most felicitously the meaning and use of the word of this account of the creation, bârâ. Thus did God cut, divide, arrange, and organize, and so create.

This will suffice to illustrate the radical meaning of the words rendered evening and morning. Thus viewed, as two protracted and antithetic stages of the earth in each of those creative periods, the use of the cardinal adjective, "one," and then of the ordinals, "second," "third," etc., in the six successive formulas, is very significant. The suggestion of Rosenmüller in his Scholia on the passage, "quemadmodum Latini et Græci quoque numeralia Cardin. pro Ordinalibus ponere solent," does not appear to exhaust the design of Moses in this peculiarity of expression. It seems more an intentional than idiomatic use of a word, and as if he would state, that the two opposite stages of the earth, of which we have spoken, constituted "one" day, period, age, or step in its wonderful advance towards its present state; then there was like it a "second" period, then a "third," and so on, each having equally contrasted characteristics in its two parts.

One question remains. Will the Scriptures elsewhere sanction this use of the word day as an indefinite period? It is sufficient to reply that the ordinary use of the word in the Old Testament is to designate time, without regard to its duration, as, the day of the Lord, the day of vengeance, of darkness, of judgment, and of salvation. Where it designates a work, it embraces moments, months, years, centuries, as the work done may require; and a solar day is no part of the idea in such case. Examples are abundant, though hardly necessary. "Wo worth the day" of Egypt's protracted period of overthrow: Ezek. 30: 2. "The day of temptation in the wilderness," which was "forty years long;" Ps. 95. "Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem," a period embracing much of the time of the final campaign of Nebuchadnezzar against Jerusalem; Ps. 137. "In his days shall the righteous flourish," a period as indefinite in its termination as the reign of the Messiah; Ps. 72: 7. So Micah 4 : 1, to the same effect, "In the last days it shall come to pass that the mountain of the Lord's house," etc. And of the existence

of this glorious King the same prophet says, "whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting," literally, and in the marginal reading, "from the days of eternity;" 5: 2. Here the thought of solar time, or even of the computation of the cycles of centuries implied, is wholly irrelevant to the import of day. But we need not multiply instances. To employ the word day to express an indefinite period of time is common usage in the Hebrew Scriptures. So are we confirmed in our conclusion, that the six days of creation were six periods of time of unknown length to us.

This interpretation of one of the six stages of the creation, with the general principles stated and intimated, indicates, as it seems to us, the main scope of the Mosaic account. It does not profess to give or even suggest a solution of all the difficulties that this difficult portion of the Word of God contains; but the views unfolded cover the essentials that are in controversy. To both parties in question, Moses and the Geologist, it gives the amplest verge. It vindicates to the inspired historian an understanding of what he wrote, and a knowledge of his subject so far as he attempted to convey information. Then, following his language as importing what it meant when he used it, we obtain, by legitimate exegesis, his views. So we close that dangerous inlet into inspired historical documents, whereby they are made to mean what they can be made to contain. By this theory of interpretation exegesis is practically inverted, and hermeneutics becomes a process of importation, and not of exportation alone. Thus those words are made free ports of entry and exit for commerce in truths inspired and uninspired, theological and scientific. To guard the sacred wealth of truth within, to keep those ideas of divine manufacture from being mingled and corrupted with the products of human laborers, we would impose an embargo on all imports. While Moses is thus allowed to speak for himself and explain his own meaning, he "gives the geologist full scope for his largest speculations concerning the age of the world," and "time enough for all the changes of mineral constitution and organic life which its strata reveal." While he

claims that all the power shown in the work of creation is of God, in its inception, progress, and conclusion, he allows, by the terms he employs, such action of natural laws as must satisfy any theistic student in the physical sciences. So are revelation and science kept distinct, the one reverenced, the other respected, and Moses and the Geologist harmonized.

ART. V. THE SPIRITUAL IN MAN, THE PROPER OBJECT OF PULPIT ADDRESS.

By Rev. N. G. CLARK, Professor in the University of Vermont.

It is to be feared that the Scriptural idea of the office of the Christian preacher, and of the spiritual nature of man as the proper object of his address, is obscured by the materialism of the age, or lost amid the manifold forms of culture and attainment expected of him. This result cannot be charged upon any lack of definite statement on the part of the sacred writers; least of all upon him who has made this a prominent topic in one of his letters. According to the Apostle of the Gentiles, the Christian preacher is a man who has received, not the spirit of the world to understand its science and learning, to follow its principles and to engage in its service, but he has received the Spirit which is of God, that he may know the things that are freely given us of God; the infinite riches of Christ, the mysteries of redeeming love, and the power of an endless life. He is, in short, a spiritual man, born again of the Spirit of God, and thus with spiritual discernment, that he may know the things of God. And these things of God, these supernatural truths centering in Christ and his cross, which have been revealed to him in the conscious experiences of his believing heart, in sympathy with the Word and Spirit of God; these truths will make up the sum of his preaching. The method is not that of science, or philosophy, or of the popular lecture; it is not, as in the sight of men, to instruct the intellect or to please the taste or gratify the passions; but as the subject-matter was above human

wisdom, so the method must not be in accordance with the maxims of human wisdom, but in words and forms which the Holy Ghost teacheth; in thoughts that breathe of near communion with God, and words that burn as coals of heavenly fire; and all with the awfulness and serious purpose that belong to the immediate presence of the King of kings.

And as neither the character of the preacher, his subjectmatter, nor his method lie within the range, nor are in any sense the result of mere human wisdom, so the object of address is not the sensuous or intellectual part of our being, but our distinctively spiritual nature. The preacher, therefore, does not address the things of God to the sensuous appetites, the hopes or fears simply, not to our love of the beautiful, not to our faculties of knowledge, whether dwarfed and stunted and stifled by ignorance and superstition, or developed by art and science and philosophy, as in the Platos and Miltons, the Raphaels and the Humboldts of the race, till men stand amazed at the possible powers and capabilities of the human soul; but to the distinctively spiritual in man, to the germ of eternities that lies shrouded in its vestment of clay, to that whereby man the finite is linked to the infinite and eternal, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. It is because of this spiritual nature in man, for the sake of its deliverance from sin, and its restoration, that the whole system of grace has been begun and carried forward; the character of the preacher depends on it; and the whole subject-matter and method of preaching are determined by reference to it.

We have, then, for our theme, The spirit and nature of man, the distinctive object of address on the part of the preacher. He is to apply the things of God revealed to him by the Holy Ghost to the heart and conscience, to the distinctively spiritual nature in man, to convince of sin, to confirm in faith and righteousness.

I. Let us first look at the character and essential quality of man's spiritual nature, and then at some of the results that follow.

Man is not mechanical, but vital; not material, but spirit

ual; not animal, but living soul; made in the image and likeness of God. His spirit or reason is from God directly. He made him of the dust of the ground, but breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. "To have reason and to know God are one, just as not to know God and to be an animal are one." The reasonless brute is ignorant of moral truths and of God their sum and centre; man cannot be. He has and must have an idea of God, and can deny him only as he denies his own freedom and his own spirit; root out such knowledge can he never. Every moral duty in its last analysis is duty to God; that which binds in the conscience is his will; obedience to moral law is at bottom obedience to God, from whom, by whom, for whom we are. All moral life goes forth from Him, at every point of its development depends on Him, and in all its manifestations may be traced back to Him, as to its stedfast, central

ource.

Fallen into sin, blinded by it, and in bondage to it, the hu man spirit still attests its true destiny. It still witnesses to what man ought to be, often even by the sternest reproaches for what he actually is. It is well known that no nation of men, however sunk in ignorance, superstition, or vice, has yet been found that has not had some conception of a divine power over them to which they are subject; it may be of one God, or ten, or fifty, but always of some power capable of doing them good or evil; so firmly is the idea of a Divine Being inlaid in the very structure of the soul, we might almost say, one with it. Men may change the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things, and they have often done so; yet some god they do have and must have, before whose wrath to tremble for their sins. In a storm at sea the hardened, blaspheming infidel will tremble in view of a coming judgment worse than the creaking, staggering ship, that alone keeps him from a watery grave and the doom he fears. He too, in such an hour, must bear witness to the no

* Jacobi.