CONSISTENCY OF GEOLOGY WITH SACRED HISTORY. 457 



We cannot see that this consequence follows. The sabbath is a 

 moral enactment; all that precedes was physical, relating merely to the 

 creation and arrangement of matter, and to irrational organized beings; 

 the sabbath could have no relation to rocks and waters : it was ordained 

 for man, as a rational being, and in mercy as a day of rest to the animal 

 races that were to labor for him : it was a new dispensation and although 

 the same word is applied both to this period and to those that prece- 

 ded, it does not appear to follow that they are necessarily of the same 

 length. The first three days that preceded the establishment of the 

 relation between the sun and the earth could have no measure of time 

 in common with our present experience, and it appears to be no un- 

 warrantable liberty to suppose that they may have been of any length 

 which the subject matter may require, although those three days 

 were also verbally limited by morning and evening, and that at a peri- 

 od of the creation when there could have been no morning and eve- 

 ning, in the sense in which those words are now used. 



The revolution of the earth on its axis in presence of an illumina- 

 ted sun, was necessary to constitute morning and evening, and it must 

 revolve with the same degree of rapidity as now, in order to have con- 

 stituted such a natural day, with its morning and evening as we at pre- 

 sent enjoy. But the sun was not ordained to rule the day until the 

 fourth of those periods, and it is not certain that the early revolutions 

 of the earth on its axis were as rapid as now. May we not there- 

 fore suppose that the historian, as he must employ some term for his 

 divisions of time, adopted one that he found in familiar use, but that 

 it is not necessarily restricted to the common acceptation of the word. 



Is it asked whether Moses had any mental reservation, a double sense 

 for the word day — one for the common people and one for geologists ; 

 we answer that it is very possible he had no geological knowledge be- 

 yond the order of time in the creation which his history exhibits. It is 

 very probable that fossil and entombed organized remains and fragmen- 

 tary rocks and indeed most of the facts which geology has developed 

 were unknown to him and that, as he told a story for mankind at large, 

 he told it in the same spirit and with the same understanding with which 

 it is commonly received. This however decides nothing more than in 

 the case of all the sacred writers who relate astronomical events, or 

 who allude to astronomical appearances in the vulgar sense, which is 

 in direct contradiction to the actual state of facts in astronomy; where- 

 as geology contradicts nothing contained in the scripture account of 

 the creation; on the contrary, it confirms the order of time and re- 

 quires only that the time should be sufiiciently extended to render it 



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