, which afterwards received form and order from
some powerful cause. According to them, God was not the Creator, but
the Architect of the universe, in ranging and disposing the elements
in situations most suitable to their respective qualities. This is the
Chaos so often sung of by the poets, and which Hesiod was the first to
mention.

It is clear that this system was but a confused and disfigured
tradition of the creation of the world, as mentioned by Moses; and
thus, beneath these fictions, there lies some faint glimmering of
truth. The first two chapters of the book of Genesis will be found to
throw considerable light on the foundation of this Mythological system
of the world's formation.

Hesiod, the most ancient of the heathen writers who have enlarged upon
this subject, seems to have derived much of his information from the
works of Sanchoniatho, who is supposed to have borrowed his ideas
concerning Chaos from that passage in the second verse of the first
Chapter of Genesis, which mentions the darkness that was spread over
the whole universe--'and darkness was upon the face of the deep'--for
he expresses himself almost in those words. Sanchoniatho lived before
the Trojan war, and professed to have received his information
respecting the original construction of the world from a priest of
'Jehovah,' named Jerombaal. He wrote in the Phoenician language; but
we have only a translation of his works, by Philo Judaeus, which is by
many supposed to be spurious. It is, however, very probable, that from
him the Greeks borrowed their notions regarding Chaos, which they
mingled with fables of their own invention.

FABLE II. [I.32-88]

After the separation of matter, God gives form and regularity to the
universe; and all other living creatures being produced, Prometheus
moulds earth tempered with water, into a human form, which is animated
by Minerva.

When thus he, whoever of the Gods he was,[11] had divided the mass {so}
separated, and reduced it, so divided, into {distinct} members; in the
first place, that it might not be unequal on any side, he gathered it up
into the form of a vast globe; then he commanded the sea to be poured
around it, and to grow boisterous with the raging winds, and to surround
the shores of the Earth, encompassed {by it}; he added also springs, and
numerous pools and lakes, and he bounded the rivers as they flowed
downwards, with sla