G. F. Wright, Ant. and Origin of Human Race, lect. II—“When in David's time it is said that ‘Shebuel, the son of Gershom, the son of Moses, was ruler over the treasures’ (1 Chron. 23:16; 26:24), Gershom was the immediate son of Moses, but Shebuel was separated by many generations from Gershom. So when Seth is said to have begotten Enosh when he was 105 years old (Gen. 5:6), it is, according to Hebrew usage, capable of meaning that Enosh was descended from the branch of Seth's line which set off at the 105th year, with any number of intermediate links omitted.” The appearance of completeness in the text may be due to alteration of the text in the course of centuries; see Bib. Com., 1:30. In the phrase “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Mat. 1:1) thirty-eight to forty generations are omitted. It may be so in some of the Old Testament genealogies. There is room for a hundred thousand years, if necessary (Conant). W. H. Green, in Bib. Sac., April, 1890:303, and in Independent, June 18, 1891—“The Scriptures furnish us with no data for a chronological computation prior to the life of Abraham. The Mosaic records do not fix, and were not intended to fix, the precise date of the Flood or of the Creation. … They give a series of specimen lives, with appropriate numbers attached, to show by selected examples what was the original term of human life. To make them a complete and continuous record, and to deduce from them the antiquity of the race, is to put them to a use they were never intended to serve.”
Comparison with secular history also shows that no such length of time as 100,000 years for man's existence upon earth seems necessary. Rawlinson, in Jour. Christ. Philosophy, 1883:339–364, dates the beginning of the Chaldean monarchy at 2400 BC Lenormant puts the entrance of the Sanskritic Indians into Hindustan at 2500 BC The earliest Vedas are between 1200 and 1000 BC (Max Müller). Call of Abraham, probably 1945 BC Chinese history possibly began as early as 2356 BC (Legge). The old Empire in Egypt possibly began as early as 2650 BC Rawlinson puts the flood at 3600 BC, and adds 2000 years between the deluge and the creation, making the age of the world 1886 + 3600 + 2000 = 7486. S. R. Pattison, in Present Day Tracts, 3: no. 13, concludes that “a term of about 8000 years is warranted by deductions from history, geology, and Scripture.” See also Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 76–128; Cowles on Genesis, 49–80; Dawson, Fossil Men, 246; Hicks, in Bap. Rev., July, 1884 (15000 years); Zöckler, Urgeschichte der Erde und des Menschen, 137–163. On the critical side, see Crooker, The New Bible and its Uses, 80–102.
Evidence of a geological nature seems to be accumulating, which tends to prove man's advent upon earth at least ten thousand years ago. An arrowhead of tempered copper and a number of human bones were found in the Rocky Point mines, near Gilman, Colorado, 460 feet beneath the surface of the earth, embedded in a vein of silver-bearing ore. More than a hundred dollars worth of ore clung to the bones when they were removed from the mine. On the age of the earth and the antiquity of man, see G. F. Wright, Man and the Glacial Epoch, lectures iv and x, and in McClure's Magazine, June, 1901, and Bib. Sac., 1903:31—“Charles Darwin first talked about 300 million years as a mere trifle of geologic time. His son George limits it to 50 or 100 million; Croll and Young to 60 or 70 million; Wallace to 28 million; Lord Kelvin to 24 million; Thompson and Newcomb to only 10 million.” Sir Archibald Geikie, at the British Association at Dover in 1899, said that 100 million years sufficed for that small portion of the earth's history which is registered in the stratified rocks of the crust.
Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 122, considers vegetable life to have existed on the planet for at least 100 million years. Warren Upham, in Pop. Science Monthly, Dec. 1893:153—“How old is the earth? 100 million years.” D. G. Brinton, in Forum, Dec. 1893:454, puts the minimum limit of man's existence on earth at 50,000 years. G. F. Wright does not doubt that man's presence on this continent was preglacial, say eleven or twelve thousand years ago. He asserts that there has been a subsidence of Central Asia and Southern Russia since man's advent, and that Arctic seals are still found in Lake Baikal in Siberia. While he grants that Egyptian civilization may go back to 5000 BC, he holds that no more than 6000 or 7000 years before this are needed as preparation for history. Le Conte, Elements of Geology, 613—“Men saw the great glaciers of the second glacial epoch, but there is no reliable evidence of their existence before the first glacial epoch. Deltas, implements, lake shores, waterfalls, indicate only 7000 to 10,000 years.” Recent calculations of Prof. Prestwich, the most eminent living geologist of Great Britain, tend to bring the close of the glacial epoch down to within 10,000 or 15,000 years.
(d) Even if error in matters of science were found in Scripture, it would not disprove inspiration, since inspiration concerns itself with science only so far as correct scientific views are necessary to morals and religion.
Great harm results from identifying Christian doctrine with specific theories of the universe. The Roman church held that the revolution of the sun around the earth was taught in Scripture, and that Christian faith required the condemnation of Galileo; John Wesley thought Christianity to be inseparable from a belief in witchcraft; opposers of the higher criticism regard the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch as “articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ.” We mistake greatly when we link inspiration with scientific doctrine. The purpose of Scripture is not to teach science, but to teach religion, and, with the exception of God's creatorship and preserving agency in the universe, no scientific truth is essential to the system of Christian doctrine. Inspiration might leave the Scripture writers in possession of the scientific ideas of their time, while yet they were empowered correctly to declare both ethical and religious truth. A right spirit indeed gains some insight into the meaning of nature, and so the Scripture writers seem to be preserved from incorporating into their productions much of the scientific error of their day. But entire freedom from such error must not be regarded as a necessary accompaniment of inspiration.
2. Errors in matters of History.
To this objection we reply:
(a) What are charged as such are often mere mistakes in transcription, and have no force as arguments against inspiration, unless it can first be shown that inspired documents are by the very fact of their inspiration exempt from the operation of those laws which affect the transmission of other ancient documents.
We have no right to expect that the inspiration of the original writer will be followed by a miracle in the case of every copyist. Why believe in infallible copyists, more than in infallible printers? God educates us to care for his word, and for its correct transmission. Reverence has kept the Scriptures more free from various readings than are other ancient manuscripts. None of the existing variations endanger any important article of faith. Yet some mistakes in transcription there probably are. In 1 Chron. 22:14, instead of 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver (= $3,750,000,000), Josephus divides the sum by ten. Dr. Howard Osgood: “A French writer, Revillout, has accounted for the differing numbers in Kings and Chronicles, just as he accounts for the same differences in Egyptian and Assyrian later accounts, by the change in the value of money and debasement of issues. He shows the change all over Western Asia.” Per contra, see Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 45.
In 2