The conclusion is as follows: My Servant is for many and bears their transgressions, Yea, with sinners he was numbered, And made atonement for sinners. There is limitation expressed in the first line. For manyit is a phrase of limitation. My Servant bears their transgressions. The fact, not the method, is here given. The chapter has suggested the method. Many shall be the portion of him. The many and the strong, for whom he died, he shall have portion with both. Such is the brief teaching of the first four lines. The same thought had been spoken before, in the earlier part of this chapter. So important is the thought that now again it is rehearsed. Indeed, the last three lines is but another repetition. Yea, with sinners he was numbered, And he bore the sins of many, And made atonement for sinners. Perhaps these three lines will give us some light upon this word "many," which appears three times in this conclusion. It would seem that "bore the sins" and "made atonement” were synonymous expressions. At least, that the same peculiar and unique fact is set forth in each expression. Then, "sinners" and "the many" are interchangeable. The logic of the lines is, that he who was numbered with sinners is he who bears their sins. Among them, but not like them; among them, and taking away their burdens; among them, and making atonement for them; this is he who is My Servant, this is he who is the Arm of Jehovah. His portion is many. These are the things the prophet has heard. So mysterious, even to him, that he says: Who hath believed what we have heard, And unto whom shall we reveal? 157 They who believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, shall believe in the prophet's words; for unto all others it is incredible. They who have had their transgressions borne by the Saviour will believe. They who see the Christ in suffering for them will believe, for such seeing opens up the heart unto his loving sorrow, and this leads to a return movement unto God. ARTICLE X. PRIMEVAL MAN. BY THE REV. SMITH B. GOODENOW, BATTLE CREEK, IOWA. THE Hebrew Bible fixes the placing of Adam in Eden at about 4000 years before the Christian era. The current Usher chronology has it 4004 years; but the most reliable reckoning of the Hebrew increases it to 4102 years. So that 6000 years from Adam expire in A. D. 1898. This expiration, within four years from now, of the six week days of human history (since "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years," 2 Pet. iii. 8), is drawing some attention to the speedy opening of the seventh thousand years, or sabbatic day of human history, as a supposed millennial epoch described in Revelation (xx. I-7). But in a different quarter there is an awakened interest in the scientific question: How are we to reconcile so short a period of human existence as the six thousand years of Hebrew chronology, now about expiring, with the accumulating geologic facts, which go to show, by human fossils and relics of human handiwork, that man has existed on the earth much more than six thousand years? The Septuagint, or earliest Greek version of the Old Testament, translated from the Hebrew about 200 B. C., allows some fifteen hundred years more than the six thousand; but this is thought not sufficient for the geologic demands. What more can be done about it? In order to forestall this alleged difficulty of science, some biblical scholars are trying to invalidate the early chronology of the Bible, from Adam to Abraham, as given in Genesis v. and xi.; so as, by having no Bible chronology of early times, to allow science full sweep for speculation as to the antiquity of man.1 The present writer is fully convinced that these endeavors to do away with the Bible chronology cannot succeed; and, further, does not entertain that apprehension that any greater antiquity for man than the Bible chronology allows, will be positively proved by science; so that he does not feel that need of " hedging" (to use a term current in worldly business ), in behalf of the Bible, which is stirring many scholars. For we believe that the geologists of our day are somewhat infatuated with the idea that they know the rate with which nature's changes proceeded in prehistoric times. Whereas, we have no witnesses (except God) to testify at what an amazing pace vast developments might leap forward in the young gush of nature under new 1 See the Bibliotheca Sacra for April, 1873, PP. 323-331; April, 1890, pp. 285-303. conditions, such developments as require ages under the settled environment of the present. Nevertheless we are ready, in our life-long research of Scripture, to lend a helping hand to those that feel it needful to be prepared against any emergency, with time enough on hand to allow modern science full sweep in its venturesome theorizing. It can do no harm to be fore-armed, even though we expect modern science to grow more sober and modest as it increases in age; it may finally withdraw its challenge against God's testimony as to the time of his own handiwork, at least in primeval eras, where there is no other witness to speak. Yet we are the more willing to aid in discovering time enough for every exigency, in harmony with God's word, in order to check (if possible) the present tendency to undervalue and undermine the chronology of the Bible, which we consider one of the main bulwarks of its strength. OUR METHOD. What, then, is our method of finding time enough for all geologic emergencies without impairing in the least the Bible chronology? We find the ample time desired in the very place where reverent geology has all along been finding it,-not within the Adamic limit of Bible chronology, but before that Adamic limit (at the garden of Eden) begins, in the six unmeasured days of creation. It is now universally allowed that there is time enough in those six untimed periods to meet all the demands of geology. Each " "day" may be thousands of years in length; and the "sixth day" may be as long as any day before it. And the last half of the sixth day, wherein man was being created, from his physical manhood on to his full spiritual manhood in Eden, may have occupied many thousands of years, with successive generations of incipient, decaying, physical men, before the completed spiritual Adam emerged (for aught the Bible contains), if science should insist on claiming human fos sils so old as that. In short, our claim is, that Gen. i. 27 may cover any amount of time that the discovered facts of human paleontology may require. All advocates of the evolution theory will at once accept this view. And they are welcome to find, if they can, their needed "missing links" among the fossils of that paleolithic age of unfinished physical man which we here concede to have possibly existed. But we ourselves reject the idea of a long evolutionary process, and hold to immediate creation, in only two steps: first, the physical or animal man; and second, the spiritual or godlike man,— with an undefined length of time between,-as recorded in Genesis (i. 27–ii. 7). It was all in the sixth day" of creation. But the human body or physical being may have been "created" at mid-day; and the inbreathing of the higher divine spirit, whereby the individual Adam became “a living soul" complete, may have been at the close of the day; with possibly many generations of time and physical propagation between, as intimated at the start (see i. 27, 28). That man at first was mortal, like other creatures, giving opportunity for 160 Primeval Man. human fossils in that pre-Eden era, is rendered quite plausible by the fact, Of course, any attempt to explain the particulars of such an unaccustomed view must be of the nature of hypothesis. And while we venture to name a few points of conjecture, and our reasons for them, we want to be understood as only theorizing, not giving positive opinions or doctrines to be Mere Scripture theory here serves maintained either by ourselves or others. Let us try, then, to answer to offset the mere geologic theory calling for it. UNITY OF THE RACE. I. If a race of men, physically such, existed for generations long before the perfected spiritual man Adam, what became of that race, when "the first Must they not still survive? man Adam"-the first complete man-began ? and does not this necessitate a denial of the unity of the human race? By If God so chose, he could readily bring about an no means, we answer. extinction of all else of that race at about the close of the sixth day, when he used the individual Adam for development into a new race. occur as simply and as naturally as in previous extinctions of species, which all geology teaches, whether at the "evenings" following the "mornings " of creation, or at other points of time. And this could In A. D. 1655, the French scholar Peyrerius broached the theory of “ Preadamite Man." But that view made the preadamites to be our still surviving human race complete as we are now; while Adam and his family were regarded as merely the selected Jewish race, preserved afterwards in part from the flood, which was looked upon as only a limited disaster confined to the Jewish or Adamic family. Such a crude theory we of course utterly repudiate. Our hypothesis is, on the contrary, that of an extinct prehistoric race, physically but not spiritually human, and only namable as preadamite man in the sense, that they were the unfinished race of men, -the bodily mould for our humanity; which mould was broken (so to speak), in the common fate of other lost fossil species, when the consummated perfect Adam was reached. 1 1 If any one, accepting our hypothesis in general, should proceed to imagine that some at least of the primeval imperfect race may have survived, and furnished the much-inquired-after wife of Cain in the land of Nod " (Gen. iv. 16, 17), as well as the "daughters of men" put in contrast with the |