THE BOOK OF GENESIS, AND SCIENCE 83

 and the life upon it. To some people, creation is an instantan-
 eous process, resulting in all the present forms of land and water,
 of plants, of animals, of man. To others creation is a gradual
 development, according to fixed laws that still continue in the
 operation of the universe.
 Each concept of creation may fully accept a Creator. In the
 first concept He is assumed to have worked with suddenness; in
 the second He established the laws by which all nature operates
 -and will continue to operate to the end of time. By the first
 concept creation is finished; by the second it continues.
 The chief stumbling block to the person who lacks either
 theological, or scientific, scholarship is the literal-or "to the
 very letter"-interpretation of the English words into which
 the original Hebrew text of Genesis is translated. Bible scholars,
 for example, do not hold to the literal explanation of the
 world "created in seven days" (one week), because they know
 that the single Hebrew word for day, "yom," is translated by
 "no less than fifty-four different English words" throughout
 the Old Testament. To insist that the "seven days" contra-
 dicts the facts of the planet's great age, or "the four corners
 of the earth" disputes its form as a ball, is to put a word above
 a thought, and a name above an idea. Such an attitude shows
 no true spirit of interpretation and is not worthy of a scholar,
 or a seeker after truth.
 The literal interpretation about creation that brings out the
 most earnest questions is of the 27th verse in Chapter I of
 Genesis: "So God created man in his own image." The "con-
 tradiction," then, comes in the statement (which, however,
 can not be found in any text of science): "Evolution teaches
 that man descended from a monkey." There is a climax in the
 clash of ideas concerning man's creation. If this be settled in
 the mind of an inquirer, the questions about plants and animals
 will seem of little consequence.
 The science teacher should immediately broaden the discus-
sion with an additional quotation from Genesis, verse 7, Chap-
ter II: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the
'Modern Science and the Genesis Record, Harry Rimmer, D.D.