CHAPTER IX.

THAT the Church had her records from the foundation of the world, is presupposed in Genesis. It is a truth patent on the very face of the Mosaic history, and it has decisive confirmation from other sources. The week of seven days is a time cycle which does not correspond with any cycle, or any part of a cycle in nature; it is not based upon any natural phenomena; yet it was a common mode of reckoning time among the most ancient nations of the East; and if a sufficient antiquity and authority be assumed for the sacred record of creation, it accounts for this historical fact, which otherwise is without any imaginable cause. The sacred history of the deluge is reproduced so closely by Berosus, Manetho, and Abydenus, that, as there is no probability that they copied from Moses, it is evident there was a version of that judgment closely resembling his, which was known to them; this idea receives some confirmation from other traditions of the flood. The most ancient cosmogonies, in some curious particulars, so resemble the Divine, as to prove its high antiquity. The aggregate evidence of all the facts bearing upon the subject, establishes the truth, that the sacred record of creation is older than Moses; and there is no reason to doubt that it came across the flood. Moses authenticates it; it is, therefore, properly associated with his name. But the Church existed before Moses, having then her records, as truly as now.

It is of some consequence to determine the style of this document. To some it reads as a poem; to others, as a vision. Poetry it is not, neither is there a word or line in it from which it can be shown to have been a vision. Yet had it been a vision, beyond all doubt it would at once appear to be such.

As, like all Scripture, it describes natural events phenomenally, the language is of course somewhat the same as if it had been a vision; but the distinguishing marks of a vision are wanting, and the fact that there is no evidence for it, is proof against it. For convenience' sake we have used the term, and spoken of it as the Mosaic vision; but Moses was not the author of it, neither was it a vision. It was a direct communication from God to some more ancient man, perchance to Adam, or Seth, or Enoch, who walked with God, or to Noah, much below whose age it cannot have been annunciated, while every probability carries it back to the time when the Church first began to be.

idea of the unity

It is not a record of the Hebraic Church, but of the Church primeval, a record coëval with her existence; and the influence of it has been, and is, felt in all the earth. On it was based the division of days into weeks, and on it the of God, which everywhere appears in the midst of, and contending against, the polytheism of the earliest nations. No ancient word of the Most High had more prevailing power in the earth than this revelation of one God creating all things. It is the origin of cosmological thought throughout the East. If, then, it was thought to teach a creation in a single week, undoubtedly some trace of this idea would appear in the world's memory, which, wherever in the ancient world there was a week of seven days, witnesses to some remembrance of this vision; and if no such trace appears, it proves no such idea was associated with it; and as none such appears also in the ancient Hebraic mind, then certainly no such idea ever should have been associated with it. It is evidently a recent error.

The idea that only through belief in a creation in six literal days could the seventh have been revered, will not bear examination. The idea revealed, that in six ages God made the world, and rested on the seventh, gives an equally sure basis for the Sabbath as the modern idea. If the Occidental mind had not been emerging from barbarism, if it had not been weakened and degraded by its antecedent heathenism to a degree far below that of the primeval nations of the earth, it

never could have taken up with an idea so puerile and absurd, but would have pronounced the days of God unlike in duration to the days of man, and have found in the idea of Divine working and repose, of six periods of labor and one of rest, as strong a reason as it seemed to find for its veneration for the Sabbath.

The modern idea of instantaneous creation is neither natural, rational, nor scriptural. It has no analogy. There is no trace of it in human thought. It is one of the marvels of human error that it should have gained even a hearing; and had the mind of the Occident been as philosophical, as metaphysical, as it is practical, it never would.

The annals of inability of the They show that

With this idea of instantaneous creation, the idea of the employment of natural agencies in creation was, of course, incompatible. Error led on to error, and so the words of God were taken as absolutely meaningless. Though the earth and the ocean are set forth as having some part in the production of life, the language was utterly disregarded. human thought furnish decisive proof of the human intellect to understand the word of God. even the Divine Record would not meet the wants of man, were there not a divinely inspired Church, coeval with the Record, and illuminated by the same Spirit from which the Record came, to interpret it; for, as will hereafter appear, in this solitary instance there was a break in the transmission of thought, through the double line of an infallible oracle and an interpreting Church.

Human reason, enkindled and strengthened by the power of faith, proved competent partially to rectify both errors, and established the truths of a creation in indefinite time, and through natural processes. This must be regarded as the highest of its achievements, as something which it never equalled before, and never will surpass. But though in this a correct result was reached, yet the view of all the speculations which crowded in to fill the void left in thought by the misinterpretation of the sacred oracle, is humiliating. The physical

investigations of man, tracing out the record of the Divine plan in nature, and following its indications with docility, did effect something, because they had something to guide them; but metaphysical speculations, busied about the primal mysteries of being, having no guide at all, wandered in wild and monstrous aberrations. The wildest legends of some of their heathen ancestry were solid sense and veritable history compared with the speculations of some of these more heathenish philosophers. Human thought, unguided by the Church aright, and venturing upon audacious hypotheses, produced such monstrous concoctions of blasphemy, arrogance, and imbecility, that the most startling proofs of the deep disease of the human intellect are to be found, not among the heathen, but in philosophical systems which have been propounded among the foremost nations of modern Europe, and which are all traceable to the defective and erroneous interpretation of the first of Genesis, though indulged in by those who rejoiced that they were delivered from the thraldom of Shemitic ideas.

The rediscovery of the two grand ideas revealed as to Creation, are no doubt destined to work great changes in thought. The tenor of the old error was at once towards Atheism and towards Pantheism. Once in the depths of eternity, it conceived of God as coming forth to create the universe; a solitary act, with naught before it, and naught after, like unto it. Such an idea almost necessarily tended towards Atheism; for it was an idea which could not attach itself to anything in the character of the Divine Being. It did not permit the mind to conceive of him as a Being who delights in his constructive energies. The mind, cut off from this truth, which is clearly revealed, found it difficult to believe that He should thus have come forth at all. Many denied there ever could have been any such fact, and somewhat logically, looking only at what was thus presented; others, finding proof of some divine action, and unconsciously, perhaps, referring it to some necessity, went to the other extreme, and resolved everything into immediate divine action, thus confounding God with the universe.

The

cause and the extent of this error appear from the fact, that it insidiously invaded the Church, showing its cause to have been some error as to its oracles. The safeguard against each is in the scriptural idea of a God who delights in Creation, as shown by repeated creative acts, and in repose, as shown by his ceasing to create. If it be said this makes God like man, we reply, Not at all. It makes man like God, which is a very different thing. God works, and it is impossible to resist the idea from the language of Scripture, that he takes pleasure in this working. Equally impossible is it to resist the idea that he takes pleasure in repose. No necessity constrains him; if it did, either he would never create, which is the root of Atheism; or would create forever, which is the root of Pantheism. In the Scripture is revealed a deity who creates, because it pleases him well; who ceases from creating, because that also pleases him. The idea of an apathetic Being, or of a Being constrained everlastingly to create, are alike fatal errors. The more simple idea is known to be ultimate and true, because it is the idea revealed. It runs through the kingdoms of nature and of grace.

The scientific ideas, as well as ecclesiastical, are destined to feel a great influence from the true interpretation of the record of Creation. Science, whose office it is to explore the world, has, in this record of the creation of the world, the rule by which to determine its lines of working, by which to test its results; a rule conforming to which its conclusions are known to be correct and ultimate. Science is not to confirm the record, but to be confirmed by it. It is no doubt true that a perfect natural science would go far to confirm it, though it would be the confirmation of the greater by the less, and therefore imperfect. But a perfect physical science there cannot be without a perfect metaphysical science; this cannot be without a perfect moral science; and this cannot be without a revelation from God. There is no science which is isolated; and on the perfection of all, the perfection of each depends. But, as yet, all are very much isolated; all, therefore, are ex