A Washington Bible Class Author:Gail Hamilton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE EEAL GENESIS. Heading the Bible as we should read any other book, regardless of what men in all ages have taught about the Bible, what do w... more »e find ? In the beginning—God. Whether "beginning" means the time when the universe began as protoplasm, or when the earth began aa planet, or what is protoplasm or what is universe, are questions for science, not for religion. What the Bible teaches is that, In the beginning—not force, or law, or energy, or a fortuitous concourse of atoms, but—God created the heaven and the earth. The story of the creation is to be read in the broad light and interpreted by the large lines of common language and common sense. God said, Let there be light. God said, I am tired of kings. There is no reason to suppose that the Genesis writer held his words to a more rigid meaning than Emerson. Both used a rhetorical and poetic impersonation in order to a vivid and imposing presentation of truth. No one supposes that Emerson meant a miraculous voice out of heaven. No one need suppose that the Genesis author meant it. The Genesis of the Bible is a pictorial representation of creation—as it might appear to an earth-dweller unfoldingin a swift panorama. It is creation in its relation to man. The object of the great lights is to give light upon the earth. He made the stars also. There is no word of the vast revolving globes, centers of other systems, universes of universes, in numbers and spaces inconceivable. The writer, the seer, sees only what they are to us—stars ; created, so far as the Genesis picture is concerned, on the day when the seer saw their dim twinkling through the dense but clearing atmosphere of earth's earlier stages. There is in it a singular and, as yet, unexplained correspondence between this unfolding ...« less