MR. GLADSTONE ON THE "STORY OF CREATION."
MR. GLADSTONE, in his new book on Scripture, makes the very true remark that in considering how far the story of Creation could be told adequately and impressively to men who were to learn from it purely religious and moral truths, and to whom our modern ideas of science were alto- gether out of reach, "any man whose labour and duty for several scores of years have included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is pro (auto perhaps in a better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of natural sciences as such." And he makes good his words. We do not think that the story of Creation has ever been treated with so large a sagacity and so full an appreciation of what could and what could not be taught to primitive and, as we may say, infantine man, as it has been by Mr. Gladstone. In the first place, the object must have been, as he points out, to teach man his relation to God, and in the next place, his relation to the universe in which he found himself, and, further, that it was not by a single act of creation that human nature had been moulded ; that the development of man had been moulded by steps and degrees, "by a plan which, stated in rough outline, may stir your faculties and help those around to the truth through the genial action of wonder, delight, and gratitude." And in treating of the rather strongly marked steps or epochs of creative energy in the story of Creation, Mr. Gladstone says that it seems "to have been vital to the efficiency of this lesson from such a point of view, that it should have been sharply broken up into parts, although there might be in Nature nothing, at any precise points of breakage or transition, to correspond physically with these divisions. They would become intelligible, significant, and useful, on a comparison of the several processes in their developed state, and of the vast and measureless differences which in that state they severally present to contemplation. As when a series of scenes are now made to move along before the eye of a spectator, his attention is not fixed upon the joints which divide them, but on the scenes themselves, yet the joints constitute a framework, as it were, for each, and the idea of each is made more distinct and lively than it would have been if, without any sort of division, they had run into one another." (pp. 45-46.) Mr. Gladstone applies these principles with what we may call a statesmanlike insight and subtlety to the story, and what are called the" days," in other words, the epochs of Creation. He shows us that the great object of the proem to the Bible was to show God beyond and above and behind the universe, and not as a mere part of it,— not as the other nations outside Israel conceived him, as posi- tively growing out of it ;—indeed, though the polytheism of the early world is now abandoned, and we no longer suppose that gods were evolved in every part of the world to suit that special part, yet the cultivated men of our own day have taken refuge instead in a Pantheism which makes God a gradual development of the future, rather than an eternal reality of all time, a view which represents perhaps, as nearly as anything can, M. Renan's vague philosophy of the universe. Now, of course, the declaration of God as the Creator of all things visible and invisible, was in sharp contrast to all the The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture. By the Bight Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P. London : W. badger, Limited. G.. 564
polytheistic or pantheistic conceptions of gods or God as involved in or evolved out of Nature by the upward drift of the universe itself ; and it is as effectual a blow to modern materialism as it is to the ancient conceptions of the apotheosis of heroes and emperors. The object of the Creation story was to teach, in the first place, the absolute dependence of all men on God ; and in the second place, to teach man that his place in the universe had long been de- signed for him, and gradually prepared by a long series of fatherly acts. Now this could only be done by appealing to the pictures of material phenomena actually before man's eyes, and showing in some detail, if not exactly how his world had come to be, yet at all events by what sort of methods it had come to be what it was. And, further, man was to be taught that all this labour of preparation led up to the idea of rest, seeing that it is not merely human weakness which looks for rest after labour, but that in some sense God himself had consecrated the idea of rest no less than the idea of labour, by declaring that he rested after his own creative acts. These are the general conceptions, then, mainly involved in the Creation story,—monotheism, gradual evolution, labour and rest as equally divine and human, and human because they are divine,—as Mr. Gladstone conceives them ; and then he puts the question whether there is anything in that story which is in direct opposition to the teaching of physical science as we now know it. His answer is, that if we have regard to what it was possible to convey to primitive man without attempting to convey distinctions which are entirely modern, and neither would nor could have carried any meaning at all to those minds for the benefit of which the story was first told, there is no contradiction between the teaching of Science and the teaching of the story of Creation,—that story being under- stood exclusively as a popular story not intended to show the relations of cause and effect, but the broad facts which alone could have been of any service to the mind of a childish and unawakened being. Mr. Gladstone believes that the most modern science confirms instead of invalidating the physical conceptions of Genesis,—for example, that light existed before the various sources of light were concen- trated into luminous centres or suns ; that in all probability, looking from the geocentric and not the heliocentric point of view, the earth must have emerged at the centre of a sort of luminous mist before there was any distinct sun visible in the heavens; and that vegetable life may very well have preceded the era when the sun and moon, as we now know them, would have been recognised as the great individual sources of light to the earth; that vegetable life must have precedeil animal life on the earth ; and, further, that the order of the evolution of the different genera, as given in Genesis, is, with an exception in relation to the reptiles,—if the "creeping things" of the first chapter of Genesis really denote the specific genus of reptiles, which is doubtful,—approximately correct, at least quite as correct as was necessary in order to give a true conception of the relation of man to his fellow- creatures in the universe, and to his Creator. He points out that the nebular theory would suggest that a solid nucleus disengaged itself slowly from the world of incandescent gas around it, and that, as no word probably existed in the Hebrew tongue to distinguish fluids from liquids, the word " water " would be used for the fluid mass, and " earth " for the nucleus which was being disengaged from it, and that this would represent as clearly as it would have been possible to represent, the scientific truth as to the early stages of creation, without a miraculous anticipation of subsequent distinctions for which there is no analogy at all throughout the records of revelation; for though God ever speaks to the highest part of man that can hear his voice, he does not address himself to that as yet unawakened, that still dormant intelligence, which only some centuries of continuously impressed teaching could develop and elicit.
But our special object at the present moment is to call attention to the advantage which Mr. Gladstone certainly possesses in dealing with such a subject as this, from his habit of considering exactly what can be clearly explained to an untrained audience, and what it would be a thorough waste of power to attempt to explain. If he errs at all, it is, we think, in assuming that the story of Creation, as revealed to the old Israelite who put it into words, would have answered its pur- pose at all less adequately, even if it were admitted that " day " and " night " cannot properly be conceived as preceding the gathering of light into a fixed solar centre and the revolution of the earth round its own axis, so that almost every spot upon it is alternately presented to the sun and averted from it. We are told that God called the light " day " and the darkness " night " before the sun was created, or at least so created as to be ;risible from the earth, which is all that Mr. Gladstone understands by Creation for the purpose of this inspired narrative. Well, suppose that the Psalmist, as we may call him, who was inspired with this sublime narrative, had in his own imagination antedated the phenomena of day and night, just as he probably postponed to too late a period the creation of the reptiles or "creeping things," would that make any difference in the moral and religious import of this marvellous proem to the education of the chosen people P Mr. Gladstone surely insists quite rightly that the real contents of this in- spired introduction to the biographies and history of those through whom God was preparing to reveal himself to the world, do not depend on the physical accuracy of the detail, but on the moral and spiritual accuracy of the lesson which is conveyed. Does it teach that God was the author of the material no less than the moral and spiritual universe, and that there is no power in matter to override the divine purpose P Does it teach that God's purpose is gradually worked out ; that, in other words, evolution, both physical and spiritual, is his law, whether the physical order of that evolution be correctly, or in some degree incorrectly, conceived? Does it teach that the great aim of man's life is to recover that union with God for which he was originally created P If it teaches all this, can it matter in the least even if there be as much misconception of the exact order and detail of the physical revelation as there certainly was at times, in the history of Israel, of the moral revelation Is there the slightest reason to take so much offence at the misplacing (say) of the origin of the phenomena of day and night, as there might fairly be to take at Deborah's emphatic eulogy on Jeers treachery, or the Psalmist's triumphant anticipation of the vengeance to be wrought on "the daughter of Babylon wasted with misery "? To us it seems that if Mr. Gladstone errs at all in his fine criticism on the Creation story, it is in attaching rather too much importance to the vindication of the accuracy of the physical order, as presented in the vision of the Creator's work. Surely in tracing every- thing to God's own hand, in insisting on the gradual and steady increase in the scope and grandeur of his work, and in setting forth the likeness of God as the true standard of man's nature, as much spiritual and moral truth was conveyed as it was possible to convey in any succinct record of God's Creation. What can be conceived more impressive, more directly miraculous in the truest sense of the word, than that any writer, even of the Mosaic period, should have declared to the people of Israel that God had moulded the universe, stage by stage, out of chaos, evolving a regular ascending scale of being, until a point had been reached at which man, taking his stand at the summit of created life, learned how to aspire to the divine likeness ? Is it possible to conceive more pregnant truths uttered in statelier accents, even though it be possible to show that some of the astronomical and some of the biological phenomena have been slightly misplaced? Is it not obvious that Mr. Gladstone is right in insisting that we must look not for absolute but for relative truth in such a story,—for the kind of truth which was best calculated to possess and impress a very infantine intelligence, and that the experience which is gathered in the attempt to shadow forth to rudimentary intel- ligence imaginative approximations to the truth, is the kind of experience which best indicates the limits of inspiration in the cosmogony of the Bible ?
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