Genesis, or in
the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions
of men acting under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea,
or India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to
humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and modern
science, in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for the old--the
reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea of evolution for
that of creation--has added and is steadily adding a new revelation
divinely inspired.

In the light of these two evolutions, then--one of the visible universe,
the other of a sacred creation-legend--science and theology, if the
master minds in both are wise, may at last be reconciled. A great
step in this reconciliation was recently seen at the main centre
of theological thought among English-speaking people, when, in the
collection of essays entitled Lux Mundi, emanating from the college
established in these latter days as a fortress of orthodoxy at Oxford,
the legendary character of the creation accounts in our sacred books was
acknowledged, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury asked, "May not the
Holy Spirit at times have made use of myth and legend?"(10)

(10) For the first citations above made, see The Cosmogony of Genesis,
by the Rev. S. R. Driver, D.D., Canon of Christ Church and Regius
Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, in the Expositor for January, 1886; for
the second series of citations, see the Early Narratives of Genesis, by
Herbert Edward Ryle, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, London,
1892. For evidence that even the stiffest of Scotch Presbyterians have
come to discard the old literal biblical narrative of creation and
to regard the declaration of the Westminster Confession thereon as
a "disproved theory of creation," see Principal John Tulloch,
in Contemporary Review, March, 1877, on Religious Thought in
Scotland--especially page 550.

II. THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS AND MAN.

In one of the windows of the cathedral at Ulm a mediaeval glass-stainer
has represented the Almighty as busily engaged in creating the animals,
and there has just left the divine hands an elephant fully
accoutred, with armour, harness, and housings, ready-for war. Similar
representations appear in illuminated manuscripts and even in early
printed books, and, as the culmination of the whole, the Almighty is
shown as fashioning the first man from a hillock of clay