s of that divine
day of rest. Jesus himself, in St. John, V. 17, puts aside a reproach of
the Pharisees in reference to a healing on the Sabbath, with the words: "My
father worketh hitherto, and I work." This answer only has a meaning in the
sense: my father worketh hitherto, although, since the accomplishment of
the days of creation, he enjoys the Sabbath-rest; and thus I also work on
the Sabbath as on a work-day. And the Letter to the Hebrews, in its fourth
chapter, looks through the medium of the ninety-fifth Psalm back to this
Sabbath of creation which, as a day of rest of God, exists to-day, and the
entering into which is given and promised to the people of God.

By this whole conception of the Biblical week of creation, which appears to
us _exegetically_ much more {304} natural and unconstrained than any other,
we alone reach that conception which the author of that record _intends to_
reach; namely, a conception really worthy of God, of his temporal relation
to the world, and of the relation of human days to the divine days of
creation; we get a foundation for the commandment to keep the Sabbath, the
idea of which can be completed without disturbing the idea of God. The
relation of God to the whole temporal course of this present world, from
its beginning to its end, for the religious mode of contemplation of man
who, as the image of God, looks to the creative activity of God for a
prototype and an example for his own activity, can be comprised in one
single, great, divine week, whose first six days last to the completion of
the creation of man, and whose seventh day still lasts and will last to the
completion of the course of the world--till the latter itself, and mankind
with it, can enter into the divine rest.

From this religious interpretation, which we have to ascribe to that
Biblical idea of the divine week of creation, it by no means follows that
religion has to demand of natural science that it shall reach in its
cosmogonic investigations the same succession in the appearance of things
as we find in the Biblical account. This would be nothing else but an
actual carrying of a pretended religious interest over beyond the limits of
a realm in which the deciding vote belongs to natural science. However
incomplete the cosmogonic knowledge of the latter may be, it nevertheless
is at present established clearly enough to reject forever such a demand.
Astronomy convinces us that it is entirely inconceivable that