Chapter XIV: Section 3: The Work of the Third Day

1. A globe of vapor in contact with the cold voids of space must condense or liquify. The beginning would be upon the outside; constantly growing heavier according to bulk, it would work its way nearer to the sun. Having become a center of attraction, and coming back to the now closed-up ring, it would claim a portion of the same as an atmosphere. Increasing now its centrifugal force, it gained an orbit inside the ring, still drawing nearer the sun. Job’s attention had been called to the earth’s appearance in this “gathering” process. “When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it.” Moses began the third day as the globe began to condense. “And he gathered the waters together into one place; and he called the gathering together of the waters, seas.” While the globe was in a condition of vapor, the waters were firmament waters; and the word firmament answered very well for both globe and visible expanse. Hence, “God made a firmament” by figure; covered both. But as soon as gathered, there was a distinction. Now only the expanse, holding yet a cloudy vapor, could be called firmament, or heaven; and the gathered waters he called seas.

2. Science claims that the present pointing of the pole of the Earth, and its inclination to the ecliptic, could not produce such a warm climate as the Earth once enjoyed. This fact, in connection with the Earth covered with ice, at a remote period of the past, confounds the mere seeker of cause in nature’s laws. The ancient pole-pointing is sung by Job. According to his description of light and darkness, one pole of the Earth must have pointed directly to the sun throughout the year. And as that warm climate was uniform, it must have turned on its axis not only daily, but as does our moon in reference to Earth, once over in its entire orbicular journey. Its enlightened hemisphere was never in darkness; its dark hemisphere was never in light. According to Job’s statement, both light and darkness were stationary. “Where is the place where light dwelleth? And as for darkness, where is the place thereof, that thou shouldst take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldst know the paths to the house thereof?” All our deposits then hung as gases in the air; one-half of which science proclaims to have been oxygen. In the language of Solomon, the mountains before rising must have first “settled” in the sea. The psalmist saw that God spread out the earth upon the waters, that he founded it upon the sea, and established it upon the floods. Job saw that the very corner foundation stone was made to sink. Moses rushes the deposits all into the evening of the third day, to the appearance of dry land. “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven (the new firmament) be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.” Here are eighty miles deposit made in the sea, all of which came out of the air and water. During this time Moses says, “The Lord God had not caused it to rain on the Earth.” “The plant and the herb of the field had not yet been made.”

3. With such a pole-pointing, only one end of the Earth could receive deposits, and the sun could take hold only of that end. Job alludes to a convulsion in which “The proud were shaken out of it, that the sun might take hold of both ends of it.” 38:13. Before this change, “The waters were covered as with a stone, and the deep was frozen.” Deposits are now made from the air at the rate of four hundredths of an inch in a year. At this rate it would take, possibly, eighty million of years to reach the surface. Our globe was never a rain-less planet.

4. The allusion to its not having rained on the earth, is an allusion that the deposits were yet beneath the waters, until the “dry land appeared.” Following the changes of organic life up to the time of the deposits of the “Old Red Sand Stone,” where God spread out the waving forests of the Devonian plain, he had found the fit contrast to the inorganic deposit of the evening.

5. The climate of the first part of the third clay was chilled to the temperature of melting ice. The latter part was torrid. The equator marked the bound between perpetual sunlight and perpetual darkness. Along this equator a line of open sea would beat against a line of perpetual ice. The spray and vapor from the open sea, going south, would be rapidly converted into snow and ice, increasing the thickness and gravity of the ice. At length, breaking by its own weight, it would drift into the open sea. During the first part of this day, there was nothing to prevent this drift-ice finding its way to the very north pole. The sea, therefore, would be at a temperature of 32 degrees Fahr.

6. After the deposits neared the top, and before dry land appeared, the larger bergs were kept back, and tropical waters resulted, followed by the same climate upon the dry land, as it appeared. At the close of this day there existed many kinds of water animals, but they did not form a suitable contrast with what Moses had to start with, as evening. These were inorganic deposits from the air. The organic deposits of the Devonian forests are the morning. “And the earth brought forth the tree, yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself (cryptogams) after his kind.” “And the evening and the morning were the third day.”