GENESIS AND SCIENCE

To the Editor.     

Sir—I think the Rev. F. C. Spurr must be commended as a man of courage in boldly facing the inevitable. The Bible is not to be accepted as a truthful record of facts, but as "inspired poetry." He might have gone a little further, however and told us the difference between "inspired and "uninspired" poetry, and how a plain man or woman may distinguish the one from the other. "Inspiration" is a fine word for some people to juggle with but, as Ingersoll remarked long ago, this practical age is not so much concerned to know whether a thing is inspired or not, but whether it is true or merely fiction. And after all, how much inspiration does it require to make an untruth become true?  During the last 50 years the Bible as a record of facts has got a terrible shake, chiefly from the science of anthropology. With the advent of this science in the seventh and eighth decades last century we have been obliged to look at the Old and New Testaments in a new light. Maclennan, Lubbock, and Tyler in England, Mannhardt in Germany, and Morgan in America began that elaborate series of enquires into the ideas,the institutions, and the practices of savage people and peasantry of Europe, which have gone forward in increasing volume till the present day. Collections of facts such as those instituted by Sir Edward Tylor and Lord Avebury could be interpreted only by the hypothesis of evolution. This new science of anthropology explored every department of human thought and social action, searching origins and reasons for things, into all the out-of-the-way places of history in the search for legends and customs hitherto unexplained.
   Nothing was sacred from its investigation, least of all religious phenomena. We all know how full the Bible is, not merely of miracles but of very remarkable events, such as the creation story, the flood, the sun standing still, and the star in the East and many other things, all treated in its pages as things of course. The story of the fall has been shown to be a mere legend, common amongst many people, and one of several widespread types account for the origin of death. That of the flood was related to a Babylonian myth on the same subject. Circumcision has been shown to be a sacred rite for ages among people who have no claim to a revelation from the Jewish tribal god; and the Mosaic law, with its quaint jumble of ritual, ethical, and juridical precepts has its parallel in many a half-civilised code, and its prohibitions correspond in much more than a general manner with taboos of Pagan barbarians. The judgment of Solomon is found in many lands and Jacob was very far from being the only hero of legend who had a Hackenschmidt encounter with a supernatural being. The dead have been raised everywhere and witchcraft found to be a universal superstition. Demonical possession was no isolated phenomenon; it was found to be a common explanation of disease in all the lowest degrees of culture. Joshua once commanded the sun to stand still. It is found that the natives of New Guinea do the same thing for the purpose of gathering their harvest of sago; the Fijian traveller does it that he may reach his journey's end in safety before the night. It has also been made clear that at the time Christianity was first promulgated tales of a divinity put to death and rising again were current all over the eastern Mediterranean. Such events were annually celebrated, the general result is that so far from being a nation chosen and set apart from all the rest of the world, the Hebrews are seen to have been a proud, sturdy, self-centred border people of mingled descent, whose experience differed little from other rude tribes on the frontiers of every Eastern Empire. With the spread of such knowledge it is only a matter of time when supernatural religion will disappear—I am  &c.             W.G.

 The Advertiser 17 June 1913,