y free to interrogate nature for
ourselves, as to all that it can reveal of the duration and progress
of the creative work. But the positive gain which comes from this
ancient formula goes far beyond these negative qualities. If received,
this one word of the Old Testament is sufficient to deliver us forever
from the superstitious dread of nature, and to present it to us as
neither self-existent nor omnipotent, but as the mere handiwork of a
spiritual Creator to whom we are kin; as not a product of chance or
caprice, but as the result of a definite plan of the All-wise; as not
a congeries of unconnected facts and processes, but as a cosmos, a
well-ordered though complex machine, designed by Him who is the
Almighty and the supreme object of reverence. Had this verse alone
constituted the whole Bible, this one utterance would, wherever known
and received, have been an inestimable boon to mankind; proclaiming
deliverance to the captives of every form of nature-worship and
idolatry, and fixing that idea of unity of plan in the universe which
is the fruitful and stable root of all true progress in science. We
owe profound thanks to the old Hebrew prophet for these words--words
which have broken from the necks of once superstitious Aryan races
chains more galling than those of Egyptian bondage.

CHAPTER V.

THE DESOLATE VOID.

"And the earth was desolate and empty, and darkness was upon
the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved on the
surface of the waters."--Genesis i., 2.

We have here a few bold outlines of a dark and mysterious scene--a
condition of the earth of which we have no certain intimation from any
other source, except the speculations based on modern discoveries in
physical science. It was "unshaped and empty," formless and
uninhabited. The words thus translated are sufficiently plain in their
meaning. The first is used by Isaiah to denote the desolation of a
ruined city, and in Job and the Psalms as characteristic of the
wilderness or desert. Both in connection are employed by Isaiah to
express the destruction of Idumea, and by Jeremiah in a powerful
description of the ruin of nations by God's judgments. When thus
united, they form the strongest expression which the Hebrew could
supply for solitary, uninhabited desolation, like that of a city
reduced to heaps of rubbish, and to the silence and loneliness of
utter decay.

In the present connection these words inform us t