childish intellect are apparent also in the collective intellect
of the human race in its earlier and ruder development. There are
two characteristics of the human mind in this condition, which
have had a very great effect on the interpretation of this portion
of the Bible.

The first of these is the impatience of doubt and uncertainty. The
power of recognizing the imperfection of our knowledge, and the
consequent necessity of suspending our judgment, is a power which
is only gradually acquired with the accumulation of experience.
The young untrained mind finds it difficult to realize the truth
that any information communicated to it is not altogether within
the grasp of its faculties. It must attach some definite meaning
to the words; it must image to itself some way in which great
events were brought about, great works were accomplished. It finds
it difficult to realize a fact as accomplished, unless it can also
picture to itself some way in which it might have been effected.
For this purpose such knowledge as it has at its command is
employed, and where that fails recourse is had to the imagination
to supply the deficiency. Thus it has been with ourselves in our
childhood, and thus it was in the childhood of the world.
Knowledge was indeed sought, but it was not sought in the right
way, and so the search often resulted in error, and this error
produced its effect in the interpretation of the passage in
question. The old school of inquirers started from certain
abstract principles, and endeavoared to reduce the results of
observation to conformity with those principles. This was the case
with astronomy. The old astronomers taking as axioms the two
assumptions that everything connected with the heavenly bodies
must be perfect, and that the circle is the only perfect figure,