Part 12 (2/2)

Such a definition as that makes human perfection and all its claims to holiness seem no better than a painted wanton dressed in the garb of purity and mouthing the words of virtue and chast.i.ty.

Whence comes this wisdom of holiness which makes the loftiest ideal of man no higher than the dust of the roadway, his best righteousness criticizable goodness and altogether a negligible quant.i.ty?

If it is from man, it must arise from two sources--human experience or human imagination.

It cannot come from human experience! no natural man in the past has experienced it--none today experience it.

It cannot come from imagination; for a man cannot imagine what he has not seen, known or experienced. As he has not experienced holiness he cannot imagine it.

In the nature of the case--the Bible concept of holiness did not originate with man, and that much of the Bible, evidently, is not of man.

That the Bible is not the word of man is shown by its statements of accurate science, written before men became scientific, and while as yet natural science did not exist.

The record of creation is given in the opening verses of Genesis.

Whence came the wisdom which enabled the writer in a pre-scientific age to set forth a cosmogony in such a fas.h.i.+on that it does not contradict the latest findings of the geologist?

The Bible says the earth was without form and void.

Science says the same thing. Over a hot granite crust, an ocean of fire, and beyond that an impenetrable atmosphere loaded with carbonic acid gas.

Cuvier, the founder of paleontology, says in his discourse on the revolutions of the globe, ”Moses has left us a cosmogony, the exact.i.tude of which is most wonderfully confirmed every day.”

Quensted says, ”Moses was a great geologist, wherever he may have obtained his knowledge.” Again he says, ”The venerable Moses, who makes the plants appear first, has not yet been proven at fault; for there are marine plants in the very lowest deposit.”

Dana, of Yale College, has said that the record of creation given by Moses and that written in the rocks are the same in all general features.

Whence came the wisdom which kept Moses from hopelessly blundering?

Moses places the account of the original creation in the first verse. In the second, he states the earth fell into chaos. ”It _became_ (not _was_) without form, and void.”

Isaiah, the prophet, declares definitely that G.o.d did not create the earth without form and void--G.o.d never was the author of chaos--he made the earth habitable from the beginning.

The first verse of Genesis records the creation of this original and habitable earth. The second verse shows, as the result of some mighty cataclysm, that the original earth fell into a state of chaos. The second verse, and the verses following, are the record of the making over of the earth after it had fallen into a state of chaos.

Whence the wisdom which taught Moses what science in our day is only beginning to spell out, that the present earth is not an original creation, but a remaking; that the original creation goes back beyond the time of s.h.i.+fted crust, of tilted rock, of ice and fire and mist and formless chaos?

Whence came the wisdom and knowledge which led Job to say that it is impossible to count the stars for number, when it _was_ possible in his day, and is equally possible in our day, to count them with the naked eye?

How did he know, what the telescope alone reveals, that the number of the stars as flashed forth in the field of these telescopes is utterly beyond our computation; and that in the attempt to number them, figures break, fall into dust, and are swept away as the chaff of the summer's thres.h.i.+ng floor.

How did he, looking up with that naked eye of his, how did he know that in the Milky Way there are countless thousands of suns--and these the centres of other systems? How did he know that world -on-world ranges in the upper s.p.a.ces of the silent sky, so mult.i.tudinously that each increase of the power of the telescope only adds unaccountable myriads until, looking from the rim of those nightly searchers, the eye beholds reach on reach of luminous clouds, and learns with awe profound, that these clouds are stars, are suns and systems--but so far away from us and from one another that they cannot be separated and distinguished by the most powerful gla.s.ses; and that these clouds, if we really could separate them and bring them within the field of our particular vision, would reveal themselves as suns and systems so numerous, that only, the Creator himself could number them?

How did Job know all this in that far day when he sat at his tent door in the beauty of the cloudless sky and without a telescope? How did he know all this so that he could tell us with absolute certainty what we now know only by the aid of modern science--that the stars _cannot_ be counted for number?

How did he know what only the modern telescope reveals, that the North is stretched out over the empty place? How did he know that there in the Northern sky there is a s.p.a.ce where no star does s.h.i.+ne --a dark abyss of fathomless night--as if, suddenly, the universe of worlds had come to an end?

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