--neither for the promotion of religious
knowledge nor for that of religious life.

Still, however, the result of our comparison between Biblical and
scientific interpretation seems to us worth mentioning for a special
reason. It is true, we have found a succession of the _meridian altitudes_
of the Biblical days in the same order in which, according to the Biblical
relation, the days' works followed one another; but we have found in the
_total course_ of the Biblical days that their works in reality passed on
in long lines contemporaneously with one another. Now, since that first
part of our result--the succession of _meridian {311} altitudes_--is the
least we have to expect, if the counting of the days shall at all have an
objectively real ground in the world's process, on the other hand, the
second part of our result--the far-reaching contemporary existence of the
different Biblical days--has an exact analogy with those prophecies whose
partial or entire fulfilment permits us a more certain judgment of the
character of prophecy and a more certain comparison between prophecy and
fulfilment. Even the prophetic world knows of a divine day, which in the
prophecies occupies an eminent and central position: it is the day of the
Lord as the day of judgment and salvation. This day of the Lord also stands
before the eye of the prophet, certainly not as a common earthly day of
twenty-four hours, but as a day of God rising above earthly days and
embracing an infinite number of them, although it also has its very
distinct meaning which comes into the earthly temporality. But in the
historic fulfilment, there happen along with it a thousand things which do
not belong to it; for two-thirds of mankind that day did not dawn at all;
and as to its temporal course, it had its dawn in the beginnings of
mankind,--its sunrise took place eighteen hundred years ago, and its
meridian altitude is still impending.

Finally, that even the piety of those who composed the Biblical records,
and of all those who see in them the manifested evidences of their faith,
assigns no religious weight to the succession of the days' works, becomes
clear from the before-mentioned fact, that the second account of creation,
which makes man and his ethical primitive history its centre, relates the
creation of the inhabitants of the earth in quite a different order from
{312} the first one. We shall treat of this point again, and more in
detail, for another reason