could be no entrance for sounder views of the unity of the Cosmos and the connexion of physical causes with physical effects. The philosophic cosmogonies, however, were not much more intelligible than the poetical, as the readers of Plato's Timæus know well. The theological era gave place, as M. Comte would say, to the metaphysical, but without pouring much additional light on the darkness of the beginning of man on the earth. Nor even to this day, in the full blaze of the Positive schools, are we much wiser than our fathers, how all things came out of nothing. Ex nihilo nil fit is the same metaphysical puzzle to us as to them, and we have only to fall back on the statement of the Apostle that by faith we understand that the worlds were made. It is ungrateful to those who owe their deliverance from mythological cosmogonies, like those of Hesiod, and philosophical cosmogonies like those of Plato, to make little of that wonderful narrative contained in the Book of Genesis, whose very silence proves

its inspiration.

On the whole, then, we conclude that Mr. Goodwin has missed the meaning of the Book of Genesis as much by his disparaging comparison of Moses with Descartes or Newton, as some orthodox divines by endeavouring to bring out of the first chapter some verbal coincidence with modern discoveries in geology. Both extremes miss the mark, by trying it by a criterion which it was never meant to satisfy. Genesis was inspired as a narrative of the creation of all things out of nothing by the will of God, and as a protest against the cosmogonies which all people then believed in without exception, and which still the greater part of the world profess to believe. The full significance of Genesis can only be understood thus by reference to a world sunk either in atheism or idolatry. The present Bishop of Victoria once said that if he could instil into the minds of the Chinese only the first verse of Genesis,

he would say nunc dimittis to his missionary work. It will take a generation or two of missionaries to get even this much truth into their idolatrous minds. It is for idolaters like these-and the Israelites were little better when Moses took them in hand-that Genesis was inspired; not to furnish a society of savans with a topic of debate-or to be used as a tilting-ground for the members of the Royal Geological Society. We care little about the points of correspondence which orthodox geologists may discern between Genesis and geology, our chief concern is to prove that there are no material contradictions. It is in the reserve of Genesis, not its explicitness, that we ground our proof of its inspiration. "We are to regard it," Mr. Goodwin tells us, "not as an authentic utterance of Divine knowledge, but a human utterance which it has pleased Providence to use in a special way for the education of mankind." Now if it was a human utterance, we should like to know how Moses, like blind old Jacob, could have guided his hand thus wittingly, as to lay his hands on Ephraim, not on Manasseh; by what happy accident he forgot his Egyptian cosmogony during his exile in Midian; how a thousand years before Plato, and two thousand before Mahomet, he brought out a system of monotheism which outshines theirs, as daylight doth a lamp. When all this is explained, it will be time enough for us to show how far Moses was inspired, and how far God acccommodated his revelation of Himself to the world's childhood-and how far we have grown so much wiser, as to be able to do without these accommodations to human infirmity. The probability is, that we are children as much as they to whom Moses wrote, and that there are wonders of creation which lie in the background to us, and perhaps even to angels. When the Adam of Milton desires to inquire of the angel concerning celestial motions, he is doubtfully answered by Raphael, who reminds

him that God's revelations are only in part, according as we are able to bear:

"Whether heaven move or earth,
Imports not, if thou reckon right-the rest,
From man or angel, the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge
His secrets to be scanned by them who ought
Rather to admire-or if they list to try
Conjecture, He his fabrick of the heavens
Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
His laughter at these quaint opinions."

71

CHAPTER V.

MR. WILSON'S ESSAY.

DURING the last few years, a series of addresses by distinguished persons holding Evangelical sentiments, entitled Séances Historiques, has been delivered at Geneva. Count Leon de Gasparin, in lecturing on Church history, laid down what he called the Individualist principle as the true basis of the Church; while M. Bungener, the well-known writer of "Tales of the French Reformation," took the opposite ground of Multitudinism. It was such a difference of opinion as exists among good men at home without destroying their respect for each other, or disabling them from cooperating in general matters in which they are agreed. Evangelical Churchmen in this country are in favour of a National Church in union with the State. Evangelical Dissenters condemn this theory of the union of Church and State, or the attempt to found a theocracy in these times of the Gentiles. Churchmen would agree with Count Gasparin, and Dissenters with M. Bungener; but the difference would not go farther than friendly controversy. The Bible Society Committee, or the Committee of the Evangelical Alliance, are made up of Multitudinists and Individualists; and if Mr. Wilson, in search of a scheme of Christian comprehension, would step into the committee-room, Earlstreet, Blackfriars, we hope to convince him that the

* Séances Historiques de Geneve. The National Church. By Henry Bristow Wilson, B.D., Vicar of Great Slaughton, Hunts.

notion of agreement on essentials, and of difference on non-essentials, is not so chimerical as he has hastily set it down to be.

Mr. Wilson seems to have set out to find some scheme of Christian comprehension, and after turning over theory after theory, to have settled down to the conclusion that there is no way of reconciling differences but by agreeing to differ on all points, essential and non-essential alike. Finding that the sectarian tendency is too strong to be restrained by any theory whatever, he would do with us as the man with his obstinate ass he gives us a push over the precipice, under the despairing conviction that the more men split and subdivide the better. We shall reach at last the ultimate atoms of the Christian community, when every member is the founder of a sect of his own; and that when men have thus divided on dogma to their hearts' content, they will begin to unite again on the basis of charity. The essay in the present volume is only one of three contributions which Mr. Wilson has made to this new scheme of comprehension on Latitudinarian principles. As the Bampton lecturer for 1851, he preached eight sermons, with notes, which discuss the same question. After repeating, one by one, the several formulæ concordia, which have been drawn up from time to time, he passes on to the extreme conclusion-unwarranted, we think, by the premises he has laid down-that as Christianity is a religion of the heart, not of the head, we are to look for agreement in moral, not in dogmatic truth; and that so the Church of the future is to be built, not on the narrow basis of creeds and articles-which comprehend only by confounding, and embrace only by coercionbut on the wide principle that "existing differences are as definite and likely to be transmitted, as differences of colour, of habits, and of speech, which separate different races, and that so we are thrown, of necessity, to seek for some principle which shall traverse