Читать книгу The Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science - Sir John William Dawson - Страница 7

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"What if earth

Be but a shadow of heaven, and things therein

Each to the other like; more than on earth is thought."

Milton.

(3) Character of the Biblical Cosmogony, and general Views of Nature which it Contains or to which it Leads.—Much of what appertains to the character of the revelation of origins has been anticipated under previous heads. We have only to read the Song of Creation, as given in the last chapter, to understand its power and influence as a beginning of religious doctrine. The revelation was written for plain men in the infancy of the world. Imagine Chaldean or Hebrew shepherd listening to these majestic lines from the lips of some ancient patriarch, and receiving them as truly the words of God. What a grand opening to him of both the seen and unseen worlds! Henceforth he has no superstitious dread of the stars above, or of the lightning and thunder, or of the dark woods and flowing waters beneath. They are all the works of the one Creator, the same Creator who is his own Maker, in whose image and shadow he is made. He can look up now to the heavens or around upon the earth, and see in all the handiwork of God, and can worship God through all. He can see that the power that cares for the birds and the flowers of the field cares for him. He is no longer the slave and sport of unknown and dreadful powers; they are God's workmanship and under his control—nay, God has given him a mission to subdue and rule over them. So these noble words raise him to a new manhood, and emancipate him from the torture of endless fears, and open to him vast new fields of thought and inquiry, which may enrich him with boundless treasures of new religious and intellectual wealth. Imagine still farther that he wanders into those great cities which are the seats of the idolatries of his time. He enters magnificent temples, sees elaborately decorated altars, huge images, gorgeous ceremonials, priests gay in vestments and imposing in numbers. He is invited to bow down before the bull Apis, to worship the statue of Belus or of Ishtar, of Osiris or of Isis. But this is not in his book of origins. All these things are contrivances of man, not works of God, and their aim is to invite him to adore that which is merely his fellow-creature, that which he has the divine commission to subdue and rule. So our primitive Puritan turns away. He will rather raise an altar of rough stones in the desert, and worship the unseen yet real Creator, the God that has no local habitation in temples made with hands, yet is everywhere present. Such is the moral elevation to which this revelation of origins raises humanity; and when there was added to it the farther history of primeval innocence, of the fall, and of the promise of a Redeemer, and of the fate of the godless antediluvians, there was a whole system of religion, pure and elevating, and placing the Abrahamidæ, who for ages seem alone to have held to it, on a plane of spiritual vantage immeasurably above that of other nations. Farther, every succeeding prophet whose works are included in the sacred canon, following up these doctrines in the same spirit, and added new treasures of divine knowledge from age to age.

But admitting all this, it may be asked, Are these ancient records of any value to us? May we not now dispense with them, and trust to the light of science? The infinitely varied and discordant notions of our modern literature on these great questions of origin, the incapacity of any philosophical system to reach the common mind for practical purposes, and the baseless character of any religious system which does not build on these great primitive truths, give a sufficient answer. Farther, we may affirm that the greatest and widest generalizations of our modern science have, in so far as they are of practical importance, been anticipated in the revelations of the Bible, and that in the cosmogony of Genesis and its continuation in the other sacred books we have general views of the universe as broad as those of any philosophies, ancient or modern. This is a hard test for our revelation, but it can be endured, and we may shortly inquire what we find in the Bible of such great general truths.

Many may be disposed to admit the accurate delineation of natural facts open to human observation in the sacred Scriptures, who may not be prepared to find in these ancient books any general views akin to those of the ancient philosophers, or to those obtained by inductive processes in modern times. Yet views of this kind are scattered through the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and are a natural outgrowth and development of the great facts and principles asserted in the first chapter of Genesis. They resolve themselves, almost as a matter of course, into the two leading ideas of order and adaptation. I have already quoted the eloquent admission by Baron Humboldt of the presence of these ideas of the cosmos in Psalm civ. They are both conspicuous in the narrative of creation, and equally so in a great number of other passages. "Order is heaven's first law; and the second is like unto it—that every thing serves an end. This is the sum of all science. These are the two mites, even all that she hath, which she throws into the treasury of the Lord; and, as she does so in faith, Eternal Wisdom looks on and approves the deed." [17] These two mites, lawfully acquired by science, by her independent exertions, she may, however, recognize as of the same coinage with the treasure already laid up in the rich storehouse of the Hebrew literature; but in a peculiar and complex form, which may be illustrated under the following general statements:

1. The Scriptures assert invariable natural law, and constantly recurring cycles in nature. Natural law is expressed as the ordinance or decree of Jehovah. From the oldest of the Hebrew books I select the following examples: [18]

"When he made a decree for the rain,

And a way for the thunder-flash."

—Job xxviii., 26.

"Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens?

Canst thou establish a dominion even over the earth?"

—Job xxxviii., 33.

The later books give us such views as the following:

"He hath established them [the heavens] for ever and ever;

He hath made a decree which shall not pass."

—Psa. cxlviii., 6.

"Thou art forever, O Jehovah, thy word is established in the heavens; Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth; They continue this day according to thine ordinances, for all are thy servants." —Psa. cxix., 90.

"When he established the clouds above;

When he strengthened the fountains of the deep;

When he gave to the sea his decree,

That the waters should not pass his commandment;

When he appointed the foundations of the earth."

—Prov. viii., 28.

Many similar instances will be found in succeeding pages; and in the mean time we may turn to the idea of recurring cycles, which forms the starting-point of the reasonings of Solomon on the current of human affairs, in the book of Ecclesiastes: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for the ages. The sun ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to its place whence it arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth unto the north. It whirleth about continually, and returneth again according to its circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea doth not overflow; unto the place whence the rivers came, thither they return again." I might fill pages with quotations more or less illustrative of the statement in proof of which the above texts are cited; but enough has been given to show that the doctrine of the Bible is not that of fortuitous occurrence, or of materialism, or of pantheism, or of arbitrary supernaturalism, but of invariable natural law representing the decree of a wise and unchanging Creator. It is a common but groundless and shallow charge against the Bible that it teaches an "arbitrary supernaturalism." What it does teach is that all nature is regulated by the laws of God, which like himself are unchanging, but which are so complex in their relations and adjustments that they allow of infinite variety, and do not exclude even miraculous intervention, or what appears to our limited intelligence as such. In opposition to this, it is true, some physicists have held that natural law is a fatal necessity. [19] If they mean by this a merely hypothetical necessity that certain effects must follow if certain laws act, this is in accordance with the Biblical view, for nothing can resist the will of God. But if they mean an absolute necessity that these laws can not be suspended or counteracted by higher laws, or by the will of the Creator, they assert what is not only contrary to Scripture, but absurd, for "blind metaphysical necessity, which is the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things." [20] It could lead merely to a dead and inert equilibrium. On the hypothesis of mere physical necessity, the universe either never could have existed, or must have come to an end infinite ages ago, which is the same thing. Only on the hypothesis of law proceeding from an intelligent will can we logically account for nature.

2. The Bible recognizes progress and development in nature. At the very outset we have this idea embodied in the gradual elaboration of all things in the six creative periods, rising from the formless void of the beginning, through successive stages of inorganic and organic being, up to Eden and to man. Beyond this point the work of creation stops; but there is to be an occupation and improvement of the whole earth by man spreading from Eden. This process is arrested or impeded by sin and the fall. Here commences the special province of the Bible, in explaining the means of recovery from the fall, and of the establishment of a new spiritual and moral kingdom, and finally of the restoration of Eden in a new heaven and earth. All this is moral, and relates to man, in so far as the present state of things is concerned; but we have the commentary of Jesus: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;" the remarkable statement of Paul, that the whole creation is involved in the results of man's moral fall and restoration, and the equally remarkable one that the Redeemer is also the maker of the "worlds" or ages of the earth's physical progress, as well as of the future "new heaven and new earth." Peter also rebukes indignantly those scoffers who maintained that all things had remained as they are since the beginning; and refers to the creation week and to the deluge as earnests of the great changes yet in store for the earth. [21]