chapters of Genesis is not peculiar to the Hebrew people, that
substantially similar views of the stages through which creation moved
are to be found in the literatures of surrounding peoples. A well-known
type of student would therefore seek at one stroke to bring the first
chapters of Genesis down to the level of the scriptures of the neighbors
of the Hebrews. He would then discount all these narratives alike by
reference to modern astronomy, geology, and biology. But the difference
between the Hebrew account and the other accounts lies in this, that in
the Hebrew statement the science of a particular time is made the
vehicle of eternally superb moral and spiritual conceptions concerning
man and concerning man's relation to the Power that brought him into
being. The worth of these conceptions even in that early statement few
of us would be inclined to question. Assuming that any man or set of men
became in the old days alive to the value of such religious ideas, how
could they speak them forth except in the language of their own day?
They had to speak in their own tongue, and speaking in that tongue they
had to use the thought terms expressed by that tongue. They accepted the
science of their day as true, and they utilized that science for the
sake of bodying forth the moral and spiritual insights to which they had
attained. The inadequacy of early Hebrew science and its likeness to
Babylonian and Chaldean science do not invalidate the worth of the
spiritual conceptions of Genesis. This ought to be apparent even to the
proverbial wayfaring man. The loftiest spiritual utterances are often
clad in the poorest scientific draperies. Who would dare deny the worth
of the great moral insights of Dante? And who, on the other hand, would
insist upon the lasting value of the science in which his deep
penetrations are uttered? And so with Milton. Dr. W. F. Warren has shown
the nature of the material universe as pictured in Milton's "Paradise
Lost." In passing from heaven to hell one would descend from an upper to
a lower region of a sphere, passing through openings at the centers of