ure directly concerned.
"The earth was (or became) without form and void (chaotic), and darkness
was on the face of the deep (or abyss)."

We have no positive knowledge of what the first condition of terrestrial
matter was, apart from Revelation. The remarkable discoveries that the
spectroscope has enabled, and the facts learned from the physical
history of comets and meteorites, can do no more than make what is known
as the "nebular hypothesis" highly probable. But it is amply sufficient
for our purpose to point out, that if it is true that matter originated
in a nebulous haze to the particles of which a spiral rotatory motion
had been communicated, and if (confining our attention to one planet
only) that attenuated matter gradually aggregated in a ring or rings,
and then consolidated into a solid or partly solid globe, then the
results are briefly, but adequately and sublimely, provided for by the
form of the Mosaic statement.

Matter thus aggregating would have developed an enormous amount of heat,
and there would have been a seething mass of molten mineral matters,
with gases and other materials in the form of vapours, which would have
gradually cooled and consolidated. Vast masses of water would in time be
formed on one hand, and solid mineral masses on the other; the latter
would contract as cooling progressed, causing great upheavals and
depressions and contortions of strata. And before the advent of
life-forms, it is not difficult to conceive that the first state of our
globe was one which is intelligibly and very graphically described as
being "without form and void." Nothing more than that, can, from actual
physical knowledge, be stated.[1]

It is also stated that this confused elemental state of our earth was
accompanied at first by darkness. Material darkness that is--for the
potentiality of light and order was there; the SPIRIT OF GOD "moved" (or
brooded) upon the face of the abyss. This presents no difficulty of
interpretation, and may therefore be passed over for the present.

[Footnote 1: It would be hardly necessary (but for some remarks in the
course of the Gladstone-Huxley controversy) to observe that the term
"void" does not imply vacuity or emptiness, as of _substance,_ but
absence of defined form such as subsequently was evolved.]

Practically, indeed, there has been no grave difficulty raised over this
first portion. And if it is argued (on the ground of what I have already
in general terms