invisible element known by this and by other names - makes all in the material world that which it is. There is no substance in nature in which it is not. It can be disengaged with marvellous rapidity from all substances, however diverse in character and form. From the moist bosom of the unsubstantial Icloud it issues in bolts of fire. It flashes from out the solid rock. It enters into combination with all that is. The lungs drink in air; taken up into the blood, it becomes incorporated into the solids and fluids of the human frame; but the whole body drinks in the element known as light, or heat. It instantly unites with every nerve, and tissue, and muscle, and bone. The most diverse substances drink it in with delight – the snow as the plant. Unseen, unfelt, it constitutes ice in the icebergs of the polar seas: it is the very being of the rocky wall of the globe. Combining with the greatest ease with all substances, separated with the greatest ease from all, it is the universal solvent which solves every substance; and it can be separated from none. It imparts itself to whatever is colder. Exhaust it to the last possible degree, and thought has only to conceive a substance from which it has been more exhausted, and this inscrutable element, existent where it seemed not, with a prodigality of love will pour its mysteriously exhaustless abundance into that want, till it brings round a harmony of states of being.

Light is the first-born of created things. It is before all other material things, and by it all material things consist. It is the element on which every other element depends. It is the universal ground of all material existence. In it all other material things live and move and have their being. True image of a truer reality than itself, by it all things were made, and without it there was not anything made that was made.

It is the mystery of mysteries in creation, till that greater mystery of which it is prophecy and image—the mystery of Life appears. And the twofold mystery of light and fire in the natural creation, is representative of the twofold mystery of light and life in the spiritual creation, of Him by whom "all

things were made, and without whom was not anything made that was made; in whom was life, and the life was the light of men." The ancient Seer, who looked on the creating of the material world, saw in this material beginning the counterpart, the symbol of that higher vision, which was seen of the spiritual beginning by that last Seer, who completed the harmony of perfect truth.

During the first, and, perhaps, the second age, Light was doing its creating work; and when by it other things were ready to be formed, and the Word went forth with His creating energies, it becomes a cherishing and an arranging power. And though the finer potencies of this many-sided element present themselves to the mind musing on Creation, it chiefly takes to itself the guise of Fire. As Fire, it runs exulting before the Artificer, it rejoices to do his bidding, even as He, the wisdom of God, the World-builder, standing with God, rejoices to fulfil his thoughts in the orb of the earth. And when He, in the likeness of man, said, "I came to send fire on the earth," then was fulfilled that which was prefigured and prophesied in the eternities of old.

In its triumphant hours, when, beneath the eye of the Artificer, Fire wrought free and alone, it seems to have burned from the centre to the circumference of the nascent world, then a ball of fire, as it will be again when the elements melt with fervent heat.

From the order in this Vision, it would seem that the work of the fire, before the second Day began, had some reference to the work of that Day. In the great Laboratory, it may then be thought of as working to eliminate the substance out of which the life-giving Word was to constitute the Air.

And as, during the first cycle, this element seems to have been preparing the material of the atmosphere, so during the second, that which was to become the Land and the Sea. In the third Day of eternity, the world-making Word goes forth

1 This seems to be the true rendering in Prov. viii. 30, and there involves the idea of a World-builder.

again, and out of this material creates the Land, creates the Sea. The element which had wrought on the material was suffered to fix the new creations in their respective positions. At the voice of thunder, the Land rose and took its station above the Sea.

To this Day is applied this formula, "Evening was, morning was, Day One." It has commonly been said the evening was the night of chaos. But it is rather strange that two names should be given, in the same breath, to the same thing. Even the condensation of the document, and the desirableness of one formula for all the Days, hardly makes this natural or credible, when it is found that the difficulty reduplicates itself. The language is: "God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night; evening was, morning was, Day One." With this alone before the mind, there could be no doubt that the Day, in these closely connected passages, was the same. It seems to teach that God called the darkness Night, and the light Day; and not that night was, and morning was, making a Day different from that spoken of; but evening was, and morning was, making the Day just then spoken of. If clear at all, this is clear on the inspection of the language, and not to be made more so; and, despite the unanimity of commentators to the contrary, it seems so clear, that the mind is free to seek for an evening elsewhere than in the night of Chaos, and in something more in harmony with the use of the term as applied to the other Days. As this Day runs through the Days, its evening and morning must be sought for in some division of the whole time; and in the Day of Creation there is a change as to the light, which ends the search. On the fourth Day, solar light is diffused over the surface of the Earth. Light is one. Such was the Hebraic conception of it. Such is the fact. Viewed,

then, as to its light, this great Day had two divisions made by the same element: the lurid, fitful, darkened splendors of the close of its evening of terrene light, were transformed into the mild, steady, ordered solar light of its morning.

In the third Age, the Land and the Sea could exist. The

Fire cannot liquefy the earth. It cannot drive off the ocean in vapor. In the fourth Age, through the purer air of the cooling globe, the sun, and at length the moon, and then the stars, are visible; and by the fifth Age, there could be a Sea swarming with life: yet, through all these changes, till the end of creation, the Fire is not weary with running before the Lord. It modifies the forms of the Land, and the bounds of the Sea. It throws up ranges of mountains. It rolls the sea over where land was, and upheaves land from the sea. It shakes what it cannot destroy. It changes climate; it affects vegetation and life. It has much to do with their forms and their times. It destroys them, but it cannot destroy the powers which produced them. Calmed, as by a look from its Master's eye, it does much of its work quietly; slowly, tenderly uplifting the bed of the ocean, so as to disturb nothing that had been deposited or formed in the waters. At other times it sweeps forth with wild fury; it seems bent on destroying all things. But in the creative Days, though one species of plants or animals perish, others are born. It is, perhaps, not suffered to destroy all life at once. It is pent up more and more. Still it breaks in upon, and breaks up, the very arrangements it perfects; confusing and effacing the marks of order, and ploughing its lines through the later days.

At last this Day ends. As a creative element, the Fire is bound. From the time human life began, not only the elements remain, but the plants, animals, and man, abide according to the laws of their institution. The free element is chained until the time when six periods of disintegration will complete this cycle of this planet. Then each creative Day will have its dread counterpart in a Day of destruction; then, not as once creating, but destroying, not less and less, but more and more, till the elements melt with heat, beginning before these Days of Ruin, running through them all, and ending all, one great Day of Fire will burn.

CHAPTER IV.

THE idea of instantaneous Creation, which ruled the ecclesiastical mind of the West, was upheld by the idea of the creation of Air, as well as of Light. For each of these elements seems to suggest that it was suddenly made. Air, thought of as invisible, imponderable, and of one substance, seems as if it might have been an instantaneous creation. And its creation was instantaneous. There was an instant when the air was not; and then an instant when it was. But the Scripture pictures each creation, as well as the creation as a whole, as a birth; and this figure implies an instant when that which is born, is, and before which it is not; and also it implies processes tending towards it, and processes perfecting it.

As to other ages of Creation, so to the second age, the ideas of vast time, and of a natural process apply. Science weighing, measuring the air, and resolving it into component parts, enables the mind to see that these ideas may apply here; but it cannot picture the preëxisting substance; it can think only in the most vague manner of the processes which formed that out of which the Omnific Word constituted the Atmosphere; and therefore those ideas must be upheld, as to this age, chiefly by the grandeur and complexity of the wonderful result.

It is revealed, as to the work of the second age, that what he then created, God called into being as the Heavens.

There must be, in every language, some word which sums up and expresses all the phenomena of the Atmosphere. Such is the word Heavens used in this formula. The creation of all that Maury's chapter on the Atmosphere sets forth as pertaining to the Air, is implied in the divine use of this one word. And it is only necessary to read that chapter to feel that the