Mr. Gladstone and Genesis | Page 5

which Mr. Gladstone
expresses and laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it
really is of no avail whatever to shut one's eyes to facts, or to try to
bury them out of sight under a tumulus of rhetoric. That is my
experience of the "Elysian regions of Science," wherein it is a pleasure
to me to think that a man of Mr. Gladstone's intimate knowledge of
English life, during the last quarter of a century, believes my
philosophic existence to have been rounded off in unbroken
equanimity.
However reprehensible, and indeed contemptible, terrestrial reptiles
may be, the only question which appears to me to be relevant to my
argument is whether these creatures are or are not comprised under the
denomination of "everything that creepeth upon the ground."
Mr. Gladstone speaks of the author of the first chapter of Genesis as
"the Mosaic writer"; I suppose, therefore, that he will admit that it is
equally proper to speak of the author of Leviticus as the "Mosaic
writer." Whether such a phrase would be used by any one who had an
adequate conception of the assured results of modern Biblical criticism
is another matter; but, at any rate, it cannot be denied that Leviticus has
as much claim to Mosaic authorship as Genesis. Therefore, if one wants
to know the sense of a phrase used in Genesis, it will be well to see
what Leviticus has to say on the matter. Hence, I commend the
following extract from the eleventh chapter of Leviticus to Mr.
Gladstone's serious attention:--
And these are they which are unclean unto you among the
creeping things that creep upon the earth: the weasel, and the mouse,
and the great lizard after its kind, and the gecko, and the land crocodile,
and the sand-lizard, and the chameleon. These are they which are
unclean to you among all that creep (v. 29-3l).
The merest Sunday-school exegesis therefore suffices to prove that
when the "Mosaic writer" in Genesis i. 24 speaks of "creeping things,"

he means to include lizards among them.
This being so, it is agreed, on all hands, that terrestrial lizards, and
other reptiles allied to lizards, occur in the Permian strata. It is further
agreed that the Triassic strata were deposited after these. Moreover, it is
well known that, even if certain footprints are to be taken as
unquestionable evidence of the existence of birds, they are not known
to occur in rocks earlier than the Trias, while indubitable remains of
birds are to be met with only much later. Hence it follows that natural
science does not "affirm" the statement that birds were made on the
fifth day, and "everything that creepeth on the ground" on the sixth, on
which Mr. Gladstone rests his order; for, as is shown by Leviticus, the
"Mosaic writer" includes lizards among his "creeping things."
Perhaps I have given myself superfluous trouble in the preceding
argument, for I find that Mr. Gladstone is willing to assume (he does
not say to admit) that the statement in the text of Genesis as to reptiles
cannot "in all points be sustained" (p. 16). But my position is that it
cannot be sustained in any point, so that, after all, it has perhaps been
as well to go over the evidence again. And then Mr. Gladstone
proceeds as if nothing had happened to tell us that--
There remain great unshaken facts to be weighed. First, the
fact that such a record should have been made at all.
As most peoples have their cosmogonies, this "fact" does not strike me
as having much value.
Secondly, the fact that, instead of dwelling in generalities, it
has placed itself under the severe conditions of a chronological order
reaching from the first nisus of chaotic matter to the
consummated production of a fair and goodly, a furnished and a
peopled world.
This "fact" can be regarded as of value only by ignoring the fact
demonstrated in my previous paper, that natural science does not
confirm the order asserted so far as living things are concerned; and by
upsetting a fact to be brought to light presently, to wit, that, in regard to
the rest of the pentateuchal cosmogony, prudent science has very little
to say one way or the other.
Thirdly, the fact that its cosmogony seems, in the light of the
nineteenth century, to draw more and more of countenance from the
best natural philosophy.

I have already questioned the accuracy of this statement, and I do not
observe that mere repetition adds to its value.
And, fourthly, that it has described the successive origins of
the five great categories of present life with which human experience
was and is conversant, in that