LIGHT, LUMINARIES AND LIFE. 181 
criticism of your use of the term ‘poem’ is absurd. Longi- 
nus puts the ‘Let there be light, etc.’ by the side of the first 
passage of Homer, as types of ‘the sublime’ in style. You 
can have prose poems.” Again, a very able contributor to the 
subsequent correspondence in the Guardian* writes to me— 
“The objection that it has not poetical form seems to me a 
quibble, and a rather poor one. Some of the fienst poems in 
existence are in prose ; ¢.g., De Quincey’s ‘ Levana, or our Lady 
of Sorrows.” I was impelled to speak of it as a poem from 
the balanced proportion and the rhythmic swing of its thoughts, 
which seem to me to give it the stamp of poetic genius. Per- 
haps we all need to “think orientally ” a little more than we are 
accustomed to do, in order rightly to appreciate it, or the Bible 
generally. 
What I find in briefest outline in the poem may perhaps be 
put thus :— 
From the first it was God (Zlohim, a word of obscure deri- 
vation according to Dr. Driver)? who was creating the heaven 
and the earth ; bringing into being the “ waste and void ” matter 
of the universe, with its marvellous properties imparted to it by 
the Creative Spirit, the primary result being luminosity (v. 3), as 
this “ waste and void” matter (this matter in an ultra-gaseous 
state) became integrated by the energy of chemical affinity ; 
directing the powers of inorganic nature (supplemented later on 
by the introduction of life); so that the inspired writer was 
able to reach the climax in ii, 3, summing it all up in the double 
category of the work “which God had created and made,” all 
culminating in man,a being endowed with spiritual faculties and 
powers. 
This will be found to agree with the last paragraph of my 
previous paper, which does not clash very much with the credo, 
to which Dr. Drivert confessed in the last stage of the contro- 
versy, except on the question of the sequence of the phenomena, 
which are associated with the third and fourth “days.” That 
question is dealt with at length in the present paper. It has long 
been a puzzle to me,as to why the writer, if he meant a literal 
“ day,” should have gone out of his way in each case to define it by 
“an evening and a morning,” instead of phrasing it in accordance 
with the natural sequence of things. 
* Rev. A. J. 8S. Downer (tbid., Dec. 18th, 1907). 
+ Genesis, 6th ed., p. 402. 
{ Guardian, Dec. 11th, 1907. See also my reply to that (hid., 
Dec. 18th, 1907). 
