events separated by
an interval of hundreds of years, it is quite consistent with the
strictest propriety of language to employ it, with an enlargement
proportioned to the duration of the subject of discourse, to connect
intervals of millions, in the narrative of the generations of the
heavens and the earth.

The Bible uniformly attributes the most remote antiquity to the work of
creation. So far from supposing man to be even approximately coeval with
it, the emphatic reproof of human presumption is couched in the
remarkable words, "Where wast thou, when I laid the foundations of the
earth?" In majestic contrast with the frail human race, Moses glances at
the primeval monuments of God's antiquity, as though by them he could
form some faint conceptions even of eternity, and sings, "Before the
mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and
the universe, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God."[235]

The very word here used, _the beginning_, is in itself an emphatic
refutation of the notion that the work of creation is only some six or
seven thousand years old. Geologists have been unable to invent a
better, and have borrowed from the Bible this very form of speech, to
designate those strata beyond which human knowledge can not
penetrate--_the primary formations_. But, with far greater propriety,
the Holy Spirit uses this word with regard to ages, compared with which
the utmost range of the astronomer's or geologist's reasonings is but as
the tale of yesterday. For this word, in Bible usage, marks the last
promontory on the boundless ocean of eternity; the only positive word by
which we can express the most remote period of past duration. It is not
a date--a point of duration. It is a period--a vast cycle. It has but
one boundary; that where creation rises from its abyss. Created eye has
never seen the other shore. It is that vast period which the Bible
assigns to the manifestations of the Word of God, "whose goings forth
have been of old, from everlasting." Carrying our astonished gaze far
back beyond the era of his creature, man, and ages before the "all
things" that were made by Him, the Bible places this _beginning_ on the
very shore of the eternity of God, when it declares, "_In the beginning_
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."[236]
Thus, both by the use of the imperfect tense, _was_, denoting continued
existence, and by the connection of this _beginning_