the opening of Genesis to the Hexameron without in any way departing from his principle of never giving us purely scientific teaching. Or, to express myself more correctly, the general principle which I have already established holds good in the Hexameron. The object of the divine revelation is not to correct or extend our scientific knowledge, but to convey to us divine truths; and when revelation includes scientific elements, these are touched upon because of the religious elements which they contain, and not for their own sake. If, then, God has revealed to man in the Bible, not only the simple truth that He is the creator of the world, but has added to it other revelations, which make up the rest of the Hexameron, He has not done this in order to teach us about the separate part of creation, about the order of its development and the time in which it was accomplished. For those are things which in themselves only interest men of science, or man as a thinking being, but do not touch the moral and religious side of man; and God can therefore leave them to the intellect of man to discover. Such things can only become objects of divine revelation when religious truths are involved in them, the knowledge of which is necessary or useful to man from a religious point of view, and when such truths can only be conveyed to man through the medium of these natural things. Religious truths are the end of divine revelation, the other things are only the means to that end.

Having examined the theological truths conveyed to us in the Hexameron, we come now to the form in which the Bible clothes these truths, and here the

connection between revelation and natural science begins. I shall begin the explanation of the separate parts of the Hexameron in my next lecture. I will now only make a few more general remarks.

Of the four theological statements which, as I have just shown, are contained in the Hexameron, the third has had great influence on the whole composition. If Moses desired to show that it was man for whom God had created all things, we may expect that in treating of the created things he would specially mention and lay stress on those which stand in the most direct relation to man; and also that he would consider these things themselves from the point of view of their relation to man. And accordingly we find that after he has briefly mentioned the creation of the heavens and the earth, that is, the whole world, in the first verse of Genesis, he turns first of all in the following verses to the earth. The second verse begins, " And the earth was without form, and void." There is no mention of the heaven; and when it is alluded to in the following verses, it is only with reference to its relation to the earth. God makes the firmament in order to take up part of the waters that covered the earth, and He creates the stars to give light upon the earth, and to be signs of the succession of time to man. The condition of the heavens apart from this, the relations of the stars to each other, whether they also have vegetation and are inhabited, these questions Moses never alludes to at all; and that because he would not tell us of every separate thing which God has created, but after saying generally that God had created all things, he would tell us only of the separate things which God has created for man.

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Therefore it is not quite correct to speak of the cosmogony of Moses; his first object is rather a geogony, and it is only when they in any way affect the earth that he alludes to the things in the kosmos outside the earth. The Mosaic account of creation must therefore be called one-sided and incomplete; this, however, is no fault, but a necessary quality. It would be very remarkable were the Bible to say more than it does, for it would then be departing from the rule of only giving us religious teaching, and mentioning natural things only as much as is necessary for the religious teaching. This incompleteness and one-sidedness characterizes the further account of the earth's development. Moses only mentions the separation of water and land, the creation of plants and animals, for that was all that was necessary to describe the position of man in the visible world. Moses does not mention the interior of the earth, the formation of the mountain ranges, the extent of the water and the land, the rational classification of plants and animals and such things; not because his scientific knowledge was too limited, although this may be unhesitatingly admitted, but because these things were of no real importance to what he wished to represent.

The first characteristic of the Mosaic account of the origin of the visible world is then a one-sidedness and incompleteness which is intentional and natural. The second characteristic is the popular, and if you will, unscientific mode of statement. As it is never the object of the Bible to give us scientific teaching, it never speaks the language of science, as I have already explained at length,-but the language of the ordinary

It is to be read for the sake of religious teaching,

not for the sake of geological, astronomical, geographical, or any other scientific studies, and therefore it chooses those expressions which are intelligible to the ordinary men, not those which will be considered correct by science; and when it speaks of the things of nature, it makes use of the conceptions and ideas which men derive from the natural, superficial, and childlike observations of nature. The man of science knows that the atmosphere of the earth is impregnated with watery vapours, which under certain conditions form themselves into clouds, and fall down to the earth as rain; the ordinary man believes that there is a provision of waters above the R'kia haschamajim, the "firmament of heaven," as the Vulgate translates the word, or more accurately, the canopy of heaven, and accordingly this is the way in which the Bible describes it. Man believes that the heaven has two great lights, the sun and moon, and beside them the host of stars; and this is what the Bible describes. Astronomy may say what it likes to this division. The botanist and zoologist may laugh, or be horrified, at the classes into which the animals and plants are divided in the Hexameron; the divisions are not meant to be scientific, for the Bible would not give us a system of botany or zoology, but only an enumeration of animals, and its division is quite fitted for this object. In ver. 12 the vegetable world is divided into trees and herbs; the word green" probably does not mean a third class, grass, etc., but it is applied to all the plants in the first stage of their creation. Nothing can be more unscientific

1 Dillmann, Genesis, p. 28. [This refers to the word translated "grass" in our version.-TR.]

than this division, but it is quite sufficient if all we are to be told is that God created all the plants, both great and small. The zoological system of the Hexameron is of the same description: 1st, water animals; 2nd, air animals; 3rd, land animals. The water animals are divided into (a) tanninim gedolim, cete grandia, the large water animals, to which of course whales belong; and (b) the small water animals. The air animals are not further particularized, but of course they include, besides the birds, bats, flies, midges, and in general col oph canaph, omne volatile, everything which has wings. The land animals are divided into (a) b'hemah, jumenta, domestic animals; (b) chajjath haarez, bestia terræ, wild animals; (c) haremes, reptilia, little creeping things, that is, in the Hebrew language, whatever moves immediately on the earth: rats and mice, serpents, worms, wingless insects, etc. And this enumeration, quite inadequate from a scientific point of view, is quite sufficient to convey to us the truth that all animals, whether moving in the waters, in the air, or on the land, both large and small, were created by God.

Thirdly, this popular, objective mode of representation is apparent in the manner in which the activity of God Himself is described. It is not possible to have a worthy conception of the Divine Being and of His working; if we would obtain an idea of it, or give an adequate description of it, the materials, as it were the colours of the picture, must come from what is accessible to our observation and knowledge, that is, from created things; and among created things, especially from the creature which has been made after the likeness