heat, which is doubtful, the soul wants light as well. It pines for light as the body does, and goes back at last to the upper world with its unwholesome damps and exhalations, as a relief from the dry but dark cavern where it had shut itself in.

We do not fear the spread of subjective religion, as taught by academic men like Newman and Powell. The doctrine of the inner light and of a faith which lives above proof is far too sublimated a creed for the masses; but we do dread this attempt to discredit Paley and the school of historical evidences, as insidious and mischievous. A clever caviller, Bishop Butler says, may throw out in conversation more objections than a sincere believer can answer in a learned treatise; for Christianity being a historical religion, now eighteen hundred years old, objections against it may start up any day, but the arguments in its favour have to be dug out of the past. This, then, is the mischief which the writers of "Essays and Reviews are doing without knowing it. Their belief, whatever it is, will convince none, but their unbelief will unsettle many. Let us be prepared for this, and press forward all the more earnestly to give men a reason of the hope that is in us, with meekness and fear.

WE were struck, on reading the title of this essay, with what Bentham calls the question-begging fallacythe unfairness with which Mr. Goodwin excites a prejudice against the Mosaic narrative, by calling it a cosmogony. The word is one very deservedly under a cloud. It has been a favourite term with charlatans, from Berosus to Ephraim Jenkinson. "Ay, Sir, the world is in its dotage, and yet the cosmogony or creation of the world has puzzled philosophers of all ages. What a medley of opinions have they not broached on the creation of the world! Sanchoniathon, Manetho, Berosus, and Oceleus Lucanus have all attempted it in vain." Mr. Goodwin has something of quiet malice, not unlike the quaker who called the dog mad, in thus dubbing Moses beforehand a cosmogonist. We are reminded of so many pretenders to omniscience-Sanchoniathon, Manetho, and the rest-and the impression left on our minds, unless we are on our guard against it, is that Moses is found in such suspicious company, that he can hardly have been the honest historian we believe him to be. Has he passed on us a draft on his own imagination, as worthless as the draft which Ephraim Jenkinson drew on the poor Vicar of Wakefield's credulity in the little back parlour of the village inn? An uneasy feeling creeps over us as over the too credulous parson, that all was not right with this talk about cosmogony; and when a Solomon Flam

E

borough, smoking his pipe at his own door, tells us that this draft on his faith is not worth the ashes in his pipe, we crumple up our bit of dishonoured paper, and register a vow never to trust a cosmogonist again.

But

It was not fair, then, to begin by calling the first chapter of Genesis a cosmogony, when, as we shall more fully show by-and-bye, the whole purport of the narrative is a protest against all cosmogonies, and sets forth instead the religious truth, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It is a pity that critics of the destructive school should waste their time in demolishing the disciples, when their mark should be to overthrow the authority of the master. "We are Moses' disciples," the innumerable interpreters of the Book of Genesis all proclaim with one mouth. Surely, the critic who thinks the disciples all wrong, should have taken the pains to see whether their points of view are the same as their master's. instead of that, he takes for granted that Moses meant exactly what his modern interpreters wished him to mean, and so he concludes that, if he has answered his interpreters or exposed their contradictions, he has also, to that extent, discredited Moses their master. "Melius est petere fontem, quam rivulos sectari,” is a piece of sound advice which we mean to act on ourselves. So, passing by all the theories which have followed fast on one another, ever since geology arose to disturb our traditional interpretation of Genesis, we will throw ourselves back at once to the point of view from which we believe that Moses was inspired to write; for we are satisfied that if we are content to read Moses' narrative in the spirit in which he received and wrote it, we shall not only see its meaning, but also profit by it, whereas all the Rabbinical or Rational, ist glosses on it of later times only obscure its simplicity, and darken counsel by words without knowledge.

rus.

Let us suppose ourselves reverently looking over Moses' shoulder as he indites this narrative, perhaps with an Egyptian reed, on a sheet of Egyptian papyThe prophet of Israel is also mighty in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. He has an opportunity now of showing his learning, and of letting slip some of those scraps of cosmogony which he could not fail to have acquired among the priests of On, and at Pharaoh's Court. This is a temptation few men are above. Even religious teachers will sometimes step aside to show that they can throw the quoit of scholarship, and play the pedant in memory of college days. Baxter, for instance, is always repenting of his Egyptian wisdom, and then sinning again in showing it off. Owen is a confirmed offender, so is Howe, so also Jeremy Taylor, and all the divines of his age. Even in our day, the brocaded style is not quite abandoned. Carnal learning will slip out in the midst of heavenly wisdom-the old Adam is too strong for young Melancthon. How is it that Moses is an exception to this general infirmity of even the strongest minds? It cannot be that he was ashamed of his previous wisdom, or unwilling to use it if it came in his way to do so. We find that Paul did not despise this means of gaining on the prejudices of his hearers. To the Greek he became a Greek. Mars Hill he Atticised, as among Greek-speaking Jews he Helenised. He would quote Greek poets, even comedians, if it served his turn to do so. Inspiration does not inflate the style, as some wrongly imagine, or dehumanise it in order to make it more divine. Moses, however, passes by Egyptian wisdom in solemn silence. As we open the Book of Genesis, we forget his forty years' training in Egypt, and think only of the keeper of sheep in Midian, who had seen God in the burning bush, and all whose previous years were a blank, as far as the knowledge of Divine things went. Is this the manner of ordinary cosmogonists? Is this the way of an unassisted thinker," a "Hebrew Descartes or

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Newton "-for these are the epithets Mr. Goodwin thinks proper to know him by? To throw aside his Egyptian learning, without some enlightenment from "the good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush," would have savoured more of presumption than true wisdom. David laid aside Saul's armour, which he had not proved, because he had by him his shepherd's sling, which he had proved in his combat with the lion and the bear. So Moses determined to know nothing save what God had taught him in Horeb, because he had found that to be true wisdom, and all his Egyptian learning to be vanity, delusion, and lies. There seems, then, to be no middle course between these two positions: either that Moses was an unassisted thinker, and then why not a cosmogonist like Berosus and the rest; or that he was directed what to write; and then the Bible opens with an Apocalypse of the world's birthday, as it ends with an Apocalypse of the world's death-day. Those who reject the latter alternative are bound, by the laws of argument, to point out how it is that the Hebrew cosmogonist managed to escape the rocks and shoals on which Babylonian and Egyptian, Greek and Roman cosmogonists all have foundered. His cosmogony is so unlike theirs, that we must ask an explanation of this anomaly. A great deal of ingenuity has been wasted in reconciling Genesis and Geology, all arising from forgetfulness of the principle, that when two writers have to allude to the same facts from a different starting-point, they will mention them in very different terms. Put a landsman on board ship, his account of the voyage will differ in many respects from the ship's log-the reason being that his interest is not so much in the ship as in the place she is bound to. The adventures by the way are only digressions to him-they are part of the sailor's life. So a geologist comes to the first chapter of Genesis, to remark how a landsman will describe the sea, and is disappointed to find his professional pride