Ladies’ Edinburgh Magazine > Volume 5

58 Tlie Ladies Edinburgh Magazine.
Evolution, as well as other better proved scientific facts, may
indeed modify the sense in which we have been accustomed
to understand the Bible narrative of creation; but to my
mind, all the facts already proven, while modifying our
understanding of it, have only brought out its fundamental
truth in new and brighter light. For example, it is to be
noted that the narrative in Genesis, the proved facts of
geology, and the theory of evolution, run in strangely
parallel lines of gradation from the lower to the higher.
The sequence in each case is essentially the same.
Let us suppose, with an eminent Scottish geologist, that
the narrative of creation, as given to us in the Bible, was
presented to the mind of the inspired writer, not in spoken
words, but in acted vision,—in a series of pictures, in which
he saw, one by one, the successive steps of creation,—not
the mode of God's creative action, but the successive crea¬
tions that resulted from it, as in the changing scenes of a
panorama. First the void darkness of the mighty deep ;
then the grey light glimmering over the waste of undivided
waters; then the mist of parting waters rising like a mighty
veil from the face of the watery waste, and a firmament
dividing the ' waters from the waters;' then the dry land
emerging from the lower deep, wrapped in its gorgeous
mantle of living green; then lights shining out from the
risen mist in the iirmament of heaven, the sun to give light
by day, and the moon and the stars by night; then the
seemingly void waters quickening into life immeasurable,
' moving creatures that had life' sporting in their boundless
depths, and sea-birds dipping their white wings in their
waves ; then the earth, too, before but green and fair in the
unconscious beauty of herb and flower, is seen again instinct
with conscious life, from the creeping thing and the beast of
the field, till the long gradation culminates at last in a being,
made indeed of the dust of the earth, yet bearing the image
of the Creator. Do not these visions or panoramic pictures
follow strangely the sequence claimed by the evolutionist ?
Of the Tiiode, of creation the Bible says absolutely nothing,
save that man was formed of the dust of the earth ; and that
would remain equally true were the evolutionists to succeed
in proving that he was the culminating point of a long
gradation of being, of which the first germs were to be found
in his primordial atoms,—nay, the Bible statement would
rather have gained a scientific confirmation, for the ' dust of
the earth' would be the literal element from which he
sprung.
I have tried to show, then,—first, That the evolution theory