"And God made the firmament, and divided the waters that were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament." "The mountains huge appear Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave III. THE FIRMAMENT, AND THE GATHERING OF THE WATERS. The subject stated. WE are now to speak of the establishment of the firmament, the gathering of the waters into the sea, and the first appearance of dry land. These events were next in order after the first formation of a crust upon the earth. It was the point, to all seeming, at which order began to reign. The situa tion. The period of dark chaos was long past. The brooding spirit had evoked light from the gradually condensing nebula, and then the blazing star had given place to an opaque body bearing some resemblance to the earth as it exists to-day. By these several changes the earth was gradually approaching the condition for which it was evidently intended from the first. There were no accidents, no mere fortunate happenings. They were parts, each in place, of the plan of the master mind that was over and in it all. And the forces, operating then and operating now, which we call electricity, gravitation, and the like, were of his creation and his appointment, and the obedient servants of his will. After the breaking up of the original nebula into the several parts that now constitute The interspaces the solar system, must have come a period extended. of gradual separation. Even if we make no account of the force with which the parts were thrown off, but suppose each disjoined fragment, in turn, to have lain immediately without the slowly shrinking central nebula, there must have been gradually widening spaces between the parts successively thrown off. The centre of the earth from the centre of the sun is, in round numbers, ninetythree million miles. Mercury, thrown off later, lies at a less distance, while Jupiter, thrown off much earlier, is at a much greater distance. As these separated nebale condensed, or changed to a more compact form by the operation of gravity and radiation, the distances between them were increased, and so each planet came to have a space of its own in which to spin its daily round and make its annual revolution. These intervening spaces would seem thus to have been left unoccupied by any visible substance, making a vast expanse between sun and planet, and between one planet and another. And here we approach what seems to have been in the mind of the writer in Gene Genesis. sis, when he penned the following words: The record in "And God made the firmament, and divided the waters that were under the firmament from the waters that were above the firmament." The word firmament. The word here translated "firmament" is from a verb that is said to mean primarily to "hammer out," or extend, as metal may be drawn out into a thin sheet, and alludes to the overarched and transparent appearance of the sky. But the word is also rendered and "expanse sometimes " heavens," which means simply "heaved up." Neither of these words, as we use them, has a very definite meaning. We speak of the birds flying through the heavens, of the clouds floating in the heavens, and of the stars that fill the heavens. Of course there is no correspondence, actual or implied, between the height attained by the birds, the clouds, and the stars. And the word expanse is scarcely more definite, since it means merely an open space. But if we substitute the word " expanse," in the passage quoted, for firmament, we shall get the idea more near the literal fact. For there is a separation of the water-producing cloud from the water-embracing sea, by the expanse of the atmosphere between. traced. But let us trace the process carefully from the time evaporation first began till the sepThe process aration was complete. For that purpose we go back to the condition of the earth as we left it in the preceding lecture. It had just passed through the "ordeal by fire." From a blazing meteor in the sky it had so far cooled as to assume a nearly opaque form with a thin crust surrounding it for the first time. But the heat within was still so great that the crust was seamed and rent at a thousand points, whence issued jets of steam and tongues of flame, and sometimes streams of liquid matter. In consequence, the atmosphere, or the region about the earth now occupied by the atmosphere, was full of various vapors. The waters when formed could not remain water, for the great heat immediately reduced them to steam. The steam went aloft, formed into clouds-fell in torrents of rain upon the hissing hot surface only to be immediately revaporized and rise again in a continual round; and thus the earth lay imbedded in a sort of perpetual London fog.. But as the process continued and the crust grew firmer, the outbreaks from within became less frequent. And the crust gradually thickening and cooling, the revaporizing became less general. The waters falling in rain found here and there a spot |