110 Science and the Bible. [Jan.
"What
other points science in its present state establishes or elucidates, we
shall now consider. The best views we have met with on the harmony
between Science and the Bible, are those of Prof. Arnold Guyot, a
philosopher of enlarged comprehension of nature and a truly christian
spirit; and the following interpretations of the sacred record are, in
the main, such as we have gathered from personal intercourse with him.1
The
first thought that strikes the scientific reader is the evidence of
Divinity, not merely in the first verse of the record, and the
successive fiats, but in the whole order of creation. There is so much
that the most recent readings of science have for the first time
explained, that the idea of man as the author becomes utterly
incomprehensible. By proving the record true, science pronounces it
divine; for who could have correctly narrated the secrets of eternity
but God himself?
Moreover,
the order or arrangement is not a possible intellectual conception,
although we grant to man, as we must, the intuition of a God. Man would
very naturally have placed the creation of vegetation, one of the two
kingdoms of life, after that of the sun, and next to that of the other
kingdom of life, especially as the sunlight is so essential to growth;
and the creation of quadrupeds he would as naturally have referred to
the fifth day, leaving a whole day to man, the most glorious of all
creations. Prof. Lewis, in making no allusion to the creation of
quadrupeds on the sixth day, writes as if it were a mistake that this
was not so done. Man, again, would never have separated fw? creation of
light so far from that of the sun, to us the source of fight; neither
would he have conceived of the creation of the firmament, as that word
-is usually understood, and was under-
