The interpretation here proposed seems moreover to
solve the difficulty, which would otherwise attend the statement
of the appearance of light upon the first day, whilst
the sun and moon and stars are not made to appear until
the fourth. If we suppose all the heavenly bodies, and the
earth, to have been created at the indefinitely distant time,
designated by the word beginning, and that the darkness
described on the evening of the first day, was a temporary
darkness/produced by an accumulation of dense vapours
"upon the face of the deep;" an incipient dispersion of
possibly be conceived by the mind of man. No assignable quantity of successive duration bears any proportion to eternity, and though we should suppose the corporeal universe to have been created six millions or six hundred millions of years ago, a caviller might still say, and with equal reason, that the glory of Almighty God manifested in his works cannot be so limited. It is not to silence such objections as this, that I have admitted the existence of a former earth and visible heavens to be not inconsistent with the cosmogony of Moses, or indeed with any other part of scripture, but only to prevent the faith of the pious reader from being unsettled by the discoveries, whether, real or pretended, of our modern geologists. If these philosophers have really discovered fossil bones that must have belonged to species and genera of animals, which now no where exist, either on the earth or in the ocean, and if the destruction of these genera or species cannot be accounted for by the general deluge, or any other catastrophe to which we know, from authentic history, that our globe has been actually subjected, or if it be a fact that towards the surface of the earth, are found strata, which could not have been so disposed as they are, but by the sea, or at least some watery mass remaining over them in a state of tranquillity, for a much longer period than the duration of Noah's Hood; if these things be indeed well ascertained, of which I am however by no means convinced, there is nothing in the sacred writings forbidding us to -suppose that they are the ruins of a former earth, deposited in the chaotic mass of which Moses informed us that God formed the present system. Ilia history, as far as it comes down, is the history of the present earth, and of the primeval ancestors of its present inhabitants; and one of the most scientific and ingenious of geologists has clearly proved,[1] that the human race cannot be much more ancient than it appears to be in the writings of the Hebrew lawgiver"—Stackhouse's Bible, by Bishop Gelig, p. 6, 7, 1816.
- ↑ See Cuvier's Essay on the Theory of the Earth.
