Chapter XI: Daylight Before Sunrise (1)

In the last chapter we saw astronomy demonstrating our need of a revelation from God. In this we shall see how it illustrates and confirms that revelation. Seen through the telescope, the Bible glows with celestial splendor. Even its cloudy mysteries are displayed as clouds of light, and its long misunderstood phrases are resolved, by a scientific investigation, into galaxies of brilliant truths, proclaiming to the philosopher that the Book which describes them is as truly the Word of God as the heavens which it describes are his handiwork.

If, once in a century, a profound practical astronomer is found denying the inspiration of the Bible, he will either acknowledge, or discover himself, not familiar with its contents. For the most part, the charges brought against the Bible, of contradicting the facts of astronomy, are based upon misstatements and mistakes of its teachings, and so do not fall within the range of the telescope, or the department of the observatory. The Sabbath-school teacher, and not the astronomer, is the proper person to correct such errors. A few months' instruction in the Bible class of any well-conducted Sabbath-school would save some of our popular anti-Bible lecturers from the sin of misrepresenting the Word of God, and the shame of hearing children laugh at their blunders.

A favorite field for the display of their knowledge of science, and ignorance of the art of reading, by our modern Infidels, is the Bible account of creation, in the first chapter of Genesis, which is alleged to be utterly irreconcilable with the known facts of astronomy and geology. Leaving the latter out of view, for the present, the astronomical objections may all be arranged under four heads. First: that the Bible account of the creation of man, only some six or seven thousand years ago, must be false; because the records of astronomical observations, taken more than seventeen thousand years ago, by the Hindoos and Egyptians, are still in existence, and have been verified. Second: that the light of some of the stars, now shining upon us, and especially of some of the distant nebulæ, must have left them millions of years ago, to have traveled over the vast space which separates them from us, and be visible on our globe now; whereas, the Bible teaches that the universe was created only some six or seven thousand years ago. Third: that the Bible represents God as creating the sky a solid crystal, or metallic sphere, or hemisphere (they are not agreed which), to which the stars are fastened, and with which they revolve around the earth; which every school-boy knows to be absurd. Fourth: that the Bible represents God as creating the sun and moon only two days before Adam, and as creating light before the sun, which is also held to be absurd.

1. The first of these objections--that the Hindoos and Egyptians made astronomical observations thousands of years before Adam, and that the accuracy of these observations has been verified by modern calculations--_is simply untrue_. No such observations were ever made. The pretended records of such have been proved, in the case of the Hindoo astronomy, to be forgeries, and in the case of the Egyptian records, blunders of the discoverers. There is not an authentic uninspired astronomical observation extant for two thousand years after Adam.

The objection, however, is worth noticing, and its history worth remembering, as a specimen of the way in which ignorant men swallow impudent falsehoods, if they only seem to contradict the Word of Truth. When the labors of oriental scholars had made the Vedas and Shasters--the sacred books of the Hindoos--accessible to European philosophers, a wonderful shout was raised among Infidels. "Here," it was said, "is the true chronology. We always knew that man was not a degenerate creature, fallen from a higher estate, some few thousand years ago, but that he has existed from eternity, in a constant progress toward his present lofty position; and now we have the most authentic records of the most ancient and civilized people in the world--the people of India--reaching back for millions of years before the Mosaic cosmogony, and allowing ample time for the development of the noble savage into the cultivated philosopher. These records have every mark of truth, giving minute details of events, and histories of successive lines of princes; and, moreover, record the principal astronomical facts of the successive periods--eclipses, comets, positions of stars, etc.--which attest their veracity. Henceforth, the Hebrew records must hide their heads. Neither as poetry nor history can they pretend to compare with the Vedas."

The Hindoo Shasters were accordingly, for a time, in high repute, among people who knew very little about them. Even Dr. Adam Clarke was so far led away with the spirit of the age, as to pollute his valuable commentary by the insertion of the _Gitagovinda_, after the Chaldee Targum on the Song of Solomon; where the curious reader can satisfy himself as to the scientific value of such Pantheistic dotings. By the Infidels of Britain and America they were appealed to as standard works of undoubted authority; and hundreds, who declared that it was irrational credulity to believe in the Bible, risked their souls on the faith of the Vedas, _of which they never had read a single sentence_!

Now, when we remember that these veracious chronicles reach back through _maha yugs_ of 4,320,000 years of mortals, a thousand of which, or 4,320,000,000, make a _kalpa_ or one day of the life of Brahma, while his night is of the same duration, and his life consists of a hundred years of such days and nights, about the middle of which period the little span of our existence is placed; that among the facts of the history are the records of the seven great continents of the world, separated by seven rivers, and seven chains of mountains, four hundred thousand miles high (reaching only to the moon); of the families of their kings, one of whom had a hundred sons, another only ten thousand, another sixty thousand, who were born in a pumpkin, nourished in pans of milk, reduced to ashes by the curse of a sage, and restored to life by the waters of the Ganges; and that among the astronomical observations, by which the accuracy of these extraordinary facts is confirmed, are accounts of deluges, in which the waters not only rose above the tops of earth's mountains, but above the seven inferior and three superior worlds, _reaching even to the Pole Star_[218]--we may well wonder at the faith which could receive all this as so true, that on the strength of it they rejected the miracles of the Bible as false. Even Voltaire ridiculed these stories.

But a visionary man, named Baillie, calculated the alleged observations backward, and found them sufficiently correct to satisfy him that all the rest of the story was equally true. It never seems to have occurred to him, that if he could calculate eclipses _backward_, so could the Hindoos. It is just as easy to calculate an eclipse, or the position of a planet, backward as forward. If I watch the motion of the hands of a clock accurately, and find that the little hand moves over the twelfth of a circle every hour, and the large hand around the circle in the same time, and that the large hand, now at noon, covers the little one, I can calculate, that at sixteen minutes and a quarter past three it will nearly cover it again; but then, it is just as easy to count that the two hands were covered at sixteen minutes and a quarter before nine that morning, or that they were exactly in line at 6 A. M. If my clock would keep going at the same rate for a thousand years, I could predict the position of the hands at any hour of the twenty-ninth of March, of the year 2857; but it is evident that the very same calculation applied the other way would show the position that the hands would have had a thousand years ago, or five thousand years ago, just as well. And if I were to allege that my clock was made by Tubal Cain, before the flood, and for proof of the fact declare, that on the first of January, 3857 B. C., at 6 o'clock P. M., I had seen the two hands directly in line, and some wiseacre were to calculate the time, and find that at that hour the hands ought to have been just in that position, and conclude thence that I was undoubtedly one of the antediluvians, and the clock no less certainly a specimen of the craft of the first artificer in brass and iron, the argument would be precisely parallel to the Infidel's argument from the Tirvalore Tables, and the astronomy of the Vedas.

But suppose my clock ran a little slow; say half a minute in the month, or so; or that it was made to keep sidereal time, which differs by a little from solar time, and that I did not know exactly what the difference was; it is evident that on a long stretch of some hundreds or thousands of years, I would get out of my reckoning, and the hands would not have been in the positions I had calculated. Now, this was just what happened with the Brahmins and their calculations. The clock of the heavens keeps a uniform rate of going, but they made a slight mistake in the counting of it; and so did their Infidel friends. But our modern astronomers have got the true time, set their clocks, and made their tables by it; and on applying these tables to the pretended Hindoo observations, find that they are all wrong, and that no such eclipses as they allege ever did occur or possibly could have happened in our solar system.[219] So the Hindoo astronomy is now consigned to the same tomb with the Hindoo chronology and cosmogony, except when a missionary, on the banks of the Ganges, exhibits it to the pupils of his English school, as a specimen of the falsehoods which have formed the swaddling bands of Pantheism.

Failing in the attempt to substitute Brahminism for Christianity, Infidels beat a retreat from India, and went down into Egypt for help. Here they made prodigious discoveries of the scientific and religious truths believed by the worshipers of dogs and dung beetles, recorded upon the coffins of holy bulls, and the temples sacred to crows and crocodiles. The age was favorable for such discoveries.

Napoleon and his savans cut out of the ceiling of a temple, at Denderah, in Egypt, a stone covered with uncouth astronomical, astrological, and hieroglyphic figures, which they insisted was a representation of the sky at the time the temple was built; and finding a division made between the signs of the crab and the lion, and marks for the sun and moon there, they took it into their heads that the sun must have entered the Zodiac at that spot, on the year this Zodiac was made; and, calculating back, found that must be at least seventeen thousand years ago. Hundreds of thousands visited the wonderful antediluvian monument, in the National Library, in Paris, where it had been brought; and where Infidel commentators were never wanting to inform them that this remarkable stone proved the whole Bible to be a series of lies. A professor of the University of Breslau published a pamphlet, entitled _Invincible Proof that the Earth is at least ten times older than is taught by the Bible_. Scores of such publications followed, and for forty years Infidel newspapers, magazines, and reviews kept trumpeting this great refutation of the Bible. From these it descended to the vulgar, with additions and improvements; and it is now frequently alleged as proving that "ten thousand years before Adam was born, the priests of Egypt were carving astronomy on the pyramids." There is scarcely one of my French or German readers who has not heard of it.

It did not shake the Skeptic's credulity in the least that no two of the savans were agreed, by some thousands of years, how old it was--that they could not tell what the Egyptian system of astronomy was--_and that none of them could read the hieroglyphics which explained it_. Whatever might be doubtful, of one thing they were all perfectly sure, that it was far older than the creation. But in 1832 the curious Egyptian astronomy was studied, and it appeared that the sun and moon were so placed on the Zodiac to mark the beginning of the year there; and the dividing line fenced off one half of the sky under the care of the sun, while the other was placed under the moon's patronage. Then it was discovered that the positions of the stars were represented by the pictures of the gods whose names they bore--Jupiter, Saturn, etc.--and by calculating the places of these pictures back, it was found that this Zodiac represented their places in the year of our Lord 37; the year of the birth of Nero, a great temple-builder and repairer. Finally, Champollion learned to read the hieroglyphics, and the names, surnames, and titles of the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and Domitian were found on the temple of Denderah; and on the portico of the temple of Esneh, which had been declared to be a few thousand years older than that of Denderah, were found the names of Claudius and Antoninus Pius; while the whole workmanship and style of building have satisfied all antiquarians that these buildings were erected during the declining days of art in the Roman Empire. The Roman title, _autocrat_, engraved on the Zodiac itself, attests its antiquity to be not quite two thousand, instead of seventeen thousand years.

But, not satisfied with merely demolishing the batteries of Infidelity, astronomy has been employed to ascertain the dates of numbers of events recorded on Egyptian monuments to have happened to one or other of the Pharaohs, "beloved of Ammon, and brother of the sun," when such a star was in such a position. Mr. Poole has spent years in gathering such inscriptions, and in calculating the dates thus furnished. The astronomer royal, at Greenwich, Mr. Airy, has reviewed the calculations, and finds them correct. Wilkinson, the great Egyptologist, agrees with their conclusions. And the result is, that _the astronomical chronology of the Egyptian monuments sustains the Bible chronology_.[220] Geology comes forward to confirm the testimony of her elder sister, and assures us, that the alleged vast antiquity of the Egyptian monuments is impossible, as it is not more than 5,000 years since the soil of Egypt first appeared above water, as a muddy morass.[221] The learned Adrian Balbo thus sums up the whole question: "No monument, either astronomical or historical, has yet been able to prove the books of Moses false; _but with them, on the contrary, agree, in the most remarkable manner, the results obtained by the most learned philologists and the profoundest geometricians_."[222]

2. To the second objection--that astronomers have discovered stars whose light must have been millions of years traveling to this earth, and that consequently these stars must have existed millions of years ago, and therefore the Bible makes a false declaration when it says the universe was created only some six or seven thousand years ago--I reply by asking, _Where does the Bible say so?_

"What," says our objector, "is not that the good old orthodox doctrine of Christians and commentators? Do they not unanimously denounce geologists and astronomers as heretics, for asserting the vast antiquity of the earth?"

We shall see presently that no such unanimity of denunciation has ever existed, and that some of the most ancient and learned Christian commentators taught the antiquity of the earth, from the Bible, before geology was born. But that is not the question before us just now. We are not asking what the good old orthodox doctrine of Christians, or the unanimous opinion of commentators may have been; but what is the reading of the Bible--_What does this Book say?_--not, "What does somebody think?"

"Well," replies our objector, "does not the Bible say, in the first of Genesis, that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and Adam on the sixth; and are not chronologists agreed that that was not more than seven thousand years ago, at the very utmost?"

If the Bible had said that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and that the end of that period was only seven thousand years ago, it would by no means follow that the beginning of it was only a few hours before that; for every Bible reader knows, that the most common use of the word _day_, in Scripture, is to denote, not a period of twenty-four hours, but a period of time which may be of various lengths.[223] In this very narrative (Genesis ii. 5) it is used to denote the whole period of the six days' work: "In the day the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." Does it mean just twenty-four hours there? In the first of Genesis, its duration is defined to consist of "the evening and the morning." Before our Infidel chronologist finds out the Bible date of creation, he must be able to tell us _of what length was the evening which preceded the first morning_, and with it constituted the first day? God has of set purpose placed stumbling-blocks for scoffers at the entrance and the exit of the Bible, as a rebuke to pride and vain curiosity.[224]

The duration of the seventh day is also hidden from man. It is God's Sabbath, on which he entered when he ceased from the work of creation, a rest which still continues, and which he invites us to enter into (Hebrews iv. 1-5) as a preparation for the eternal rest. God's rest day has already lasted six thousand years, and no man can tell how much longer it may last. Perhaps his working days were each as long.

But if our objector had read the Bible attentively, he would have seen that it _does not say that God created the heavens and the earth in six days_. Before it begins to give any account of the six days' work, it tells us of a previous state of disorder; and going back beyond that again, it says: "_In the beginning_, God created the heavens and the earth." It is as self-evident that this _beginning_ was before the six days' work, as that the world must have existed before it could be adjusted to its present form. How long before, the Bible does not say, nor does the objector pretend to know. It may have been as many millions of years as he assigns to the stars, or twice as many, for anything he knows to the contrary. He must have overlooked the first two verses of the Bible, else he had never made this objection; which is simply a blunder, arising from incapacity to read a few verses of Scripture correctly.

But it is replied, "Does not the Bible say, in the fourth commandment, 'In six days the Lord made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is,'" etc.? True. But we are speaking just now of a very different work--the work of _creation_. If any one does not know the difference between _create_ and _make_, let him turn to his dictionary, and Webster will inform him that the primary literal meaning of _create_ is, "To produce; to bring into being from nothing; to cause to exist." The example he gives to illustrate his definition is this verse, "In the beginning God _created_ the heavens and the earth." But the primary meaning of _make_ is, "To compel; to constrain;" thence, "to form of materials;" and he illustrates the generic difference between these two words by a quotation from Dwight: "God not only _made_, but _created_; he not only made the work, but the materials." Both words are as good translations of the Hebrew originals, _bra_, and _oshe_, as can be given.

If any of my readers has not a dictionary he can satisfy himself thoroughly as to the different meanings of these two words, and of their equivalents in the original Hebrew, by looking at their use in his Bible. Thus, he will find _create_ applied to the creation of the heavens and the earth, in the beginning, when there could have been no pre-existent materials to make them from; unless we adopt the Atheistic absurdity, of the eternity of matter--that is to say, _that the paving stones made themselves_.[225] Then it is applied to the production of animal life--verse twenty-one--which is not a product or combination of any lifeless matter, but a direct and constant resistance to the chemical and mechanical laws which govern lifeless matter: "God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth."[226] Next it is applied to the production of the human race, as a species distinct from all other living creatures, and not derived from any of them. "God _created_ man in his own image."[227] It is in like manner applied to all God's subsequent bestowals of animal life and rational souls, which are directly bestowed by God, and are not in the power of any creature to give. "Thou sendest forth thy spirit: they are _created_." "Remember now thy _Creator_, in the days of thy youth."[228] In all these instances, the use of the word determines its literal meaning to be what Webster defines it: "To bring into being from nothing."

The metaphorical use of the word is equally expressive of its literal meaning, for it is applied to the production of new dispositions of mind and soul utterly opposite to those previously existing. "Create in me a clean heart;" which God thus explains: "A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh."[229] The Hebrew word _bra_ has as many derivative meanings as our English word _create_; as we speak of "creating a peer," "long abstinence creating uneasiness," etc.; but these no more change the primitive idea in the one case than in the other.

From this word _create_, the Bible very plainly distinguishes the words _make_ and _form_, using them as the complement of the former, in many passages which speak of both creation and making. Thus, man was both created and made. His life and soul are spoken of as a creation; his body as a formation from the dust; his deputed authority over the earth also implies a primal creation, and subsequent investiture; and so both terms are applied to it. So the words _make_ and _form_ are applied to the production of the bodies of animals from pre-existing materials, while animal life is ever spoken of as a product of creative power. But, that we may see that these processes are distinct, and that the words which express them have distinctive meanings, _the Author of the Bible takes care to use them both_ in reference to this very work, in such a way that we can not fail to perceive he intends some distinction, unless we suppose that he fills the Bible with useless tautologies. For instance, "On the seventh day, God rested from all his work, which God _created_ and _made_." "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth, when they were _created_; in the day the Lord God _made_ the earth and the heavens." "But now thus saith the Lord that _created_ thee, Jacob, and he that _formed_ thee, O Israel." "For thus saith the Lord that _created_ the heavens, God himself, that _formed_ the earth, and _made_ it; he hath established it; he _created_ it not in confusion; he _formed_ it to be inhabited."[230] In all these passages _creation_ is clearly distinguished from _formation_ and _making_, if the Bible is not a mass of senseless repetitions. If _create_, and _make_, and _form_, have all the same meaning, why use them all in the same verse? These, and many similar passages, show that the Bible teaches the work of _creation_--calling things into being--to be previous to and distinct from the work of _making_--forming of materials already created.

Between these two widely different processes--of the original creation of the universe, and the subsequent preparation of the habitable earth, by the six days' work--two intervening periods are indicated by Scripture, both of indefinite length. The first of these is that which intervened between the original creation and the period of disorder indicated in the second verse. The second is that disordered period during which the earth continued without form and void.

That original chaos which some would find in the second verse, never had any existence, save in the brains of Atheistic philosophers. It is purely absurd. God never created a chaos. Man never saw it. The crystals of the smallest grain of sand, the sporules of the humblest fungus on the rotten tree, the animalculæ in the filthiest pool of mud, are as orderly in their arrangements, as perfect after their kind, and as wisely adapted to their station, as the angels before the throne of God. And as man never saw, so he has no language to describe, a state of original disorder; for every word he can use implies a previous state of regularity; as disorder tells of order dissolved; confusion of previous forms melted together. So the poets who have tried to describe a chaos have been obliged to represent it as the wreck of a former state.

Both the Bible language and the Bible narrative correspond to the philosophy and philology of the case; for, by the use of the substantive verb, in the past tense, implying progressive being, according to the usual force of the word in Hebrew, we are told literally, "the earth _became_ without form and void." God did not create it so, but after it was created, and by a series of revolutions not recorded, it became disordered and empty. The Holy Spirit takes care to explain this verse, by quoting it in Jeremiah iv. 23, as the appropriate symbolical description of the state of a previously existing and regularly constituted body politic, reduced to confusion by the calamities of war. Again, he explains both the terms used in it in Isaiah xxxiv. 11, by using them to describe, not the rude and undigested mass of the heathen poet, but the wilderness condition of a ravaged country, and the desolate ruins of once beautiful and populous cities: "He will stretch out upon it the line of _confusion_, and the stones of _emptiness_." In both these cases the previous existence of an orderly and populous state is implied. And finally, we are expressly assured, that the state of disorder mentioned in the second verse of Genesis i., was not the original condition of the earth--Isaiah xlv. 18--where the very same word is used as in Genesis i. 2, "He created it not, _teu_, _disordered_, in _confusion_." The period of the earth's previous existence in an orderly state, or that occupied by the revolutions and catastrophes which disordered its surface, is not recorded in Scripture.

The second period is that of disorder, which must have been of some duration, more or less, and is plainly implied to have been of considerable length, in the declaration that "the Spirit of the Lord moved"--literally, _was brooding_ (a figure taken from the incubation of fowls)--"upon the face of the waters." But no portion of Scripture gives any intimation of the length of this period.

If, then, astronomers and geologists assert that the earth was millions, or hundreds of millions of years in process of preparation for its present state, by a long series of successive destructions and renovations, and gradual formations, _there is not one word in the Bible to contradict that opinion_; but, on the contrary, very many texts which fully and unequivocally imply its truth. But, as the knowledge of the exact age of the earth is by no means necessary to any man's present happiness, or the salvation of his soul, it is nowhere taught in the Bible. God has given us the stars to teach us astronomy, the earth to teach us geology, and the Bible to teach us religion, and neither contradicts the other.

This is no new interpretation evoked to meet the necessities of modern science. The Jewish Rabbins, and those of the early Christian Fathers who gave any attention to criticism, are perfectly explicit in recognizing these distinctions. The doctrine of the creation of the world only six or seven thousand years ago is a product of monkish ignorance of the original language of the Bible. But Clement of Alexandria, Chrysostom, and Gregory Nazianzen, after Justin Martyr, teach the existence of an indefinite period between the creation and the formation of all things. Basil and Origen account for the existence of light before the sun, by alleging that the sun existed, but that the chaotic atmosphere prevented his rays from being visible till the first day, and his light till the third.[231] Augustine, in his first homily, represents the first state of the earth, in Genesis i. 1, as bearing the same relation to its finished state, that the seed of a tree does to the trunk, branches, leaves, and fruit. Horsley, Edward King, Jennings, Baxter, and many others, who wrote during the last two centuries, but before the period of geological discovery, explained the second verse substantially as did Bishop Patrick, a hundred and fifty years ago. "How long all things continued in confusion, we are not told. _It might have been, for anything that is here revealed, a very great while._"[232]

Some persons, however, have supposed that the chaos of the second verse succeeded immediately to the creation of the first, and that the six days' work in like manner followed that instantaneously, or at least after a very brief interval, because the records of these cycles are connected by the word _and_, which, they think, precludes the idea of any lengthened periods or intervals. But the slightest reflection upon the meaning of the word will show that _and_ can not of itself be any _measure_ of time, its use being to indicate merely _sequence_ and _connection_. When used historically, it always implies an interval of time; for there can be no succession without an interval; but the length of that interval must be determined from the context, or some other source. A very cursory perusal of the Bible, either in English or Hebrew, will show that very often in its brief narratives, the interval indicated by _and_, and its Hebrew originals, is a very long time. The descent of Jacob and his children into Egypt is connected with the record of their deaths, in the very next verse, by this word _and_, which thus includes nearly the lifetime of a generation. That event, again, is connected with a change of dynasty in Egypt, and the oppression and multiplication of the Israelites there, recorded in the next verse, by the same word, _vau_, _and_; while the period over which it reaches was over two hundred years.[233] So in the brief record of the family of Adam, after reciting the birth of Seth, the historian adds, in the next verse, "And to Seth also was born a son, and he called his name Enos;" while the interval thus indicated by the word _and_ was a hundred and five years. The command to build the ark, recorded in the last verse of the sixth chapter of Genesis, is connected with the command to enter into it, in the first verse of the seventh chapter, by this same word _and_, although we know, from the nature of the case, that the interval required for the construction of such a huge vessel must have been considerable; and from the third verse of the sixth chapter, we learn that it was a hundred and twenty years. So the births and deaths of the antediluvians are connected by this same word _and_, throughout the fifth chapter of Genesis; while the interval, as we see from the narrative, was often eight or nine hundred years. The descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ, to qualify him for judging the world, is connected with the actual discharge of that office, in the destruction of Antichrist by the breath of his mouth, by this word _and_,[234] although the interval has been over eighteen hundred years. If in the records of the generations of mortal men, the word _and_ is customarily employed as a connecting link in the narrations of events separated by an interval of hundreds of years, it is quite consistent with the strictest propriety of language to employ it, with an enlargement proportioned to the duration of the subject of discourse, to connect intervals of millions, in the narrative of the generations of the heavens and the earth.

The Bible uniformly attributes the most remote antiquity to the work of creation. So far from supposing man to be even approximately coeval with it, the emphatic reproof of human presumption is couched in the remarkable words, "Where wast thou, when I laid the foundations of the earth?" In majestic contrast with the frail human race, Moses glances at the primeval monuments of God's antiquity, as though by them he could form some faint conceptions even of eternity, and sings, "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the universe, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God."[235]

The very word here used, _the beginning_, is in itself an emphatic refutation of the notion that the work of creation is only some six or seven thousand years old. Geologists have been unable to invent a better, and have borrowed from the Bible this very form of speech, to designate those strata beyond which human knowledge can not penetrate--_the primary formations_. But, with far greater propriety, the Holy Spirit uses this word with regard to ages, compared with which the utmost range of the astronomer's or geologist's reasonings is but as the tale of yesterday. For this word, in Bible usage, marks the last promontory on the boundless ocean of eternity; the only positive word by which we can express the most remote period of past duration. It is not a date--a point of duration. It is a period--a vast cycle. It has but one boundary; that where creation rises from its abyss. Created eye has never seen the other shore. It is that vast period which the Bible assigns to the manifestations of the Word of God, "whose goings forth have been of old, from everlasting." Carrying our astonished gaze far back beyond the era of his creature, man, and ages before the "all things" that were made by Him, the Bible places this _beginning_ on the very shore of the eternity of God, when it declares, "_In the beginning_ was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."[236] Thus, both by the use of the imperfect tense, _was_, denoting continued existence, and by the connection of this _beginning_ with the eternity of the Word, does the Bible teach us to dismiss from our thoughts all narrow views of the period of duration employed in manifesting the glory of the self-existent Eternal One, and to raise our conceptions to the highest possible pitch, and then to feel, that far beyond the grasp of human calculation lies that _beginning_ which includes the years of the right hand of the Most High, and is even used as one of the names of the Eternal: "I AM THE BEGINNING _and the Ending, saith the Lord, who is, and who was, and who is to come_--THE ALMIGHTY."[237]

In another Bible exhibition of the eternity of the Son of God, we are conducted from that _beginning_, downward, stage by stage, from those periods of remote antiquity prior to the formation of water, the upheaval of the mountains, the alluvial deposits, the subsidence of the existing sea basins, and the adornment of the habitable parts of the earth, to that comparatively recent event, the existence of the sons of men. Our ideas of the eternity of the love of Christ are thus enhanced, by the vastness of the ages which stretch out between the human race and that beginning when He was, as it were, "The Lamb slain from before the foundations of the world."

"The Lord possessed me _in the beginning of his way_,
_Before his works of old_.
I was set up from everlasting,
_From the beginning, or ever the earth was_.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth;
When there were no fountains, abounding with water;
Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills, was I brought forth;
While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields,
Nor the highest part of the dust of the world
When he prepared the heavens, I was there;
When he described a circle upon the face of the deep;
When he established the clouds above;
When he strengthened the fountains of the deep;
When he gave to the sea his decree,
That the waters should not pass his commandment;
When he appointed the foundations of the earth:
Then was I by him, as one brought up with him;
And I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him:
Rejoicing in the habitable parts of his earth;
And my delights were with the sons of men."[238]

Let the geologist, then, penetrate as deeply as he can into the profundities of the foundations of the earth, and bring forth the monuments of their hoary antiquities: we will follow with the most unfaltering faith, and receive with joy these proofs of his eternal power and Godhead. Let the astronomer raise his telescope, and reflect on our astonished eyes the light which flashed from morning stars, on the day of this earth's first existence, or even the rays which began to travel from distant suns, millions of years ere the first morning dawned on our planet: we will place them as jewels in the crown of Him who is the bright and morning star. They shall shed a sacred luster over the pages of the Bible, and give new beauties of illustration to its majestic symbols. But never will geologist penetrate, much less exhaust, the profundity of its mysteries, nor astronomer attain, much less explore, the sublimity of that beginning revealed in its pages; for eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, either the antiquity, or the nature, or the duration of the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. Human science will never be able to reach the Bible era of creation. It is placed in an antiquity beyond the power of human calculation, in that sublime sentence with which it introduces mortals to the Eternal: "_In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth._"

3. The third objection we have named is equally unfounded. _The Bible nowhere teaches that the sky is a solid sphere, to which the stars are fixed, and which revolves with them around the earth._ I know that Infidels allege that the word _firmament_, in the first chapter of Genesis, conveys this meaning. It does not. Neither the English word, nor the Hebrew original, has any such meaning. As to the meaning of the English word, I adhere to the dictionary. Infidels must not be allowed to coin uncouth meanings for words, different from the known usage of the English tongue, for which Webster is undeniable authority. His definition of _firmament_ is, "The region of the air; the sky, or heavens. In Scripture, the word denotes an expanse--a wide extent; for such is the signification of the Hebrew word, coinciding with _regio_, _region_, and _reach_. The original, therefore, does not convey the sense of solidity, but of stretching--extension. The great arch or expanse over our heads, in which are placed the atmosphere and the clouds, and in which the stars _appear_ to be placed, and are _really_ seen." The word _firmament_, then, conveys no such meaning as the Infidel alleges, to any man who understands the English tongue.

No Hebrew speaking man or woman ever did, or ever could understand the original Hebrew word _reqo_ in any other sense than that of _expanse_; for the verb from which it is formed means to extend, or spread out, as even the English reader may see, by a few examples of its use, in the following passages of Scripture; where the English words by which the verb _reqo_ is expressed, are marked in italics. "Then did I beat them small as the dust of the earth, and did stamp them as the mire of the street, and _did spread them abroad_." "The goldsmith _spreadeth it over_ with gold." "Thus saith the Lord: he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that _spread forth_ the earth." "I am the Lord, that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, and _spreadeth abroad_ the earth by myself." "To him that _stretcheth out_ the earth above the waters." "The censers of these sinners against their own souls, let them _make them broad_ plates, for a covering for the altar. _And they were made broad._" "Hast thou with him _spread out_ the sky;"[239] or, in Humboldt's elegant rendering, "the pure ether, _spread_ (during the scorching heat of the south wind) as a melted mirror over the parched desert."[240] We might refer to the opinions of lexicographers, all unanimous in ascribing the same idea to the word; but the authorities given above are conclusive. The meaning, then, of the Hebrew word rendered firmament is so utterly removed from the notion of compactness, or solidity, or metallic or crystalline spheres, that it is derived from the very opposite; the fineness or tenuity produced by processes of expansion. Science has not been able to this day to invent a better word for the regions of space than the literal rendering of the original Hebrew word used by Moses--_the expanse_.

The inspired writers of the New Testament, though they found the world full of all the absurdities of the Greek philosophy, and their Greek translations of the Bible continually using the word _stereoma_, which expressed these notions, _never used it_ but once, and then not for the sky, but for the _steadfastness of faith_ in Christ. Their thus using it once shows that they were acquainted with the word, and its proper meaning, and that their disuse of it was intentional; while their disuse of it, and choice of another word to denote the heavens, proves decisively that they disapproved of the absurdity which it was understood to express. Now, whether you account for this fact by admitting their inspiration, or by alleging that they drew their language from the Hebrew original, and not from the Greek translation, it is in either case perfectly conclusive as to the scriptural meaning of the word. Indeed, it is marvelous how any man who is familiar with his Bible, and knows that the Scriptures usually describe the sky by metaphors conveying the very opposite ideas to those of solidity or permanence--as, "stretched out like a curtain," "spread abroad like a tent to dwell in," "folded up like a vesture," and the like--should allow himself to be imposed on by the impudent falsehood of Voltaire, that the Bible teaches us that the sky is a solid metallic or crystal hemisphere, supported by pillars.

Those beautiful figures of sacred poetry in which the universe is represented as the palace of the Great King, adorned with majestic "pillars," and "windows of heaven," whence he scatters his gifts among his expectant subjects in the courts below, have been grossly abused for the support of this miserable falsehood. We are assured, that so ignorant was Moses of the true nature of the atmosphere, and of the origin of rain, that he believed and taught that there was an ocean of fresh water on _the outside_ of this metal hemisphere, which covered the earth like a great sugar-kettle, bottom upward, and was supported on pillars; and at the bottom of the ocean were trap-doors, to let the rain through; which trap-doors in the metal firmament are to be understood, when the Bible speaks of the windows of heaven. Now, the bottom of an ocean is an odd place for windows, and a trap-door is rather a strange kind of watering-pot; and if Moses put the ocean of fresh water on the _outside_ of his metal hemisphere, he must have changed his notions of gravity materially from the time he planned the brazen hemisphere for the tabernacle, which he turned mouth upward, and put the water in the _inside_.

While such writers are quite clear about the metal trap-doors and the ocean, they have not yet fully fathomed the construction and arrangement of the pillars. Whether the Bible teaches that they are "pillars of salt," like Lot's wife, or of flesh and blood, like "James, Cephas, and John," or such "iron pillars and brazen walls" as Jeremiah was against the house of Israel--whether they consisted of "cloud and fire," like the pillar Moses describes in the next book as floating in the sky over the camp of Israel, or are "pillars of smoke," such as ascend out of the wilderness--whether they are those "pillars of the earth which tremble" when God shakes it, or "the pillars of heaven which are astonished at his reproof"--whether they are the pillars of the earth and its anarchical inhabitants, which Asaph bore up, or are composed of the same materials as Paul's "pillar and basis of the truth," or the pillars of victory which Christ erects "in the temple of God"[241]--they have not yet decided. Whether the Hebrews understood these pillars to be arranged on the outside of the metal hemisphere, and if so, to imagine any use for them there; or in the inside, and in that case whether they kept the sky from falling upon the earth, or only supported the earth from falling into the sky, these learned men are by no means agreed. Having trampled the pearl into fragments, their attempts to combine them into another shape are more amusing than successful; and it is hard to say which of the seven opinions ascribed to the Bible by Infidel commentators is least probable. That opinion, however, will, doubtless, after more vigorous and protracted rooting, be discovered and greedily swallowed amid grunts of satisfaction; an appropriate reward of such laborious stupidity.

The absurdities of the Greek philosophers were not drawn from the Bible. Had the Greeks read the Bible more, they would have preserved the common sense God gave them a great deal longer, and would not, while professing themselves to be wise, have become such fools as to adore blocks and stones, and dream of metal firmaments. But they turned away their ears from the truth, and were turned unto such fables as Infidels falsely ascribe to the Bible. A thousand years before the cycles and epicycles of the Ptolemaic astronomy were invented, and before learned Greeks had learned to talk nonsense about crystal spheres, and trap-doors in the bottom of celestial oceans, the writers of the Bible were recording those conversations of pious philosophers concerning stars, and clouds, and rain, from which Galileo derived the first hints of the causes of barometrical phenomena. The origin of rain, its proportion to the amount of evaporation, and the mode of its distribution by condensation, could not be propounded by Humboldt himself with more brevity and perspicuity than they are expressed by the Idumean philosopher: "He maketh small the drops of water; they pour down rain according to the vapor thereof, which the clouds do drop and distill upon man abundantly. Also, can any understand the spreadings of the clouds, or the noise of his tabernacles?"[242] The cause of this rarefaction of _cold water_ is as much a mystery to the British Association as it was to Elihu; and even were all the mysteries of the electrical tension of vapors disclosed, "the balancings of the clouds" would only be more clearly discovered to be, as the Bible declares, "the wonderful works of Him who is perfect in wisdom." But the gravity of the atmosphere, the comparative density of floating water, and its increased density by discharges of electricity, were as well known to Job and his friends as they are to the wisest of our modern philosophers. "He looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven, _to make weight to air, and regulate waters by measure, in his making a law for the rain, and a path for the lightning of thunder_."[243] Three thousand years before the theory of the trade winds was demonstrated, or before Maury had discovered the rotation and revolutions of the wind-currents, it was written in the Bible, "The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about to the north. _And the wind returneth again, according to his circuits._"[244]

Thousands of years before Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus were born, Isaiah was writing about the "orbit of the earth," and its insignificance in the eyes of the Creator of the host of heaven.[245] Job was conversing with his friends on the inclination of its axis, and its equilibrium in space: "He spreadeth out the north over the empty space, and hangeth the earth upon nothing."[246]

So far from entertaining the least idea of the waters of the atmosphere being contained either on the outside or the inside of a metal or solid hemisphere, the writers of the Bible never once use, even figuratively, any expression conveying it. On the contrary, the well-known scriptural figures for the fountains of the rain, are the soft, elastic, leathern waterskins of the east, "the bottles of the clouds," or the wide, flowing shawl or upper garment wherein the people of the east are accustomed to tie up loose, scattering substances.[247] "He bindeth up the waters in his thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under them." "Who hath bound the waters in a garment;" "As a vesture thou shalt change them;" or the loose, flowing curtains of a royal pavilion; or the extended covering of a tent: "his pavilion around him were dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies;" "the spreadings of the clouds, and the noise of his tabernacle;" "he spread a cloud for a covering."[248] Instead of the notion of a single ocean, the "number of the clouds" is proverbial in the Scriptures[249] for a multitude; and in direct opposition to the permanence of a vast metallic arch, the chosen emblems of instability and transitoriness, and of the utmost rapidity of motion, suitable even for the chariot of Jehovah, are selected from the heavens.[250]

In short, there is not the slightest vestige of any foundation in Scripture for the notions long afterward introduced by the Greek philosophers. Yet Christians, who have read these passages of Scripture over and over again, allow themselves to give heed to Infidels, who have not, asserting, without the shadow of proof, that Moses taught absurdities which were not invented for a thousand years after his death. The Bible gives hints of many profound scientific truths; it teaches no absurdities; _and, instead of countenancing the notion that the sky is a solid metal hemisphere, it teaches, both literally and figuratively, directly the contrary_.

4. We come now to the fourth objection, _that the Bible represents God as creating light before the sun_, which is supposed to be an absurdity, _and as creating the sun, moon, and stars only two days before Adam_. This is the only astronomical objection to the Bible account of creation which has any foundation of Scripture statement to rest upon; but we shall soon see that here, also, Infidels have not done themselves the justice of reading the Bible with attention.