Many persons who loved the Bible, but whose education, and, consequently, whose powers of judgment in the matter were very limited, have received very great injury from the doubt which has been thrown on its authority.  Unable of themselves to form a judgment on the subject, they could not be unmoved by the opinion expressed by those whom they regarded as better informed than themselves.  Hence their faith has received a shock always painful and dangerous, often perhaps fatal.

Many attempts have been made to overcome the difficulty which has thus arisen.  When geologists first began to study the lessons which are to be learnt from fossils, a suggestion was made which, though it was soon shown to be untenable, has still perhaps a few supporters.  It was said that these fossils were not what they seemed to be, the remains of creatures which once lived, but simple stones, fashioned from the first in their present form by the will of the Creator.  But such an idea is at variance with all that either Nature or Revelation teaches us concerning God.  All those who have any familiarity with the subject cannot but feel that the suggestion of such a solution of the difficulty is little short of a suggestion that the Almighty has stamped a lie upon the face of His own Work.

Another proposed solution, which for a time seemed satisfactory, assumed several successive creations and destructions of the world to have taken place in the interval between the first and second verses of Genesis.  To these all the fossil remains were ascribed, while the present state of things was supposed to be the result of the operations recorded in the remainder of the chapter.  But as geological knowledge advanced, it soon became clear that there were no breaks in the chain of life; no points at which one set of creatures had died out, while another had not yet arisen to fill up the void, but that all change had been gradual and progressive, and that species still living on the earth are identical with some which were in existence when the lowest tertiary strata were in process of formation—­a time which must have been many thousand years prior to the appearance of man.

Other attempts have been made upon literary grounds.  Hugh Miller [Footnote:  Testimony of the Rocks.] carefully worked out a suggestion derived from a German source, that the history of Creation was presented to Moses in a series of six visions, which appeared to him as so many days with intervening nights.  More recently Dr. Rorison [Footnote:  In Answers to “Essays and Reviews.”] has maintained that the first chapter of Genesis is not a history at all, but a poem—­“the Hymn of Creation.”  There is, however, nothing in the chapter itself to confirm either of these views.  When visions are recorded elsewhere we are told that they are visions, but no such hint is given us here.  Nor do we find in the passage any of the characteristics of Hebrew poetry.  It is inserted in an Historical document, and in the absence of any proof to the contrary, it is plainly itself also to be regarded as History.