how the world was
peopled, how mankind was to fare upon the earth, how the present order was
to come to an end, and many things beside. To answer authoritatively these
questions was the _raison d'etre_ of the Bible. It laid a solid foundation
for a science of life. With the passing away of the unreal Bible all
reference to it for such information should cease. These books, as actual
human writings, the studies of men of long past centuries, of men having
no guarantees of infallibility, cannot be expected to have anticipated the
solution of the great problems of knowledge, towards which the human
intellect has been laboriously working through the generations since they
were written; towards which it is still toilsomely striving, content, even
now, with the cold, grey light as of the dawning day.

Our truer idea of revelation--the evolution of nature and the historic
growth of man--forbids such a notion of any book. It has plainly pleased
the Most High that knowledge of these mysteries should come to man through
his patient, persevering effort after truth. Such continued endeavour wins
gradually better knowledge, and with it better life. This process of human
discovery is yet more truly a process of the Divine self-revealing. In
each and every real knowledge man is learning to know--God. Each truth of
science is a manifestation of somewhat in the Infinite Power in whom we
live and move and have our being. Had it pleased God to have given,
centuries ago, a super-natural answer to these problems of earth, He would
simply have dismissed His children from school, with-held from them that
noble education which lies in the discipline of study, and, while giving
them truth, have robbed them of that keenest joy of life, that benediction
richer even than the possession of truth--the search for it.

How indeed, even in the resources of omnipotence, could an answer to the
earth-problems have been framed, which, while coming down to the plane of
the age of Moses, should have kept level with the rise of human knowledge
through the climbing centuries? No, the Bible was not prepared as an
Encyclopedia of Knowledge for the successive generations of men. Its
writers may anticipate the thought of ages by profound intuitions,
pregnant imaginations, visions of the seer, as Plato does. Genius often
outstrips the plodding feet of generations. But genius must not put on the
airs of omniscience. It must submit its claims to trial by jury. They ar