The epoch of creation. The Scripture doctrine contrasted with the geological theory

III 1Ull li iittiiiTiiiffMrnftmm

PRINCETON, N. J.

division BS 657 .L68 1851 Lord, Eleazar, 1788-1871 The epoch of creation

The John M. Krehs Dunation.

Princeton Theological Seminary Library

THE

EPOCH OF CREATION.

THE SCRIPTURE DOCTRINE

CONTEASTED WITH

THE GEOLOGICAL THEORY.

BY

ELEAZAR LORD

WITH AN" INTRODUCTION,

BY

RICHARD W. DICKINSON, D.D.

NEW YORK:

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, by

ELEAZAR LORD,

In tho Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

Introduction

Whatever diversity of view might be supposed to exist in relation to the divine origin of the Scriptures, it cannot be denied that they have exerted a mighty influence over the human mind, in awakening its energies and directing its inquiries. Simply to ascertain the meaning of this book, we call the Bible, and to set forth the high authority of its claims on the belief of all men, how many languages have been mastered, philosophies investigated, histories studied, and regions explored. Difficulties of interpretation have but served as incentives to higher mental attainments, while skeptical objections have only impelled to deeper and more varied researches, until at last, it may be said, that every department of human learning has been rendered tributary to the illustration and defenoe of revealed truth. We need not institute any invidious comparisons between the champions and the assailants of revelation ; much less challenge its ene-

IV INTRODUCTION.

mies to meet its friends on the fair field of open controversy. Now and then, some one, mistaking his prejudices for convictions, may talk loudly or scribble boastingly, in the hope of securing a little notoriety to his name ; but they who are well read in the controversies which Christianity has occasioned, will be slow to advance objections which have been so often answered or to resort to sophistry which has been repeatedly exposed ; and still more backward to employ missiles which may be so easily turned to their own discomfiture. Such, too, is the lodgment which Christianity has gained in the public mind, so deep and wide-spread the conviction that it is inseparable from the best interests of society — allied, as it is, with the purest characters, the safest counsels, the truest confidences, and the dearest charities — that whoever shall publicly aim to undermine its authority, and paralyze its influence, must necessarily labor under a disadvantage. Hence, infidelity at the present day changes its forms only that it may the more effectually conceal its designs. Now assuming some new phase of philosophy, and then intercepting our view by stratified rocks and fossil remains ; now blazoning the wonders of mesmerism, or the discoveries of phrenology, and then wrapping itself in mystery, or lying encoiled in the bosom of a myth. But being less open, it may be only the more insidious, or if less virulent, it is only the more dangerous : and especially to those who, in order to keep pace with what is called

INTRODUCTION.

" the spirit of the age," would acquaint themselves with any and every publication, though its only claim to notice may be that it is the latest issue. Works which would shock the moral sense of the community, and outrage every pious sentiment, are not to be dreaded ; the infamy of such writings would counteract their malignity. The danger is, not that revelation will, be rudely assailed, and overcome by invective and satire ; but that it will be betrayed by a kiss ; that even its professed adherents, mistaking theories for arguments, and assumptions for facts, may, in some important particulars, waive its fair and obvious meaning to save its credit with the demi-savants of the age.

The fact that (rod has made a revelation of his mind and will to man, may not be openly denied ; but while his Word is admitted and professedly respected, theories are broached at variance with its doctrines, or even irreconcileable with its origin ; and which, being associated with all that currently passes for philosophy and science, are, therefore, only the more imposing to those who would be held in repute for their mental independence and enlargement. Minds of this class are always the first to be captivated by anything which has the aspect of being a new view ; and hence, should infidel sentiments ever obtain in the community, it will be chiefly through their influence.

Let it be considered, then, that whatever tends either to pervert or to modify the doctrines of the Gros-

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pel, is false to Christ ; and in like manner, whatever tends to insinuate doubt as to the truthfulness of any portion of the Pentateuch, is false to Moses — though anything at variance with the obvious teachings of either the New or the Old Testament, must re-act to the disparagement of the other. The one necessarily involves the other ; so that if the inspiration of the Gospel be admitted, that of the Pentateuch cannot be consistently denied ; or if the inspiration of the latter be abandoned, that of the former cannot be proved. This is understood by the opponents of the Bible ; though many who admit the great truths of the Gospel, seem to imagine that because Judaism has been abrogated, it matters not in what sense we regard the teachings of Moses : they are of no practical moment to us as Christians, and certainly need constitute no limits to the speculations of the human mind.

In some instances, we are willing to admit, that the lovers of science have not been aware of the tendency of their own views ; they have been misled by the spirit of theorizing, or through a desire to make to themselves a distinctive name by deviating from received hypotheses ; but in other instances, objections to the Mosaic record have been stated in so plausible a manner, that even some who hold to its credibility have been inclined to force its clear and admitted import into harmony with the positions of a Babbage or a Maillet. But if we are to reconcile the theories of geologists with the teachings of Moses, we endanger

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the record as effectually as we should the Gospel itself, by attempting to harmonize its doctrines with the pre- conceptions of the carnal mind ; nor could there be an end to such a process, until we found ourselves hand in hand with the enemies of revelation, in demolishing its divine authority. No ; let us meet all objections fairly put — whenever an answer is practicable ; but when it is not — it is legitimate to fall back on the authority of the Bible. Here is our vantage ground : all arguments against the Bible can never outweigh the arguments in its favor.

We may be sure that nothing short of a revelation could be accompanied by such an array of proofs ; but we can never be sure that all objections against the Bible do not arise from either the limited nature of our faculties, the perversion of reason, or a misapprehension of the facts in any given case. Certain it is, that no theory can adduce a moiety of the evidence which goes to establish the authenticity and genuineness of the Holy Scriptures. Reason and revelation are traceable to the same high source. Science proper cannot be divorced from religion. G-od's works cannot contradict his Word : hence the presumption that any conclusion from a survey of his works which clashes with the intimations of his Word, is untenable, and will yet yield to some more impartial or profound analysis of physical phenomena. Objections to the Mosaic record may be raised on divers grounds ; and if we accommodate its

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sense to one, why not to another, and still another ? If we are at liberty to abandon the cosmogony of the Pentateuch, why not, also, the fall of man, the unity of the race, the origin of animal sacrifices, and the universality of the Deluge, — until the whole record is marred by the inroads of neology, or sunk in the excavations of geology.

But whatever the form of such objections or under' whatever names they are advanced, they all have the same tendency, and that is, to invalidate the inspiration and authority of the Pentateuch ; and hence, in relation to the subject to which our introduction has especial reference, we are reduced to this alternative : whether to believe Moses, or to adopt the generalizations of some " hammer-bearing philosopher ?"

But which should be the more competent to instruct us — a man whom God had raised up, and inspired to be the historian of creation, or one who relies on his own limited and superficial understanding as to what the Creator of the ends of the earth has or has not done ? "Which merits the readier credence — a record which has more historical and moral testimony in its support than any other in the world ; or a science which as yet has led only a few scattered individuals to collect, as one of the most prominent among them has admitted, " some materials for future generalizations ?" — a record which preserves the same lucid distinctness and commanding unity through a period of four thousand years ; or a science which is

INTRODUCTION. IX

but of yesterday's growth, and embraces almost as many different theories, and leads to almost as many different conclusions, as the number of its teachers ? — a cosmogony, which, being in keeping with the sublime idea of creative energy, implies the supernatural ; or one, which having originated in an induction from supposed existing causes, excludes, and stigmatizes as unscientific, all that is miraculous in the works as well as in the Word of the Creator ?

We admit that, in some of our modern treatises on geology, there is much that is imposing and even fascinating to the imagination, because it borders on the nature of new discoveries ; nor do we presume to deny the facts from which sage inferences are deduced ; but where is the proof that geology has as yet legitimately accounted for the former changes on the earth's surface, much less for the time and manner of its origin ? Where is the consistency of geological theories ? What is the theory of any one writer on the subject, but the construction which he has seen fit to put on the physical phenomena of the globe, as being the exclusive effects, in his view, of the ordinary operation of natural causes ? If Smith may conflict in his geological views with Buckland, and Lyell with Lamarck ; or if the author of the " Footprints" may oppose the development theory of the author of the " Vestiges," with what propriety, we ask, can either demand that we shall substitute his understanding of the Mosaic record of the creation in

X INTRODUCTION.

the place of our own, or forfeit the respect of scientific men.

If geologists may draw different conclusions from the changes in the organic and the inorganic world which are now in progress, by what law of evidence are we bound either to harmonize the Mosaic record with their conflicting theories, or to discard its authority ?

The work of creation was necessarily a supernatural work ; and hence, all reasoning from the general laws of nature, which in their operation were subsequent to the work of creation, is as irrelevant in explanation of the Mosaic account, as the argument drawn from universal experience in disparagement of the miracles re corded in Holy Writ. Be it so, that great changes have for thousands of years been going on in the organic texture of the globe, this does not legitimate the inference that the world, when created, was not in a perfect state — having the great distinctive features of land and water, and adapted to the immediate and most exuberant production of plants and animals ; and though we may see in what way soils are formed, and by what action rocks are worn away, and how what is now land may have once been a lake or the ocean, still, it does not follow that the act of creation was any less a miracle ; nor that those wonderful stratified formations on which so much stress has been laid in support of certain theories, were not the result of causes acting with a rapidity and a force, of which,

INTRODUCTION. XI

with all our boasted knowledge of natural philosophy and chemistry, we can form no adequate conception. To admit the original act of creation, and to attempt to account for it on natural principles, or to prescribe the mode in which the primeval creation was effected, is preposterous in the extreme ; and he who so far presumes, only exposes himself to the pertinent rebuke : " Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth ? declare if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measure thereof if thou knowest ; or who hath stretched out the line upon it ? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened ; or who hath laid the corner-stone thereof ?"

It is of the nature of science to be governed by known laws ; but it does not follow from our knowledge of natural causes that there is no supernatural agency. No ; let natural science not overstep its legitimate limits, nor venture to trench on the science of Heaven's revealed will ; a science, which, though it can adduce only historical and moral evidence in its support, is, by the very nature of evidence, entitled to equal weight with any mathematical demonstration. We yield to no one in our conviction of the value of scientific researches and discoveries ; nor are we backward in our endeavors to resolve whatever is only seemingly miraculous into natural causes, or to explain effects if possible, on philosophical principles ; but to our mind, the natural implies the supernatural, as certainly as the existence of the creature that of the Creator.

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Now, to suppose, from an observation of natural causes and effects, that the world could not have been created and finished " in the space of six days and all very good," is as conclusive as to infer that man was not created in one day, because years are necessary to the maturity of the infant, or that the trees were not, because it requires a long period of time to develope the acorn. Aside from this, however, to attempt to decide the epoch of creation by science, seems to us to betray as profound ignorance of the principles of evidence, as if one should endeavor to explain the origin of Christianity by mathematics. The question respecting the origin and epoch of the creation, is not a scientific, it is simply an historical question ; to be decided as we would ascertain the correctness of any other point appertaining to the department of history. If the world is older than the Mosaic account intimates, we may expect to find among the antediluvians and in the earliest state of society of which we have any knowlege, some indications of a higher antiquity ; but if none are to be found — if, on the contrary, all our researches into the early condition of society only go to show that the beginning of the world we inhabit cannot be reasonably referred to a more remote period than that assigned by Moses, while his account is supported by the most exact chronological computations drawn from well-known and indisputable historical facts, then, all that remains for us, is to receive the testimony of Moses, or to reject it ; and, in the latter

INTKODTTCTION. Xlll

case, to reject it simply on the ground that it is so defective as to be unworthy of reasonable credence. Science has no logical connection with the point at issue. It cannot disprove what it is not competent to establish. If it be received, it must be, not on the ground of any scientific deductions, but solely on the ground of testimony ; and hence it is a point not to be either overthrown or even supported by the natural sciences ; but to be believed on the credit of revelation. " By faith, we understand, the worlds were framed by the word of Grod." In all our reasonings, this great fact, that in the beginning Grod created and completed the heaven and the earth in the space of six days, is to be regarded as a starting point, like a first truth in philosophy, or an axiom in geometry. He, therefore, who so far transcends the legitimate object of all true science, as to deny or even to exclude the supernatural, must needs take unwarrantable liberties with the word of Grod, and expose himself to the charge, if not of downright infidelity, at least of rash conjecture, extravagant fancies, and marvellous credulity. Nothing may be further from the intentions of our geologists than to afford material for sceptical thoughts ; some of them profess to believe in Divine revelation ; but no one can surrender his mind to the spirit of theorizing without becoming as unsafe a guide in all matters pertaining to philosophy and faith, as the partisan of any cause is, in matters of conscience and good morals. It is the judgment,

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rather than the integrity of those who, par eminence, claim to be the scientific guardians of the Bible, that wc are constrained to doubt ; nor can we welcome their aid in support of the Mosaic record, if we must accommodate its sense to the theories which they, in turn, may be induced to advance or to follow.

A firm, cordial belief in Grod's revelation to man, limits, while it awakens the spirit of philosophic inquiry ; and had its study been pursued in connection with physical researches, its advocates would have been spared the pains of combating many a theory which leads, by necessary inference, to its rejection. We are not exciting a groundless apprehension ; much less do we betray a state of mind in unison with such prejudices as were arrayed against Gallileo. To confound the advocates of the Mosaic record with the ignorant, bigoted, and persecuting priests of a dark age, is, to say the least, not very consistent with well-grounded claims to superior acumen_ The discoveries of that much-injured astronomer did not conflict with revelation ; but some of our modern geological theories clash directly with the teachings of Moses. Even to refer the period designated by " the beginning" to millions of ages back, in order to account for certain stratified formations and fossil remains, is to contradict the record which refers the creation of those vegetable substances of which beds of coal are composed, and of those animals of which fossils arc discovered, to the third, fifth, and

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sixth days ; or that the lights of heaven existed long before the Mosaic era, and that they then, owing to further purification of the atmosphere, on the fourth day became visible in the firmament and assumed new relations to the newly modified earth, is a supposition which cannot be reconciled with the declaration that God made two great lights, and then set them in the firmament. Hence, among the supporters of such thories may be found those who assume the ground that their faith in revelation has no connection with their views of the work of creation ; who abandon not only the Mosaic account of the creation, but the unity of the race, the universality of the Deluge, and the reason for the institution of the Sabbath. Among this class, too, may be found those who discard the scriptural belief that death was the consequence of sin, and that animal sacrifices were of divine appointment; and who are wont to disparage the credibility of the miraculous portions of the Old Testament, on the ground that all the early nations were extremely prone to hyperbolize ! Through the tendency of neological views on the one hand, and of geological speculations on the other, it has become not uncommon to represent the Pentateuch as a collection of popular traditions, having scarcely any more foundation in fact than the legends of classical antiquity ; and, with the writings of Herodotus or the poems of Homer, to be philosophically referred to an age of fabulous uncertainty. Sometimes ridicule is employed ; then dif-

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Acuities are insinuated under the mask of philosophy or of science ; and then again, to quiet all apprehensions, we are gravely told that the Bible is not a revelation of science! or that it can be readily explained in accordance with geological deductions by putting a different construction on this or that part, or by resolving the particulars of the Mosaic account into general terms or figurative language. But thus it is, that, through the medium of the Pentateuch, a blow is often struck at Christianity itself. We are not deceived ; it will be found on inquiry, that they who attach no importance to the Mosaic account in order to secure belief in their own theories repecting the work of creation, are inclined to trace the Mosaic enactments to the prior customs of the Egyptians, and, in some instances, have no faith in the inspiration of the Old Testament.

Let us then thrust the Mosaic record aside, and what have we gained ? Does it relieve our laboring minds to be able to read that, at a period too remote to be measured even by the power of imagination, Grod created the primordial elements ? and that, after an almost boundless interval of time, he undertook what is called " the work of the first day," and which took him a thousand years to finish ? Does the fond notion of myriads of ages having been employed to render this earth a fit habitation for man, relieve us from the necessity of admitting some supernatural agency in the beginning, or render any more comprehensible

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the time and the mode of creative energy in its material manifestations ? Does it exalt our conceptions of the great God to think, that after experimenting through countless ages, at the expense of successive dynasties of beasts and reptiles, he found himself under the necessity of reducing all his work again to chaos, and of doing it all over to adapt its condition, and attemper its climate to the reasoning brain of the last product of his skill? Or, are we more deeply impressed with a sense of his greatness and glory, when, by availing ourselves of the kindly proffered aids of geology and chemistry, we have contrived to exclude all moral ends in the work of creation — thus reducing the intelligent immaterial Creator into a necessary mechanical principle of motion, groping its way through illimitable space, and at last working itself up, by chemical affinities, into outward shapes and things ?

For ourselves, the Chaldean cosmogony, in which the monster Omoroca fell subdued beneath the victorious arm of the god Belus, and the world was formed out of her substance ; the Hindoo, in which the Divine idea deposited in the waters, first with a thought created, a productive seed which became an egg, and in which Brahma sat inactive a whole year of the Creator ; the Egyptian, which derives the visible universe from an eternal darkness in a boundless abyss ; the Epicurean, which ascribes all things to a fortuitous concourse of atoms ; or the Cartesian vorti-

XV111 INTRODUCTION.

cal theory, which teaches that a formative circular motion was originally impressed on the elements of matter, — seems to us not more unworthy of him whom we call God than some of the theories of modern geology, and certainly quite as worthy of displacing the Mosaic record in our belief.

It is by a comparison of all the pagan cosmogonies with that of Moses, that we come to give our judgment in favor of his account of the work of creation, as being the most simple, connected, and intelligible, — in every respect free from those wild and distorted images or most fanciful conceits, which form the characteristics of all ancient mythology ; and in like manner, it is by looking into our modern cosmogonies, and discovering their bold assumptions, illogical generalizations, and, above all, their flagrant want of consistency, that we are led to prize the more highly the G-enesis of Moses.

How unlike the god of modern science is that great Being whose account of his creative work his servant Moses was commanded to transmit to all coming ages ! How presumptuous to divine his unsearchable ways by the experiments of the chemist or the classifications of the geologist ! How preposterous to limit his creative energy by those aqueous and igneous agents, and those destroying, transporting, and reproductive agents which some self-complacent theorist

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boasts of having discovered, and thinks he understands ! How impossible for the finite mind to rise to an adequate conception of his power —

" Whose word leaped forth at once to its effect ; Who called for things that were not, and they came !"

Because man, with his wondrous knowledge of chemical agents and mechanical forces, of sedimentary deposits and fossil remains, concludes that the Creator of the ends of the earth must have proceeded in a particular way and taken a great length of time to finish his work, does it follow that his conclusion is not a mere presumptuous conjecture ? No ; " ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God." " His thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways." The mysteries of his works are as far above our conceptions as the mysteries of his nature.

So far as we can understand his agency, Grod accomplishes his ends by the simplest and most direct means : —

" In human works, though labored on with pain A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain ; In God's, one single can its end produce, Yet serves to second too, some other use."

We delight to contemplate him as seen every where in the works of his hands ; to look out on the ever-varying brilliancy and grandeur of the landscape ; to gaza

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on the towering rocks, and the cloud-capped mountains, and the wide-spread ocean, or to look up to the magnificence of worlds on worlds which stud the firmament like gems of light, and amid all these phenomena to see the evidences of an agent which, though invisible to us, is adequate to the production of all the physical wonders by which we are surrounded. Natural science, with all its philosophical apparatus and boasted generalizations, can only secure to me a more extended vision, or a more thorough scrutiny ; but it cannot inspire me with more adoring conceptions of the great First Cause of all things than a few simple expressions that may be gathered from the inspired record of Grod's creation. It may conduct me to distant worlds, or carry me into the dark and cavernous recesses of nature ; it may point me to the inscriptions on the rocks, or to the teachings of long-buried organisms ; but it can offer nothing, do nothing, to impress me with so profound a sense of the inscrutable greatness and majesty of the Divine Being — as a poor Hebrew, the son of a bondwoman, has done, by the sublime manner in which he has announced the work of creation: " In the beginning Gtod created the heaven and the earth :" — a declaration which carries its own heaven-born evidence with it, flashing like a ray of light across the darkness of the unassisted mind, whenever it feels after God. Nor less impressive are the succeeding announcements : And God said, Let there be light and there

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ivas light : Let there be a firmament, and there was a firmament: Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. No representation of power can be compared with this ; nor has the sublimity of the narration been equalled, much less surpassed, by any subsequent writer.

He who " spake and it was done, who commanded and it stood fast," could have created the world in a moment of time ; but such an act would have been altogether incomprehensible even to those created intelligences who were witnesses of his works, and who could not then, as they did when the heavens and earth were finished, " have sung together and shouted for joy." Nor could the historian have added anything to the first verse of G-enesisin, explanation of an instantaneous work of such magnitude ; while the bare affirmation of its having been instantly performed, though thus imparting to us the knowledge of a fact which the unassisted mind might have vainly essayed to excogitate, would have afforded but little satisfaction.

But while the narrative conveys to us this stupendous idea of an uncreated omnipotent will, it furnishes us with an account of the work of creation which is at once comprehensible, instructive, and deeply impressive. It does in no wise gratify a wanton curiosity, nor deviate from the line of its immediate object ; it simply imparts to us views of Grod worthy of himself

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as the Creator, and views of man in his relations to (rod, of the last importance to him in furthering the great end of his being ; and thus preserving brevity with simplicity, and consistency with strength, while uniting the grandest conceptions with all the sober dignity of the weightiest truths, it stands like the work which it depicts, a mighty and imperishable monument to the glory of God the Creator, to be seen and read by all his rational and intelligent creatures.