DISCOVERIES WITH SACRED HISTORY. 21 
first day : it is nowhere affirmed that God cre- 
ated the heaven and the earth in the first day, 
but in the beginning ; this beginning may have 
been an epoch at an unmeasured distance, fol- 
lowed by periods of undefined duration, during 
which all the physical operations disclosed by 
Geology were going on. 
The first verse of Genesis, therefore, seems 
explicitly to assert the creation of the Universe ; 
"the heaven," including the sidereal systems;'^ 
*' and the earth," more especially specifying 
our own planet, as the subsequent scene of the 
operations of the six days about to be described : 
no information is given as to events which may 
have occurred upon this earth, unconnected with 
the history of man, between the creation of its 
component matter recorded in the first verse, 
and the era at which its history is resumed 
in the second verse; nor is any limit fixed 
to the time during which these intermediate 
events may have been going on : millions of 
millions of years may have occupied the inde- 
finite interval, between the beginning in which 
God created the heaven and the earth, and the 
* The Hebrew plural word, shamaim, Gen. i. I, translated 
heaven, means etymologically, the higher regions, all that seems 
above the earth : as we say, God above, God on high, God in 
heaven ; meaning thereby to express the presence of the Deity 
in space distinct from this earth. — E. B. Piisey. 
