lysm, 6,000 years ago, the face of the
earth was renewed and replenished for the habitation of man, the
preceding geological ages being left entirely unnoticed. Some writers
have confined the cataclysm and renewal to a small portion of the
earth's surface--to "Eden," and its neighbourhood. Other commentators
have laid stress on the truth revealed in Scripture that "one day is
with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day," and
have urged the argument that the six days of creation were really vast
periods of time, during which the earth's geological changes and the
evolution of its varied forms of life were running their course. Others,
again, have urged that the six days of creation were six literal days,
but instead of being consecutive were separated by long ages. And yet
again, as no man was present during the creation period, it has been
suggested that the Divine revelation of it was given to Moses or some
other inspired prophet in six successive visions or dreams, which
constituted the "six days" in which the chief facts of creation were set
forth.

All such hypotheses are based on the assumption that the opening
chapters of Genesis are intended to reveal to man certain physical
details in the material history of this planet; to be in fact a little
compendium of the geological and zoological history of the world, and so
a suitable introduction to the history of the early days of mankind
which followed it.

It is surely more reasonable to conclude that there was no purpose
whatever of teaching us anything about the physical relationships of
land and sea, of tree and plant, of bird and fish; it seems, indeed,
scarcely conceivable that it should have been the Divine intention so to
supply the ages with a condensed manual of the physical sciences. What
useful purpose could it have served? What man would have been the wiser
or better for it? Who could have understood it until the time when men,
by their own intellectual strivings, had attained sufficient knowledge
of their physical surroundings to do without such a revelation at all?

But although the opening chapters of Genesis were not designed to teach
the Hebrew certain physical facts of nature, they gave him the knowledge
that he might lawfully study nature. For he learnt from them that nature
has no power nor vitality of its own; that sun, and sea, and cloud, and
wind are not separate deities, nor the expression of deities that they
are but