ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE.

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can not be popularized, and we assume as sufficient for our purpose the substantial oneness of Genesis as a work of Moses. It is more important to trace the internal evidences of the truth of the narrative and its divine origin.

The subject of this first chapter is the origin of the existing order of things-the earth and its inhabitants, with the visible surrounding heavens. This is one of the profoundest subjects of human thought. It has occupied the speculations of the greatest philosophers of ancient times, and the investigations and theories of modern science; but neither philosophy nor science has yet accurately determined the origin of the universe. The method of Genesis is the reverse of physical science. The latter, by induction, seeks after laws, principles, and causes; but Genesis begins with the great First Cause. Science leads us back step by step to the necessity of an original cause; Genesis sets that cause before us directly in the declaration, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." If the account given of the creation in this chapter is true, it must have proceeded from God. There was no human observer to record it, and the facts are beyond human discovery even in the present advanced stage of science. It is impossible to believe that, in the age of the world when this book was composed, and among the people to whom it was first given, the human mind should have been capable of originating such a description of the universe. It was communicated by illumination from God to man. The truth of this will appear if we look at it somewhat in detail.

"In the Beginning!" This describes a vague period before the present condition of things had an existence, before the heaven and earth, as they now are, began to be. There is here no limitation of time, and therefore the expansion of astronomical and geological eons, cycle upon cycle, finds here the most ample scope. There was time enough in that "Be

ginning" for the evolution of the entire solar system from a single nebulous mass-supposing that to have been the condition in which matter was first produced.

"God created the heaven and the earth!" Did the writer mean to describe the universe at large and the origin of matter? or simply our globe and its visible firmament, as established or constituted in its existing order? This can not be determined from the word bara, which has the same ambiguity as the English word create; but inasmuch as the succeeding verses are occupied with the plastic process in detail, by which crude chaotic matter was reduced to form and order, we may infer that by the act of creation in the first verse was intended the origination of matter, the first beginning of that from which the worlds were shaped. This is the meaning put upon it by the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews:"the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.' The objection that the metaphysical notion of creation ex nihilo is foreign to the Scriptures, has little weight, since the Hebrew writer, impressed with the eternal self-existence and the absolute personality of God, was declaring a fact, without reference to a philosophical mode of conceiving that fact.

As used in the Bible, the word bara sometimes signifies the bringing into existence a new thing-as, for instance, the creation of Matter, of Life, and of Man-and sometimes the constituting or establishing in order that which had already been brought into existence as to its germs or essence—in the sense to cut, carve, or shape; but in either case the principle is the same-a personal God giving existence, form, and order to matter by his own power and will. Applied to the acts of the Almighty, bara always denotes the giving existence to

* Hebrews xi. 3.

BIBLICAL IDEA OF CREATION.

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something new,* either in substance or in form, and the bringing into being by divine power is the leading idea in creation. This verse represents God as the primary cause of the whole material creation which comes under the observation of our senses, and which is comprehensively described as "the heaven and the earth." t

At first we have a picture of chaos:-matter in a crude, formless condition, shrouded in darkness. The first act of the divine will, represented as "the Spirit brooding upon the waters," is the evolution of light. A beautiful experiment has been invented to illustrate the possible formation of the world from a gaseous condition, according to the nebular theory. In a globe of water and alcohol, mixed in a nicely proportioned density, is deposited a diminutive ball of oil, which, by its relative specific gravity, adjusts itself to the center of the fluid mass. A certain motion imparted to this by a wire from without gives it the shape of our globe flattened at the poles; another motion will throw off the moon, or, if you please, the four moons of Jupiter; again, Saturn and its rings may be produced by another rotary movement; and finally, the whole mass broken up into globules representing the planetary system as it swims in space.

Our knowledge of the prodigious force of gases, and of the effects of motion and electricity on a grand scale, may help

* An important passage for the meaning to create out of nothing is Genesis ii. 3, where, according to Gesenius, we read, "he rested from all his work which God created in making; i. e., which he made in creating something new: see also Jer. xxxi. 22; whence it is apparent that bara implies the creation of something new, not before existing." This view is ably advocated by Dr. Barrows in the Bibliotheca Sacra for 1856, p. 743; by Kalisch, "Commentary on Genesis; " by Delitzsch," Commentar über die Genesis," and others; but Dr. Tayler Lewis, in Lange's "Genesis" (p. 127), maintains that the word denotes, not the primal origination, but formations, dispositions, of matter. Yet he adds, "this is creation; it is the divine supernatural making of something new, and which did not exist before."

+ Keeping in mind the Hebrew conception of one, eternal, almighty, self-existent God, the natural interpretation of barc would appear to be the bringing something out of nothing, although in its strict metaphysical form the doctrine of creation ex nihilo can hardly be traced in the early Hebrew Scriptures.

us to understand how, if this Chaos was matter in a rare gaseous state diffused in space, molecular motion, or a chemical change evolving electricity, may have produced the light here described, and then motion, once set in order, might have given shape by degrees to the earth and the heavenly bodies. As to the process, however, all is mere conjecture; Genesis does not describe it,-science can not unfold it.*

Here comes in the term "Day." I suppose it now to be well understood that neither this word itself, nor Biblical usage, nor the context here, requires us to understand by a Day a period of twenty-four hours. The term is first applied to the appearing of light after the darkness of chaos. Chaos was the evening, light the morning. But when did this darkness begin? and how long did the light thus engendered continue? Was this merely a natural day? Why should we attempt to measure this first period by a chronometer which, according to the narrative itself, could not have come into use until the fourth day, when the heavenly bodies became visible from our globe, so as to serve for the measurement of times and seasons?

*The nebular hypothesis is thus stated by Prof. Loomis: "Suppose that the matter composing the entire solar system once existed in the condition of a single nebulous mass, extending beyond the orbit of the most remote planet. Suppose that this nebula has a slow rotation upon an axis, and that by radiation it gradually cools, thereby contracting in its dimensions. As it contracts in its dimensions, its velocity of rotation, according to the principles of Mechanics, must necessarily increase, and the centrifugal force thus generated in the exterior portion of the nebula would at length become equal to the attraction of the central mass. This exterior portion would thus become detached, and revolve independently as an immense zone or ring. As the central mass continued to cool and contract in its dimensions. other zones would in the same manner become detached, while the central mass continually decreases in size and increases in density. The zones thus successively detached would generally break up into separate masses, revolving independently about the sun; and if their velocities were slightly unequal, the matter of each zone would ultimately collect in a single planetary but still gaseous mass, having a spheroidal form, and also a motion of rotation about an axis. As each of these planetary masses becomes still further cooled, it would pass through a succession of changes similar to those of the first solar nebula; rings of matter would be formed surrounding the planetary nucleus, and these rings, if they broke up into separate masses, would ultimately form satellites revolving about their primaries. . . This hypothesis must be regarded as possessing considerable probability, since it accounts for a large number of phenomena which hitherto had remained unexplained."-Treatise on Astronomy, p. 314.

MEANING OF THE WORD DAY.

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In the fourth verse of the second chapter we have an example of the use of this word "Day" to cover the whole period of operations included in the seven days of the first chapter: "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." Here the whole term of creation is comprehended within one day. Again: we are told that 'one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."* In short, the word is used in the Scriptures to describe an event or period which had a beginning and a completion. Lest any should suppose that this interpretation of the word Day is a modern invention to accommodate the narrative in Genesis to the discoveries of Geology, or to evade the objections of science to this record, let me remind you that Augustine, in the fourth century, by the simple principles of interpretation, called these "ineffable days," describing them as alternate births and pauses in the work of the Almighty-the boundaries of periods in the vast evolution of the worlds. And such was the earlier Christian interpretation of this narrative. The notion that these were literal days of twenty-four hours seems rather to have sprung up in the middle ages, an offspring of that literalism and realism which in times of ignorance have often perverted the meaning of the Scriptures.

It has been objected to this narrative, that the sun, moon, and stars did not appear until the fourth day, whereas the growth of vegetation requires the action of light, and the light of certain stars requires to travel for ages before reaching an observer on our earth; and therefore there must have been light from the heavenly bodies during the period of vegetable growth described as the third day, and the stars

* 2 Peter iii. 8.

+"De Genesi ad Literam."