nowledge of exact scientific
facts in a prescientific age need not be denied. It is, however, a
question whether God could have communicated such facts to man three
thousand years ago without robbing him of his personality and changing
him into a mechanism. So far as the ways of God are known from
experience, observation, history, and other sources, he has always
treated with respect and consideration the powers and faculties of his
chief creature. "Had inspired men," says Dods,[31] "introduced into
their writings information which anticipated the discoveries of
science, their state of mind would be inconceivable, and revelation
would be a source of confusion. God's methods are harmonious with one
another, and as he has given men natural faculties to acquire
scientific knowledge and historical information, he did not stultify
this gift by imparting such knowledge in a miraculous and
unintelligible manner." The same truth is expressed by H. E. Ryle in
these words: "We do not expect instruction upon matters of physical
inquiry from revelation in the written Word. God's other gifts to men,
of learning, perseverance, calculation, and the like, have been and are
a true source of revelation. But scripture supplies no short cut for
the intellect. Where {58} man's intellectual powers may hope to attain
to the truth, be it in the region of historical, scientific, and
critical study, we have no warrant to expect an anticipation of results
through the interposition of supernatural instruction in the letter of
scripture.... Scripture is divinely inspired, not to release men from
the toil of mental inquiry, but to lead and instruct their souls in
things of eternal salvation."[32] This is not an arbitrary limitation
of the scope of inspiration; it is a conclusion based upon a careful
consideration of the facts of science and of the Bible, which seem to
furnish sufficient evidence that the biblical writers were not in any
marked degree in advance of their age in the knowledge of physical
facts or laws. In other words, the Bible is primarily a book of
religion, hence religion, and not science, is to be looked for in its
pages. Altogether too much time has been spent in an effort to find in
it scientific truth in a scientific form. Such attempts clearly
disregard the purpose of the biblical writers as interpreted in the New
Testament.

And could a Divine Providence have chosen a different method? Even now
discoveries foll