[Transcriber's note: All footnotes are renumbered and moved to the end of the text before the index.]

THE

ORIGIN OF THE WORLD,

ACCORDING TO

REVELATION AND SCIENCE.

By J. W. DAWSON, LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S.,

PRINCIPAL AND VICE-CHANCELLOR OF M'GILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL; AUTHOR OF
"ACADIAN GEOLOGY," "THE STORY OF THE EARTH AND MAN," "LIFE'S DAWN ON
EARTH," ETC.

"Speak to the Earth, and it shall teach thee."
—Job.

NEW YORK:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,

FRANKLIN SQUARE.

1877.

TO HIS EXCELLENCY
THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF DUFFERIN,
K.P., K.C.B., ETC.,
GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF CANADA,
This Work is Respectfully Dedicated,
AS A SLIGHT TRIBUTE OF ESTEEM TO ONE WHO GRACES THE
HIGHEST POSITION IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA BY HIS
EMINENT PERSONAL QUALITIES, HIS REPUTATION AS
A STATESMAN AND AN AUTHOR, AND HIS KIND
AND ENLIGHTENED PATRONAGE OF EDUCATION,
LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE.

PREFACE.

The scope of this work is in the main identical with that of "Archaia," published in 1860; but in attempting to prepare a new edition brought up to the present condition of the subject, it was found that so much required to be rewritten as to make it essentially a new book, and it was therefore decided to give it a new name, more clearly indicating its character and purpose.

The intention of this new publication is to throw as much light as possible on the present condition of the much-agitated questions respecting the origin of the world and its inhabitants. To students of the Bible it will afford the means of determining the precise import of the biblical references to creation, and of their relation to what is known from other sources. To geologists and biologists it is intended to give some intelligible explanation of the connection of the doctrines of revealed religion with the results of their respective sciences.

A still higher end to which the author would gladly contribute is that of aiding thoughtful men perplexed with the apparent antagonisms of science and religion, and of indicating how they may best harmonize our great and growing knowledge of nature with our old and cherished beliefs as to the origin and destiny of man.

In aiming at these results, it has not been thought necessary to assume a controversial attitude or to stand on the defensive, either with regard to religion or science, but rather to attempt to arrive at broad and comprehensive views which may exhibit those higher harmonies of the spiritual and the natural which they derive from their common Author, and which reach beyond the petty difficulties arising from narrow or imperfect views of either or both. Such an aim is too high to be fully attained, but in so far as it can be reached we may hope to rescue science from a dry and barren infidelity, and religion from mere fruitless sentiment or enfeebling superstition.

Since the publication of "Archaia," the subject of which it treats has passed through several phases, but the author has seen no reason to abandon in the least degree the principles of interpretation on which he then insisted, and he takes a hopeful view as to their ultimate prevalence. It is true that the wide acceptance of hypotheses of "evolution" has led to a more decided antagonism than heretofore between some of the utterances of scientific men and the religious ideas of mankind, and to a contemptuous disregard of revealed religion in the more shallow literature of the time; but, on the other hand, a barrier of scientific fact and induction has been slowly rising to stem this current of crude and rash hypothesis. Of this nature are the great discoveries as to the physical constitution and probable origin of the universe, the doctrine of the correlation and conservation of forces, the new estimates of the age of the earth, the overthrow of the doctrine of spontaneous generation, the high bodily and mental type of the earliest known men, the light which philology has thrown on the unity of language, our growing knowledge of the uniformity of the constructive and other habits of primitive men, and of the condition of man in the earlier historic time, the greater completeness of our conceptions as to the phenomena of life and their relation to organizable matters—all these and many other aspects of the later progress of science must tend to bring it back into greater harmony with revealed religion.

On the other side, there has been a growing disposition on the part of theologians to inquire as to the actual views of nature presented in the Bible, and to separate these from those accretions of obsolete philosophy which have been too often confounded with them. With respect to the first chapter of Genesis more especially, there has been a decided growth in the acceptance of those principles for which I contended in 1860. In illustration of this I may refer to the fact that in 1862 it was precisely on these principles that Dr. McCaul conducted his able defence of the Mosaic record of creation in the "Aids to Faith," which may almost be regarded as an authoritative expression of the views of orthodox Christians in opposition to those of the once notorious "Essays and Reviews." Equally significant is the adoption of this method of interpretation by Dr. Tayler Lewis in his masterly "Special Introduction" to the first chapter of Genesis, in the American edition of Lange's Commentary, edited by Dr. Philip Schaff; and the manifest approval with which the lucid statement of the relations of Geology and the Bible by Dr. Arnold Guyot, was received by the great gathering of divines at the Convention of the Evangelical Alliance in New York, in 1873, bears testimony to the same fact. The author has also had the honor of being invited to illustrate this mode of reconciliation to the students of two of the most important theological colleges in America, in lectures afterwards published and widely circulated.

The time is perhaps nearer than we anticipate when Natural Science and Theology will unite in the conviction that the first chapter of Genesis "stands alone among the traditions of mankind in the wonderful simplicity and grandeur of its words," and that "the meaning of these words is always a meaning ahead of science—not because it anticipates the results of science, but because it is independent of them, and runs as it were round the outer margin of all possible discovery." [1]

In the Appendix the reader will find several short essays on special points collateral to the general subject, and important in the solution of some of its difficulties, but which could not be conveniently included in the text. More especially I would refer to the summaries given in the Appendix of the present state of our knowledge as to the origin of life, of species, and of man—topics not discussed in much detail in the body of the work, both because of the wide fields of controversy to which they lead, and because I have treated of them somewhat fully in a previous work, "The Story of the Earth and Man," in which the detailed history of life as disclosed by science was the main subject in hand.

J. W. D.

May, 1877.

CONTENTS.

THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD.

[CHAPTER I.]
THE MYSTERY OF ORIGINS AND ITS SOLUTIONS.
"The things that are seen are temporal."—Paul.

Have we or can we have any certain solution of those two great questions—Whence are all things? and Whither do all things tend? No thinking man is content to live merely in a transitory present, ever emerging out of darkness and ever returning thither again, without knowing any thing of the origin and issue of the world and its inhabitants. Yet it would seem that to-day men are as much in uncertainty on these subjects as at any previous time. It even appears as if all our added knowledge would only, for a time at least, deprive us of the solutions to which we trusted, and give no others in their room. Christians have been accustomed to rest on the cosmogony and prophecy of the Bible; but we are now frankly told on all hands that these are valueless, and that even ministers of religion more or less "sacrifice their sincerity" in making them the basis of their teachings. On the other hand, we are informed that nothing can be discerned in the universe beyond matter and force, and that it is by a purely material and spontaneous evolution that all things exist. But when we ask as to the origin of matter and force, and the laws which regulate them—as to the end to which their movement is tending, as to the manner in which they have evolved the myriad forms of life and the human intelligence itself—the only answer is that these are "insoluble mysteries."

Are we, then, to fall back on the real or imagined revelations and traditions of the past, and to endeavor to find in them some foothold of assurance; or are we to wait till further progress in science may have cleared up some of the present mysteries? Whatever may be said of the former alternative, all honest students of science will unite with me in the admission that the latter is hopeless. We need not seek to belittle the magnificent triumphs of modern science. They have been real and stupendous. But it is of their very nature to conduct us to ultimate facts and laws of which science can give no explanation; and the further we push our inquiries the more insuperably does the wall of mystery rise before us. It is true we can furnish the materials for philosophical speculations which may be built on scientific facts and principles; but these are in their nature uncertain, and must constantly change as knowledge advances. They can not solve for us the great practical problems of our origin and destiny.

In these circumstances no apology is needed for a thorough and careful inquiry into those foundations of religious belief which rest on the idea of a revelation of origins and destinies made to man from without, and on which we may build the superstructure of a rational religion, giving guidance for the present and hope for the future. In the following pages I propose to enter upon so much of this subject as relates to the origin and earliest history of the world, in so far as these are treated of in the Bible and in the traditions of the more ancient nations; and this with reference to the present standpoint of science in relation to these questions.

To discuss such questions at all, certain preliminary admissions are necessary. These are: (1) The reality of an unseen universe, spiritual rather than material in its nature. (2) The existence of a personal God, or of a great Universal Will. (3) The possibility of communication taking place between God and man. I do not propose to attempt any proof of these positions, but it may be well to explain what they mean.

(1) That the great machine for the dissipation of energy, in which we exist, and which we call the universe, must have a correlative and complement in the unseen, is a conclusion now forced upon physicists by the necessities of the doctrine of the conservation of force. In short, it seems that, unless we admit this conclusion, we can not believe in the possible existence of the material universe itself, and must sink into absolute nihilism. This doctrine is expressed by the apostle Paul in the statement, "The things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal," and it has been ably discussed by the authors of the remarkable work, "The Unseen Universe." That this unseen world is spiritual—that is, not subject to the same material laws with the visible universe—is also a fair deduction from physical science, as well as a doctrine of Scripture. I prefer the term spiritual to supernatural, because the first is the term used in the Bible, and because the latter has had associated with it ideas of the miraculous and abnormal, not implied at all in the idea of the spiritual, which in some important senses may be more natural than the material.

(2) The idea of a personal God implies not merely the existence of an unknown absolute power, as Herbert Spencer seems to hold, or of "an Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness," as Matthew Arnold puts it, but of a Being of whom we can affirm will, intelligence, feeling, self-consciousness, not certainly precisely as they occur in us, but in a higher and more perfect form, of which our own consciousness furnishes the type, or "image and shadow," as Moses long ago phrased it. On the one hand, it is true that we can not fully comprehend such a personal God, because not limited by the conditions which limit us. On the other hand, it is clear that our intellect, as constituted, can furnish us with no ultimate explanation of the universe except in the action of such a primary personal will. In the Bible the absolute personality of God is expressed by the title "I am." His intimate relation to us is indicated by the expression, "In him we live, and move, and have our being." His all-pervading essence is stated as "the fullness of him that filleth all in all." His relative personality is shadowed forth by the attribution to him of love, anger, and other human feelings and sentiments, and by presenting him in the endearing relation of the universal Father.

(3) With reference to the possibility of communication between God and man, it may truly be said that such communication is not only possible, but infinitely probable. God is not only near to us, but we are in him, and, independently of the testimony of revelation, it has been felt by all classes of men, from the rudest and most primitive savages up to our great English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, that if there is a God, he can not be excluded from communion with his intelligent creatures, either directly or through the medium of ministering spirits. [2] Farther, placed as man is in the midst of complex and to him inexplicable phenomena, involved in a conflict of good and evil, happiness and misery, to which the wisest and the greatest minds have found no issue, subject to be degraded by low passions and tempted to great extremes of evil, and himself weak, impulsive, and vacillating, there seems the most urgent need for divine communication. It may be said that these are conflicts and problems which God has left man to decide and solve for himself by his own reason. But when we consider how slow this process is, and how imperfect even now, after the experience of ages, we seem to need some intervention that shall stimulate the human mind, and impel it forward with greater rapidity. Farther, it would appear only right that an intelligent and accountable being, placed in a world like this, should have some explanation of his origin and destiny given him at first, and that, if he should perchance go astray, a helping hand should be extended to him.

Practically it is an historical fact that all the great impulses given to humanity have been by men claiming divine guidance or inspiration, and professing to bring light and truth from the unseen world. It would be too much to say that all these prophets and reformers have been inspired of heaven; but scarcely too much to say that they have either received a message of God, or have been permitted to transmit to our world messages for weal or woe from powers without in subordination to him. Farther, we shall have reason in the sequel to see that in far back prehistoric times there must have been impulses given to mankind, and revelations made to them, as potent as those which have acted in later historic periods. In Holy Scripture the Word of God is represented as "enlightening every man; [3] " and with reference to our present subject we are told that "by faith we understand that the ages of the world were constituted by the Word of God, so that the visible things were not made of those which appear." [4] In other words, that the will of God has been active and operative as the sole cause throughout all ages of the world's creation and history, and that the visible universe is not a mere product of its own phenomena. We may call this faith, if we please, an intuition or instinct, a God-given gift, or a product of our own thought acting on evidence afforded by the outer world; but in any case it seems to be the sole possible solution of the mystery of origins.

These points being premised, we are in a position to inquire as to the teaching of our own Holy Scriptures, and in this inquiry we can easily take along with them all other revelations, pretended or true, that deal with our subject.

Max Müller, in his lectures on the Science of Religion, rejects the ordinary division into natural and revealed, and adopts a threefold grouping, corresponding to the great division of languages into Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic. With some modification and explanation, this classification will serve well our present purpose. As to natural and revealed religions, if we regard our own as revealed, we must admit an element of revelation in all others as well. According to the Hebrew Scriptures revelation began in Eden, and was continued more or less in all successive ages up to the apostolic times. Consequently the earlier revelations of the antediluvian and postdiluvian times must have been the common property of all races, and must have been associated with whatever elements of natural religion they had. When, therefore, we call our religion distinctively a revealed one, we must admit that traces of the same revelation may be found in all others. On the other hand, when we characterize our religion as Hebrew or Semitic, we must bear in mind that in its earlier stages it was not so limited; but that, if as old as it professes to be, it must include a substratum common to it with the old religions of the Turanians and Aryans. Neglect of these very simple considerations often leads to great confusion in the minds both of Christians and unbelievers, as to the relation of Christianity to heathenism, and especially to the older and more primitive forms of heathenism.

The Turanian stock, of which the Mongolian peoples of Northern Asia may be taken as the type, includes also the American races, and the oldest historical populations of Western Asia and of Europe; and they are the peoples who, in their physical features and their art tendencies, most nearly resemble the prehistoric men of the caves and gravels. They largely consist of the populations which the Bible affiliates with Ham. They are remarkable for their permanent and stationary forms of civilization or barbarism, and for the languages least developed in grammatical structure. These people had and still have traditions of the creation and early history of man similar to those in the earlier Biblical books; but the connection of their religions with that of the Bible breaks off from the time of Abraham; and the earlier portions of revelation which they possessed became disintegrated into a polytheism which takes very largely the form of animism, or of attributing some special spiritual indwelling to all natural objects, and also that of worship of ancestors and heroes. The portion of primitive theological belief to which they have clung most persistently is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which in all their religious beliefs occupies a prominent place, and has always been connected with special attention to rites of sepulture and monuments to the dead. Their version of the revelation of creation appears most distinctly in the sacred book of the Quichés of Central America, and in the creation myths of the Mexicans, Iroquois, Algonquins, and other North American tribes; and it has been handed down to us through the Semitic Assyrians from the ancient Chaldæo-turanian population of the valley of the Euphrates.

The Aryan races have been remarkable for their changeable and versatile character. Their religious ideas in the most primitive times appear to have been not dissimilar from those of the Turanians; and the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Scandinavians, and Celts have all gone some length in developing and modifying these, apparently by purely human imaginative and intellectual materials. But all these developments were defective in a moral point of view, and had lost the stability and rational basis which proceed from monotheism. Hence they have given way before other and higher faiths; and at this day the more advanced nations of the Aryan, or in Scriptural language the Japhetic stock, have adopted the Semitic faith; and, as Noah long ago predicted, "dwell in the tents of Shem." No indigenous account of the genesis of things remains among the Aryan races, with the exception of that in the Avesta, and in some ancient Hindoo hymns, and these are merely variations of the Turanian or Semitic cosmogony. God has given to the Aryans no special revelations of his will, and they would have been left to grope for themselves along the paths of science and philosophy, but for the advent among them of the prophets of "Jehovah the God of Shem."

It is to the Semitic race that God has been most liberal in his gift of inspiration. Gathering up and treasuring the old common inheritance of religion, and eliminating from it the accretions of superstition, the children of Abraham at one time stood alone, or almost alone, as adherents of a belief in one God the Creator. Their theology was added to from age to age by a succession of prophets, all working in one line of development, till it culminated in the appearance of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to expand itself over the other races. Among them it has undergone two remarkable phases of retrograde development—the one in Mohammedanism, which carries it back to a resemblance to its own earlier patriarchal stage, the other in Roman and Greek ecclesiasticism, which have taken it back to the Levitical system, along with a strong color of paganism. Still its original documents survive, and retain their hold on large portions of the more enlightened Aryan nations, while through their means these documents have entered on a new career of conquest among the Semites and Turanians. They are, however, it must be admitted, among the Aryan races of Europe, growing in a somewhat uncongenial soil; partly because of the materialistic organization of these races, and partly because of the abundant remains of heathenism which still linger among them; and it is possible that they may not realize their full triumphs over humanity till the Semitic races return to the position of Abraham, and erect again in the world the standard of monotheistic faith, under the auspices of a purified Christianity.

It follows from this hasty survey that it is the Semitic solution of the question of origins, as contained in the Hebrew Scriptures, that mainly concerns us; and in the first place we must consider the foundation and historical development of this solution, as many misconceptions prevail on these points. We may discuss these subjects under the heads of the Abrahamic Genesis and the Mosaic Genesis, and may in a subsequent chapter consider the results of these in the Genesis of the later Scripture writers.

THE ABRAHAMIC GENESIS.

It has been a favorite theory with some learned men that the earlier parts of the book of Genesis existed as ancient documents even in the time of Moses, and were incorporated by him in his work, and attempts have been made to separate, on various grounds, the older from the newer portions. Until lately, however, these attempts have been altogether conjectural and destitute of any positive basis of archæological fact. A new and interesting aspect has been given to them by the recent readings of the inscriptions on clay tablets found at Nineveh, and to which especial attention has been given by the late Mr. G. Smith, of the Archæological Department of the British Museum.

Assurbanipal, king of Assyria, one of the kings known to the Greeks by the name of Sardanapalus, reigned at Nineveh about B.C. 673. He was a grandson of the Biblical Sennacherib, and son of Esarhaddon, and it seems that he had inherited from his fathers a library of Chaldean and Assyrian literature, written not on perishable paper or parchment, but on tablets of clay, and containing much ancient lore of the nations inhabiting the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Assurbanipal, living when the Assyrian empire had attained to the acme of its greatness, had leisure to become a greater patron of learning than any preceding king. His scribes ransacked the record chambers of the oldest temples in the world; and Babel, Erech, Accad, and Ur had to yield up their treasures of history and theology to diligent copyists, who transcribed them in beautiful arrow-head characters on new clay tablets, and deposited them in the library of the great king. It would appear that, at the same time, these documents were edited, archaic forms of expression translated, and lacunæ caused by decay or fracture repaired. They were also inscribed with legends stating the sources whence they had been derived.

The empire of Assyria went down in blood, and its palaces were destroyed with fire, but the imperishable clay tablets which had formed the treasure of their libraries remained, more or less broken it is true, among the ruins. Exhumed by Layard and Smith, they are now among the collections of the British Museum, and their decipherment is throwing a new and strange light on the cosmogony and religions of the early East. Though the date of the writing of these tablets is comparatively modern, being about the time of the later kings of Judah, the original records from which they were transcribed profess to have been very ancient—some of them about 1600 years before the time of Assurbanipal, so that they go back to a time anterior to that of the early Hebrew patriarchs. Their genuineness has been endorsed, in one case, by the discovery by Mr. Loftus, in the city of Senkereh, of an apparent original, bearing date about 1600 years before Christ, and other inscriptions of equal or greater antiquity have been found in the ruins of Ur, on the Euphrates. Nor does there seem any reason to doubt that the scribes of Assurbanipal faithfully transcribed the oldest records extant in their time. Their care and diligence are also shown by the fact that where different versions of these records existed in different cities, they have made copies of these variant manuscripts, instead of attempting to reduce them to one text. The subjects treated of in the Nineveh tablets are very various, but those that concern our present purpose are the documents relating to the creation, the fall of man, and the deluge, of which considerable portions have been recovered, and have been translated by Mr. Smith.

These documents carry us back to a time when the Turanian religions had not yet been separated from the Semitic. The early Chaldeans, termed Cushites in the Bible, and who under Nimrod seem to have established the first empire in that region, are now known to have been Turanian; and among them apparently arose at a very early period a literature and a mythology. The Chaldeans were politically subjugated by the Semitic Assyrians, but they retained their religious predominance; and until a comparatively late period existed as a learned and priestly caste. To these primitive Chasdim were undoubtedly due the creation legends collected by the scribes of Assurbanipal. They were obtained in the old Chaldean cities, in the temples under the guardianship of Chaldean priests; and their date carries them back to a time anterior to the Assyrian conquest, and in which Chaldean kings still reigned. Here, then, we have an important connecting link between the cosmogonies of the Turanian and Semitic races; and leaving out of sight for the present the legends of the deluge and other matters allied to it, we may inquire as to the nature and contents of the Assyrian and Chaldean record of creation.

The Assyrian Genesis is similar in order and arrangement to that in our own Bible, and gives the same general order of the creative work. Its days, however, of creation, as indeed there is good internal evidence to prove those of Moses also are, seem to be periods or ages. It treats of the creation of gods, as well as of the universe, and thus introduces a polytheistic system; and it seems to recognize, like the Avesta, a primitive principle of evil, presiding over chaos, and subsequently introducing evil among men. These points may be illustrated by an extract from Mr. Smith's translation. It relates to the earlier part of the work:

"When above were not raised the heavens,
And below on the earth a plant had not grown up
The deep also had not broken up its boundaries
Chaos (or water) Tiamat (the sea or abyss) was the producing mother
of them all
These waters at the beginning were ordained
But a tree had not grown a flower had not unfolded
When the gods had not sprung up any one of them
A plant had not grown and order did not exist
Were made also the great gods
The gods Lahma and Lahamu they caused to come * * *
And they grew * * *
The gods Sar and Kisar were made
A course of days and a long time passed
The god Anu * * *
The gods Sar and * * *"

Here the first existences are Chaos (Mummu, or confusion) and Tiamat, which is the Thalatth of Berosus, representing the sea or primitive abyss, but also recognized as a female deity or first mother. Then we have Lahma and Lahamu, which represent power or motion in nature, and are the equivalents of the Divine Spirit moving on the face of the waters in our Genesis. Next we have the production of Sar or Iloar and Kisar, representing the expanse or firmament. Sar is supposed to be the god Assur of the Assyrians, a great weather god, and after whom their nation and its founder were named. The next process is the creation of the heaven and the earth, represented by Anu and Anatu. Anu was always one of the greater gods, and was identified with the higher or starry heavens. In succeeding tablets to this we find Bel or Belus introduced, as the agent in the creation of animals and of men; and he is the true Demiurgus or Mediator of the Assyrian system. Next we have the introduction of Hea or Saturn, who is the equivalent of the Biblical Adam, and of Ishtar, mother of men, who is the Isba or Eve of Genesis. The rest of this legend evidently relates to deified men, among whom are Merodach, Nebo, and other heroes.

The first remark that we may make on this Assyrian Genesis is that, while it resembles generally the Mosaic account of creation, it also strongly resembles the old cosmogonies of the Egyptians and Persians, and those of the widely scattered Turanians of Northern Asia and of America. As an extreme illustration of this, and to obviate the necessity of digression at this point of our inquiry, I introduce here some extracts from the Popul Vuh, or sacred book of the Quiché Indians of Central America, an undoubted product of prehistoric religion in the western continent. [5]

"And the heaven was formed, and all the signs thereof set in their angle and alignment, and its boundaries fixed toward the four winds by the Creator and Former, and Mother and Father of life and existence—he by whom all move and breathe, the Father and Cherisher of the peace of nations and of the civilization of his people—he whose wisdom has projected the excellence of all that is on the earth or in the lakes or in the sea."

"Behold the first word and the first discourse. There was yet no man nor any animal, * * * nothing was but the firmament. The face of the earth had not yet appeared over the peaceful sea, and all the space of heaven * * * nothing but immobility and silence in the night."

"Alone also the Creator, the Former, the Dominator, the Feathered Serpent—those that engender, those that give being—they are upon the water like a growing light. They are enveloped in green and blue, and therefore their name is Gucumatz."[6]

"Lo now how the heavens exist, how exists also the Heart of Heaven; such is the name of God. It is thus that he is called. And they spake, they consulted together and meditated; they mingled their words and their opinions."

"And the creation [of the earth] was verily after this wise. Earth, they said, and on the instant it was formed; like a cloud or a fog was its beginning. Then the mountains rose over the water like great fishes; in an instant the mountains and the plains were visible, and the cypress and the pine appeared. Then was the Gucumatz filled with joy, crying out: Blessed be thy coming, O Heart of Heaven, Hurakan, Thunderbolt. Our work and our labor has accomplished its end."

This corresponds to the work of the first four creative days; and next details are given as to the introduction of animals, with which, however, the Creator is represented as dissatisfied, because they could not know or invoke the Creator. They are therefore condemned to be subject to be devoured one of another. Again there is a council in heaven, and the gods determine to make man. But he also is imperfect, for he has speech without intelligence: so he is condemned to be destroyed by water. A new council is held, and a second race of men produced; but this fails in the capacity for religious worship—"they forgot the Heart of Heaven." These were partly destroyed by fire and partly converted into apes. Lastly another council is held, and perfect men created. Then follows a remarkable series of stories relating to the early history and migrations of men.

It is known that similar creation myths existed among the Mexicans and other early civilized nations of America, and in ruder and more grotesque forms even among the semi-barbarous and hunter tribes. Their connection with the ancient Semitic and Turanian revelations of Asia is unquestionable.

We have thus in the Assyrian Genesis a relic of early religious belief belonging to a period when such widely separated stocks as the Assyrian and American were still one: to a period, therefore, presumably long anterior to that of Moses. Yet at this very early period the central portions at least of the Turanian race had already devised some means of recording their traditions in writing—probably the arrow-head writing, afterwards used by the Assyrians, had already been invented. Again, at this early period a complex polytheism had already sprung up, and this was connected with cosmological ideas, inasmuch as the primitive abyss, the firmament, the starry heavens, the principle of life, were all subordinate gods; and so were also some of the earliest of the patriarchs of the human race. It is possible, however, that this was among the early Chaldeans an exoteric representation for the vulgar, and that the priestly caste may have understood it in a monotheistic sense. In any case, the idea of a Supreme Creator remains behind the whole. Farther, in the early Chaldean record we have a more detailed and expanded document than that of the Hebrew Genesis, probably intended for the popular ear, and to include as much as possible of the current mythology. As an example, I quote the following in relation to the creation of the moon, being apparently a part of the narrative of that creative period corresponding with the fourth day of Genesis:

"In its mass [that is, of the lower chaos] he made a boiling,
The God Uru [the moon] he caused to rise out, the night he overshadowed.
To fix it also for the light of the night until the shining of the day,
That the month might not be broken and in its amount be regular.
At the beginning of the month at the rising of the night,
His horns are breaking through to shine in the heavens.
On the seventh day to a circle he begins to swell,
And stretches toward the dawn farther."

We now come to the historical connection of all this with Abraham and with the Hebrew Scriptures. The early life of the "Father of the Faithful" belongs to the time when Turanian and Semitic elements were mingled in the Euphratean valley. Himself of the stock of Shem, he dwelt in Ur of the Chaldees, a city in whose ruins, now known by the name of Mugheir, Chaldean inscriptions have been found of a date anterior to that of the patriarch. In the time of Abraham a polytheistic religion already existed in Ur, for we are told that his father "served other gods." Further, the legends of the creation and the deluge, and the antediluvian age, with the history of Nimrod and other postdiluvian heroes, existed in a written form; and, strange though this may seem, there can be little doubt that Abraham, before he left Ur of the Chaldees, had read the same creation legends that have so recently been translated and published by Mr. Smith. But Abraham's relation to these was of a peculiar kind. With a spiritual enlightenment beyond that of his age, he dissented from the Turanian animism and polytheism, and maintained that pure and spiritual monotheism which, according to the Bible, had been the original faith of the sons of Noah. But he was overborne by the tendencies of his time, and probably by the royal and priestly influence then dominant in Chaldea, and he went forth from his native land in search of a country where he might have freedom to worship God. It is thus that Abraham appears as the earliest reformer, the first of those martyrs of conscience who fear not to differ from the majority, the father and prototype of the faithful of every age, and the earliest apostle of the monotheistic faith which still reigns among all the higher races of men.

Did Abraham take with him in his pilgrimage the records of his people? It is scarcely possible to doubt that he did, and this probably in a written form, but purified from the polytheism and inane imaginations accreted upon them; or perhaps he had access to still older and more primitive records anterior to the rise of the Turanian superstitions. In any case we may safely infer that Abraham and his tribe carried with them the substance of all that part of Genesis which contains the history of the world up to his time, and that this would be a precious heir-loom of his family, until it was edited and incorporated in the Pentateuch by his great descendant Moses. It seems plain, therefore, that the original prophet or seer to whom the narrative of creation was revealed lived before Abraham, but we need not doubt that the latter had the benefit of divine guidance in his noble stand against the idolatry of his age, and in his selection of the documents on which his own theology was based. These considerations help us to understand the persistence of Hebrew monotheism in the presence of the idolatries of Canaan and Egypt, since these were closely allied to the Chaldean system against which Abraham had protested. They also explain the recognition by Abraham, as co-religionists, of such monotheistic personages as Melchisedec, king of Salem. They further illustrate the nature of the religious basis in his people's beliefs on which Moses had to work, and on which he founded his theocratic system.

Before leaving this part of the subject, I would observe that the view above given; while it explains the agreement between the Hebrew Genesis and other ancient religious beliefs, is in strict accordance with the teachings of Genesis itself. The history given there implies monotheism and knowledge of God as the Creator and Redeemer, in antediluvian and early postdiluvian times, a decadence from this into a systematic polytheism at a very early date, the protest and dissent of Abraham, his call of God to be the upholder of a purer faith, and the maintenance of that faith by his descendants. Besides this, any careful reader of Genesis and of the book of Job, which, whatever its origin, must be more ancient than the Mosaic law, will readily discover indications that Abraham and the patriarchs were in the possession of documents and traditions of the same purport with those in the early chapters of Genesis, and that these were to them their only sacred literature. The reader of the Pentateuch must carry this idea with him, if he would have any clear conception of the unity and symmetry of these remarkable books.

THE MOSAIC GENESIS.

In the period of 400 years intervening between Abraham's departure from Ur and the exodus of Israel from Egypt, no great prophetic mind, like that of the Father of the Faithful, appeared among the Hebrews. But then arose Moses, the greatest figure in all antiquity before the advent of Christ, and who was destined to give permanence and world-wide prevalence to the faith for which Abraham had sacrificed so much. Under the leadership of Moses, the Abrahamidæ, now reduced to the condition of a serf population, emancipated themselves from Egyptian bondage, and, after forty years of wandering desert life, settled themselves permanently on the hills and in the valleys of Palestine. The voice of the ruling race, indistinctly conveyed to us from that distant antiquity, maintains that the fugitive slaves were an abject and contemptible herd; but the leader of the exodus informs us that, though cruelly trodden down by a haughty despot, they were of noble parentage, the heirs of high hopes and promises. Their migration is certainly the most remarkable national movement in the world's history—remarkable, not merely in its events and immediate circumstances, but in its remote political, literary, and moral results. The rulers of Egypt, polished, enlightened, and practical men, were yet the devotees of a complicated system of hero and animal worship, like that from which Abraham dissented, and derived in great part from the "animism" which caused some of the oldest nations of the world to associate a spiritual indwelling with the natural objects surrounding them; or, if they had ceased to believe in this, they had sunk into a materialistic devotion to the good things of the present world, combined with a superstitious belief in the efficacy of priestly absolution.

The slaves, leaving all this behind them, rose in their religious opinions to the pure and spiritual monotheism of the great father of their race; and their leader presented to them a law unequalled up to our time in its union of justice, patriotism, and benevolence, and established among them, for the first time in the world's history, a free constitutional republic. Nor is this all; unexampled though such results are elsewhere in the case of serfs suddenly emancipated. The Hebrew lawgiver has interwoven his institutions in a great historical composition, including the grand and simple cosmogony of the patriarchs, a detailed account of the affiliation and ethnological relations of the races of men, and a narrative of the fortunes of his own people; intimating not only that they were a favored and chosen race, but that of them was to arise a great Deliverer, who would bless all nations with pardon and with peace, [7] and would solve once for all those great problems of the relations of man to God and the unseen world, which in the time of Moses as in our own were the most momentous of all, and gave to questions of origins all their practical value.

The lawgiver passed to his rest. His laws and literature, surviving through many vicissitudes, have produced in each succeeding age a new harvest of poetry and history, leavened with their own spirit. In the mean time the learning and the superstition of Egypt faded from the eyes of men. The splendid political and military organizations of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Macedon arose and crumbled into dust. The wonderful literature of Greece blazed forth and expired. That of Rome, a reflex and copy of the former, had reached its culminating point; and no prophet had arisen among any of these Gentile nations to teach them the truth of God. The world, with all its national liberties crushed out, its religion and its philosophy corrupted and enfeebled to the last degree by an endless succession of borrowings and intermixtures, lay prostrate under the iron heel of Rome. Then appeared among the now obscure remnant of Israel, one who announced himself as the Prophet like unto Moses, promised of old; but a prophet whose mission it was to redeem not Israel only, but the whole world, and to make all who will believe, children of faithful Abraham. Adopting the whole of the sacred literature of the Hebrews, and proving his mission by its words, he sent forth a few plain men to write its closing books, and to plant it on the ruins of all the time-honored beliefs of the nations—beliefs supported by a splendid and highly organized priestly system and by despotic power, and gilded by all the highest efforts of poetry and art.

The story is a very familiar one; but it is marvellous beyond all others. Nor is the modern history of the Bible less wonderful. Exhumed from the rubbish of the Middle Ages, it has entered on a new career of victory. It has stimulated the mind of modern Europe to all its highest efforts, and has been the charter of its civil and religious liberties. Its wondrous revelation of all that man most desires to know, in the past, in the present, and in his future destinies, has gone home to the hearts of men in all ranks of society and in all countries. In many great nations it is the only rule of religious faith. In every civilized country it is the basis of all that is most valuable in religion. Where it has been withheld from the people, civilization in its highest aspects has languished, and superstition, priestcraft, and tyranny have held their ground or have perished under the assaults of a heartless and inhuman infidelity. Where it has been a household book, education has necessarily flourished, liberty has taken root, and the higher nature of man has been developed to the full. Driven from many other countries by tyrannical interference with liberty of thought and discussion, or by a short-sighted ecclesiasticism, it has taken up its special abode with the greatest commercial nations of our time; and, scattered by their agency broadcast over the world, it is read by every nation under heaven in its own tongue, and is slowly but surely preparing the way for wider and greater changes than any that have heretofore resulted from its influence. Explain it as we may, the Bible is a great literary miracle; and no amount of inspiration or authority that can be claimed for it is more strange or incredible than the actual history of the book. Yet no book has ever thrown itself into so decided antagonism with all the great forces of evil in the world. Tyranny hates it, because the Bible so strongly maintains the individual value and rights of man as man. The spirit of caste dislikes it for the same reason. Anarchical license, on the other hand, finds nothing but discouragement in it. Priestcraft gnashes its teeth at it, as the very embodiment of private judgment in religion, and because it so scornfully ignores human authority in matters of conscience, and human intervention between man and his Maker. Skepticism sneers at it, because it requires faith and humility, and threatens ruin to the unbeliever. It launches its thunders against every form of violence or fraud or allurement that seeks to profit by wrong or to pander to the vices of mankind; all these consequently are its foes. On the other hand, by its uncompromising stand with reference to certain scientific and historical facts, it has appeared to oppose the progress of thought and speculation; though, as we shall see, it has been unfairly accused in this last respect.

With its antagonism to the evil that is in the world we have at present nothing to do, except to caution the student of this venerable literature against the prejudices which interested and unscrupulous foes seek to cultivate. Its doctrine of the origin of man and of the world, and the relation of this to modern scientific and historical results, is that which now claims our attention; and this more especially in the relation which the Mosaic cosmogony, considered as an early revelation from God, may be found to bear to the facts which modern scientific research has elicited from the universe itself. The aspects in which apparent conflicts present themselves are threefold. At one time it was not unusual to impugn the historical accuracy of the Pentateuch on the evidence of the Greek historians; and on many points scarcely any corroborative evidence could be cited in favor of the Hebrew writers. In our own time much of this difficulty has been removed, and an immense amount of learned research has been reduced to waste paper, by the circumstance that the monuments of Egypt and Assyria have risen up to bear testimony in favor of the Bible; and scarcely any sane man now doubts the value of the Hebrew history. The battle-ground has in consequence been shifted farther back, to points concerning the affiliation of the races of men, the absolute antiquity of man's residence on the earth, and the condition of prehistoric men; questions on which we can scarcely expect to find, at least for a long time, any decisive monumental or scientific evidence. Secondly, the Bible commits itself to certain cosmological doctrines and statements respecting the system of nature, and details of that system, more or less approaching to the domain which geology occupies in its investigations of the past history of the earth; and at every stage in the progress of modern science, independently of the mischief done by smatterers and skeptics, earnest bigotry on the one hand, and earnest scientific enthusiasm on the other, have come into collision. One stumbling-block after another has, it is true, been removed by mutual concession and farther enlightenment, and by the removal of false traditional interpretations of the sacred records, as well as by farther discoveries in relation to nature. But the field of conflict has thereby apparently only changed; and we still have some Christians in consequence regarding the revelations of natural science with suspicion, and some scientific men cherishing a sullen resentment against what they regard as an intolerant intermeddling of theology with the domain of legitimate investigation. Lastly, the great growth of physical science, and the tendency to take partial views of the universe as if it were comprehended in mere matter and force, with similarly partial views of the doctrines of continuity and the conservation of forces, along with the growth of a belief in spontaneous evolution as a philosophical dogma, have placed many scientific minds in a position which makes them treat the whole question of the origin and destiny of man and of the world with absolute indifference.

There can nevertheless be no question that the whole subject is at the present moment in a more satisfactory state than ever previously; that much has been done for the solution of difficulties; that many theologians admit the great service which in many cases science has rendered to the interpretation of the Bible, and that most naturalists feel themselves free from undue trammels. Above all, there is a very general disposition to admit the distinctness and independence of the fields of revelation and natural science, the possibility of their arriving at some of the same truths, though in very different ways, and the folly of expecting them fully and manifestly to agree in the present state of our information. The literature of this kind of natural history has also become very extensive, and there are few persons who do not at least know that there are methods of reconciling the cosmogony of Moses with that obtained from the study of nature. For this very reason the time is favorable for an unprejudiced discussion of the questions involved; and for presenting on the one hand to naturalists a summary of what the Bible does actually teach respecting the early history of the earth and man, and on the other to those whose studies lie in the book which they regard as the Word of God, rather than in the material universe which they regard as his work, a view of the points in which the teaching of the Bible comes into contact with natural science at its present stage of progress. These are the ends which I propose to myself in the following pages, and which I shall endeavor to pursue in a spirit of fair and truthful investigation; having regard on the one hand to the claims and influence of the venerable Book of God, and on the other to the rights and legitimate results of modern scientific inquiry.

The plan which I have proposed to myself in this part of my subject is to take the statements of Genesis in their order, and consider what they import, and how they appear to harmonize with what we know from other sources. This will occupy some space, but it will save time in dealing with the remaining parts of the subject. Before entering upon it, I propose to devote one chapter to the answers to three questions which concern the whole doctrine of revealed religion, whether Semitic, Turanian, or Aryan. These are: (1) Why the origin of things should be revealed; (2) How it could be revealed; and (3) What would require to be revealed in order to form the basis of a rational theism.

CHAPTER II.
OBJECTS AND NATURE OF A REVELATION OF ORIGINS.

"There are two books from which I collect my divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant nature—that universal and public manuscript that lies expansed unto the eyes of all."—Sir T. Browne.

There are some questions, simple enough in themselves, respecting the general character and object of the references to nature and creation in the Scriptures, which yet are so variously and vaguely answered that they deserve some consideration before entering on the detailed study of the subject. These are: (1) The object of the introduction of such subjects into the Hebrew sacred books—the why of the revelation of origins. (2) The origin, character, and structure of the narrative of creation and other cosmological statements in those books—the how of the revelation. (3) The character of the Biblical cosmogony, and general views of nature to which it leads—the what of the revelation.

(1) The Object of the Introduction of a Cosmogony in the Bible.—Man, even in his rudest and most uncivilized state, does not limit his mental vision to his daily wants. He desires to live not merely in the present, but in the future also and the past. This is a psychological peculiarity which, as much as any other, marks his separation from the lower animals, and which in his utmost degradation he never wholly loses. Whatever may be fancied as to imagined prehistoric nations, it is certain that no people now existing, or historically known to us, is so rude as to be destitute of some hopes or fears in reference to the future, some traditions as to the distant past. Every religious system that has had any influence over the human mind has included such ideas. Nor are we to regard this as an accident. It depends on fixed principles in our constitution, which crave as their proper aliment such information; and if it can not be obtained, the mind, rather than want it, invents for itself. We might infer from this very circumstance that a true religion, emanating from the Creator, would supply this craving; and might content ourselves with affirming that, on this ground alone, it behooved revelation to have a cosmogony.

But the religion of the Hebrews especially required to be explicit as to the origin of the earth and all things therein. Its peculiar dogma is that of one only God, the Creator, requiring the sole homage of his creatures. The heathen for the most part acknowledged in some form a supreme god, but they also gave divine honors to subordinate gods, to deceased ancestors and heroes, and to natural phenomena, in such a manner as practically to obscure their ideas of the Creator, or altogether to set aside his worship. The influence of such idolatry was the chief antagonism which the Hebrew monotheism had to encounter; and we learn from the history of the nation how often the worshippers of Jehovah were led astray by its allurements. To guard against this danger, it was absolutely necessary that no place should be left for the introduction of polytheism, by placing the whole work of creation and providence under the sole jurisdiction of the One God. Moses consequently takes strong ground on these points. He first insists on the creation of all things by the fiat of the Supreme. Next he specifies the elaboration and arrangement of all the powers of inanimate nature, and the introduction of every form of organic existence, as the work of the same First Cause. Lastly, he insists on the creation of a primal human pair, and on the descent from them of all the branches of the human race, including of course those ancestors and magnates who up to his time had been honored with apotheosis; and on the same principle he explains the golden age of Eden, the fall, the cherubic emblems, the deluge, and other facts in human history interwoven by the heathen with their idolatries. He thus grasps the whole material of ancient idolatry, reduces it within the compass of monotheism, and shows its relation to the one true primitive religion, which was that not only of the Hebrews, but of right that of the whole world, whose prevailing polytheism consisted in perversions of its truth or unity. For such reasons the early chapters of Genesis are so far from being of the character of digressions from the scope and intention of the book, that they form a substratum of doctrine absolutely essential to the Hebrew faith, and equally so to its development in Christianity.

The references to nature in the Bible, however, and especially in its poetical books, far exceed the absolute requirements of the reasons above stated; and this leads to another and very interesting view, namely, the tendency of monotheism to the development of truthful and exalted ideas of nature. The Hebrew theology allowed no attempt at visible representations of the Creator or of his works for purposes of worship. It thus to a great extent prevented that connection of imitative art with religion which flourished in heathen antiquity, and has been introduced into certain forms of Christianity. But it cultivated the higher arts of poetry and song, and taught them to draw their inspiration from nature as the only visible revelation of Deity. Hence the growth of a healthy "physico-theology," excluding all idolatry of natural phenomena, and all superstitious dread of them as independent powers, but inviting to their examination as manifestations of God, and leading to conceptions of the unity of plan in the cosmos, of which polytheism, even in its highest literary efforts, was quite incapable. In the same manner the Bible has always proved itself an active stimulant of natural science, connecting such studies, as it does, with our higher religious sentiments; while polytheism and materialism have acted as repressive influences, the one because it obscures the unity of nature, the other because, in robbing it of its presiding Divinity, it gives a cold and repulsive, corpse-like aspect, chilling to the imagination, and incapable of attracting the general mind.

Naturalists should not forget their obligations to the Bible in this respect, and should on this very ground prefer its teachings to those of modern pantheism and positivism, and still more to those of mere priestly authority. Very few minds are content with simple materialism, and those who must have a God, if they do not recognize the Jehovah of the Hebrew Scriptures as the Creator and Supreme Ruler of the universe, are too likely to seek for him in the dimness of human authority and tradition, or of pantheistic philosophy; both of them more akin to ancient heathenism than to modern civilization, and in their ultimate tendencies, if not in their immediate consequences, quite as hostile to progress in science as to evangelical Christianity.

Every student of human nature is aware of the influence in favor of the appreciation of natural beauty and sublimity which the Bible impresses on those who are deeply imbued with its teaching; even where that same teaching has induced what may be regarded as a puritanical dislike of imitative art, at least in its religious aspects. On the other hand, naturalists can not refuse to acknowledge the surpassing majesty of the views of nature presented in the Bible. No one has expressed this better than Humboldt: "It is characteristic of the poetry of the Hebrews that, as a reflex of monotheism, it always embraces the universe in its unity, comprising both terrestrial life and the luminous realms of space; it dwells but rarely on the individuality of phenomena, preferring the contemplation of great masses. The Hebrew poet does not depict nature as a self-dependent object, glorious in its individual beauty, but always as in relation or subjection to a higher spiritual power. Nature is to him a work of creation and order—the living expression of the omnipresence of the Divinity in the visible world." In reference to the 104th Psalm, which may be viewed as a poetical version of the narrative of creation in Genesis, the same great writer remarks: "We are astonished to find in a lyrical poem of such a limited compass, the whole universe—the heavens and the earth—sketched with a few bold touches. The calm and toilsome life of man, from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, when his daily work is done, is here contrasted with the moving life of the elements of nature. This contrast and generalization in the conception of the mutual action of natural phenomena, and the retrospection of an omnipresent invisible Power, which can renew the earth or crumble it to dust, constitute a solemn and exalted rather than a gentle form of poetic creation." [8]

If we admit the source of inspiration claimed by the Hebrew poets, we shall not be surprised that they should thus write of nature. We shall only lament that so many pious and learned interpreters of Scripture have been too little acquainted with nature to appreciate the natural history of the Book of God, or adequately to illustrate it to those who depend on their teaching; and that so many naturalists have contented themselves with wondering at the large general views of the Hebrew poets, without considering that they are based on a revelation of the nature and order of the creative work which supplied to the Hebrew mind the place of those geological wonders which have astonished and enlarged the minds of modern nations. A modern divine, himself well read in nature, truly says: "If men of piety were also men of science, and if men of science were to read the Scriptures, there would be more faith on the earth and also more philosophy." [9] In a similar strain the patient botanist of the marine algæ thus pleads for the joint claims of the Bible and nature: "Unfortunately it happens that in the educational course prescribed to our divines natural history has no place, for which reason many are ignorant of the important bearings which the book of nature has on the book of revelation. They do not consider, apparently, that both are from God—both are his faithful witnesses to mankind. And if this be so, is it reasonable to suppose that either, without the other, can be fully understood? It is only necessary to glance at the absurd commentaries in reference to natural objects which are to be found in too many annotations of the Holy Scriptures to be convinced of the benefit which the clergy would themselves derive from a more extended study of the works of creation. And to missionaries especially, a minute familiarity with natural objects must be a powerful assistance in awakening the attention of the savage, who, after his manner, is a close observer, and likely to detect a fallacy in his teacher, should the latter attempt a practical illustration of his discourse without sufficient knowledge. These are not days in which persons who ought to be our guides in matters of doctrine can afford to be behind the rest of the world in knowledge; nor can they safely sneer at the knowledge which puffeth up, until, like the apostle, they have sounded its depths and proved its shallowness." [10] It is truly much to be desired that divines and commentators, instead of trying to distort the representations of nature in the Bible into the supposed requirements of a barbarous age, or of setting aside modern discoveries as if they could have no connection with Scripture truth, would study natural objects and laws sufficiently to bring themselves in this respect to the level of the Hebrew writers. Such knowledge would be cheaply purchased even by the sacrifice of a part of their verbal and literary training. It is well that this point is now attracting the attention of the Christian world, and it is but just to admit that some of our more eminent religious writers have produced noble examples of accurate illustrations of Scripture derived from nature. In any case, the Bible itself can not be charged with any neglect of the claims of nature or with any narrow tendency to place material and spiritual things in antagonism to one another.

Another reason why a revelation from God must deal with the origins of things, is that such revelation is, like creation, in its own nature progressive. It is given little by little to successive generations of men, and must proceed from the first rudiments of religious truth onward to its higher developments with the growth of humanity from age to age. Hence the teachings in the early chapters of Genesis are of the simplest and most child-like character, and the first of these early teachings is necessarily that of God the Creator, just as our elementary catechisms for children have been wont to begin with the question, "Who made you?" In this way man is led in the most direct and simple way to the feet of the Universal Father, and a foundation is laid whereon further religious teaching adapted to the growth of the individual mind and to the growing complications of human society can be built. But again, alike in the earliest and simplest as in the more advanced states of the human mind, if spiritual things are to be taught, it must be through the medium of material things. We have no language to express in any direct way spiritual truths; they must be given to us in terms of the natural. We have not yet learned the tongue of the immortals, and probably can not learn it in this world. The word "spirit" itself, which we borrow from the Latin, the Greek Pneuma, the Hebrew Ruah, primarily all agree in signifying breath or wind. We have to speak of our own breath when we mean our spiritual nature, of God's breath when we mean his spiritual nature, and so of all other things not obvious to our senses. There is constant danger in this that the material shall be taken for the spiritual of which it is the symbol, the figure for the reality, the creature for the Creator, and this danger is best counteracted by a decided testimony in relation to the origin of all material things in the will of the spiritual and eternal God. Thus the Bible writers are enabled to use a free and bold manner of speech respecting divine things. Their expressions at one time appear pantheistic and at another anthropomorphic; they see God in every thing, and use with the utmost freedom natural emblems to indicate his perfections and procedure, and our relations to him. In this way there is life and action in their teaching, and it is removed as far as possible from a dry, abstract theology, while equally remote from any tinge of idolatry or superstition.

It may, however, be objected that by the introduction of a cosmogony the Bible exposes itself to a conflict with science, and that thereby injury results both to science and to religion. This is a grave charge, and one that has evidently had much weight with many minds, since it has been the subject of entire treatises designed to illustrate the history of the conflict or to explain its nature. The revelation of God's will to man for his moral guidance, if necessary at all, was necessary before the rise of natural science. Men could not do without the knowledge of the unity of nature and of the unity of God, until these great truths could be worked out by scientific induction. Perhaps they might never have been so worked out. Therefore a revealed book of origins has a right to precedence in this matter. Nor need it in any way come into conflict with the science subsequently to grow up. Science does not deal so much with the origin of nature as with its method and laws, and all that is necessary on the part of a revelation, to avoid conflict with it, is to confine itself to statements of phenomena and to avoid hypotheses. This is eminently the course of the Bible. In its cosmogony it shuns all embellishments and details, and contents itself with the fact of creation and a slight sketch of its order; and in their subsequent references to nature the sacred writers are strictly phenomenal in their statements, and refer every thing directly to the will of God, without any theory as to secondary causes and relations. They are thus decided and positive on the points with reference to which it behooves revelation to testify, and absolutely non-committal on the points which belong to the exclusive domain of science.

What, then, are we to say of the imaginary "conflict of science with religion," of which so much has been made? Simply that it results largely from misapprehension and from misuse of terms. True religion, which consists in practical love to God and to our fellow-men, can have no conflict with science. True science is its fast ally. The Bible, considered as a revelation of spiritual truth to man for his salvation and enlightenment, can have no conflict with science. It promotes the study of nature, rendering it honorable by giving it the dignity of an inquiry into the ways of God, and rendering it safe by separating it from all ideas of magic and necromancy. It gives a theological basis to the ideas of the unity of nature and of natural law. The conflict of science, when historically analyzed, is found to have been fourfold—with the Church, with theology, with superstition, and with false or imperfect science and philosophy. Religious men may have identified themselves from time to time with these opponents, but that is all; and much more frequently the opposition has been by bad men more or less professing religious objects. Organizations calling themselves "the Church," and whose warrant from the Bible is often of the slenderest, have denounced and opposed and persecuted new scientific truths; but they have just as often denounced the Bible itself, and religious doctrines founded on it. Theology claims to be itself one of the sciences, and as such it is necessarily imperfect and progressive, and may at any time be more or less in conflict with other sciences; but theology is not religion, and may often have very little in common either with true religion or the Bible. When discussions arise between theology and other sciences, it is only a pity that either side should indulge in what has been called the odium theologicum, but which is unfortunately not confined to divines. Superstition, considered as the unreasonable fear of natural agencies, is a passive rather than an active opponent of science. But revelation, which affirms unity, law, and a Father's hand in nature, is the deadly foe of superstition, and no people who have been readers of the Bible and imbued with its spirit have ever been found ready to molest or persecute science. Work of this sort has been done only by the ignorant, superstitious, and priest-ridden votaries of systems which withhold the Bible from the people, and detest it as much as they dislike science. Perhaps the most troublesome opposition to science, or rather to the progress of science, has sprung from the tenacity with which men hold to old ideas. These, which may have been at one time the best science attainable, root themselves in popular literature, and even in learned bodies and in educational books and institutions. They become identified with men's conceptions both of nature and religion, and modify their interpretations of the Bible itself. It thus becomes a most difficult matter to wrench them from men's minds, and their advocates are too apt to invoke in their defense political, social, and ecclesiastical powers, and to seek to support them by the authority of revelation, when this may perhaps be quite as favorable to the newer views opposed to them. All these conflicts are, however, necessary incidents in human progress, which comes only by conflict; and there is reason to believe that they would be as severe in the absence of revealed religion as in its presence, were it not that the absence of revelation seems often to produce a fixity and stagnation of thought unfavorable to any new views, and consequently to some extent to any intellectual conflict. It has been, indeed, to the disinterment of the Bible in the Reformation of the fifteenth century that the world owes, more than to any other cause, the immense growth of modern science, and the freedom of discussion which now prevails. The Protestant idea of individual judgment in matters of religion is thoroughly Biblical, for the Bible everywhere appeals to men in this way; and this idea is the strongest guarantee that the world possesses for intellectual liberty in other matters.

We conclude, therefore, on all these grounds, that it was necessary that a revelation from God should take strong and positive ground on the question of the origin of the universe.

(2) The Origin, Method, and Structure of the Scriptural Cosmogony.—A respectable physicist, but somewhat shallow naturalist and theologian, whose works at one time attracted much attention, has said of the first chapter of Genesis: "It can not be history—it may be poetry." Its claims to be history we shall investigate under another head, but it is pertinent to our present inquiry to ask whether it can be poetry. That its substance or matter is poetical no one who has read it once can believe; but it can not be denied that in its form it approaches somewhat to that kind of thought-rhythm or parallelism which gives so peculiar a character to Hebrew poetry. We learn from many Scripture passages, especially in the Proverbs, that this poetical parallelism need not necessarily be connected with poetical thought; that in truth it might be used, as rhyme is sometimes with us, to aid the memory. The oldest acknowledged verse in Scripture is a case in point. Lamech, who lived before the flood, appears to have slain a man in self-defense, or at least in an encounter in which he himself was wounded; and he attempts to define the nature of the crime in the following words:

"Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
Ye wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech:—
I have slain a man to my wounding,
And a young man to my hurt;
If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold,
Truly Lamech seventy and seven fold."

All this is prosaic enough in matter, but the form into which it is thrown gives it a certain dignity, and impresses it on the memory; which last object was probably what the author of this sole fragment of antediluvian literature had in view. He succeeded too—for the sentiment was handed down, probably orally; and Moses incorporates it in his narration, perhaps on account of its interest as the first record of the distinction between willful murder like that of Cain, and justifiable homicide. It is interesting also to observe the same parallelism of style, no doubt with the same objects, in many old Egyptian monumental inscriptions, which, however grandiloquent, are scarcely poetical. [11] It also appears in that ancient record of creation and the deluge recently rescued from the clay tablets of Nineveh.

Now in the first chapter of Genesis, and the first three verses of chapter second, being the formal general narrative of creation, on which, as we shall see, every other statement on the subject in the Bible is based, we have this peculiar parallelism of style. If we ask why, the answer must, I think, be—to give dignity and symmetry to what would otherwise be a dry abstract, and still more to aid memory. This last consideration, perhaps indicating that this chapter, like the apology of Lamech, had been handed down orally for a long period, connects itself with the theory of the pre-Abrahamic origin of these documents to which reference has already been made.

The form of the narrative, however, in no way impairs its precision or accuracy of statement. On this Eichhorn well says: "There lies at the foundation of the first chapter a carefully designed plan, all whose parts are carried out with much art, whereby its appropriate place is assigned to every idea;" and we may add, whereby every idea is expressed in the simplest and fewest words, yet with marvellous accuracy, amounting to an almost scientific precision of diction, for which both the form into which it is thrown and the homogeneous and simple character of the Hebrew language are very well adapted. Much of this indeed remains in the English version, though our language is less perfectly suited than the Hebrew for the concise announcement of general truths of this description. Our translators have, however, deviated greatly from the true sense of many important words, especially where they have taken the Septuagint translation for their guide, as in the words "firmament," "whales," "creeping things," etc. These errors will be noticed in subsequent pages. In the mean time I may merely add that the labors of the ablest Biblical critics give us every reason to conclude that the received text of Genesis preserves, almost without an iota of change, the beautiful simplicity of its first chapter; and that we now have it in a more perfect state than that in which it was presented to the translators of most of the early versions. It must also be admitted that the object in view was best served by that direct reference to the creative fiat, and ignoring of all secondary causes, which are conspicuous in this narrative. This is indeed the general tone of the Bible in speaking of natural phenomena; and this mode of proceeding is in perfect harmony with its claims to divine authority. Had not this course been chosen, no other could have been adopted, in strict consistency with truth, short of a full revelation of the whole system of nature, in the details of all its laws and processes. This we now know would have been impossible, and, if possible, useless or even mischievous.

Regarded from this point of view—the plenary inspiration of the book—the Scriptural references to creation profess to furnish a very general outline, for theological purposes, of the principal features of a vast region unexplored when they were written, and into which human research has yet penetrated along only a few lines. Natural science, in following out these lines of observation, has reached some of the objects delineated in the Scriptural sketch; of others it has obtained distant glimpses; many are probably unknown, and we can appreciate the true value and dimensions relatively to the whole of very few. So vast indeed are the subjects of the bold sketch of the Hebrew prophet, that natural science can not pretend as yet so to fill in the outline as quite to measure the accuracy of its proportions. Yet the lines, though few, are so boldly drawn, and with so much apparent unity and symmetry, that we almost involuntarily admit that they are accurate and complete. This may appear to be underrating the actual progress of science relatively to this great foreshadowing outline; but I know that those most deeply versed in the knowledge of nature will be the least disposed to quarrel with it, whatever skepticism they may entertain as to the greater general completeness of the inspired record.

Another point which deserves a passing notice here is the theory of Dr. Kurtz and others, that the Mosaic narrative represents a vision of creation, analogous to those prophetic visions which appear in the later books of Scripture. This is beyond all question the most simple and probable solution of the origin of the document, when viewed as inspired, but we shall have to recur to it on a future page.

But with respect to the precise origin of this cosmogony, the question now arises, Is it really in substance a revelation from God to man? We must not disguise from ourselves that this deliberate statement of an order of creation in so far challenges comparison with the results of science, and this in a very different way from that which applies to the incidental references to nature in the Bible. Further, inasmuch as it relates to events which transpired before the creation of man, it is of the nature of prophecy rather than of history. It is, in short, either an inspired revelation of the divine procedure in creation, or it is a product of human imagination or research, or a deliberate fraud.

To no part of the Bible do these alternatives more strictly apply than to its first chapter. This "can not be history" in the strict acceptation of the term. It relates to events which no human eye witnessed, respecting which no human testimony could give any information. It represents the creation of man as the last of a long series of events, of which it professes to inform us. The knowledge of these events can not have been a matter of human experience. If at all entitled to confidence, the narrative must, therefore, be received as an inspired document, not handed down by any doubtful tradition, but existing as originally transfused into human language from the mind of the Author of nature himself. This view is in no way affected by the hypothesis, already mentioned, that the first chapters of Genesis were compiled by Moses from more ancient documents. This merely throws back the revelation to a higher antiquity, and requires us to suppose the agency of two inspired men instead of one.

It would be out of place here to enter into any argument for the inspiration of Scripture, or to attempt to define the nature of that inspiration. I merely wish to impress on the mind of the reader that without the admission of its reality, or at least its possibility, our present inquiry becomes merely a matter of curious antiquarian research. We must also on this ground distinguish between the claims of the Scriptures and those of tradition or secular history, when they refer to the same facts. The traditions and cosmogonies of some ancient nations have many features in common with the Bible narrative; and, on the supposition that Moses compiled from older documents, they may be portions of this more ancient sacred truth, but clothed in the varied garments of the fanciful mythological creeds which have sprung up in later and more degenerate times. Such fragments may safely be received as secondary aids to the understanding of the authentic record, but it would be folly to seek in them for the whole truth. They are but the scattered masses of ore, by tracing which we may sometimes open up new and rich portions of the vein of primitive lore from which they have been derived. It is, however, quite necessary here formally to inquire if there are any hypotheses short of that of plenary inspiration which may allow us to attach any value whatever to this most ancient document. I know but two views of this kind that are worthy of any attention.

1. The Mosaic account of creation may be a result of ancient scientific inquiries, analogous to those of modern geology.

2. It may be an allegorical or poetical mythus, not intended to be historical, but either devised for some extraneous purpose, or consisting of the conjectures of some gifted intellect.

These alternatives we may shortly consider, though the materials for their full discussion can be furnished only by facts to be subsequently stated. I am not aware that the first of these views has been maintained by any modern writer. Some eminent scientific men are, however, disposed to adopt such an explanation of the ancient Hindoo hymns, as well as of the cosmogony of Pythagoras, which bears evidence of this origin; and it may be an easy step to infer that the Hebrew cosmogony was derived from some similar source. Not many years ago such a supposition would have been regarded as almost insane. Then the science of antiquity was only another name for the philosophy of Greece and Rome. But in recent times we have seen Egypt disclose the ruins of a mighty civilization, more grand and massive though less elegant than that of Greece, and which had reached its acme ere Greece had received its alphabet—a civilization which, according to the Scripture history, is derived from that of the primeval Cushite empire, which extended from the plains of Shinar over all Southeastern Asia, but was crushed at its centre before the dawn of secular history. We have now little reason to doubt that Moses, when he studied the learning of Egypt, held converse with men who saw more clearly and deeply into nature's mysteries than did Thales or Pythagoras, or even Aristotle. [12] Still later the remnants of old Nineveh have been exhumed from their long sepulture, and antiquaries have been astonished by the discovery that knowledge and arts, supposed to belong exclusively to far more recent times, were in the days of the early Hebrew kings, and probably very long previously, firmly established on the banks of the Tigris. Such discoveries, when compared with hints furnished by the Scriptures, tend greatly to exalt our ideas of the state of civilization at the time when they were written; and we shall perceive, in the course of our inquiry, many additional reasons for believing that the ancient Israelites were much farther advanced in natural science than is commonly supposed.

We have, however, no positive proof of such a theory, and it is subject to many grave objections. The narrative itself makes no pretension to a scientific origin, it quotes no authority, and it is connected with no philosophical speculations or deductions. It bears no internal evidence of having been the result of inductive inquiry, but appeals at once to faith in the truth of the great ultimate doctrine of absolute creation, and then proceeds to detail the steps of the process, in the manner of history as recorded by a witness, and not in the manner of science tracing back effects to their causes. Farther, it refers to conditions of our planet respecting which science has even now attained to no conclusions supported by evidence, and is not in a position to make dogmatic assertions. The tone of all the ancient cosmogonies has in these respects a resemblance to that of the Scriptures, and bears testimony to a general impression pervading the mind of antiquity that there was a divine and authoritative testimony to the facts of creation, distinct from history, philosophical speculation, or induction.

One of the boldest and simplest methods of this kind is that followed by the authors of the "Types of Mankind," in the attempt to assign a purely human origin to Genesis 1st. These writers admit the greater antiquity of the first chapter, though assigning the whole of the book to a comparatively modern date. They say:

"The 'document Jehovah' [13] does not especially concern our present subject; and it is incomparable with the grander conception of the more ancient and unknown writer of Genesis 1st. With extreme felicity of diction and conciseness of plan, the latter has defined the most philosophical views of antiquity upon cosmogony; in fact so well that it has required the palæontological discoveries of the nineteenth century—at least 2500 years after his death—to overthrow his septenary arrangement of 'Creation;' which, after all, would still be correct enough in great principles, were it not for one individual oversight and one unlucky blunder; not exposed, however, until long after his era, by post-Copernican astronomy. The oversight is where he wrote (Gen. i. 6-8), 'Let there be raquiê,' i. e., a firmament; which proves that his notions of 'sky' (solid like the concavity of a copper basin, with stars set as brilliants in the metal) were the same as those of adjacent people of his time—indeed, of all men before the publication of Newton's 'Principia' and of Laplace's 'Mécanique Céleste.' The blunder is where he conceives that aur, 'light,' and iom, 'day' (Gen. i. 14-18), could have been physically possible three whole days before the 'two great luminaries,' Sun and Moon, were created. These venial errors deducted, his majestic song beautifully illustrates the simple process of ratiocination through which—often without the slightest historical proof of intercourse—different 'Types of Mankind,' at distinct epochas, and in countries widely apart, had arrived, naturally, at cosmogonic conclusions similar to the doctrines of that Hebraical school of which his harmonic and melodious numbers remain a magnificent memento.

"That process seems to have been the following: The ancients knew, as we do, that man is upon the earth; and they were persuaded, as we are, that his appearance was preceded by unfathomable depths of time. Unable (as we are still) to measure periods antecedent to man by any chronological standard, the ancients rationally reached the tabulation of some events anterior to man through induction—a method not original with Lord Bacon, because known to St. Paul; 'for his unseen things from the creation of the world, his power and Godhead, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made' (Rom. i., 20). Man, they felt, could not have lived upon earth without animal food; ergo, 'cattle' preceded him, together with birds, reptiles, fishes, etc. Nothing living, they knew, could have existed without light and heat; ergo, the solar system antedated animal life, no less than the vegetation indispensable for animal support. But terrestrial plants can not grow without earth; ergo, that dry land had to be separated from pre-existent 'waters.' Their geological speculations inclining rather to the Neptunian than to the Plutonian theory—for Werner ever preceded Hutton—the ancients found it difficult to 'divide the waters from the waters' without interposing a metallic substance that 'divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters that were above the firmament;' so they inferred, logically, that a firmament must have been actually created for this object. [E.g., 'The windows of the skies' (Gen. vii., 11); 'the waters above the skies' (Psa. cxlviii., 4).] Before the 'waters' (and here is the peculiar error of the genesiacal bard) some of the ancients claimed the pre-existence of light (a view adopted by the writer of Genesis 1st); while others asserted that 'chaos' prevailed. Both schools united, however, in the conviction that DARKNESS—Erebus—anteceded all other created things. What, said these ancients, can have existed before the 'darkness?' Ens entium, the CREATOR, was the humbled reply. Elohim is the Hebrew vocal expression of that climax; to define whose attributes, save through the phenomena of creation, is an attempt we leave to others more presumptuous than ourselves."

The problem here set to the "unknown" author of Genesis is a hard one—given the one fact that "man is" to find in detail how the world was formed in a series of preceding ages of vast duration. Is it possible that such a problem could have been so worked out as to have endured the test of three thousand years, and the scrutiny of modern science? But there is an "oversight" in one detail, and a "blunder" in another. By reference farther on, the reader will find under the chapters on "Light" and the "Atmosphere" that the oversight and blunder are those not of the writer of Genesis, but of the learned American ethnologists in the nineteenth century; a circumstance which cuts in two ways in defense of the ancient author so unhappily unknown to his modern critics.

The second of the alternatives above referred to, the mythical hypothesis, has been advanced and ably supported, especially on the continent of Europe, and by such English writers as are disposed to apply the methods of modern rationalistic criticism to the Bible. In one of its least objectionable forms it is thus stated by Professor Powell:

"The narrative, then, of six periods of creation, followed by a seventh similar period of rest and blessing, was clearly designed by adaptation to their conceptions to enforce upon the Israelites the institution of the Sabbath; and in whatever way its details may be interpreted, it can not be regarded as an historical statement of the primeval institution of a Sabbath; a supposition which is indeed on other grounds sufficiently improbable, though often adopted. * * * If, then, we would avoid the alternative of being compelled to admit what must amount to impugning the truth of those portions at least of the Old Testament, we surely are bound to give fair consideration to the only suggestion which can set us entirely free from all the difficulties arising from the geological contradiction which does and must exist against any conceivable interpretation which retains the assertion of the historical character of the details of the narrative, as referring to the distinct transactions of each of the seven periods. * * * The one great fact couched in the general assertion that all things were created by the sole power of one Supreme Being is the whole of the representation to which an historical character can be assigned. As to the particular form in which the descriptive narrative is conveyed, we merely affirm that it can not be history—it may be poetry." [14]

The general ground on which this view is entertained is the supposed irreconcilable contradiction between the literal interpretation of the Mosaic record and the facts of geology. The real amount of this difficulty we are not, in the present stage of our inquiry, prepared to estimate. We can, however, readily understand that the hypothesis depends on the supposition that the narrative of creation is posterior in date to the Mosaic ritual, and that this plain and circumstantial series of statements is a fable designed to support the Sabbatical institution, instead of the rite being, as represented in the Bible itself, a commemoration of the previously recorded fact. This is, fortunately, a gratuitous assumption, contrary to the probable date of the documents, as deduced from internal evidence and from comparison with the Assyrian and other cosmogonies; and it also completely ignores the other manifest uses mentioned under our first head. If proved, it would give to the whole the character of a pious fraud, and would obviously render any comparison with the geological history of the earth altogether unnecessary. While, therefore, it must be freely admitted that the Mosaic narrative can not be history, in so far at least as history is a product of human experience, we can not admit that it is a poetical mythus, or, in other words, that it is destitute of substantial truth, unless proved by good evidence to be so; and, when this is proved, we must also admit that it is quite undeserving of the credit which it claims as a revelation from God.

Since, therefore, the events recorded in the first chapter of Genesis were not witnessed by man; since there is no reason to believe that they were discovered by scientific inquiry; and since, if true, they can not be a poetical myth, we must, in the mean time, return to our former supposition that the Mosaic cosmogony is a direct revelation from the Creator. In this respect, the position of this part of the earth's Biblical history resembles that of prophecy. Writers may accurately relate contemporary events, or those which belong to the human period, without inspiration; but the moment that they profess accurately to foretell the history of the future, or to inform us of events which preceded the human period, we must either believe them to be inspired, or reject them as impostors or fanatics. Many attempts have been made to find intermediate standing-ground, but it is so precarious that the nicest of our modern critical balancers have been unable to maintain themselves upon it.

Having thus determined that the Mosaic cosmogony, in its grand general features, must either be inspired or worthless, we have further to inquire to what extent it is necessary to suppose that the particular details and mode of expression of the narrative, and the subsequent allusions to nature in the Bible, must be regarded as entitled to this position. We may conceive them to have been left to the discretion of the writers; and, in that case, they will merely represent the knowledge of nature actually existing at the time. On the other hand, their accuracy may have been secured by the divine afflatus. Few modern writers have been disposed to insist on the latter alternative, and have rather assumed that these references and details are accommodated to the state of knowledge at the time. I must observe here, however, that a careful consideration of the facts gives to a naturalist a much higher estimate of the real value of the observations of nature embodied in the Scriptures than that which divines have ordinarily entertained; and, consequently, that if we suppose them of human origin, we must be prepared to modify the views generally entertained of early Oriental simplicity and ignorance. The truth is, that a large proportion of the difficulties in Scriptural natural history appear to have arisen from want of such accommodation to the low state of the knowledge of nature among translators and expositors; and this is precisely what we should expect in a veritable revelation. Its moral and religious doctrines were slowly developed, each new light illuminating previous obscurities. Its human history comes out as evidence of its truth, when compared with monumental inscriptions; and why should not the All-wise have constructed as skilfully its teachings respecting his own works? There can be no doubt whatever that the Scripture writers intended to address themselves to the common mind, which now as then requires simple and popular teaching, but they were under obligation to give truthful statements; and we need not hesitate to say, with Dr. Chalmers, in reference to a book making such claims as those of the Bible: "There is no argument, saving that grounded on the usages of popular language, which would tempt us to meddle with the literalities of that ancient and, as appears to us, authoritative document, any farther than may be required by those conventionalities of speech which spring from 'optical' impressions of nature." [15]

Attempt as we may to disguise it, any other view is totally unworthy of the great Ruler of the universe, especially in a document characterized as emphatically the truth, and in a moral revelation, in which statements respecting natural objects need not be inserted, unless they could be rendered at once truthful and illustrative of the higher objects of the revelation. The statement often so flippantly made that the Bible was not intended to teach natural history has no application here. Spiritual truths are no doubt shadowed forth in the Bible by material emblems, often but rudely resembling them, because the nature of human thought and language render this necessary, not only to the unlearned, but in some degree to all; but this principle of adaptation can not be applied to plain material facts. Yet a confusion of these two very distinct cases appears to prevail almost unaccountably in the minds of many expositors. They tell us that the Scriptures ascribe bodily members to the immaterial God, and typify his spiritual procedure by outward emblems; and this they think analogous to such doctrines as a solid firmament, a plane earth, and others of a like nature, which they ascribe to the sacred writers. We shall find that the writers of the Scriptures had themselves much clearer views, and that, even in poetical language, they take no such liberties with truth.

As an illustration of the extent to which this doctrine of "accommodation" carries us beyond the limits of fair interpretation, I cite the following passage from one of the ablest and most judicious writers on the subject: [16] "It was the opinion of the ancients that the earth, at a certain height, was surrounded by a transparent hollow sphere of solid matter, which they called the firmament. When rain descended, they supposed that it was through windows or holes made in the crystalline curtain suspended in mid-heavens. To these notions the language of the Bible is frequently conformed. * * * But the most decisive example I have to give on this subject is derived from astronomy. Until the time of Copernicus no opinion respecting natural phenomena was thought better established than that the earth is fixed immovably in the centre of the universe, and that the heavenly bodies move diurnally round it. To sustain this view the most decisive language of Scripture might be quoted. God is there said to have 'established the foundations of the earth, so that they could not be removed forever' and the sacred writers expressly declare that the heavenly bodies arise and set, and nowhere allude to any proper motion of the earth."

Will it be believed that, with the exception of the poetical expression, "windows of heaven," and the common forms of speech relating to sunrise and sunset, the above "decisive" instances of accommodation have no foundation whatever in the language of Scripture. The doctrine of the rotation of solid celestial spheres around the earth belongs to a Greek philosophy which arose after the Hebrew cosmogony was complete; and though it occurs in the Septuagint and other ancient versions, it is not based on the Hebrew original. In truth, we know that those Grecian philosophers—of the Ionic and Pythagorean schools—who lived nearest the times of the Hebrew writers, and who derived the elements of their science from Egypt and Western Asia, taught very different doctrines. How absurd, then, is it thus to fasten upon the sacred writers, contrary to their own words, the views of a school of astronomy which probably arose long after their time, when we know that more accurate ideas prevailed nearer their epoch. Secondly, though there is some reason for stating that the "ancients," though certainly not those of Israel, believed in celestial spheres supporting the heavenly bodies, I suspect that the doctrine of a solid vault supporting the clouds, except as a mere poetical or mythological fancy, is a product of the imagination of the theologians and closet philosophers of a more modern time. The testimony of men's senses appears to be in favor of the whole universe revolving around a plane earth, though the oldest astronomical school with which we are acquainted suspected that this is an illusion; but the every-day observation of the most unlettered man who treads the fields and is wet with the mists and rains must convince him that there is no sub-nubilar solid sphere. If, therefore, the Bible had taught such a doctrine, it would have shocked the common-sense even of the plain husbandmen to whom it was addressed, and could have found no fit audience except among a portion of the literati of comparatively modern times. Thirdly, with respect to the foundations of the earth, I may remark that in the tenth verse of Genesis there occurs a definition as precise as that of any lexicon—"and God called the dry land earth;" consequently it is but fair to assume that the earth afterwards spoken of as supported above the waters is the dry land or continental masses of the earth, and no geologist can object to the statement that the dry land is supported above the waters by foundations or pillars.

We shall find in our examination of the document itself that all the instances of such accommodation which have been cited by writers on this subject are as baseless as those above referred to. It is much to be regretted that so many otherwise useful expositors have either wanted that familiarity with the aspects of external nature by which all the Hebrew writers are characterized, or have taken too little pains to ascertain the actual meaning of the references to creation which they find in the Bible. I may further remark that if such instances of accommodation could be found in the later poetical books, it would be extremely unfair to apply them as aids in the interpretation of the plain, precise, and unadorned statements of the first chapters of Genesis. There is, however, throughout even the higher poetry of the Bible, a truthful representation and high appreciation of nature for which we seek in vain in any other poetry, and we may fairly trace this in part to the influence of the cosmogony which appears in its first chapter. The Hebrew was thus taught to recognize the unity of nature as the work of an Almighty Intelligence, to regard all its operations as regulated by his unchanging law or "decree," and to venerate it as a revelation of his supreme wisdom and goodness. On this account he was likely to regard careful observation and representation with as scrupulous attention as the modern naturalist. Nor must we forget that the Old Testament literature has descended to us through two dark ages—that of Greek and Roman polytheism and of Middle Age barbarism—and that we must not confound its tenets with those of either. The religious ideas of both these ages were favorable to certain forms of literature and art, but eminently unfavorable to the successful prosecution of the study of nature. Hence we have a right to expect in the literature of the golden age of primeval monotheism more affinity with the ideas of modern science than in any intermediate time; and the truthful delineation which the claims of the Bible to inspiration require might have been, as already hinted, to a certain extent secured merely by the reflex influence of its earlier statements, without the necessity of our supposing that illustrations of this kind in the later books came directly from the Spirit of God.

Our discussion of this part of the subject has necessarily been rather desultory, and the arguments adduced must depend for their full confirmation on the results of our future inquiries. The conclusions arrived at may be summed up as follows: 1. That the Mosaic cosmogony must be considered, like the prophecies of the Bible, to claim the rank of inspired teaching, and must depend for its authority on the maintenance of that claim. 2. That the incidental references to nature in other parts of Scripture indicate, at least, the influence of these earlier teachings, and of a pure monotheistic faith, in creating a high and just appreciation of nature among the Hebrew people.

It is now necessary to inquire in what precise form this remarkable revelation of the origin of the world has been given. I have already referred to the hypothesis that it represents a vision of creation presented to the mind of a seer, as if in a series of pictures which he represents to us in words. This is perhaps the most intelligible conception of the manner of communication of a revelation from God; and inasmuch as it is that referred to in other parts of the Bible as the mode of presentation of the future to inspired prophets, there can be no impropriety in supposing it to have been the means of communicating the knowledge of the unknown past. We may imagine the seer—perhaps some aboriginal patriarch, long before the time of Moses—perhaps the first man himself—wrapt in ecstatic vision, having his senses closed to all the impressions of the present time, and looking as at a moving procession of the events of the earth's past history, presented to him in a series of apparent days and nights. In the first chapter of Genesis he rehearses this divine vision to us, not in poetry, but in a series of regularly arranged parts or strophes, thrown into a sort of rhythmical order fitted to impress them on the memory, and to allow them to be handed down from mouth to mouth, perhaps through successive generations of men, before they could be fixed in a written form of words. Though the style can scarcely be called poetical, since its expressions are obviously literal and unadorned by figures of speech, the production may not unfairly be called the Song or Ballad of Creation, and it presents an Archaic simplicity reminding us of the compositions of the oldest and rudest times, while it has also an artificial and orderly arrangement, much obscured by its division into verses and chapters in our Bibles. It is undoubtedly also characterized by a clearness and grandeur of expression very striking and majestic, and which shows that it was written by and intended for men of no mean and contracted minds, but who could grasp the great problems of the origin of things, and comprehend and express them in a bold and vigorous manner. It may be well, before proceeding farther, to present to the reader this ancient document in a form more literal and intelligible, and probably nearer to its original dress, than that in which we are most familiar with it in our English Bibles:

THE ABORIGINAL SONG OF CREATION.

Beginning.

In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,
And the Earth was formless and empty,
And darkness on the surface of the deep,
And the Breath of God moved on the Surface of the Waters.

Day One.

And God said—"Let Light be,"
And Light was.
And God saw the Light that it was good.
And God called the Light Day,
And the darkness he called Night.
And Evening was and Morning was—Day one.

Day Second.

And God said—"Let there be an Expanse in the midst of the waters,
And let it divide the waters from the waters."
And God made the Expanse,
And divided the waters below the Expanse from the waters above the Expanse.
And it was so.
And God called the Expanse Heavens.
And Evening was and Morning was, a Second Day.

Day Third.

And God said—"Let the waters under the Heavens be gathered into one place,
And let the Dry Land appear."
And it was so,
And God called the Dry Land Earth,
And the gathering of waters called he Seas.
And God saw that it was good.
And God said—"Let the earth shoot forth herbage,
The Herb yielding seed and the fruit-tree yielding fruit containing seed after its kind, on the earth."
And it was so.
And the earth brought forth herbage,
The Herb yielding seed and the Tree yielding fruit whose seed is in it after its kind,
And God saw that it was good.
And Evening was and Morning was, a Third Day.

Day Fourth.

And God said—"Let there be Luminaries in the Expanse of Heaven,
To divide the day from the night,
And let them be for Signs and for Seasons,
And for Days and for Years.
And let them be Luminaries in the Expanse of Heaven
To give light on the earth."
And it was so.
And God made two great Luminaries,
The greater Luminary to rule the day,
The lesser Luminary to rule the night,
The Stars also.
And God placed them in the Expanse of Heaven
To give light upon the earth,
And to rule over the day and over the night,
And to divide the light from the darkness.
And God saw that it was good.
And Evening was and Morning was, a Fourth Day.

Day Fifth.

And God said—"Let the waters swarm
with swarmers, having life,
And let winged animals fly over the earth on the
surface of the expanse of heaven."
And God created great Reptiles,
And every living thing that moveth,
With which the waters swarmed after their kind,
And every winged bird after its kind.
And God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying—
"Be fruitful and multiply,
And fill the waters of the sea;
And let birds multiply in the land."
And Evening was and Morning was, a Fifth Day.

Day Sixth.

And God said—"Let the Land bring forth living things after their kind,
Herbivores and smaller mammals and Carnivores after their kind."
And it was so.
And God made all Carnivores after their kind,
And all Herbivores after their kind,
And all minor mammals after their kind.
And God saw that it was good.
And God said—"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,
And let him have dominion over the fish in the sea
And over the birds of the heavens,
And over the Herbivora,
And over the Earth,
And over all the minor animals that creep upon the earth."
And God created man in his own image,
In the image of God created he him,
Male and female created he them.
And God blessed them.
And God said unto them—
"Be fruitful and multiply,
And replenish the earth and subdue it,
And have dominion over the fishes of the sea
And over the birds of the air,
And over all the animals that move upon the earth."
And God said—"Behold, I have given you all herbs yielding seed,
Which are on the surface of the whole earth,
And every tree with fruit having seed,
They shall be unto you for food.
And to all the animals of the land
And to all the birds of the heavens,
And to all things moving on the land having the breath of life,
I have given every green herb for food."
And it was so.
And God saw every thing that he had made,
and behold it was very good.
And Evening was and Morning was, a Sixth Day.

Day Seventh.

Thus the Heavens and the Earth were finished,
And all the hosts of them.
And on the seventh day God ended the work which he had made,
And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it,
Because that in it he rested from all his work that he had created and made.

CHAPTER III.
OBJECTS AND NATURE OF A REVELATION OF ORIGINS—Continued.

(3) Character of the Biblical Cosmogony, and general Views of Nature which it Contains or to which it Leads.—Much of what appertains to the character of the revelation of origins has been anticipated under previous heads. We have only to read the Song of Creation, as given in the last chapter, to understand its power and influence as a beginning of religious doctrine. The revelation was written for plain men in the infancy of the world. Imagine Chaldean or Hebrew shepherd listening to these majestic lines from the lips of some ancient patriarch, and receiving them as truly the words of God. What a grand opening to him of both the seen and unseen worlds! Henceforth he has no superstitious dread of the stars above, or of the lightning and thunder, or of the dark woods and flowing waters beneath. They are all the works of the one Creator, the same Creator who is his own Maker, in whose image and shadow he is made. He can look up now to the heavens or around upon the earth, and see in all the handiwork of God, and can worship God through all. He can see that the power that cares for the birds and the flowers of the field cares for him. He is no longer the slave and sport of unknown and dreadful powers; they are God's workmanship and under his control—nay, God has given him a mission to subdue and rule over them. So these noble words raise him to a new manhood, and emancipate him from the torture of endless fears, and open to him vast new fields of thought and inquiry, which may enrich him with boundless treasures of new religious and intellectual wealth. Imagine still farther that he wanders into those great cities which are the seats of the idolatries of his time. He enters magnificent temples, sees elaborately decorated altars, huge images, gorgeous ceremonials, priests gay in vestments and imposing in numbers. He is invited to bow down before the bull Apis, to worship the statue of Belus or of Ishtar, of Osiris or of Isis. But this is not in his book of origins. All these things are contrivances of man, not works of God, and their aim is to invite him to adore that which is merely his fellow-creature, that which he has the divine commission to subdue and rule. So our primitive Puritan turns away. He will rather raise an altar of rough stones in the desert, and worship the unseen yet real Creator, the God that has no local habitation in temples made with hands, yet is everywhere present. Such is the moral elevation to which this revelation of origins raises humanity; and when there was added to it the farther history of primeval innocence, of the fall, and of the promise of a Redeemer, and of the fate of the godless antediluvians, there was a whole system of religion, pure and elevating, and placing the Abrahamidæ, who for ages seem alone to have held to it, on a plane of spiritual vantage immeasurably above that of other nations. Farther, every succeeding prophet whose works are included in the sacred canon, following up these doctrines in the same spirit, and added new treasures of divine knowledge from age to age.

But admitting all this, it may be asked, Are these ancient records of any value to us? May we not now dispense with them, and trust to the light of science? The infinitely varied and discordant notions of our modern literature on these great questions of origin, the incapacity of any philosophical system to reach the common mind for practical purposes, and the baseless character of any religious system which does not build on these great primitive truths, give a sufficient answer. Farther, we may affirm that the greatest and widest generalizations of our modern science have, in so far as they are of practical importance, been anticipated in the revelations of the Bible, and that in the cosmogony of Genesis and its continuation in the other sacred books we have general views of the universe as broad as those of any philosophies, ancient or modern. This is a hard test for our revelation, but it can be endured, and we may shortly inquire what we find in the Bible of such great general truths.

Many may be disposed to admit the accurate delineation of natural facts open to human observation in the sacred Scriptures, who may not be prepared to find in these ancient books any general views akin to those of the ancient philosophers, or to those obtained by inductive processes in modern times. Yet views of this kind are scattered through the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and are a natural outgrowth and development of the great facts and principles asserted in the first chapter of Genesis. They resolve themselves, almost as a matter of course, into the two leading ideas of order and adaptation. I have already quoted the eloquent admission by Baron Humboldt of the presence of these ideas of the cosmos in Psalm civ. They are both conspicuous in the narrative of creation, and equally so in a great number of other passages. "Order is heaven's first law; and the second is like unto it—that every thing serves an end. This is the sum of all science. These are the two mites, even all that she hath, which she throws into the treasury of the Lord; and, as she does so in faith, Eternal Wisdom looks on and approves the deed." [17] These two mites, lawfully acquired by science, by her independent exertions, she may, however, recognize as of the same coinage with the treasure already laid up in the rich storehouse of the Hebrew literature; but in a peculiar and complex form, which may be illustrated under the following general statements:

1. The Scriptures assert invariable natural law, and constantly recurring cycles in nature. Natural law is expressed as the ordinance or decree of Jehovah. From the oldest of the Hebrew books I select the following examples: [18]

"When he made a decree for the rain,
And a way for the thunder-flash."
—Job xxviii., 26.
"Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens?
Canst thou establish a dominion even over the earth?"
—Job xxxviii., 33.

The later books give us such views as the following:

"He hath established them [the heavens] for ever and ever;
He hath made a decree which shall not pass."
—Psa. cxlviii., 6.

"Thou art forever, O Jehovah, thy word is established in the heavens;
Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth;
They continue this day according to thine ordinances, for all are thy servants."
—Psa. cxix., 90.

"When he established the clouds above;
When he strengthened the fountains of the deep;
When he gave to the sea his decree,
That the waters should not pass his commandment;
When he appointed the foundations of the earth."
—Prov. viii., 28.

Many similar instances will be found in succeeding pages; and in the mean time we may turn to the idea of recurring cycles, which forms the starting-point of the reasonings of Solomon on the current of human affairs, in the book of Ecclesiastes: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for the ages. The sun ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to its place whence it arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth unto the north. It whirleth about continually, and returneth again according to its circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea doth not overflow; unto the place whence the rivers came, thither they return again." I might fill pages with quotations more or less illustrative of the statement in proof of which the above texts are cited; but enough has been given to show that the doctrine of the Bible is not that of fortuitous occurrence, or of materialism, or of pantheism, or of arbitrary supernaturalism, but of invariable natural law representing the decree of a wise and unchanging Creator. It is a common but groundless and shallow charge against the Bible that it teaches an "arbitrary supernaturalism." What it does teach is that all nature is regulated by the laws of God, which like himself are unchanging, but which are so complex in their relations and adjustments that they allow of infinite variety, and do not exclude even miraculous intervention, or what appears to our limited intelligence as such. In opposition to this, it is true, some physicists have held that natural law is a fatal necessity. [19] If they mean by this a merely hypothetical necessity that certain effects must follow if certain laws act, this is in accordance with the Biblical view, for nothing can resist the will of God. But if they mean an absolute necessity that these laws can not be suspended or counteracted by higher laws, or by the will of the Creator, they assert what is not only contrary to Scripture, but absurd, for "blind metaphysical necessity, which is the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things." [20] It could lead merely to a dead and inert equilibrium. On the hypothesis of mere physical necessity, the universe either never could have existed, or must have come to an end infinite ages ago, which is the same thing. Only on the hypothesis of law proceeding from an intelligent will can we logically account for nature.

2. The Bible recognizes progress and development in nature. At the very outset we have this idea embodied in the gradual elaboration of all things in the six creative periods, rising from the formless void of the beginning, through successive stages of inorganic and organic being, up to Eden and to man. Beyond this point the work of creation stops; but there is to be an occupation and improvement of the whole earth by man spreading from Eden. This process is arrested or impeded by sin and the fall. Here commences the special province of the Bible, in explaining the means of recovery from the fall, and of the establishment of a new spiritual and moral kingdom, and finally of the restoration of Eden in a new heaven and earth. All this is moral, and relates to man, in so far as the present state of things is concerned; but we have the commentary of Jesus: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;" the remarkable statement of Paul, that the whole creation is involved in the results of man's moral fall and restoration, and the equally remarkable one that the Redeemer is also the maker of the "worlds" or ages of the earth's physical progress, as well as of the future "new heaven and new earth." Peter also rebukes indignantly those scoffers who maintained that all things had remained as they are since the beginning; and refers to the creation week and to the deluge as earnests of the great changes yet in store for the earth. [21]

It is indeed curious to observe how in our version of the Bible this idea of progress in the universe, or of "time-worlds," as it has been called, has been variously replaced by the words "world" and "eternity," owing to the defective ideas prevalent at the time when the translation was made. In the Hebrew Scriptures the term Olam, "age," and in the New Testament the equivalent term Ai[=o]n have been thus treated, and their real significance much obscured. Thus when it is said, "by faith we understand that the worlds were framed," or "by him God made the worlds," [22] or that certain of God's plans have been hid "from the beginning of the world," [23] the reference is not to worlds in space, but to worlds in time, or ages of God's working in the universe. So also these ages of God's working are given to us as our only intelligible type of eternity, of which absolutely we can have no conception. Thus God's "eternal purpose" is his purpose of the ages. So when he is the "King eternal," [24] and in that capacity gives to his people "life everlasting," he is the King of the ages, and gives life of the ages. So in the noble hymn attributed to Moses (Psalm xc.), where our version has, "from everlasting to everlasting thou art God," [25] the original is, "from age to age thou art, O God." It has perhaps been a defect of our modern science that it has familiarized us merely with the existence of worlds in space, and not with their existence in time. It is only in comparatively modern times that the developments of chronological geology and of physical astronomy have brought before us, not only the long ages in which the earth was passing through its formative stages, but also the fact that still longer æons are embraced in the history of the other bodies of our solar system, and of the starry orbs and nebulæ. These grand conceptions were already embodied in the Hebrew revelation, and were used there as the means of giving some faint approach to a conception of the unlimited existence of God himself, of the ages in which his creative work has been going on, and of the future life he has prepared for his redeemed people.

Such views of development and progress are not unknown to many ancient cosmogonies and philosophical systems, but they had no stable foundation in observed fact until the rise of modern geology and physical astronomy; which enable us to affirm that, in addition to those changeless physical laws which cause the bodies of the universe to wheel in unvarying cycles, and all natural powers to reproduce themselves, and, in addition to those organic laws which produce unceasing successions of living individuals, there is a higher law of progress. We can now trace back man, the animals and plants his contemporaries, and others which preceded them, our continents and mountain ranges, and the solid rocks of which they are composed—nay, the very fabric of the solar system itself—to their several origins at distinct points of time; and can maintain that since the earth began to wheel around the sun, no succeeding year has seen it precisely as it was in the year before. The old Hebrew record affirms, and I presume scarcely any sane man really doubts, that this law of progress emanates from the mind and power of one creative Being. When men see in natural law only recurring cycles, they may be pardoned for falling even into the absurdity of believing in eternal succession; but when they see change and progress, and this in a uniform direction, overmastering recurring cycles, and introducing new objects and powers not accounted for by previous objects or powers, they are brought very near to the presence of the Spiritual Creator. And hence, although no science can reach back to the act of creation, this doctrine is much more strongly held in our day by geologists than by physicists. It is quite true that the idea of creative acts has been superseded to a great extent by that of "creation by law," or by that of "evolution." Still behind all there lies a primary creative power; and the validity of these ideas and their bearing on theism and creation we shall have to discuss in the sequel. In one thing only does the Bible here part company with natural science. The Bible goes on into the future, and predicts a final condition of our planet, of which science can from its investigations learn nothing.

3. The Bible recognizes purpose, use, and special adaptation in nature. It is, in short, full of natural theology, akin in some respects to that which has been so elaborately worked out by so many modern writers. Numerous passages in support of this will occur to every one who has read the Scriptures. It is necessary here, however, to direct attention to a distinction very obvious in Scripture, but not always attended to by writers on this subject. The Bible maintains the true "final cause" of all nature to be, not its material and special adaptations or its value to man, but the pleasure or satisfaction of the Creator himself. In the earlier periods of Creation, before man was upon the earth, God contemplates his work and pronounces it good. The heavenly hosts praise him, saying, "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." Further, the Bible represents intelligences higher than man as sharing in the delight which may be derived from the contemplation of God's works. When the earth first rose from the waters to greet the light, "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." There are many things in nature that strongly impress the naturalist with this same view, that the Creator takes pleasure in his works; and, like human genius in its highest efforts, rejoices in production, even if no sentient being should be ready to sympathize. The elaborate structures of fossils, of which we have only fragmentary remains, the profusion of natural objects of surpassing beauty that grow and perish unseen by us, the delicate microscopic mechanism of nearly all organic structures, point to other reasons for beauty and order than those that concern man, or the mere utilities of human beings; and though there are now naturalists who deny absolutely that beauty is an object in nature, and assign even the colors of flowers and insects to utility alone, and this of a very low order, this doctrine is so repulsive to our higher sentiments that there is little danger of its general acceptance; while the slightest consideration shows that the utilities referred to could have been secured without any of this consummate beauty associated with them, and our perception of and delight in which mark in a way beyond the ability of skepticism to cavil at our own spiritual kinship with the Author of all this profusion of beauty. Yet man is represented as the chief created being for whom this earth has been prepared and designed. He obtains dominion over it. A chosen spot is prepared for him, in which not only his wants but his tastes are consulted; and, being made in the image of his Maker, his æsthetic sentiments correspond with the beauties of the Maker's work, and he finds there also food for his reason and imagination. This view of the subject, as well as others already referred to, is finely represented in the address of the Almighty to Job. [26]

The Bible also very often refers to the special adaptations of natural objects and laws to each other, and to the promotion of the happiness of sentient creatures lower than man. The 104th Psalm is replete with notices of such adaptations, and so is the address to Job; and indeed this view seems hardly ever absent from the minds of the Hebrew writers, but has its highest applications in the lilies of the field, that toil not neither do they spin, and the sparrows that are sold for a farthing, yet the heavenly Father has clothed the one with surpassing beauty, and provides food for the other, nor allows it to fail without his knowledge. I may, by way of farther illustration, merely name a few of the adaptations referred to in Job xxxviii. and the following chapters. The winds and the clouds are so arranged as to afford the required supplies of moisture to the wilderness where no man is, to "cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth." For similar objects the tempest is ordered, and the clouds arranged "by wisdom." The adaptations of the wild ass, the wild goat, the ostrich, the migratory birds, the horse, the hippopotamus, the crocodile, to their several habitats, modes of life, and uses in nature, are most vividly sketched and applied as illustrations of the consummate wisdom of the Creator, which descends to the minutest details of organization and habit.

It is to be observed here that in holding this doctrine of use and adaptation in nature, the Bible is only consistent with its own theory of rational theism. The Monotheist can not refer nature to a conflict of antagonistic powers and forces. He must recognize in it a unity of plan; and even those things which appear aberrant, irregular, or noxious must have their place in this plan. Hence in the Bible God is maker not only of the day but of the night, not only of the peaceful cattle but of the voracious crocodile, not only of the sunshine and shower but of the tornado and the earthquake. Further, in all these things God is manifested, so that we may learn "his eternal power and divinity [27] from the things which he has made," and in all these also there are emblems of his relations to us. This argument from design is in truth the only proof the Bible condescends to urge for the existence of God; and it is the only one in which in his later days our great English philosopher Mill could see any validity. [28]

If the reader happens to be familiar with the objections to the doctrine of final causes, or teleology, in nature, urged in our day by Spencer, Haeckel, and others, he will have seen from the foregoing statements that these objections are in themselves baseless, or inapplicable to this doctrine as maintained in the Bible. There is no consistency in the position of men who, when they dig a rudely chipped flint out of a bed of gravel, immediately infer an intelligent workman, and who refuse to see any indication of a higher intelligence in the creation of the workman himself. It is a blind philosophy which professes to see in primal atoms the "promise and potency of mind," and which fails to perceive that such potency is more inconceivable than the evidence of primary and supreme mind. The men who maintain that wings were not planned for flight, but that flight has produced wings, and thousands of like propositions, are simply amusing themselves with paradoxes to which may very properly be applied the strange word devised by Haeckel to express his theory of nature—Dysteleology, or purposelessness. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the teleology of the Bible is not of that narrow kind which would make man the sole object of nature, and the supreme judge of its adaptations. Inasmuch as God's plan goes over all the ages past and future, and relates to the welfare of all sentient beings known or unknown to us, and also to his own sovereign pleasure as the supreme object, we may not be in a position either to understand or profit by all its parts, and hence may expect to find many mysteries, and many things that we can not at present reconcile with God's wisdom and goodness. We know but "parts of his ways," the "fullness of his power who can understand." "His judgments are unsearchable," "his ways are past finding out."

4. The law of type or pattern in nature is distinctly indicated in the Bible. This is a principle only recently understood by naturalists, but it has more or less dimly dawned on the minds of many great thinkers in all ages. Nor is this wonderful, for the idea of type is scarcely ever absent from our own conceptions of any work that we may undertake. In any such work we anticipate recurring daily toil, like the returning cycles of nature. We look for progress, like that of the growth of the universe. We study adaptation both of the several parts to subordinate uses, and of the whole to some general design. But we also keep in view some pattern, style, or order, according to which the whole is arranged, and the mutual relations of the parts are adjusted. The architect must adhere to some order of architecture, and to some style within that order. The potter, the calico-printer, and the silversmith must equally study uniformity of pattern in their several manufactures. The Almighty Worker has exhibited the same idea in his works. In the animal kingdom, for instance, we have four or more leading types of structure. Taking any one of these—the vertebrate, for example—we have a uniform general plan, embracing the vertebral column constructed of the same elements; the members, whether the arm of man, the limb of the quadruped, or the wing of the bat or the bird, or the swimming-paddle of the whale, built of the same bones. In like manner all the parts of the vertebral column itself in the same animal, whether in the skull, the neck, or the trunk, are composed of the same elementary structures. These types are farther found to be sketched out—first in their more general, and then in their special features—in proceeding from the lower species of the same type to the higher, in proceeding from the earlier to the later stages of embryonic development, and in proceeding from the more ancient to the more recent creatures that have succeeded each other in geological time. Man, the highest of the vertebrates, is thus the archetype, representing and including all the lower and earlier members of the vertebrate type. The above are but trite and familiar examples of a doctrine which may furbish and has furnished the material of volumes. There can be no question that the Hebrew Bible is the oldest book in which this principle is stated. In the first chapter of Genesis we have specific type in the creation of plants and animals after their kinds or species, and in the formation of man in the image and likeness of the Creator; and, as we shall find in the sequel, there are some curious ideas of higher and more general types in the grouping of the creatures referred to. The same idea is indicated in the closing chapters of Job, where the three higher classes of the vertebrates are represented by a number of examples, and the typical likeness of one of these—the hippopotamus—to man, seems to be recognized. Dr. McCosh has quoted, as an illustration of the doctrine of types, a very remarkable passage from Psalm cxxxix.:

"I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Marvellous are thy works,
And that my soul knoweth right well.
My substance was not hid from Thee,
When I was made in secret,
And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth:
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect;
And in thy book all my members were written,
Which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them."

It would too much tax the faith of many to ask them to believe that the writer of the above passage, or the Spirit that inspired him, actually meant to teach—what we now know so well from geology—that the prototypes of all the parts of the archetypal human structure may be found in those fossil remains of extinct animals which may, in nearly every country, be dug up from the rocks of the earth. No objection need, however, be taken to our reading in it the doctrine of embryonic development according to a systematic type.

Science, it is true, or rather I should perhaps say philosophical speculation, has sometimes pushed this idea of plan into that of a spontaneous genetic evolution of things in time, without any creative superintendence or definite purpose. This way of viewing the matter is, however, as we shall have occasion to see, both bald and irrational, and wants the symmetry and completeness of that style of thought which grasps at once progress and plan and adaptation, as emanating from a Supreme Will. The question of how the plan has been worked out will come up for detailed consideration farther on. In the mean time we have before us the fact that the Bible represents the cosmos as not the product of a blind conflict of self-existent forces, but as the result of the production and guidance of these forces by infinite wisdom.

It is more than curious that this idea of type, so long existing in an isolated and often depised form, as a theological thought in the imagery of Scripture, should now be a leading idea of natural science; and that while comparative anatomy teaches us that the structures of all past and present lower animals point to man, who, as Professor Owen expresses it, has had all his parts and organs "sketched out in anticipation in the inferior animals," the Bible points still farther forward to an exaltation of the human type itself into what even the comparative anatomist might perhaps regard as among the "possible modifications of it beyond those realized in this little orb of ours," could he but learn its real nature.

Under the foregoing heads, of the object, the structure, the authority, and the general cosmical views of the Scripture, I have endeavored to group certain leading thoughts important as preliminary to the study of the subject; and, in now entering on the details of the Old Testament cosmogony, I trust the reader will pardon me for assuming, as a working hypothesis, that we are studying an inspired book, revealing the origin of nature, and presenting accurate pictures of natural facts and broad general views of the cosmos, at least until in the progress of our inquiry we find reason to adopt lower views; and that he will, in the mean time, be content to follow me in that careful and systematic analysis which a work claiming such a character surely demands.

CHAPTER IV.
THE BEGINNING.
"In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth."—Genesis i., 1.

It is a remarkable and instructive fact that the first verse of the Hebrew sacred writings speaks of the material universe—speaks of it as a whole, and as originating in a power outside of itself. The universe, then, in the conception of this ancient writer, is not eternal. It had a beginning, but that beginning in the indefinite and by us unmeasured past. It did not originate fortuitously, or by any merely accidental conflict of self-existent material atoms, but by an act—an act of will on the part of a Being designated by that name which among all the Semitic peoples represented the ultimate, eternal, inscrutable source of power and object of awe and veneration. With the simplicity and child-like faith of an archaic age, the writer makes no attempt to combat any objections or difficulties with which this great fundamental truth may be assailed. He feels its axiomatic force as the basis of all true religion and sound philosophy, and the ultimate fact which must ever bar our further progress in the investigation of the origin of things—the production from non-existence of the material universe by the eternal self-existent God.

It did not concern him to know what might be the nature of that unconditioned self-existence; for though, like our ideas of space and time, incomprehensible, it must be assumed. It did not concern him to know how matter and force subsist, or what may be the difference between a material universe cognizable by our senses and the absolute want of all the phenomena of such a universe or of whatever may be their basis and essence. Such questions can never be answered, yet the succession of these phenomena must have had a commencement somewhere in time. How simple and how grand is his statement! How plain and yet how profound its teachings!

It is evident that the writer grasps firmly the essence of the question as to the beginning of things, and covers the whole ground which advanced scientific or philosophical speculation can yet traverse. That the universe must have had a beginning no one now needs to be told. If any philosophical speculator ever truly held that there has been an endless succession of phenomena, science has now completely negatived the idea by showing us the beginning of all things that we know in the present universe, and by establishing the strongest probabilities that even its ultimate atoms could not have been eternal. But the question remains—If there was a beginning, what existed in that beginning? To this question many partial and imperfect answers have been given, but our ancient record includes them all.

If any one should say, "In the beginning was nothing." Yes, says Genesis, there was, it is true, nothing of the present matter and arrangements of nature. Yet all was present potentially in the will of the Creator.

"In the beginning were atoms," says another. Yes, says Genesis, but they were created; and so says modern science, and must say of ultimate particles determined by weight and measure, and incapable of modification in their essential properties—"They have the properties of a manufactured article." [29]

"In the beginning were forces," says yet another. True, says Genesis; but all forces are one in origin—they represent merely the fiat of the eternal and self-existent. So says science, that force must in the ultimate resort be an "expression of Will." [30]

"In the beginning was Elohim," adds our old Semitic authority, and in him are the absolute and eternal thought and will, the Creator from whom and by whom and in whom are all things.

Thus the simple familiar words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," answer all possible questions as to the origin of things, and include all under the conception of theism. Let us now look at these pregnant words more particularly as to their precise import and significance.

The divine personality expressed by the Hebrew Elohim may be fairly said to include all that can be claimed for the pantheistic conception of "dynamis," or universal material power. Lange gives this as included in the term Elohim, in his discussion of this term in his book on Genesis. It has been aptly said that if, physically speaking, the fall of a sparrow produces a gravitative effect that extends throughout the universe, there can be no reason why it should be unknown to God. God is thus everywhere, and always. Yet he is everywhere and always present as a personality knowing and willing. From his thought and will in the beginning proceeded the universe. By him it was created.

What, then, is creation in the sense of the Hebrew writer. The act is expressed by the verb bara, a word of comparatively rare occurrence in the Scriptures, and employed to denote absolute creation, though its primary sense is to cut or carve, and it is indeed a near relative of our own English word "pare." If, says Professor Stuart, of Andover, this word "does not mean to create in the highest sense, then the Hebrews had no word by which they could designate this idea." Yet, like our English "create," the word is used in secondary and figurative senses, which in no degree detract from its force when strictly and literally used. Since, however, these secondary senses may often appear to obscure the primitive meaning, we must examine them in detail.

In the first chapter of Genesis, after the general statement in verse 1, other verbs signifying to form or make are used to denote the elaboration of the separate parts of the universe, and the word "create" is found in only two places, when it refers to the introduction of "great whales" (reptiles) and of man. These uses of the word have been cited to disprove its sense of absolute creation. It must be observed, however, that in the first of these cases we have the earliest appearance of animal life, and in the second the introduction of a rational and spiritual nature. Nothing but pure materialism can suppose that the elements of vital and spiritual being were included in the matter of the heavens and the earth as produced in the beginning; and as the Scripture writers were not materialists, we may infer that they recognized, in the introduction of life and reason, acts of absolute creation, just as in the origin of matter itself. In Genesis ii. and iii. we have a form of expression which well marks the distinction between creation and making. God is there said to have rested from all his works which he "created and made" —literally, created "for or in reference to making," the word for making being one of those already referred to. [31] The force of this expression consists in its intimating that God had not only finished the work of creation, properly so called, but also the elaboration of the various details of the universe, as formed or fashioned out of the original materials. Of a similar character is the expression in Isaiah xlii., 5, "Jehovah, he that created the heavens and spread them out;" and that in Psalm cxlviii., 5, "He commanded and they were created, he hath also established them for ever and ever."

In as far as I am aware, the word bara in all the remaining instances of its occurrence in the Pentateuch refers to the creation of man, with the following exceptions: Exodus xxxiv., 10, "I will do (create) marvels, such as have not been seen in all the earth;" Numbers xvi., 30, "If the Lord make a new thing (create a creation), and the earth open her mouth and swallow them up." These verses are types of a class of expressions in which the proper term for creation is applied to the production of something new, strange, and marvellous; for instance, "Create in me a clean heart, O Lord;" "Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth." It is, however, evidently an inversion of sound exposition to say that these secondary or figurative meanings should determine the primary and literal sense in Genesis i. On the contrary, we should rather infer that the sacred writers in these cases selected the proper word for creation, to express in the most forcible manner the novel and thorough character of the changes to which they refer, and their direct dependence on the Divine will. By such expressions we are in effect referred back to the original use of the word, as denoting the actual creation of matter by the command of God, in contradistinction from those arrangements which have been effected by the gradual operation of secondary agents, or of laws attached to matter at its creation. It has been farther observed [32] that in the Hebrew Scriptures this word bara is applied to God only as an agent, not to any human artificer; a fact which is very important with reference to its true significance. Viewing creation in this light, we need not perplex ourselves with the question whether we should consider Genesis i., 1, to refer to the essence of matter as distinguished from its qualities. We may content ourselves with the explanation given by Paul in the eleventh of Hebrews: "By faith we are certain that the worlds [33] were created by the decree of God, so that that which is seen was made of that which appears not." Or, with reference to the other uses of the word, if the first introduction of animal life was a creation, and if the introduction of the rational nature of man was a creation, we may suppose that the original creation was in like manner the introduction or first production of those entities which we call matter and force, and which to science now are as much ultimate facts as they were to Moses.

The nature of the act of creation being thus settled, its extent may be ascertained by an examination of the terms heaven and earth.

The word "heavens" (shamayim) has in Hebrew as in English a variety of significations. Of material heavens there are, in the quaint language of Poole, "tres regiones, ubi aves, ubi nubes, ubi sidera;" or (1) the atmosphere or firmament; [34] (2) the region of clouds in the upper part of the atmosphere; [35] (3) the depths of space comprehending the starry orbs. [36] Besides these we have the "heaven of heavens," the abode of God and spiritual beings. [37] The application of the term "heaven" to the atmosphere will be considered when we reach the 6th and 7th verses. In the mean time we may accept the word in this place as including the material heavens in the widest sense: (1.) Because it is not here, as in verse 8th, restricted to the atmosphere by the terms of the narrative; this restriction in verse 8th in fact implying the wider sense of the word in preceding verses. (2.) Because the atmospheric firmament, elsewhere called heaven, divides the waters above from those below, whereas it is evident that all these waters, and of consequence the materials of the atmosphere itself, are included in the earth of the following verse. (3.) Because in verse 14th the sidereal heavens are spoken of as arranged from pre-existing materials, which refers their actual creation back to this passage.

In the words now under consideration we therefore regard the heavens as including the whole material universe beyond the limits of our earth. That this sense of the word is not unknown to the writers of Scripture, and that they had enlarged and rational views of the star-spangled abysses of space, will appear from the terms employed by Moses in his solemn warning against the Sabæan idolatry, in Deuteronomy iv.: "And lest thou lift up thine eyes to the heavens, and when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of the heavens, shouldest be incited to worship them and serve them which Jehovah thy God hath appointed to all nations under the whole heavens." To the same effect is the expression of the awe and wonder of the poet king of Israel in Psalm viii.:

"When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers,
The moon and the stars which thou hast ordained;
What is man that thou art mindful of him?"

I may observe, however, that throughout the Scriptures the word in question is much more frequently applied to the atmospheric than to the sidereal heavens. The reason of this appears in the terms of verse 8th.

If we have correctly referred the term "heavens" to the whole of extramundane space, then the word "earth" must denote our globe as a distinct world, with all the liquid and aeriform substances on its surface. The arrangement of the whole universe under the heads "heaven" and "earth" has been derided as a division into "infinity and an atom;" but when we consider the relative importance of the earth to us, and that it constitutes the principal object of the whole revelation to which this is introductory, the absurdity disappears, and we recognize the classification as in the circumstances natural and rational. The word "earth" (aretz) is, however, generally used to denote the dry land, or even a region or district of country. It is indeed expressly restricted to the dry land in verse 10th; but as in the case of the parallel limitation of the word "heaven," we may consider this as a hint that its previous meaning is more extended. That it is really so, appears from the following considerations: (1.) It includes the deep, or the material from which the sea and atmosphere were afterwards formed. (2.) The subsequent verses show that at the period in question no dry land existed. If instances of a similar meaning from other parts of Scripture are required, I give the following: Genesis ii., 1 to 4, "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them;" "these are the generations of the heavens and the earth.' In this general summary of the creative work, the earth evidently includes the seas and all that is in them, as well as the dry land; and the whole expression denotes the universe. The well-known and striking remark of Job, "Who hangeth the earth upon nothing," is also a case in point, and must refer to the whole world, since in other parts of the same book the dry land or continental masses of the earth are said, and with great truth and propriety, to be supported above the waters on pillars or foundations. The following passages may also be cited as instances of the occurrence of the idea of the whole world expressed by the word "earth:" Exodus x., 29, "And Moses said unto him, As soon as I am gone out of the city, I will spread abroad my hands unto the Lord, and the thunder shall cease, neither shall there be any more hail; that thou mayest know the earth is the Lord's;" Deuteronomy x., 14, "Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord's, the earth also, and all that therein is."

The material universe was brought into existence in the "beginning"—a term evidently indefinite as far as regards any known epoch, and implying merely priority to all other recorded events. It can not be the first day, for there is no expressed connection, and the work of the first day is distinct from that of the beginning. It can not be a general term for the whole six days, since these are separated from it by that chaotic or formless state to which we are next introduced. The beginning, therefore, is the threshold of creation—the line that separates the old tenantless condition of space from the world-crowded galaxies of the existing universe. The only other information respecting it that we have in Scripture is in that fine descriptive poem in Proverbs viii., in which the Wisdom of God personified—who may be held to represent the Almighty Word, or Logos, introduced in the formula "God said," and afterward referred to in Scripture as the manifested or conditioned Deity, the Mediator between man and the otherwise inaccessible Divinity, the agent in the work of creation as well as in that of redemption—narrates the origin of all created things:

"Jehovah possessed [38] me, the beginning of his way,
Before his work of old.
I was set up from everlasting,
From the beginning, before the earth was;
When there were no deeps I was brought forth,
When there were no fountains abounding in water."

The beginning here precedes the creation of the earth, as well as of the deep which encompassed its surface in its earliest condition. The beginning, in this point of view, stretches back from the origin of the world into the depths of eternity. It is to us emphatically the beginning, because it witnessed the birth of our material system; but to the eternal Jehovah it was but the beginning of a great series of his operations, and we have no information of its absolute duration. From the time when God began to create the celestial orbs, until that time when it could be said that he had created the heavens and the earth, countless ages may have rolled along, and myriads of worlds may have passed through various stages of existence, and the creation of our planetary system may have been one of the last acts of that long beginning.

The author of creation is Elohim, or God in his general aspect to nature and man, and not in that special aspect in reference to the Hebrew commonwealth and to the work of redemption indicated by the name Jehovah (Iaveh). We need not enter into the doubtful etymology of the word; but may content ourselves with that supported by many, perhaps the majority of authorities, which gives it the meaning of "Object of dread or adoration," or with that preferred by Gesenius, which makes it mean the "Strong or mighty one." Its plural form has also greatly tried the ingenuity of the commentators. After carefully considering the various hypotheses, such as that of the plural of majesty of the Rabbins, and the primitive polytheism supposed by certain Rationalists, I can see no better reason than an attempt to give a grammatical expression to that plurality in unity indicated by the appearance of the Spirit or breath of God and his Word, or manifested will and power, as distinct agents in the succeeding verses. This was probably always held by the Hebrews in a general form; and was by our Saviour and his apostles specialized in that trinitarian doctrine which enables both John and Paul explicitly to assert the agency of the second person of the Trinity in the creative work.

This elementary trinitarian idea of the first chapter of Genesis may be further stated thus: The name Elohim expresses the absolute unconditioned will and reason—the Godhead. The manifestation of God in creative power, and in the framing and ordering of the cosmos, is represented by the formula "God said"—the equivalent of the Divine Word. The further manifestation of God in love of and sympathy with his work is represented by the Breath of God, and by the expression, "God saw that it was good"—operations these of the Divine Spirit.

The aboriginal root of the word Elohim probably lies far back of the Semitic literature, and comes from the natural exclamations "al," "lo," "la," which arise from the spontaneous action of the human vocal organs in the presence of any object of awe or wonder. The plural form may in like manner be simply equivalent to our terms Godhead or Divinity, implying all that is essentially God without specification or distinction of personalities. As Dr. Tayler Lewis well remarks in his "Introduction to Genesis," we should not dismiss such plurals as mere usus loquendi. The plural form of the name of God, of the heavens (literally, the "heights"), of the olamim, or time-worlds, of the word for life in Genesis (lives), indicates an idea of vastness and diversity not measurable by speech, which must have been impressed on the minds of early men, otherwise these forms would not have arisen. God, heaven, time, life, were to them existences stretching outward to infinity, and not to be denoted by the bare singular form suitable to ordinary objects.

Fairly regarding, then, this ancient form of words, we may hold it as a clear, concise, and accurate enunciation of an ultimate doctrine of the origin of things, which with all our increased knowledge of the history of the earth we are not in a position to replace with any thing better or more probable. On the other hand, this sublime dogma of creation leaves us perfectly free to interrogate nature for ourselves, as to all that it can reveal of the duration and progress of the creative work. But the positive gain which comes from this ancient formula goes far beyond these negative qualities. If received, this one word of the Old Testament is sufficient to deliver us forever from the superstitious dread of nature, and to present it to us as neither self-existent nor omnipotent, but as the mere handiwork of a spiritual Creator to whom we are kin; as not a product of chance or caprice, but as the result of a definite plan of the All-wise; as not a congeries of unconnected facts and processes, but as a cosmos, a well-ordered though complex machine, designed by Him who is the Almighty and the supreme object of reverence. Had this verse alone constituted the whole Bible, this one utterance would, wherever known and received, have been an inestimable boon to mankind; proclaiming deliverance to the captives of every form of nature-worship and idolatry, and fixing that idea of unity of plan in the universe which is the fruitful and stable root of all true progress in science. We owe profound thanks to the old Hebrew prophet for these words—words which have broken from the necks of once superstitious Aryan races chains more galling than those of Egyptian bondage.

CHAPTER V.
THE DESOLATE VOID.
"And the earth was desolate and empty, and darkness was upon the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved on the surface of the waters."—Genesis i., 2.

We have here a few bold outlines of a dark and mysterious scene—a condition of the earth of which we have no certain intimation from any other source, except the speculations based on modern discoveries in physical science. It was "unshaped and empty," formless and uninhabited. The words thus translated are sufficiently plain in their meaning. The first is used by Isaiah to denote the desolation of a ruined city, and in Job and the Psalms as characteristic of the wilderness or desert. Both in connection are employed by Isaiah to express the destruction of Idumea, and by Jeremiah in a powerful description of the ruin of nations by God's judgments. When thus united, they form the strongest expression which the Hebrew could supply for solitary, uninhabited desolation, like that of a city reduced to heaps of rubbish, and to the silence and loneliness of utter decay.

In the present connection these words inform us that the earth was in a chaotic state, and unfit for the residence of organized beings. The words themselves suggest the important question: Are they intended to represent this as the original condition of the earth? Was it a scene of desolation and confusion when it sprang from the hand of its Creator? or was this state of ruin consequent on convulsions which may have been preceded by a very different condition, not mentioned by the inspired historian? That it may have been so is rendered possible by the circumstance that the words employed are generally used to denote the ruin of places formerly inhabited, and by the want of any necessary connection in time between the first and second verses. It has even been proposed, though this does violence to the construction, to read "and the earth became" desolate and empty. Farther, it seems, à priori, improbable that the first act of creative power should have resulted in the production of a mere chaos. The crust of the earth also shows, in its alternations of strata and organic remains, evidence of a great series of changes extending over vast periods, and which might, in a revelation intended for moral purposes, with great propriety be omitted.

For such reasons some eminent expositors of these words are disposed to consider the first verse as a title or introduction, and to refer to this period the whole series of geological changes; and this view has formed one of the most popular solutions of the apparent discrepancies between the geological and Scriptural histories of the world. It is evident, however, that if we continue to view the term "earth" as including the whole globe, this hypothesis becomes altogether untenable. The subsequent verses inform us that at the period in question the earth was covered by a universal ocean, possessed no atmosphere and received no light, and had not entered into its present relations with the other bodies of our system. No conceivable convulsions could have effected such changes on an earth previously possessing these arrangements; and geology assures us that the existing laws and dispositions in these respects have prevailed from the earliest periods to which it can lead us back, and that the modern state of things was not separated from those which preceded it by any such general chaos. To avoid this difficulty, which has been much more strongly felt as these facts have been more and more clearly developed by modern science, it has been held that the word earth may denote only a particular region, temporarily obscured and reduced to ruin, and about to be fitted up, by the operations of the six days, for the residence of man; and that consequently the narrative of the six days refers not to the original arrangement of the surface, relations, and inhabitants of our planet, but to the retrieval from ruin and repeopling of a limited territory, supposed to have been in Central Asia, and which had been submerged and its atmosphere obscured by aqueous or volcanic vapors. The chief support of this view is the fact, previously noticed, that the word earth is very frequently used in the signification of region, district, country; to which may be added the supposed necessity for harmonizing the Scriptures with geological discovery, and at the same time viewing the days of creation as literal solar days.

Can we, however, after finding that in verse 1st the term earth must mean the whole world, suddenly restrict it in verse 2d to a limited region. Is it possible that the writer who in verse 10th for the first time intimates a limitation of the meaning of this word, by the solemn announcement, "And God called the dry land earth," should in a previous place use it in a much more limited sense without any hint of such restriction. The case stands thus: A writer uses the word earth in the most general sense; in the next sentence he is supposed, without any intimation of his intention, to use the same word to denote a region or country, and by so doing entirely to change the meaning of his whole discourse from that which would otherwise have attached to it. Yet the same writer when, a few sentences farther on, it becomes necessary for him to use the word earth to denote the dry land as distinguished from the seas, formally and with an assertion of divine authority, intimates the change of meaning. Is not this supposition contrary not only to sound principles of interpretation, but also to common-sense; and would it not tend to render worthless the testimony of a writer to whose diction such inaccuracy must be ascribed. It is in truth to me surprising beyond measure that such a view could ever have obtained currency; and I fear it is to be attributed to a determination, at all hazards and with any amount of violence to the written record, to make geology and religion coincide. Must we then throw aside this simple and convenient method of reconciliation, sanctioned by Chalmers, Smith, Harris, King, Hitchcock, and many other great or respectable names, and on which so many good men complacently rest. Truth obliges us to do so, and to confess that both geology and Scripture refuse to be reconciled on this basis. We may still admit that the lapse of time between the beginning and the first day may have been great; but we must emphatically deny that this interval corresponds with the time indicated by the series of fossiliferous rocks.

Before leaving this part of the subject, I may remark that the desolate and empty condition of the earth was not necessarily a chaotic mass of confusion—rudis indigestaque moles; but in reality, when physically considered, may have been a more symmetrical and homogeneous condition than any that it subsequently assumed. If the earth were first a vast globe of vapor, then a liquid spheroid, and then acquired a crust not yet seamed by fissures or broken by corrugations, and eventually covered with a universal ocean, then in each of these early conditions it would, in regard to its form, be a more perfect globe than at any succeeding time. That something of this kind is the intention of our historian is implied in his subsequent statements as to the absence of land and the prevalence of a universal ocean in the immediately succeeding period, which imply that the crust had not yet been ruptured or disturbed, but presented an even and uniform surface, no part of which could project above the comparatively thin fluid envelope.

The second clause introduces a new object—"the deep." Whatever its precise nature, this is evidently something included in the earth of verse 1st, and created with it. The word occurs in other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures in various senses. It often denotes the sea, especially when in an agitated state (Psa. xlii., 8; Job xxxviii., 10). In Psalm cxxxv., however, it is distinguished from the sea: "Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, in the earth, in the seas, and in all deeps." In other cases it has been supposed to refer to interior recesses of the earth, as when at the deluge "the fountains of the great deep" are said to have been broken up. It is probable, however, that this refers to the ocean. In some places it would appear to mean the atmosphere or its waters; as Prov. viii., 27-29, "When he prepared the heavens, I was there; when he described a circle on the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep." The Septuagint in this passage reads "throne on the winds" and "fountains under the heaven." [39] Though we can not attach much value to these readings, there seems little reason to doubt that the author of this passage understands by the deep the atmospheric waters, and not the sea, which he mentions separately. The same meaning must be attached to the word in another passage of the Book of Proverbs: "The Lord in wisdom hath founded the earth, by understanding hath he established the heavens; by his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the small rain."

In the passage now under consideration, it would seem that we have both the deep and the waters mentioned, and this not in a way which would lead us to infer their identity. The darkness on the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God on the face of the waters seem to refer to the condition of two distinct objects at the same time. Neither can the word here refer to subterranean cavities, for the ascription of a surface to these, and the statement that they were enveloped in darkness, would in this case have neither meaning nor use. For these reasons I am induced to believe that the locality of the deep or abyss is to be sought, not in the universal ocean or the interior of the earth, but in the vaporous or aeriform mass mantling the surface of our nascent planet, and containing the materials out of which the atmosphere was afterward elaborated. This is a view leading to important consequences: one of which is that the darkness on the surface of the deep can not have been, as believed by the advocates of a local chaos, a mere atmospheric obscuration; since even at the surface of what then represented the atmosphere darkness prevailed. "God covered the earth with the deep as with a garment, and the waters stood above the hills," and without this outer garment was the darkness of space destitute of luminaries, at least of those greater ones which are of primary importance to us. We learn from the following verses that there was no layer of clear atmosphere in this misty deep, separating the clouds from the ocean waters.

The last clause of the verse has always been obscure, and perhaps it is still impossible to form a clear idea of the operation intended to be described. We are not even certain whether it is intended to represent any thing within the compass of ordinary natural laws, or to denote a direct intervention of the Creator, miraculous in its nature and confined to one period. It is possible that the general intention of the statement may be to the effect that the agency of the divine power in separating the waters from the incumbent vapors had already commenced—that the Spirit which would afterward evoke so many wonders out of the chaotic mass was already acting upon it in an unseen and mysterious way, preparing it for its future destiny.

Some commentators, both Jewish and Christian, are, however, disposed to view the Ruach Elohim, Spirit, or breath of God, as meaning a wind of God, or mighty wind, according to a well-known Hebrew idiom. The word in its primary sense means wind or breath, and there are undoubted instances of the expression "wind of God" for a great or strong wind. For example, Isaiah xl., 7: "The grass withereth because the wind of the Lord bloweth upon it;" see also 2 Kings ii., 16. Such examples, however, are very rare, and by no means sufficient of themselves to establish this interpretation. Those who hold this view do so mainly in consideration of the advantage which it affords in attaching a definite meaning to the expression. Many of them are not, however, aware of its precise import in a cosmical point of view. A violent wind, before the formation of the atmosphere, and the establishment of the laws which regulate the suspension and motions of aqueous vapors and clouds, must have been merely an agitation of the confused misty and vaporous mass of the deep; since, as Ainsworth—more careful than modern interpreters—long ago observed, "winde (which is the moving of the aier) was not created till the second day, that the firmament was spred, and the aier made." Such an agitation is by no means improbable. It would be a very likely accompaniment of a boiling ocean, resting on a heated surface, and of excessive condensation of moisture in the upper regions of the atmosphere; and might act as an influential means of preparing the earth for the operations of the second day. It is curious also that the Phoenician cosmogony is said to have contained the idea of a mighty wind in connection with this part of creation, and the idea of seething or commotion in the primitive chaos also occurs in the Assyrian tablets of creation, while the Quiché legend represents Hurakon, the storm-god, as specially concerned in the creative work. [40] On the other hand, the verb used in the text rather expresses hovering or brooding than violent motion, and this better corresponds with the old fable of the mundane egg, which seems to have been derived from the event recorded in this verse. The more evangelical view, which supposes the Holy Spirit to be intended, is also more in accordance with the general scope of the Scripture teachings on this subject; and the opposite idea is, as Calvin well says, "too frigid" to meet with much favor from evangelical theologians.

Chaos, the equivalent of the Hebrew "desolation and emptiness," figures largely in all ancient cosmogonies. That of the Egyptians is interesting, not only from its resemblance to the Hebrew doctrine, but also from its probable connection with the cosmogony of the Greeks. Taking the version of Diodorus Siculus, which though comparatively modern, yet corresponds with the hints derived from older sources, we find the original chaos to have been an intermingled condition of elements constituting heaven and earth. This is the Hebrew "deep." The first step of progress is the separation of these; the fiery particles ascending above, and not only producing light, but the revolution of the heavenly bodies—a curious foreshadowing of the nebular hypothesis of modern astronomy. After these, in the terms of the lines quoted by Diodorus from Euripides, plants, birds, mammals, and finally man are produced, not however by a direct creative fiat, but by the spontaneous fecundity of the teeming earth. The Phoenician cosmogony attributed to Sancuniathon has the void, the deep, and the brooding Spirit; and one of the terms employed, "baau," is the same with the Hebrew "bohu," void, if read without the points. The Babylonians, according to Berosus, believed in a chaos—which, however, like the literal-day theory of some moderns, produced many monsters before Belus intervened to separate heaven and earth. But the Assyrian legend found in the Nineveh tablets is very precise in its intimation of the Chaos or Tiamat, the mother of all things; and, farther, it recognizes this personified chaos as the principle of evil, whose "dragon" becomes the tempter of the progenitors of mankind, exactly like the Biblical serpent. This "dragon of the abyss" is thus identical in name and function with the evil principle even of the last book of the New Testament, and we have in this also probably the origin of the Ahriman of the Avesta. Thus in these Eastern theologies the primeval chaos becomes the type of evil as opposed to the order, beauty, and goodness of the creation of God—a very natural association; but one kept in the background by the Hebrew Scriptures, as tending to a dualistic belief subversive of monotheism. The Greek myth of Chaos, and its children Erebus and Night, who give birth to Aether and Day, is the same tradition, personified after the fanciful manner of a people who, in the primitive period of their civilization, had no profound appreciation of nature, but were full of human sympathies. [41] Lastly, in a hymn translated by Dr. Max Müller from the Rig-Veda, a work probably far older than the Institutes of Menu, we have such utterances as the following:

"Nor aught nor nought existed: yon bright sky
Was not, nor heaven's broad woof outstretched above.
What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed?
Was it the water's fathomless abyss? * * *
Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom profound—an ocean without light;
The germ that still lay covered in the husk
Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat."

It is evident that the state of our planet which we have just been considering is one of which we can scarcely form any adequate conception, and science can in no way aid us, except by suggesting hypotheses or conjectures. It is remarkable, however, that nearly all the cosmological theories which have been devised contain some of the elements of the inspired narrative. The words of Moses appear to suggest a heated and cooling globe, its crust as yet unbroken by internal forces, covered by a universal ocean, on which rested a mass of confused vaporous substances; and it is of such materials, thus combined by the sacred historian, that cosmologists have built up their several theories, aqueous or igneous, of the early state of the earth. Geology, as a science of observation and induction, does not carry us back to this period. It must still and always say, with Hutton, that it can find "no trace of a beginning, no prospect of an end"—not because there has been no beginning or will be no end, but because the facts which it collects extend neither to the one nor the other. Geology, like every other department of natural history, can but investigate the facts which are open to observation, and reason on these in accordance with the known laws and arrangements of existing nature. It finds these laws to hold for the oldest period to which the rocky archives of the earth extend. Respecting the origin of these general laws and arrangements, or the condition of the earth before they originated, it knows nothing. In like manner a botanist may determine the age of a forest by counting the growth rings of the oldest trees, but he can tell nothing of the forests that may have preceded it, or of the condition of the surface before it supported a forest. So the archæologist may on Egyptian monuments read the names and history of successive dynasties of kings, but he can tell nothing of the state of the country and its native tribes before those dynasties began or their monuments were built. Yet geology at least establishes a probability that a time was when organized beings did not exist, and when many of the arrangements of the surface of our earth had not been perfected; and the few facts which have given birth to the theories promulgated on this subject tend to show that this pre-geological condition of the earth may have been such as that described in the words now under consideration. I may remark, in addition, that if the words of Moses imply the cooling of the globe from a molten or intensely heated state down to a temperature at which water could exist on its surface, the known rate of cooling of bodies of the dimensions and materials of the earth shows that the time included in these two verses of Genesis must have been enormous, amounting it may be to many millions of years.

There are two other sciences besides geology which have in modern times attempted to penetrate into the mysteries of the primitive abyss, at least by hypothetical explanations—astronomy and chemistry. The magnificent nebular hypothesis of La Place, which explains the formation of the whole solar system by the condensation of a revolving mass of gaseous matter, would manifestly bring our earth to the condition of a fluid body, with or without a solid crust, and surrounded by a huge atmosphere of its more volatile materials, gradually condensing itself around the central nucleus. Chemistry informs us that this vaporous mass would contain not only the atmospheric air and water, but all the carbon, sulphur, phosphorus, chlorine, and other elements, volatile in themselves, or forming volatile compounds with oxygen or hydrogen, that are now imprisoned in various states of combination in the solid crust of the earth. Such an atmosphere—vast, dark, pestilential, and capable in its condensation of producing the most intense chemical action—is a necessity of an earth condensing from a vaporous and incandescent state. Thus, in so far as scientific speculation ventures to penetrate into the genesis of the earth, its conclusions are at one with the Mosaic cosmogony and with the traditions of most ancient nations as to the primitive existence of a chaos—formless and void, in which "nor aught nor nought existed."

Some of the details of the Mosaic vision of the primeval chaos may be supplied by the probabilities established by physics and chemistry. Our first idea of the earth would be a vast vaporous ball, recently spun out from the general mass of vapors forming the nebula which once represented the solar system. This huge cloud, whirling its annual round about the still vaporous centre of the system, would consist of all the materials now constituting the solid rocks as well as those of the seas and atmosphere, their atoms kept asunder by the force of heat, preventing not only their mechanical union, but even their chemical combination. But heat is being radiated on all sides into space, and the opposing force of gravitation is little by little gathering the particles toward the centre. At length a liquid nucleus is formed, while upon this are being precipitated showers of condensing matter from the still vast atmosphere to add to its volume. As this process advances, a new brilliancy is given to the feebly shining vapors by the incandescence of solid particles in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and in this stage our earth would be a little sun, a miniature of that which now forms the centre of our system, and which still, by virtue of its greater mass, continues in this state. But at length, by further cooling, this brilliancy is lost, and the still fluid globe is surrounded by a vast cloudy pall, in which condensing vapors gather in huge dark masses, and amid terrible electrical explosions, pour, in constantly increasing, acid, corrosive rains, upon the heated nucleus, combining with its materials, or again flashing into vapors. Thus darkness dense and gross would settle upon the vaporous deep, and would continue for long ages, until the atmosphere could be finally cleared of its superfluous vapors. In the mean time a crust of slag or cinder has been forming upon the molten nucleus. Broken again and again by the heaving of the seething mass, it at length sets permanently, and finally allows some portion of the liquid rain condensed upon it to remain as a boiling ocean. Then began the reign of the waters, under which the first stratified rocks were laid down by the deposit of earthy and saline matter suspended or dissolved in the heated sea. Such is the picture which science presents to us of the genesis of the earth, and so far as we can judge from his words, such must have been the picture presented to the mental vision of the ancient seer of creation; but he could discern also that mysterious influence, the "breath of Elohim," which moved on the face of the waters, and prepared for the evolution of land and of life from their bosom. He saw—

"An earth—formless and void;
A vaporous abyss—dark at its very surface;
A universal ocean—the breath of God hovering over it."

How could such a scene be represented in words? since it presented none of the familiar features of the actual world. Had he attempted to dilate upon it, he would, in the absence of the facts furnished by modern science, have been obliged, like the writers of some of the less simple and primitive cosmogonies already quoted, [42] to adopt the feeble expedient of enumerating the things not present. He wisely contents himself with a few well-chosen words, which boldly sketch the crude materials of a world hopeless and chaotic but for the animating breath of the Almighty, who has created even that old chaos out of which is to be worked in the course of the six creative days all the variety and beauty of a finished world.

In conclusion, the reader will perceive how this reticence of the author of Genesis strengthens the argument for the primitive age of the document, and for the vision-theory as to its origin; and will also observe that, in the conception of this ancient writer, the "promise and potency" of order and life reside not alone in the atoms of a vaporous world, but also in the will of its Creator.

CHAPTER VI.
LIGHT AND CREATIVE DAYS.
"And God said, Let light be, and light was; and God saw the light that it was good, and separated the light from the darkness; and God called the light Day; and the darkness he called Night. And Evening was and Morning was—Day one."— Genesis i., 3-5.

Light is the first element of order and perfection introduced upon our planet—the first innovation on the old régime of darkness and desolation. There is a beautiful propriety in this, for the Hebrew Aur (light) should be viewed as including heat and electricity as well as light; and these three forces—if they are really distinct, and not merely various movements of one and the same ether—are in themselves, or the proximate causes of their manifestation, the prime movers of the machinery of nature, the vivifying forces without which the primeval desolation would have been eternal. The statement presented here is, however, a bold one. Light without luminaries, which were afterward formed—independent light, so to speak, shining all around the earth—is an idea not likely to have occurred in the days of Moses to the framer of a fictitious cosmogony, and yet it corresponds in a remarkable manner with some of the theories which have grown out of modern induction.

I have said that the Hebrew word translated "light" includes the vibratory movements which we call heat and electricity as well. I make this statement, not intending to assert that the Hebrews experimented on these forces in the manner of modern science, and would therefore be prepared to understand their laws or correlations as fully as we can. I give the word this general sense simply because throughout the Bible it is used to denote the solar light and heat, and also the electric light of the thunder-cloud: "the light of His cloud," "the bright light which is in the clouds." The absence of "aur," therefore, in the primeval earth, is the absence of solar radiation, of the lightning's flash, and of volcanic fires. We shall in the succeeding verses find additional reasons for excluding all these phenomena from the darkness of the primeval night.

The light of the first day can not reasonably be supposed to have been in any other than a visible and active state. Whether light be, as supposed by the older physicists, luminous matter radiated with immense velocity, or, as now appears more probable, merely the undulations of a universally diffused ether, its motion had already commenced. The idea of the matter of light as distinct from its power of affecting the senses does not appear in the Scriptures any farther than that the Hebrew name is probably radically identical with the word ether now used to express the undulating medium by which light is propagated; and if it did, the general creation of matter being stated in verse 1, and the notice of the separation of light and darkness being distinctly given in the present verse, there is no place left for such a view here. For this reason, that explanation of these words which supposes that on the first day the matter of light, or the ether whose motions produce light, was created, and that on the fourth day, when luminaries were appointed, it became visible by beginning to undulate, must be abandoned; and the connection between these two statements must be sought in some other group of facts than that connected with the existence of the matter of light as distinct from its undulations.

What, then, was the nature of the light which on the first day shone without the presence of any local luminary? It must have proceeded from luminous matter diffused through the whole space of the solar system, or surrounding our globe as with a mantle. It was "clothed with light as with a garment,"
"Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun was not."
We have already rejected the hypothesis that the primeval night proceeded from a temporary obscuration of the atmosphere; and the expression, "God said, Let light be," affords an additional reason, since, in accordance with the strict precision of language which everywhere prevails in this ancient document, a mere restoration of light would not be stated in such terms. If we wish to find a natural explanation of the mode of illumination referred to, we must recur to one or other of the suppositions mentioned above, that the luminous matter formed a nebulous atmosphere, slowly concentrating itself toward the centre of the solar system, or that it formed a special envelope of our earth, which subsequently disappeared.

We may suppose this light-giving matter to be the same with that which now surrounds the sun, and constitutes the stratum of luminous substance which, by its wondrous and unceasing power of emitting light, gives him all his glory. To explain the division of the light from the darkness, we need only suppose that the luminous matter, in the progress of its concentration, was at length all gathered within the earth's orbit, and then, as one hemisphere only would be illuminated at a time, the separation of light from darkness, or of day from night, would be established. This hypothesis, suggested by the words themselves, affords a simple and natural explanation of a statement otherwise obscure.

It is an instructive circumstance that the probabilities respecting the early state of our planet, thus deduced from the Scriptural narrative, correspond very closely with the most ingenious and truly philosophical speculation ever hazarded respecting the origin of our solar system. I refer to the cosmical hypothesis of La Place, which was certainly formed without any reference to the Bible; and by persons whose views of the Mosaic narrative are of that shallow character which is too prevalent, has been suspected as of infidel tendency. La Place's theory is based on the following properties of the solar system, which will be found referred to in this connection in many popular works on astronomy: 1. The orbits of the planets are nearly circular. 2. They revolve nearly in the plane of the sun's equator. [43] 3. They all revolve round the sun in one direction, which is also the direction of the sun's rotation. 4. They rotate on their axes also, as far as is known, in the same direction. 5. Their satellites, with the exception of those of Uranus and Neptune, revolve in the same direction. Now all these coincidences can scarcely have been fortuitous, and yet they might have been otherwise without affecting the working of the system; and, farther, if not fortuitous, they correspond precisely with the results which would flow from the condensation of a revolving mass of nebulous matter. La Place, therefore, conceived that in the beginning the matter of our system existed in the condition of a mass of vaporous material, having a central nucleus more or less dense, and the whole rotating in a uniform direction. Such a mass must, "in condensing by cold, leave in the plane of its equator zones of vapor composed of substances which required an intense degree of cold to return to a liquid or solid state. These zones must have begun by circulating round the sun in the form of concentric rings, the most volatile molecules of which must have formed the superior part, and the most condensed the inferior part. If all the nebulous molecules of which these rings are composed had continued to cool without disuniting, they would have ended by forming a liquid or solid ring. But the regular constitution which all parts of the ring would require for this, and which they would have needed to preserve when cooling, would make this phenomenon extremely rare. Accordingly the solar system presents only one instance of it—that of the rings of Saturn. Generally the ring must have broken into several parts which have continued to circulate round the sun, and with almost equal velocity, while at the same time, in consequence of their separation, they would acquire a rotatory motion round their respective centres of gravity; and as the molecules of the superior part of the ring—that is to say, those farthest from the centre of the sun—had necessarily an absolute velocity greater than the molecules of the inferior part which is nearest it, the rotatory motion common to all the fragments must always have been in the same direction with the orbitual motion. However, if after their division one of these fragments has been sufficiently superior to the others to unite them to it by its attraction, they will have formed only a mass of vapor, which, by the continual friction of all its parts, must have assumed the form of a spheroid, flattened at the poles and expanded in the direction of its equator." [44] Here, then, are rings of vapor left by the successive retreats of the atmosphere of the sun, changed into so many planets in the condition of vapor, circulating round the central orb, and possessing a rotatory motion in the direction of their revolution, while the solar mass was gradually contracting itself round its centre and assuming its present organized form. Such is a general view of the hypothesis of La Place, which may also be followed out into all the known details of the solar system, and will be found to account for them all. Into these details, however, we can not now enter. Let us now compare this ingenious speculation with the Scripture narrative. In both we have the raw material of the heavens and the earth created before it assumed its distinct forms. In both we have that state of the planets characterized as without form and void, the condensing nebulous mass of La Place's theory being in perfect correspondence with the Scriptural "deep." In both it is implied that the permanent mutual relations of the several bodies of the system must have been perfected long after their origin. Lastly, supposing the luminous atmosphere of our sun to have been of such a character as to concentrate itself wholly around the centre of the system, and that as it became concentrated it acquired its intense luminosity, we have in both the production of light from the same cause; and in both it would follow that the concentration of this matter within the orbit of the earth would effect the separation of day from night, by illuminating alternately the opposite sides of the earth. It is true that the theory of La Place does not provide for any such special condensation of luminous matter, nor for any precise stage of the process as that in which the arrangements of light and darkness should be completed; but under his hypothesis it seems necessary to account in some such way for the sole luminosity of the sun; and the point of separation of day and night must have been a marked epoch in the history of the process for each planet. The theory of accretion of matter which has in modern times been associated with that of La Place would equally well accord with the indications in our Mosaic record. [45]

It is further to be observed that so long as the material of the earth constituted a part of the great vaporous mass, it would be encompassed with its diffused light, and that after it had been left outside the contracting solar envelope, it might still retain some independent luminosity in its atmosphere, a trace of which may still exist in the auroral displays of the upper strata of the air. The earth might thus at first be in total darkness. It might then be dimly lighted by the surrounding nebulosity, or by a luminous envelope in its own atmosphere. Then it might, as before explained, relapse into the darkness of its misty mantle, and as this cleared away and the light of the sun increased and became condensed, the latter would gradually be installed into his office as the sole orb of day. It is quite evident that we thus have a sufficient hypothetical explanation of the light of the first of the creative æons; and this is all that in the present state of science we can expect. "Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof, that thou shouldest take it to the bound thereof, and know the way to the house thereof?"

For the reasons above given, we must regard the hypothesis of the great French astronomer as a wonderful approximation to the grand and simple plan of the construction of our system as revealed in Scripture. Nor must we omit to notice that the telescope and the spectroscope reveal to us in the heavens gaseous nebular bodies which may well be new systems in progress of formation, and in which the Creator is even now dividing the light from the darkness. Still another thought in connection with this subject is that the theory of a condensing system affords a measure of the aggregate time occupied in the work of creation. Sir William Thomson's well-known calculations give us one hundred millions of years as the possible age of the earth as a planetary globe; but calculations of the sun's heat as produced by gravitation alone would give a much less time. We have, however, a right to assume an original heated condition of the vaporous mass from which the sun was formed. Still the date above given would seem to be a maximum rather than a minimum age for the solar system.

"God saw the light that it was good," though it illuminated but a waste of lifeless waters. It was good because beautiful in itself, and because God saw it in its relations to long trains of processes and wonderful organic structures on which it was to act as a vivifying agency. Throughout the Scriptures light is not only good, but an emblem of higher good. In Psalm civ. God is represented as "clothing himself with light as with a garment;" and in many other parts of these exquisite lyrics we have similar figures. "The Lord is my light and salvation;" "Lift up the light of thy countenance upon me;" "The entrance of thy law giveth light;" "The path of the just is as a shining light." And the great spiritual Light of the world, the "only begotten of the Father," the mediator alike in creation and redemption, is himself the "Sun of Righteousness." Perhaps the noblest Scripture passage relating to the blessing of light is one in the address of Jehovah to Job, which is unfortunately so imperfectly translated in the English version as to be almost unintelligible:

"Hast thou in thy lifetime given law to the morning,
Or caused the dawn to know its place,
That it may enclose the horizon in its grasp,
And chase the robbers before it:
It rolls along as the seal over the clay,
Causing all things to stand forth in gorgeous apparel." [46]
Job xxxviii., 12.

The concluding words, "Day one," bring us to the consideration of one of the most difficult problems in this history, and one on which its significance in a great measure depends—the meaning of the word day, and the length of the days of creation.

In pursuing this investigation, I shall refrain from noticing in detail the views of the many able modern writers who, from Cuvier, De Luc, and Jameson, down to Hugh Miller, Donald McDonald, and Tayler Lewis, have maintained the period theory, or those equally numerous and able writers who have supported the opposite view. I acknowledge obligations to them all, but prefer to direct my attention immediately to the record itself.

The first important fact that strikes us is one which has not received the attention it deserves, viz., that the word day is evidently used in three senses in the record itself. We are told (verse 5th) that God called the light, that is, the diurnal continuance of light, day. We are also informed that the evening and the morning were the first day. Day, therefore, in one of these clauses is the light as separated from the darkness, which we may call the natural day; in the other it is the whole time occupied in the creation of light and its separation from the darkness, whether that was a civil or astronomical day of twenty-four hours or some longer period. In other words, the daylight, to which God is represented as restricting the use of the term day, is only a part of a day of creation, which included both light and darkness, and which might be either a civil day or a longer period, but could not be the natural day intervening between sunrise and sunset, which is the ordinary day of Scripture phraseology. Again, in the 4th verse of chapter ii., which begins the second part of the history, the whole creative week is called one day—"In the day that Jehovah Elohim made the earth and the heavens." Such an expression must surely in such a place imply more than a mere inadvertence on the part of the writer or writers.

To pave the way for a right understanding of the day of creation, it may be well to consider, in the first place, the manner in which the shorter day is introduced. In the expression, "God called the light day," we find for the first time the Creator naming his works, and we may infer that some important purpose was to be served by this. The nature of this purpose we ascertain by comparison with other instances of the same kind occurring in the chapter. God called the darkness night, the firmament heaven, the dry land earth, the gathered waters seas. In all these cases the purpose seems to have been one of verbal definition, perhaps along with an assertion of sovereignty. It was necessary to distinguish the diurnal darkness from that unvaried darkness which had been of old, and to discriminate between the limited waters of an earth having dry land on its surface and those of the ancient universal ocean. This is effected by introducing two new terms, night and seas. In like manner it was necessary to mark the new application of the term earth to the dry land, and that of heaven to the atmosphere, more especially as these were the senses in which the words were to be popularly used. The intention, therefore, in all these cases was to affix to certain things names different from those which they had previously borne in the narrative, and to certain terms new senses differing from those in which they had been previously used. Applying this explanation here, it results that the probable reason for calling the light day is to point out that the word occurs in two senses, and that while it was to be the popular and proper term for the natural day, this sense must be distinguished from its other meaning as a day of creation. In short, we may take this as a plain and authoritative declaration that the day of creation is not the day of popular speech. We see in this a striking instance of the general truth that in the simplicity of the structure of this record we find not carelessness, but studied and severe precision, and are warned against the neglect of the smallest peculiarities in its diction.

What, then, is the day of creation, as distinguished by Moses himself from the natural day. The general opinion, and that which at first sight appears most probable, is that it is merely the ordinary civil day of twenty-four hours. Those who adopt this view insist on the impropriety of diverting the word from its usual sense. Unfortunately, however, for this argument, the word is not very frequently used in the Scriptures for the whole twenty-four hours of the earth's revolution. Its etymology gives it the sense of the time of glowing or warmth, and in accordance with this the divine authority here limits its meaning to the daylight. Accordingly throughout the Hebrew Scriptures yom is generally the natural and not the civil day; and where the latter is intended, the compound terms "day and night" and "evening and morning" are frequently used. Any one who glances over the word "day" in a good English concordance can satisfy himself of this fact. But the sense of natural day from sunrise to sunset is expressly excluded here by the context, as already shown; and all that we can say in favor of the interpretation that limits the day of creation to twenty-four hours, is that next to the use of the word for the natural day, which is its true popular meaning, its use for the civil day is perhaps the most frequent. It is therefore by no means a statement of the whole truth to affirm, as many writers have done, that the civil day is the ordinary meaning of the term. At the same time we may admit that this is one of its ordinary meanings, and therefore may be its meaning here. Another argument frequently urged is that the day of creation is said to have had an evening and morning. We shall consider this more fully in the sequel, and in the mean time may observe that it appears rather hazardous to attribute an ordinary evening and morning to a day which, on the face of the record, preceded the formation and arrangement of the luminaries which are "for days and for years." [47]

But it may be affirmed that in the Bible long and undefined periods are indicated by the word "day." In many of these cases the word is in the plural: as Genesis iv., 3, "And after days it came to pass," rendered in our version "in process of time;" Genesis xl., 4, "days in ward," rendered "a season." Such instances as these are not applicable to the present question, since the plural may have the sense of indefinite time, merely by denoting an undetermined number of natural days. Passages in which the singular occurs in this sense are those which strictly apply to the case in hand, and such are by no means rare. A very remarkable example is that in Genesis ii., 4, already mentioned, where we find, "In the day when Jehovah Elohim made the earth and the heavens." This day must either mean the beginning, or must include the whole six days; most probably the latter, since the word "made" refers not to the act of creation, properly so called, but to the elaborating processes of the creative week; and occurring as this does immediately after the narrative of creation, it seems almost like an intentional intimation of the wide import of the creative days. It has been objected, however, that the expression "in the day" is properly a compound adverb, having the force of "when" or "at the time." But the learned and ingenious authors who urge this objection have omitted to consider the relative probabilities as to whether the adverbial use had arisen while the word yom meant simply a day, or whether the use of the noun for long periods was the reason of the introduction of such an adverbial expression. The probabilities are in favor of the latter, for it is not likely that men would construct an adverb referring to indefinite time from a word denoting one of the most precisely limited portions of time, unless that word had also a second and more unlimited sense. Admitting, therefore, that the phrase is an adverb of time, its use so early as the date of the composition of Genesis, to denote a period longer than a literal day, seems to imply that this indefinite use of the word was of high antiquity, and probably preceded the invention of any term by which long periods could be denoted.

This use of the word "day" is, however, not limited to cases of the occurrence of the formula "in the day." The following are a few out of many instances that might be quoted: Job xviii., 20, "They that come after him shall be astonished at his day;" Job xv., 32, "It shall be accomplished before his time;" Judges xviii., 30, "Until the day of the captivity of the land;" Deut. i., 39, "And your children which in that day had no knowledge of good and evil;" Gen. xxxix., 10, "And it came to pass about that time" (on that day). We find also abundance of such expressions as "day of calamity," "day of distress," "day of wrath," "day of God's power," "day of prosperity." In such passages the word is evidently used in the sense of era or period of time, and this in prose as well as poetry.

There is a remarkable passage in the Psalms, which conveys the idea of a day of God as distinct from human or terrestrial days:

"Before the mountains were brought forth,
Or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world,
Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
Thou turnest man to destruction,
And sayest, Return, ye children of men;
For a thousand years are in thy sight as yesterday when it is past,
And as a watch in the night." [48]

It is a singular coincidence that the authorship of this Psalm is attributed to Moses, and that its style and language correspond with the songs credited to him in Deuteronomy. It is farther to be observed that the reference is to the long periods employed in creation as contrasted with the limited space of years allotted to man. Its meaning, too, is somewhat obscured by the inaccurate translation of the third line. In the original it is, "From olam to olam thou art, O El"—that is, "from age to age." These long ages of creation, constituting a duration to us relatively eternal, were so protracted that even a thousand years are but as a watch in the night. If this Psalm is rightly attributed to the author of the first chapter of Genesis, it seems absolutely certain that he understood his own creative days as being Olamim or æons. The same thought occurs in the Second Epistle of Peter: "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

That the other writers of the Old Testament understood the creative days in this sense, might be inferred from the entire absence of any reference to the work of creation as short, since it occupied only six days. Such reference we may find in modern writers, but never in the Scriptures. On the contrary, we receive the impression of the creative work as long continued. Thus the divine Wisdom says in Prov. viii., The Lord possessed me "from the beginning of his way before his works of old, from everlasting, before the antiquities of the earth." So in Psalm cxlv., God's kingdom relatively to nature and providence is a kingdom "of all ages." In Psalm civ., which is a poetical version of the creative work, and the oldest extant commentary on Genesis i., it is evident that there was no idea in the mind of the writer of a short time, but rather of long consecutive processes; and I may remark here that the course of the narrative itself in Genesis i., implies time for the replenishing of the earth with various forms of being in preparation for others, exactly as in Psalm civ.

Perhaps one of the most conclusive arguments in favor of the length of the creative days is that furnished by the seventh day and the institution of the Sabbath. In Genesis the seventh day is not said to have had any evening or morning, nor is God said to have resumed his work on any eighth day. Consequently the seventh day of creation must be still current. Now in the fourth commandment the Israelites are enjoined to "remember the Sabbath-day," because "in six days God created the heavens and the earth." Observe here that the Sabbath is to be remembered as an institution already known. Observe farther that the commandment is placed in the middle of the Decalogue, a solitary piece of apparently arbitrary ritual amid the plainest and most obvious moral duties. Observe also that the reason given—namely, God's six days' work and seventh day's rest—seems at first sight both far-fetched and trivial, as an argument for abstaining from work in a seventh part of our time. How is all this to be explained? Simply, I think, on the supposition that the Lawgiver, and those for whom he legislated, knew beforehand the history of creation and the fall, as we have them recorded in Genesis, and knew that God's days are æons. The argument is not, "God worked on six natural days, and rested on the seventh; do you therefore the same." Such an argument could have no moral or religious force, more especially as it could not be affirmed that God habitually works and rests in this way. The argument reaches far deeper and higher. It is this. God created the world in six of his days, and on the seventh rested, and invited man in Eden to enter on his rest as a perpetual Sabbath of happiness. But man fell, and lost God's Sabbath. Therefore a weekly Sabbath was prescribed to him as a memorial of what he had lost, and a pledge of what God has promised in the renewal of life and happiness through our Saviour. Thus the Sabbath is the central point of the moral law—the Gospel in the Decalogue—the connection between God and man through the promise of redemption. It is this and this alone that gives it its true religious significance, but is lost on the natural-day theory. It would farther seem that this view of the law was that of our Lord himself, and was known to the Jews of his time, for, when blamed for healing a man on the Sabbath, he says, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work"—an argument whose force depended on the fact that God continues to work in his providence throughout his long Sabbath, which has never been broken except by man. Farther, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews takes this view in arguing as to the rest or Sabbatism that remains to the people of God. His argument (chap. iv., 4) may be stated thus: God finished his work and entered into his rest. Man, in consequence of the fall, failed to do so. He has made several attempts since, but unsuccessfully. Now Christ has finished his work, and has entered into his Sabbath, and through him we may enter into that rest of God which otherwise we can not attain to. This does not, it is true, refer to the keeping of a Sabbath-day; but it implies an understanding of the reference to God's olamic Sabbath, and also implies that Christ, having entered into his Sabbatism in heaven, gives us a warrant for the Christian Sabbath or Lord's day, which has the same relation to Christ's present Sabbatism in heaven that the old Sabbath had to God's rest from his work of creation. [49]

We may add to these considerations the use of the Greek term Ai[=o]n in the New Testament, for what may be called time-worlds as distinguished from space-worlds. For example, take the expression in Heb. i., 2: "His Son, by whom he made the worlds," or, literally, "constituted the æons"—the long time-worlds of the creation. For God's worlds must exist in time as well as in space, and both may to our minds alike appear as infinities. If, then, we find that Moses himself seems to have understood his creative days as æons, that the succeeding Old Testament writers favor the same view, that this view is essential to the true significance of the Sabbath and the Lord's day, and that it is sustained by Christ and his apostles, there is surely no need for our clinging to a mediæval notion which has no theological value, and is in opposition to the facts of nature. On the contrary, should not even children be taught these grand truths, and led to contemplate the great work of Him who is from æon to æon, and to think of that Sabbatism which he prepared for us, and which he still offers to us in the future, in connection with the succession of worlds in time revealed by geology, and which rivals in grandeur and perhaps exceeds in interest the extension of worlds in space revealed by astronomy. In truth, we should bear in mind that the great revelations of astronomy have too much habituated us to think of space-worlds rather than time-worlds, while the latter idea was evidently dominant with the Biblical writers as it is also with modern geologists. Viewed as æons—divine days, or time-worlds—the days of creation are thus a reality for all ages; and connect themselves with the highest moral teachings of the Bible in relation to the fall of man and God's plan for his restoration, begun in this seventh æon of the world's long history, and to be completed in that second divine Sabbatism, secured by the work of redemption, the final "rest" of the "new heavens and new earth," which remains for the people of God.

But supposing that the inspired writer intended to say that the world was formed in six long periods of time, could not he have used some other word than yom that would have been liable to fewer doubts. There are words which might have been used, as, for instance, eth, time, season, or olam, age, ancient time, eternity. The former, however, has about it a want of precision as to its beginning and end which unfits it for this use; the latter we have already seen is used as equivalent to the creative yom. On the whole, I am unable to find any instance which would justify me in affirming that, on the supposition that Moses intended long periods, he could have better expressed the idea than by the use of the word yom, more especially if he and those to whom he wrote were familiar with the thought, preserved to us in the mythology of the Hindoos and Persians, and probably widely diffused in ancient Asia, that a working day of the Creator immeasurably transcends a working day of man. [50]

Many objections to the view which I have thus endeavored to support from internal evidence will at once occur to every intelligent reader familiar with the literature of this subject. I shall now attempt to give the principal of these objections a candid consideration.

(1.) It is objected that the time occupied in the work of creation is given as a reason for the observance of the seventh day as a Sabbath; and that this requires us to view the days of creation as literal days. "For in six days Jehovah made the heaven and the earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day; therefore Jehovah blessed the Sabbath-day and sanctified it." The argument used here is, however, as we have already seen, one of analogy. Because God rested on his seventh day, he blessed and sanctified it, and required men in like manner to sanctify their seventh day. [51] Now, if it should appear that the working day of God is not the same with the working day of man, and that the Sabbath of God is of proportionate length to his working day, the analogy is not weakened; more especially as we find the same analogy extended to the seventh year. If it should be said, God worked in the creation of the world in six long ages, and rested on the seventh, therefore man, in commemoration of this fact, and of his own loss of an interest in God's rest by the fall, shall sanctify the seventh of his working days, the argument is stronger, the example more intelligible, than on the common supposition. This objection is, in fact, a piece of pedantic hyperorthodoxy which has too long been handed about without investigation. I may add to what has been already said in reference to it, the following vigorous thrust by Hugh Miller: [52]

"I can not avoid thinking that many of our theologians attach a too narrow meaning to the remarkable reason attached to the fourth commandment by the divine Lawgiver. "God rested on the seventh day," says the text, "from all his work which he had created and made; and God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it." And such is the reason given in the Decalogue why man should rest on the Sabbath-day. God rested on the Sabbath-day and sanctified it; and therefore man ought also to rest on the Sabbath and keep it holy. But I know not where we shall find grounds for the belief that the Sabbath-day during which God rested was merely commensurate with one of the Sabbaths of short-lived man—a brief period measured by a single revolution of the earth on its axis. We have not, as has been shown, a shadow of evidence that he resumed his work of creation on the morrow; the geologist finds no trace of post-Adamic creation; the theologian can tell us of none. God's Sabbath of rest may still exist; the work of redemption may be the work of his Sabbath-day. That elevatory process through successive acts of creation, which engaged him during myriads of ages, was of an ordinary week-day character; but when the term of his moral government began, the elevatory process peculiar to it assumed the divine character of the Sabbath. This special view appears to lend peculiar emphasis to the reason embodied in the commandment. The collation of the passage with the geologic record seems, as if by a species of retranslation, to make it enunciate as its injunction, "Keep this day, not merely as a day of memorial related to a past fact, but also as a day of co-operation with God in the work of elevation, in relation both to a present fact and a future purpose." "God keeps his Sabbath," it says, "in order that he may save; keep yours also that ye may be saved." It serves besides to throw light on the prominence of the Sabbatical command, in a digest of law of which no jot or tittle can pass away until the fulfillment of all things. During the present dynasty of probation and trial, that special work of both God and man on which the character of the future dynasty depends is the Sabbath-day work of saving and being saved.

"The common objection to that special view which regards the days of creation as immensely protracted periods of time, furnishes a specimen, if not of reasoning in a circle, at least of reasoning from a mere assumption. It first takes for granted that the Sabbath-day during which God rested was a day of but twenty-four hours, and then argues from the supposition that, in order to keep up the proportion between the six previous working days and the seventh day of rest, which the reason annexed to the fourth commandment demands, these previous days must also have been twenty-four hours each. It would, I have begun to suspect, square better with the ascertained facts, and be at least equally in accordance with Scripture, to reverse the process, and argue that because God's working days were immensely protracted periods, his Sabbath also must be an immensely protracted period. The reason attached to the law of the Sabbath seems to be simply a reason of proportion: the objection to which I refer is an objection palpably founded on considerations of proportion, and certainly were the reason to be divested of proportion, it would be divested also of its distinctive character as a reason. Were it as follows, it could not be at all understood: "Six days shalt thou labor, etc.; but on the seventh day shalt thou do no labor, etc.; for in six immensely protracted periods of several thousand years each did the Lord make the heavens and the earth, etc.; and then rested during a brief day of twenty-four hours; therefore the Lord blessed the brief day of twenty-four hours and hallowed it." This, I repeat, would not be reason. All, however, that seems necessary to the integrity of the reason, in its character as such, is that the proportion of six parts to seven should be maintained. God's periods may be periods expressed algebraically by letters symbolical of unknown quantities, and man's periods by letters symbolical of quantities well known; but if God's Sabbath be equal to one of his six working days, and man's Sabbath equal to one of his six working days, the integrity of proportion is maintained."

Not only does this view of the case entirely remove the objection, but, as we have already seen, it throws a new light on the nature and reason of the Sabbath. No good reason, except that of setting an example, can be assigned for God's resting for a literal day. But if God's Sabbath of rest from natural creation is still in progress, and if our short Sabbaths are symbolical of the work of that great Sabbath in its present gray morning and in its coming glorious noon, then may the Christian thank this question, incidentally raised by geology and its long periods, for a ray of light which shines along the whole course of Scripture history, from the first Sabbath up to that final "rest which remaineth for the people of God." [53]

(2.) It is objected that evening and morning are ascribed to the first day. This has been already noticed; it may here be considered more fully. The word evening in the original is literally the darkening, the sunset, the dusk. Morning is the opening or breaking forth of light—the daybreak. It must not be denied that the explanation of these terms is attended with some difficulty, but this is not at all lessened by narrowing the day to twenty-four hours. The first operation of the first day was the creation of light; next we have the Creator contemplating his work and pronouncing it to be good; then we have the separation of the light and darkness, previously, it is to be presumed, intermixed; and all this without the presence of a sun or other luminary. Which of these operations occupied the evening, and which the morning, if the day consisted of but twenty-four hours, beginning, according to Hebrew custom, in the evening? Was the old primeval darkness the evening or night, and the first breaking forth of light morning? This is almost the only view compatible with the Hebrew civil day beginning at evening, but it would at once lengthen the day beyond twenty-four hours, and contradict the terms of the record. Again, were the separated light and darkness the morning and evening? If so, why is the evening mentioned first, contrary to the supposed facts of the case? why, indeed, are the evening and morning mentioned at all, since on that supposition this is merely a repetition? Lastly, shall we adopt the ingenious expedient of dividing the evening and morning between two days, and maintaining that the evening belongs to the first and the morning to the second day, which would deprive the first day of a morning, and render the creative days, whatever their length, altogether different from Hebrew natural or civil days? It is unnecessary to pursue such inquiries farther, since it is evident that the terms of the record will not agree with the supposition of natural evening and morning. This is of itself a strong presumption against the hypothesis of civil days, since the writer was under no necessity so to word these verses that they would not give any rational or connected sense on the supposition of natural evening and morning, unless he wished to be otherwise understood.

But what is the meaning of evening and morning, if these days were long periods? Here fewer difficulties meet us. First: It is readily conceivable that the beginning and end of a period named a day should be called evening and morning. But what made the use of these divisions necessary or appropriate? I answer that nature and revelation both give grounds at least to suspect that the evening, or earlier part of each period, was a time of comparative inaction, sometimes even of retrogression, and that the latter part of each period was that of its greatest activity and perfection. Thus, on the views stated in a former chapter, in the first day there was a time when luminous matter, either gradually concentrating itself toward the sun, or surrounding the earth itself, shed a dim but slowly increasing light; then there were day and night, the light increasing in intensity as, toward the end of the period, the luminous matter became more and more concentrated around the sun. So in our own seventh day, the earlier part was a time of deplorable retrogression, and though the Sun of Righteousness has arisen, we have seen as yet only a dim and cloudy morning. On the theory of days of vision, as expounded by Hugh Miller, in the "Testimony of the Rocks," in one of his noblest passages, the evening and night fall on each picture presented to the seer like the curtain of a stage. Secondly: Though the explanation stated above is the most probable, the hypothesis of long periods admits of another, namely, that the writer means to inform us that evening and morning, once established by the separation of light from darkness, continued without cessation throughout the remainder of the period—rolling from this time uninterruptedly around our planet, like the seal cylinder over the clay. [54] This explanation is, however, less applicable to the following days than to the first. Nor does this accord with the curious fact that the seventh day, which, on the hypothesis of long periods, is still in progress, is not said to have had an evening or morning.

(3.) It is objected that the first chapter of Genesis "is not a poem nor a piece of oratorical diction," but a simple prosaic narrative, and consequently that its terms must be taken in a literal sense. In answer to this, I urge that the most truly literal sense of the word, namely, the natural day, is excluded by the terms of the narrative; and that the word may be received as a literal day of the Creator, in the sense of one of his working periods, without involving the use of poetical diction, and in harmony with the wording of plain prosaic passages in other parts of the Bible. Examples of this have already been given. It is, however, true that, though the first chapter of Genesis is not strictly poetical, it is thrown into a metrical form which admits of some approach to a figurative expression in the case of a term of this kind.

(4.) It has been urged that in cases where day is used to denote period, as in the expressions "day of calamity," etc., the adjuncts plainly show that it can not mean an ordinary day. In answer to this, I merely refer to the internal evidence already adduced, and to the deliberate character of the statements, in the manner rather of the description of processes than of acts. The difficulties attending the explanation of the evening and the morning, and the successive creation of herbivorous and carnivorous animals, are also strong indications which should serve here to mark the sense, just as the context does in the cases above referred to.

(5.) In Professor Hitchcock's valuable and popular "Religion of Geology," I find some additional objections, which deserve notice as specimens of the learned trifles which pass current among writers on this subject, much to the detriment of sound Scriptural literature. I give them in the words of the author. 1. "From Genesis ii., 5 compared with Genesis i., 11 and 12, it seems that it had not rained on the earth till the third day; a fact altogether probable if the days were of twenty-four hours, but absurd if they were long periods." It strikes us that the absurdity here is all on the side of the short days. Why should any prominence be given to a fact so common as the lapse of two ordinary days without rain, more especially if a region of the earth and not the whole is referred to, and in a document prepared for a people residing in climates such as those of Egypt and Palestine. But what could be more instructive and confirmatory of the truth of the narrative than the fact that in the two long periods which preceded the formation and clearing up of the atmosphere or firmament, on which rain depends, and the elevation of the dry land, which so greatly modifies its distribution, there had been no rain such as now occurs. This is a most important fact, and one of the marked coincidences of the record with scientific truth. The objection, therefore, merely shows that the ordinary day hypothesis tends to convert one of the finest internal harmonies of this wonderful history into an empty and, in some respects, absurd commonplace. 2. "This hypothesis (that days are long periods) assumes that Moses describes the creation of all the animals and plants that have ever lived on our globe. But geology decides that the species now living, since they are not found in the rocks any lower than man is, [55] could not have been contemporaneous with those in the rocks, but must have been created when man was—that is, in the sixth day. Of such a creation no mention is made in Genesis; the inference is that Moses does not describe the creation of the existing races, but only of those that lived thousands of years earlier, and whose existence was scarcely suspected till modern times. Who will admit such an absurdity?" In answer to this objection, I remark that it is based on a false assumption. The hypothesis of long periods does not require us to assume that Moses notices all the animals and plants that have ever lived, but on the contrary that he informs us only of the first appearance of each great natural type in the animal and vegetable kingdoms; just as he informs us of the first appearance of dry land on the third day, but says nothing of the changes which it underwent on subsequent days. Thus plants were created on the third day, and though they may have been several times destroyed and renewed as to genera and species, we infer that they continued to exist in all the succeeding days, though the inspired historian does not inform us of the fact. So also many tribes of animals were created in the early part of the fifth day, and it is quite unnecessary for us to be informed that these tribes continued to exist through the sixth day. If the days were long periods, the inspired writer could not have adopted any other course, unless he had been instructed to write a treatise on Palæontology, and to describe the fauna and flora of each successive period with their characteristic differences. 3. "Though there is a general resemblance between the order of creation as described in Genesis and by geology, yet when we look at the details of the creation of the organic world, as required by this hypothesis, we find manifest discrepancy. Thus the Bible represents plants only to have been created on the third day, and animals not till the fifth; and hence at least the lower half of the fossiliferous rocks ought to contain nothing but vegetables. Whereas in fact the lower half of these rocks, all below the carboniferous, although abounding in animals, contain scarcely any plants, and these in the lowest strata fucoids or sea-weeds. But the Mosaic account evidently describes flowering and seed-bearing plants, not flowerless and seedless algæ. Again, reptiles are described in Genesis as created on the fifth day; but reptilia and batrachians existed as early as the time when the lower carboniferous and even old red sandstone were in course of deposition, as their tracks on those rocks in Nova Scotia and Pennsylvania evince. [56] In short, if we maintain that Moses describes fossils as well as living species, we find discrepancy instead of correspondence between his order of creation and that of geology." In this objection it is assumed that the geological history of the earth goes back to the third day of creation, or, in other words, to the dawn of organic life. None of the greater authorities in geology would, however, now venture to make such an assertion, and the progress of geology is rapidly making the contrary more and more probable. The fact is that, on the supposition that the days of creation are long periods, the whole series of the fossiliferous rocks belongs to the fifth and sixth days; and that for the early plant creation of the third day, and the great physical changes of the fourth, geology has nothing as yet to show, except a mass of metamorphosed eozoic rocks which have hitherto yielded no fossils except a few Protozoa; but which contain vast quantities of carbon in the form of graphite, which may be the remains of plants.

I have much pleasure in quoting, as a further answer to these objections, the following from Professor Dana: [57]

"Accepting the account in Genesis as true, the seeming discrepancy between it and geology rests mainly here: Geology holds, and has held from the first, that the progress of creation was mainly through secondary causes; for the existence of the science presupposes this. Moses, on the contrary, was thought to sustain the idea of a simple fiat for each step. Grant this first point to science, and what farther conflict is there? The question of the length of time, it is replied. But not so; for if we may take the record as allowing more than six days of twenty-four hours, the Bible then places no limit to time. The question of the days and periods, it is replied again. But this is of little moment in comparison with the first principle granted. Those who admit the length of time and stand upon days of twenty-four hours have to place geological time before the six days, and then assume a chaos and reordering of creation, on the six-day and fiat principle, after a previous creation that had operated for a long period through secondary causes. Others take days as periods, and thus allow the required time, admitting that creation was one in progress, a grand whole, instead of a first creation excepting man by one method, and a second with man by the other. This is now the remaining question between the theologians and geologists; for all the minor points, as to the exact interpretation of each day, do not affect the general concordance or discordance of the Bible and science.

"On this point geology is now explicit in its decision, and indeed has long been so. It proves that there was no return to chaos, no great revolution, that creation was beyond doubt one in its progress. We know that some geologists have taken the other view. But it is only in the capacity of theologians, and not as geologists. The Rev. Dr. Buckland, in placing the great events of geology between the first and second verses of the Mosaic account, did not pretend that there was a geological basis for such an hypothesis; and no writer since has ever brought forward the first fact in geology to support the idea of a rearrangement just before man; not one solitary fact has ever been appealed to. The conclusion was on Biblical grounds, and not in any sense on geological. The best that Buckland could say, when he wrote twenty-five years since, was that geology did not absolutely disprove such an hypothesis; and that can not be said now.

"It is often asserted, in order to unsettle confidence in these particular teachings of geology, that geology is a changing science. In this connection the remark conveys an erroneous impression. Geology is a progressive science; and all its progress tends to establish more firmly these two principles: (1) The slow progress of creation through secondary causes, as explained; and (2) the progress by periods analogous to the days of Genesis."

I have, I trust, shown that the principal objections to the lengthening of the Mosaic days into great cosmical periods are of a character too light and superficial to deserve any regard. I shall now endeavor to add to the internal evidence previously given some considerations of an external character which support this view.

1. The fact that the creation was progressive, that it proceeded from the formation of the raw material of the universe, through successive stages, to the perfection of living organisms, if we regard the analogy of God's operations as disclosed in the geological history of the earth and in the present course of nature, must impress us with a suspicion that long periods were employed in the work. God might have prepared the earth for man in an instant. He did not choose to do so, but on the contrary proceeded step by step; and the record he has given us does not receive its full significance nor attain its full harmony with the course of geological history, unless we can understand each day of the creative week as including a long succession of ages.

2. We have, as already explained, reason to believe that the seventh day at least has been of long duration. At the close of the sixth, God rested from all his work of material creation, and we have as yet no evidence that he has resumed it. Neither theologians nor evolutionists will, I presume, desire to maintain that any strictly creative acts have occurred in the modern period of geology. We know that the present day, if it is the seventh, has lasted already for at least six thousand years, and, if we may judge from the testimony of prophecy, has yet a long space to run, before it merges in that "new heaven and new earth" for which all believers look, and which will constitute the first day of an endless sabbatism.

3. The philosophical and religious systems of many ancient nations afford intimations of the somewhat extensive prevalence in ancient times of the notion of long creative periods, corresponding to the Mosaic days. These notions, in so far as they are based on truth, are probably derived from the Mosaic narrative itself, or from the primitive patriarchal documents which may have formed the basis of that narrative. They are, no doubt, all more or less garbled versions, and can not be regarded as of any authority, but they serve to show what was the interpretation of the document in a very remote antiquity. I have collected from a variety of sources the following examples:

The ancient mythology of Persia appears to have had six creative periods, each apparently of a thousand years, and corresponding very nearly with the Mosaic days. [58] The Chaldeans had a similar system, to which in a previous chapter we have already referred. The Etruscans possessed a history of the creation, somewhat resembling that of the Bible, and representing the creation as occupying six periods of a thousand years each. [59]

The Egyptians believed that the world had been subject to a series of destructions and renewals, the intervals between which amounted to 120,000 years, or, according to other authorities, to 300,000 or 360,000 years. This system of destruction and renewal the Egyptian priests appear to have wrought out into considerable detail, but though important truths may be concealed under their mysterious dogmas, it will not repay us to dwell on the fragments that remain of them. There can be no doubt, however, that at least the basis of the Egyptian cosmogony must have been the common property of all the Hamite nations, of which Egypt was the greatest and most permanent; and therefore in all probability derived from the ideas of creation which were current not long after the Deluge. The Egyptians appear also, as already stated, to have had a physical cosmogony, beginning with a chaos in which heaven and earth were mingled, and from which were evolved fiery matters which ascended into the heavens, and moist earthy matters which formed the earth and the sea; and from these were produced, by the agency of solar heat, the various animals. The terms of this cosmogony, as it is given by Diodorus Siculus, indicate the belief of long formative periods. [60]

The Hindoos have a somewhat extended, though, according to the translations, a not very intelligible cosmogony. It plainly, however, asserts long periods of creative work, and is interesting as an ancient cosmogony preserved entire and without transmission through secondary channels. The following is a summary, in so far as I have been able to gather it, from the translation of the Institutes of Menu by Sir W. Jones. [61]

The introduction to the Institutes represents Menu as questioned by the "divine sages" respecting the laws that should regulate all classes or castes. He proceeds to detail the course of creation, stating that the "Self-existing Power, [62] undiscovered, but making this world discernible, He whom the mind alone can perceive, whose essence eludes the external senses, who has no visible parts, who exists from eternity, even the soul of all being, whom no being can comprehend, shone forth in person."

After giving this exalted view of the Creator, the writer proceeds to state that the Self-existent created the waters, and then an egg, from which he himself comes forth as Brahma the forefather of spirits. "The waters are called Nara because they are the production of Nara, the spirit of God, and since they were his first Ayana, or place of motion, he thence is named Narayana, or moving on the waters. In the egg Brahma remained a year, and caused the egg to divide, forming the heaven above and the earth beneath, and the subtile ether, the eight regions, and the receptacle of waters between. He then drew forth from the supreme soul mind with all its powers and properties." The rest of the account appears to be very confused, and I confess to a great extent unintelligible to me. There follows, however, a continuation of the narrative, stating that there is a succession of seven Menus, each of whom produces and supports the earth during his reign. It is in the account of these successive Menus that the following statement respecting the days and years of Brahma occurs:

"A day of the Gods is equal to a year. Four thousand years of the Gods are called a Critya or Satya age. Four ages are an age of the Gods. One thousand divine ages (equal to more than four millions of human years) are a day of Brahma the Creator. Seventy-two divine ages are one manwantara. * * * The aggregate of four ages they call a divine age, and believe that in every thousand such ages, or in every day of Brahma, fourteen Menus are successively invested with the sovereignty of the earth. Each Menu they suppose transmits his authority to his sons and grandsons during a period of seventy-two divine ages, and such a period they call a manwantara. Thirty such days (of the Creator), or calpas, constitute a month of Brahma; twelve such months one of his years, and 100 such years his age, of which they assert that fifty years have elapsed. We are thus, according to the Hindoos, in the first day or calpa of the fifty-first year of Brahma's life, and in the twenty-eighth divine age of the seventh manwantara of that day. In the present day of Brahma the first Menu was named the Son of the Self-existent, and by him the institutes of religion and civil duties are said to have been delivered. In his time occurred a new creation called the Lotos creation." Of five Menus who succeeded him, Sir William could find little but the names, but the accounts of the seventh are very full, and it appears that in his reign the earth was destroyed by a flood. Sir William suggests that the first Menu may represent the creation, and that the seventh may be Noah. The name Menu or Manu is equivalent to "man," and signifies "the intelligent." [63]

In this Hindoo cosmogony we have many points of correspondence with the Scripture narrative: for instance, the Self-existent Creator; the agency of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit; the absolute creation of matter; the hovering of the Spirit over the primeval waters; the sevenfold division of the creative process; and the idea of days of the Creator of immense duration. If we suppose the day of Brahma in the Hindoo cosmogony to represent the Mosaic day, then it amounts to no less than 4,320,000 years; or if, with Sir W. Jones, we suppose the manwantara to represent the Mosaic day, its duration will be 308,571 years; and the total antiquity of the earth, without counting the undefined "beginning," will be either more than twenty-five or than two millions of years. It would be folly, however, to suppose that these Hindoo numbers, which are probably purely conjectural, or based on astronomical cycles, make any near approximation to the facts of the case. The Institutes of Menu are probably in their present form not of great antiquity, but there are other Hindoo documents of greater age which maintain similar views, and it is probable that the account of the creation in the Institutes is at least an imperfect version of the original narrative as it existed among the earliest colonists of India. [64] It corresponds in many points with the oldest notions on these subjects that remain to us in the wrecks of the mythology of Egypt and other ancient nations, and it aids in proving that the fabulous ages of gods and demigods in the ancient mythologies are really pre-Adamite; and belong not to human history, but to the work of creation. It also shows that the idea of long creative periods as equivalents of the Mosaic days must, in the infancy of the postdiluvian world, have been very widely diffused. Such evidence is, no doubt, of small authority in the interpretation of Scripture; but it must be admitted that serious consideration is due to a method of interpretation which thus tends to bring the Mosaic account into harmony with the facts of modern science, and with the belief of almost universal antiquity, and at the same time gives it its fullest significance and most perfect internal symmetry of parts. It is also very interesting to note the wide diffusion among the most ancient nations of cosmological views identical in their main features with those of the Bible, proving, almost beyond doubt, that these views had some common and very ancient source, and commanded universal belief among the primitive tribes of men.

I have hitherto in this part of the discussion avoided detailed reference to what may be regarded as the "prophetic day" view of the narrative of creation. This may be shortly stated as follows: In the prophetical parts of Scripture the prophet sees in vision, as in a picture or acted scene, the events that are to come to pass, and in consequence represents years or longer periods by days of vision. Now the revelation of the pre-Adamite past is in its nature akin to that of the unknown future; and Moses may have seen these wondrous events in vision—in visions of successive days—under the guise of which he presents geological time. Some things in the form of the narrative favor this view, and it certainly affords the most clearly intelligible theory as to the mode in which such a revelation may have been made to man. It is advocated by Kurtz, by the author of an excellent little work, the "Harmony of the Mosaic and Geological Records," by Hugh Miller, and more recently by Tayler Lewis. To these writers I must refer for its more full illustration, and for the grand pictorial view which it gives of the vision of the creative week.

In reviewing the somewhat lengthy train of reasoning into which the term "day" has led us, it appears that from internal evidence alone it can be rendered probable that the day of creation is neither the natural nor the civil day. It also appears that the objections urged against the doctrine of day-periods are of no weight when properly scrutinized, and that it harmonizes with the progressive nature of the work, the evidence of geology, and the cosmological notions of ancient nations. I do not suppose that this position has been incontrovertibly established; but I believe that every serious difficulty has been removed from its acceptance; and with this, for the present, I remain satisfied. Every step of our subsequent progress will afford new criteria of its truth or fallacy.

One further question of some interest is—What, according to the theory of long creative days and the testimony of geology, would be the length and precise cosmical nature of these days? With regard to the first part of the question, we do not know the actual value of our geological ages in time; but it is probable that each great creative æon may have extended through millions of years. As to the nature of the days, this may have been determined by direct volitions of the Creator, or indirectly by some of those great astronomical cycles which arise from the varying eccentricity of the earth's orbit, or the diminution of the velocity of its rotation, or by its gradual cooling.

With reference to these points, science has as yet little information to give. Sir William Thomson has, indeed, indicated for the time since the earth's crust first began to form a period of between one and two hundred millions of years; but Professor Guthrie Tait, on the other hand, argues that ten or fifteen millions of years are probably sufficient, [65] and Lockyer has suggested an hypothesis of successive rekindlings of the solar heat which might give a more protracted time than that of Thomson. Some of the hypotheses of derivation current, but which are based rather on philosophical speculation than on scientific fact, would also require a longer time than that allowed by Thomson; and it is to be regretted that some geologists, by giving credence to such hypotheses of derivation, and by loose reasoning on the time required for the denudation and deposition of rocks, have been induced to commit themselves to very extravagant estimates as to geological time. On the whole, it is evident that only the most vague guesses can at present be based on the facts in our possession, though the whole time required has unquestionably been very great, the deposition of the series of stratified rocks probably requiring at least the greater part of the minimum time allowed by Thomson. [66]

As to the cosmical nature of the periods, while some geologists appear to regard the whole of geological time as a continuous evolution without any breaks, it is evidently more in accordance with facts to hold that there have been cycles of repose and activity succeeding each other, and that these have been of different grades. In the succession of deposits it is plain that periods of depression and upheaval common to all the continental masses have succeeded each other at somewhat regular intervals, and that within these periods there have been alternations of colder and warmer climates. These, however, are not equal to the creative days of our record, for they are greatly more numerous. They are but the vastly protracted hours of these almost endless days. Beyond and above these there is another grade of geological period, marked not by mere gradual elevation and depression of the continental areas, but by vast crumplings of the earth's crust and enormous changes of level. Such a great movement unquestionably closed the Eozoic period of geology. Another of less magnitude occurred in what is termed the Permian age at the end of the Palæozoic. A third terminated the Mesozoic age, and introduced the Tertiary or Kainozoic. Perhaps we should reckon the glacial age, though characterized by far less physical change than the others, as a fourth. The possible physical causes which have been suggested for such greater disturbances are the collapses of the crust in equatorial regions, which may be supposed to have resulted at long intervals of time, from the gradual retardation of the earth's rotation caused by the tides, or the similar collapses and other changes due to the shrinkages of the earth's interior caused by its gradual cooling, and to the unequal deposition of material by water on different parts of its surface. [67] The more full discussion of these points belongs, however, to a future chapter.

These greater movements of the crust, would, as already stated, coincide to some extent with the later creative days in the manner indicated below:

The question recurs—Why are God's days so long? He is not like us, a being of yesterday. He is "from Olam to Olam," and even in human history one day is with him as a thousand years; and we who live in these later days of the world know full well how slow the march of his plan has been even in human history. We shall know in the endless ages of a future eternity that even to us these long creative days may at last become but as watches in the night.

CHAPTER VII.
THE ATMOSPHERE.
"And God said, Let there be an expanse between the waters; and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse, and separated the waters which are under the expanse from the waters which are over the expanse: and it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."—Genesis i. 6-8.

At the opening of the period to which we are now introduced the earth was covered by the waters, and these were in such a condition that there was no distinction between the seas and the clouds. No atmosphere separated them, or, in other words, dense fogs and mists everywhere rested on the surface of the primeval ocean. To understand as far as possible the precise condition of the earth's surface at this period, it will be necessary to notice the present constitution of the atmosphere, especially in its relations to aqueous vapor.

The regular and constant constituents of the atmosphere are the elements oxygen and nitrogen, which, at the temperature and pressure existing on the surface of our globe, are permanently aeriform or gaseous. Beside these gases, the air always contains a quantity of the vapor of water in a perfectly aeriform and transparent condition. This vapor is not, however, permanently gaseous. At all temperatures below 212 degrees it tends to the liquid state; and its elastic force, which preserves its particles in the separated state of vapor, increases or diminishes at a more rapid rate than the increase or diminution of temperature. Hence the quantity of vapor that can be suspended in clear air depends on the temperature of the air itself. As the temperature of the air rises, its power of sustaining vapor increases more rapidly than its temperature; and as the temperature of the air falls, the elastic force of its contained vapor diminishes in a greater ratio, until it can exist as an invisible vapor no longer, but becomes condensed into minute bubbles or globules, forming cloud, mist, or rain. Two other circumstances operate along with these properties of air and vapor. The heat radiated from the earth's surface causes the lower strata of air to be, in ordinary circumstances, warmer than the higher; and, on the other hand, warm air, being lighter than that which is colder, the warm layer of air at the surface continually tends to rise through and above the colder currents immediately over it. Let us consider the operation of the causes thus roughly sketched in a column of calm air. The lower portion becomes warmed, and if in contact with water takes up a quantity of its vapor proportioned to the temperature, or in ordinary circumstances somewhat less than this proportion. It then tends to ascend, and as it rises and becomes mixed with colder air it gradually loses its power of sustaining moisture, and at a height proportioned to the diminution of temperature and the quantity of vapor originally contained in the air, it begins to part with water, which becomes condensed in the form of mist or cloud; and the surface at which this precipitation takes place is often still more distinctly marked when two masses or layers of air at different temperatures become intermixed; in which case, on the principle already stated, the mean temperature produced is unable to sustain the vapor proper to the two extremes, and moisture is precipitated. It thus happens that layers of cloud accumulate in the atmosphere, while between them and the surface there is a stratum of clear air. Fogs and mists are in the present state of nature exceptional appearances, depending generally on local causes, and showing what the world might be but for that balancing of temperature and the elastic force of vapor which constitutes the atmospheric firmament. [68]

The quantity of water thus suspended over the earth is enormous. "When we see a cloud resolve itself into rain, and pour out thousands of gallons of water, we can not comprehend how it can float in the atmosphere." [69] The explanation is—1st, the extreme levity of the minute globules, which causes them to fall very slowly; 2d, they are supported by currents of air, especially by the ascending currents developed both in still air and in storms; 3dly, clouds are often dissolving on one side and forming on another. A cloud gradually descending may be dissolving away by evaporation at the base as fast as new matter is being added above. On the other hand, an ascending warm current of air may be constantly depositing moisture at the base of the cloud, and this may be evaporating under the solar rays above. In this case a cloud is "merely the visible form of an aerial space, in which certain processes are at the moment in equilibrium, and all the particles in a state of upward movement." [70] But so soon as condensation markedly exceeds evaporation, rain falls, and the atmosphere discharges its vast load of water—how vast we may gather from the fact that the waters of all the rivers are but a part of the overflowings of the great atmospheric reservoir. "God binds up the waters in his thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under them." It is thus that the terrestrial waters are divided into those above and those below that expanse of clear air in which we live and move, exempt from the dense, dark mists of the earth's earlier state, yet enjoying the benefits of the cloudy curtain that veils the burning sun, and of the cloudy reservoirs that drop down rain to nourish every green thing.

We have no reason to suppose that the laws which regulate mixtures of gases and vapors did not prevail in the period in question. It is probable that these laws are as old as the creation of matter; but the condition of our earth up to the second day must have been such as prevented them from operating as at present. Such a condition might possibly be the result of an excessive evaporation occasioned by internal heat. The interior of the earth still remains in a heated state, and includes large subterranean reservoirs of melted rock, as is proved by the increase of temperature in deep mines and borings, and by the widely extended phenomena of hot springs and volcanic action. At the period in question the internal temperature of the earth was probably vastly greater than at present, and perhaps the whole interior of the globe may have been in a state of igneous fluidity. At the same time the external solid crust may have been thin, and it was not fractured and thickened in places by the upheaval of mountain chains or the deposition of great and unequal sheets of sediment; for, as I may again remind the reader, the primitive chaos did not consist of a confused accumulation of rocky masses, but the earth's crust must then have been more smooth and unbroken than at any subsequent period. This being the internal condition of the earth, it is quite conceivable, without any violation of the existing laws of nature, that the waters of the ocean, warmed by internal heat, may have sent up a sufficient quantity of vapor to keep the lower strata of air in a constant state of saturation, and to occasion an equally constant precipitation of moisture from the colder strata above. This would merely be the universal operation of a cause similar to that which now produces fogs at the northern limit of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, and in other localities where currents of warm water flow under or near to cooler air. Such a state of things is more conceivable in a globe covered with water, and consequently destitute of the dry and powerfully radiating surfaces which land presents, and receiving from without the rays, not of a solar orb, but of a comparatively feeble and diffused luminous ether. The continued action of these causes would gradually cool the earth's crust and its incumbent waters, until the heat from without preponderated over that from within, when the result stated in the text would be effected.

The statements of our primitive authority for this condition of the earth might also be accounted for on the supposition that the permanently gaseous part of the atmosphere did not at the period in question exist in its present state, but that it was on the second day actually elaborated and caused to take its place in separating the atmospheric from the oceanic waters. The first is by far the more probable view; but we may still apply to such speculations the words of Elihu, the friend of Job:

"Stand still and consider the wonderful works of God.
Dost thou know when God disposes them,
And the lightning of his cloud shines forth?
Dost thou know the poising of the dark clouds,
The wonderful works of the Perfect in knowledge?"

We may now consider the words in which this great improvement in the condition of the earth is recorded. The Hebrew term for the atmosphere is Rakiah, literally, something expanded or beaten out—an expanse. It is rendered in our version "firmament," a word conveying the notion of support and fixity, and in the Septuagint "Stereoma," a word having a similar meaning. The idea conveyed by the Hebrew word is not, however, that of strength, but of extent; or as Milton—the most accurate of expositors of these words—has it:

"The firmament, expanse of liquid, pure,
Transparent, elemental air, diffused
In circuit to the uttermost convex
Of this great round."

That this was really the way in which this word was understood by the Hebrews appears from several passages of the Bible. Job says of God, "Who alone spreadeth out the heavens." [71] David, in the 104th Psalm, which is a poetical paraphrase of the history of creation, speaks of the Creator as "stretching out the heavens as a curtain." In later writers, as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, similar expressions occur. The notion of a solid or arched firmament was probably altogether remote from the minds of these writers. Such beliefs may have prevailed at the time when the Septuagint translation was made, but I have no hesitation in affirming that no trace of them can be found in the Old Testament. In proof of this, I may refer to some of the passages which have been cited as affording the strongest instances of this kind of "accommodation." In Exodus xxiv., 10, we are told, "And they saw the God of Israel, and under his feet as it were a paved work of sapphire, and as it were the heaven itself in its clearness." This is evidently a comparison of the pavement seen under the feet of Jehovah to a sapphire in its color, and to the heavens in its transparency. The intention of the writer is not to give information respecting the heavens, or to liken them either to a pavement or a sapphire; all that we can infer is that he believed the heavens to be clear or transparent. Job mentions the "pillars of heaven," but the connection shows that this is merely a poetical expression for lofty mountains. The earthquake causes these pillars of heaven to "tremble." We are informed in the book of Job that God "ties up his waters in his thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under them." We are also told of the "treasures of snow and the treasures of hail," and rain is called the "bottles of heaven," and is said to be poured out of the "lattices of heaven." I recognize in all these mere poetical figures, not intended to be literally understood. Some learned writers wish us to believe that the intention of the Bible in these places is actually to teach that the clouds are contained in skin bottles, or something similar, and that they are emptied through hatches in a solid firmament. To found such a belief, however, on a few figurative statements, seems ridiculous, especially when we consider that the writers of the Scriptures show themselves to be well acquainted with nature, and would not be likely on any account to deviate so far from the ordinary testimony of the senses; more especially as by doing so they would enable every unlettered man who has seen a cloud gather on a mountain's brow or dissolve away before increasing heat to oppose the evidence of his senses to their statements, and perhaps to reject them with scorn as a barefaced imposture. But, lastly, we are triumphantly directed to the question of Elihu in his address to Job:

"Hast thou with him stretched out the sky,
Which is firm and like a molten mirror?"

But the word translated sky here is not "rakiah," or "shamayim," but another signifying the clouds, so that we should regard Elihu as speaking of the apparent firmness or stability, and the beautiful reflected tints of the clouds. His words may be paraphrased thus: "Hast thou aided Him in spreading out those clouds, which appear so stable and self-sustaining, and so beautifully reflect the sunlight?" [72] The above passages form the only authority which I can find in the Scriptures for the doctrine of a solid firmament, which may therefore be characterized as a modern figment of men more learned in books but less acquainted with nature than the Scripture writers. As a contrast to all such doctrines I may quote the sublime opening of the poetical account of creation in Psalm civ., which we may also take here as elsewhere as the oldest and most authoritative commentary on the first chapter of Genesis:

"Bless the Lord, O my soul!
O Lord, my God, thou art very great:
Thou art clothed with honor and majesty,
Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment,
Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain (of a tent),
Who layest the beams of thy chambers in the waters,
Who makest the clouds thy chariots,
Who walkest upon the wings of the wind."

The waters here are those above the firmament, the whole of this part of the Psalm being occupied with the heavens; and there is no place left for the solid firmament, of which the writer evidently knew nothing. He represents God as laying his chambers on the waters, instead of on the supposed firmament, and as careering in cloudy chariots on the wings of the wind, instead of over a solid arch. For all the above reasons, we conclude that the "expanse" of the verses under consideration was understood by the writers of the book of God to be aerial, not solid; and the "establishment of the clouds above," as it is finely called in Proverbs, is the effect of those meteorological laws to which I have already referred, and which were now for the first time brought into operation by the divine Legislator. The Hebrew theology was not of a kind to require such expedients as that of solid heavenly arches; it recurred at once to the will—the decree—of Jehovah; and was content to believe that through this efficient cause the "rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full," for "to the place whence the rivers came, thither they return again," through the agency of those floating clouds, "the waters above the heavens," which "pour down rain according to the vapor thereof."

God called the expanse "Heaven." In former chapters we have noticed that heaven in the popular speech of the Hebrews, as in our own, had different meanings, applying alike to the cloudy, the astral, and the spiritual heavens. The Creator here sanctions its application to the aerial expanse; and accordingly throughout the Scriptures it is used in this way; rakiah occurs very rarely, as if it had become nearly obsolete, or was perhaps regarded as a merely technical or descriptive term. The divine sanction for the use of the term heaven for the atmosphere is, as already explained, to indicate that this popular use is not to interfere with its application to the whole universe beyond our earth in verse 1st.

The poetical parts of the Bible, and especially the book of Job, which is probably the most ancient of the whole, abound in references to the atmosphere and its phenomena. I may quote a few of these passages, to enable us to understand the views of these subjects given in the Bible, and the meaning attached to the creation of the atmosphere, in very ancient periods. In Job, 38th chapter, we have the following:

"In what way is the lightning distributed,
And how is the east wind spread abroad over the earth?
Who hath opened a channel for the pouring rain,
Or a way for the thunder-flash?
To cause it to rain on the land where no man is,
In the desert where no one dwells;
To saturate the desolate and waste ground,
And to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth."

Here we have the unequal and unforeseen distribution of thunder-storms, beyond the knowledge and power of man, but under the absolute control of God, and designed by him for beneficent purposes. Equally fine are some of the following lines:

"Dost thou lift up thy voice to the clouds,
That abundance of waters may cover thee?
Dost thou send forth the lightnings, and they go,
And say unto thee, Here are we?
Who can number the clouds by wisdom,
Or cause the bottles of heaven to empty themselves?
When the dust groweth into mire,
And the clods cleave fast together?"

In the 36th and 37th chapters of the same book we have a grand description of atmospheric changes in their relation to man and his works. The speaker is Elihu, who in this ancient book most favorably represents the knowledge of nature that existed at a time probably anterior to the age of Moses—a knowledge far superior to that which we find in the works of many modern poets and expositors, and accompanied by an intense appreciation of the grandeur and beauty of natural objects:

"For he draweth up the drops of water,
Rain is condensed [73] from his vapor,
Which the clouds do drop,
And distill upon man abundantly.
Yea, can any understand the distribution of the clouds
Or the thundering of his tabernacle. [74]
Behold he spreadeth his lightning upon it,
He covereth it as with the depths of the sea. [75]
By these he executes judgment on the people,
By these also he giveth food in abundance;
His hands he covers with the lightning,
And commands it (against the enemy) in its striking;
He uttereth to it his decree, [76]
Concerning the herd as well as proud man.
At this also my heart trembles,
And bounds out of its place;
Hear attentively the thunder of his voice,
And the loud sound that goes from his mouth.
He directs it under the whole heavens,
And his lightning to the ends of the earth.
After it his voice roareth,
He thundereth with the voice of his majesty;
And delays not (the tempest) when his voice is heard.
God thundereth marvellously with his voice,
He doeth wonders which we can not comprehend;
For he saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth.
Also to the pouring rain, even the great rain of his might.
He sealeth up the hand of every man,
That all men may know his work.
Then the beasts go to their dens,
And remain in their caverns.
Out of the south cometh the whirlwind
And cold out of the north,
By the breath of God the frost is produced
And the breadth of waters becomes bound;
With moisture he loads the thick cloud,
He spreads the cloud of his lightning,
And it is turned about by his direction,
To execute his pleasure on the face of the world;
Whether for correction, for his land, or for mercy,
He causeth it to come.
Hearken unto this, O Job,
Stand still and consider the wonderful works of God.
Dost thou know when God disposes these things,
And the lightning of his cloud flashes forth?
Dost thou know the poising of the clouds,
The wonderful work of the Perfect in knowledge?
When thy garments become warm
When he quieteth the earth by the south wind;
Hast thou with him spread out the clouds
Firm and like a molten mirror?" [77]

It would not be easy to find, in the poetry of any nation or time, a description of so many natural phenomena, so fine in feeling or truthful in delineation. It should go far to dispel the too prevalent ideas of early Oriental ignorance, and should lead to a more full appreciation of these noble pictures of nature, unsurpassed in the literature of any people or time. I trust that the previous illustrations are sufficient to show, not only that the stereoma, or solid firmament of the Septuagint, is not to be found in Scripture, but that the positive doctrine of the Bible on the subject is of a very different character. For instance, in the above extract from the book of Job, Elihu speaks of the poising or suspension of the clouds as inscrutable, and tells us that God draws up water into the clouds, and pours down rain according to the vapor thereof; he also speaks of the clouds as being scattered before the brightness of the sun; and notices, in truthful as well as exalted language, the nature and succession of the lightning's flash, the thunder, and the precipitation of rain that follows. Solomon also informs us that the "establishment of the clouds above" is due to the law or will of Jehovah. Finally, in this connection, the divine sanction given to the use of the term heaven for the atmosphere may in itself be regarded as an intimation that no definite barrier separates our film of atmosphere from the boundless abyss of heaven without.