At the same time, few, I think, even of the orthodox, while bating no jot of their respect for the sacred volume, or their faith in the great current of inspired purpose and meaning which streams through it, from cover to cover, hold to-day that every line and word is literally accurate beyond a shadow of question.  The direct contradictions which occur in the text itself show that the errors of man have crept into the compilation or composition of the volume.

The assaults of the skeptical have been largely directed against the opening chapters of Genesis: 

“What!” it has been said, “you pretend in the first chapter that the animated creation was made in six days; and then in the second chapter (verses 4 and 5) you say that the heavens and the earth and all the vegetation were made in one day.  Again:  you tell us that there was light shining on the earth on the first day; and that there was night too; for ‘God divided the light from the darkness’; and there was morning and evening on the first, second, and third days, while the sun, moon, and stars, we are told, were not created until the fourth day; and grass and fruit-trees were made before the sun.”

{p. 318}

“How,” it is asked, “could there be night and day and vegetation without a sun?”

And to this assault religion has had no answer.

Now, I can not but regard these opening chapters as a Mosaic work of ancient legends, dovetailed together in such wise that the true chronological arrangement has been departed from and lost.

It is conceded that in some of the verses of these chapters God is spoken of as Elohim, while in the remaining verses he is called Jehovah Elohim.  This is very much as if a book were discovered to-day in part of which God was referred to as Jove, and in the rest as Jehovah-Jove.  The conclusion would be very strong that the first part was written by one who know the Deity only as Jove, while the other portion was written by one who had come under Hebraic influences.  And this state of facts in Genesis indicates that it was not the work of one inspired mind, faultless and free from error; but the work of two minds, relating facts, it is true, but jumbling them together in an incongruous order.

I propose, therefore, with all reverence, to attempt a re-arrangement of the verses of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis, which will, I hope, place it in such shape that it will be beyond future attack from the results of scientific research; by restoring the fragments to the position they really occupied before their last compilation.  Whether or not I present a reasonably probable case, it is for the reader to judge.

If we were to find, under the débris of Pompeii, a grand tessellated pavement, representing one of the scenes of the “Iliad,” but shattered by an earthquake, its fragments dislocated and piled one upon the top of another, it would be our duty and our pleasure to seek, by following the clew of the picture, to re-arrange the fragments so as