ow one another so fast in the realm of science that no
book remains a standard work for more than a few years. It seems
obvious, therefore, that a book written thousands of years ago could
not remain a standard scientific work for all times. {59} But assuming
for the sake of argument that God had communicated the knowledge of
scientific facts to these writers--evidence for which is entirely
lacking--what would have been the result? Later occurrences suggest
what might have happened. The great mass of people would have looked
upon teachers of strange science as heretics and madmen, and would have
rejected not only their scientific teaching but their religious
teaching as well. What a loss that would have been to mankind! No
serious loss would come to men if they were left a while longer in
ignorance concerning scientific matters, but very serious loss would
come to them by continuing in their lower religious and ethical beliefs
and practices. The only way to make the higher religious truth
understood was to present it in a form easily apprehended by the
people. To do this is the chief purpose of the primitive,
_prescientific science_ of the Old Testament Scriptures.

The peculiar element in scripture is the spirit and religious
atmosphere which permeate all its parts and give to the Bible a unique
place among the literatures of the world. This is the divine element
due to inspiration. It is this element which establishes a gulf
between the Hebrew account of creation and the cosmologies of other
nations. Though the biblical writers had very much the same idea about
the form and general {60} arrangement of the visible world as we find
among other peoples--ideas that have satisfied at all times the
majority of men even among nations with a pretense to culture, namely,
the cosmology of appearances--these ideas were all connected with their
sublime faith in Jehovah: to his omnipotence they referred the
existence of the world, and they made all its changes depend entirely
on his will. In their monotheistic religion they secured the
foundation of a clear and simple cosmology different from the grotesque
cosmologies of other nations and yet not beyond the demands of men of a
primitive type and of simple mind, who were full of a lively
imagination, but not much accustomed to analyze phenomena or their
causes.

In this connection it may prove helpful to remember what, according to
the biblical viewpoint and in the li