ssive periods of great
extent. And certainly, in looking at my English Bible, I find that the
portion of time spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis as _six_ days,
is spoken of in the second chapter as _one_ day. True, there are other
philologers, such as the late Professor Moses Stuart, who take a
different view; but then I find this same Professor Stuart striving hard
to make the phraseology of Moses "fix the antiquity of the globe;" and
so, as a mere geologist, I reject his philology, on exactly the same
principle on which the mere geographer would reject, and be justified in
rejecting, the philology of the doctors of Salamanca, or on which the
mere astronomer would reject, and be justified in rejecting, the
philology of Turrettine and the old Franciscans. I would, in any such
case, at once, and without hesitation, cut the philological knot, by
determining that that philology cannot be sound which would commit the
Scriptures to a science that cannot be true. Waiving, however, the
question as a philological one, and simply holding with Cuvier,
Parkinson, and Silliman, that each of the _six_ days of the Mosaic
narrative in the first chapter were what is assuredly meant by the _day_
referred to in the second,--not natural days, but lengthened periods,--I
find myself called on, as a geologist, to account for but three of the
six. Of the period during which light was created,--of the period during
which a firmament was made to separate the waters from the waters,--or
of the period during which the two great lights of the earth, with the
other heavenly bodies, became visible from the earth's surface,--we need
expect to find no record in the rocks. Let me, however, pause for a
moment, to remark the peculiar character of the language in which we are
first introduced in the Mosaic narrative to the heavenly bodies,--sun,
moon, and stars. The moon, though absolutely one of the smallest lights
of our system, is described as secondary and subordinate to only its
greatest light, the sun. It is the apparent, then, not the actual, which
we find in the passage,--what _seemed_ to be, not what _was_; and as it
was merely what appeared to be greatest that was described as greatest,
on what grounds are we to hold that it may not also have been what
_appeared_ at the time to be made that has been described as made? The
sun, moon, and stars may have been created long before, though it was
not until this fourth period of creation that they