day, or to
reconcile the interpretation of it with our Lord's words concerning the
Sabbath, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' There is no more
reason for setting aside Geology, because it does not agree in detail
with Genesis, than there is for setting aside Astronomy because all
through the Old Testament the sun is spoken of as going round the earth.

And when the writer of Genesis passes from creation in general to man
in particular, it is still clear that he has no mission to tell those
for whom he was writing by what processes man was formed, or how long
those processes lasted. This was as alien from his purpose as it would
have been to tell what every physiologist now knows of the processes by
which every individual man is developed from a small germ to a breathing
and living infant. He takes men--and he could not but take men as he
sees them--with their sinful nature, with their moral and spiritual
capacity, with their relations of sex