DISCOVERIES WITH SACRED HISTORY. 29 
The interpretation here proposed seems more- 
over to solve the difficulty, which would otherwise 
attend the statement of the appearance of light 
upon the first day, whilst the sun 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 indefi- 
nitely distant time, designated by the word be- 
ginning, and that the darkness described on the 
evening of the first day, was a temporary dark- 
ness, produced by an accumulation of dense va- 
the objection which has sometimes been urged against the Mo- 
saic cosmogony, from its representing the works of creation 
as being no more than six or seven thousand years old, for Moses 
gives no such representation of the age of those works. How- 
ever distant the period may be, and it is probably very distant, 
when God created the heavens and the earth ; there has been a 
time when it was not distant one year, one day, or one hour. 
Those, therefore, who contend that the glory of the Almighty 
God manifested in his works, cannot be limited to the short 
period of six or seven thousand years, are not aware that the 
same objection may be made to the longest period which can 
possibly be conceived by the mind of man. No assignable 
quantity of successive duration bears any proportion to eternity, 
and though we should suppose the corporeal universe to have 
been created six millions or six hundred 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 admitted 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 scripture, 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 
