have thus endeavoured to vindicate, so that minor matters of
detail, in which it is supposed (1) that some contradiction to known
physical fact may still lurk, and (2) something that negatives the
explanation suggested, may be cleared up.

Let us take it seriatim:--

"In the beginning God created the heaven (plural in the original) and
the earth."

As I have before remarked, we have no real need to discuss whether
"bara" means originated (created where nothing previously existed), or
whether we should render it "fashioned," i.e., moulded material (thus
assumed in terms to be) already in existence.

Either will yield perfectly good and consistent sense; but, as a matter
of fact, there is a virtual consensus of the best scholars that the
word is here used to denote original production of the material.

It is also clear that the text is intended to embrace the whole system
of planets, suns, stars, and whatever else is in space. So the Psalmist
understood it: "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and _all_
the host of them by the breath of his mouth.[1]" Nor is there any
reasonable doubt, exegetically, that the subsequent allusion to the sun,
moon, and stars, refers (as the sense of the text itself obviously
requires) to their _appointment_ or adjustment to certain relations with
the earth, and assumes their original material production in space, to
have been already stated or understood.

"And the earth was (became) without form[2] and void, and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of
the waters."

I have, in another connection, already remarked on this verse, and so
shall not repeat those remarks.

[Footnote 1: Psa. xxxiii. 6, and so Psa. cii. 25; _cf_. 2 Peter iii. 5.]

[Footnote 2: Waste (R.V.).]

I will only say that the elemental strife and rushing together of
chemical elements under the stress of various forces and the presence of
enormous heat, would naturally envelop the globe in dense vapours, a
large portion of which would be watery vapour, capable of condensation
or of dispersion, under proper conditions, afterwards to be prescribed
and realized. As it is beautifully expressed in Job xxxviii., "When I
made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling-band
for it" (verse 8).

Then commences the serial order of Divine acts with reference to the
_Earth_:--

(1) "AND GOD SAID; LET THERE BE LIGHT: AND THERE WAS LIGHT."

This