Of course, as Professor Huxley puts it, millions of pious Jews and
Christians[1] supposed _creation_ to mean a "sudden act of the
Deity"--i.e., to mean just what the knowledge of the time enabled them
to imagine. They could do nothing else. The state of knowledge fifty
years ago would not have rendered it possible for an article like
Professor Huxley's (that to which allusion has several times been made)
to have been written at all. What wonder, then, that the multitude did
not understand what _creation_ meant, and that a reasonable
interpretation of the word has only become possible in quite recent
times? Surely all that is the fault of the reader, not of the text. I do
not even care that the writer himself did not fully apprehend the
subject. When a human prophet is entrusted with the divulgation of high
and wonderful things, it is quite possible that he may have been to
greater or less extent in the dark as to all or some of the
communication he was writing.
[Footnote 1: Article quoted, p. 857.]
All that can be reasonably required is that the narrative, as it stands,
shall be consistent with actual truth, and shall at no time come to be
provably at variance with it.
But let us look at the word "creation" more closely. We accept what we
are told, that in the beginning God called into existence force and
matter, the material or "physical basis," and all other necessaries of
life.
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