1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was waste and 2 void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.** This great introductory sentence of the book of God is equal in weight to the whole of its subsequent communications concerning the kingdom of nature. It assumes the existence of God; for it is he who in the beginning creates. It assumes his eternity; for he is before all things; and as nothing comes from nothing, he himself must have always been. It implies his omnipotence; for he creates the universe of things. It implies his absolute freedom; for he begins a new course of action. It implies his infinite wisdom; for a kosmos, an order of matter and mind, can only come from a being of absolute intelligence. It implies his essential goodness; for the Sole, Eternal, Almighty, All-wise, and All-sufficient Being has no reason, no motive, and no capacity for evil. It presumes him to be beyond all limit of time and place; as he is before all time and place. It asserts the creation of the heavens and the earth; that is, of the universe of mind and matter. This creating is the omnipotent act of giving existence to things which before had no existence. This sentence assumes the being of God, and asserts the beginning of things. Hence it intimates that the existence of God is more immediately patent to the reason of man than the creation of the universe. And this is agreeable to the philosophy of things; for the existence of God is a necessary and eternal truth, more and more self-evident to the intellect as it rises to maturity. This sentence denies atheism; for it assumes the being of God. It denies polytheism, and among its various forms the doctrine of two eternal principles, the one good and the other evil; for it confesses the one eternal Creator. It denies materialism; for it asserts the creation of matter. It denies pantheism; for it assumes the existence of God before all things, and apart from them. It denies fatalism; for it involves the freedom of the Eternal Being. M.

We wander back in quest of the origin of our race and of the world we inhabit till we meet this sublime declaration, In the beginning, God. —We traverse the whole field of speculative philosophy and reach the same sublime result, In the beginning, God. We roam through the interminable ages and cycles of ages in the eras of geology, and the weary mind comes at length to the same terminus, In the beginning, God. Everywhere it is written, There is a God—a living God, a personal God, a present God. Whence came this sublime conception of God, which has never been exceeded by any philosophy since? Whence this wondrously true and accurate outline of the course of creation, in an age of the world when there was no philosophy nor science equal to such conceptions and discoveries—in an age when all the wisdom of the world upon such matters has shown itself to have been utterly and hopelessly at fault? Whence came this account of the creation but from God himself, by direct communication to man? J. P. T.

God, who is in a high sense the Author of Scripture, does not argue His own existence any more than a human author begins his book by proving that he himself actually lives. God is. What is the conclusion of long arguments elsewhere is the starting-point of the Bible. The name of God is stamped on the forehead of His book. D. F.

By the positive exclusion of eternity from the existence of the universe, and by repelling the idea of accidental creation, the fact of a beginning is raised in the Bible not only above all the entangling speculations of recent philosophy, but above the boldest reasonings of modern scepticism. Those who have pushed the discoveries of science to their present limit tell us that however much further they may hereafter proceed, they have no hope of gaining the least insight into that origination of matter of which the Scriptures speak. This point they regard as beyond the aim of the sciences, for each is restricted to its own facts and laws, and is necessarily silent in reference to history antecedent to itself. “To ascend to the origin of things,” says Sir John Herschel, “and speculate on creation, is not the business of the natural philosopher." W. Fraser.

The writer to the Hebrews affirms that this doctrine—God the original Creator of matter—is accepted by faith, i.e. upon the credit of God’s own testimony. “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God so that things which are seen were not made of things that do appear” (Heb. 11 : 3). Not being constructed out of matter previously apparent, they must have been made by the direct production of matter not before existing. H. C.

Reason as well as faith demands that we deny independency to whatever is created, and devoutly confess that God is “all in all.” In Him, by whom they were formed, “all things consist”—in Him all “live and move and have their being.” He is the author and giver of life, and in the strictest sense it may be affirmed that every day, not less than the first, is a day of creation; every moment the word of power is pronounced from the height of the Eternal Throne—“let there be light” and life. This belief constitutes the basement-principle of all religion, and is the sentiment from which piety must take its spring. The notion of independency and of eternity, suggested by the regular movements of nature, are thus thrown off from the surface of the visible world, and go to enhance our impressions of the glories of Him who alone is eternal, unchangeable and independent. I. T.

It is an assured truth and a conclusion of experience, that a little or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism, but a further proceeding therein doth bring the mind back again to religion: for in the entrance of philosophy, when the second causes which are next unto the senses do offer themselves to the mind of man, if it dwell and stay there it may induce some oblivion of the highest cause: but when a man passeth on further and seeth the dependence of causes and the works of Providence, then, according to the allegory of the poets, he will easily believe that the highest link of Nature’s chain must needs be tied to the foot of Jupiter’s chair. Bacon.

The eternity of matter is to this day the foundation of the pagan idea. This principle is not only a metaphysical falsehood; it is the denial of liberty to God and man, a denial which makes an end of all morality. If any matter whatever was necessary to the Creator, He could not have formed a world absolutely good, but only the best world possible; and man can be just as little master over his own body, as God over matter. But this night of darkness and of gloom which overshadows the conception of God, of the world, and of man, is dispersed at the first word of Divine revelation: “in the beginning God created.” Everything, substance and form, came into being at the flat of the creative will, which is free and omnipotent. Hirsch.

There must have been a commencement of the motions now going on in the solar system. Since these motions, when once begun, would be deranged and destroyed in a period which, however large, is yet finite, it is obvious we cannot carry their origin indefinitely backward in the range of past duration. The argument is indeed forced upon our minds, whatever view we take of the past history of the world. Some have endeavored to evade its force by maintaining that the world, as it now exists, has existed from eternity. But the doctrine of a resisting medium, once established, makes this imagination untenable, compels us to go back to the origin, not only of the present course of the world, not only of the earth, but of the solar system itself; and thus sets us forth upon that path of research into the series of past causation, where we obtain no answer of which the meaning corresponds to our questions, till we rest in the conclusion of a most provident and most powerful creating intelligence. Whewell.—Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come, the earth must again be, unfit for habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have been or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world are subject. There cannot be uniformity. The earth is filled with evidence that it has not been going on forever in the present state, and that there is a process of events toward a state infinitely different from the present. Sir W. Thompson.

There is not an existing stratum in the body of the earth which geology has laid bare, which cannot be traced back to a time when it was not; and there is not an existing species of plants, or animals, which cannot be referred to a time when it had no place in the world. Their beginnings are discoverable in succeeding cycles of time. It can be demonstrated that man also had a beginning, and all the species contemporary with him, and that, therefore, the present state of the organized world has not been sustained from eternity. Lyell.—These statements corroborate those prophetic descriptions which are definitely historical, and forbid modification (Ps. 102 : 26 ; Isa. 34 : 4 ; 51 : 6 ; 2 Pet. 3 : 10 ; Rev. 21 : 1). W. Fraser.

Beginning. Reshith, the Hebrew word for “beginning,” is without the definite article. “In Reshith,” Moses says, not in the Reshith, Elohim created, etc. “The meaning, then, is” In Reshith (anteriority), i.e. in former times, of old, God created; and the article is omitted to exclude the application of the word to the order of creation. The words refer to “time or duration,” not to order, and mean, not “In the beginning of creation he created,” etc., but of old, in former duration, God created. How long ago is not said. The Hebrew word is indefinite. McCaul.

God. Elohim. From the same Saxon root as good, thus beautifully expressing the Divine benignity as the leading attribute of the most generous term for the Deity, and corresponding almost invariably to two Hebrew words, both from a common root—ul, to be strong. An.

Elohim occurs for the most part in the plural, and yet is connected, as here, with a verb in the singular. Bush.—The root probably means to be lasting, binding, firm, strong. Hence the noun means the Everlasting, and in the plural, the Eternal Powers. It is correctly rendered God, the name of the Eternal and Supreme Being in our language, which perhaps originally meant lord or ruler. M.

When Moses is describing the primal creative act of God, he joins a singular verb to a plural noun. Language, it would seem, thus submits to a violent anomaly, that she may the better hint at the mystery of several Powers or Persons who not merely act together but who constitute a single Agent. The Hebrew language could have described God by singular forms, such as El, Eloah, and no question would have been raised as to the strictly Monotheistic force of those words. The Hebrew language might have amplified the idea of God thus conveyed by less dangerous processes than the employment of a plural form. Would it not have done so unless the plural form had been really necessary, in order to hint at the complex mystery of God’s inner life, until that mystery should be more clearly unveiled by the explicit Revelations of a later day? H. P. L.—Elohim. 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 as a distinct actor in the next verse. Dawson.

God is the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from Himself without foreign motive or influence; He who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely benevolent, beneficent, true, and holy; the cause of all being, the upholder of all things; infinitely happy because infinitely perfect and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that He has made; illimitable in His immensity, inconceivable in His mode of existence, and indescribable in His essence; known fully only to Himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from His infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and, from His infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind. A Clarke.—So great a revelation had never been made to man for it disclosed the existence of the One eternal holy, just and good God,—a God of wisdom and order, as well as purity and truth, and implied His right to our absolute obedience and love, as the work of His hands. There remained only another self-disclosure, of still greater condescension, when He declared Himself to mankind in the person of His incarnate Son. Geikie.

Create (bara), give being to something new. It has God always for its subject. Its object may be anything: matter (5 : 1); animal life (5 : 21); spiritual life (5 : 27). The verb in its simple form occurs forty-eight times (of which eleven are in Genesis, fourteen in the whole Pentateuch, and twenty-one in Isaiah), and always in one sense. M.—In the first two chapters of Genesis we meet with four different verbs to express the creative work of God, viz. to create; to make; to form; to build. The word bara is evidently the common word for a true and original creation, and there is no other word in Hebrew which can express that thought. E. H. B.—Bara never appears as the word for human creations, differing in this from the synonyms “asak,” “yatzar,” “yalad,” which are used both of men and of God—it is never used with an accusative of the material, and even from this it follows that it defines the divine creative act as one without any limitations, and its result, as to its proper material, as entirely new; and as to its first cause, entirely the creation of divine power. Delit.—There is one special sense in which God can make and man cannot, viz. that of bringing into existence what had no existence before. Over against this, place the fact that the word “bara” is used of God’s making forty-eight times and of man’s making never, and we conclude that the Hebrew expressed by this word that distinctive power of God which man never can even approach—viz., the power to give existence to matter, to mind and to life. In passages where this sense of “bara” is appropriate, there can be no question that it is the real meaning. H. C.—It occurs in this chapter only on three occasions, the first creation of matter in the first verse, the first introduction of life in the fifth day, and the creation of man in the sixth day. Barà is thus reserved for marking the first introduction of each of the three great spheres of existence—the world of matter, the world of life, and the world spiritual, represented by man in this visible economy—all three of which, though profoundly distinct in essence, are intimately associated, and together constitute all the universe known to us. Guyot.—As bara is exclusively appropriated to God so God alone is called Barè, Creator. Creation is therefore, according to the Hebrew, a Divine act.

The idea of creation out of nothing, that is, that God did not produce the world out of anything outside of himself, is in accordance with the doctrine of Mosaism. How later reflection laid hold of the simple utterances of the record of creation, and carried out farther the thoughts contained in them, is especially shown in Ps. 104 (which is really a commentary on Gen. 1). O.—That the first verse of Genesis teaches that the original creation of the world in its rude and chaotic state was from nothing, while in the remaining part of the chapter the elaboration and distribution of the matter thus created is taught, the connection of the whole section shows sufficiently clearly. Gesenius.—This creation of things from nothing speaks an infinite power. The distance between nothing and being, hath been always counted so great, that nothing but an infinite power can make such distances meet together; either for nothing to pass into being, or being to return to nothing. To imagine so small a thing as a bee, a fly, a grain of corn, or an atom of dust, to be made of nothing, would stupefy any creature in the consideration of it; much more to behold the heavens with all the troop of stars, the earth with all its embroidery, and the sea with all her inhabitants of fish, and man, the noblest creature of all, to arise out of the womb of mere emptiness. Indeed God had not acted as an almighty Creator if he had stood in need of any materials but of his own framing. Charnock.

The heaven and the earth. There is no single word in the Hebrew language corresponding to our English word universe. The phrase “the heaven and the earth” is the nearest equivalent to it, and is here doubtless used to signify the whole system of which our earth forms a part: the sun, the planets with their satellites, and the fixed stars, with all that belong to them. So Moses understood the expression, for he afterward wrote: “The Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is.” Armstrong.—Consequently these uncounted tenants of the skies, along with our own planet, are all declared to be in existence before the commencement of the six days’ creation. The subsequent verses reveal a new effort of creative power, by which the pre-adamic earth, in the condition in which it appears in the second verse, is fitted up for the residence of a fresh animal creation, including the human race. M.

The simplest exposition seems to be that ver. 1 is not meant to be a title of the whole, but rather the declaration how a first creation of heaven and earth as prima materia preceded the process portrayed from the second verse onward; compare how Job 38:4-7, supposes a prius preceding the creation of the earth. By the absolute Bereshith the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something which already existed, and heaven and earth is wholly subjected to the lapse of time, which God transcends; compare Ps. 90:2; 102:26. O.—The first verse may be understood as relating to a primeval creation, complete in itself, but which, by some catastrophe, had become desolate and dark (as described in ver. 2)—in which case the work of the six creative days would be a restitution or new creation of the earth which had become desolate. The narrative before us does not decide this point. The writer does not inform us whether the earth had been created “without form and void,” or whether and by what process it had become such. Besides this account and the hymn of creation (Ps. 104), we have another description of several points in the process of creation, in Job 37:3, etc. Therein it is declared that when the Almighty founded the earth, the morning stars rejoiced, and the sons of God sang in praise of the divine wisdom and power then displayed. Hence the morning stars and sons of God must have existed previous to the six creative days. K.

Inasmuch as every one of the six days’ works opens with And God said, it is required by the symmetry of the narrative that the first day’s work should begin at ver. 3, and that vv. 1, 2, should be regarded as introductory matter. This being so, we have in it three propositions.

First, originally God created the heaven and the earth. Secondly, at a certain time formlessness and darkness prevailed. Thirdly, the Divine Spirit wrought upon this chaotic state. And thus the way is prepared for the six-days’ work. Alf.—The length of time that may have elapsed between the events recorded in the first verse (of the first chapter of Genesis) and the condition of the globe, as described in the second verse, is absolutely indefinite. How long it was, we know not; and ample space is therefore given to all the requisitions of geology. The second verse describes the condition of our globe, when God began to fit it up for the abode of man. The first day’s work does not begin till the third verse. This is no new theory. It was held by Justin Martyr, Basil, Origen, Theodoret, and Augustine—men who came to such a conclusion without any bias, and who certainly were not driven to it by any geological difficulties. Eadie.

Objections. The view that the geological ages might be contained in the time between the beginning and first day, involves a strained interpretation of the passage, and is contradicted by the fact that no chaotic period intervenes between the human period and the preceding tertiary ages. Dawson.—1. The sacred writer gives no intimation of such an interval. There is no indication that it was present to his mind, and no reason for it in the connection. 2. It assumes that the writer has given us only an account of a part of the Creator’s work; that for unknown ages the earth was peepled with vegetable and animal life, of which no record is made. 3. Scientific investigation shows that no such conclusion, as is assumed in this theory, occurred at the period preceding the creation of man. 4. It is an unworthy conception of the Creator and his work. Why was the creation extended through six natural days, when a single divine volition would have brought the whole universe into being, with all its apparatus for the support of life, and its myriads of living beings? Its extension through six successive periods, of whatever duration, can be explained only by the operation of those secondary causes, which the structure of the earth itself proves to have been active in its formation, requiring ages for their accomplishment. T. J. C.

2. This verse cuts clear of the universe at large, or even of the solar system, and confines itself to “the earth.” This fact would seem to preclude the view advanced by high scientific authorities, that in a subsequent verse the dividing of the waters from the waters was the separation of the earth from the nebula of which it was a part, and forces us to a simpler and narrower explanation. “The earth”—to which our attention is now confined—was after its creation “without form and void,” literally “wasteness and emptiness,” in other words a chaotic mass, described by two archaic Hebrew words, and in the next breath designated as “the deep;” perhaps because no other than this last term could so vividly describe the vast, confused, unstable, and, it may be, heaving and roaring mass of material in its earlier stages, as the vast ocean abyss. S. C. B.—The verb in this sentence is in the perfect state, and therefore denotes that the condition of confusion and emptiness was not in progress, but had run its course and become a settled thing, at least at the time of the next recorded event. M.—Unless the context forbids, it may just as well be understood in the preter past;—“and the earth had been without form and void.” How long no one may know. The toba and bohu may have been a rudimentary chaos which had never yet assumed order—such as we may suppose to have been the condition of perhaps many an elemental world—or it may have been a chaos to which some world or system had been reduced from some previously better state. It may have lain long in ruins; it may have gone through an immense number of older cycles; or it may be that it was now for the first time made the subject of a creation, that is, according to the Latin word, an orderly growing through harmonious laws, or, according to the Hebrew conception, a separating, a dividing, a clearing up, a bringing into order, an arranging of outward relations, by which it comes in harmony with the exact measurements of universal, objective time, and is thus prepared for the abode of life, happiness and rationality. T. L.

The Spirit of God. Science cannot tell how the change from the chaotic, the desolate and the empty, was effected. Moses informs us that it was by the action of the Divine Spirit. According to the Old Testament, the Spirit of God is the quickening principle of the world, and all life is an outgoing from God. McGard.—Moved. It is significant that the same science which has bound “the heavens and the earth” in a single belt of law—which has established a positive beginning for them—which has detected the traces of a single hand in the uniform structure of all, and so illustrated the first word of Scripture concerning the origin of the universe,—has given us, as its last solution of the secret of the unfolding earth, the one word, “motion”—motion, of which light, heat, and electricity, are “modes,” and of which

matter is but the phenomenal vehicle. Is it not curious—after learning from Hebrew scholars that the “moving” of the Spirit (which in the Scripture was followed at once by light) means literally a “trembling,” as of brooding wings—to read from Professor Tyndall’s pen the statement that “the splendor of the starry firmament is the transported shiver of bodies countless millions of miles distant”? After four thousand years, once more man “thinks God’s thought after him”—the word with which science ends its inquiry after the origin of things is the same with which Moses began his “book of origins”—“the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” J. B. Thomas.

The word conveys the idea of brooding over—cherishing—the act of incubation which a fowl performs when hatching its eggs, and the particular form of the verb implies a continuance of this action. It was not the self development of powers inherent in matter. The creative movement was made by the will of God; and as if to refute the doctrine of Pantheism, it is expressly stated that the action was not in but upon the face of the waters. Jamieson.—We render it brooded; or it might be translated, hovered. Either of these words would present the primary image, or conception, better than the term in our common version. Any one may be as certain of its meaning as the best Hebrew scholar, by just turning to Deuteronomy 32 : 11,—“As the eagle hovers, or broods, over its young.” It is the same word and the same conception. T. L.

The drama of creation opens with chaos, and the Holy Spirit brooded over the waters; then chaos became cosmos, order. The Spirit garnished the heavens. All the beauty of the world, physical as well as spiritual, is from the Holy Spirit. He gives wisdom, inspires prophets, works in regeneration and sanctification, and enkindles love to God. This is not speculation. This is what God reveals. A. A. Hodge.

3. And God said, Let there be light : and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was 4 good : and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the 5 darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. 6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the 7 waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were 8 under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament : and it was so. And 9 God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second 10 day. 9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear : and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth ; and the gather- ing together of the waters called he Seas : and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let 11 the earth put forth grass, herb yielding seed, and fruit tree bearing fruit after its kind, wherein 12 is the seed thereof, upon the earth : and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit, wherein is the seed thereof, after its kind : 13 and God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.

First Day. Vast in its outline, this remarkable history is yet so scrupulously strict in its minuter details, that it may be read without dubiety, not only in the midst of the exactest records of antiquity, but in the light of those modern discoveries in physical science which bear most directly on its statements. In reliableness and in consistency it stands alone. The myths of heathenism regarding the origin of the world can be easily separated from it. While it contains every element of truth which imparts to them any coherency which they pospossess, it gives no place to their grotesque and deformed traditions. W. Fraser.—When the Pentateuch was written mankind was absorbed in the grossest idolatry; and that idolatry, for the most part, originated in the neglect, the perversion, or the misapprehension of certain truths, which had once been universally known. Moses therefore commences his narrative, by relating the creation of the world by the one true God, in opposition to the Egyptian doctrines of the necessary eternity of the world, and an infinite succession of similar worlds.

G. T.—In no other passage, perhaps, does the incomparable pre-eminence of these creative acts of the one Jehovah above the confused and uncertain creative efforts of the Assyrian pantheon so clearly appear. Here is the one God, who unites in himself everything divine which the heathen world divided among its many gods. Here the creation is not a necessitated emanation from his essence, or from wild chaos, but something brought into existence by the free will of the Absolute One. Here is an ascending gradation of acts of creation to the supreme aim. This supreme aim is not, as in the Babylonian account, one or another concurrent cause, not a God, not a new Lord of heaven, but an image of God, “a King of the earth, the synthesis of Spirit and Nature.” We have here, on the threshold of the revelation of God to men, a tradition of creation free from mythological additions; here the true idea of God is announced in the midst of a heathenism sunk far and wide in unbelief and apostasy, and in this announcement we have the foundation of all true religions and culture. In the Babylonian account of creation, a multitude of conceptions concerning God and divine things betrays what we may call the childhood of the people; but the creative agency of God, as exhibited in the first chapter of Genesis, is so perfect that the purest knowledge of God is unable to improve upon it in the least. O.

And God said. This is the word which gives the key-note to the narrative, the burden, ten times repeated, of this magnificent poem. To say is both to think and to will. In this speaking of God, there is both the legislative power of His intelligence, and the executive power of His will; this one word dispels all notion of blind matter, and of brute fatalism; it reveals an enlightened Power, an intelligent and benevolent Thought, underlying all that is. At the same time that this word, “And God said,” appears to us as the veritable truth of things, it also reveals to us their true value and legitimate use. Beautiful and beneficent as the work may be, its real worth is not in itself; it is in the thought and in the heart of the Author to whom it owes its existence. Whenever we stop short in the work itself, our enjoyment of it can only be superficial, and we are, through our ingratitude, on the road to an idolatry more or less gross. Our enjoyment is only pure and perfect when it results from the contact of our soul with the Author himself. To form this bond is the true aim of Nature, as well as the proper destination of the life of man. Behind this veil of the visible universe which dazzles me, behind these blind forces of which the play at times terror-strikes me, behind this regularity of seasons and this fixedness of laws, which almost compel me to recognize in all things only the march of a fixed Fate, this word, “And God said,” unveils to me an Arm of might, an Eye which sees, a Heart full of benevolence which is seeking me, a Person who loves me. Godet.—If we remove the term GOD from this chapter, we leave behind a mystery of darkness; when we reinsert the term GOD we import the nobler mystery of light. In a very plain sense there is, so far as the visible creation is concerned, less mystery with a Creator than without one; since there is nothing but mystery on the side of atheism. Here is the Christian standpoint, and here the Christian resting ground—God the mighty and holy Maker of all things. J. P.

3. Let there be light.** The most elegant critic of the heathen world has produced the opening of this narrative, as the most striking specimen of the true sublime which could be presented. “God said—what? Be light; and light was. Be earth, and it was so.” Enc. Mt.—The substantive verb is used here, and not either the words “create” or “made.” It was the manifestation of what had been previously in existence—Let light be, or, rather, Light shall be, not the formation of an element, or matter, which had no being at all till the divine command was issued. Where all had been involved in darkness, there was an alternation of light; and as unbroken gloom had reigned previous to this happy change, so, in describing the physical arrangement that was now established, this natural sequence is preserved, and the evening is reckoned before the morning. Jamieson.

It is now an established truth, that Light is in its nature entirely independent of the sun. It is a vibration of the ether, in which the sun is, in our time, no doubt, the chief agent, but which may be produced by the action of many causes. Science proves that there is a light, other than that of the sun, which possesses all the properties required by vegetation, and that this light existed at the beginning of the world. Godet.—The phenomena of light have been proved to be a result of molecular action, and to be dependent upon fundamental qualities of matter as now constituted. Man has ascertained the wave-lengths in the vibration of molecular force corresponding to light of different parts of the spectrum, and also other laws of light. He has found, moreover, that the laws of heat and of electrical and chemical action are so involved with those of light that all these conditions are convertible and one in molecular origin. Dana.

4. God saw that the light was good;** that is, He predestined it for its multiform uses in the economy of vegetative and animal life, and in the development of the human intellect. And it was He who separated the light from the darkness; He retained the control of the force which He had created, and appointed of His foreknowledge the alternations of day and night. In like manner with all the forces of nature afterward to be discovered in scientific research—heat, electricity, galvanic currents, chemical affinities, actinic rays, whatever they were—they came at God’s command, they were foreseen by Him as good, and designed for their uses, and they are retained in His power of guidance. Hill.—Every created work is to us an evidence of God’s mercy and wisdom; to Himself a source of fresh joy. The expression so constantly repeated, “God saw that it was good,” declares to us that God is the holy source of all good, and that in this world there lies no incentive to sin, but sin is the fault of man. Gerl.—The sacred writer has it, from the first, in his purpose to affirm the absolute goodness of the Divine works: and this formula is only another and a more detailed method of saying that all creation followed the behest and the character of its maker, himself all good. Alf.

5. Evening and morning, one day. The evening is mentioned first because the darkness preceded the light. On the ground of this recorded order of things in the sacred narrative, the Jews commenced their day of twenty-four hours from the evening. Bush.—Beyond all question the word “day” is used abundantly (and therefore admits of being used) to denote a period of special character, with no particular reference to its duration. We have a case in this immediate connection (Gen. 2:4), where it is used of the whole creative period (see Eccl. 7:14; Joel 2:2; Luke 19:42, etc.). H. C.—In the Hebrew Scriptures the word day is used: (1) For past or future time, without limit (Isa. 30:8; Prov. 31:25). (2) For a future prophetic period of indefinite limit (Isa. 2:11, 17; Ezek. 38:14). (3) For a period of time, in history (Jud. 18:1; 1 Sam. 8:18). (4) For a season of the year (Prov. 25:13). (5) For a period of life, as of old age (Eccl. 12:3). (6) For any specified time of indefinite length (1 Sam. 3:2). T. J. C.

There are the days which God divided—super-naturally divided by his own direct immediate power originating a new thing, or a new work, in nature—and there are the days of which he said, “let the sun divide them,” natural days, measured off in the regularly returning course of nature, and marking the interior divisions of that nature instead of being its exterior chronological bound. Here is this wondrous difference patent on the very face of the account. Can we read of these two kinds of days so strikingly contrasted in their natural and supernatural character, their God-made and sun-made modes of division, and yet believe that they must be exactly alike in all the other features with which we are familiar as belonging to our solar periods? . . . The Bible does not teach that the creative days were twenty-four hours long; but leaves a great latitude in this respect, determining nothing about their duration, except that they must be in some kind of conceived harmony with the growths and processes assigned to each. Hence this view of indefinite periods may be applied in various ways. It may be supposed to embrace the whole physical history of our earth from its earliest condition of being, or it may refer merely to the successive steps by which an old chaotic earth was renewed, and a new division of land and water, a new vegetation, a new animal life, etc., were made to succeed older growths and older creations, which had long before run through their cycles. The writer would confess his partiality for the first supposition, as the second burdens the conceptive faculty with the idea of a series of great creations, as well as of great periods in each creation. T. L.

6-8. And God said, Let there be a firmament (expansion, “rakiah”) to divide the waters, and he called the firmament Heaven. This was the sky, that pure and transparent expanse of air above us, the atmosphere with its inexhaustible springs of life and blessing, providing the necessary means of nourishment to every kind of living beings that were to appear on earth. This sky rests on the waters of the earth, and like a firm arch supports the oceans of heaven. Thus it divides the upper from the lower waters, the sea from the clouds which rise from it, that in turn they also may become a spring of blessing and fruitfulness to the dry land when it shall have been emancipated from the dominion of the sea. K.—We, describing the expanse, would say that it lay between, or separated, the clouds and the earth. But the historian speaks as things would have appeared to a spectator at the time of the creation. A portion of the heavy, watery vapor was carried into the upper regions, and rested there in dense clouds, which still obscured the sun; while below, the whole earth was still covered with water, for the dry land had not yet appeared. Thus we see the propriety with which the firmament is said to have divided “the waters from the waters.” Kit.—This harmonizes with what is known of the processes of evaporation to which the clouds are subject as they float above us—lakes of water in the azure vault. The firmament sustains the waters collected in its scattered clouds, and separates them from those resting on the surface of the earth. Take, in connection with this, what Solomon has written, “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again” (Eccl. 1:7); and we may fairly press the question, Can any brief description more exactly set forth what has been ascertained as to the settled course of evaporation? W. Fraser.—7. Waters above the firmament. The quantity of water suspended in the atmosphere is enormous; and the rains, the springs, and rivers which fertilize the earth and sustain its inhabitants, are only the overflowings of this vast aerial reservoir, upheld by the laws established by God. Dawson.

An unscientific reader knows little about the manner in which the volume of the atmosphere surrounds the earth; but I imagine that he could hardly glance at the sky when rain was falling in the distance, and see the level line of the bases of the clouds from which the shower descended, without being able to attach an instant and easy meaning to the words, “expansion in the midst of the waters.” And if, having once seized the idea, he proceeded to examine it more accurately, he would perceive at once, if he had ever noticed anything of the nature of the clouds, that the level line of their bases did indeed most severely and stringently divide “waters from waters,” that is to say, divide water in its collected and tangible state from water in its divided and aerial state; or the waters which fall and flow from those which rise and float. I understand the making the firmament to signify that (so far as man is concerned) most magnificent ordinance of the clouds; the ordinance that as the great plain of waters was formed in the face of the earth, so also a plain of waters should be stretched along the height of air, and the face of the cloud answer the face of the ocean; and that this upper and heavenly should be of waters, as it were, glorified in their nature, no longer quenching the fire, but now bearing fire in their own bosoms; no longer murmuring only when the winds raise them, or rocks divide, but answering each other with their own voices from pole to pole; no longer restrained by established shores, and guided through unchanging channels, but going forth at His pleasure like the armies of the angels and choosing their encampments on the height of the hills: no longer hurried downward forever, moving but to fall, nor lost in the lightless accumulation of the abyss, but covering the East and the West with the waving of their wings, and robing the gloom of the farther infinite with a vesture of divers colors, of which the threads are purple and scarlet, and the embroideries flame. Ruskin.

8. God called the firmament heaven. We have here an interesting and instructive example of the way in which words expand in their significance from the near, the simple, the obvious, to the far and wide, the complex and inferential. The heaven, in the first instance, meant the open space above the surface in which we breathe and move, in which the birds fly and the clouds float. This is the atmosphere. Then it stretches away into the seemingly boundless regions of space, in which the countless orbs of luminous and of opaque surfaces circumambulate. Then the heavens come to signify the contents of this indefinitely augmented expanse,—the celestial luminaries themselves. Then, by a still further enlargement of its meaning, we rise to the heaven of heavens, the inexpressibly grand and august presence-chamber of the Most High, where the cherubim and seraphim, the innumerable company of angels, the myriads of saints, move in their several grades and spheres, keeping the charge of their Maker, and realizing the joy of their being. M.

9-13. We have now a purer and a clearer sky; but still our earth is drenched with water, and unfit for production. The water must be partly removed, and confined within proper bounds; and this is the work of the THIRD day of creation. “And God said, ‘Let the waters be gathered together into one place; and let the dry land appear.’” The historian adds, “And it was so;” but he gives us no details of the operation. Kit.—The third day witnessed two consecutive and connected acts of creation—the separation of the sea from the dry land, and the clothing of the latter with vegetation. The creative word of the third day set free the earth from the dominion of the sea, which till then had engulfed and covered everything. The dry land is the habitation of the noblest of God’s creatures; therefore the creative word of Omnipotence liberated it from the dominion of the sea, and assigned to the latter its bounds. K.

The gathering of the waters into one place implies no more than that they were, from this day forward, to be collected into one vast body, and restrained within bounds in a place by themselves, so as to admit of the exposure of the earth’s soil. The “place founded for them” was, of course, the depths and hollows in the earth’s crust, into which they were immediately withdrawn, not through direct supernatural agency, but by their own natural gravitation. The configuration of the dry land is not described; but there is reason to believe that the original distribution of land and water was the same, or nearly the same, as it is at present. Whitelaw.—The sacred singer possibly hints at the process in Ps. 104 : 6-8 : “The deep as a garment thou didst spread over it; above the mountains stood the waters. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. They go up the mountains; they go down the valleys; unto the place that thou hast founded for them.” This description is highly poetical, and therefore true to nature. The hills are to rise out of the waters above them. The agitated waters dash up the stirring mountains, but, as these ascend, at length sink into the valleys, and take the place allotted for them. Plainly the result was accomplished by lowering some and elevating other parts of the solid ground. Over this inequality of surface, the waters, which before overspread the whole ground, flowed into the hollows, and the elevated regions became dry land. This disposition of land and water prepares for the second step, which is the main work of this day; namely, the creation of plants. M.

The language conveys the thought of a process of some kind, longer or shorter. There is that which looks like a causation, a train of sequences, or, in other words, an energizing of natural powers producing natural results. We have every reason to believe that the earth and water, as they existed at the beginning of the third day, possessed, in the main, the natural properties which they now possess, the same or a similar gravity, the same density, the same resistance, the same laws of fluidity, of pressure, of repulsion; and that the same or similar effects would have followed from their action upon each other, according as that action was slower or more rapid, that is, took place in a longer or shorter time. And so, also, in respect to the processes of evaporation and acidification; they must have had some analogy at least to the same processes as they now take place. This is only saying, that if there is a nature, there must be a harmony, a consistency in it. Such an apparent process of moving waters could not have taken place throughout all the wide earth and ocean, within the time of a few hours, without utterly deranging all such causal dependence, even if we suppose the laws of nature to have been much more rapid in their action than they have been since; of which, however, there is no intimation in the account. T. L.

12. Grass, herb yielding seed, fruit tree bearing fruit.** The plants now created are divided into three classes,—grass, herb, and tree. In the first, the seed is not noticed, as not obvious to the eye; in the second, the seed is the striking characteristic; in the third, the fruit, “in which is its seed,” in which the seed is enclosed, forms the distinguishing mark. This division is simple and natural. It proceeds upon two concurrent marks,—the structure and the seed. In the first, the green leaf or blade is prominent; in the second, the stalk; in the third, the woody texture. In the first, the seed is not conspicuous; in the second, it is conspicuous; in the third, it is enclosed in a fruit which is conspicuous. It appears from the text that the full plants, and not the seeds, germs, or roots, were created. The land sent forth grass, herb tree, each in its fully developed form. M.—The earth brought forth plants, yet they were made after their species, and, when made, a new relation was established between solar light and the earth, by which not only a new beauty was given to the world, but a new power of producing those marvellous organic compounds on which animal life, with all its further endowments, would be founded. If one looks at the structure of a leaf, with its vessels and fibres drawing into it the soil water taken up by the stem; its microscopic sac-like cells piled loosely on each other, its hygrometric breathing pores opening and shutting with every atmospheric change, and considers that this delicate organ is fitted for exposure to wind, sun, and rain, and through all to avail itself of undulations transmitted through 90,000,000 of miles of space, by means of which it can convert all the gases of putrescent matters from the soil and air into the endless variety of products of the plant, we have before us a marvel of adaptation perhaps inferior to no other in affording an inductive argument for design. Dawson.

An immense advance in the career of Creation is marked by these phrases: “whose seed is in itself, yielding fruit after its kind.” These are expressions you would never apply to anything inorganic, but only to living things, which do have seed in themselves, and which do yield fruit after their kinds. These phrases mark the eternal boundary between the organic world and the inorganic; between life and absence of life. Strikingly, too, these phrases, “yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself,” involve the doctrine of the invariability of species. G. D. B.—The doctrine of the transformation of species is most decidedly contradicted by facts. Not only has no new species originated during the period of human history, but even the lignites (or woody coal), which go back to a much earlier time, exhibit the existing flora. The present Swiss Alpine plants are the descendants of the Alpine drift flora, but, though living under different physical conditions, it is impossible to distinguish those of the present day from plants of the drift flora of Iceland and Greenland. It is the same with marine animals. No new species has had its origin since the drift period. Nor is this peculiar to the drift. The same facts are true of preceding geological periods. The same species maintain their existence through long cycles, and often, in all parts of the globe, present precisely the same characteristics. The formation immediately following any earlier period, and belonging to a new epoch, may contain some species inherited from the preceding period, but the greater part of the species show us a new type, and present distinct characteristics. There are no forms which would indicate a fusion of species. Heer.

The system of the transformation of species is no less refuted by science than by the instincts of common-sense. It rests upon no tangible fact, on no principle of scientific observation or historic tradition. All the facts ascertained, all the monuments collected in different ages and different places, respecting the existence of living species, disprove the hypothesis of their having undergone any transformation, any notable and permanent change. Guisol.—In the expressions, “yielding seed,” “having seed in itself,” the words describe with wonderful precision the characteristic of a living species, distinguishing it from mineral or inorganic substances. Beings having powers of growth and reproduction were now facts. With reference to the introduction of life, science has no explanation; for no experiments have resulted in making from dead matter a living species. We can only say, “God created.” The growing plant is on a higher level than that of ordinary molecular law; for it controls and subordinates to itself chemical forces, and thereby is enabled to make out of mineral matter chemical compounds and living structures which the forces without this control are incapable of. Only when growth ceases, and death consequently ensues, does ordinary chemical law regain control, and then decomposition commences. More than this, the living being, before it dies, produces germs which develop into other like forms, with like powers; and thus cycles of growth are continued indefinitely. In making its tissues, the living plant is storing force for the sustenance and purposes of beings of a still higher grade—those of the animal kingdom; beings that cannot live on mineral materials. There is, hence, reason for believing that the power which so controls and exalts chemical forces, raising them to the level required by the functions of a plant, cannot come from unaided chemical forces; and much less that which carries them to a still higher level,—that of the living, sentient animal. Dana.

Whence came that original first Life? The answer to this question marks the boundary-line between theism and atheism, between plan and chance, between personal will and impersonal law, between first cause and eternal necessity, between God and zero. Whence, then, came that first Life? Is there any better answer, any answer more profoundly philosophical or gloriously satisfying, than the child-like answer of the far-off, hoary witness of the Creation Panorama? “God said: ‘Let the earth bring forth grass.’ God said: ‘Let the waters swarm with the moving creature that hath life.’” This “God said,” this Eternal Word, who in the beginning was with God and was God: this “God said” of Moses and “God Word” of John—this it was who on the Third Day spoke life-givingly, germinatingly; and, lo, in a way perhaps forever inscrutable to us, the Immaterial took on itself the material, the life organized itself into the body. G. D. B.

All that God does is in prosecution of a plan, an eternal idea come to utterance. The tree ripens to the grade of a purpose that was ripe before the tree, and before the Third Day. It is all one whether we say that the plan is deposited in the seed, or that God builds the plant each moment against the pattern of His thought, as the mason lays bricks close to the plumb-line. It all sums up into the same result. There are no planless seeds, no purposeless scions. They follow a plan. Nature works from a copy. C. H. P.

14. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the 15 night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years: and let them be for 16 lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God 17 made the two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the 18 night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light 19 upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the 20 darkness: and God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a 21 fourth day. 22 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, 23 and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created the 24 great sea-monsters, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth 25 abundantly, after their kinds, and every winged fowl after its kind: and God saw that it was 26 good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the 27 seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And there was evening and there was morning, a 28 fifth day. 29 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle, and creep- 30 ing thing, and beast of the earth after its kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of 31 the earth after its kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the 32 ground after its kind: and God saw that it was good.

14-19. On the FOURTH DAY, the Sun and Moon were seen in the firmament of heaven. The fact of their previous creation is involved in the stability of the earth as a member of the solar system. It is not said that they were first created on the fourth day; and of the stars, many of which must have existed myriads of years before their light reached the earth, it is simply said, “He made the stars also,” not when He made them. The “fourth day” seems to mark the period during which the air was cleared of its thick vapors so that the heavenly bodies became visible. Stress is laid on their ruling as well as lighting the day and night. God said:—“Let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years.” They were designed, as they have ever since been used, to mark out the periods of human life; to inculcate the great lesson that “to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” P. S.—14. He made two lights. The original word for “made” is not the same as that which is rendered “create.” It is a term frequently employed to signify constituted, appointed, set for a particular purpose or use. As the rainbow was made or constituted a sign, though it might have existed before, so the sun, moon, and stars may be said to have been made or set as lights in the firmament on the fourth day though actually called into existence previously. Bush.—Lights. Luminaries, or light-bearers, spoken of lamps and candlesticks (Ex. 25:6; Num. 4:9, 16). The narrative only tells what sun, moon, and stars are in relation to the earth. When the clouds and mists are dispelled from its surface, the seas confined within their boundaries, and the first vegetation springs up; then the sky is cleared up, the sun, moon, and stars appear and assume their natural functions, marking days and nights, seasons and years; and God makes or appoints them, the sun to rule the day, and the moon to rule the night. E. H. B.

The astronomy which deals especially with the physical nature and structure of the heavenly bodies as they are made known to us by the spectroscope and improved telescope, testifies that the sun and planets have all had a beginning. It even ventures to attempt to fix the date of the sun’s beginning. “We may say,” writes Professor Langley, “with something like awe at the meaning to which science points, that the whole past of the sun cannot have been over eighteen million years; and its whole future radiation cannot last so much more. Its probable life is covered by about thirty million years. No reasonable allowance for the fall of meteors, or for all other known causes of supply, could possibly raise the whole term of its existence to sixty million years.

This is substantially Professor Young’s view.” Armstrong.—The stars also. The purpose of the sacred narrative being to describe the adaptation of the earth to the use of man, no account is taken of the nature of the stars, as suns or planets, but merely as signs in the heavens. The words in the text may be a kind of parenthesis, not assigning the special time of the creation of the stars. E. H. B.

The sun and moon were certainly made to give light upon the earth, and to rule the earth’s seasons, whatever other designs may have been in their creation, or their appointment with reference to our own world. The interpretation does not demand it, and yet we may extend the same view to the stars. The light they give the earth could hardly have been in the writer’s mind at all, but the other use may have been intended. They rule the seasons and the years; that is, they regulate our knowledge of them; and in the early ages of the world, were almost the only means for this end. They furnished the rule or canon by which they were determined. The first nations had no other almanac than the rolling heavens. Spring and summer, ploughing, sowing, and reaping time, were regulated by the rising and setting of certain constellations. Their use in this respect is referred to, not only by the Greek and Latin poets, but also in the Bible. “Canst thou bring out Mazzaroth in its seasons?” The “bands of Orion” are the iron chains of the wintry frosts and storms; the “sweet influences of Pleiades” represent the return of the genial vernal season, and of that reviviscence of nature of which the heliocentric rising of this beautiful constellation was the well-known rule or signal. Let astronomy be carried ever so far theoretically, the great practical uses of the stars to us will continue to be the accurate determination of the year, the regulation of the seasons, and the safe navigation of ships. For these uses, therefore, if not created, they were at least appointed, and revealed to our earth. T. L.

Divide the day from the night. That we may sleep and wake at healthful intervals, the Framer of our bodies and Father of our spirits has mercifully divided the day from the night; at every sunset dropping the curtains of His evening, and so inviting to repose; at every sunrise lifting the curtains of His morning, and so inviting to labor! For days and years. In all ages of the world men have accepted the motions of the heavenly bodies as the measure of duration or time. It is these motions, these sunrises and sunsets, these new and full moons, these morning and evening stars, these transits of the meridian, which have enabled men to divide time into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years, decades, centuries, millenniums. It is also to these motions of the heavenly bodies that we owe such words as dial, clock, chronometer, journal, Sabbath, anniversary, era, almanac, calendar, chronology, even that august word - History. Sun, moon, and stars are man’s natural chronometer. G. D. B.

Without an accurate measurement of the day and year, there could be no chronology; without chronology there could be no history; without history there could be no national or generic experience; without such experience there could be no progress; and without progress there could be no civilization. Take away, then, all outward measures of time, and formed as we now are of soul and body, it would be like removing the regulator, or balance wheel, of the whole system. The inner as well as the outer machinery would run down. Our souls would become chaotic, our thoughts unregulated; our life a dream, in which past phenomena, present sensations, and future imaginations would be mingled in hopeless confusion. For the want of such a regulator, man with his boasted intellect would sink below all that is known of the condition of the savage. T. L.

The works of the first three days and the last three correspond with one another. On the first day is light created; on the fourth day, the lights in heaven: on the second, the visible heaven with the waters; on the fifth, the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air: on the third, the dry land, with its clothing of vegetation; on the sixth, the land animals and man—on the first three days the inanimate substances, on the last three the living inhabitants, are produced. In the vegetable world the dry land attains its destined purpose, as the animal world, and indeed the whole creation, attains its end in man. All the following history is written only for men; and therefore the sun, moon, and stars, and the whole host of heaven, appear only as lights in the firmament of heaven. Of the inhabitants of heaven nothing is told us. Gert.

THE FIFTH DAY. Verses 20-23.

21. Created. The word bara is used for the second time. On the first day a new admission of light into a darkened region is expressed by the word “be.” On the second day a new disposition of the air and the water is described by the verbs “be” and “make.” These indicate a modification of that which already existed. On the third day no verb is directly applied to the act of divine power. This agency is thus understood, while the natural changes following are expressly noticed. In the fourth the words “be,” “make,” and “give” occur, where the matter in hand is the manifestation of the heavenly bodies and their adaptation to the use of man. In these cases it is evident that the word “create” would have been only improperly or indirectly applicable to the action of the Eternal Being. Here it is employed with propriety; as the animal world is something new and distinct summoned into existence.

22. Blessed them. We are brought into a new sphere of creation on this day, and we meet with a new act of the Almighty. To bless is to wish, and, in the case of God, to will some good to the object of the blessing. The blessing here pronounced upon the fish and the fowl is that of abundant increase. M.—The word translated “moving creature,” is the noun of the verb which in the same verse is rendered “to bring forth abundantly.” Thus we see, that the astonishing fecundity with which they were endowed, is the prevalent idea of this description. Indeed, there is no phrase in human language in which, both by noun and verb, this idea could be more forcibly expressed than in the Hebrew original. And yet all language fails to convey an idea of the amazing extent of that “abundance” in bringing forth, with which these creatures were endowed on the day of their creation. Kit.

According to Moses, plants and animals, with the exception of man, were not brought into being as single individuals, or as pairs at the most, but when God spake He said: “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures.” The result of such a work of creation was at once to people the air, the earth, and seas with many individuals or pairs of every species intended to inhabit them. To such a creation as this the fossiliferous rocks testify. Not at one point on the earth’s surface only does a particular species appear, but at many points at the same time, and these points far distant from each other. Armstrong.—The earliest life was a long marine era, and the geologist, Le Conte, unconsciously echoes the very words of the Scripture when he says that the “early” seas literally swarmed with living beings, beginning in the Cambrian, and that 10,074 species have been found in the Silurian rocks alone. Sea life was the first main exhibition. And a mighty exhibition it was. For following close upon these Silurian species, and in fact beginning there, came the vast outburst of fishes that fill the Old Red Sandstone, or Devonian, so full. But “the winged creature,” says the narrative, was to fly “over the face” (Hebrew) of heaven. And in this same Devonian series they begin with the ephemeris—Platephemera antiqua—of five inches spread of wings and two other species of neuroptera, expanding in the Carboniferous into a dozen other known species, one with a seven-inch spread, and culminating in the Jurassic and onward, with those many kinds of monstrous winged creatures, Pterosaurs or flying lizards—some of them extending their wings twenty-five feet from tip to tip, and well-nigh darkening the face of the sky—followed at length or accompanied by the true bird with feathers—the archaeopteryx, also of the Jurassic, and by numerous species in the Cretaceous. But still another mark of this wonderful era were the great monsters of sea and land, the “stretched out” creatures. A singular description; and a marvellous fulfilment does science record. Huge reptiles and amphibians, in vast variety. The world offers, at the present time, of living species, not more than six species fifteen feet in length, the largest of them not longer than twenty-five; but then, from the Carboniferous through the Cretaceous periods, not less than one hundred and seventy-five known species, ranging from twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, to eighty feet in length, and one—the titanosaur of the Jurassic—a hundred feet in length and at least thirty feet in height. S. C. B.

20,21. Moving creature that hath life—living creature that moveth. The appearance of all these forms, so infinitely various, of organic life, animal and vegetable, is attributed in Genesis to a series of Divine commands: “and God said,"—without, however, thereby either denying or even omitting expressly to notice the instrumentality of natural agents, as witness the expression: “let the waters bring forth, . . . let the land bring forth.” “And God said,"—there we see the principle that life alone is capable of begetting life. “Let the earth, . . . let the waters bring forth,"—there we see the co-operation of Nature freely granted. Godet.—The physical laws may explain the inorganic world: the biological law may account for the development of the organic; but of the point where they meet, of the strange border-land between the dead and the living, science is silent. It is as if God had placed everything in earth and heaven in the hands of nature, but had reserved a point at the genesis of life for His direct appearing. Drummond.

All life, vegetable or animal, has for its starting-point the organic cell; that is a fact which no man of science now disputes. But whence comes the cell itself? Is it the result of some happy combination of the elements of inorganic matter? or is it a sudden apparition in the midst of this,—a phenomenon entirely inexplicable without the act of a creator? Godet.—A minute examination has not, up to this time, discovered any power capable of originating life but life itself. Inanimate matter cannot become living except under the influence of matter already living. This is a fact in science which seems to me as well ascertained as the law of gravitation. And I am ready to accept as an article of faith in science, valid for all time and in all space, that life is produced by life, and only by life. Wm. Thompson.

In all departments of philosophy, human curiosity is stopped, at an earlier or at a later stage, by an impassable barrier—it meets what is inscrutable. The constitution of the elements in the material world is inscrutable; the gravitating force, and the principle of chemical affinity—the nature of light, and the principle of vegetable life—these things are utterly inscrutable: so also is the principle of animal life; and so, in like manner, but not more so, is mind. At all these points alike, and as to each of them for the same reasons, we reach a limit which the human mind has never yet passed. I. T.

The doctrine that God created plants and animals in the beginning, “after their kind,” has prevailed for three thousand years, from Moses until now, among the best, noblest, and wisest of men. It has been no crude fancy of ignorant peasants alone. Among its firm believers are all the prophets and all the apostles, most of the Greek philosophers, and Christian divines and men of science for fifteen centuries, the intellectual lights and standard-bearers of the leading nations of the earth. It includes among its disciples and adherents nearly all the great names, like Bacon, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton, by whom the chief advances of modern science have been made. Its true birthplace is in no flint-weapon manufactory, or bone-cavern—in an “era of profoundest darkness.” It is in thick darkness of a very opposite kind, when Moses, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians—the foremost, wisest, and noblest of all living men, drew near to the presence of Jehovah, talked with Him face to face in the holy mount as a man speaketh with his friend, and received from Him those messages which have enlightened and cheered the minds and hearts of sinful men through every later age of the world’s history. Birks.

According to Moses, at their creation special provision was made that each several kind of plant and animal should continue its kind by natural generation. On this point science, long at variance with the Mosaic cosmogony, is now in harmony therewith. In the higher forms of plant and animal life, that the offspring was the product of a parent like itself has been long known and universally admitted. That this same law obtains among the lower orders, even the lowest, science has now demonstrated. Armstrong.—

Seven times is the phrase, “after his (or their) kind,” repeated, in four verses. Like the previous, solemn iteration of the same phrase in the story of the genesis of the plants, it almost stands like a prophetic caveat against the modern hypothesis of the mutability of species. Alike according to Moses and the observed facts of nature, the tree, whose seed is in itself, bears fruit after its kind; the fish of the sea bears fishes after its kind; the bird of the air bears birds after its kind; the beast of the land bears beasts after its kind. G. D. B.

The record in Genesis sets forth that God created grass, herb, and then fruit tree; “each after his kind;” also reptiles, fish, fowl and land animals, each “after his kind;” and finally man “in the image of God.” Over against this the modern theory (of Darwin) holds that all the animals of our globe “have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number;” and moreover, that man has in this respect no preeminence above the beasts, but has descended in the same line with them from some one of the four or five progenitors of the great animal kingdom. More still the author says in the same connection—“Analogy would lead me one step further, viz. to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype.” Not merely does he build upon assumed facts where no known facts are—which is building upon nothing—but where no facts can be, which is building not merely upon negatives but upon impossibilities. There is no room for his assumed facts where he locates them. If Geology proves anything it proves that vegetable and animal life commenced on our planet as soon as the planet was ready and not sooner, and that we have the remains of the earliest living organisms in the oldest fossil-bearing rocks. His scheme is therefore conditioned upon impossibilities and must be false. That plant life shades off by almost imperceptible stages till it comes so near to the lowest forms of animal life that the dividing line is scarcely if at all perceptible, no scientist disputes. But the ultimate reason for this remarkable fact is not to facilitate the transit of generations from the one province to the other. Of such transit there is not the first shade of evidence. The reason is that the Great Author of nature out of his infinite resources has filled both kingdoms perfectly full of life-forms so that no territory between their respective domains lies unoccupied. It is simply a fecundity of life-forms or species, analogous to the fecundity of living representatives under most of these species—all alike

tion! How adapted are the solids for incessant action, and the fluids for continual motion! Not more remarkable is the multiplicity of parts which enter into the composition of the body—the connection between these several parts, and the variety of functions which the whole performs, than is the close dependence of one function upon another. Such is the construction of this wondrous mechanism as to contain within itself the means of ministering to its own growth and preservation. It can draw its supply of materials from without—can appropriate to its own use every form of organized matter, and can convert it by a subtle chemistry into blood, and by sending this through the whole frame can nourish and vivify and stimulate every part. Here is a mechanism which has no parallel! Here is a workmanship which proclaims itself to be Divine! Here are the clearest manifestations of infinite wisdom and benevolence—and the most glorious! Ferguson.

In the last work we have God here giving His last stroke, and summing up all into man, the whole into a part, the universe into an individual; so that whereas in other creatures we have but the trace of His footsteps, in man we have the draught of His hand. In him were united all the scattered perfections of the creature; all the graces and ornaments, all the airs and features of being were abridged into this small yet full system of nature and divinity; as we might well imagine that the great Artificer would be more than ordinarily exact in drawing His own picture. South.—First, thou madest the great house of the world, and furnishedst it: then thou broughtest in thy tenant to possess it. All thy creation hath not more wonder in it than one of us: other creatures thou madest by a simple command; man, not without a divine consultation: others at once; man thou didst first form, then inspire: others in several shapes like to none but themselves; man, after thine own image: others with qualities fit for service; man, for dominion. Man had his name from thee; they had their names from man. How should we be consecrated to thee above all others, since thou hast bestowed more cost on us than others! Bp. II.

The points clearly taught in the Bible about the origin of man are that his body was made out of pre-existent material, and his soul was created out of nothing. . . . The body is generated. The soul is created by God. At every moment of conception God creates a new soul. A. A. Hodge.—At its first formation the body of man, so exquisitely organized, was no more than a mass of inert matter, till the Lord God endowed it with vitality, and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”—literally, lives. Jamieson.

As to his rational and moral part, he was not formed, but “created;” brought into being by that mysterious energy which speaks existence out of non-existence. As to his material and corruptible part, he was—not created—but “formed,” fashioned out of already existing materials, “the dust of the ground.” After his lifeless body had been thus fashioned, God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;” and thus the created and the formed taking union, “man became a living soul,” a simply perfect man, new from his Maker’s hand, and bright in his Maker’s image. Stone.

“Man,” says the Scripture, “became a living soul.” But the animals, also, are styled nephesh hayya, breath of life, or soul of life, or living soul. It is the general term for animation, including all beyond matter, all the immaterial region, whether we call it life, sense, feeling, thought, or intellect, extending from the lowest sentient to the highest rational. As far, then, as this phrase (nephesh hayya) is concerned, we could predicate of man no superiority of origin or of psychological rank above the beast. Every thing depends upon the view we take of the different source from which, or different way is which the human nephesh hayya came. In the Hebrew account, the emphasis is not on the word for life, but on the manner of origination. “And God breathed into him the nephesh hayya and man became,”—that is, thus “man became a living soul,” and, of course, a higher soul in proportion to the more specially divine and higher source from whence it came. The animation of the other living creatures was from the earth, and through the earth, by the common vivification of the Spirit in nature, the Ruah Elohim mentioned in Gen. 1:2,—the brooding, cherishing, life-giving, life-sustaining spirit, which is the genial source of all physical animation. But God breathed into man the breath of life; in a sense higher than the term would bear when applied to the animals, he made this inspiration or inbreathing to be the medium of endowment with moral, rational, and religious faculties; still more than this,—over all, and above all, he made a covenant with him. The word is not in the first of Genesis, but its spirit is there, and the term itself is most expressly predicated of the transaction when referred to in other parts of the Old Testament. He thus places him above nature, not merely in his psychological constitution, but in his objective relation to the divine. Here, then, is the crowning distinction between man and the physical world in all its grades of existence. And this is the glory of the human soul, that unlike the animal, it can be in this forensic or covenant relation to the universal law-giver. Deity binds himself to give his creature life and immortality. T. L.

The epithet which we translate living, the Arabic renders a rational soul; and none but a rational deserves the name of a living soul. For all other forms or souls, which are of an earthly extract, do both depend on and die with the matter out of which they were educed; but this being of another nature, a spiritual and substantial being is therefore rightly styled a living soul. The Chaldee renders it a speaking soul. And it deserves remark, that the ability of speech is conferred on no other soul but man’s. Other creatures have apt and excellent organs; but no creature except man, whose soul is of a heavenly nature and extraction, can articulate the sound, and form it into words by which the notions and sentiments of one soul are in a noble, apt, and expeditious manner conveyed to the understanding of another soul. And, indeed, what should any other creature do with the faculty or power of speech, without a principle of reason to guide and govern it? It is sufficient that they discern each other’s meaning by dumb signs; but speech is proper only to the rational or living soul. However we render it, a living, a rational, or a speaking soul, it distinguisheth the soul of man from all other souls. Flavel.—Life is the one universal soul which, by virtue of the enlivening Breath and the informing Word, all organized bodies have in common, each after its kind. This, therefore, all animals possess, and man as an animal. But, in addition to this, God transfused into man a higher gift, and specially inbreathed—even a living (that is, self-subsisting) soul, a soul having its life in itself. “And man became a living soul.” He did not merely possess it, he became it. It was proper being, his truest self, the man in the man. None, then, not one of human kind so poor and destitute but there is provided for him, even in his present state, “a house not built with hands.” Ay, and a house gloriously furnished. Ch’eridge.

Man was made last because he was worthiest. The soul was inspired last, because yet more noble. No air, no earth, no water was here used to give help to this work; thou, that breathedst upon man and gavest him the Holy Spirit, didst also breathe upon the body and gavest it a living spirit; we are beholden to nothing but thee for our soul. Our flesh is from flesh, our spirit is from the God of spirits. Bp. H.—First God breathed the light of sense upon the face of matter; then he breathed the light of reason into the face of man; and still by the illumination of his Spirit he breatheth and inspireth light into the faces of his chosen. Bacon.

Man’s Dual Nature. In man two elements were combined; the one Divine, the other purely human—the one the form of clay, the other the breath of Divine life breathed into it. Thus man is of twofold origin. In respect of his body, he belongs to the animal sphere, and is the highest product of nature. In so far as a godlike spirit dwells in him, he is above nature, and the offspring of God. In virtue of this twofold character, he forms the link between God and nature, and is the representative of God, the Priest and the King of Nature. The indwelling of the breath of the Lord constitutes him the image of God, destined for, and capable of, Divine wisdom and power, holiness and blessedness. K.

The dualistic view holds that man consists of body (basar, soma, corpus) and soul (ruach, pneuma, psyche, animus), and of these two elements only. Trichotomy makes a distinction between pneuma, spirit, and psyche, soul, and holds that the latter is the sentient nature which we have in common with the brutes (understanding, desire, feeling), while the former denotes our higher peculiar nature (reason, conscience, will). The point at issue therefore is, whether these two terms, the animal soul and the rational soul, with their varied applications, denote two distinct entities, or are simply the names of two different powers of one and the same substance.—Positive evidence of bipartite nature. (1) The Scripture account is a plain statement of a material body framed out of the dust of the earth and the vital principle derived from God. There is not even a hint of any third factor in man’s nature. Body and soul, these only, are mentioned. How could there have been an omission of the term for spirit (ruach), if that also had been included as a distinct element in the creative process? (2) Further, the way in which the terms soul and spirit are employed for the most part in the Scripture is decisive against the theory of trichotomy. It is true that the latter term is sometimes used to denote the higher functions or faculties of the inner man. But in general the two terms are used interchangeably, and often indifferently as parallel and equivalent expres-

traceable to the infinite resources of the Creator’s wisdom and power. H. C.

FIRST HALF OF THE SIXTH DAY. Verses 24, 25.

24,25. The waters now are peopled; the air is peopled; and terrestrial animals alone are wanting. Accordingly, on the sixth day, God is described as resuming his creative work, in the words:—“Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind.” The term “living creature,” seems to be merely a collective designation of the animals which are there indicated according to their kind. Under the term of “cattle,” are included the ruminant herbivora, generally gregarious and capable of domestication. The “beasts of the earth” are the carnivora or beasts of prey in their various kinds. The name by which they are designated comes from a word signifying “life” or “living,” and is well suited to the vivacious, active, and vigorous character which they display in comparison with the animals which crop the herb of the field. Under the remaining class, rendered by “creeping thing,” we have not only the minor quadrupeds that seem to creep rather than walk, and such as creep on many feet, but all that glide along the surface of the soil—the serpents, annelides, etc. The idea throughout this classification is that of creeping. Kit.

The flat of the fifth day reads: “Let the waters bring forth abundantly.” The words which follow describe the lower orders of animals, or the Invertebrates, together with all Vertebrates excepting Mammals (or quadrupeds and man). The flat of the first half of the sixth day begins with “Let the earth bring forth,” and the words that follow describe the Mammals, the division of Vertebrates of which Man is the head. The succession in the living tribes given in the chapter is: (1) Plants (third day); (2) Invertebrates and the lower Vertebrates (fifth day); (3) Mammals, or the higher Vertebrates (first half of the sixth day); (4) Man, the head of Mammals (second half of the sixth day). Science might say that the principles of zoological classification would have been conformed to more closely if the work of the fifth day had ended with the Invertebrates, leaving all the Vertebrates to the sixth day. But this arrangement, viewed in the light of the philosophy of history, is no improvement; since the record, like the rest of the Bible, has special reference to Man, in whom is the consummation of all history. The sixth day’s work includes only that particular division of Vertebrates, to which Man himself belongs, whose common characteristic, that of suckling their young, is, through the feelings of subjection, reverence and affection it occasions, of the highest value as a means of binding child to parent, man to man, and man to his Maker. DAN’L.

The Mosaic cosmogony presents us with a certain order of creation—viz.: (1) “Grass, herbs, and trees”—i.e., the vegetable kingdom, and this before the sun, moon, and stars were “set in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth;” (2) fishes, including all the numerous inhabitants of the waters, together with “great sea-mons’ers,” and “birds,” or flying creatures, including insects; (3) “cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth.” Plants alone are capable of feeding directly upon inorganic matter. Animals, although the ultimate composition of their food is the same with that of plants, are incapable of digesting that food until it has undergone the preliminary organization which it acquires in assuming a vegetable form. Armstrong.—The most important function of the plant in the economy of nature is, with the aid of the sun’s light, to turn inorganic into organic matter, and thus prepare food for the animal. Nothing else in nature does this important work. The animal cannot do it, and starves in the midst of an abundance of the materials needed for the building up of its body. The plant, therefore, is the indispensable basis of all animal life; for though animals partially feed upon each other, ultimately the organic matter they need must come from the plant. Guyot.—Matter is brought into being. It is rudimental. The Holy Ghost—whose special province is process, evolution, organization—broods over the elemental abyss. There are dividings and combinings, and, at length, there is a becoming of light, with (doubtless) its kindred agents, such as heat, electricity, magnetism. Processes go on, and the atmosphere is constituted. The new agents become additional forces in the great laboratory; and there results the mineral kingdom, with its gradations of rocks, clays, chemical compounds, and crystalline formations. The mineral kingdom is a preparation for higher planes of being. From the organizing processes of the brooding Spirit the floral world has a becoming. All that have gone before have been made tributary to this. It takes them up and assimilates them, transforming them into living organisms of root, and trunk, and bough, and frond, and flower, and fruit, and seed. The vegetable system is a prophecy of something higher. It has scant meaning if it is to find its end in itself. In due time the animal world appears. It gathers up into itself the elements of all below it, and exalts them into the more complex and nobler organisms of flesh and blood, bone and sinew, nerve and brain, sensation, instinct, affection, and will. An.

The world is to be regarded throughout as being, in respect to its foundation, the act of God, or creation; according to its development, nature; according to its appearance, cosmos; and according to the plastic life-principle lying at its base, it is won. T. L.

If by the sagacity of one infernal mind, a single planet has been seduced from its allegiance, and brought under the ascendancy of him who in the Scriptures is called the god of this world, and if the errand on which the Redeemer came was to destroy the works of the devil, then let this planet have all the littleness which astronomy has assigned to it—call it, what it is, one of the smaller islets which float on the ocean of immensity—it has become the theatre of such a competition as may have all the desires and all the energies of a divided universe embarked upon it. It involves in it other objects than the single recovery of our species. It decides higher questions—it stands linked with the supremacy of God. To an infidel ear, all this may carry the sound of something wild and visionary along with it; but though only known through the medium of revelation, after it is known who can fail to recognize its harmony with the great lineaments of human experience? Who does not recognize in these facts much that goes to explain why our planet has taken so conspicuous a position in the foreground of history? Chalmers.—As Judea was the least and most despised country of the earth, and yet “the glorious land” (De. 11: 16, 41); as Bethlehem was least among the thousands of Judah (Mic. 5: 2) and yet the Sun of Righteousness arose there (Mal. 4: 2), so our solar system is the Judea of the universe, and our insignificant earth the Bethlehem of this holy land—poor and despised, yet precious above all. When at first Jehovah founded the earth, the morning stars looked on with songs of praise; when the eternal Word full of grace and truth, left the throne of glory to clothe Himself with our nature, the hosts of heaven burst forth into this hymn: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” Again when the Son of man shall return in the clouds, surrounded with all the glory of his eternal Godhead, to renew heaven and earth and to consummate all things, shall those messengers of his power and goodness, in whose presence even now here is joy at every new progress of the kingdom of God upon earth, behold with rapturous delight the unfolding of that mystery of godliness, into which they now desire to look, and in louder tones and loftier strains shall they enchoir their never-ending Hallelujah. Kurtz.

1. Summary Points.

These lessons emerge unforced from the record. That creation did not create itself. That matter is not God’s coeval, but his creature and servant. That God only had no beginning, and that all things else began to be by his will. That the whole universe is one harmonious system, the work of one God; the projection of his thought, the transcript of his plan. That such plan bore the stamp of a preconceived progress; and evolved itself in orderly successions, stage after stage, toward a foreseen terminus or goal. That each form or type of life was made “after its kind,” and owes its characteristic endowments to creative ordination, not to fortuitous development. That man has not developed into what he is from some bestial type, but holds his prerogatives as a gift direct from the Almighty. That we owe no worship to nature, and all worship to God. G. Rorison.

In this account of the creation of plants and animals we note the following particulars: (1) It is a creation out of pre-existing materials, and not, like that of the universe, out of nothing; (2) the origin of life, like the origin of matter, is traced directly to God himself; (3) that special provision is made that each several kind of plant and animal shall continue its kind by natural generation; (4) that plants and animals are brought into being not singly, nor in pairs, but in great numbers; and (5) that this creation is said to have been effected in a certain order. Armstrong.—The history is that of creative ascent from dead matter to life; from invertebrate life to that of the backbone; from the life of the backbone in the fish-reptile series to that of the breast; from the life of the breast to that of the plenarily-endowed brain. G. Rorison.

1. Moses, who in his first sentence sets God’s personality in clear relief against the universe

(which is not “evolved” out of, but “made” by him), keeps it distinct throughout from confusion with natural forces. 2. God, though put at the beginning, is not left there, having, as the Deists taught, “made a world, and standing apart to see it go.” The work of creation is represented as progressive, and God is continually present and continually intervening, and according to our Lord’s testimony he “worketh hitherto.” 3. The successive entrance of the physical, the vital and the mental factors into the problem of the growing world is clearly recognized. But the divine intelligence is always put before and exalted above the divine power; “God said” before “God made.” The order of creation also is teleologically and not genealogically determined. Grass and herb appear before beast and man, not to be kept but to feed them. 4. The supposed continuity of development is broken across by distinctly epochal divisions, across whose border, whatever may transpire within them, the genetic lines do not extend. It is worthy of passing notice, as hinting of what we possibly have yet to learn of the significance of the sacred record, that fishes, birds and reptiles—which are so strangely isolated from other creatures and grouped together as the product of “the waters” in a single day—are now said to be correspondingly united and isolated by a unique physiological circumstance. They are literally “of one blood,” the blood disk in them all being oval, while in other creatures it is round. The agency of second causes is uniformly recognized and no “fishing of atoms” into perfect form is hinted at. But it is not the vegetable world, but “the waters” that bring forth aquatic creatures, nor does the Creator “form man” of the “beasts of the earth,” but of the “dust” of the earth. There is in each case a distinct return to the elemental, and a creative word. J. B. Thomas.

The narrative is in keeping, as far as it goes, with the facts of astronomy and geology, of botany, zoology and ethnology. It agrees with the cosmogonies of all nations, so far as these are founded upon a genuine tradition and not upon the mere conjectures of a lively fancy. Finally, it has the singular and superlative merit of drawing the diurnal scenes of that creation to which our race owes its origin in the simple language of common life, and presenting each transcendent change as it would appear to an ordinary spectator standing on the earth. It was thus sufficiently intelligible to primeval man, and remains to this day intelligible to us, as soon as we divest ourselves of the narrowing preconceptions of our modern civilization. M.

The whole record shows remarkable freedom from merely local or national peculiarities. The Euphrates and the Mesopotamian plains influence the Babylonian cosmogony; the Nile gives character to the Egyptian; sunny slopes and contrasting heights determine the Grecian; and valley gloom, forest depths, and wintry storms, the Scandinavian. It is easy to trace the physical basis of distinct cosmogonies. The bases themselves may vary, but their connection with religious beliefs is always uniform. Even national myths about creation have not preserved their original cast. They have varied with the history of the people. While the religious tendency of the national mind, and the traditional basis as to the mere fact of creation, have remained, the form of the cosmogony has been completely changed; it has been so moulded as to suit the different physical conformation and other varied conditions of the new country in which the people have settled. But no such process or influence is ever traceable in the Bible account. There is nothing local; nothing contingent; nothing dependent on the traditions of any country; not a line which indicates any such antecedent influence. W. Fraser.—In all the other cosmogonies we discover the peculiarities of nation, of age, of partial modes of thinking. In the Mosaic there is nothing national. It is altogether separate from the Jewish national history. It stands away back of the earliest annals in which their national characteristics begin to make themselves manifest. Thus, standing at the head of all history, it belongs to all nations. It is no more distinctively Jewish, as far as the known history of this people is concerned, than it is Egyptian, or Greek, or Babylonian, unless we regard as Jewish peculiarities the grandeur and purity of its theism. T. L.

The cosmogony of the Babylonians represents the beginning of things as in darkness and water, where nondescript animals, hideous monsters, half-men and half-beasts, appeared, and after this, a woman—who personates the creative spirit or principle—was split into two parts, and the heaven and the earth produced by the division. Then Belus, the supreme divinity, cut off his own head, and his blood trickling down and mingling with the dust of the earth, produced human creatures having intelligence and spiritual life. According to the Phoenician cosmogony, that which first appeared was an ether or a mist diffused in space. Then arose the wind, the representative of motion, and from this agitation proceeded a spiritual God, from whom again in turn proceeded an egg—which is so common a feature of the cosmogonies of antiquity—the division of which, as in the case of the woman, produced the heavens and the earth. The noise of thunder awakened beings into spiritual life. The Egyptian cosmogony was in general harmony with the Phoenician. Its principal divinity was Ptah, the world-creating power, who shaped the cosmic egg, which again appears here, as in the Phoenician. There followed from Ptah a long succession of gods, with various offices and powers—solar, telluric, psychical—from whom at length proceeded demigods, and from these again heroes, until the line of our common humanity was established. According to Grote, “the mythical world of the Greeks opens with the gods, anterior as well as superior to man; it gradually descends, first to heroes, and next to the human race. Along with the gods are found various monstrous natures, ultra-human and extra-human, who cannot with propriety be called gods, but who partake with gods and man in the attributes of free-will, conscious agency, and susceptibility of pleasure and pain—such as the Harpies the Gorgons, the Sirens, the Sphinx, the Cyclops, the Centaurs, etc.” After violent contests among these gigantic creatures and forces, there arises a stable government of Zeus, the chief among the gods. First appears Chaos, then the broad, firm, flat Earth, with deep and dark Tartarus below, and from these proceed various divinities and creatures, some grand and terrible, some simply monstrous; their relations to each other violate all notions of decency and morality; their wars and slaughters, their gross and abominable crimes, issue in successive creative products upon the earth, which terminate at last in the appearing of man. J. P. T.

The Biblical cosmogony is distinguished by the absence of everything fanciful and absurd, with which the others teem. The Biblical betrays nothing of a local or national character, whereas the others are indelibly stamped with them. The Biblical is characterized by correct and worthy conceptions of the Creator, the rest either ignore Divine interposition, ascribe eternity to matter, introduce some demiurgic principle, or exhibit a supreme Being in a way degrading, confused, and indistinct. The Biblical is simple, grand, and consistent, embodying all the truths in heathen cosmogonies, but free from their chaotic, grotesque, and self-contradictory representation. D. M.

The Mosaic account is a record of the steps by which God made the world. The Pagan myths are, for the most part, theogonius as well as cosmogonies,—that is, they give the generation of the universe, including Gods as well as men. They make us all the children of one mother. When we come to trace strictly the leading idea, plants, animals, men, and divinities, even the highest Gods, are all, in some way, developments from one unaided and eternal nature. The language of Pindar (Nem. vi.) would give the spirit of almost every cosmogony, but that of the Bible. “One race of Gods and men, from one mother breathe we all.” And this mother is nature, or, as expressed in the grosser form, the earth. Gods, indeed, are mentioned, “Gods many,” and demigods in vast numbers, but the highest gods are only the older powers, the first-born of this universal parent. In this one respect, how immense the difference between all such mythologies and the Mosaic narrative! How irresistible the argument from this alone, that it must have had an origin, not only totally distinct from, but immeasurably above, them all. In the one, God is the supernatural cause as well as the supernatural governor of nature, in the others, the Divinity (if for convenience we retain the name), is only Nature’s first-born, her highest or oldest development.

In whose mind was born this wondrous vision, in all the rigid truthfulness of its unity and consistency? Whence this remarkable order of ideas so different from what some would regard as the natural offspring of that simple, unphilosophical, unscientific age? Whence this peculiar chronological aspect, this succession of periods, rising from the chaotic, the unformed, through such regular and harmonious gradations into higher and higher forms of life? What is there like it, or to be at all compared with it, in any mythology on earth? There it stands, high above them all, and remote from them all, in its air of great antiquity, in its unaccountableness, in its serene truthfulness, in its unapproachable sublimity, in that impress of divine majesty and ineffable holiness which even the unbelieving neologist has been compelled to acknowledge, and by which every devout reader feels that the first page in Genesis is forever distinguished from any mere human production. T. L.

2. Order and Organization, Law and Adaptation, testify that the Universe is a Creation of God

Creation is the production of order. What a simple but comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Order is the law of all intelligible existence. Everything that exists, that has been made by God or produced by man, of any permanent value, is only some manifestation of order in its thousandfold possibilities. Everything that has a shape is a manifestation of order. Well ordered stones make architecture; well-ordered words make good writing; well-ordered facts make science. Disorder makes nothing at all, but unmakes everything. Stones in disorder produce ruins; an ill-ordered social condition is decline, revolution, or anarchy; ill-ordered ideas are absurdity; ill-ordered facts are chaos. J. S. Buckie.

Astronomy testifies to a wonderful order pervading the universe, mathematical in its accuracy, in so far as the bodies astronomy has to deal with are concerned; zoology and botany testify to an equally wonderful order prevailing throughout the kingdom of organic nature—a wonderful adaptation of living creatures to their environments, and of the parts and organs of these living creatures to their functions, which are utterly inconsistent with the idea of their being the product of chance. G. D. A.—The conception of the constancy of the order of nature has become a dominant idea of modern thought. To persons familiar with the facts upon which that conception is based, and competent to estimate their significance, it has ceased to be conceivable that chance should have any place in the universe, or that events should depend upon any but the natural sequence of cause and effect. Hoxley.

If there be an order and harmony, there must be an orderer, one that “made the earth by His power, established the world by His wisdom, and stretched out the heavens by His discretion” (Jer. 10:12). Order being the effect, cannot be the cause of itself. Order is the disposition of things to an end, and is not intelligent, but implies an intelligent orderer; and therefore it is as certain that there is a God as it is certain there is order in the world. Order is an effect of reason and counsel; this reason and counsel must have its residence in some being before this order was fixed. The things ordered are always distinct from that reason and counsel whereby they are ordered; and also after it, as the effect is after the cause. No man begins a piece of work but he hath the model of it in his own mind; no man builds a house or makes a watch but he hath the idea or copy of it in his own head. This beautiful world bespeaks an idea of it or a model, since there is such a magnificent wisdom in the make of each creature, and the proportion of one creature to another; this model must be before the world, as the pattern is always before the thing that is wrought by it. This therefore must be in some intelligent and wise agent, and this is God. Charnock.

Kant defines organization “a product of nature in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.” Hence, every part of an organized structure is necessarily indicative of wisdom; but where our view is extended to the boundless varieties of organized life, we are convinced that the resources of creative wisdom are boundless; they can have no limitation. Every variety of life has an organization of its own, from which arise the numerous types of being, scientifically divided into classes, orders, genera, and species. The diversified forms of being are astounding. Botanical science has arranged and classified from eighty to a hundred thousand species of plants; new discoveries are continually increasing the number; and to these must be added the extinct species embedded in geological deposits. Zoology has numbered upward of a thousand species of quadrupeds, five thousand species of birds, an equal number of fishes, a hundred thousand species of insects; while of reptiles, shell-fish, crustaceans, worms, radiates, zoophytes, and animalcules, the numerous species defy the industry of man to ascertain. In these multifarious species, what diversity in size, from the microscopic plant to the gigantic pine, from the monad that finds a world in a drop of water to the iguanodon and the whale! What diversity in shape, in colors, in habits, in instincts, in physical conformation! The earth, the air, the ocean, are crowded with life, and the varieties of organization are as numerous as the conditions under which life is capable of subsisting. It is as if the Creator had called these endless varieties of being into existence for the purpose of displaying the inexhaustible opulence of His wisdom, of showing to His intelligent creatures that the resources of His knowledge and power are absolutely infinite. W. Cooke.

Matter—the lowest order—is a general substratum for all the others. Aided and fashioned by the principle of life, it performs higher functions in the plant and animal. Matter, plant life and animal life perform higher intellectual and moral functions under the guidance of the human soul. Every one of the lower powers, associated with a higher element, becomes instrumental: the higher as a cause, the lower as a condition of existence, or as an instrument, both co-operating to a common progress. But after each of these factors has performed its part, something yet remains to be explained. The result, varied as it may be, is never arbitrary confusion, but order and beauty; and this shows the constant and indispensable supervision of God over his work. Guyot.

The mystery of the universe and the meaning of God’s world are shrouded in hopeless obscurity, until we learn to feel that all laws suppose a laxepier, and that all working involves a Divine energy. Maclaren.—A law supposes an agent and a power; for it is the mode, according to which the agent proceeds, the order according to which the power acts. Without the presence of such an agent, of such a power, conscious of the relations on which the law depends, producing the effects which the law prescribes, the law can have no efficacy, no existence. Hence we infer that the intelligence by which the law is ordained, the power by which it is put into action, must be present, at all times and in all places, where the effects of the law occur; that thus the knowledge and the agency of the Divine Being pervade every portion of the universe, producing all action and passion, all permanence and change. The laws of matter are the laws which He, in his wisdom, prescribes to his own acts; His universal presence is the necessary condition of any course of events; His universal agency the only organ of any efficient force. Whewell.—The laws of nature can no more administer themselves than the laws of the land. Just as the laws of the land imply the existence of an authority, a magistrate, who will act on them and assert them, so the laws of nature bear witness to an unseen force, or power, or person, who imposes and enforces them, rewarding those who obey, punishing those who violate them. This power we call God. We know of no adequate source of universal law save the Maker of heaven and earth. So that our first and simplest conception of God, the conception we derive from the facts of the physical universe, is that He is the source of physical law. . . . Science knows of no pantheon. There must be one dominant and supreme power which rules over all. And this power, which sits behind the laws of nature, must be inconceivably great and wise. If it were not wise and strong beyond our reach of thought, the universe, instead of being a harmony of invariable and beneficent sequences, would break into ruinous and irremediable confusion; disaster would tread on the heels of disaster, and the end would be destruction and death. What, then, shall we call this power? how name it? We call it God. Others, hiding their ignorance in unmeaning and self-contradictory phrases, may call it “the stream of tendency,” ignoring the fountain from which the stream flows. We say that law implies a law-giver, that power implies a person from whom it proceeds; and we worship God as the sole source of the forces and laws of nature. Brit. Quar.

The laws of nature are not to be confounded with causes. There can be no laws of a thing until the thing itself is caused or made. They presuppose such causes, or volitions, of which they are the effects or manifestations. In other words, they are the rules by which God is pleased to regulate the phenomena of nature. The existing form of the physical constitution, therefore, is entirely dependent on the will of God. Every one of its laws, when creation is viewed on a comprehensive scale, is, for anything we know, as strictly provisional as any of the temporary enactments of the Jewish ritual. J. H.

If it be a fact of universal experience that man’s will, while unable to suspend or alter a single law of nature, is yet able to change and guide the succession of events to an incalculable extent, we cannot reasonably think that the Creator of man has less power over the course of the world. If we believe in Him at all, we must credit Him with the ability to exert, if so He wills, a directing influence over the course of events without the necessity of suspending or abrogating any one of the laws which have been impressed by Him on nature. The touch of his hand cannot be less efficacious than the touch of man’s hand. Providence may guide and rule without in the least degree violating natural law and order. B. Maitland.—I exercise a discretionary providence within a limited scope. I may make my field an orchard, a desert, or a wilderness. Possessed of wealth, I may send with it comfort and joy through a score of else wretched homes; or, by my penuriousness, may make my own home cheerless and desolate. There is here no infraction of general laws; but I insert my own will so as to make these laws do my bidding. Can God’s power be less than man’s? On the other hand, may not man’s action upon nature under law interpret God’s action upon nature under the laws which He has made supreme, and which He no more transcends than He suffers man to violate them? Man disturbs not the normal relation between cause and effect, or antecedent and consequent: no more does the Divine Providence. But as man, to effect his purposes, so lays hold on the course of Nature as to modify the current of events, yet without deranging the laws of causation; in like manner may the Divine will interpose with reference to man’s deserts or needs, so that the laws of causation shall be undisturbed, and yet events shall flow in an entirely different channel from that which they would have taken had man’s deserts or needs been other than they are. Peabody.—If we mean by law the observed regularity with which God works in nature as in grace, then, in our contact with law, we are dealing, not with a brutal, unintelligent, unconquerable force, but with the free will of an intelligent and moral Artist, who works, in his perfect freedom, with sustained and beautiful symmetry. Where is the absurdity of asking Him to hold his hand or to hasten his work? He to whom we pray may be trusted to grant or to refuse a prayer, as may seem best to the highest Wisdom and the truest Love. If He really works at all; if something that is neither moral nor intelligent has not usurped his throne—it is certain that “the thing that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself.” H. P. L.

So far from general laws being able, as superficial thinkers imagine, to produce the beautiful adaptations which are so numerous in nature, they are themselves the results of nicely balanced and skilful adjustments. So far from being simple, they are the product of many arrangements. They are not agencies, but ends contemplated by Him who adjusted the physical agencies which produced them. As such they become the rules of God’s house, the laws of His kingdom; and whenever we see such laws, we see the certain traces of a Lawgiver. McCosh.—We are, by the discovery of the general laws of nature, led into a scene of wider design, of deeper contrivances, of more comprehensive adjustments. Final causes, if they appear driven further from us by such extension of our views, embrace us only with a vaster and more majestic circuit. Instead of a few threads connecting some detached objects they become a stupendous network which is wound round and round the universal frame of things. Our conviction that the artist works intelligently is not destroyed, though it may be modified and transferred when we obtain a sight of his tools. Our discovery of laws cannot contradict our persuasion of ends. Whewell.

So far as the management of the material universe is concerned, God has declared unmistakably that He has no favorites. He has given to material forces a law which cannot be broken. His sun shines on the evil and on the good, and His rain falls on the just and on the unjust. The great blessings of life come to us all alike. The cradle, and the mother’s tenderness, and the mirth of boyhood, and the lover’s joy, and old age, and the smile of children, and night and day, and seed-time, and harvest, and summer, and winter, are for the poor man quite as much as for the king. And we shall all be equal at the last—all classed according to life’s natural ranks, fathers, sons, brothers, friends—not rich, nor wise, nor noble. There is in nature nothing provisional, nothing provincial. “The sun,” says a wise writer, “smiles equally over Arctic wastes and over-teeming cities, and glances alike from the sword of an Attila and from the crucifix of a Xavier.” What science calls the uniformity of nature, faith accepts as the fidelity of God. It is thus that He disciplines us through obedience and patience, and rebukes the wild sophistry of temptation by irremediable decrees. We trust Him more because there is no devilish element in nature, no wild impulse rushing, with eruptions of curse and blessing, into space. And when we thus see nature making such superb provision for our joy in all the lavish prodigality of her manifold mysteries; when we see her steadily waning us against the causes of our misery and our degradation; when we see her rebuking, by her magnificent indifference, the petulances of our sorrow and the faithlessness of our despair; when we see her granting to us a splendid dominion over her elements by faithful obedience to her laws; when we see her constantly educating good out of evil; then we are glad and not angry that her steps are measured, her exceptions rare, her laws unchangeable. Farrar.

3. Creation, not Evolution, the origin of living organisms, plant and animal.

Though the narrative is, on the whole, singularly non-committal in regard to any specific scientific doctrine, there are a few points on which it is positive. It teaches that: 1. The primordial creation of matter, the creation of the system of life, and the creation of man, are three distinct creations. 2. They are not simultaneous, but successive. 3. God’s action in the creation is constant. As already observed, each of these great orders of things is introduced by the word bara, so that Moses seemed to distinguish the three great groups of phenomena as distinct in essence. According to this, the evolution from one of these orders into the other—from matter into life, from animal life into the spiritual life of man—is impossible. Gugol.—Suppose the world to be in its condition of inorganic progress, we have no scientific ground for supposing that it could pass to a higher state, possessing living beings, by any parturient powers within. Or if Life exists, we still get no hint as to the evolution of the four sub-kingdoms of animal life from a universal germ; nor as to the origin of the Class-types, Order-family, or Genus-types, or those of Species, each of which is a distinct idea in the plan of creation. Nature, in fact, pronounces such a theory of evolution absolutely false. The perpetual presence of Mind, infinite in power, wisdom, and love, and ever acting, is manifest in the whole history of the past. Dons.

During the pre-Adamite periods, which were of enormous duration, the existing general laws of nature were in force, though the dispositions of inorganic nature were different in different periods, and the animals and plants of successive periods were also different from each other. The introduction of new species of animals and of plants, while indicating advance in the perfection of nature, does not prove spontaneous development, but rather creation. Dawson.—Transmutation of species, unknown to experience, is equally unknown to geology. Type after type appears and disappears, but none melts into a something not itself. Each creature, throughout the long succession, comes in as it goes out and goes out as it came in. G. Ruison.—The geological record is imperfect. But, as Sir Rod-rick Murchison has long ago proved, there are parts of that record which are singularly complete, and in those parts we have the proofs of creation, without any indication of development. The Silurian rocks, as regards oceanic life, are perfect and abundant in the forms they have preserved, yet there are no fish. The Devonian Age followed tranquilly and without a break; and in the Devonian sea suddenly fish appear—appear in shoals and in forms of the highest and most perfect type. There is no trace of links or transitional forms between the great class of mollusks and the great class of fishes. There is no reason whatever to suppose that such forms, if they had existed, can have been destroyed in deposits which have preserved in wonderful perfection the minutest organisms. So much for the past. As regards the present, organisms are known to reproduce life, but always life which is like their own. And if this likeness admits of degrees of difference, the margin of variety is not known to be ever broad enough for the foundation of a new species. That any organism can ever produce another which varies from itself in any truly specific character is an assumption not justified by any known fact. No organism is ever seen to exert such a power now. Many indications tend to show that all organisms have been equally incapable of modification since the earliest monuments of man. Arayl.

It has been said that at the starting-point of existence all plants and animals are alike. As a late writer puts it, “The apple which fell in Newton’s garden, Newton’s dog Diamond, and Newton himself began life at the same point.” It is true, that with our best microscopes we have not yet been able to discover any structural difference in these first cellules of the apple, the dog, and the man. But the fact that the apple-cellule always develops into an apple, the dog-cellule into a dog, and the man-cellule into a man, furnishes irrefragable proof that there is a radical difference in these cellules, either in structure or in the nature of the vitality with which they are endowed, though our microscopes may not be able to discover it.

This whole class of changes takes place under the law of variation of growth-development. Co-ordinate with this law, we find another law limiting the range of these variations. In the case of the acorn, under the law of variation, it develops into the mature oak, and then the operation of the law, as a law of life, ceases. The oak dies, and by chemical agencies is resolved into its original elements. Its material falls back from its condition of organic matter to that of inorganic matter again. But before its death the mature oak had produced its acorns, and from these acorns other oaks grow just as the first oak did; and so this whole series of changes is repeated time after time. The life-story of the silk-worm, the frog, an, and even the parasitic tape-worm in this particular is the same with that of the oak. The law of limitation in the case of growth-development may be thus stated: Variation, extreme as it may be, never extends beyond the life of the individual plant or animal in which it occurs. Growth-development runs a certain definite round, and then we are brought back to the same starting point again. By growth-development an oak will never become anything but an oak, a silk-worm will never become anything but a silk-worm to the end of time. Armstrong.

Competent Testimony. Who ever recalls to mind the lamentable failure of all the attempts made very recently to discover a decided support for the generalis equivoca in the lower forms of transition from the inorganic to the organic world, will feel it doubly serious to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, should be in any way accepted as the basis of all our views of life. All really scientific experience tells us that life can be produced from a living antecedent only. Virchow.—In Bastian’s experiments, after every expedient to secure sterility, life did appear inside in myriad quantity. Therefore, he argued, it was spontaneously generated. But the phalanx of observers found two errors in this calculation. Professor Tyndall repeated the same experiment, only with a precaution to insure absolute sterility suggested by the most recent science—a discovery of his own. He manipulated his experimental vessels in an atmosphere which, under the high test of optical purity—the most delicate known test—was absolutely germless. Here not a vestige of life appeared. He varied the experiment in every direction, but matter in the germless air never yielded life. The other error was detected by Mr. Dallinger. He found among the lower forms of life the most surprising and indestructible vitality. Many animals could survive much higher temperature than Dr. Bastian had applied to annihilate them. Some germs almost refused to be annihilated—they were all but fire-proof. These experiments have practically closed the question. A decided and authoritative conclusion has now taken its place in science. Spontaneous generation has had to be given up. And it is now recognized on every hand that life can only come from the touch of life. Huxley categorically announces that the doctrine of Biogenesis, or life only from life, is “victorious along the whole line at the present day.” And even while confessing that he wishes the evidence were the other way, Tyndall is compelled to say, “I affirm that no shred of trustworthy experimental testimony exists to prove that life in our day has ever appeared independently of antecedent life.” Drummond.

We are in the presence of the one incommunicable gulf—the gulf of all gulfs—the gulf which Mr. Huxley’s protoplasm is as powerless to efface as any other material expedient that has ever been suggested since the eyes of men first looked into it—the mighty gulf between death and life. Stelling.—Breeds (i.e., varieties) among animals are the work of man; species were created by God. Agassiz.—Notwithstanding observations reaching back for thousands of years, and made on hundreds of species, we do not yet know a single example of intermediate species obtained by the crossing of animals belonging to different species. Quatrefages.—This founding of new forms by the union of different species, even when standing in close natural relation to each other, is absolutely forbidden by the sentence of sterility which Nature pronounces and enforces upon all hybrid offspring. And so it results that man has never seen the origin of any species. Creation by birth is the only kind of creation he has ever seen; and from this kind of creation he has never seen a new species come. Argyll.

In all this great museum there is not a particle of evidence of transmutation of species. Nine tenths of the talk of evolutionists is not founded on observation, and wholly unsupported by fact. Moreover, the talk of the great antiquity of man is of the same value. There is no such thing as a fossil man. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of these views. Mr. Etheridge (of the British Museum).—The doctrine of evolution, as held by a prominent school of German and English biologists, I regard as equally at variance with science, revelation, and common-sense, and destitute of any foundation in fact. Dawson.

Man is not an ape transformed and perfected by some dim imperceptible fermentation of the elements of nature and by the operation of ages. This assumed explanation of the origin of the human species is a mere vague hypothesis, the fruit of an imagination ill comprehending the spectacle that nature presents, and therefore easily seduced to form ingenious conjectures. These their authors sow in the stream of events unknown and of time infinite, and trust to them for the realization of their dreams. The principle of the fundamental diversity and the permanence of species, firmly upheld by Cuvier, Flourens, Coste, Quatrefages, and by all exact observers of facts, remains dominant in science as in reality. Guizot.—Evolution cheats us with the semblance of a man without the reality. Shave and paint your ape as you may, clothe him and set him upon his feet, still he fails greatly of “the human form divine;” and so it is with him morally and spiritually as well. We have seen that he wants the instinct of immortality, the love of God, the mental and spiritual power of exercising dominion over the earth. Dawson.—The possession of intellect and conscience; the capacity for distinguishing between truth and error, right and wrong; the ability to communicate thought by language, and to originate the fine arts—painting, sculpture, architecture—and to start and carry forward all that is embraced in our modern civilization, to say nothing of anatomical differences, make between the ape and man not as wide a gulf, it may be, as that which separates between the living and the non-living, but a gulf as utterly impassable. Armstrong.

Who creates or evolves? Whither do the atoms come, or go? These questions remain as before. Science has not found a substitute for God. And yet, in another sense, these questions are very different from before. Science has put them through its crucible. It took them from theology, and deliberately proclaimed that it would try to answer them. They are now handed back, tried, unanswered, but with a new place in theology and a new power with science. Science has attained, after this ordeal, to a new respect for theology. If there are answers to these questions, and there ought to be, theology holds them. And theology, likewise, has learned a new respect for science. In its investigations of these questions science has made a discovery. It has seen plainly that atheism is unscientific. It is a remarkable thing that, after trailing its black length for centuries across European thought, atheism should have had its doom pronounced by science. H. Drummond.

The Geological History of the Earth. The materials of the earth are so arranged that we can read its history. Beginning with the foundation, upon which the vast structure rests, we find that it is granite and the different ingredients of granite. Examining this underlying rock we discover no evidences of life during its formation. There are no remains of plants or animals of any kind. How long the matter of the globe remained after its creation before it took this form, even, we cannot tell. How long it remained bare, naked granite, we are totally ignorant. It must have been age upon age; for “of old he laid the foundations.”

The formation next above this is called the Silurian. The rocks of this period are, chiefly, the sandstones, slates, and limestones. Including the older and newer formations, they are not less than thirty thousand feet in thickness. An examination of this layer will disclose fossil plants, and the fossil remains of the four great branches of the animal kingdom—the Radiates, typified in the star-fish and sun-fish; the Mollusks in the clam and land-snail; the Articulates, represented by worms and insects; and the Vertebrates, by fishes, birds, and mammals. The fish, however, is the only vertebrate which then existed. What is still more remarkable is, that, though we find more than a thousand different fossil species, and though there are three hundred thousand living species of the same classes now in the waters, yet not one can be found among those which at present swim the sea, or creep across the earth, that does not differ in its species from every one of those that lived, died, and were buried in the great Silurian Period.

The next page in this wonderful book is called the Old Red Sandstone. In the State of New York it is fourteen thousand feet thick. In it we find the remains of numerous plants, and the four branches of the animal kingdom, as in the last; but, though there are a thousand different species, though the remains are such as to show that the waters of this period must have swarmed with life, still it may be safely stated that but few, if any, species of animal or plant found in the preceding, and that none found in the present age existed during the formation of the old red sandstone.

Next above this formation, we reach the age in which the coal we use to warm and light our dwellings was formed and deposited. It is called the Carboniferous Period. The growth of vegetation in this age transcends all Calculation. Immense forests sprang up. The exuding sap, i.e., petroleum, flowed down into the limestone and iron-cased vats or basins, and was there preserved. The undergrowth of the forests consisted of at least three hundred different varieties of fern. The sunlight was excluded from all those forests. The geologist, the chemist, and the botanist tell us they were never touched by an illuminating sunbeam. More than tropical heat extended to the polar regions. These are conditions the most perfectly adapted for vegetable development, but the most fatal to animal life. As we should expect, though the limestone and iron which constitute the introduction of this period abound in the remains of a great variety of land insects and reptiles, not one of any kind or class of air-breathing animals or insects can be found in the coal formation proper. But when the supplies had been stored up in vast quantities, when the carbon and poisons had been taken up from the atmosphere by the development of vegetation, to which, indeed, it owed its growth, then those ancient forests were suddenly checked in their development. They were sunk beneath the ocean, and stratum after stratum of sandstone and limestone were piled over that forgotten vegetation, hiding it for centuries, and pressing it, like a modern peat-press, into solid rock. That rock is our coal.

The next deposit above the coal is the New Red Sandstone. In this the poisons of the atmosphere having been absorbed, we again find the remains of air-breathing animals. The birds of the period especially claim our attention. They were found in such abundance that we may term it the Bird Epoch. They consisted of at least thirty-five different species; in some cases, of enormous size. They were rulers of the hills and vales of earth for centuries; but, like every other race that had preceded them, they at length perished.

The next period is very properly called the Reptilian Age. Reptiles flourished at this date as vigorously as plants had in the coal period, and as the birds had in the age just preceding. There were at this time gigantic reptiles, seventy feet in length, which could walk the earth, swim the sea, or fly the air, equally well. But they met, at length, a sudden and total extinction, and left only their skeletons to acquaint us with the facts of their existence and nature.

Ages again pass, and new orders appear. They constitute what is called the Chalk or Cretaceous formation. If we could have visited the earth during the period of these deposits, we should have found it inhabited, century after century, by the minutest shell animals, many species of which are imperceptible without the aid of the microscope. It may properly be called the Shell-insect Age. How unlike the age of monster birds and reptiles which preceded! Where is the development theory? But after these little animals had done their work,—after their accumulated remains had provided the world with its chalk, its marble, and the different varieties of carbonate of lime,—then their age and reign ceased.

We now approach comparatively near the earth’s surface, and may begin to talk of modern times. Above the Cretaceous, lies the last of the Tertiary, or the Mammal deposits. Visiting the earth at this stage of its construction, the race of mammals would especially have attracted our attention and excited our surprise. “They agreed,” says Cuvier, “neither specifically, nor even for the most part generically, with any hitherto discovered in the living creation.” But during the entire age of magnificent forests and mighty mammals, the earth at no time and in no place echoed to the voice of man, or felt the impress of his footfall. All these orders were destroyed, not by the advancing civilization of man, but by the command of God. Amid some of the most terrible convulsions that have ever shaken the earth these races expired, with as sudden death as that of the savage monsters of an earlier age. “The disruption of the earth’s crust, extending W. 16° S., and E. 16° N., through which the chain of the great Alps was forced up to its present elevation, which, according to M. D’Orbigny, was simultaneous with that which forced up the Chilian Andes,—a chain which extends over a length of three thousand miles of the western continent,—terminated the Tertiary Age, and preceded immediately the creation of the human race and its concomitant tribes. The waters of the seas and oceans, lifted up from their beds by this immense perturbation, swept over the continents with irresistible force, destroying instantaneously the entire flora and fauna of the last tertiary period, and burying its ruins in the sedimentary deposits which ensued.” (Lardner.)

After this, the earth, which had witnessed at least twenty-seven different exterminations and recreations, was itself buried under the freezing waters of the Glacial and Drift period. This constitutes the first formation of the last geological layer—the Diluvian. During the drift and the modified drift periods, North America, to the depth of two or three thousand feet, was covered with the sea. The submergence of the British Isles is beyond question. The earth was at that time swept with oceanic currents loaded with icebergs which had been wrenched off from the mountain peaks. Northern Germany, Poland, and Russia are overspread with bowlders from Sweden, Lapland, and Finland. Granite rocks have been thrown down upon Iceland, though the island itself was formed from lava. These bowlders, disconnected from the ice-floats to which they had been attached, sank through the flood of waters, and were anchored where they now remain.

That the whole earth, at one time or another, has been under water, is the uniform testimony of science. Says Humboldt, “The highest peaks of the Alps were once beneath the ocean’s surface.” “All land,” says Lyell, “has been under water.” “It seems,” says Hitchcock, “that the surface of the globe has been a shoreless ocean.” “The highest mountains,” says Tenney, “have once been the ocean’s bottom.” The same sublime and startling record is inscribed upon every mountain peak and range around the globe, east and west, north and south, far and near. Long after the sandstones, coal, limestones, and animal remains of earth had been formed and deposited, long after the ancient river-courses had found the sea, all things were inguiled under the waters of the drift, which were laden with ice-floats and which bore upon their bosoms the ruins of past generations. The surface bowlders and erratic stones found in every country confirm the statement that this was the condition of the world, and that it occurred just before the present, or the human era.

There is no language or speech at human command which more exactly expresses the condition of the earth after these mighty vicissitudes of which we have been speaking had taken place, and during the drift, when the world was inguiled in dark, turbid, and frozen waters, than the original text of the old Hebrew prophet: “The earth had become a waste and a void, darkness was upon the face of the roaring deep, and the soul of God was brooding upon the face of the waters.” Was there anything in the apparently insane and boisterous play of the great physical catastrophe of the nine distinct and long-continued eras we have been considering, anything in the turbulence and mighty clamor of the drift period, which could repeople the earth with living inhabitants? There was nothing. Had not the voice of God been heard above the waters, they had remained as they were L. T. Townsend.

Grouping comprehensively some geological facts we note (1) Vast strata of rock-formations, widely diverse from each other, too diverse to have been formed under the same circumstances and conditions of our globe. Some—the lowest in relative position—appear to have been once in a state of fusion under intense heat, while others—in general all the higher rocks—seem to have been deposited under water. Mineralogically, these rocks differ from each other very widely and also from the fused rocks. (2) Again, some are manifestly composed of fragments of pre-existing rocks, broken off and worn by long-continued attrition and then compacted—known as pudding-stone—the breccias. (3) Yet again; immense strata of these intermediate and higher rocks contain fossil organic remains, some of vegetables, others of animals or of both, and also in very great variety. More marvellous still; they are found occurring in groups, bearing a well-defined relation to each other, as that one stratum of rock contains species of vegetables and also of animals in a measure adapted to each other, and adjusted to the condition of the earth’s surface and climate at one and the same time. Another stratum shall contain a different group, to some extent new and yet not altogether so, but lapping on with some of the earth’s old inhabitants reproduced, and omitting other species. (4) Again, immense beds of coal are found, undoubtedly of vegetable origin, differing somewhat widely from each other as having been formed from diverse vegetable and forest material, and under various degrees of heat and pressure. No small amount of time must be given for the growth and deposition of these mountain piles of tree and fern. The charring of these coal pits of nature was provided for in the “fervent heat” of the earth just below the surface, coupled with pressure brought upon them it would seem by convulsions and upbreakings, to which the earth’s crust has been many times subjected. (5) Limestone, largely of animal origin, demands in like manner time for the growth of the animals whose shelly inasements, accumulating age after age, have made such ample provision of limestone and of lime for the use of man. H. C.

The widest and most important generalization of modern geology is, that all the materials of the earth’s crust, to the greatest depth to which we can penetrate, are of such a nature as to prove that they are not unchanged and primitive rocks, but the results of the operation of causes of change now in progress. They may be such things as conglomerates, sandstones, shales, and slates, all of which are the debris of older rocks, broken down into pebbles, sand, or mud; or they may be limestones, made up of the ruins of corals and shells; or beds of coal and metallic ores, accumulated by the agency of vegetable matter; or they may be substances analogous to the lavas and ashes of modern volcanoes; or they may be rocks that are aqueous in their origin, and now hardened and altered by heat. But everywhere we see the evidence of change under natural laws still in force. Dawson.

The earth’s surface has at no very remote period experienced considerable elevations and depressions and changes of temperature. Especially there are proofs of an extraordinary period of glaciers and icebergs, by means of which huge bowlders have been transported from their ancient beds and scattered afar, and vast masses of débris, rocks ground down and pulverized, mixed with sand, gravel, and small stones, have been heaped up along the line of the glaciers and spread over their track. It is not easy to conceive the full measure of utility resulting from this great ice-flood and glacier movement, in grinding the surface of the rocky strata and mixing this finely pulverized matter with decomposed vegetable elements to prepare soil for our earth’s surface. H. C.

Prof. A. Guyot.

[Condensed from the Paper read before the Evangelical Alliance at New York. For his full and final treatment of the subject, see the volume entitled “Creation.” The views therein expressed are substantially those of Professor Dana, Principal Dawson, Dr. Godet, and many other Christian scientists and scholars.]

The introduction to the work of the six days is comprised in the first and second verses, in which we have the primordial creation of the matter of the universe, and a description of its original state. The primitive state of matter when first created is described in the second verse. We take the word “earth” to be in this verse an equivalent to matter in general. The use of the concrete word “earth,” instead of the generic or abstract word “matter,” is common to most languages, and was here a necessity, as such a word as “matter” does not exist in the Hebrew language. We feel then justified in understanding aurets, in this early stage of the history of the universe, as meaning the primordial cosmic material out of which God was going to organize the heavens and the earth. The same reasoning applies to the waters of the second verse. The Hebrew word maim does not necessarily mean “waters,” but applies as well to the fluid atmosphere; it is simply descriptive of the state of cosmic matter comprised in the word earth.

The sense of these two words being thus settled, every word of the second verse becomes clear and natural. The matter just created was gaseous; it was without form, for the property of gas is to expand indefinitely. It was void, because homogeneous and invisible. It was dark, because as yet inactive, light being the result of physical or chemical action. It was a deep, for its expansion in space, though indefinite, was not infinite, and it had dimensions. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face (outside, and not inside, as the pantheist would have it) of that vast gaseous mass, ready to act upon it, and to direct all its subsequent activity, according to a plan revealed by the great works which follow.

The central idea of the second verse is the state of matter when created. The Spirit of God, moving upon it, announces and prepares the work of the six coming days. The description applies, therefore, to the matter of the universe and the earth, and not to the earth alone as a globe already made, which would be no beginning.

The First Day’s work was the production of light. At God’s command movement begins. This is no creation, but a simple manifestation of the activity of matter. Under the action of gravity that immeasurable body of gaseous matter contracts; atoms conglomerate into molecules; nearer approach begets continual chemical combinations on a multitude of points; in the more concentrated part light and heat are produced, and the result is the appearance in the dark space of heaven of a large luminous mass, the primitive grand nebula, the prototype of those thousands of luminous clouds observed by the astronomer floating in the empty wastes beyond our starry heavens. Thus God divided the light from the darkness—that is, the light of the nebula from the dark outside matter, as yet inactive, and from the empty space around. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night—both specific names—without reference to any period of time. And the evening (the dark chaotic time preceding) and the morning (the glorious light of that vast luminous mass) were the first day—the first great period of development, under God’s guidance, of that world of matter just created; a day measured by the work assigned to it.

The Second Day’s work is the organization of the heavens. “And God said, Let there be an expanse (firmament) in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters; and God called the expanse heaven.”

The central idea of this day’s work is division or separation. The vast primitive nebula of the first day breaks up into a multitude of gaseous masses, and these are concentrated into stars. Motion is everywhere. Gravitation and the chemical forces tend to concentrate matter around various centres, and thus to isolate them from each other; centrifugal force tends to disperse them. Under the laws of the forces of matter and motion—established by God himself, and under his guidance—these numberless bodies, of all forms and sizes, which fill the space and adorn our heavens, combine into those worlds and groups of worlds whose wonderful organization it is the province of astronomy to discover. But the text speaks of waters above the heavens, and of waters under the heavens. The latter are determined by the work of the third day, by which it appears that they are the matter out of which our globe was made, the waters above being the matter which formed the heavenly bodies.

The Third Day has two works. The first is the formation of the material globe of the earth. The main idea is condensation of matter into the solid globe, its liquid covering and gaseous envelope. Here, as usual, Moses gives us the final result of the work, and not the process by which it was produced. For that we must ask geology. Guided by the general facts of geology, and aided by the light derived from chemistry, physics, and astronomy, we may distinguish, in the gradual formation of the physical globe, before the introduction of life, four periods: 1. The nebulous. 2. The mineral incandescent. 3. The period of the hot oceans. 4. The period of the cold oceans.

In the first the matter of the earth was a part of the hot atmosphere of the sun. In the slow process of contraction, consequent upon its cooling, the sun left it behind in the form of a gaseous ring. The ring breaks in several places, and is rolled up into a globular mass, which, according to the laws of motion, rotates upon itself, and revolves around its parent body nearly in the plane of its equator, and with the velocity imparted to it by the sun itself. The new globe, born from the old matter of the sun, now enters, as a gaseous mass, into the first period of its separate existence. Loss of heat by radiation causes further concentration. The molecules, brought nearer together and to the proper temperature for chemical action, now combine. A vast, long-continued, and ever-renewed conflagration, with an enormous development of heat, takes place, and the result is an incandescent melted mineral body, surrounded by a vast luminous atmosphere. The earth is a sun. This is the second period of its history.

The cooling continues: a hard crust is formed on the surface of the melted body of the globe, and, when the temperature becomes low enough to admit of the formation of water, the ocean—which was before a part of the atmosphere in the shape of vapor—is deposited on the solid surface of the globe. The temperature of this first ocean must have been very high, owing to the immense weight of the atmosphere resting upon it. It has been calculated that when the deposition began, the temperature of the first waters could not have been less than 600° Fahr. This geological phase, though it is one through which a cooling globe must have necessarily passed, has not, thus far, received the attention it deserves. Let us try to see what this state of things implies, for it is important for the explanation of the fourth day. The oceans were not only very warm, but must have been highly acidulated; for all the acids, which form a large part of the thousands upon thousands of feet of rocks deposited since, must have been then in the atmosphere. These hot and acid waters, resting upon the old mineral crust, must have decomposed it, and a new series of chemical combinations have been formed, to which, perhaps, we may refer the deposition of the lowermost crystalline rocks which are at the base of the new terrestrial crust—the only one we actually know. By these powerful chemical actions the earth was transformed into a vast galvanic pile, emitting constant streams of electricity, which, reaching the ethereal space at the boundary of the thick atmosphere, became luminous. During this third period the earth was still surrounded by a photosphere of subdued brilliancy: it was a nebulous star.

The process goes on; the physical and chemical forces, thus far so active, subside and enter into a state of quiescence; the photosphere disappears; the globe becomes an extinct body; the ocean cools down to the mild temperature of our tropical seas, and is ready for the introduction of living beings. The age of matter is over; the age of life is at hand. The fourth period was that of the dark planet and the cool oceans.

This fourth period, and perhaps the latter part of the third, are represented in the geological strata by the so-called azoic rocks, which are found in all continents. Here also we have evidence of the appearance of the first land above the waters of the ocean. Considerable surfaces and low mountain chains, both in the Old and New World, belong to this age. Geology explains very plausibly the sinking of the large surfaces—now containing the oceans—and the rising between them of the continents and mountains, by the gradual shrinkage of the cooling interior, forcing the hard external crust—now too large—to mould itself on the smaller sphere by folding into mighty wrinkles. This process could not be better described than by the words of Moses: “Let the waters be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear”—implying that the land was formed already under the surface of the ocean, and was subsequently raised above it. The first work of the third day closes the age of matter; for, if science is right in its view of the origin of our solar system, the sun, moon, and stars of the fourth day were then in existence, but invisible to the earth.

But in this third day there is a second work, entirely unlike the first, belonging to the age of organic life—the creation of the plant—a creation, indeed, of a new principle, though it is not designated in the text by hard, because it is but the peristyle of the temple of true life, the condition of its existence. We say that it is a creation; for in it matter is controlled by an immaterial principle, directing its forces so as to make it assume new forces unknown to the mineral. In the plant, as in every organized being, there is an inward principle of individuality not possessed by the crystal; a variety of functions and organs working together toward a common aim for the benefit of the individual; an inward growth, with a beginning and a definite end, and a reproduction which perpetuates the species—phenomena which are all absolutely foreign to inorganic matter. These characteristics are admirably summed up in the eleventh verse. If we should understand the text as meaning that the whole plant kingdom, from the lowest infusorial form to the highest dicotyledon, was created at this early day, geology would assuredly disprove it. But the author mentions every order of facts but once, and he does it at the time of its first introduction. Here, therefore, the whole system of plants is described in full outline, as it has been developed, from the lowest to the most perfect, in the succession of ages.

Fourth Day.—The sun and moon are not created, they existed before, but now enter into new relations with the earth. During the age of matter the intensity of chemical action was a source of permanent light—the earth was self-luminous—the light of the sun, moon, and stars being merged in the stronger light of its photosphere, and therefore invisible to it. But after the disappearance of its luminous envelope, our glorious heavens, with sun, moon, and stars, become visible, and the earth depends upon it is outside source for light and heat.

Fifth Day.—The work of this day is the creation of the lower animals, up to the birds. “And God created great whales, and every creature which in with, which the waters brought forth abundantly, and every winged fowl.” The order of their appearance is that discovered by geology; the water animals first, together with the large amphibious, the great whales (marine monsters), and other reptiles, and then the birds. This corresponds with the first geological ages, the paleozoic and the mesozoic, up to the tertiary epoch.

Sixth Day.—The sixth day, which is the third of the era of life, contains two works, as did the third day of the era of matter: first, the creation of the higher animals especially living on the dry land, or the mammalia—it corresponds with the tertiary age; and, second, the creation of man in the quaternary age.

Here end the working days of the Creator. All his other works God had declared to be good; but on the sixth day “God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was VERY GOOD.” The work of the whole week is now finished, and perfect as God will have it for his purpose—the education of man. Now begins the seventh day, the day of rest, or the Sabbath of the earth, when the globe and its inhabitants are completed. Since the beginning of this day no new creation has taken place. God rests as the Creator of the visible universe. The forces of nature are in that admirable equilibrium which we now behold, and which is necessary to our existence. No more mountains or continents are formed, no new species of plants or animals are created. Nature goes on steadily in its wonted path. All movement, all progress has passed into the realm of mankind, which is now accomplishing its task. The seventh day is, then, the present age of our globe; the age in which we live, and which was prepared for the development of mankind. The narrative of Moses seems to indicate this fact; for at the end of each of the six working days of creation we find an evening. But the morning of the seventh is not followed by any evening. The day is still open. When the evening shall come the last hour of humanity will strike. Guyot.

[A full discussion of the subject from a similar standpoint will be found in Prof. Dana’s “Geology,” and various articles in the Bib. Sacra; in Dr. Godet’s “Studies in the Old Test,” in Principal Dawson’s “Archaia,” and in Macdonald’s “Creation and Fall.”]

Of the Nebular Theory in its present form La Place is the author. Perhaps the first suggestion came from Sir W. Herschel. It has been adopted by Mädler, defended by Pfaff, and its truth taken for granted by Humboldt. It supposes that the whole solar system was originally one mass of vapory or nebulous matter which, according to the laws of gravitation, assumed the form of an immense sphere. This sphere received (from without) an impulse which caused it to revolve on its axis from west to east. In consequence of this revolving motion, it became flattened at the poles and swollen in the equatorial region, and in consequence of the greatness of the centrifugal force at the equator and the contemporaneous condensation and contraction of the nebulous mass a free revolving ring, similar to that of Saturn, detached itself in the region of the equator. This ring not being of uniform density, and in consequence of contraction, broke in one or more places, and these fragments, in obedience to the laws of gravitation, became a sphere or spheres, that is a planet or planets, all necessarily revolving from west to east round the parent mass. Another ring was formed in like manner and another planet came into existence; and so on until the whole solar system was complete. A similar process took place with regard to some of the planets, and thus they got their moons. McCaul.

Half a century ago Dr. Whewell discussed under the name of the nebular hypothesis that theory of rotation which had been indicated by Herschel, and more largely taught by La Place, as the probable method through which the solar system has taken its form. Carefully abstaining at that early date from a formal judgment on the hypothesis, he appears to discuss it with favor, and he shows that this hypothesis, which assumes “a beginning of the present state of things,” is in no way adverse to the Mosaic cosmogony. The theory has received marked support from opposite quarters. In the “Vestiges of Creation” it is frankly adopted; the very curious experiment of Prof. Plateau is detailed at length on its behalf, and the author considers, with La Place, that the zodiacal light on which Humboldt in his “Kosmos” has dwelt at large may be a remnant of the luminous atmosphere originally diffused around the sun. Dr. McCaul, in his very able argument on the Mosaic record, quotes Humboldt, Pfaff, and Mädler—a famous German astronomer—as adhering to it. It appears on the whole to be in possession of the field; and McCaul observes that, “had it been devised for the express purpose of removing the supposed difficulties of the Mosaic record, it could hardly have been more to the purpose.” W. E. Gladstone.

[On the other hand], Mr. Proctor, in an essay on the new star in Andromeda, puts himself among its opponents in such decided language as this:

“If any occurrence in the star depths could possibly shake men’s faith in that theory—or rather speculation, for so La Place regarded it—the sudden appearance of a new star in the midst of a mass of stellar matter should do so. A theory which has been accepted by astronomers under the mistaken idea that there are no physical objections against it, and by physicists under the equally mistaken idea that observed astronomical facts absolutely require it; a hypothesis according to which a mass of gas, far rarer than hydrogen at atmospheric pressure (may, almost infinitely rarer), and having a span of about six thousand millions of miles, rotated for millions of years as a coherent whole—such a theory may be expected to retain vitality under almost any conceivable shock. Otherwise, assuredly the discovery that sudden and rapid changes, not the inconceivably slow changes imagined by La Place, affect star clouds of enormous size, might be expected to destroy men’s faith in an idea which its celebrated author never regarded as more than a guess, and which, with the knowledge of physical laws possessed in our time, should have been long ago rejected as obviously erroneous.”

1. By those who favor the nebular hypothesis as the best sustained

“Heavens and earth” never mean materials, and that meaning would not agree with the context. The connecting “and” of Gen. 1:2 shows that the earth is the same spoken of in the first, not the materials. McCaul.—A use of the word “waters” so extraordinary and unparalleled cannot be admitted. Nowhere else do we find attached to it the vestige of such a meaning. The context is wholly against such an interpretation. E. P. Barroux.

Genesis speaks of days; but the periods implied by the stratifications and the fossils they contain must each have consisted of millions of centuries. Further, according to Genesis, animal life did not begin upon the earth till after the appearance of the plants, whereas the oldest strata that contain vegetable remains exhibit already some debris of crustaceans and of corals—monuments of an animal life which must have existed contemporaneously with that primitive vegetation. At the same time that the rich carboniferous flora developed itself, there existed also different species of fish, and one breathing vertebrate (the labyrinthodes). These are differences of which we are not to deny the importance. Godet.

Though the Mosaic language implies that the six days of which he speaks are six periods of time, it does not follow that they are to be identified with the six periods commonly received in geology. The impossibility of identifying these periods is evident from the fact that of the work of two days in the Mosaic account geology knows nothing and astronomy nothing certain; namely, that of the first and the fourth. After the original creation of heaven and earth and the condition of the earth, Moses mentions the evocation of light and the creation of the ether in which the heavenly bodies move, as effected in the first two days. So far as the record is concerned, these two days may include the whole of the primary, secondary and tertiary formations with all their products, their flora and their fauna. The object of the Mosaic narrative is to explain the origin of the universe and its parts. So soon, therefore, as he has mentioned the light and the ether he advances at once to the preparation of the earth for man; and thus the third day presents the dry land in its present state. “When the seas had settled into their new beds and the outlines of the land were permanently defined, the latest and greatest act of creation was accomplished by clothing the earth with the vegetation which now covers it, peopling the land and the water with the animal tribes which now exist, and calling into being the human race. . . . A striking physical difference between the present and all formal periods consists in the different divisions of the earth’s surface into climatological zones, each zone having its peculiar fauna and flora. In all former ages and periods, including those which immediately preceded the present, no traces of climate difference have been found” (Lardner). In this is a striking coincidence with the Mosaic statement, which represents the earth as existing for a long period before the sun became its source of light and heat, a period during which there could have been no climatic difference; and consequently the fauna and flora of warm climates are found in the pre-human period (when there was apparently one uniform high temperature over the whole earth) in latitudes where they could not now exist. Here is an instance of the extraordinary scientific accuracy of the Mosaic account. McCaul, “Aids to Faith,” p. 250 ff.

Had we been told, that instantly, by the Divine fiat, the earth was covered with vegetation of the largest and most perfect kind, that in a moment there stood forth in all their physical perfection the “creeping hyssop,” the rose of Sharon, and the waving cedar of Lebanon, that in the twinkling of an eye, from being a barren, inanimate, and solitary waste, our world was swarming with animals of every size and species, full grown, and at the maximum of their strength and beauty, there would have been no a priori difficulty in believing it. There would have been nothing irrational or incredible in the account. Such an instantaneous production would have been in harmony with all our ideas of the Divine power and dignity. But it has not been so revealed. A different method was taken by the Divine Wisdom,—the method to which we give the name of nature,—the method of growth, of succession, of duration, of the apparent birth of one thing out of another, and this, too, through the action of a previous nature quickened by a new Word into a new energy, and to the development of a new law. Both these suppositions are rational, both are credible if clearly revealed. But how long were these creative days? The question must remain unanswered. They were viva ineffabiles. They were incommensurable by any estimates we could apply. The whole question, too, is comparative. In one aspect they may have been short, in another immensely long. The Bible has not told us anything about it. The geologist talks of millions and billions of years. He measures the operations of God and nature then, by the movements of the latter as they come under his present observation. On the other hand, the rigid advocate of the twenty-four-hour theory presses him with a great many very puzzling questions as to the rationale of such a method, which our confident appellant to reason and science finds it very difficult to answer. Why so many ages apparently wasted before the living organizations? Why so many thousand years of fungi and sea-weed? Why so many ages of shell-fish with their unmeaning varieties,—unmeaning, he would say, as long as there were no human eyes to admire, and no men of science to classify them into geners and species? Why so many unhistorical centuries of zoophytes, and worms, and monstrous reptiles,—all before man appeared? What wisdom in all this; what possible design worthy of an all-wise and omnipotent Being; what order, what fitness, what beauty? It is absurdity, it is confusion, says the literalist, it is worse than chaos, it is worse than atheism, it is, in truth, a godless nature that would work in this manner, and not the eternal Wisdom. Such a priori objections may be pressed with great force and skill. The geologist, from his mere scientific position, cannot answer a word. It would certainly look like a very strange proceeding. But he may press home upon our literalist just as many questions which he cannot answer. Why a world of waters, then a world with an atmosphere and clouds, then a world of vegetation, then a world of reptile life, then a world inhabited by quadrupeds, each precisely twenty-four hours before the other? And what must have been the apparatus for making these days of twenty-four hours that had their date before the outshining of the celestial luminaries? Did the light go out, and the darkness come back, each time, from its submersion in the abyss? Why is there no explanation of the difficulty which the writer must have seen to exist, if the twenty-four-hour duration had been meant? Why is there not the least allusion to it in any other part of the Bible in which the creation is spoken of, and its marvels made the theme of praise and admiration? What possible conjectures can be offered on this head, which will not seem more strange, forced, and capricious than any positions assumed by the most extravagant geologist? There is no end to such questions; and the maintainer of the twenty-four-hour hypothesis cannot answer one of them without resorting to that divine arbitrium under which the scientific speculatist may take shelter as well as himself. T. L.

2. The Six Days’ Record not an Account of Geological Changes. (Condensed from Kurtz.)

The Bible says nothing about the formation of the earth’s crust and of mountains, and the account of the creative days (as well as Ps. 104) presupposes them as already existing. Hence the organisms also which lie concealed in these strata originated not during but previous to the six creative days. The creation of plants and animals which the Bible relates is different from, and posterior to, that of the organisms which geology discloses. Those primeval animals of which the remains are found buried in the strata, like the rocks which hold them, belong to a period which Revelation does not describe. Theirs is a world quite different from ours, and which has perished long ago. The Bible is only concerned to narrate the creation of those animals and plants which were assigned to man. It professes to be a rule of faith, and not a manual of geology.

The vegetable and animal kingdoms of the strata are very different from those of our world, and it is evident that those plants and animals, of which the Bible speaks, were intended to continue and to remain with man on the earth, and not completely to disappear before the appearance of man. This may be gathered even from the terms in which we are told that grass, herbs, and trees—each after their own kind—had fruit and seed by which to propagate their species, from the emphasis with which we are assured that every type of animals was created after its own kind, and from the circumstance that each obtained the blessing, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the earth.” Besides, the Bible manifestly refers to the creation of organisms which had indeed been produced before man, but still, and on that very ground, were destined for him. For every herb bearing seed, upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is fruit, was given to man for meat; and with reference to animals man was commanded to subdue them, and to have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moved upon the earth. The plants on which he was to feed, and the beasts over which he was to have dominion, were evidently those whose creation is related in that chapter; hence the organisms described in the Bible must also be those which were destined to live along with man, or, generally speaking, the plants and animals presently existing. The same inference may be gathered from the constant repetition of the statement: “and God saw that it was good.” Being good, these creatures must have been destined to continue and not to perish. The types buried in the rocks were not destined to continue perpetually, or else have not attained their destination; they were not created for man, and have not been his contemporaries on earth. Long before he appeared they had become extinct, and were shut up in their rocky graves. Therefore the fossils of the rocks cannot represent those organisms whose creation the Bible relates. It speaks not of the petrifications and Entozoa of geology: it refers only to those beings which were created for man, partly for his nourishment and partly as means of, or aids to, his own peculiar activity. On the other hand geology does not treat of those creatures which, according to the Scriptures, were called forth on the third, fifth, and sixth days, nor can this science take notice of them, since their types were intended to continue and not to perish, and their families were not to be petrified in strata, but each individual was to decay in the ordinary manner, so that their bones have mostly passed away without leaving any trace. As the Bible gives no countenance to the idea that the crust of the earth was formed on the fifth or sixth day, and implies that sea and land had previously already existed, so neither does it admit the hypothesis according to which the work of the fifth and sixth days is relegated into previous days. It does not describe the origin of the crust of the earth and the creation of organic beings as having taken place at the same time, but as having occurred the one after the other. Hence what geology relates belongs to a period anterior to that which the history of creation describes.

This view is further confirmed by another conclusion of celebrated paleontologists; that a difference of species, types and families is found to exist between the various forms of life which occur in different rocky formations of the primeval world. Thus Agassiz remarks: “I hold it to be demonstrated that the totality of organic beings was renewed not only in the intervals of each of those great periods which we designate as formations, but also in the stratification of each separate division of every formation. Nor do I believe in the genetic descent of the living species from the different tertiary divisions which have been regarded as identical, but which I hold to be specifically different, so that I cannot adopt the idea of a transformation of the species of one formation into that of another. In enunciating these conclusions, let it be understood that they are not inductions derived from the study of one particular class of animals (such as fishes), and applied to other classes, but the results of direct comparison of very considerable collections of petrifications of different formations and classes of animals.”

Brown, indeed, refers to some formations that occasionally contain specimens similar to those of other strata. But even if Brown’s opinion were confirmed, the general fact (which mere exceptions could not remove) would still remain, that there is a peculiar genetic relationship, not only between different rocks, but frequently even between the strata of one and the same formation and the organic types which they contain, and the conclusion would still be that each formation had its own independent creation, and hence that with every formation the act of creation was renewed. But the Bible speaks only of one creation of organic life, and could, therefore, at most, allude to only one of these many creations. But that even this is not the case is manifest from the fact that the Bible refers to the organisms which were created for man, and hence still continue; while the “transition” and stratified formations only contain types which became extinct long before man appeared.

A further confirmation of this view is found in the fact that in the earliest formations plants and animals appear simultaneously, while the Bible informs us that one kingdom and one class of animals was called forth after the other.

Other objections summarized. It is evident, that we read only of one general inundation within the six creative days (Gen. 1: 2-10) to which, on the third day, bounds were assigned which were not to be passed till the flood. But the theory that identifies the geological with the Biblical account of creation, requires that we should suppose that a number of inundations had taken place in order to account for the numerous secondary and tertiary stratifications which are thought to have taken place on the fifth and sixth days.

Scripture plainly states that the mountains of the earth existed, at any rate, on the third day. But this theory requires us to believe that the secondary and tertiary (if not the primary) strata and rocks had been formed on the fifth and sixth days.

Scripture plainly states that plants only, and not animals of any kind, were created on the third day, and animals only, but not trees and plants, on the fifth and sixth days. But according to this theory, these Biblical are the same as the geological periods of which each has both its plants and animals.

It is evident that the account in Genesis only speaks of three periods of organic creation, while geology recounts as many as there are stratifications. Yet the above theory identifies the Biblical with the geological creation.

Lastly, it is evident on the one hand that the Flora and Fauna of the primeval world had perished before man appeared, and hence could not have been destined to continue along with man on the earth; and on the other hand, that according to the clear and unequivocal statements of Scripture the Flora and Fauna created during the six days was created for man, and destined to continue on earth along with him. Yet the above theory confounds these two kinds of Flora and Fauna. K.

1. The method of reconciling the conclusions of geology, especially its conclusion respecting the great age of the world, with the statements of the first chapters of Genesis most popular with Christian scientists in our day, is one which assumes that the word day in these chapters is to be understood not in the sense of a period of twenty-four hours, but in the sense of an age, or long period of time, characterized by something peculiar to it. Understood in this sense, Moses’ days of creation correspond to the eras of geology; and the “morning and evening” are but the opening and closing portions of those eras.

2. A second method of reconciling the conclusions of geology, especially its conclusion respecting the great age of the world, with the statements of the first chapters of Genesis, is, to understand Gen. 1: 1—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”—to refer to a period long anterior to that of the events recorded in the subsequent portions of the chapters; that Moses makes this statement for the purpose of teaching us who was the Creator of all things, and who, therefore, was the proper object of man’s adoration and worship; that then the long ages demanded by geology followed; ages in which the rock-strata with all their fossils were deposited, with the exception of those in which human remains occur; and of these Moses says nothing, for the sufficient reason that their history has nothing to do with the religious history of man; that when God begins the subsequent setting in order of the earth which is to fit it for the inhabitation of man, Moses resumes the narrative in the words, “And the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep”—thus describing the chaotic condition to which the earth was reduced at the time—“and the spirit of God moved upon” (was brooding upon) “the face of the waters.” Then follows an account of God’s preparation of the earth as a dwelling-place for man, and the restocking it with plants and animals adapted to its improved condition; many of these plants and animals being the same in kind with those existing in preceding ages, others entirely new; and then the story of man’s creation is given us, with which the cosmogony properly closes. Armstrong.

[In “Nature and Revelation” (pp. 131-135) Dr. Armstrong answers succinctly the chief objections which have been urged against this second method of reconciliation.]

3. Neither of these methods of reconciling the cosmogony of Moses with the demands of geology as to the great age of the earth should be adopted as a finality. Either of them will fully answer the purposes of Christian apology, will suffice to show that there is no real conflict on this point between the Mosaic cosmogony and the fairly established conclusions of the geologist. The time for making out a complete “harmony” of the two has not yet come. It is to be remembered that the Mosaic cosmogony is given us in the language of common life—a language in which things are described as they appear, while the geological record is in the language of science; and a harmony of the two involves the correct translation of the one into the language of the other. That the cosmogony of geology is yet very incomplete, and very uncertain, too, especially as regards the element of time, every intelligent geologist will admit. To be convinced of this, one needs but to read Professor Huxley’s address before the British Geological Society, published in his volume of “Lay Sermons,” more particularly the part of it concerning “geological contemporaneity.”

In such circumstances the construction of a perfect “harmony” of the two records is out of the question. What we can do, and all we can safely do at present is, to collate the two from time to time, carefully distinguishing between the established truths of science and the unproved hypotheses of enthusiastic scientists, noting the points in which they agree, and quietly leaving seeming discrepancies to be explained in the future. This is the course which the writer has pursued for many years; and in those years he has seen science, in more instances than one, adopt the very doctrines of the Mosaic cosmogony which at one time it denounced—e.g., the doctrines of “the unity of mankind” and the laws of “biogenesis” and “homogenesis.” Armstrong.

The enlightened Christian will never doubt that the narrative of Moses will be established as true by a perfected geology and astronomy. Meanwhile, he is at liberty to rest his mind provisionally on any working hypothesis which may seem to fulfil best the conditions of the problem so far as they are now known. He may accept the explanation of Chalmers and Hengstenberg, or that of Hugh Miller and Shultz, or that of the Westminster divines. He may rest there until Moses shall be interpreted aright, and the facts in nature shall be discovcred. Then a generalization will be reached which will include and harmonize all the testimony of God’s word and all the phenomena of God’s works relating to the matter. E. P. Humphrey.

While questions regarding details may be urged which, in the present stage of scientific inquiry, cannot be satisfactorily answered, recent discoveries in geology and applications in natural philosophy, taken in connection with advances in Biblical scholarship, warrant our anticipating such a combination of results as may soon shed light through what is still obscure. Meanwhile, we may suggest the probability that, while in the six natural days the preparation of the earth for man was consummated through a series of divinely-instituted adjustments, these transactions are the outcome or crown of processes which had been transpiring through long antecedent periods—but an outcome only through the mediately creative power of God. The six days’ work, therefore, may be representative of those changes and advances which constitute the previous history of our globe as the intended abode of man. Revelation, in closing the Bible, unfolds the future; Genesis, in its commencement, reveals the distant past. The Bible sheds light in both directions, until it fades in mystery; but the same principles of interpretation can be legitimately applied whether we look into the future or the past. We may assume, therefore, that as one prophetic description sometimes serves to cover widely separated future events, so the one historical description in Genesis may embrace events in the past lying widely apart. W. Fraser.

1. The Trinity. 2. Jehovah Elohim.

ONLY where the true idea of God is known is the true idea of man and of history understood. Israel is the only nation that has a true historic sense. The historic recollections of the Israelites have a universal background and range of view. Their traditions are not those of a single people only, but of a primitive history of the race. It is not so with heathen nations. Before Christ, the world was divided into different nationalities, and each nation went back only into its own past. It had no other antecedent than the land it dwelt in; it was the offspring of that. All beyond their own history, respecting remote beginnings, or views of heaven and earth, of gods and men, are mere theogenic and cosmogonic myths. Auberlen.

While all nations over the earth have developed a religious tendency which acknowledged a higher than human power in the universe, Israel is the only one which has risen to the grandeur of conceiving this power as the One, Only, Living God. Nor is it possible to explain on merely historical grounds how the Hebrews first obtained and so persistently clung to this grand first truth. Their chronicles show continual lapses into idolatry, and yet they always recovered themselves; till, at last, after a bitter discipline of national calamities, they finally turned with enthusiastic devotion to the worship of Jehovah. . . . If we are asked how it was that Abraham possessed not only the primitive conception of the divinity, as He had revealed Himself to all mankind, but passed, through the denial of all other gods, to the knowledge of the One God, we are content to answer that it was by a special divine revelation. Max Müller.

1. The Trinity. 1 : 26, Let us make. Only a plurality of persons can justify the phrase. Hence we are forced to conclude that the plural pronoun indicates a plurality of persons or hypostases in the Divine Being. M.—“Let us” (ch. 3 : 22, One of us). Undoubtedly allusion is intended to a plurality in the God-head, to which, in a later chapter, the “Angel of the Lord,” who is different from God the Lord, and yet One with Him, even more clearly points. Gerl.—How remarkable that the plural term, Elohim, should be applied to the Divine Being; especially when there was not the least necessity for so doing arising from the Hebrew language itself. How much is this apparent anomaly increased by the fact that these plural names are construed with singular verbs, pronouns, and adjectives. How awakening and suggestive the fact that Elohim, God, thus designated by a plural appellative, should also speak of himself in plural forms: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness!” while in the declaration, “My Spirit shall not always strive with man,” the idea of plurality combined with unity is still more fully developed. J. H.—I see no explanation of this plural that is at all satisfactory save that which assumes a reference to the persons of the Trinity. As one reason for such reference it may be suggested as certainly not improbable—that the idea of man, God’s chief work in creation, was coupled with his future history (all present to the divine mind)—as fallen, yet also as redeemed, and specially as redeemed by means of the incarnation of the Son of God in human flesh. Supposing this incarnation present to the divine thought, the significance of this plural would be—Let us proceed to make in our own image this wonderful being whose nature the eternal Son shall one day assume—this man who is to bear relations to us so extraordinary, so wonderful before the angels, so signal before all created minds, so glorious in its results to the whole moral universe! Have not we—Father, Son and Holy Ghost—a most surpassing interest in the creation of this being, man? H. C.

What should hinder us from accepting the solution, given by the best expositors, ancient and modern, and drawn from this consideration, that in the unity of the Divine Essence there is a plurality of persons, coequal and co-eternal, who might say, with truth and propriety, “Let us make man,” and, “Man is become as ONE OF US”? Of such a personality revelation informs us: it is that, upon which the economy of man’s redemption is founded; his creation, as well as that of the world, is, in different passages, attributed to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; what more natural therefore than that, at his production, this form of speech should be used by the divine Persons? Horne.—If, on the sixth day of Creation, God solemnly called upon the persons of the Trinity to unite in the formation of man, saying, “Let us make man in our image,” in due time also He called upon the same Trinity to unite in the work of his restoration,—the Father accepting the sacrifice, the Son achieving it, and the Spirit forever sanctifying the redeemed. W. A. B.

In these words, which precede the final act and climax of the Creation, the early Fathers detected a clear intimation of a Plurality of Persons in the Godhead. Their doctrine is to the effect that the verb, “let us make,” points to a Plurality of Persons within the Unity of the One Agent, while the “likeness,” common to all these Persons and itself One, suggests very pointedly their participation in an undivided Nature. And in such sayings as “Behold the man is become like one of us,” used with reference to the Fall or “Go to, let us go down,” etc., uttered on the eve of the Dispersion, it is clear that an equality of rank is distinctly assumed between the Speaker and those whom he is addressing. The true sense of the comparatively indeterminate language occurring in this chapter is more fully explained by the priestly Blessing prescribed in the Book of Numbers (6 : 23-26). This is spoken of as a putting the name of God, that is to say, a symbol unveiling his nature, upon the children of Israel. Here we discover a distinct limit to the number of the Persons hinted at in Genesis as being internal to the Unity of God. The priest is to repeat the most holy Name three times. The Hebrew accentuation, whatever its date, shows that the Jews themselves saw in this repetition the declaration of a mystery in the Divine nature. Unless such a repetition had been designed to secure the assertion of some important truth, a single mention of the sacred Name would have been more natural in a system, the object of which was to impress belief in the Divine Unity upon an entire people. This significant repetition, suggesting without distinctly asserting a Trinity in the being of God, did its work in the mind of Israel. It is impossible not to be struck with the recurrence of the threefold rhythm of prayer or praise, again and again, in the Psalter. And to omit traces of the influence of this priestly blessing discoverable in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, observe the crowning significance of the vision of Isaiah (6 : 2-8). In the adoration of the most holy Three, who are yet One, by the veiled and mysterious seraphim, and in the last inquiry on the part of the Divine Speaker, the very terms of which reveal him as One and yet more than One, what a flood of almost Gospel light is poured upon the intelligence of the elder Church! H. P. L.

While the doctrine of the divine Unity was taught in the most express terms, there are, at the same time, intimations that there subsists somehow a plurality in, or compatible with, this Unity. Elohim, the most usual, and probably the earliest name of God in Hebrew, is a plural term, but with very rare exceptions conjoined with verbs and adjectives singular. But, seeing that in the later Hebrew Scriptures the doctrine of a plurality in the divine Essence is unquestionably taught, what occasion is there for denying that its germ is found in the Pentateuch—a supposition which would at once account for the use of the plural term Elohim? A passage in Deut. 6 : 4 is very significant: “Hear Israel, Jehovah our Elohim is one Jehovah.” Here plurality and unity are plainly ascribed to Jehovah at the same time. “The only expressible idea suggested by such a statement is, that while there is but one God, and while that God is one in substance, there is, nevertheless, a distinction of some sort or other coexisting with this unity, and compatible with it” (Alexander). Further, in various instances, God is introduced as speaking to or of himself in the plural. Thus, Gen. 1 : 26, “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness;” chap. 3 : 22, “The Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us;” and ch. 11 : 7, “Go to, let us go down, and there (let us) confound their language.” Still more remarkable is the language of ch. 19 : 24: “Jehovah rained brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven.”

But, besides these intimations generally of a plurality in the Godhead, particular mention is made of Agents, who are denominated “the Spirit,” and “the Angel of God,” or “Jehovah” respectively. The agency of the former first appears in the creation: “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Gen. 1 : 2), preparing the dark chaotic mass for the evolutions which were to follow from the Divine fiat. That the “Spirit” in this case is not simply an attribute of the Creator, appears from the whole tenor of the narrative, and still more from the passage where mention is next made of the same

Agent: “The Lord said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man” (Gen. 6 : 3). Other references are, Ex. 31 : 3: “I have filled him (Bezaleel) with the Spirit of God;” Num. 24 : 2: “The Spirit of God came upon Balaam;” ch. 27 : 18: “The Lord said unto Moses, Take thee Joshua . . . a man in whom is the Spirit;” that is God’s Spirit, as appears from ch. 11 : 25, 29. With respect, again, to the “Angel of God,” or of “Jehovah,” fuller and more precise information is afforded in the Mosaic writings. That this was a Divine Agent, and not a created angel or messenger of God speaking and acting merely in the name of Him by whom he was commissioned, appears from various considerations. (1) He makes statements and promises which imply the possession of Divine prerogatives; as in the promise to Hagar (Gen. 16 : 10), to Abraham (22 : 12, 15-17), and to Jacob (31 : 11-13). It was this same Being to whom Jacob subsequently referred as the Angel who had redeemed him from all evil, and in whom he recognized a power to bestow blessing (48 : 15, 16). (2) He is addressed as Jehovah and God, and is so styled by the writer of the Pentateuch, showing that it was not through any misconception that these appellations were bestowed. Thus the person who appeared to Hagar is four times named the Angel of the Lord; and then it is added: “She called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, thou God seest me” (16 : 13). But the most explicit testimony is in Ex. 3 : 2-6, where it is stated that “the Angel of the Lord” appeared to Moses in the burning bush; and then is added: “When the Lord saw that Moses turned aside to see, the Lord called unto him out of the midst of the bush,” and said, “I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham,” etc. In reference to this theophany, Moses, in his concluding discourse, uses the expression, “He that dwelt in the bush” (Deut. 33 : 16), to designate Jehovah, to whom alone he looked for any blessing. (3) The Angel of God is represented as distinct from God, in Ex. 23 : 20, 21: “Behold, I send an Angel before thee to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Beware of him and obey his voice, provoke him not; for he will not pardon your transgressions; for my name is in him.” Comparing this declaration with chap. 32 : 34; 33 : 2, where God threatened that, in consequence of the Israelites’ idolatry, He himself no longer, but an angel, would be their guide, there is an unequivocal distinction between the angels referred to in the two cases. The one was a token of favor, and is so regarded in Isa. 63 : 9, the other was deprecated by Moses as a judgment. Further, that the Angel, in the one case at least, was not a creature, is proven by the terms: “He will not pardon your sins,” and God’s “name is in him,” plainly showing him to be possessed of Divine prerogatives, and to be God’s representative or revealer, by his bearing the Divine name. Yet the fact, as here declared, that he was sent by God, intimated that, though he was God, he in some sense or other was distinct from him,—a point, however, the full explanation of which was reserved to subsequent times. D. M. (See Sec. 43.)

The Christian Revelation has unfolded to us the truth above all reach of reason,—that in the Unity of the divine substance is a Trinity of the divine manifestations; and it has instructed us, when we would reflect upon that wondrous essence which caused and sustains the universe,—the Life of all Life and Soul of all Souls,—to regard it as mysteriously threefold,—as parting into three streams from one eternal source, which (stooping to our capacities, relationships, and language) it has styled the Father, Son, and Spirit. Of what these mighty personages are, in their own nature, it declares nothing; for no revelation can communicate what no created faculty can apprehend. But it tells us, and largely, that which alone it imports that we should know; it tells of their relation to us, of the distinctness of their offices, and of our corresponding duties. It declares what blessings descend from them, what answering tribute should rise from us. W. A. B.—All vital theological systems consciously or unconsciously make the Trinity the foundation, each separate truth a column, each connecting truth an arch, and Christ the dome which crowns the whole, while the work of the Holy Spirit, like the ascending spire, leads us to heaven. H. B. Smith.

The revelation of the Trinity comes from God, the source of reason, and, therefore, must, in its inner centre, be absolutely congruous with God, with his works, with us, and with all else in the universe. The Bible from beginning to end reveals God as one. He is one because one substance, one glorious Spirit; and one substance is the foundation of his glorious attributes. He is one because the three persons have an inner oneness. The Father is in the Son; the Son is in the Father; the Father and Son are in the Spirit; the Spirit is in the Father and the Son. One in their exterior unity, because together they constitute one supreme majesty; the creator, preserver and governor of the moral universe is the one God. There is, too, an absolute unity of purpose, of plan, of co-operation, of method, of work in perfect harmony to one glorious end. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost are this one God. The Bible is full of this truth. From Genesis to Revelation it is implied, asserted and inwoven into the texture of the Bible, as the soul is in the body. There is a revelation as to unity, but there is more as to Trinity. Three persons stand face to face with one another; they are objective to one another. They look at, individualize, love, speak to, command one another; they form a plan with one another; they distribute the functions of office by mutual plans, and with these distinctive functions they work together at the same plan, and to out and come in, and rejoice with one another. God is revealed as a Trinity; he is revealed as a unity, and the unity is tri-personality—three distinct persons—Father, Son and Holy Ghost, one God. A. A. Hodge.

The threefold personality of God has its ground in the one, eternal, indivisible essence. In three human persons there are three separate and independent natures or essences; in the three Divine Persons there is but one and the same numerical nature or essence. In the latter case, therefore, the word Person is not used in the same exact way as in the former, but only to denote such a threefold distinction in the one Divine nature as connects itself with personal properties and acts, without affecting the indivisible oneness. Calvin therefore said, repeating a thought of Augustine, that “the word Person was extorted by necessity, by reason of the poverty of language on so great a subject; not for the sake of expressing what God is, but to avoid passing over, in total silence, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three.” W. Lord.

There is one Divine nature or essence common unto three Persons, incomprehensibly united and ineffably distinguished; united in essential attributes, distinguished by peculiar idioms and relations; all equally infinite in every Divine perfection, each different from the other in order and manner of subsistence; that there is a mutual existence of one in all, and all in one; a communication without any deprivation or diminution in the communicant; an eternal generation, and an eternal procession without precedence or succession, without proper causality or dependence; a Father imparting His own, and a Son receiving His Father’s life, and a Spirit issuing from both, without any division or multiplication of essence. Barrow.—The essence of the Godhead is common to the several Persons. They have a common intelligence, will, and power. There are not in God three intelligences, three wills, three efficiencies. The three are one God, and therefore have one mind and will. In man the soul and body are distinct, yet while united they have a common life. We distinguish between the acts of the intellect and the acts of the will, and yet in every act of the will there is an exercise of the intelligence; as in every act of the affections there is a joint action of the intelligence and will. These are illustrations of the fact that in other and entirely different spheres there is this community of life in different subsistences. This fact of the intimate union, communion, and inhabitation of the Persons of the Trinity is the reason why everywhere in Scripture, and instinctively by all Christians, God as God is addressed as a Person, in perfect consistency with the Tri-personality of the Godhead. C. Hodge.

It is an abstract and self-evident truth that no being can be one and three at the same time and in the same sense; and, therefore, to affirm this, would be to contradict a self-evident proposition, and to maintain a palpable absurdity. But this is not the doctrine of the Trinity, nor does it bear any semblance to it. The doctrine that in the Godhead there are distinctions in personal consciousness, combined with identity of nature and attributes, is nothing more than to affirm that a being may be singular in one sense and plural in another; and this involves no contradiction. It is perfectly consistent with abstract truth, and is illustrated by actual truth; we have numerous illustrations of it in the phenomena of Nature. In the constitution of a human being we have a conjunction of unity and plurality. A human being is one, but his nature is twofold. W. Cooke.—It is no contradiction to say that in different respects the three may be one; that is, that in respect of persons they shall be three, and in respect of Godhead, essence, or nature they shall be one. The manner of the thing is a perfectly distinct question, and its incomprehensibility proves nothing but that we are finite creatures and not God. R. Watson.—If the Holy Scripture teacheth us plainly, and frequently doth inculcate upon us that there is but one true God; if it as manifestly doth ascribe to the three Persons of the blessed Trinity the same august names, the same peculiar characters, the same Divine attributes, the same superlatively admirable operations of creation and providence; if it also doth prescribe to them the same supreme honors, services, praises, and acknowledgments to be paid to them all—this may be abundantly enough to satisfy our minds, to stop our mouths, to smother all doubt and dispute about this high and holy mystery. Barrow.

If God reveal himself to the world as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it is because he is what he reveals himself as being. The Trinity of revelation implies and presupposes the Trinity of inward being which it thus makes manifest. The eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit involve a Divine impulse from eternity to creation and redemption. In like manner the Trinity of revelation has ontological elements. If love be the essence of the Divine nature, the impulse to revelation is inherent in it. In other words, God’s actions without imply inward workings and revelations, and His inward actions and revelations are the necessary premises and preparations for His outward working. In revelation God reveals himself, and the impulse of self-manifestation belongs to His inmost being. Christlieb.

When we think of God, the ever-blessed object of trust and worship, we think of a Being who is one, yet not single. Our God reveals himself as eternally capable of the most perfect blessedness, because he was never solitary, even when alone. Before creation began to rise, within the awful depths of an eternity where nothing was save God, we already discern at the heart of the infinite Deity this sacred companionship. God is not now—he never was—simply and solely “I.” Dykes.

We see in the Trinity the sublimest and completest theory of God—a God whose nature is neither diffracted by multiplicity, nor yet concluded in singularity; a God whose essence is not to be sought in lone seclusion, but in everlasting self-communication; whose being is a unit, and yet a process—a process of which the two associated names, Son and Holy Ghost, are the august terms and the perfect method; a God who allies Himself with finite intelligence by the co-eternal, mediating word, and reflects Himself in human nature and enchurches Himself in human society by the ever-proceeding sanctifying Spirit. Robie.

The social quality inheres in personality. All life is both self-affirmative and self-communicating. Here, so far as we can discover it, is the deeper and necessary ground of the Trinity in the Being of God. God is not solitary, but social, in the essential constitution of His being. There has always been in Him an active commerce of thought and affection. He has existed from all eternity in a life of self-communication, not of pure self-contemplation. And this social propensity is the ultimate spring of creation.

Not for possession, but for communication of Himself, and for the fellowship resulting therefrom, did God create the world and man. And when man responds to this movement of the Divine mind and heart, by the fellowship of a voluntary conformity to God’s holy will, he answers the end of his created being. Behrends.

Practical Basis of the Doctrine.

The primary Scriptural aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity is not speculative but practical. In the Scriptures it is a great truth, underlying the whole Christian revelation, God as Father, the source of Redemption; God as Son, achieving Redemption; God as the Holy Spirit, applying the Redemption to man. It is not a barren, abstract truth, but vital, interwoven with the whole Christian economy. The doctrine has always been vital in Christendom, the source of the life and power of Christianity. We find God in the plan, God in the work, God in the carrying into execution of the economy of Redemption. H. B. Smith.

We are to seek the foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity in that which constitutes the peculiarity of the Christian system, that it is a scheme of redemption. It is in our conscious experience of this redemption, considering this consciousness as connected with the whole Christian scheme, that we find the true basis for this doctrine. We cannot find it in the different relations which God sustains to the world, nor can we reach it by any philosophical division we may make of God’s natural attributes, nor by any reflection upon our natural and necessary conceptions of God. It is not in Natural Theology, it is not in the general relation of God to the world, that we are to seek the basis of the Trinity; it is found only in connection with the Christian system of redemption. Twesten.—The Trinity of God is the necessary groundwork of the whole Scripture doctrine of the atonement for sin, or the reconciliation between God and man. Transgression has introduced between God and man a new element and a new relation. Sin is not an act only, but a state, a state of the individual and a state of the race. Hence the great need of the race was that God should come into it anew in a quickening, healing, life-giving, personal mediation. Lost humanity was to be restored, how plainly! only by an incarnation of God Himself in the Son, making a perfect union of it with His own Spirit by the “Word made flesh.” The Holy Spirit ever comes, from the Father and the Son, to make the whole work effectual for the Church and the heart. We behold, we begin at least to behold, why God is forever One—is forever Three. Sherlock.—It is the basis of atonement for sin by Divine sacrifice, and regeneration of the soul by Divine influence. Only a Divine Saviour could make atonement for sin; only a Divine Spirit can give life to the soul. Hence these doctrines stand or fall with the doctrine of the Trinity. It is essential to the true spiritual worship of God. We worship the Father, through the Son, in the communion of the Holy Ghost. Robie.

The great advantage which the Christian perceives to belong to him in this doctrine of a Trinity is—the covenanted, certain, and unchangeable purpose of the whole Godhead both in establishing the means, and in securing the end, of his eternal salvation. He perceives that the means are equal to the end, and that the end must be the result of the means; because the great Agents who use the means are Divine and infinite, can neither be mistaken in their views, nor be disappointed in their purposes. Jehovah, “who fainteth not, neither is weary,” is engaged, by an everlasting covenant existing in His Divine personality, to create, recover, and preserve the souls of His people. Nothing, therefore, can arise which hath not been foreseen; no impediment thrown in the way which was not foreknown; no difficulty but which was designed to be overcome. The great sin of Adam, that fountain from which innumerable streams of iniquity have overflowed the world, hath only rendered this covenant more illustrious, by proving that where “sin did abound, grace could much more abound,” and that nothing, which concerned the happiness or misery of myriads of souls for everlasting ages, “is too hard for Jehovah.” None but Jehovah could reconcile to Jehovah. None but himself had either will, or love, or power, to accomplish the reconciliation. A. Serle.—Yet how could the eternal Jehovah sustain toward us so many inconsistent or incompatible relationships—be at once our Brother-Man, our Spirit Indweller, our unseen Father—be Judge, Reconciler, Quickener, if Jehovah our God were one Jehovah and nothing more? These economic relations of God to saved men do naturally lie in the threefold distinction of the Trinity. They form the several functions of the several Divine Persons in the one concurrent and sublime enterprise of man’s redemption. Dykes

All implanted wants are wonderfully satisfied in the Divine Trinity. In the absolute and one only Godhead all man’s highest, purest, largest, most far-reaching conceptions, stretching away into the regions of infinitude, eternity, almightiness, have their full and complete exercise. In the incarnate Christ, taking up our humanity, the longing for a personal, sympathizing, companionable Deity, is blessedly answered—and yet God is there; there is no loss of the essential and veritable Deity. In the Holy Spirit, the natural desire of the devout mind to connect God with all the operations of the present world, the processes of creation, the welfare, renewal, revolutions, sanctification of the human family, finds its lawful verification. Huntington.—The good man that feels the “power of the Father,” and he to whom “the Son” is become “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption;” he in “whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is spread;” to whom God hath communicated the “Holy Ghost the Comforter;”—this man, though he understands nothing of that which is unintelligible, yet he only understands the mysteriousness of the holy Trinity. No man can be convinced well and wisely of the article of the holy, blessed, and undivided Trinity, but he that feels the mightiness of “the Father begetting him to a new life;” the wisdom of “the Son building him up in a most holy faith;” and the “love of the Spirit of God making him to become like unto God.” Taylor.

The apostolic benediction (2 Cor. 13 : 14) supplies to us what we may call the three great watchwords of the Christian faith—grace, love, and fellowship. There is a triple work; there must be a triplicate of workers to perform that triple work, and each Person discharging his own individual work. And so here is the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three great and effectual works to be wrought upon man. God the Father has undertaken one of these; that makes Him real, and His work real. God the Son has undertaken another of these; that makes Him real and His work real; and God the Holy Ghost has undertaken to discharge the remaining one of these three, and that makes the work and the Person of the Holy Spirit to be alike real. Maquire.—The Church lives but by this truth; for its life is in the indwelling of Christ, and were Christ not God, His indwelling were a fable and a mockery; its life is in the abiding presence of the Spirit, and were the Spirit not a Person Divine, how were He thus universally to abide and to intercede without invading the deepest and holiest prerogatives of the Eternal God? how shall not the Church adore these as God who do for her, and are to her, all that her highest conceptions can imagine her God to be and to do? or in what terms shall she define her God which shall exclude the characters and properties that Revelation ascribes to her Sanctifier and her Redeemer? Her life is blended with the life of Christ and of the Spirit; she breathes but by these Divine ministers of the Divine Father; forsaking the blessed truth of their essential divinity she abandons the very charter of her existence. W. A. B.

History of the Doctrine.

The Ante-Nicene Church held the doctrine in an undogmatic form, but a catena of their testimonies proves that the apostolic fathers made a large advance toward later definitions. All forms of early creeds direct Christian faith to Three Persons, as also their doxologies, such as that of Polycarp. Athenagoras repudiates the charge of atheism on the ground of believing in Three Divine Persons. Theophilus of Antioch gives us the term “Triad,” used after him by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Hippolytus, and by Tertullian and Novatian changed into Trinitas. Tertullian’s language is very expressive. “All three are one by unity of substance, and the unity is developed into a Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Origen is equally clear.

Very soon, however, heresies on this particular doctrine became rife. Praxas (160-180) was the author, promulgator of Patripassianism, so-called because it abolished the distinction between the Father and the Son who suffered. But Sabellius (250) more fully developed the error, which from him was taken the name of Sabellionism; and from his peculiar theory that of M-dalism, or the assumption that the one Lord appeared first as Jehovah, then more clearly as the Son, then more fully and spiritually as the Holy Ghost. The general idea of Subordinationism took various forms, but on the whole the Ante- and Post-Nicene fathers labored to preserve the Monarchia, or unity of the Divine essence, by representing the Father as the Fountain of the Deity and its representative. They laid, however, great stress on the derived, but eternally derived, divinity of the Son and the Holy Ghost. The term “subordination,” which came into use at a later period, is an obviously perilous one, from the difficulty of admitting a subordination which does not include inferiority. Arianism took its name from Arius, who reduced the Son to a Divine creature, and taught that the Spirit was the first creation of that first-born creature, though he maintained that both were Persons, and much more intimately near to God than to the created universe. Semi-Arianism, which went as far as it could in making the Son the unchangeable image of the Father, was not quite so solicitous to maintain the dignity of the Spirit. Macedonius of that party has connected his name with that of the Pneumatomachoi, or enemies of the Spirit.

The Council of Nicea (325) against Arius, and that of Constantinople (381) against Macedonius, vindicated forever the doctrine of the Trinity; the former in relation to the divinity of the Son, the latter in relation to the personality of the Spirit. The specific relation of the Spirit to the Father and the Son, however, was not determined till 594, when, at a synod held at Toledo, the term “Filioque” was added to the Nicene Creed, which, asserting the Double Procession, was one main cause of the permanent rupture between the churches of the East and West. The Athanasian Creed completed and fixed the ecclesiastical form of the doctrine, although it does not give due prominence to its redempitional aspect.

The schoolmen exhausted their subtlety on this profound subject, but added nothing of permanent value. Nominalism, which allowed nothing but nominal existence to the general nature represented by the individual as a specimen, obviously though unintentionally led to Tritheism. Realism, which asserted the reality of the nature behind the individual, was more faithful to the Trinity in Unity.

The communities of the Reformation retained the three creeds, and were generally faithful to the doctrine, with this difference in their favor; their exhibition of the absolute Trinity has always interwoven with it an evangelical reference to the redempitional aspect of the doctrine. After the Reformation most of the ancient types of error reappeared in various forms adapted to altered circumstances. Socinian Unitarianism denied the divinity of Christ and the personality of the Holy Ghost. Sabellianism reappeared in Swedenborg’s Trinity of Principles, and of the eternal God-man, and in Schleiermacher’s Philosophy. Arianism, too, revived to mould opinion very extensively in later Christendom; and subordinationism was exaggerated by the Remonstrant divine, especially those of the later age of Arminianism, and glided downward to Unitarianism. W. B. Pope.

Hypostasis, a term used in theology to signify person. Thus the orthodox hold that there is but one nature or essence in God, but three hypostases or persons. This term is of very ancient use in the Church. Cyril, in a letter to Nestorius, employs it instead of prosopos, person, which did not appear to him sufficiently expressive. The term occasioned great dissensions, both among the Greeks and Latins. In the Council of Nicea, hypostasis was defined to mean essence or substance, so that it was heresy to say that Christ was of a different hypostasis from his father. Custom, however, altered its meaning. In the necessity they were under of expressing themselves strongly against the Sabellians, the Greeks used the word hypostasis, the Latins persona, which proved a source of great disagreement. The barrenness of the Latin language allowed them only one word by which to translate the two Greek ones, ousia and upostasis, and thus prevented them from distinguishing essence from hypostasis. An end was put to these disputes by a synod held in Alexandria about A.D. 362, at which Athanasius assisted, when it was determined to be synonymous with prosopon. After this time the Latins made no great scruple in saying tres hypostases, or the Greeks three persons. Newman.

A trinity of deities is common to all nations. The Emperor of China offers once every year a sacrifice to the Spirit of Trinity and Unity. Lao-tse (600 B.C.) says: Tao is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together brought forth the third; these three made all things. We are more familiar with the Indian Trimurti, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, who are represented and worshipped as three persons, though the original Divine principle Brahm is but one. In a commentary on the Rig Veda it is said: There are three Deities, but there is only one Godhead, the great soul. The so-called Chaldean oracle says, “The Unity brought forth the Duality which dwells with it and shines in intellectual light; from these proceeded the Trinity which shines through the whole world.” The names of the Chaldean Trinity are Anos, Illinos, Aos. In like manner we find a Divine Trinity among the Babylonians (witness the three images in the temple of Belus), the Phoenicians (Ulomus, Ulosurus, Eliun), and the Egyptians (Kneph or Ammur, Pthah, and Osiris). The divinities of Greece were grouped by mythologers both in a successive (Uranas, Chronos, Zeus) and a simultaneous trinity (Zeus, Poseidon, Aidoneus). So, too, among the Irish (Kriosan, Biosena, Jiva), the Scandinavians (Thor, Woden, Frieco), the ancient Prussians, the Pomeranians, the Wends, and the old Americans. Do not all these coincidences serve as an indirect proof to compel us to acknowledge that Schelling was right when he said, “The philosophy of mythology proves that a Trinity of Divine potentialities is the root from which have grown the religious ideas of all nations of any importance that are known to us? . . . This idea does not exist because there is such a thing as Christianity; on the contrary, Christianity exists because this idea is the most original of all.” Christlieb.

2:7. The Lord God, or, in Hebrew, Jehovah-Elohim. This name is here given to God, after he had been called simply Elohim. Elohim signifies the majesty, power, greatness, and glory of God, in the domain of creation. Jehovah indicates the covenant-relation in which he has placed himself with the better part of the children of men, and points to the plan of salvation which he purposed to accomplish on their behalf, and which in the fullness of time he actually effected. C. G. B.—The sacred writer, having recorded the creation as the act of God, giving to Him then His generic name as the Supreme Being, now passes to the more personal history of man and his immediate relation to his Maker, and therefore introduces the more personal name of God, the name by which He became afterward known to the patriarchs, as th-ir God. The union of the two names JEHOVAH Elohim throughout chapters 2 and 3 is singularly appropriate, as indicating that the Elohim of the first chapter is the same as the JEHOVAH who appears afterward in the fourth chapter, and from time to time throughout the history. E. H. B.

Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures two chief names are used for the one true divine Being—ELOHIM, commonly translated God in our version, and JEHOVAH, translated LORD. ELOHIM is the plural of ELOAH (in Arabic Allah), a form which occurs only in poetry and a few passages of later Hebrew (Neh. 9:17; 2 Chr. 32:15). P. S.—It does not occur in the singular in the earlier books of Scripture, except in the abbreviated form of El. The word is a title rather than a name. It is applied to false gods, as well as to the true. The heathen nations round about the Israelites would have recognized the existence and the divinity of El and of the Elohim.

JEHOVAH, on the contrary, is as clearly a proper name as Jupiter or Vishnu. Elohim and Jehovah are therefore as distinguishable as D-us and Jupiter; the difference being only in this, that, whereas the worshippers of Jupiter admitted “gods many and lords many,” a multitude of Dil, the worshippers of Jehovah, on the other hand, believe in no Elohim except JEHOVAH. E. H. B.

Where in the Old Testament, in our translation, the word “God” stands, there in the Hebrew is the word “Elohim.” Where the word “Lord” occurs, it is commonly in Heb. “Jehovah.” Elohim is properly a plural, “the Beings to be feared;” it has, however, the verb in the singular. Elohim is the more general name, answering somewhat to our word “Deities,” and is therefore used also of the gods of the heathen. This more general word “God” describes the Almighty in his relation as Creator and Lord of the world, whose “eternal power and godhead” might be known by the heathen, as declared in the works of creation. The word “Jehovah” represents always the living, personal God, in His revealed character, in His covenanted relations to man. Gerl.

JEHOVAH. As is well known, the proper vowels of this most difficult and important of all the divine names are lost. Expressed without vowels, its consonants stand thus: Y-H-V-H. Judging from its relation to the Hebrew word Eryeh in Ex. 3:13, it is now most frequently vocalized thus by scholars: YAHEH. Its derivation from the verb of “being” suggests as its root-idea the highly abstract conception of the divine self-existence. From the root-idea of “being, undetermined from without,” flow the two characteristics of God as the God of the covenant: (1) freedom or sovereignty in His self-determination; and (2) consistency or faithfulness, unchangeableness, in His self-determination. As free to choose, and yet as bound by His choice or promise, he is Jehovah—the Covenant God. Dykes.

Even the patriarchs, who were led by a Divine light, recognized God rather as El Shaddai, God Almighty, than in his character of Jehovah. Yet in no age from the call of Abraham was this latter name altogether unknown, though in general so dimly apprehended, that at the time of the Exodus, it had, as it were, to be announced anew. To Abraham its import was made particularly apparent in the transaction of Moriah; and both the name of the locality and the proverb connected with it—“Abraham called the name of the place Jehovah-jireh (Jehovah will see), as it is said to this day, In the mount of Jehovah he will appear” (Gen. 22:14), show that it was a standing memorial in Israel of the Patriarchal age. How Abraham himself viewed the revelation then made to him, appears not only from the name Moriah, but also from his subsequent constant use of the name Jehovah, as, for instance, JEHOVAH-ELOHIM of heaven and JEHOVAH-ELOHIM of earth (Gen. 24:3, 12), so that even the patriarch’s servant spoke of God as JEHOVAH-ELOHIM of his master (ver. 12), and strangers like Laban recognized the servant as the ‘blessed of JEHOVAH’ (ver. 31). This is the more remarkable, because previously Abraham designated God variously as JEHOVAH EL ELYON, ADONAI JEHOVAH, ADONAI, and ELOHIM. So also Isaac refers to JEHOVAH as the author of blessings on nature, and to EL SHADDAL as the source of blessing on Jacob; and Jacob himself is seen in the closing scene of his history, waiting in faith for the salvation to be wrought through this deliverer: “I have waited for thy salvation, O Jehovah.” D. M.

The names Elohim and Jehovah are not synonymous, and cannot be so used. The one expresses the genus, the other stands for the individual, and is a proper name. Elohim answers to our own word God or Deity, and is therefore used of false gods as well as of the true. Jehovah stands for the personal, living, self-revealing Being, and is explained in Ex. 3 : 14 and 34 : 6. It can be applied to none but the one true and eternal God, as is said, “I am Jehovah; that is my name, and my glory will I not give to another.” This distinction is strongly marked in the words of Elijah, “If Jehovah be Elohim, follow him.” Here it would be impossible to interchange Elohim and Jehovah, or to say, “if Baal be Jehovah.” There is an essential difference in signification, and, though sometimes either might be used, yet there are cases where there is a peculiar propriety in using one rather than the other, and there are other cases in which one must be used, and the other cannot. In the first chapter of Genesis Moses might have used either Elohim or Jehovah, except in the 27th verse, where Elohim was compulsory. But in the opening of the Divine teaching it was necessary to make clear that God is Creator, that the world was not eternal, nor independent; and also that Jehovah is not one among many—not the national God of the Hebrews—but that Jehovah the self-revealer and Elohim the Almighty Creator are one. Therefore in the first chapter Elohim is used throughout. The Deity is the Creator. But in approaching that part of the narrative where the personal God enters into relations with man, and where Jehovah was necessary, Moses unites the names, Jehovah Elohim. The union proves identity, and this being proved, Moses sometimes employs Jehovah, sometimes Elohim, as occasion, propriety and the laws of the Hebrew language require. McCaul.

From an examination of parallel passages concontaining the remarkable designation, Jehovah-Elohim, it appears that the two terms are in apposition; the combination being thus equivalent to “Jehovah, who is Elohim.” An explanation or paraphrase of the designation is probably contained in such passages as Ps. 18 : 32; Isa. 44 : 6; Deut. 32 : 30. This view is fully confirmed by the only other passage in the Pentateuch where the same combination occurs (Ex. 9 : 30): “I know ye will not fear Jehovah-Elohim.” So also in 1 Kings 18 : 21, Elijah represents that the great issue between the worshippers of the true God and of Baal was whether Jehovah or Baal was Ha-Elohim—the proper Elohim. D. M.

In reading the Scriptures, the Rabbins substituted for Jehovah the word ADONAI (Lord), from the translation of which by Kurios in the LXX., followed by the Vulgate, which uses Dominus, we have got the LORD of our Version. Our translators have, however, used JEHOVAH in four passages (Ex. 6 : 3; Psalm 83 : 18; Is. 12 : 2; 26 : 4), and in the compounds Jehovah-Jirch, Jehovah-Nissl, and Jehovah-Shalom (Jehovah shall see, Jehovah is my Banner, Jehovah is Peace); while the similar phrases Jehovah-Tsidkenu and Jehovah-Shammah are translated, “the LORD our righteousness,” and “the Lord is there” (Jer. 23 : 6; 33 : 16; Ezek. 48 : 35). In one passage the abbreviated form JAH is retained (Psalm 68 : 4). The substitution of the word LORD is most unhappy; for, while it in no way represents the meaning of the sacred name, the mind has constantly to guard against a confusion with its lower uses, and, above all, the direct personal bearing of the name on the revelation of God through the whole course of Jewish history is kept injuriously out of sight. P. S.—The characteristic Divine name, Jehovah, occurs in the Old Testament (A. V.) in seven places, in three of which it is in composition, as Jehovah-Shalom (Judg. 6 : 24). This number has been considerably increased in the revision, but the American Committee think that the change should be universal. It is well known that the Jews cherished a superstitious dread of this name, and while preserving its radical letters altered the vowels, so that it is not altogether a settled question what those vowels were, though all admit that they were not those represented by our English word Jehovah. Most modern scholars propose to express them by the form Jahveh. The Greek translators did not transfer the word, but rendered it uniformly by kurios, and the English translators copied their example by rendering with the exceptions noted, LORD; and where this occurred in connection with another Hebrew word signifying Lord, they rendered the compound phrase “Lord God,” thus completely hiding from the ordinary reader the full force of the term. For “Lord” simply conveys the ideas of authority, power and majesty, which are abundantly conveyed by other terms, such as E. Shaddai. As is well known, God is the ordinary title given to the Creator as supreme and the object of worship, in which sense it is applied to the gods of the heathen; but Jehovah belongs alone to the God of Israel who revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and it is never applied to any other deity. There are Gods many, or many that are so called, but there is only one Jehovah. This is the incommunicable name. There are differences of opinion as to its exact meaning, but there is no difference as to its being the chosen and characteristic appellation of the God of the Scriptures, the One who revealed himself to his people and entered into covenant with them. Elohim is the God of nature, the creator and preserver of men, but Jehovah is the God of revelation and redemption; and this wealth of meaning in the latter term is increased if we regard it as involving the ideas of eternal and immutable self-existence which its derivation is generally considered to imply. Chambers.

1:26 AND God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth 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. 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

26. Man. Here the language is definite, “the man,” and in the first half of the verse the pronoun is singular and masculine, intimating that at first only one human being and that one the male was created. Then the writer as briefly and clearly describes the subsequent distinction into sexes. And in noticing this fact there is something peculiar, for with regard to fish or beasts or cattle he does not mention that God created them male and female. With regard to man, short as is the notice, he does relate, first that “in the image of God created He him,” that is, one male; and then “male and female created He them.” McCaul.

Instead of saying, “Let there be man,” as he had before said, “Let there be light,” or giving a command to the elements to bring forth so noble a creature, he speaks of the work as immediately his own, and in the language of deliberation; implying thereby not any more intrinsic difficulty in this act of his power than in the creation of the smallest insect, but the superior dignity and excellence of the creature he was about to form. Bush.—The fact of Divine deliberation here, and here only, interrupting the continuous flow of God’s creative acts, sufficiently indicates the solemnity of that which is to follow. Earth and earth’s tribes were prepared; but now there is a king to be set over them,—one like them, but also unlike them: a complex being, made up of the dust of the earth and of the image of God. Alf.

Three times in v. 27 the verb created is used concerning the production of man; for, though his bodily organization may, like that of the beasts, have been produced from already created elements (“the dust of the ground,” ch. 2:7); yet the complex being, man, “of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting,” was now for the first time called into being, and so was, unlike the beasts, wholly a new creation. E. H. B.—Of the last work, the sacred record says, “God created Man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” Three times this strong affirmation is repeated in the announcement, and three times “the potent word” bāra is used. Man’s commission, as sent forth, was “subdue” “and have dominion,” in which all nature was placed at his feet; and being made in the image of God, he was capable of moral distinctions and of spiritual progress. He was thus above nature, while of nature. “With him begins the age of moral freedom and responsibility, that of the historical world.” Dana.—After the further lapse of ages the elevatory fiat went forth yet once more in an act of creation, and with the human, heaven aspiring dynasty the moral government of God, in its connection with the world we inhabit, “took beginning;” and then creation ceased. Why?—simply because God’s moral government had begun. Hugh Miller.

Three principal features in the Mosaic picture will ever claim attention from all thoughtful men:—1. The cause of all things: God. 2. The order of things: a continual progress. 3. The final object of things: man; not an individual one amongst the terrestrial creatures; but the very object and aim of creation itself. God.—Each divine act marks a step in an ordered progress culminating at last in man. Of him all lower creation prophecies; to him all lower creation tends. The vertebrate structure is the endowment of life with power; the mammalian function superadds love. But the plenary development of neither is possible till wisdom is bestowed through the human brain. Paleontology, like the Mosaic cosmogony, leads up to its “image of God.” When man is made God creates no more. G. Rorison.—The record of creation relates specifically to the race of man. Besides being prepared for man, it concerns itself chiefly, if not exclusively, with what belongs to him. Of the creation of angels nothing is said. Respecting the starry heavens a brief clause is employed; for what are they all to man, in his present state, compared with the sun which makes his day, the moon which rules his night, and the earth on which he dwells? In the account of the vegetable creation, no mention is made of timber-trees, the giants of the botanical kingdom; the history is confined to the production of grasses, or food for cattle; to herbs, or grain and leguminous plants for his own use, and to fruit-bearing trees; all relating, directly or indirectly, to the wants and conveniences of mankind. Man himself is described as created last; plainly intimating that all which had gone before was only a means of which he was to be the subordinate end. And not only the process, but even its termination is made to subserve his welfare, for it is laid as a reason for the institution of the Sabbath. An.

In the appearance of man the system of life, in progress through the ages, reached its comcompletion, and the animal structure its highest perfection. Another higher is not within the range of our conception. For the vertebrate type, which began during the palæozoic, in the prone or horizontal fish, becomes erect in man, and thus completes, as Agassiz has observed, the possible changes in the series to its last term. An erect body and an erect forehead admit of no step beyond. But besides this, man’s whole structure declares his intellectual and spiritual nature. His fore-limbs are not organs of locomotion, as they are in all other mammals; they have passed from the locomotive to the cephalic series, being made to subserve the purposes of the head; and this transfer is in accordance with a grand law in nature, which is at the basis of grade and development. The cephalization of the animal has been the goal in all progress; and in man we mark its highest possible triumph. Man was the first being that was not finished on reaching adult growth, but was provided with powers for indefinite expansion, a will for a life work, and boundless aspirations to lead to an endless improvement. He was the first being capable of an intelligent survey of Nature, and comprehension of her laws; the first capable of augmenting his strength by bending nature to his service, rendering thereby a weak body stronger than all animal force; the first capable of deriving happiness from truth and goodness; of apprehending eternal right; of reaching toward a knowledge of self and of God; the first, therefore, capable of conscious obedience or disobedience of moral law, and the first subject to debasement through his appetites and moral nature. Dana.

The body. Nothing can be conceived which would surpass the workmanship and the elegance of this fabric. It sets forth pre-eminently the Divine art—the art of God in fitting up a structure including within itself so many miracles. Whether we look to what is external or internal—to what is more essential, or to what is rather ornamental, we are equally impressed and surprised. Nor is the comeliness more striking than the utility of the various parts. How beautifully and aptly subservient is every member to the great functions and offices for which it was designed! How adapted is the eye for the transmission of light—the ear for the conveying of sound—the hand for manipulation—the tongue, with its manifold appendages, for the utterance of speech—the bones for strength and support—the muscles for locomotion—the lungs for respiration—the heart for circulation—the brain for sensation and vol-

sions. Mark says (8 : 12) that our Lord sighed deeply in spirit, and also records him as saying (14 : 34), “My soul is exceeding sorrowful.” Both terms are used to designate the animating principle of the body (Jno. 12 : 25 and James 2 : 26), and both to designate that which is the subject of eternal salvation (1 Cor. 5 : 5 and 1 Pet. 1 : 9). Both stand for the life of beasts (Eccles. 3 : 19-21 and Rev. 16 : 3). Each is used over and over to express the whole inner man, the proper personal self. Both are applied without distinction to deceased persons (Rev. 6 : 9 and Heb. 12 : 23). They cannot therefore be regarded as distinctive hypostases, as separate constituent parts of man’s natural constitution. (3) Moreover, the established usage of the Scripture is to recognize only a twofold division of man. The sacred writers speak of “soul and body” and also of “spirit and body,” but they never discriminate soul and spirit. In one case, these two are placed close together, viz.: in Mary’s Magnificat, Luke 1 : 46, 47.

My soul doth magnify the Lord,

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

But the parallelism shows that both words mean the same thing. Our Lord’s solemn utterance in Matt. 10 : 28 is pertinent here. “Fear not them which kill the body, but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell (Gehenna).” Here it is plain that the soul and the body are all that there is of man. So in the interesting passage in the sixteenth Psalm, quoted and argued from by the Apostle Peter on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2 : 25-31), there is mention made of only two elements, the soul that was not left in (rather, given over to) Hades and the flesh that did not see corruption. These two being provided for, nothing else was left to desire. Chambers.

From the point of view of Holy Scripture, man is a composite being, made up of two elements of opposite nature and origin. The being which resulted from the combination of these two elements is described by the expression “a living soul;” and thus, continues Genesis, “man became a living soul”—words reproduced by Paul almost literally (1 Cor. 15 : 15). This expression “living soul” is not applied to the breath of God considered in itself and as separate from the body, but it describes man in his entirety, as the result of the union of the two contrasted elements. If Holy Scripture, speaking of the soul, undeniably puts it in more direct relation with the breath of God than with the body, it is none the less true that it only gives the name soul to the first of these elements when looked at as the principle of life, and as the animating principle of the body (anima, âme). When that which was breathed into us is considered in itself and apart from the body, it takes the name of spirit (ruach, pneuma). Thus it is said in Ecclesiastes: “The dust shall return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” And Jesus said, after the resurrection, “a spirit (pneuma) hath not flesh and bones.” The spirit then, in the Bible, means the breath of God considered as independent of the body; the soul is the same breath, in so far as it gives life to the body. By this we may understand how it comes to pass that notwithstanding the essential duality of the nature of man, the soul, in Scripture, is often distinguished from the spirit; and even how it is that when Paul wishes to describe the complete constitution of the human being, he places side by side these three words—body, soul, and spirit (1 Thes. 5 : 23). Observation and Holy Scripture agree then in this,—that they teach us to see in man a spirit united to a body, and which has become, by means of this union, a soul which is the centre of three kinds of life; that of a person, free and intelligent, the life of the soul, or psychical life; that of the sensations and of the organic activities, or physical life; and that of the aspirations and of heavenly communion, or spiritual life. Godet.

God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Herein is plainly taught the distinct personality both of man and God, and that each is a spiritual being capable of holding intercourse with the other. Bowen.—The intimations made at the very commencement of the Hebrew Scriptures with regard to man are not less distinct than those which, as already noticed, refer to the character of the Creator. The anthropology of the Pentateuch is as complete and explicit as its theology. Indeed, the one doctrine is viewed as the proper correlate of the other; and this is in entire harmony with the idea expressed in the very first notice regarding man, as to his being created in the image of God, or in other words, as to his constituting, not only the object, but likewise the chief medium of Divine revelation. The revelation of man is thus the revelation of Him whose workmanship he is, both as respects the old or Adamic, and that new creation of which the New Testament gives more explicit information. Thus it has been well remarked: “The doctrine of one personal, holy God, was not the only truth on which the law insisted. It unfolded, also, the true doctrine of man; his dignity and wretchedness. It urged not one of these great verities, but both; for only where the origin and grandeur of the human species are fully apprehended can we hope to understand the turpitude of moral evil, and the real nature of the fall of man. The Bible tells us that there is in him a high and God-like element, that instead of having been fashioned in the lower model of the brute creation, he came forth into the world erect in stature, and impressed with the Divine similitude; that in virtue of this kinship human life is sacred (Gen. 9:6), and that human spirits, on the dissolution of the body, return to God who gave them (Eccles. 12:7). D. M.—From hence we learn, not only the origin of those admirable faculties of man, especially in the light of his understanding and the liberty of his will, whereby he resembles his Maker; but also from whence he had that intellectual soul, not out of the matter whereof his corporeal and animal nature was constituted, but of a higher and nobler extraction, namely, by creation. He breathed into him the breath of life. Sir Matthew Hale.

Man, as bearing the image of God, was made capable of knowing God, and further, of making Him known to others. He was so constituted as to be an embodiment of certain Divine ideas affecting primarily himself, and, ultimately, other intelligent beings. He was thus to be not only the object, but also through, or in consequence of, God’s purposes concerning him, the chief medium of Divine revelation. The fundamental idea involved in this Divine image would seem to be that man, of all the creatures of God, was especially set apart for sustaining in the highest form a representative character and some peculiar relation to God, in connection with which the whole of the Divine perfections should be wonderfully and universally manifested. It thus corresponded entirely with the “intent,” to which Paul refers in Eph. 3:9, 10, as the ultimate end of redemption. D. M.

We gather from this first chapter that God is a spirit, that he thinks, speaks, wills, and acts. Here are the great points of conformity to God in man, namely, reason, speech, will, and power. In the spiritual being that exercises reason and will resides the power to act, which presupposes both these faculties,—the reason as informing the will, and the will as directing the power. This is that form of God in which he has created man, and condescends to communicate with him. M.

God may be in man by an image, a likeness of Himself; but not by an actual impartation of Himself, of His substance. His moral and rational attribuées are communicable, in the sense of being imitable; but his nature itself is in communicable. In this sense, He neither “will,” nor can, “give His glory to another.” God may be imaged in the soul; He may have His likeness there: but He cannot be in the soul by a literal impartation and commingling of Himself with its substance. A miraculous union of the human nature with the Divine has been once effected in the mysterious person of our glorious “Immanuel.” Such a union cannot be effected in a mere man without rendering every Christian literally a true Christ. Stone.—The Scripture never speaks of the Divine image in man, but always of man as formed after the Divine image. And this indicates a profound principle of Biblical thought. It presupposes God to account for man. Thus by “the Divine image,” the Bible does not mean those elements in man from which an idea of God may be framed, but conversely those features in the Divine Being of which man is a copy. If we read what the Bible says of God in relation to the world, and what of God in Himself, we shall get leading lines for its delineation of man; always premising that of the Divine idea man is a created copy, not, like the Logos, an essential image. Laidlaw.

The brute creatures are gifted with life and will and self-consciousness, and even with some powers of reason; but they have no self-determining will, no choice between good and evil, no power of self-education, no proper moral character, and so no true personality. God is the essentially personal Being, and in giving to man an immortal soul, He gave him also a true personality, self-consciousness, power of free choice, and so distinct moral responsibility. All this was accompanied at first with purity and innocence; and thus man was like his Maker, intelligent, immortal, personal, with powers of forethought and free choice, and at the same time pure and undefiled. E. H. B.

We seek this resemblance in man’s intellectual constitution, in his spiritual capacities and powers, in his moral faculties, and in that position of dominion in which he was placed to represent the Creator upon the earth. Man is a reasonable, personal soul, and in this respect is the likeness of God. J. P. T.—This likeness consists in his superior spiritual nature, which he has by direct communication from God. This spiritual nature, when free from sin, reflected in small the spiritual nature of God himself. When sin intervened, it lost its purity and dignity, its holiness and blessedness, but not its basis and form. Christ is the restorer again to it of the Divine image (Col. 3:10).

Alf.—Man is made in God’s image as being gifted like his Maker with intelligence and with capacities for moral action—beyond comparison the noblest possible elements of being. He has the sense of moral obligation and the voluntary powers requisite to fulfil such obligation. He can find his supreme joy in voluntarily seeking the good of others, even of all other sentient beings, and in laboring even to the extent of self-sacrifice to promote their welfare. This is the pre-eminent perfection of God—the very point ultimately in which man is made in his image, and capable of becoming more and more God-like, forever approximating toward his holiness and blessedness. His intellectual powers are only the servants of these highest and noblest activities of his being. H. C.

Dean Graves says: “The expression of the image of God plainly implies the idea of the soul’s immortality.” He cites Abarbanel, Tertullian, Vatablus, Paulus Fagius, Edwards, Augustin, Poole, and Patrick as holding the same view. In the trial of our first parents, the threatened penalty of death clearly implied the promise of life as the reward of obedience. And the life, thus implicitly promised, must have been an endless one; otherwise death would have followed obedience as well as disobedience, and the distinction between virtue and vice would have been destroyed. E. C. W.

Man was formed, God tells us, in the image of God, after the likeness of the all-holy Trinity. Every power and faculty of the soul bore some trace of its likeness to its Maker. They were shadowy representations of some aspect of the infinite mind. In God all is one. His attributes are, even in thought, inseparable from Himself. His power, His will, His goodness, His greatness, His wisdom, His blessedness, are Himself. For He is one simple essence. The very Persons of the all-holy Trinity, in that mode of existence which belongs to God, exist in one another in perfect oneness. In this image and likeness of the all-perfect God man was made, his various powers shadowing attributes of God, which, although inseparable from God, we, as finite, can only conceive of (as far as we can conceive of them) when set before us apart. But so, the immortality of man is a faint shadow of the eternity of God; man’s forethought, of the Divine providence; man’s intuition, of the Divine intelligence; man’s memory, of the Divine knowledge; man’s imagination, of God’s conception of all things possible, though they are not. More plainly yet man’s will, power, desire to communicate himself, love, complacency, tenderness, justice, truth, are imparted copies of God’s infinite perfections. Nay, those three especially, memory, reason, will, have, both in earlier and later times of the gospel, been thought to be a shadow of the all-holy Trinity in itself. Pusey.

On the theatre of Nature, unconscious life has been exercised, a slave to the senses. On the stage of history, the human soul has displayed the riches of life self conscious and free. In the Church (understanding this word in its most spiritual sense) there grew up, and has since developed itself, a new thing,—the life of holy love, realized in Jesus Christ, and by him communicated to us. Finally, in that supreme abode which we call heaven, this perfect life, divine in its essence, human in its form, will expand and radiate through matter then glorified. Existence, liberty, holy love, these are the characteristics of the three kinds of life which are ours either actually or potentially, and whose growth and development make up the whole sum of the life of man. Above simple existence there is free existence; above freedom, there is the life which, having reached the entire disposal of itself, sacrifices itself for love. Above this third form of existence we can conceive nothing,—we dare to say there is nothing, for God is Love. Through the possession of these three kinds of life, of which the first is in contact with the lowest steps in the scale of being, the last is an emanation from the Divine essence, and the second forms the link between the two others, must not man be the summary and compendium of life in the universe? Godet.

Wonderful in pathos is the appeal which results from all these considerations; to be felt rather than expressed in words. Man is God’s child; man bears a signature Divine. Great things are expected of man: reasoning which approaches the quality of a revelation; service which requires Almightiness alone to exceed it; love that courts the agony of sacrifice; purity hard to distinguish from the holiness of God. J. P.

Original condition of the first man. It is sufficiently manifest that a human being, however mature in size and strength, entering on life without experience, would require some immediate and preternatural knowledge as a substitute for experience; otherwise he would be like the new-born infant in capacity to care for himself, and the day of his creation might easily have been the day of his dissolution. His very faculty of sight would be misleading, and all his muscular powers unmanageable. While therefore the scripture consistently and necessarily ascribes to him a precocious intelligence and some linguistic development, as exhibited in fitly giving names to the animal world and in recognizing the contrast of his own solitude, there is a clear intimation of his practical inexperience in his being directed by his Geator to make the clothing of skins, and perhaps also in the absence of all surprise in Eve’s listening to the speech of one in the form of a serpent. The scripture thus makes a fully consistent picture,—of one in the balance of the moral nature, with Augustine’s “posse peccare et posse non peccare,” yet without the formed character which will make the security of the ransomed; and, intellectually, of one entirely destitute of the industrial arts and scientific attainments, but with a mental capacity full grown. S. C. B.—We cannot suppose that man was placed on the earth in ignorance of his own origin, or of the origin of the creatures by which he is surrounded, and of which he is at once the crown and glory. Doubtless Adam was well instructed in the history of creation; and it is most unlikely that he should have withheld this knowledge from his family, or that they should have failed to transmit it in some way or other to their posterity. We know that Abraham was the instructor as well as the governor of his household, and that the fathers possessed supernatural revelation. E. A. Thompson.

In the constitution of the first man, considered as a sinless being, we behold a creature whose every susceptibility and power tends to enjoyment. Regarded merely as a partaker of animal existence, the consciousness of life alone is the consciousness of enjoyment. Additional enjoyment was provided for him in the gratification of each of those appetites which relate to the support and continuance of life. As a percipient being, every organ of sense was an avenue of distinct and additional grateful sensations. As a reflective and rational being, the mere exercise and expansion of his intellectual faculties would occasion him enjoyment: improvement itself would be pleasure. The emotions of novelty and curiosity, of anticipation and hope, of cheerfulness and love, are only other names for happiness; and yet this is the only class of emotions of which unfallen man would be conscious. The consciousness of a power to will—of his doing what he did from choice—this was another and a deep source of enjoyment. And, then, the highest, the most exquisite of all, was the consciousness that he had done morally right, that he had acted in harmony with the objective and supreme will. J. H.—Peace, as God meant it, is the primitive state of humanity—a state toward which, though it has long since fled, humanity still ever yearns again; the hope of which forms the rosy fringe of the future, and to restore which is the effort and the aim of all true religion. Ewald.

The difference between a man and an animal is threefold. In man we find: First,—A comprehending power, that surveys the universe, and all the capacities of its possessor, in relation to that universe. Second,—A sense of Obligation to do certain acts, and to refrain from others,—this sense arising spontaneously, in view of certain relations or results, and being distinct from those impulses of the affections or desires, which may belong to an animal. Third,—The power of choice, that gives, by its generic action, individuality of aim for a lifetime; and, in specific acts, determines whether the higher or lower nature of man shall rule. These three powers, with executive volition, make man the ruler of the world and the shaper of his own destiny, so far as choice and attempts are concerned. These three powers are all that we have yet found distinctive in the higher nature of man. If animals have either of them, we look in vain for the proof of it in the whole range of the animal kingdom. The beautiful action of the natural instincts—as the social instincts, and parental instincts—is often triumphantly referred to as proof of the moral nature of animals; but a full analysis of these instincts shows that they occupy an entirely different sphere from the three powers we have mentioned. In man these natural instincts call the moral nature into action, it is true; but in the animals, they need neither guidance nor restraint from obligation or anything above them. P. A. Chadbourne.

WE encounter at the threshold the question of the original estate of man. Was it, as the infidel theories assume, sheer barbarism? Was it mere “crude capacity,” involving, perhaps, a protracted feebleness of pupilage? Or was it only infancy, more fresh than crude, infolded in the Divine arms, breathed upon by a Divine inspiration, and at once aroused and informed by the lessons of a Divine tuition? These are the three suppositions, or assumptions: which of them is the right one? Surely, not the first, which propounds barbarism as the primitive estate, since, as Niebuhr has affirmed, there is not in history the record of a single indigenous civilization; there is nowhere, in any reliable document, the report of any people lifting themselves up out of barbarism. The historic civilizations are all exotic. The torches that blaze along the line of the centuries were kindled, each by the one behind it. Nor yet can we accept the second supposition, which assumes a crude capacity, somewhat tardily developed. It offends our moral sense, to imagine the human race lying, even for a night, like a poor foundling on the cold door-sill of its future habitation. The third assumption must therefore be the true one. Humanity, we are constrained to believe, was born into its home and passed at once into its Father’s arms, taken up with infinite tenderness, immediate provision being made for all its wants. The first man, made outright, must have been more than a puling infant, staring and stammering at what he saw. We need not reckon him a philosopher, but we must believe him to have been a man; somewhat infantile, doubtless, in tone, but not in capacity, nor in the method of his mental growth. R. D. H.

The theory of the evolutionists is that man is the son of a monkey; the philosophy of the Bible teaches throughout that he is a child of God. The former make out a supposititious history of what they suppose to be the several stages of unassisted progress from barbarism to civilization, and rashly conclude that man actually has risen by his own efforts, merely because they see no reason why he might not so rise under favorable circumstances. But according to the account in Genesis, man has fallen from a former state of innocence and happiness through his own fault in weakly yielding to temptation, and so plunging into corruption and wickedness. F. Bowen.

We are told that man, beginning his course as a savage, has gradually raised himself through what are termed the palæolithic, the neolithic, the bronze and the iron ages, each of which lasted for many thousands of years—until he reached the beginnings of our modern civilization. This opinion has been supported with especial zeal by those who adopt the hypothesis of man’s evolution from the brute. Beginning our examination with the present condition of man, we find him in every possible stage of civilization, from the utter savagery of the Digger Indians of North America and the Weddas of Ceylon to the advanced civilization of the English-speaking nations, who dominate the world. And comparing the present condition of the nations with what authentic history tells us it was a few centuries ago, we learn that while some nations have been steadily advancing in civilization, others have been stationary, and others, again, have retrograded. G. D. A.—Nothing in the natural history of man can be more certain than that, both morally and intellectually and physically, he can and he often does sink from a higher to a lower level. This is true of man both collectively and individually, of men and of societies of men. Some regions of the world are strewn with monuments of civilizations which have passed away. Rude and barbarous tribes stare with wonder on the remains of temples, of which they cannot conceive the purpose, and of cities which are the dens of beasts. Argyll.—Savagery and civilization are the two opposite poles of our social condition, states between which men oscillate freely, passing from either to the other with almost equal ease according to the external circumstances wherewith they are surrounded. G. R.

Archæologists talk of an Old Stone Age (Palæolithic), and of a Newer Stone Age (Neolithic), and of a Bronze Age, and of an Iron Age. There is no proof whatever that such Ages ever existed in the world. Argyll.—Innumerable facts show that in any absolutely general sense we cannot rationally divide the pre-historic period into ages of Stone and Metal. . . . The Palæolithic period, as a distinct age, is rather a product of the imagination of over-zealous antiquaries, whose fancies have been too readily accepted as facts by geologists. Dawson.—It may be and probably is true that all nations in the progress of the Arts have passed through the stages of using stone for implements before they were acquainted with the use of metals. But knowledge of the metals must have arisen at very different epochs in different regions of the earth. We know from the remains of the First Chaldean Monarchy that a very high civilization in the arts of agriculture and commerce coexisted with the use of stone implements of a very rude character. This fact proves that rude stone implements are not necessarily any indication whatever of a really barbarous condition. Assuming then that the use of stone has in all cases preceded the use of metals, it is quite certain that the same Age which was an Age of Stone in one part of the world was an Age of Metal in another. Argyll.

The several ages, as they are called, of stone, bronze, iron, and a higher civilization are not, nor have they ever been, ages in the progress of the human race as a whole; but only in that of particular peoples or nations; peoples in all these stages of progress living, not only at the same time, but often side by side—as did the English colonists, the Red Indians and the Aztecs in America two centuries ago. Nor does the passage of a people through one of these ages—the stone age, for example—necessarily require thousands of years. Where a savage people are brought into contact with a civilized one, they may pass through all these ages in the course of a generation or two. Such has been the case with the civilized Indians in our Indian Territory. “The Stone Age is not necessarily associated with antiquity. It is a stage of civilization, and not a measure of time.” (Southall.) These several ages may be stages in a course of degradation, as was the fact, according to Sir John Lubbock, with respect to the Stone Age, in which many tribes of our North American Indians were found living, at the first settlement of the country by Europeans. G. D. A.

I set little value on the argument of Whately, that as regards the mechanical arts man can never have arisen “unaided.” The aid which man had from his Creator may possibly have been nothing more than the aid of a body and a mind, so marvellously endowed that thought was an instinct and contrivance at once a necessity and delight. But I set still less value on the arguments of Lubbock, that primeval man must have been born in a state of “utter barbarism,” on the ground that this is the actual condition of the outcasts of our race or that industrial knowledge has advanced from small beginnings, or that there are traces of rude customs among many nations now highly civilized. None of these arguments afford any proof whatever, or even any reasonable presumption in favor of the conclusion which they are employed to support: first, because along with a complete ignorance of the Arts it is quite possible there may have been a higher knowledge of God, and a closer communion with Him; secondly, because many cases of existing barbarism can be distinctly traced to adverse external circumstances, and because it is at least possible that all real barbarism has had its origin in like conditions; thirdly, because the known character of man and the indisputable facts of history prove that he has within him at all times the elements of corruption—that even in his most civilized condition he is capable of degradation, that his knowledge may decay, and that his religion may be lost. Argyll.

Barbarism is not a youthful crudeness, but a decrepitude, of society, not a wild exuberance, but a consumption, of life. Only this consumption, like that of a man’s lungs, has its stage of hectic glow, and undiminished fullness of fibre, separated sometimes, by quite an interval, from the hollow cough, the sunken cheek and the fatal night-sweat. Sometimes, however, the consumption gallops. But slow or quick, it kills. Such is barbarism. Its law is violence, and its end is death. The noblest race of Barbarians who have a name in history, the Germans, overpraised no doubt by Tacitus, would never have civilized themselves, and, but for Christianity, which had as much as it could do to civilize them, would long ago have perished; just as, in spite of Christianity, the Hawaiians of the Pacific, and perhaps the Aborigines of our own Continent, are now perishing, the physician having arrived too late to save them. R. D. H.

Different Forms of Evidence. The assumption by the advocates of a great antiquity for man that our existing civilization is a result wrought out by the human race as a whole, through long ages, the general course being one of advance from utter savagery at its beginning, is irreconcilable with the known facts in the case. The question under examination cannot be settled by any general reasoning upon what is assumed to be the nature of man and the necessary progress in civilization, nor can it be settled by a study of the existing condition of the nations of the earth, and their history for the few centuries which authentic history covers in the case of many of them. In seeking an answer to it, we must make use of written history, so far as that is available; and when that fails us, we must turn to the “monuments” and tradition and every trace of himself of every kind which man has left behind him in the distant past. Geology, anthropology, and archaeology, as well as history, traditional, monumental, and written, have a right to be heard. G. D. A.

Evidence bearing upon the antiquity of man may be gathered along several different walks of science, and these are all found tending in one direction and pointing to one general result. First comes the evidence of History, embracing under that name all literature. Then comes archaeology, the evidence of Human Monuments, belonging to times or races whose voice, though not silenced, has become inarticulate to us. Piecing on to this evidence, comes that which Geology has recently afforded from human remains associated with the latest physical changes on the surface and in the climates of the globe. Then comes the evidence of Language, founded on the facts of human speech and the laws which regulate its development and growth. And lastly, there is the evidence afforded by the existing physical structure, and the existing geographical distribution of the various races of mankind. Argyll.

Testimony of History.

The “primeval savage” is a familiar term in modern literature; but there is no evidence that the primeval savage ever existed. All the evidence looks the other way. The mythical traditions of almost all nations place at the beginnings of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a “golden age,” which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement. The sacred records, venerated alike by Jews and Christians, depict antediluvian man as from the first “tilling the ground,” “building cities,” “smelting metals,” and “making musical instruments.” Babylonian documents of an early date tell of art and literature having preceded the Great Deluge, and having survived it. The explorers who have dug deep into the Mesopotamian mounds and ransacked the tombs of Egypt have come upon no traces of savage man. So far from savagery being the primitive condition of man, it is rather a corruption and degradation, the result of adverse circumstances during a long period of time, crushing man down, and effacing the divine image wherein he was crested. Had savagery been man’s primitive condition it is scarcely conceivable that he could have ever emerged from it. There is no historical evidence of savages ever having civilized themselves, no instance on record of their ever having been raised out of their miserable condition by any other means than by contact with a civilized race. G. R. —In all regions of the world known to have been inhabited by barbarous and savage tribes, but which are now civilized, it is easy to show from whence, in what way, and at what period, they severally received the arts and polish of civilized life; and that in every instance they were indebted to others more improved than themselves for all their acquisitions. From analogy, we may and must conclude that such will ever be the order of events. Lindsley. —Civilization, as far as all experience goes, has always been learned from without. No extremely barbarous nation has ever yet been found capable of initiating civilization. Retrogression is rapid, but progress unknown till the first steps have been taught. E. H. B. —All the evidence of history goes to show that as far back as we can trace the history of the Assyrians, Phoenicians and Egyptians, we find them civilized, and that too in a very high degree. Now, what right have we—supposing we could extend our researches no further—to infer that they were ever otherwise than civilized? or that their ancestors had been savages? None at all, unless it could be proved that these were not the most ancient nations in the world; and that the nations from which they sprung had been originally savage. This none will attempt to prove. The civilization of modern Europe—of the Gauls, Germans, Britons, Goths, Vandals, Huns, Scandinavians, and the rest of the northern barbarians—was derived from the Romans; as theirs had been from the Greeks; and theirs again from the Egyptians and other Orientals. Prior to these latter nations, savage life is unknown to either sacred or profane history. P. Lindsley.

The country known to us, in part, as Armenia—the elevated region in which the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Indus have their head waters—is regarded as the cradle of the human race; and this, among other reasons, because the most ancient traditions all point to this as man’s starting-point, because this is the native country of the cereals which have furnished food for man the world over, and because ethnological investigations all lead to the same conclusion. It is here, and clustering around this as a centre, we find the oldest nations the only ones that have a history reaching back into the long past—e.g., the Chinese, the Indians, the Persians, the Assyrians, the Jews, the Phoenicians, the

Greeks, and the Egyptians. G. D. A.—The teachings of history and archaeology indicate that in Egypt, Babylonia, Southern Arabia, as well as among the Aryan tribes of ancient Bactria, the primitive condition of mankind was one of civilization. The Chaldeans, the primitive Aryans, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the South Arabian Cushites, the Phœnicians, the Phrygians, the “Pelasgi” (and probably the Chinese)—all set out as builders of cities and acquainted with the arts of civilized life. The first glimpse that we catch of the race in Egypt and Babylonia presents it as engaged in erecting pyramids and great temple towers, as acquainted with bronze and even iron, as possessing a written language, and already deeply absorbed in astronomy and medicine. The further we go back in Egypt, the more perfect is the art. We find all of these primeval peoples suddenly appearing on the scene together, and with a full-fledged civilization. That was about four thousand six hundred years ago. The Book of Genesis makes a precisely similar representation as to the beginnings of the human race. Before the Flood we find Cain building a city: in the eighth generation we have Jubal and Tubal-Cain; while after the Flood, Nimrod is associated with the cities of Babel, etc.; and Abraham, in the tenth generation from Noah, finds Egypt an organized State. We find the Aryan settled in villages; working in gold, silver, and bronze; in possession of domestic animals, harnessing horses and oxen to carriages; worshipping the “holy” Ahuramazda. The Cushite cities of Southern Arabia and the primeval civilization of China tell the same story. Southall.

“The scenes depicted in the tombs show that the Egyptians had already the same arts and habits as in after times; and the hieroglyphics in the Great Pyramid prove that writing had been long in use. We see no primitive mode of life in Egypt; no barbarous customs; not even the habit, so slowly abandoned by all people, of wearing arms when not on military service, nor any archaic art.” (G. Wilkinson.) If to all this we add the architectural skill exhibited in fixing the casing-stones of the pyramid, and in polishing the marble linings of the several passages, and more especially the red granite linings of what is called the King’s Chamber, we cannot but form a high idea of Egyptian civilization at that period. In view of all these facts M. Renan exclaims, “When we think of this civilization, that it had no known infancy; that this art, of which there remain innumerable monuments, had no archaic period; that the Egypt of Cheops and Cephron is superior, in a sense, to all that followed, on est pris de vertige.” G. D. A.

If man, as some affirm, has been on the earth a hundred thousand years, why are there no traces of him anterior to the organized and civilized communities in Egypt and Babylonia? If tribes, savage, barbarous and half civilized, had been inhabiting the valley of the Nile a hundred and fifty thousand years before Menes, we ought to find, if not their bones, at least their implements; and in the case of the more advanced tribes, as we approach the period of Egyptian civilization we ought to find some traces of their habitations and tombs. But behind the pyramids in Egypt and the cities of Erech and Calneh in Southern Babylonia there is nothing to indicate the earlier presence of the human race. And if we come to North and South America there is nothing to indicate an older civilization than that of Asia and Africa, Southall.—The oldest civilization of which we can learn anything with certainty outside the records of Scripture is the Egyptian; and among the monuments of this Egyptian civilization the grandest are confessedly the oldest; and the oldest form of Egypt’s religion is the purest. So it is with the Assyrian and Indian civilizations, the written and monumental records of which have lately been disentombed. On our western continent the civilization of the empire of the Incas, in South America, was far in advance of that of their descendants in our time. The mouldering temples of Central America and the rock-cities of New Mexico tell the same story. Standing on the height of our modern civilization, and looking away into the distant past, the farthest objects distinctly seen are the pyramids and temples of Egypt; then the palaces and great cities of the valley of the Euphrates; and then the rock-hewn temples and old pagodas of India and China—all telling, not of savage man working up through sheer force of intellect from savagery to civilization, but of civilized man sinking lower and lower from generation to generation; all confirming the simple story of the Bible. G. D. A.

Language. What shall be said of human language, that mysterious, subtle, cunning instrument of thought? Science hesitates about its origin, whether to call it Divine or human, and is best satisfied, perhaps, to call it both. The conviction is irresistible, on the basis of any generous conception of God, that man, his “offspring,” as Aratus and Cleanthes called him, cannot have been put to his lessons without a teacher, and can have had no other teacher than his Heavenly Father. Civilization, consequently, was no belated and painful achievement of ages, but appeared immediately, as the joint product of God and man, the teacher and the taught. Precisely what form it took, in what lines it moved, and to what lengths it went, it were idle to ask. Suffice it to know, that every just postulate in philosophy invites us to the conclusion that human history must have had its beginning, not in barbarism, nor yet in mere crude capacity, but in a sensitive, athletic humanity, taking its lessons, whence its life was kindled, from above. R. D. H.—The two exclusively human endowments of language and the use of fire prove conclusively that man was originally taught by God. They could not have been invented except by a highly civilized people; for without them, even a beginning of civilization would be obviously impossible, and man, if he was a brute to begin with, must always have remained a brute. The divine origin of one of them is indicated in the beautiful myth of the Greeks, that Prometheus stole fire from heaven. And of language, as soon as we perceive that it does not consist merely in giving names to things, but that it is an organic structure, marvellously complex and intricate, founded on a philosophical analysis of the elements of human thought, may we not well say, that it could no more have been a human invention than is the anatomical structure of the human body, but that in both cases the inventor and fashioner was divine? That mere savages, as yet hardly raised above their kindred brutes, and unaided by a divine instinct specially implanted in them for the purpose, could have invented both language and the use of fire, or could have taken the first step toward civilization without the aid of both, is a doctrine which can be entertained only by those who can believe in a chance development of all things out of mud. F. Bowen.

Earliest Inventions. If we are to assume with the supporters of the Savage-theory that man has himself invented all that he now knows, then the very earliest inventions of our race must have been the most wonderful of all, and the richest in the fruits they bore. The men who first discovered the use of fire, and the use of those grasses which we now know under the name of corn, were discoverers compared with whom, as regards the value of their ideas to the world, Faraday and Wheatstone are but the inventors of ingenious toys. Argyll.

Earliest Religions. If there is one thing which a comparative study of religions places in the clearest light it is the inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed. Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings we find it free from many blemishes that affected it in its later stages. Max Müller.—It is incontestably true that the sublimest portions of the Egyptian religion are not the comparatively late result of a process of development, or elimination from the grosser. The sublimest portions are demonstrably ancient, and the last stage of the Egyptian religion, that known to the Greek and Latin writers, was by far the grossest and most corrupt. Reno-f.

A historic review of the religions of the ancient world lends no support to the theory that there is a uniform growth and progress from fetishism to polytheism, from polytheism to monotheism, and from monotheism to positivism, as maintained by the followers of Comte. None of the religions here described shows any signs of having been developed out of fetishism, unless it be the Shamanism of the Etruscans. In most of them the monotheistic idea is most prominent at the first, and gradually becomes obscured, and gives way before a polytheistic corruption. In all there is one element, at least, which appears to be traditional—viz., sacrifice, for it can scarcely have been by the exercise of his reason that man came so generally to believe that the superior powers, whatever they were, would be pleased by the violent death of one or more of their creatures. Altogether, the theory to which the facts appear on the whole to point is the existence of a primitive religion, communicated to man from without, whereof monotheism and expiatory sacrifice were parts, and the gradual clouding over of this primitive revelation everywhere, unless it were among the Hebrews. Even among them a worship of Teraphim crept in (Gen. 31:19-35), together with other corruptions (Josh 24:14); and the terrors of Sinai were needed to clear away polytheistic accretions. Elsewhere degeneration had free play. The cloud was darker and thicker in some places than in others. There were, perhaps, races with whom the whole of the past became a tabula rasa. There were others which lost a portion, without losing the whole of their inherited knowledge. There were others again who lost scarcely anything, but hid up the truth in mystic language and strange symbolism. The only theory which accounts for all the facts—for the unity as well as the diversity of ancient religions—is that of a primeval revelation, variously corrupted through the manifold and multiform deterioration of human nature in different races and places. G. R.

1. There is already ground for saying that in its idea of evil pagan religion is upon the whole more pure in tone and more consistent with the teachings of enlightened reason, even, as we ascend into prehistoric times. As we approach the primitive periods in the annals of any historic pagan religion we find the conception of evil more and more that of our own sacred books. The prehistoric literature of these religions, so far as yet accessible, deals with evil almost wholly in its aspect as moral evil, while the pagan rituals of that early period are pervaded, as those of later times never are, with a penitent utterance that at times is almost in the phraseology of the Hebrew ritual itself.

2. When this primitive purity in the conception of evil began to change to its later and corrupt form, the first step of change was, as the evidence appears to show, that of the old dualistic religions, in which the origin of evil was found in the malignant interposition of an evil being, powerful enough to contest the supremacy of the universe, while the creation of evil by this being was his method of making war upon the author of all good. In this, so much of the original revelation on this subject was retained as concerns the fall of man and the introduction of evil on earth through the instrumentality of Satan, the tempter.

3. In process of further change those speculative notions began to prevail, in which ideas of physical and moral evil were confused; the conception of evil as sin grew dim and feeble, and while pagan religions became more pantheistic or idolatrous, the sense of accountability, of personal guilt, was obscured if not wholly lost. In a word, pagan religions, in their history, are shown to have undergone processes of steady deterioration, in respect to the idea of evil, just as also in their idea of God.

4. If these inferences from what is known at present of the history of religions shall be justified by the results of further inquiry, as there is every reason to believe they will be, that theory of the origin of religion which is held by the extreme evolutionist school, will, it should seem, have to be given up. This theory supposes that religion began in a sentiment of wonder, as man in his earliest rise above the conditions of a brute became more intelligent; that the next step of evolution was the worship of the fetish, in the form of any object that appealed to this sentiment of wonder, or the sentiment of reverence, or of fear; that next came the worship of nature-gods; then mythology and the deities of such pantheons as those of Egypt, of Greece, and of Rome; polytheism becoming at last monotheism. This necessarily presupposes that all religious ideas were in the beginning crude and almost brutal, and that as we ascend into prehistoric times, they become more crude, and less in harmony with the reason and conscience of enlightened man. It is enough to say that the evidence thus far warrants us in holding that the facts are in direct conflict with this theory; and these facts, as time goes on and investigation proceeds, will in all probability make it at last impossible to consistently hold any other theory of the origin of religion than that which finds it in that revelation of which the Christian Bible is the record and the repository. J. A. Smith.

Where science forsakes us, revelation meets us with an account of man’s origin, state, and destiny, which is adequate and coherent, which explains all the facts, and commends itself alike to the reason and the conscience; and the more it is sifted and examined, the more well-founded and irrefragable does it prove to be. . . . This account of man we accept because it is revealed by God, is supported by adequate evidence, solves the otherwise insoluble problems not only of science and history, but of inward experience, and meets our deepest need. Pfaff.

Testimony of Tradition.

By means of authentic records, written and monumental, we have traced back the history of man about 4500 years. Beyond this date we have certain traditions, more or less universal. 1. The Tradition respecting the “Tower of Tongues.” “This was among the most ancient recollections of the Chaldeans, and was one of the national traditions of the Armenians, who had received it from the civilized nations inhabiting the Tigro-Euphrates basin.” (Lenormant.) This tradition, in its earliest form, has recently been discovered inscribed on one of the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum. 2. Tradition of a General Flood. “The one tradition which is really universal, among those bearing on the history of primeval man, is that of the Deluge.” (Lenormant.) 3. Tradition of a Golden Age. “The traditions of almost all nations place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, ‘a golden age,’ which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of civilization and refinement.” (G. Rawlinson.) Under the guidance of tradition we can go back 1000 or 2000 years more—and there, we seem to reach his beginning, to come upon Primeval Man as he is starting upon his course; and we find him—not the ignorant, brutal savage, destitute of all religion, which some would have us believe man to have been—but man enjoying his golden age, under the immediate government of the gods, and in happy communion with them; and true science testifies to nothing at variance with this. G. D. A.

The Pentateuch contains the most ancient tradition as to the first days of the human race, the only one which has not been disfigured by the introduction of fantastic myths of disordered imaginations run wild. The chief features of that tradition, which was originally common to all mankind, and which the special care of Providence has preserved in greater purity among the chosen people than among other races, are preserved, though changed, in countries distant from each other, and whose inhabitants have had no communication for thousands of years. The only clew which can guide us through the labyrinth of these scattered fragments of tradition, is the Bible story. Lenormant

Natural increase. Considering the tendency of mankind to “increase and multiply,” so that, according to Malthus, it would excepting for artificial hindrances double itself every 25 years, it is sufficiently astonishing that the human race has not, in the space of 5000 years, exceeded greatly the actual number, which is estimated commonly at a thousand [fourteen hundred] million of souls. Is it conceivable that if man had occupied the earth for the “one hundred thousand years” of some writers, or even the “twenty-one thousand” of others, he would not by this time have multiplied far beyond the actual numbers of the present day? G. R.—The known population of the world is much what it would be, according to recognized rules of the increase of our race, dating from the received chronology of Noah, and starting with six persons. Rough as such calculations must be, they wholly exclude the fabulous unbroken antiquity which some claim for the human race. It is calculated by M. Faa de Bruns, Professor at Turin, that, starting from the received chronology of the flood, n.c. 2348, and taking as the annual increase 1/257, a number not far from that which represents the annual increase of the population of France, you would light on the net number of the population of the earth, 1,400,000,000. Pusey.

Testimony of Archaeology, or Human Monuments.

1. That of the Megalithic Monuments and Tumuli found in various parts of the world. Mr. James Fergusson, in his “Rude Stone Monuments,” states as his conclusion that the “Cromlecha” of Great Britain and France belong to the first centuries of the Christian era, and further, that “three fourths of these monuments have yielded sepulchral deposits to the explorer; and, including the tumuli, probably nine tenths have proved to be burial places.” For the tumuli of North and South America no more ancient date can reasonably be claimed than for those of Europe.

2. That of the remains of the Lake Dwellings, i.e., buildings erected upon piles, which have been discovered in the course of the last thirty years in many of the lakes of Switzerland and adjacent countries. An age of six or seven thousand years has been claimed for these remains, on the ground of the rude stone implements found in them. But (1) Mingled with these stone implements, others of bronze and iron occur; together with the remains of the horse, the ox, the goat, the sheep, and the dog, all domesticated animals; and wheat, barley and millet roasted and stored up in jars, precisely as is now done in these same countries; and very recently silver coins, of the eighth and tenth centuries, have been dredged up from the ruins of the lake-dwellings of Lake Paladru, in Southern France; (2) Pile-dwellings are delineated on Trajan’s Column at Rome. Such dwellings have been common in many countries in ages past, and are still in use in some.

3. That of the Danish Kjokken-modlings, or shell-mounds. The great antiquity of these shell-mounds is contended for on the ground of the rude character of the stone implements found in them. “The whole argument which has been founded on flint implements is liable to these two fundamental objections: (1) That flint implements are a very uncertain index of civilization even among the tribes who use them; and (2) that they are no index at all of the state of civilization of other tribes who lived at the same time in other portions of the globe. The finding of flint implements, for example, however rude, in England or Denmark or France, affords no evidence whatever of the condition of the Industrial Arts in the same age, upon the banks of the Euphrates or the Nile.” (Argyll.)

4. That of the “Bone-Caves” of Europe; in which the bones of man are found, mingled with those of the cave-bear, the cave hyena, the mammoth, the woolly elephant, and the reindeer, animals now extinct, or else no longer inhabitants of the countries in which these caves occur. If man was the contemporary of these animals—and the evidence seems to place this beyond reasonable doubt—the question presents itself, how long ago is it that these animals inhabited Central Europe? And when did they cease to exist, if they have disappeared altogether? (1) The cave-bear and cave-hyena, once thought to be extinct species of these animals, and so, very ancient, more careful examination has shown to be identical with those now living. (2) The reindeer, now confined to Northern Europe, Cessar and Sallust both tell us was common in Gaul (France) and Germany in their day. (3) The remains of the woolly elephant occur in great abundance in Siberia, in some instances with the flesh perfect, and in such a condition as to be eaten by dogs. (4) The remains of the mammoth are found in surface deposits and peat swamps, with the bones retaining a large portion of their animal matter, thus proving their comparatively recent extinction. And in confirmation of this, in the Smithsonian “Contributions to Knowledge,” we are told that among the North American Indians, there are native legends which indicate a traditional knowledge of more than one extinct animal, among them the mastodon or mammoth. This much is certainly true, that there is nothing in the known facts of the case which demands for these human bones an antiquity greater than 4000 or 5000 years. G. D. A.

Mere rudeness of workmanship and low condition of life generally is sometimes adduced as an evidence of enormous antiquity; and the discoveries made in cairns and caves, in lake-beds and shell-mounds are brought forward to prove that man must have a past of enormous duration. But it seems to be forgotten that as great a rudeness and as low a savagism as any which the spade has ever turned up still exists upon the earth in various places, as among the Australian aborigines, the Bushmen of South Africa, the Ostiaks and Samoyedes of Northern Asia, and the Weddas of Ceylon. The savagery of a race is thus no proof of its antiquity. G. R.—We have absolutely no geological evidence, so far as the association of man with extinct animals is concerned, that the residence of man in Europe has been longer than 6000 years. Dawson.

Testimony of Geology.

On one point the testimony of geology respecting primeval man is definite and unquestionable, and that is, that man is “the latest born” of the inhabitants of our earth. From time to time during the last half century the announcement has been made that human remains had been found in positions which demonstrated a much greater antiquity for man than had hitherto been allowed; but in every instance a more careful examination has proved this claim to be unfounded. Among the most noted of these cases are the following: (1) “Two skeletons found imbedded in the solid rock on the north coast of Gaudaloupe in the West Indies. A careful study has led to the conclusion that they are the remains of Indians, killed in battle not more than two centuries ago.” (Southall.) (2) Human bones found by Count Portales, as reported, in the coral reefs of Florida. The discoverer of these bones says: “The human jaw and other bones found in Florida by myself in 1848, were not in a coral formation, but in a fresh-water sandstone, on the shore of Lake Monroe, associated with fresh-water shell, of species still living in the lake.” (3) “The Natchez man,” as it was called—a human pelvis found in the bottom of a ravine cut through the fluviatile deposit at Natchez, Miss., which Sir Charles Lyell estimated to have an age of one hundred thousand years. Professor C. G. Forshey, who subsequently examined the spot where this bone was found, says: “Probably this loam and the bone too had caved in from some point above and been washed thither. A dozen plantation burial-places and Indian mounds and camps had been exposed above for centuries. The probabilities are a hundred to one that this bone was not of the bluff formation.” The conclusion of Lyell respecting the age of this bone is based upon another conclusion of his, that the delta of the Mississippi has been one hundred thousand years in forming. Since Lyell’s estimate, more accurate observations on the rate of formation of the Mississippi delta have reduced the estimate of its age to 14,200 years according to Professor Hitchcock, or 4400 according to Majors Humphrey and Abbot, United States engineers, the latest authorities on the subject.—The last discovery of human bones upon which the claim of antiquity is based, has been made in Mexico, near the capital. Professor Newberry has weighed the reports and says: “It is possible that we have in these bones the oldest record of man’s occupation of the continent, but no facts have yet been brought to light which prove that the deposit containing them was not made within a thousand years.” G. D. A.

I must reject this supposed later Glacial age intervening between Paleolithic and modern man, and maintain that there is no proof of the existence of man earlier than the close of the proper Glacial age. . . . The archaeological literature of the last ten years is strewn with the wrecks of supposed facts establishing the antiquity of man, but which more careful examination has shown to have been wrongly observed or misunderstood. . . . The evidence available at present points to the appearance of man, with all his powers and properties, in the Post-glacial age of geology, and not more than 6000 to 8000 years ago. This abrupt appearance of man in his full perfection, his association with animals the greater part of which still survive, and his introduction at the close of that great and as yet very mysterious revolution of the earth which we call the Glacial period, accords with the analogy of geological science in the information which it gives as to the first appearance of other types of organic being in the several stages of development of our earth. . . . The most ancient man whose bones are known to us may be referred to a race still extant, and perhaps the most widely distributed of all—a fact which tells strongly in favor both of the unity and moderate antiquity of the species, while it is directly opposed to all theories of evolution from brute ancestors. Diveson.

With geological records of great uncertainty, and written records declared to be incomplete for this purpose, we submit that it is sufficient for us to show a near approximation between science and Scripture, and to express the conviction, founded on actual facts, that the more geology is studied and its facts ascertained, the closer does this approximation become; already this is the case in the judgment of some leading geologists, for undoubtedly the tendency of modern observation and discovery has been to bring down and modernize the mammalian and prehistoric epochs. Finally, the matter stands thus—the exact age of man on the earth is not ascertainable by science, but science shows to us a number of converging probabilities which point to his first appearance along with great animals about eight thousand years ago, and certainly not in indefinite ages before that. S. R. Pattison.

Testimony of Anthropology. At one time it was claimed that certain human skulls which from the position in which they were found were regarded as the skulls of paleolithic men—“the Neanderthall skull,” for example—demonstrated a great difference between these men and the men of the present day, and so a much greater antiquity for man than had hitherto been allowed him. A more careful and extended examination has led anthropologists to a different conclusion. “The most ancient of all known human skulls,” writes the Duke of Argyll, “is so ample in its dimensions that it might have contained the brains of a philosopher.” So conclusive is this evidence against any change whatever in the specific characters of man since the oldest human being yet known was born.

that Professor Huxley pronounces it to be clearly indicated that the first traces of the primordial stock whence man has proceeded need no longer be sought by those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive development in the newest tertiaries; but he adds they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of those tertiaries than it is from us. “The newest tertiaries” are the oldest strata in which human remains have as yet been found. Professor Pfaff, of the University of Erlangen, after giving a tabular statement of the dimensions of a large number of very ancient skulls—paleolithic skulls, as they are called—collected in Great Britain and France, reaches the conclusion: “We see very clearly from all this that the size of the brain of the oldest population known to us is not such as to permit us to place them on a lower level than that of the now living inhabitants of the earth.” And, he subsequently adds, “The brain of the ape most like man does not amount to quite a third of the brain of the lowest race of men; it is not half the size of the brain of a new-born child. The same gulf which is found to-day between man and the ape goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the tertiary period.” G. D. A.

If man had lived on the earth contemporary with the oldest animal species, we ought to find not merely one skeleton or half a skeleton buried alongside of myriads of fossil sea-shells and fishes, but a fair show of specimens, so many at least as to leave no question as to his being a joint occupant with them of the earth as it then was. One or two, or even a dozen skeletons, gathered from every explored portion of the earth’s surface, are too few for the base of a theory like this, because such scattered cases, in number so meagre, are always subject, more or less, to abatement from the following possibilities: (a.) The human family in all ages have buried their dead, and often, during the earlier ages, in rock-hewn sepulchres or in natural caves; (b.) In all ages of the world men have been liable to fall into rock-fissures and ravines and to die there; and to leave their skeletons to become fossil there, particularly in calcareous and similar rocks where decomposition or solution in water and new deposits are in progress; (c.) Men have been wont to frequent caves for shelter, for safety in war or from persecution, and consequently might leave their bones there; or (d.) Their bones may have been dragged into caverns by flesh-eating animals or borne into strange positions by underground currents of water; or again, (e.) Since the historic Adam, drift deposits have in some circumstances been forming under water, in which waters men have been liable to be drowned and their skeletons to become imbedded in those deposits. Changes of elevation may bring such deposits to view.

Such possibilities must practically nullify confidence in the proof of man’s high antiquity from his bones so long as the specimens are so exceedingly few and even these few found only quite near the surface. This argument will be appreciated by those who duly consider, on the one hand, that if man were on the earth in those pre-Adamic ages, it is in the highest degree improbable that his population ranged at a dozen for the area of all France, and a few hundreds only to a continent—for what should forbid him as well as the lower animals to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth”? Besides, a population so sparse and consequently weak could have made no stand against armies of hyenas, leopards, bears and lions. On the other hand, the occurrence of human bones, in numbers so very few and so remote from each other, will be much more rationally accounted for by the possibilities above indicated. H. C.

Conclusions. Through a survey of Babylonian, Indian, Iranian, Phoenician, Israelitish, Lydian, Phrygian, Chinese, and Egyptian history, the history of man may be traced from authentic sources a little beyond the middle of the third millennium before our era; so that man has existed in communities, under settled government, for about 4500 years. The Scriptures, the mythology of almost all nations, and Babylonian documents represent primitive man as civilized. No traces of savage man have been found in what tradition makes the cradle of the human race. There is no evidence of savages ever having civilized themselves. The civilization found in Egypt B.C. 2600 might have been reached in 500, or at most 1000 years, if primitive man began his history in a state of incipient civilization. Assuming that there was a primitive language from which all others have been derived, there is no difficulty in conceiving that all the four thousand languages said to exist now have been developed within 5000 years. Nor do the existing diversities of physical type require us to assume a vast antiquity for man. The early Egyptian remains indicate five types. The rest may have been developed subsequently. The growth of population and the waste spaces of the earth, and the absence of architectural remains earlier than the third millennium B.C. favor the “juvenility” of man. G. R., Argument of Tract 8, “Pres. Pay Tracts.”

The facts do not require more than seven or eight thousand years backward from the present, for the antiquity of man. This conclusion agrees with the facts of history, and is not in conflict with the chronology of Scripture. The tendency of modern discovery is ever to reduce the pre-historic period. By a survey of the measurements of the skulls of various races, and a comparison between the oldest men known to us and now living men, it is shown that man appeared suddenly, in all essential respects the same as the man of to-day. The total absence of proof of any transition from the man to the ape is pointed out, and the sufficiency and consistency of the scriptural account of man is shown. S. R. Pattison.

The sketch thus given of Primeval Man is complete enough to place beyond all reasonable question the fact, that he was no savage, just emerging as to body and mind from the condition of a brute; living in a damp, gloomy cave, and feeding upon the raw flesh of such animals as he was able to entrap, or master in open fight. But a being bearing the image of God, cultivating the fruitful earth which, in response to his labor, yielded an abundant return of all that was good for food; possessed of a language copious enough to give names to every living thing; subduing the earth, and having dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth; and having the marriage relation established in all the sacredness which belongs to it among the most civilized nations of our day, a most significant particular in Moses’ sketch, when we consider that “one of the most general characteristics of the savage is to despise and degrade the female sex.”

In view of all the facts of the case, the conclusion to which we come is that no sufficient reason, either scientific or historical, has as yet been given for abandoning what has been hitherto the almost universal faith, not of Christian peoples alone, but of the more enlightened heathen also, as manifested in their traditions—That man was created some six or seven thousand years ago, and that he commenced his course as a civilized being, believing in the one only living and true God. G. D. Armstrong.

[Volumes to be consulted: Southall, “Recent Origin of Man” and “Epoch of the Mammal;” Dawson, “Fossil Man,” “Origin of the World;” Duke of Argyll, “Primeval Man;” Rawlinson, “Origin of Nations;” and the clear, compact pages of “Nature and Revelation,” by Dr. G. D. Armstrong.]

—the most profound survey of this most complex and tedious part of knowledge conducts the inquirer to no conclusion more indubitable than that there is a common origin, a common organization, a common nature, underlying and running through this endless variety of a common power, peculiar to the race, and to it alone. Thus a second science—philology—has borne its marvellous testimony. Rising one more step, and passing more completely to a higher region, we find the rational and moral nature of men of every age and kindred absolutely the same. Those great faculties by which man alone—and yet by which every man—perceives that there is in things that distinction which we call true and false, and that other distinction which we call good and evil, upon which distinctions and which faculties rests at last the moral and intellectual destiny of the entire race, belonging to us as men, without which we are not men, with which we are the head of the visible creation of God. So has a third science delivered its testimony. If we rise another step, and survey man as he is gathered into families and tribes and nations, with an endless variety of development, we still behold the broad foundations of a common nature reposing under all—the grand principles of a common being ruling in the midst of all. So a fourth, and the youngest of the sciences, ethnology, brings her tribute. And now from this lofty summit survey the whole track of ages. In their length and in their breadth scrutinize the recorded annals of mankind. There is not one page on which one fact is written which favors the historical idea of a diversity of nature or origin, while the whole scope of human story involves, assumes, and proclaims, as the first and grandest historic truth, the absolute unity of the race.” (“Unity of Mankind,” pp. 285.) G. D. A.

28. 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 fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed ; to you it shall be for meat : and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat : and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was ever-fing and there was morning, the sixth day.

The command to the first pair to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth was given as a blessing of paradise, and while man was unfallen. Dubney.—The record in Genesis stands, not only unmatched for beauty and dignity, but guaranteed by the testimony of all subsequent history, and commending itself to the profoundest philosophy. In the beginning God created man in his own image ; male and female created he them, preserving the unity in the diversity ; and having thus created them he blessed their wedlock, and gave them Eden for a home. The monogamous family is the primitive domestic institution. Behrends.

In every aspect, physical, economical, intellectual, moral, the Family is the appointed nursery of the race for the well-being of the individual and the progress of society. Neatness, politeness, industry, economy, order, punctuality, affectionateness, truth, where can these be acquired from tutors or from books, as they are instilled with the dews of daily affection in the household and warmed with the sunshine of its love? As one has said, “Home education is a law of Nature. And where can that labor of love be found more minutely and wisely divided than between the father and the mother, between patience and power, tenderness and authority, the instinctive love of offspring, and the moral regard for the excellence and wellbeing of that offspring?” Hence it is that the Family, as originally constituted in Paradise, is the only true basis of society. J. P. T.

In the Family the great principles are unfolded upon which all human government rests, and society itself is created in the germ. It is simply the law of the household that expands itself through all the ramifications of the commonwealth; and a true statesmanship must glean its great and essential principles from the subordination first established in the Family. The nearer a government is conformed to this ideal, in the distribution of power and in the combination of influences by which society shall be controlled, the more perfect will it be, both in its conception and administration. Palmer.—There can be no state where there are no citizens, and there can be no citizens where there is no family. The existence of the state is dependent on that relation of the sexes on which marriage is based. Not the individual therefore, but the family, is the unit of society; and so far from its being true that the state may determine the constitution of the family, the order of nature demands that the state shall conform in its legislation to the antecedent law of the household. The latter is an elemental fact in the social organization, and the statute must deal with it as fundamental and ultimate. Behrends.

In the Family, Man is trained to reverence for just and lawful authority; submission to government; obedience to law. In the Family, one learns to control instinct and passion by reason and affection. In the Family, one learns to respect the rights and the feelings of others as equal to his own. The child in the nursery is taught the rights of property, and the claims of gratitude and love. The Family is the proper nursery of the race in morality and religion. For this it was designed by the Creator. Here are inculcated those principles of moral government; here are developed those pure and generous affections; here are nurtured those immortal hopes, that fit the growing mind to recognize and assume relations toward that heavenly Father of whose authority and benignity the earthly father is its daily type. The Family was instituted as a school for heaven, whose perfect symbol is the Family gathered in their father’s house. J. P. T.

The Family is an ordinance of God. It draws its credentials from the parental appointment in Eden. Its solemn ceremony of installation was the crowning act of creation. No other institution, whether surviving now or perished in the past, can show such an antiquity. The records of it are the first syllables of written history, and the faintest stammerings of tradition. It runs up, beyond Assyrian or Chaldean empires, and the founding of Palmyra, to the tents on the plains of Shinar. The first breathing of its spirit was the simplicity of patriarchs. It began while the earliest beams of the world’s twilight were shooting up into a sky whose stars no tongue had yet called by their names,—over an unpeopled world. Was not its origin, then, divine? And is not the preservation of the family as clearly stamped with God’s purpose as its origin? Its uses,—with equal distinctness, with what bright tokens, with what emphatic demonstrations, do they speak of the home as God’s appointment! Where lie the clearest proofs of a heavenly watchfulness over our heads, if not in the shelters where we lay those heads at night? Consider what securities home affections bind about tempted virtue; how the man of business carries a zone of moral purity woven about him by the caresses of children, from his house to the market-place; how the false or fraudulent purpose, half conceived in the counting-room, is rebuked and put to shame by the innocence that gazes into his eyes and clings about his neck when he goes home and shuts the door on the world at night. Consider what a hindrance household love interposes, to stay the straying feet of dissipation; what a triple shield it holds up against the sins of prodigality, indulgence, or dishonor! Consider that, with most of us, whatever impulses of generosity visit the soul, whatever prayers we breathe, whatever holy vows of religious consecration we pledge, whatever aspiring resolves we form, are apt to spring up within the sacred enclosures of the house! Consider how the mere memory of that spot, with all its precious endearments, goes forth with the traveller, sails with the sailor, keeps vigils over the exposed heart among the perils of the foreign city, sweetens the feverish dreams and softens the pain of the sufferer in the sickly climate, and, by calling his love homeward, calls his faith to Heaven! Consider that the discipline of disease, the purification of bereavement, the tears of mourners, are all elements in the sanctity of home; that closets of devotion are parts of the architecture of the house; that Bibles are opened on its tables; that the eyes of newborn children open, and their first breaths are drawn, in its chambers; and that the dead body is borne out of its doors;—how fast do the gathering proofs accumulate, that the human dwelling is a sanctuary of the Most High! Whoever builds its walls, God hallows them for his temple. That outward house is but the visible pattern of the interior edifice; and of that spiritual structure God has laid the foundation, and sprung the arches, and commanded the economy. The family is surely his ordinance. F. D. H.

It may be beyond our skill to distinguish and allot the several parts of the agency which belong to God and to the human instruments in the origin of a new human soul. It is enough for us to know that God, by His mysterious works of creation and providence, does empower human parents for this amazing result—the origination, out of nothing, of a new being—and that, a rational, immortal spirit! How solemn, how high, this prerogative! It raises man nearer the almighty Creator, in his supreme prerogative as Master of all things, than anything else that is done by creatures on earth or in heaven. Angels are not thus endued Dabney.—Why can man have been invested subordinately with the prerogative of multiplying his own image, but in order that he might transform his offspring into the likeness of the Creator? For this profound conception of the conjugal union, we are indebted exclusively to the Bible. The derivation of the woman, and of only one woman, from the man—the domestic supremacy of the man—the entireness or oneness of the union—and its sacred indissolubility—all point to this high spiritual aim as the normal idea of marriage. Only on this ground have two beings, made for God, any right to give themselves up to each other in a union of love. But the fact that the union is one by which the Creator actually admits man into fellowship with Himself in the accomplishment of His highest ends, makes the mutual surrender, otherwise inexplicable, consistent with human dignity by consecrating it to the divine glory. In the primal union, all the foreshadowings of nature on the subject were interpreted and fulfilled. That which, in the lower creation, had been only sexual and transitory, now became sacramentally related to the spiritual and eternal. The paternal will found itself enthroned over other wills. Man was the representative of God. The family became the seat of moral government—the very image of the divine. To individual man, the first table of the law only would have been known; with the family, came the second table. Aspects of the divine character, hitherto unknown, were now unveiled; and the family constitution, rightly understood, became a new volume of divine Revelation. J. H.

In the Pauline ideal the headship of the husband band is regarded as the enactment of a wise beneficence, securing the orderly unity of the household; it is symbolized by the headship of Christ in the church, and by the rule which every man is called upon to exercise over his own body. The relation of husband and wife is not regarded as that of a king to his subjects, or of a master to his slaves, or of a man to his property; but as grounded in love, limited by the law of Christ, and as determined by a balancing of claims as intricate and subtle as that by which body and soul act and react upon each other. Under such ethical limitations the headship of the husband is affirmed, not for the aggrandizement of the man, but as indispensable to the establishment and maintenance of the unity of the family. Behrends.

As moral and accountable beings the husband and wife, by respecting the decisions of each other’s conscience, are to strengthen its authority. By the exercise of forbearance, where forbearance is necessary; by the mutual admiration of everything estimable; and by prayer for each other’s highest welfare, they are constantly to improve each other’s character, to convert marriage into a discipline of virtue, and thus to be ever finding in each other new cause for affection, and for gratitude to Him who has given them to each other. Although perfection, in the highest sense, is unattainable, they are, in this way, to be ever advancing toward it. And for this they are responsible, increasingly responsible. Obligation accumulates with opportunity. And at every onward stage of their course—say, at the return of every anniversary of their union—they are held responsible for all the excellence and consequent happiness which they might have possessed on that day, had they discharged their respective duties toward each other during every hour of every preceding day. J. H.

The household must be built on the Divine pattern. It must be founded on, and cemented by, love; and the pledge of love is inviolable fidelity. No calamities must be permitted to break its strength. Sickness and old age must not dim its beauty, nor lessen its tenderness. It must deepen with the years, more and more refined in quality and force, outgrowing and casting aside its early and earthly wrappings, until death transfigures it into a holy memory and an abiding heritage. Behrends.

Parental, and especially maternal, affection is the most disinterested principle which remains in the ruined nature of man. God has kept alive this remnant of the estate of paradise, like the one entirely fresh oasis in the desert of depravity. He preserves it, apparently, that there may be a spot whence can flow forth the water of life for dying humanity. It is the only adequate type, on earth, of Divine love. God honors it by making it the imperfect image from which He would have us comprehend His own infinite benevolence and pity. He declares, “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.” When He would exalt the love of redemption to its most transcendent height, He can find nothing on earth which comes so near it as a mother’s love, although this also comes short of it. Dabney.

All the Religion there is in the world has come through the Family. The Abrahamic covenant rests upon it. Patriarchal piety was kept alive on its altars. Household consecration is the leading feature of primitive and gospel godliness. Parents and children and home-piety are the chief factors in all revivals, in all reformations, and the work of conversion and sanctification goes on mainly along the line of a godly seed, and household consecration, and family purity and power. Hence the decay of Family Religion is the greatest and most alarming evil that can come upon society. You may destroy the State and the Church, and rebuild them both by means of the Family, as God ordained it. Sherwood.

To him who has appreciated the parental relation as God represents it, the failure to include it within the circuit of the visible church, to sanctify its obligations and to seal its hopes with the sacramental badge, would appear an unaccountable thing. We know that the promise of a multiplying offspring was the blessing of paradise; that paternity was the splendid expedient of our Maker for multiplying the human subjects of His blessings and instruments of His glory, and of making holiness and bliss the sure, hereditary possession of the increasing multitudes of men, through the probation and adoption of their first father. We hear Him declare in Malachi 2:15, long after the Fall, that His object in founding the family, in the form of monogamy, was “to seek a godly seed.” Thus the supreme end of the family institution is as distinctly religious and spiritual as that of the church itself. The instrumentalities of the family are chosen and ordained of God as the most efficient of all means of grace. To family piety are given the best promises of the Gospel, under the new as well as under the old dispensation. How, then, should a wise God do otherwise than consecrate the Christian family, and ordain that the believing parents shall sanctify the children? Hence, the very foundation of all parental fidelity to children’s souls is to be laid in the conscientious, solemn and hearty adoption of the very duties and promises which God seals in the covenant of infant baptism. It is pleasing to think that many Christians who refuse the sacrament do, with a happy inconsistency, embrace the duties and seek the blessing. But God gives all His people the truths and promises, along with the edifying seal. Let us hold fast to both. Dabney.

28. And subdue it. At the present day man has wandered to the ends of the earth. Yet vast realms lie unexplored, waiting his arrival. This clause may be described as the colonist’s charter. The commission thus received was to utilize for his necessities the vast resources of the earth, by agricultural and mining operations, by geographical research, scientific discovery and mechanical invention. Whitelaw. —The subduing and ruling refer not to the mere supply of his natural wants, for which provision is made in the following verse, but to the accomplishment of his various purposes of science and beneficence, whether toward the inferior animals or his own race. It is the part of intellectual and moral reason to employ power for the ends of general no less than personal good. The sway of man ought to be beneficent. M.

What an education for the race has been this labor of subduing the earth! How it has developed reflection, stimulated invention, and quickened the powers of combination, which would otherwise have lain dormant! Nor are the collateral and remote less important than the direct and immediate results. He who takes a piece of timber from the common forest, and forms it into a useful implement, thereby makes it his own, and it cannot rightfully be taken from him; since no one can justly appropriate to himself the product of another’s skill and labor. So he who originally takes possession of an unappropriated field, and by his labor prepares it for use, thereby makes it his own, and it cannot rightfully be taken from him. Hence arises the right of property, the origin and bond of civil society; and thus all the blessings of society, and of civilization and government, are due to the divinely implanted impulse, “fill the earth, and subdue it.” T. J. C.

Have dominion over every living thing. Man is expressly set apart as ruler of all creation, of its varied forces and creatures. He is the last and the most perfect being formed from that earth to which himself belongs, and whose every stage of life he includes in himself.

Hence he is also qualified to be its representative, both so far as he is personally concerned, and in relation to every higher sphere of existence. But as the image of God, he is also of Divine origin, and hence above nature, and the representative of God to it, its lord and master. K.—The lion has his tooth, the crocodile his coat of mail, the birds their wings, the fish their fins; but which is man’s weapon for attack, which his shield for defense?—the spirit from God: therefore all must obey him. The cattle on the pasture, wild beasts roaming the forests, birds flying below the expanse of heaven, fish swimming in the depths of the sea; they all must obey him—man is their lord and king. Tholuck.

29,30. Provision for the sustenance of man (v. 29), and of other animals (v. 30).

To man is assigned every herb scattering seed (propagated by seed), leaving him his choice among them of such as are suited to his nature and wants, as the different kinds of grain, pulse, etc.; and every fruit-tree in like manner, to choose among them what is suited to his taste, and adapted for his nourishment. To other animals is assigned all green herbage, without distinction. T. J. C.—From this original commission to Adam, afterward renewed and enlarged in the announcement to Noah, the second representative of the race, it appears that every right and privilege of man on the earth have their basis in an express Divine charter. B.

Man stood, at his creation, a subject as toward his Creator, but a sovereign as toward the other creatures of the earthly system. He stands forth in the image of God. His vital principle is inseparably united with his soul. He is capable of an endless life himself, with the power of transmitting the power of a like endless existence to an innumerable race of beings in his own image and likeness. He is capable of communion with God and with the angelic orders of being. He is free from every sort of evil, physical, mental, moral or spiritual. Out of such a state of facts arises necessarily certain relations to God the Creator and to other creatures. To God as the author of his being he owes perfect obedience and service. To God as the bestower of so many blessings he owes in return a grateful love and self-consecration. To the creatures of his dominion he owes a just and benevolent administration of his authority and rule. To the beings who may spring from him he owes a parental care and loving guardianship, that they may keep steadfastly their “first estate” of bliss and not fall irrevocably by sinning against God. S. R.

31. Everything good.** That a divine plan is to be realized in the world, and that the divine creation is therefore a teleological act, is shown in the account of the creation, partly and in general in the progress of creation according to a definite plan, and partly in particular in the divine sanction, “and God saw that it was good,” following each step of creation, and in the divine blessing pronounced on every living being. But the creating God does not reach the goal of His creation until He has set over against Him His image in man. From this fact it is plain that the self-revelation of God is the final end of the creation of the world; or, to express it more generally, that the whole world serves to reveal the divine glory, and is thereby the object of divine joy (Ps. 104 : 31). The Old Testament view of nature rests on this fundamental conception. O.—Unity of purpose pervades all the works of the Almighty. The scheme of his government is one; and though there be wheels within wheels, plans within plans, all move on in unbroken harmony and tend to a common result. There is a subordination of parts,—the inanimate to the living, the material to the spiritual, the spiritual to the moral, and all to the glory of God; and when He casts the eye of His omniscience upon any portion of His works, He delights not in it as an isolated fragment, however perfect in its kind or however clearly displaying any single perfection of His nature, but as a means tending, in its proper place, to the development of the great result which the whole was designed to accomplish. Thornwell.

The sixth day. The amount of creative and other work brought within the sixth day should be noticed. First, God created all the land animals; then Adam; then he brought “every beast of the field and every fowl of the air” to Adam to see what he would call them—which at least must assume that Adam had attained a somewhat full knowledge of language, and that he had time enough to study the special character of each animal so as to give each one its appropriate name, and time enough also to ascertain that there was not one among them all adapted to be a “helpmeet” for himself. Then the “deep sleep” of Adam—how long protracted, the record saith not; and finally the creation of Eve, all come within the sixth day. It is not easy to see how Moses or his intelligent readers of the early time could have supposed all this to have transpired within the twelve hours of light in a human day. We may say, moreover, in regard to each and all of these six creative periods that if the holy angels were indeed spectators of these scenes, and if God adjusted his methods of creation to the capacities of these pupils—these admiring students of his glorious works—then surely we must not think of his compressing them within the period of six human days. Divine days they certainly must have been, sufficiently protracted to afford finite minds scope for intelligent study, adoring contemplation, and as the Bible indicates, most rapturous shouts of joy. H. C.