But-and here we come to the most dangerous astronomical objection, and one on which Strauss has not laid sufficient stress in the passage we have quoted -is it not absurd that Moses should have described the sun and moon as being created, or rather as giving light on the earth, on the fourth day only, while the light, which, as every child knows, is caused by the sun, is supposed to have existed on the first day?

Now, first of all, the difficulty here is not that Moses appears to be ignorant of what every child knows, but that he certainly does know it, he says in ver. 17 it,—he as plainly as possible that the sun and moon were intended by God to give light and to shine upon the earth,—and that in spite of knowing this he still says that it was light before the sun existed. By this Moses teaches-if we suppose that the six days mean six successive periods, whether of twenty-four hours or of uncertain duration-that, since the fourth day, the light on the earth has been connected with the heavenly bodies; but that there was light upon the earth before the time when the earth was thus connected with the heavenly bodies, for the words: "God said, Let there be light; and there was light," only signify that it became light in consequence of God's command.

Is it then possible that the light, which, as Moses says himself in ver. 17, is now as it were bound to the sun, can have existed formerly on the earth independently of the sun? I answer with the counter question, What is light? Science has not yet answered this universally known phenomenon is

question; this

1 Kurtz, p. 302.

most ignorant.'

rather the one of whose cause and nature she is Formerly, as we know, light was supposed to be a fine matter proceeding from a shining body. Instead of this view, the so-called theory of emanation, the theory of vibration or undulation, was adopted later, according to which light proceeds from very slight vibrations of the smallest portions of the shining bodies; these vibrations or oscillations are transmitted, as is sound through the air, through an extremely fine matter which exists everywhere, and which is called ether. Further, modern inquirers lean to the opinion that light, and the other so-called imponderables, warmth, magnetism, electricity, are related to one another, and intimately connected.2

However this may be, Genesis does not interfere with these theories. It only says that there was light at God's command. It does not say how God caused this light, and although the earth is now regularly illumined by the sun, yet natural science, whose source must necessarily and exclusively be the observation of present phenomena, will never be able to prove that before the present relation between the sun and the earth was fixed, that is, before the fourth day of the Hexameron, God could not have produced light by other means.

1 Ulrici, Gott und die Natur, p. 92. Eisenlohr simply observes: "Light is the cause of brightness," which only tells us what is the effect of light, but not what light itself is. He adds: "We know nothing certain about its real nature, although we already know many of its qualities. For this reason all attempts to explain the phenomena of light are founded on hypotheses." Cf. Pfaff, Schöpfungsgeschichte, 2d ed. p. 746. 2 Ulrici, pp. 110, 123, 137.

3 Delitzsch says, see Genesis, 3rd ed. p. 97 (cf. 4th ed. p. 81): "It is

Strauss objects that, according to Genesis, the alternation of day and night took place before the creation of the sun, or, more correctly, before the present relation of the earth to the sun was established; but this rests on a pure misconception. God created the sun and moon on the fourth day only, to rule the day and the night, and to be signs of the days and years; that is, translated into our plainer language, on the fourth day began the regular apparent rising and setting of the sun, or the regular rotation of the earth round its own axis and round the sun, by which the days and years are measured. Genesis does not know of this before the fourth day. The first three days of creation are either to be understood figuratively with the three others as long periods of time, or at least all that they have in common with our days is, that they are caused by one alternation of light and darkness. And when we find in the account of the first day, in vers. 4, 5, the words: "And God divided the light from the dark

hardly necessary to remind those who take offence at the existence of light before the creation of the sun, the source of light, that the sunlight does not come from the sun itself, but from a shell which surrounds the body of the sun, and that from the occasional tearing of this shell we sometimes obtain a glimpse of the darkness underneath." Cf. Mädler in the Ges. Naturw. iii. 563: “A shining gaseous envelope is spread round the sun, which is itself a dark body, and this has been called the photosphere (the surrounding light), in contradistinction to our atmosphere." This seemed to be a fact which would justify the expressions of the French savants detailed on p. 2. The theory (which I have adopted in the two previous editions) that the sun's body is dark in itself, and that a photosphere surrounding it is the source of light on the earth, is now contested on the ground of the investigations conducted by means of the spectrum analysis; and it is supposed that the sun consists of a solid or fluid nucleus, which is in a state of white heat, and of a gaseous and glowing envelope, the photosphere, which has a rather lower temperature than the nucleus. See Secchi, p. 396. Pfaff, Schöpfungsgeschichte, 2d ed. pp. 122-127. Cornelius, Entstehung der Welt, p. 23.

ness; and God called the light day, and the darkness called He night," they only mean, as I have shown in the exegetical discussions on these verses, that after God had created light He established the relation of light and darkness; and this relation established by God is the regular sequence and alternation of light and darkness, which we call day and night. Again, Genesis does not say that this alternation of day and night immediately took place regularly once every twenty-four hours; it rather seems to wish to point out that this only began with the fourth so-called day of creation.

The difficulty that the plants were brought forth on the third day, that is, before the sun gave light and warmth on the earth, is not insuperable. No doubt the light and warmth of the sun are now necessary in order that the plants should flourish. But if before the fourth day light and warmth were not, for the earth, connected with the sun in the same way as at present, vegetation was not dependent on the sun in the same way as at present. Further, the establish

ment of the sun's relation to the earth follows, in the Hexameron, immediately on the bringing forth of the plants, so that we need only assume that their first origin took place without the light and warmth of the sun, and not that they existed a long time without them.

In this way the supporters of the literal and concordistic theories of the six days may combine the results of astronomical inquiry with the Biblical narrative. I must postpone a further explanation to another lecture. But I may just point out here that the objec1 Pfaff, Schöpfungsgeschichte, 2d ed. p. 747.

tion which is based on the separation of light from the sun in the Mosaic record entirely falls to the ground if, according to the theory discussed fourthly in my last lecture, the six days are considered not as six successive chronological periods, but as six chief moments of the creative activity of God. In this case the establishment of the regular alternation of day and night— according to the Biblical expression, the separation of light from darkness-would be represented as one moment of the divine creative activity, the establishment of the earth's present relation to the sun and the other heavenly bodies as a second; and no one would be justified in concluding from the fact that these two moments are distinguished, and that the one is represented as the first and the other as the fourth among the six, that these two divine works took place chronologically one after the other, and were separated from each other by several other intermediate divine works. On the contrary, it is according to this theory possible that events which Genesis logically distinguishes were chronologically simultaneous; therefore the fact that the alternation of day and night and other phenomena are placed by Genesis in the first half of its narrative, and the connection of the earth with the sun and star system on which those phenomena depend is placed in the second half, need not hinder astronomers and geologists from investigating these things by their own methods, for the account in Genesis is unchronological.

The explanations I have given to-day will, I think, warrant my drawing the following conclusion. There can only, at any rate, be a question of an irreconcilable contradiction between the assured results of astrono