ods, he could have better
expressed the idea than by the use of the word _yom_, more especially
if he and those to whom he wrote were familiar with the thought,
preserved to us in the mythology of the Hindoos and Persians, and
probably widely diffused in ancient Asia, that a working day of the
Creator immeasurably transcends a working day of man.[50]

Many objections to the view which I have thus endeavored to support
from internal evidence will at once occur to every intelligent reader
familiar with the literature of this subject. I shall now attempt to
give the principal of these objections a candid consideration.

(1.) It is objected that the time occupied in the work of creation is
given as a reason for the observance of the seventh day as a Sabbath;
and that this requires us to view the days of creation as literal
days. "For in six days Jehovah made the heaven and the earth, the sea
and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day; therefore
Jehovah blessed the Sabbath-day and sanctified it." The argument used
here is, however, as we have already seen, one of analogy. Because God
rested on his seventh day, he blessed and sanctified it, and required
men in like manner to sanctify their seventh day.[51] Now, if it
should appear that the working day of God is not the same with the
working day of man, and that the Sabbath of God is of proportionate
length to his working day, the analogy is not weakened; more
especially as we find the same analogy extended to the seventh year.
If it should be said, God worked in the creation of the world in six
long ages, and rested on the seventh, therefore man, in commemoration
of this fact, and of his own loss of an interest in God's rest by the
fall, shall sanctify the seventh of his working days, the argument is
stronger, the example more intelligible, than on the common
supposition. This objection is, in fact, a piece of pedantic
hyperorthodoxy which has too long been handed about without
investigation. I may add to what has been already said in reference to
it, the following vigorous thrust by Hugh Miller:[52]

"I can not avoid thinking that many of our theologians attach a too
narrow meaning to the remarkable reason attached to the fourth
commandment by the divine Lawgiver. "God rested on the seventh day,"
says the text, "from all his work which he had created and made; and
God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it." And such is the reason
given in the Decalogue why