it does not appear to be substantiated by Scripture, as we shall presently see, and the guile of the serpent may be detected in its results. For how great a contest has it provoked between the Church and the World! How ready a handle do the geological difficulties involved in it present to the assailants of Scripture! With what perplexity do we behold earth gloomy with the shadow of pain and death ages before the sin of Adam! How many young minds have been turned aside by the absolute impossibility of defending what they have been taught to regard as Biblical statements! And lastly, in carrying on the dispute, how much precious time has been wasted by able servants of God, who would otherwise have been more profitably employed!

Let us, then, turn to the Mosaic account, and endeavour to elicit its plain and obvious "In the beginning," we

Examination of the

Mosaic record. "In meaning. the beginning."

read, "God created the heaven and the earth." * The beginning refers, of course, to the first existence of that with which the history is concerned, the heaven and the earth. Here, then, is at once an end to speculation in regard to the eternity of matter: for God was before the things that are seen, and by His supreme volition called them into being. And again; this short sentence strikes a mortal blow at all pantheistic identification of God and nature. Nature

is but one of His many creatures, one of the works of

* Gen. i. 1.

†Therefore the expression has in this case a sense very different from that which it bears in the first verse of John. Here it is used of the beginning of time; but there of the countless ages of eternity before time was. The third verse of John, "All things were made by Him," brings us down to the period of the first of Genesis.

His hands her years can be numbered, the day of her birth is known; but from everlasting to everlasting He is God.

The earth and its

have been "created" in

Now, in the inspired description of what took place in the beginning, the heaven and earth surroundings are said to are not said to have been moulded, the beginning; while in fashioned, or made out of material, but the six days they were to have been created. For, whatever only "made." Meaning of the Hebrew words may have been the original meaning of bara, asah, and yatsar. the word bara, it seems certain that in this and similar passages it is used of calling into being without the aid of pre-existing material. The Hebrew writers give it this sense, and Rabbi Nackman declares that there is no other word to express production out of nothing. But it is, of course, easy to understand that a language might not possess a verb originally confined to such a meaning: for the idea would scarcely have been conceived by men without the assistance of revelation. The development theories so popular in our days, coupled as they almost invariably are with more or less of scepticism, indicate the natural bent of human minds on this point: and the philosophic poet Lucretius was an exponent of it when he declared the first principle of nature to be, "Nothing is ever gotten out of nothing by Divine power."

Hence we can readily understand that the word selected by the Holy Spirit to express creation may have previously signified the forming out of material. But its use is sufficiently defined in this and other similar passages. For we are told that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth; but the Scriptures never affirm that He did this in the six days. * De Rer. Nat. i. 150.

The work of those days was, as we shall presently see, quite a different thing from original creation: they were times of restoration, and the word asah is generally used in connection with them.

Now asah signifies to make, fashion, or prepare out of existing material; as, for instance, to build a ship erect a house, or prepare a meal.

There are, however, two acts of creation mentioned in the history of the six days. First; God is said to have created the inhabitants of the waters and the fowls of heaven because these do not consist merely of the material mould of their bodies, but have a life principle within which could be conferred only by a direct act of creation.* Hence the change of word in this place is quite intelligible. Just in the same way man is said to have been created, though in the second chapter we are expressly told that his body was formed from the dust.t For the real man is the soul and spirit: the body, which is naturally changed every seven years, and must ultimately moulder in the grave, is regarded merely as the outward casing which gives him the power of dealing with his present surroundings, and the materials of which were appropriately taken from that earth in contact with which he was destined to live.

In the detailed account of man's origin, a third word is used to signify the forming of his body. This is yatzar, which means to shape, or mould, as a potter does the clay.‡

A passage in Isaiah well illustrates the meaning and connection of all three verbs ;-"I have created him for My glory; I have formed him; yea, I have made † Gen. i. 27; ii. 7.

* Gen. i. 21.

Į Gen. ii. 7.

him." On this verse Kimchi remarks;-"I have created him, that is, produced him out of nothing; I have formed him, that is, caused him to exist in a shape or form appointed; I have made him, that is, made the final dispositions and arrangements respecting him."

God may, perhaps, be

detected in man.

God, then, in the beginning created the heaven and A faint reflection of the earth, not merely the materials out the creative power of of which they were afterwards formed. How this wonderful work was accomplished we are not told but it may be that the creative power of God has a very dim analogy in the beings who were made after His image, an analogy which would well illustrate the distance between the creature and the Creator. We know that by force of imagination we can not only place before our eyes scenes in which we were long ago interested, spots which we would fain revisit in the body, departed forms dear to us as our own lives, but are even able to paint in fancy future events as we would wish them to be. The vision is, however, shadowy, fleeting, and alas! too often unholy. Somewhat, then, perhaps, as we produce this dim and quickly fading picture, the thoughts of God, issuing from the depths of His holiness and love, take instant shape, and become, not an unsubstantial and evanescent dream, but a beautiful reality, established for ever unless He choose to alter or remove it. Hence it may be that a great part, or, perhaps, the whole host of innumerable suns and planets which make up the universe, flashed into being simultaneously at His will, and, in a moment, illumined the black realm of space with their many-hued glories.

The first verse

of

mary of what follows,

The heaven mentioned in the first verse of Genesis is the starry heaven, not the firmament Genesis is not a sum- immediately surrounding our earth: * but a record of the first and since its history is not further of a series of events. unfolded, it may, for aught we know, have remained, developing, perhaps, but without violent change from the time of its creation until now. Not so, however, the earth, as the next verse goes on to show: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

Now the "and," according to Hebrew usage-as well as that of most other languages-proves that the first verse is not a compendium of what follows, but a statement of the first event in the record. For if it were a mere summary, the second verse would be the actual commencement of the history, and certainly would not begin with a copulative. A good illustration of this may be found in the fifth chapter of Genesis.† There the opening words, "This is the book of the generations of Adam," are a compendium of the chapter, and, consequently, the next sentence begins without a copulative. We have, therefore, in the second verse of Genesis no first detail of a general statement in the preceding sentence, but the record of an altogether distinct and subsequent event, which did not affect the sidereal heaven, but only the earth and its immediate surroundings. And what that event was we must now endeavour to discover.

* See remarks on the Fourth Day in Chap. IV., and also the exposition of Gen. ii. 4, in the latter part of the same chapter.

† Gen. v. 1.