research or abandon his faith in Scripture is a monstrous perversion of
Christian freedom." He declares: "The old position is no longer tenable;
a new position has to be taken up at once, prayerfully chosen, and
hopefully held." He then goes on to compare the Hebrew story of creation
with the earlier stories developed among kindred peoples, and especially
with the pre-existing Assyro-Babylonian cosmogony, and shows that they
are from the same source. He points out that any attempt to explain
particular features of the story into harmony with the modern scientific
ideas necessitates "a non-natural" interpretation; but he says that, if
we adopt a natural interpretation, "we shall consider that the Hebrew
description of the visible universe is unscientific as judged by modern
standards, and that it shares the limitations of the imperfect knowledge
of the age at which it was committed to writing." Regarding the account
in Genesis of man's physical origin, he says that it "is expressed
in the simple terms of prehistoric legend, of unscientific pictorial
description."

In these statements and in a multitude of others made by eminent
Christian investigators in other countries is indicated what the victory
is which has now been fully won over the older theology.

Thus, from the Assyrian researches as well as from other sources, it
has come to be acknowledged by the most eminent scholars at the leading
seats of Christian learning that the accounts of creation with which
for nearly two thousand years all scientific discoveries have had to
be "reconciled"--the accounts which blocked the way of Copernicus, and
Galileo, and Newton, and Laplace--were simply transcribed or evolved
from a mass of myths and legends largely derived by the Hebrews from
their ancient relations with Chaldea, rewrought in a monotheistic sense,
imperfectly welded together, and then thrown into poetic forms in the
sacred books which we have inherited.

On one hand, then, we have the various groups of men devoted to the
physical sciences all converging toward the proofs that the universe,
as we at present know it, is the result of an evolutionary process--that
is, of the gradual working of physical laws upon an early condition of
matter; on the other hand, we have other great groups of men devoted to
historical, philological, and archaeological science whose researches
all converge toward the conclusion that our sacred accounts of creation
were the result of