235 
his purpose. Such being the case, we cannot con-| 
clude this preface without briefly stating two or 
three methods by which any seeming discrepancies 
may be explained. First, those who imagine that 
the six periods of creation, mentioned in the begin- 
ning of the pentateuch, mean literaily days of 24 
hours each, believe that, as only a.small part of the 
earth was at first required for the abode of man and. 
the higher animals, the present continents might 
have remained as long beneath the waters, and have 
undergone every change necessary to solve this geo- 
logical puzzle. 
Again, others have thought that Moses, after re- 
cording, in the first sentence of Genesis, the great 
truth that all things were made by the will of an in- 
telligent Cr eator—passed silently over some interme- 
diate state of the earth, which had no direct relation — 
to the history, or to the duties of man—and proceed- 
ed to describe the successive appearance of the pre- 
— order of things. On this supposition, the fossil 
remains and peculiarities in the structure of the 
earth may have belonged to that intermediate state. : 
A third method of explaining ths difficulty, and 
which we think highly satisfactory, is, by under- 
standing the days of creation to mean, not ordinary 
days, but periods of time, in which the recorded events 
took place in the order described So briefly by the 
sacred historian. It is acknowledged by every one 
competent to judge, that among the Hebrews, days 
_and weeks were often used in this manner. The ac- 
cordance between the order in which, according to 
