DISCOVERIES WITH SACRED HISTORY. 25 
already existing, and involved in darkness ; 
their condition also is described as a state of 
confusion and emptiness, (tohu hohu), words 
which are usually interpreted by the vague and 
indefinite Greek term, " chaos," and which may 
luce"), considering tiie two first verses as a summary of the ac- 
count of creation which was about to follow, and a general de- 
claration that all things were made by God. 
Episcopius again, and others, thought that the creation and 
fall of the bad angels took place in the interval here spoken of : 
and misplaced as such speculations are, still they seem to show 
that it is natural to suppose that a considerable interval may have 
taken place between the creation related in the first verse of Ge- 
nesis and that of which an account is given in the third and fol- 
lowing verses. Accordingly, in some old editions of the English 
Bible, where there is no division into verses, you actually find a 
break at the end of what is now the second verse ; and in Lu- 
ther's Bible (Wittenburg, 1557) you have in addition the figure 
1 placed against the third verse, as being the beginning of the 
account of the creation on the first day. 
This then is just the sort of confirmation which one wished for, 
because, though one would shrink from the impiety of bending 
the language of God's book to any other than its obvious mean- 
ing, we can not help fearing lest we might be unconsciously 
influenced by the floating opinions of our own day, and therefore 
turn the more anxiously to those who explained Holy Scripture, 
before these theories existed. You must allow me to add that I 
would not define further. We know nothing of creation, nothing 
of ultimate causes^ nothing of space, except what is bounded by 
actual existing bodies, nothing of time, but what is limited by the 
revolution of those bodies. I should be very sorry to appear to 
dogmatize upon that, of which it requires very little reflection, or 
reverence, to confess that we are necessarily ignorant. " Hardly 
do we guess aright of things that are upon earth, and with labour 
do we find the things that are before us ; but the things that are in 
heaven who hath searched out ?" — Wisdom, ix. 16. — E. B. Pusey. 
