DIVINE ENLIGHTENMENT. 165 



the absolute facts of the case. All that is required to exhibit 

 one revelation as a substantial transcript of the other, is an ad- 

 mission that the word " day " is used by Moses in the sense 

 of an indefinite period a sense in which it is used in scores 

 of instances in the Bible, and a sense in which Moses unques- 

 tionably used it in Gen. ii. 4, where, in a more summary 

 allusion to these same works of creation, he speaks of " THE 

 DAY that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." 



As it is next to an impossibility to suppose that all these 

 surprising coincidences could have been a mere work of 

 chance, the conclusion is scarcely avoidable, that the account 

 in the first chapter of Genesis, by whomsoever written, must 

 have originated in a source of intelligence in which a general 

 knowledge of the whole history of the creation was familiarly 

 embraced. 



It is quite certain, however, that Moses Knew nothing, at 

 least in an exterior way, about Geology ; for of this science 

 the whole human race has been ignorant until within the last 

 century. I apprehend that nothing short of an hypothesis of 

 a spiritual or Divine enlightenment, will be found adequate to 

 explain the origin of this biblical and wonderfully accurate 

 account of creation. Concerning the laws of such enlighten- 

 ment, some explanations may be submitted in a future work. 



I have deemed it useful to show, in this summary manner, 

 the true bearings of geological science upon the initial revela- 

 tion of the Bible, partly to correct a tendency which, strange 

 to say, has been manifested in the modern spiritual mode of 

 philosophizing, to treat lightly this and other revelations of 

 the Bible, on account of the supposed " unprogressed " state of 

 their writers ; partly for the purpose of further illustrating the 

 fact, that all true theology and other species of doctrine, 

 whether found in the Bible or elsewhere, must conform to the 



