has entered into the corresponding name ever since "God called the light day, and the darkness he called night”—that same darkness that wrapped the formless earth while the Spirit was brooding o'er the chaotic deep. We are in the midst of the vast, the shapeless, the undefined; who shall talk of twentyfour hours? Who shall give us the watches of that night, or the dial-plate of that ineffable period which "God divided?" HE called it yom, the day, and from that has come the lesser naming. All words for periods, or cycles of time, being radically grounded on this primitive conception of duality, and corresponding to it, even as the reduced scale corresponds in every division and in every point to the greater measurement.

Such an impression of the first great day once fixed in the mind, it goes with us readily through all the rest. "Let there be a firmament"-an atmosphere is formed; a sky appears; God calls it heavens; this is the second morning; and so there is a second day. This must have borne some analogy to the wondrous first, or all harmony and proportion in the account are lost. Again: "Let the waters be gathered together; let the dry land appear." Here is process; how long or how short we cannot know. We have nothing to measure them by. God might have brought forth all these phenomena in twenty-four hours, or twenty-four seconds; but why then a process at all? Why is so orderly a succession presented, unless it is meant to be a succession according to the then nature of the things succeeding, whatever that nature might be, or however it had been given to them. It must have been a movement according to the properties then existing in earth and water, and which we have no reason, from the account, to regard as essentially different from those that belong to them now. Oceans are formed; lands are dried; they appear as something emerging from the deep. It is the very language in which the same or similar phenomena would be described now. Here is order, and order suggests time. Why such appearings? why such statements, if there is no reality corresponding to them? The whole might have been instantaneous-sky, earth, and seas in a moment assuming the form and state they now possess. That we could readily have believed had it been told us; but why then this orderly chronology of cause and effect in just such order as nature employs, and would be expected to employ, in

a similar process? There is a settling, a gathering, a drying, and an appearing. Was this all crowded into the compass of a few hours, as our hours are now measured by the sun? It does not look so on the face of the account, and we would not think of it if we did not regard ourselves as shut up by this narrow conception of the word yom. We could have belieyed in the direct and instantaneous supernatural, but this has the appearance of something like a nature without that other idea of time-succession which is demanded as a necessary correspondence to make the conception harmonious. It seems magical rather than supernatural; that is, it is a process without any reason; it is an appearance of successive causation without any corresponding successive causality. When we attempt to regard it as supernatural, purely and throughout, the conception is impeded by this appearance of a nature; and when we would view it as a nature, we find no law, or an unnatural law of succession. Harmony of thought is only found when we regard it as a process supernaturally originated by "the going forth" of the divine Word, and then carried on in perfect accordance with the previous nature, or natures, given by the same Word to the substances so affected.

"Let the earth bring forth grass," Gen. i, 11, 7 JINI NUT —literally, “Let the earth grow grass,” Bhaotŋoátw ý yñ Botávm, germinet terra herbam. Here is process again; here is something which looks like a nature, a generatio, or п. There is an inward energizing power in the verb wn. It is in the Hiphil or causative conjugation. The grammatical subject is the earth, and it denotes an agency in the earth. It brings forth according to a law; the things brought forth come forth with their law in them, "the herb seeding seed, each after its kind, (1,) or species."

The supernatural Word goes forth again, and again is there something which looks wondrously like a process or nature. There is another mn, or generation, to take its place among "the generations of the heavens and the earth." And God said, "Let the waters bring forth abundantly (literally, let them swarm with,) the swarming, or moving creature of life, and birds that may fly," etc. Here is a higher nature, but still a nature. It is strange that commentators should not have been more struck with this language. It can only be accounted

for on the part of the modern, (for some of the ancient had more freedom,) by their having been bound up in a preconceived notion at war with its plain and literal import. Had it been stated, as an independent hypothesis, that the waters ever could originate life, by any power, however given to them, some good people, and some learned people, and even some scientific people, might have been startled with it as naturalistic and even atheistic. But here it is in the Scriptures. It is the naturalism of the Bible that does not hesitate to ascribe to the waters a life-giving power, (even of the birds ultimately,) and we may see in it, very evidently, the origin of that idea, very conspicuous in the ancient mythologies, (and even entering into the earliest philosophy of the Ionic school,) that water was the first material principle, and Oceanus and Tethys the parents of all things that have life.

"The waters bring forth," not only the substances that form the lowest stratum, or seem to make the transition from the vegetable to the animal, such as the zoophytes, the mollusks, (if the writer makes no blunder here in his terminology,) or the shell-fish immovable, but the moving creature (reptile) the creeping thing, or swimming thing-the serpent and the fish. We have nothing to do with the science of this; in our present business of interpretation we care nothing about it; but here is naturalism of a certain kind taught in the Scriptures, and why should it alarm us? It is the word of our God, and should we find it connecting man's physical with the waters or the earth, it should cause no fear to a true faith. On any hypothesis, we are sufficiently allied to all below us, so that we may say, literally, "to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister." Job xvii, 14; xxv, 6. It is the lowliness of our physical that exalts our spiritual. There is nothing here to prevent our truly believing, or our truly hearing the voice so near and yet so far--the voice that says unto us, "Fear not, thou worm* Jacob, I have redeemed thee, saith the Lord, I hold thee by thy hand, thou art mine."

Here is a nature supernaturally called out from the waters by the Omnific Word, and that ineffable thing Life (as ineffable in the mollusk as in the archangel) is the product. There is a process, a going on of cause and effect, a law in the waters. *Isaiah xli, 14; Psalm xxii, 7.

How long or how short this process was we know not, we have no means of knowing. It looks very much like a process through a series of gradations. It must have been by many steps that the bird nature brings its origin from the waters.* It says, collectively, "the moving thing that hath life," "let it swarm with them;" as though it began with the lowest and most prolific forms. It looks somewhat as though the higher came from these, through progression of species born of species. So say some scientific men. The writer has not science enough to give any scientific decision in the matter; but this occasions very little concern for the honor of the Scriptures one way or the other. Generic or specific generation is, in itself, no greater mystery, no further from or nearer to the recognition of science, than individual generation, or one individual life coming out of another; and as for any inductive testimony in the case, time is too long, and we are too brief, to arrive at any firm conclusion. "As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit (of the life) or how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the work of God who maketh all." Ecclesiastes xi, 5. It is his working, in either way. On proper testimony we can believe one as well as the other, and there need be no fear about its possibly linking us physically (although the Bible necessitates no such conclusion) with the animal races below us, as long as we believe aright in respect to our more divine spiritual origin. We need to elevate this side of man; we need a more spiritual philosophy of the human soul. With a low psychology, we may well be afraid of the scientific naturalism. With a

* Genesis i, 20. There has been an attempt on the part of some modern commentators to correct this passage, in order to divest it of its seemingly gross naturalism. They have made it a clause by itself, "And let the birds fly," etc., as though it were a separate thing in the creative process. This, however, even if it were critically allowable, would not help the matter. It is further off, indeed, but no more strange, essentially, that the waters should produce the bird life than the reptile life. It is that wondrous thing life, in both cases. We cannot take up our space here in dwelling on the exegesis, except to say, very confidently, that our common translation is right, favored by the ancient versions, and strictly agreeable to the idiom of the Hebrew. " here is the descriptive future, quite common in the Hebrew, and still more common in the Arabic. The very expression occurs in the Koran with the same subject, and in precisely the same way. The true rendering is, "Let the waters, bring forth the creeping thing and the birds that fly in the heavens."

higher doctrine of the spirit than is taught in our most common text-books, we may laugh to scorn all physical theories, whether of the regular scientific or of the new development school, that find in the physical man types or antique remains of everything below. They touch not the divine breath, they reach not the divine image, which spiritually and specifically constituted the primus homo, the species man.

What does the language really mean in the passages we have quoted? It is not too much to say, that most readers, even among the biblically learned, have been content with a hazy, unsteady view of some kind of mechanical formation, without troubling themselves with the strange and perplexing conclusions to which they must inevitably be brought if such view is subjected to strict examination. The most common

notion has been that of a direct outward making, by an outward divine power, and then an arbitrary connection, in some way, of this outward mechanical product with the earth and waters; for, after the express language of the Scriptures, it would not do to deny to these all place in the process. Let us look steadily at the thing and see where it leads. When it takes the poetical form, the mind feels less revulsion in following it to its extreme, and it is carried out in all its grotesque unreasonableness. Milton, for example, represents the animals, behemoth and all, as some way made full formed, in the earth, and then, each one finding its own way out when the earth is commanded to bring them forth. With all respect and reverence be it said, that even Milton's genius, with all the poetical embellishments he has employed, can hardly save it from the aspect of the ludicrous.

"Let the waters bring forth abundantly," "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind." This is the