DISCOVERIES WITH SACRED HISTORY. 33 



The interpretation here proposed seems moreover to 

 solve the difiiculty, which would otherwise attend the state- 

 ment of the appearance of light upon the first day, whilst 

 the Sim 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 suc- 

 cessive duration bears any proportion to eternity, and though we should 

 suppose the corporeal universe to have been created six millions or six 

 liundred 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 ad- 

 mitted the existence of a former earth and visible heavens to be not incon- 

 sistent with the cosmogony of Moses, or indeed with any other part of scrip- 

 ture, 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 be- 

 longed 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 spe- 

 cies 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 fa(;t, that towards the surface of the earth are found 

 strata, which could not have been so disposed as they are, but by t!ie 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 flood; 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 tliat God formed the present S3'stem. His history, as far 

 as it comes down, is the history of the present earth, and of the primeval an- 

 ceators of its present inhabitants ; and one of the most scientific and inge- 

 nious of geologists has clearly proved,* that the human race cannot bo 

 much more ancient than it appears to be in the writings of the Hebrew law- 

 giver." — Stcckhouse^s Bible, by BisJiop Gleig, p, 6, 7, 1816, 



See Cuvier's Essay on tlio Theory of the Earth. 



