THE BOOK OF GENESIS.

CHAPTER I.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."-Ver. 1, 2.

IN the introduction to the geology of the Bible (p. 14, ante), and in treating of the imaginary difficulties of the Bible in relation to science, (p. 263, ante) we have examined the difficulties in which the disclosures of geology are, by some, said to involve the Mosaic account of the creation, as given in this opening chapter of the Divine record; and to the facts and reasonings there advanced against the sceptical school we refer the reader who finds any hesitation in accepting the Mosaic narrative in its obvious and literal sense, believing that they will satisfy any candid mind that there is such a striking agreement between that record and the discoveries of geology as is to be accounted for only upon the assumption of the divine inspiration of the record. Moses has so described the progression and several states of the creative work, that it exactly agrees with the successive deposits that are now found of the fossilized flora and fauna of the strata opened upon in the crust of the earth; and as no one pretends to say that "Moses" derived a knowledge of these from investigation or observation, the only

alternative is to be found in the Divine revelation that was made to him.

CHAPTER III.

"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Ver. 3.

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THE Hebrew, mut temut, is, literally, "a death thou shalt die"; or dying, thou shalt die," as in the margin of the English Bible. From that moment thou shalt become mortal, and shall continue in a dying state till thou diest. But, as Dr. John Gardner has remarked, in his charming book,* more than this physical change was implied in the sentence. Man, immediately upon his transgression, suffered death spiritually, not only in the loss of holiness, in the separation of his soul, the alienation of his heart, from his Maker, but he was forsaken of God-the life-giving spirit was withdrawn from him, and he thus suffered the death of sin." This, as the doctor observes, was the primary death intended by the curse; but there was the further meaning in it, more literally conveyed in the announcement which succeeded the commission of the offence: 'Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." This is that natural death, and dissolution of our bodily organisation, of which disease and suffering are the antecedents, the warnings, the signs, the means, and the causes, "death hath passed upon all men, for that all have sinned."

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"And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living."-Ver. 20.

It is difficult to comprehend the reason here

"The Great Physician," p. 2.

assigned for Adam's giving that name to his wife by which we now always call her Eve. The Septuagint helps us to the reason, by using the word Zoe. "And Adam called his wife's name Life, because she was the mother of all the living." The word chevah, in the Hebrew text, is faithfully represented by the word Zoe, for both signify Life; and thus rendered, the propriety of the reason assigned for it is obvious.

CHAPTER VI.

"And the Lord repented that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart."—Ver. 6.

It is impious, Bolingbroke* says, to assert the divine origin of writings in which God employs the language of men; judges, thinks, repents, as men are wont to do; allows himself to be animated by human affections; appeals to human knowledge, and performs acts which can only be done by the organs of the human body. And so Tindal and many others. The mode of meeting these attacks on the principle of condescension to the capacities of a rude multitude, or that it was allowable in common discourse to speak of God in images borrowed from material objects and human weaknesses, is not a satisfactory one; and Hengstenberg expresses his satisfaction at the healthful impulse which, in modern times, has led to a deeper investigation of the nature of anthropomorphisms by Jacobi †

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God, in creating, theomorphises man; man, therefore, necessarily anthropomorphises God;" and he concludes with the words, "We confess ourselves, therefore, to have the conviction that man bears * "Dissertations Pent.," vol. ii., p. 366. † Works, vol. iii., pp. 418, etc.

in himself the image of God—an indissoluble anthropomorphism and maintain that, apart from this anthropomorphism, what has hitherto been called Theism is no better than Atheism or Fetischism."

Hengstenberg, who accepts as the truth Jacobi's solution, that the foundation on which the use of anthropomorphisms rests is that man is created in the image of God, observes that it is of no use to dispute with any one who denies this, as Bolingbroke does; but that whoever acknowledges it, cannot make it consist merely in the spirit of man, but must recognise in the human body a worthy substratum for the representation of the Deity. As the schoolmen said, "the human body is the image of the image of God; and, as the original image is reflected in it, so it is suited to be a medium of representation for it." And hence anthropomor

phisms are not merely permitted, they are absolutely necessary. Without them nothing positive can be asserted of God. God himself has referred us to them. He who would get rid of them, loses God entirely, while he tries as much as possible to purify and refine his conceptions of Him, and loses all reverence, by the illusion of excessive reverence. His position towards God becomes, of all others, the most untrue and unworthy. He falls from anthropomorphism into Nihilism. The nearest becomes to him the farthest; reality is changed for him into shadow. Even the grosser anthropomorphisms, as Hengstenberg observes, we cannot altogether dispense with, as perhaps unfallen man might have been able to do. But the best justification of anthropomorphisms, as he observes, the best proof of their necessity, lies in the incarnation of God in

Christ, which is impugned, consciously or unconsciously, by the opponents of anthropomorphisms. That a connection between both must exist, appears from the fact, that almost all the grosser anthropomorphisms of the New Testament contain an express reference to the Old Testament, and are taken from it. "The finger of God," in Luke xi. 20, is from Ex. viii. 19; "The bosom of God," in John i. 18, from Prov. viii. 30; "A sweet-smelling savour to God," in Eph. v. 2, from Lev. i. 9, etc. Where that necessity which anthropomorphisms partially and provisionally relieved has been fully and definitively satisfied by the incarnation of God in Christ, the other necessity, which always accompanies it, he adds the highest possible spiritualisation of God, who is a spirit-now becomes prominent. But where, on the contrary, as among the Hellenistic Jews and the Samaritans, before Christ's appearance, and where, without Christ-as in Deism-we find an effort to set aside or to avoid anthropomorphisms, a want of vitality in religion is always connected with it, and appears as its source.

There are two classes of anthropomorphisms ; first, those in which human forms, limbs, corporeal qualities, and actions, are transferred to Godanthropomorphisms in a narrower sense; and those in which human affections are attributed to God; or anthropopathisms. Those of the first class have their special corrective in the doctrine of the spirituality of God, of whom no image was to be made (Ex. xx. 4, etc.) because He is invisible, incorporeal - because He is SPIRIT. The special corrective of the second class is the doctrine of the holiness of God: a religion over whose portal is inscribed, in letters of flame, "I AM HOLY," can,