ust necessarily have understood earthly
days, such as we know now?

We readily perceive how interpreters have arrived at this view. The divine
sections of creation in the Mosaic account show themselves too decidedly as
days to make possible any other interpretation than to take them as days.
Now from experience we do not know of any other days than of earthly days
of twenty-four hours; {298} and therefore the conclusion naturally follows,
that the author also took the divine days of creation as such earthly days
of twenty-four hours. A simple reference of the same to periods, so that we
should again think of fixed periods of the earth or of the world, would
especially pervert the literal sense--would entirely remove from the
account the idea of "day" which is so essential to the author of the
record, and thereby render obscure the archetype of the divine week of
creation for the human divisions of time; and the looked-for harmony
between the Biblical days and the geological periods of the earth would by
no means be established by such an identification of the days of creation
with the periods of the world: for the geological or even the cosmic and
astronomical periods are nowhere in congruity with the Biblical days of
creation.

But the question, however, is: are there not evidences in the Biblical
account itself which show that the author did _not_ take these days as
creative earthly days of twenty-four hours? We have to answer this question
decidedly in the affirmative.

In the first place, it is an established fact that these days of the week
of creation were also, according to the meaning of the author, _days of
God_. Now that such days of God, even with the most childish and simple
worldly knowledge of that early period of mankind, so soon as such a pure
_idea of God_, as appears from the whole account, is at the bottom of the
conception, can no longer be _identical_ with the days of the creature, is
to be inferred beforehand with the greatest probability from the purity of
that idea of God, and is even expressly {299} confirmed by special
evidences in the record itself. We have to mention no less than four of
them.

The days of creation present themselves _as days of God_, which as such
_differ from the creative days of earth_ by the fact that with them the
_day_ and the _work of the day_ are absolutely identical. In the creative
days, the day and the work of the day are always different from one
another; the