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to stand, if stand they shall, not because they are in Genesis or the
Republic, but because they prove true.

When (_e.g._) the Biblical writers speak of the Creation, the Garden of
Eden, the Fall of Man, etc., they give us their thoughts, the thoughts of
their age, the thoughts of earlier ages, of greatly gifted minds in many
ages gathering into an imposing tradition; which, as we now see, came down
through successive generations of Hebrews, from a remote antiquity in
which this race had not been thrown off from the common Semitic stock. On
the baked clay tablets of Babylonia we read to-day the same stories. The
Hebrews worked them over, under the plastic power of their religious
genius, into the lofty ethical and theistic forms in which they stand in
Genesis; forms which, rightly read, are parables fresh and inspiring now,
as when, twenty-five hundred years ago, Jewish children listened to them
with awe beneath the willows by the water courses of Babylonia. That most
exquisite story of our weird Hawthorne, the Marble Faun, is a version of
the legend of the Garden of Eden. Commingled with these lofty truths we
find crude notions of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology How
could it be otherwise, since these sciences were embryotic then, or even
unborn? We hearken, reverently, thankfully, to the philosophy and poetry
of Hebrew, Chaldean and Accadian sages and seers, in these profound and
subtle parables of the mysteries which still fascinate us. We dismiss the
knowledge of nature set forth in these legends and myths as the
child-sciences of Israel and Chaldea and Accadia.

We go to our savans for knowledge of physical nature. We make no attempt
to reconcile Genesis with the Origin of Species. Genesis is no authority
in science, and The Origin of Species is no authority in philosophy,
poetry, theology or religion.

The accounts of man in the dim distance of pre-historic times, given in
Genesis, belong to the departments of the antiquarian, and the
philologist; and we trust their story, no matter how it collides with the
Hebrew traditions. So through every sphere of knowledge upon which the
Biblical writers enter, outside of their own special spheres, we follow
them as venerable guides, but as entirely fallible authorities, expressing
the knowledge of their age and race.

Thus, to take one example from later times, St. Paul, in the first epistle
to the Corinthians, condemns woman's participation in the exerci