instructed to use popularly intelligible language, and so
the text speaks of the lights as they _appear_ in the sky or firmament.

Even if we suppose that before this act, the sun was already
incandescent, and the moon capable of reflecting the light, the whole
arrangement of the earth's rotation may have been such that the
alternations of light and darkness may have been very different from
what they are now, and the seasons also. A moment's reflection regarding
the obliquity of the earth's axis, nutation, the precession of the
equinoxes, the eccentricity of the orbit and the changes in the position
of the orbit, will show us what ample room there was for a special
adjustment and adaptation between the earth and its satellite and
between both to the solar centre.[2] So that faith which accepts this as
a Divine arrangement made among the special and formal acts of Creation,
cannot be said to be unreasonable, or to be flying in the face of any
known facts.

[Footnote 1: Ver. 19, &c. The same word is also used of "making" priests
(l Kings xii. 31), and appointing (R.V.)("advancing" A.V.), ("making,"
as we familiarly say) Moses and Aaron (1 Sam. xii. 6).]

[Footnote 2: And the Psalmist justly speaks of God as _preparing_ the
light of the sun (Psa. lxxiv. 16).]

It is very remarkable, as showing how little we can attribute this
narrative, on any basis of probability, to mere fancy or guess-work,
that this matter should have been assigned to the fourth day--_after_
the fiat for plant-life had gone forth.

But the fact is that the unregulated light, and the vaporous uniform
climate that must have continued if the fourth day's command had never
issued, though it might have served for a time for the lowest beginnings
of life, especially marine or aquatic, would ultimately have rendered
any advance in the series of design impossible. Such a fact would never
have occurred to an ignorant and uninspired writer.

It is here impossible to say whether the whole arrangements indicated
were made at once in obedience to the Divine Design, or were produced
gradually.

It has been suggested that uniformity of climate and temperature
continued up till the carboniferous ages, at any rate; and it is only in
the later ages that such differences of _fauna_ in different parts of
the world appear, as to show differences of climate more like what we
have at present.

Whether this is so or not, I am not concerned to argue. The narrative