SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[(Neter this heading we notice such, Books of the week am have not been reserved for review in other forms.] The First Chapter of Genesis : is it Defensible? By the Rev. G. Hanson, D.D. (R.T.S. 1d.)—This is one of the " R.T.S. Tracts for the Times" Series. We heartily agree with Dr. Hanson when La writes :—" To ask for anything but general accord between Genesis and science is exceedingly perilous. To ask from Genesis anything but the simplest of cosmogonies, couched in the language of the times in which it was written and intelligible to the race in its childhood and easily carried in man's memory, is both foolish and unjust." The case could not be better put. Only one must remember that what Dr. Hanson protests against is what up to the last sixty years or so practically all apologists for Christianity have asked, and that to-day nineteen Christians out of twenty hold this position. Nothing, again, can be more to the point than the quotation from S. T. Coleridge :—"The language of Scripture describes facts of appearance." An example is to be found in the idea cf the "firmament." The Hebrew writer conceived of a solid arch across which the sun and moon moved, and in which the stars were set,—stenis ardentilras apturn, as Virgil puts it. But we have seen book after book within the last few years in which it has been maintained that the "firmament " of Genesis i. is an absolutely exact scientific conception. Of the general dignity and coherence of the Mosaic cosmogony we would use the same language as Dr. Hanson. No other in the world is worthy to be ranked oven near it.
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