03.05. CHAPTER V.THE WITNESS OF THE BIBLE . . .

CHAPTER V. THE WITNESS OF THE BIBLE TO ITSELF - ITS SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY.

"Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven." Psalms 119:89. This sublime assertion of the eternal stability of the Word of God is "Luther’s text." He had it written in charcoal on the walls of his chamber, and wrought in embroidery on the dress of his servants. Earthly changes reach not the heavenly sphere; and there the Word of God is settled, far beyond the reach of disturbing causes. Even progressive Modern Science, which has unsettled the notions of centuries, is unable to prove the testimony of God’s Word to be false. The Bible is a very remarkable book, from whatever source it has come. One of the princes of men, the light of the fourth century, whose oratory gave him the name of Chrysostom, "the golden mouth," and whose virtues made him the admiration and terror of the corrupt court of Eudoxia, such a man himself one of the foremost scholars of his day, has given to the Bible its very name, "O Biblos" the Book! In every work we see the workman his skill in handling tools, his inventive genius in planning, his taste in arranging and adorning. The artist breathes in his canvas and speaks in the marble. If there be a work of God, we expect it to express and exhibit him. You go to St. Peter’s Cathedral; you stand beneath that vast dome, prepared to feel a sense of awe at the grand proportions and exquisite decorations for Michaelangelo designed and adorned it. And when, in the hush of midnight, you look up into the dome of heaven and see thousands of lamps that burn for whole millenniums unconsumed, and shine at a distance beyond calculation when you remember that that streaming banner of light, the "Milky Way," is myriads of stars, in close ranks, like countless warriors, so that you see only the lines of light flash in from their silver helmets, you are prepared to believe that God planned that concave, and wrote his own name on it in letters of light. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork."

So, if this book be the Word of God, we shall find in it proof and mark of a divine mind and hand. There will be a grandeur in the sweep and span of its teachings which reminds of the arch of the firmament a glory about its facts and truths which suggests the radiance of suns and stars; there will be that which is too high for our attainment, and too broad for our measurement. God will compel us to say, "Hath not my hand made all these things!" The Bible asks you to try it by this test: Does it bear marks of a more than human mind? If there be nothing in it inconsistent with a merely human origin, it is idolatry to call it the Word of God, to treat it as of divine origin, and yield it divine honors. But if there be here such a gigantic structure of truth as that not even a race of Titans could have built it; if its basis is laid deeper than man ever dug, and its pinnacles rise higher than man ever reached, how are we to escape the conclusion and conviction that its author and maker is God? The Bible has always been the focal point of all controversy; for it is the very key of the whole system of Christianity. To carry this by storm, or undermine it, is to take Christianity at its centre; and the outposts follow the fortunes of the main defenses. Of late, the form of attack and the tone of assault have changed. Infidelity is rarely insulting, contemptuous. It is rather plausible, patronizing. It used to pound the Bible with denunciations; now it pats the Bible and says, "Really a very fine book, but by no means faultless!" Dr. Pressense says of Renan: "He very skillfully undermines Christianity while profuse in its praise; he buries it in flowers. He comes to the tomb of the Savior not to weep and worship like the women of the gospel, but to stifle with perfumes and spices any lingering spark of life in the religion of Jesus. He does not deal a blow with a sharp sword; no, he embalms. But the result is the same as though he made a violent attack."

Modern skepticism, with the lofty air of profound learning and philosophic doubt, approaches the Divine Word. Under pretense of a careful, conscientious, impartial investigation, as though reluctant not to believe that the Bible is all it claims to be, it applies its strictly scientific tests, and, like a physician who feels a feeble pulse, sounds a decayed lung, or tests a diseased heart, turns away with a sigh of disappointment and an ominous shake of the head. And yet the more we see of scientific and philosophic skepticism, the more we are satisfied that, like Lord Nelson, it covers the only sound eye, and declares it can’t see with the blind one. Underneath all this assumption of judicial coolness and fairness we detect voluntary suppression of the truth, partial pleading, desperate corruptions of the doctrines and perversions of the facts of Scripture, and the same hot hate of the religion of the Bible, the same passion to overthrow it, the same resolute hostility to everything supernatural, as in the bolder and more defiant forms of attack. You may find this plausible skepticism in the sanctum of the editor, the silver tongue of the orator, the chair of the university professor, and even the pulpit of the nominal preacher. The Bible is, by the confession even of skeptics, the best of books, and, on the whole, most marked by all that gives permanent value; but they would have us believe that it is scarcely abreast with our advanced age, and that its claim to infallibility is absurd. But the Bible accepts no patronage, no hesitating homage, no qualified encomium. Submit the Word of God to any and every test which is possible and proper intellectual, moral, philosophical, ethical, literary, or scientific. If, on any rational ground, it does not stand the test, it must fall; if it has no granite buttresses, it is folly to attempt to support its tremendous claims to divine authority by any rotten props of our own. Of all tests, the scientific is the most unpromising; for here, if at any point, we may expect to find the Bible weak, exposed to successful assault. That is a grand fort which has no angle which its guns do not fully command. Even firm friends of the Bible show some little apprehension when we talk of applying scientific tests; when science comes, as with crucible and lancet, to try its severe processes on the Word. But even at this weakest point, God’s Word is too strong for the combined strength of all its foes. From this angle, as well as every other, its guns command the approach and make a clean sweep; and every candid doubter may find abundant proof, even on the scientific side, that a more than human mind has produced the Bible. It is a Gibraltar, and they who attack it, like the waves that sweep against that giant rock in the Mediterranean seas, do not break or even shake it, but only cleave themselves asunder! The argument from the side of science is the more conclusive because the Bible is not, and cannot be, in the nature of the case, a scientific book. In history, any matter of science touched upon would be only casual, and whatever scientific errors or inadvertencies might occur would not impair its value as a narrative of facts. So a treatise on mathematics would not be the less trustworthy as a guide in working out difficult problems, simply because there might be words misspelled, or inaccurate statements about geography. Every book is judged by its main purpose; all else is incidental. The object of the Bible is not to teach science, but moral and spiritual truth. Scientific facts and truths may be discovered by the intellect and industry of man; and hence no revelation of them is needed. But our origin and destiny, our relations to God, the way of peace and purity, the link between the here and the hereafter the highest wisdom of man has only guessed at these things; and here comes the need that God shall speak.

We are therefore to judge the Word of God by its professed purpose, and if, in the unfolding of moral and religious truth, scientific errors or inaccuracies appear, which have no relation to spiritual truth, they may not make the Bible unworthy of acceptance as a guide to the knowledge and practice of duty. Lord Bacon, from a strictly philosophical point of view, has said that the "scope or purpose of the Spirit of God is not to express matters of nature in Scripture, otherwise than in passage, for application to man’s capacity and to matters moral and divine." It was no part of the design or mission of inspired writers to tell us scientific truth. Hence it was natural that, in referring to the Kingdom of Nature, they should use the language of appearance, as we do now at an age of the world far more advanced in scientific knowledge. We know that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and that the earth moves around it; yet we talk of the sun as rising in the east, setting in the west, and revolving about the earth. We speak of the dew as descending from the heaven, as though distilled in the far depths of space, while in fact the atmosphere gives up its vapor at the touch of a colder surface, as an ice-pitcher collects and condenses the moisture from the air. When, therefore, sacred writers use forms of speech which fit appearances, not realities, and accord with popular impressions, rather than scientific discoveries, "the absence of scientific accuracy by no means involves any real discrepancy or contradiction." Had the language of Scripture been scientific, instead of popular, it would have been a blemish and a hindrance, because it would have arrested attention and diverted it from the grander truths that the Bible was meant to unfold, and created controversies on matters of little consequence. Suppose, for instance, that in the opening chapters of Genesis, Moses had accurately announced, in plain terms, all the discoveries of modern geology and astronomy; had given this globe a great age, even prior to the creation of man; had made the six days of creation six periods of vast length; had described the vast vegetation of the carboniferous age, and the marvelous process by which it was converted into coal; had told men of the original chemical or "cosmical" light and heat that preceded the appearance of the sun of the mighty monsters that sported in the waters and roamed on the land; had recorded the tremendous convulsions that rocked the earth as on the bosom of a vast crater - what would have been the effect?

First, scientific discovery would have been announced prematurely, before mankind was fitted to understand or use it. Secondly, God would have been contradicting himself by communicating directly to man knowledge which He had decreed man shall dig out for himself. Thirdly, men would have forgotten the more important spiritual truths, that are the main matters of revelation, in discussions of subordinate questions, for which the race was not yet ready. Fourthly, the effect would be to discredit the whole revelation to make Moses appear either as a madman or a dreamer, and thus to defeat the grand end for which the Inspired Word was given! And yet, if the Bible is God’s Truth, it ought not, even by the way, to affirm what is actually untrue. We cannot imagine the infinite God as telling man the grandest truths on spiritual themes and surrounding them with many little falsehoods, simply because man was not mature enough to understand the full facts. Was there any way by which all desirable ends should be met? One only suggests itself. God might lead inspired men to use such language, that, without revealing scientific facts in advance, it might accurately accommodate itself to them, when discovered. The language might be so elastic and flexible as to contract itself to the narrowness of ignorance, and yet expand itself to the dimensions of knowledge, like the rubber bandage, so invaluable in modern surgery, which stretches about an inflamed and swollen limb, yet shrinks as the swelling abates. If there be terms or phrases which, without suggesting puzzling enigmas, shall yet contain within themselves ample space for all the demands of growing human knowledge; if the Bible may, from imperfect human language, select terms which may hold hidden truths, till ages to come shall disclose the inner meaning, this would seem to be the best solution of this difficult problem. And when we come to compare the language of the Bible with modern science, we find just this to be the fact.

I. Take, for example, astronomy. How bitter has been the battle between undevout astronomers and the Word of God!

We are told that the Bible term, "firmament," is an ancient blunder, crystallized. Modern science, taking a dignified stand, says: "Ye have heard it hath been said by them of old time, there is a solid sphere above us which revolves with its starry lamps; but I say unto you that this is an old notion of ignorance, for there is nothing but vast space filled with ether above us, and stars are suns varying by infinite distances, and the earth turns on its axis." But look closer at this word "firmament." While Mr. Goodwin declares it "irreconcilable with modern astronomy," and timid apologists venture to suggest that Moses simply made a mistake, or may be pardoned for speaking after the manner of men, we find that the original term rakiya means that which is spread out, or over spreads an "expanse." Now, read the word expanse where firmament occurs, and there is not only no contradiction as to the facts of astronomy, but perfect harmony. If Moses had been Mitchell, he could not have chosen a better word to express the appearance, and yet accommodate the reality. He actually anticipated science. And this is one of the "Mistakes of Moses."

Another error of them of old time was that of the revolution of the heavenly bodies around the earth; and after Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo taught the true law of the solar system, men raised an outcry against the Bible. And yet the Bible is found to be entirely consistent with the discoveries of science, that the earth is not flat, but a sphere, and that it moves with perfect uniformity on its axis.

Take such expressions as these: (Job 26:7) He hangeth the earth upon nothing. (Job 38:8-11) Who shut up the sea with doors when it rushed forth and came out of the womb; when I made the cloud its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling-hand? and established my decree upon it, and set bars and doors, and said hitherto shalt thou come, but no further, etc. (Job 38:12) Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days, and caused the dayspring to know his place?

How beautifully this language adapts itself to the scientific facts not then known that a relation is established between land and sea, by which the waters cannot overwhelm the earth; that this globe is not supported on any other solid substance, as the Pagan mythologies even now teach, but held in place by invisible forces of gravitation; that the revolution of the earth upon its axis is so absolutely regular that, as LaPlace says, it has not for two thousand years varied the one- hundredth part of a second; so that the dayspring never fails or lingers in the eastern sky.

Jeremiah 33:22 "The host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured." The fact of the vast host of stars is a fact of modern discovery. Hipparchus, about a century and a half before Christ, gave the number of stars as 1,022, and Ptolemy, in the beginning of the second century of the Christian era, could find but 1,026. We may on a clear night, with the unaided eye, see only 1,160, or, if we could survey the whole celestial sphere, about 3,000. But when the telescope began to be pointed to the heavens, less than three centuries ago, by Galileo, then for the first time men began to know that Jeremiah was right when he made the stars as countless as the sand on the sea-shore. When Lord Rosse’s instrument turned its great mirror to the sky, lo, the number of visible stars increased to nearly 400,000,000! and Herschel compares the multitude of them to glittering dust scattered on the black background of the heavens. When John Herschel, at the foot of the dark continent, resolves the nebulae into suns, and Lord Rosse, as with the eye of a Titan, finds in the cloudy scarf about Orion "a gorgeous bed of stars," and the very milky way itself proves to be simply a grand procession of stars absolutely without number, how true is the exclamation of Jeremiah, 600 years before Christ, 2,200 years before Galileo: "The host of heaven cannot be numbered!" Who taught Jeremiah astronomy?

II. When the modern science of Geology began to unwrap the earth’s coverings and read the records of the rocks, timid faith grew pale and trembled for the Word of God. A vast age was revealed for our globe, and what must we do with the "Mistakes of Moses?" How came these fossils or organic remains in the rocks? and in such quantities that coral reefs represent countless millions of zoophytes, and mountain masses are composed of shells not larger than a grain of sand? The Tuscan hills are built of chambered shells so small that one ounce of stone contains over 10,000; and the dust that falls from the chalk at the blackboard under the microscope proves to be fossils! And what enormous periods were required for living creatures to build such masses as these!

Some attempted to account for the deposit of these fossils by the convulsions attending the deluge; others suggested that God built the world out of fossils, in which life had never dwelt, so that the rocks, after all, really lie to us. Others have been ready to thunder anathemas against science, because they could not reconcile it with Scripture, after the fashion of the Brahmin who, when the microscope showed him the folly of his pagan notions and practices, rid himself of his doubts by dashing the microscope into fragments! But surely the Bible cannot need such methods of defense. If truth be divided against itself, how, then, shall his kingdom stand? The correspondence between the Mosaic account of creation and the most advanced discoveries of science proves that only He who built the world built the Book. Note a few instances:

I. The order of creation.

Geology teaches a watery waste, whose dense vapors shut out light: Moses affirms that, at first, the earth was formless and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Geology makes life to precede light, and the life develops beneath the deep: Moses presents the creative spirit as brooding over that great deep, before God said "Let light be." Geology makes the atmosphere to form an expanse by lifting watery vapors into clouds, and so separating the fountains of waters above from those below: Moses affirms the same. Geology tells us that continents next lifted themselves from beneath the great deep, and bore vegetation: Moses also declares that the dry land appeared, and brought forth grass, herb, and the tree, exactly correspondent to the three orders of primeval vegetation! Geology then asserts that the heavens became cleared of cloud and the sun and moon and stars appeared: Moses does not say that God created all these heavenly bodies on the fourth creative day, but that they then began to serve to divide day from night and to become signs for seasons, days and years! Geology then shows us sea monsters, reptiles and winged creatures: Moses likewise reveals the waters bringing forth moving and creeping creatures and fowl flying in the expanse. Geology unfolds next, the race of quadruped mammals and so Moses makes cattle and beast of the earth to follow, in the same order and on the sixth day of creation. Geology brings man on the scene last of all, and so does Moses. Geology makes the first light and heat not solar but chemical or "cosmical." Moses makes light to precede the first appearance of the sun, by the space of three creative days!

2. Look at the order of animal creation! Geology and comparative anatomy combine to teach that the order of creation was from lower to higher. Fish, proportion of brain to spinal cord; 2 to 1. Reptiles 2 to 1. Birds, 3 to 1. Mammals 4 to 1. Man 33 to 1. Now this is exactly the order of Moses. Who told Moses, what modern comparative anatomy has discovered, that fish and reptile come below birds? And these are some more of the "Mistakes of Moses!" Here is a record of creation, produced fifteen or twenty centuries before science unveiled these modern facts and truths; and yet there is not one scientific blunder or error, and the coincidences and correspondences are so many and so marked, that a modern scientist has confessed, that if one should sketch briefly the celestial mechanism of LaPlace, the Cosmos of Humboldt and the latest system of geology, no simpler and sublimer words could be found than those of Moses!

3. Again geology shows us that the vast plants of the great coal age are such as never grew in sunlight but in long continued shade; they are such as must have fed upon an atmosphere full of vapor and their wood is not hardened as it would have been under sunshine. Who taught Moses to put the growth of that earliest vegetation in the period preceding the first appearance of the sun in the sky!

4. Geology teaches six periods of creation, extending through ages. Moses appears to teach six days of 24 hours each. But again on examining closely, we find the Hebrew word, Yom, means a period of time, and is often used of in definite periods or seasons! In the first chapter of Genesis, skeptics triumphantly say, it makes creative periods to be measured by 24 hours; and yet in Genesis 2:4, it is used of the whole time occupied in creation! In Psalms 95:8, "in the day of temptation," it means forty years. We use the English word with the same looseness of application a "polar day" means six months, the day of grace, the period of probation. Origen and Augustine, long before science suggested that day might mean a period, maintained that the Hebrew word was indefinite; and when the Bible declares that "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years," it gives a clue and key to its own interpretation.

Again you will notice that of these creative days Moses said "and the evening and the morning were the first day." If the solar day is meant, why begin with the evening? the solar day obviously begins with sunrise. To account for this curious feature in the Mosaic record by the fact that the Jews reckoned their day from sunset to sunset, is to reason in a circle, for it was from this first chapter of Genesis that such an unnatural mode of reckoning proceeded. Now when we turn to geology and find that each creative period began in an evening and developed into a morning light developing out of darkness and order out of confusion we see why Moses was guided to make each day to begin with evening.

5. The Deluge, as recorded in the days of Noah, has been thought to be irreconcilable with modern science. The grand point where objections center is that of the universal character of the flood. As the human race then occupied but a small part of the globe, to submerge the whole, so that even the loftiest mountains should be more than covered seems a needless waste of divine energy; especially as it may well be doubted whether the entire atmosphere, condensed into rain, would suffice to lift the seas to such a height; and there are believed to be many evidences, in certain parts of the earth, that no universal flood has prevailed within the last 6,000 years. To these objections it is only necessary to reply that the moment the Bible record is interpreted with reference to the inhabited world, all difficulties vanish. Such phrases as "the whole earth," "under the whole heaven," etc., are frequently used in Scripture of so much of the earth as was peopled; or even of Palestine, and the lands lying about it. Terms of a universal character are to be interpreted not literally, but by the design and end of the writer. When we are told that "all countries came into Egypt to buy corn" what do we understand? Are we to suppose that, if there were inhabitants in Britain, they journeyed to Egypt for grain? It would take about as much time, in those days, to get there and back, as it would to secure a new harvest. But if we understand that Egypt became a granary, a house of bread, to all the district over which the famine prevailed, the record is plain.

Now, in the account of the deluge, Moses is writing of God’s awful judgment upon the sin of the race. His judgment fell upon the earth for man’s sake, and only so much of the earth as was the scene of man’s sin was necessarily concerned. If then we understand the whole earth to refer to the entire inhabited surface, the flood is still relatively universal, i.e., universal as to mankind; and the usage of similar terms in other parts of Scripture justifies such interpretation! Hugh Miller has shown that all the phenomena of the flood might be produced by the gradual sinking and rising again of that part of the earth’s surface known as the cradle of the race; and this would produce the very effects, so graphically described by Noah, "breaking up of the fountains of the great deep and the returning of the waters from off the earth." It ought to be added that tradition even among the pagans confirms the fact of the flood and the resting of the ark on Ararat.

Haywood W. Guion of North Carolina has suggested a theory of the Deluge, which both harmonizes all the discoveries of science with the record in Genesis, and may yet displace all previous conceptions of the subject. He takes literally the statement of St. Peter, "the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished." In Genesis we read "let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear." In both passages there is no hint of more than one continent or more than one sea. The dry land or earth seems to be by itself in one grand elevation above sea level, and the waters gathered in one place. This would imply, as any scientist knows, certain peculiar conditions. This solitary continent, rising in one mass from the midst of one sea that surrounds it, would present no great inequalities of surface, though there might be elevations that, compared with the rest, would be hills or even mountains; there would be a great uniformity of climate and temperature, no rains or clouds, but heavy mists constantly keeping the earth moist; and consequently vast vegetable growths, very luxuriant and abundant, making animal food unnecessary either for man or beast. There would be a paradise of verdure, and one perennial spring. This Mr. Guion holds was the case. At the time of the deluge this huge dome that rose out of the water was shattered by volcanic explosions and a great earthquake, and its grand roof fell in and became the bed of what is now the Pacific ocean, while its shattered and irregular rim was tilted up into the great mountain ranges, that line the eastern boundaries of the Pacific; and the bed of this original ocean was lifted into the continents of our eastern and western hemispheres, while the sea rushed into the new bed formed by the submersion of the original continent. This would give us in the new order of things great mountain ranges, with marked inequalities of climate and temperature and all the phenomena of the changing seasons, winds, clouds, storms of rain and snow; and consequently the first rainbow. Animals inhabiting barren districts would be driven to devour animals weaker than they, and animal food would become necessary to man. This theory makes the whole original world to be submerged and all the high hills covered. The gigantic animals of that primeval continent engulfed in the foaming waters and afterward buried beneath the superficial mass of shifting soil, would furnish the remarkable remains found in so many places, shewing that the creatures they represent were overtaken in some universal catastrophe.

Mr. Tullidge says: that "with the advance of discovery, the opposition, supposed to exist between Revelation and Geology, has disappeared; and of the eighty theories which the French Institute counted in 1806, as hostile to the Bible, not one now stands." Not only so; but among the mightiest advocates of God’s Word are many of the masters who have explored his works. Their united testimony is that we have no occasion to fear for the Bible notwithstanding the oppositions of science falsely so called. For "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Word shall not pass away."