This view I cannot adopt:  it seems not quite fair to ourselves, and not quite fair to the Jews.  Let me explain what I mean.  If we have nothing to do with the narrative, let us abstain equally from defending it or pronouncing it wrong—­that is for ourselves.  As to the Jewish Church, a little more must be said.  Let us admit, at any rate for argument’s sake, that the separation between the Jewish formal and ceremonial religion and Christianity is as wide as can be wished.  Nor would I undervalue the importance of insisting on pure Christianity, as distinct from Judaism.  And, further, let us (without any question as to ultimate objects) regard the narrative as primarily addressed to Jews, and let us admit that it may have been unimportant, for the purpose of the first steps in Divine knowledge, that any account should be given of Creation beyond the primary fact that all idolatrous cosmogonies were false, and that the Unseen God of Israel alone made the heavens and the earth “in the beginning.”  Why should the Jews have received that truth through the medium of a story of which the whole framework was false, and nothing but the moral true?  The framework, moreover, is one so plainly professing to be fact, that it was certain to be received as such by a simple people.  It seems to me that there is something very suspicious, something repugnant to notions of truth and honest dealing, in the possible communication of underlying Divine truth through the medium of stories, which are not stories on the face of them, but profess and pretend to be statements of fact and authoritatively made.

But, further, it cannot be denied that, whatever allowance may have to be made under the early Jewish dispensation for the ideas and weaknesses of a semi-barbarous people, whatever “winking” there may have been “at times of ignorance,” the main object was, by a gradual revelation,[1] by a system of typical ordinances and ceremonies, to lead up to the full spiritual light of the Christian dispensation.  Everything written, said, or done, was a step—­however small an one—­always tending in the one direction, according to the usual law of Evolution.  The Christian believer may then look back to the early stages as imperfect foreshadowings and dim illustrations of the whole truth; but he would, I should think, on any ordinary principles, be shocked to find truth developed out of positive error.  And should the error have been discovered, as it now is[2] (in the view of these I am contending against), this discovery might have arrested the further development of Divine truth altogether.  If Moses, or whoever wrote the Book of Genesis—­we will not cavil at that—­was allowed to compose his own fancies or beliefs on the subject of Creation, and to state them as Divine fact (no matter that the reader at the time was not able to find out the error), would not grave suspicion attach to whatever else he put forward?  Who could tell that, on any other subject, the plainest and most direct statement of fact was not equally a fancy, only embodying or enshrining (under the guise of its errors) some real Divine facts?  If Genesis i. is unreliable, we have a case of a writer going out of his way to add to certain truths, which might easily have been stated by themselves, a number of positive declarations, as of Divine authority, regarding facts, which are not facts.