[Footnote 1:  I am not aware of any authority, living or dead, who has gone so far as to deny that God’s revelation to the Jewish Church was in any way connected with Christianity; that it was not even a stage of progress, or preparatory step towards the kingdom of Christ.]

[Footnote 2:  And was sure to be sooner or later, when a science of Biology and Palaeontology became possible.]

The great truths that God is really the Maker and Author of all things, and that man has a spiritual being, and so forth, surely gain nothing from being conveyed to the world in the folds of a fable.  And when it is not in a confessed fable, but a fable put forth as fact—­“God said,” “God created,” “it was so”—­not only is there no gain, but our sense of fitness and of truth receive a shock.  A parable is always discernible as a parable, a vision as a vision.  When our Lord, for example, tells us of the ten virgins, we do not suppose Him to be revealing the actual existence of ten such maidens, wise and foolish.  We know that He is reading a lesson of watchfulness.  But looking at the Genesis narrative, who could suppose it to be a parable?  If sober, unmistakable statement of fact is possible, we surely have it here, in intention, at least.

The plan of teaching truth in an envelope of error is per se difficult to conceive.  But how much worse is it when we consider—­what criterion does mankind possess for disinterring and distinguishing the elements of truth?  If in religion we had only to do (as some would perhaps contend) with obvious enforcements of common morality and kindness, there might be a possibility of getting over the difficulty, because man would possess some kind of criterion whereby to distinguish what was fictitious, by the simple process of considering whether any given statement bore on morals or not.  Such a test would not indeed go very far, because the human race is by no means agreed on all moral questions; nor does it always find it easy to say what is, and what is not, directly or indirectly connected with morals.  But, in fact, the scope of religion cannot be so confined:  and then the difficulty returns; for a revelation that tells us anything of the nature of God and His method of government, of the nature of our own being and of a future state, must necessarily go beyond our own ethical knowledge and powers of judging, or it would not be a revelation.  Supposing that the revelation regarding such vital subjects is occasionally conveyed through the medium of erroneous statements, where in any given case would be the certainty as to what was Divine truth, and what not so?