temporary during the morning of their being with many of the extinct ones during the evening of theirs. We know further, that not a few of the shells which now live on our coasts, and several of even the wild animals which continue to survive amid our tracts of hill and forest, were in existence many ages ere the human age began. Instead of dating their beginning only a single natural day, or at most two natural days, in advance of man, they must have preceded him by many thousands of years. In fine, in consequence of that comparatively recent extension of geologic fact in the direction of the later systems and formations, through which we are led to know that the present creation was not cut off abruptly from the preceding one, but that, on the contrary, it dovetailed into it at a thousand different points, we are led also to know that any scheme of reconciliation which would separate between the recent and the extinct existences by a chaotic gulf of death and darkness, is a scheme which no longer meets the necessities of the case."1 "From the present time up to the times representing the Eocene formations of the tertiary division, day has succeeded day, and season has followed season, and no chasm or hiatus-no age of general chaos, darkness, and death-has occurred to break the time of succession or check the course of life. All the evidence runs counter to the supposition, that immediately before the appearance of man upon earth there existed a chaotic period which separated the previous from the present creation.” 2 If this is true, then the conclusion which H. Miller draws from it is inevitable. 2 Ibid. p. 129.

1 Testimony of the Rocks, p. 121.

"We are led also to know that any scheme of reconciliation which would separate between the recent and the extinct existences by a chaotic gulf of death and darkness, is a scheme which no longer meets the necessities of the case. Though perfectly adequate forty years ago, it has been greatly outgrown by the progress of geological discovery, and is, as I have said, adequate no longer; and it becomes a not unimportant matter to determine the special scheme that would bring into completest harmony the course of creation as now ascertained by the geologist, and that brief but sublime narrative of its progress which forms a meet introduction in Holy Writ to the history of the human family."

1

This question must no doubt be left to natural science to decide; and if the decision is unfavourable to the theory of restitution, the latter, although exegetically admissible, must be given up as completely as the theory which was discussed in my last lecture. I intend to return to it later, for to-day let me just say a few words about a curious modification of the theory of restitution which was brought forward by the learned presbyterian divine John Pye Smith in an otherwise in many ways very instructive book, and which has been adopted in England by many writers." 1 Testimony of the Rocks, p. 122. Also Walworth in Brownson's Quarterly Review, 1863, p. 207.

2 The Relation, etc., p. 250. Also Ed. Hitchcock and others; see Zöckler, Gesch. der Beziehungen, ii. S. 32. Cf. on the other side, H. Miller, Testimony, pp. 119, 130, and Brownson's Quarterly Review, 1863, p. 208. I may mention here another extraordinary modification of the theory of restitution, which is brought forward in a book by the Abbé J. Fabre d'Envieu, Les Origines de la Terre. It is as follows: The earlier periods of the earth's history occur before the events spoken of in the first verse of the Hexameron; for this verse does not speak

Smith assumes, as do all supporters of the ordinary theory of restitution, that the creation described in Genesis took place about 6000 years ago; that it was completed in six real days, and that it was separated from a previously existing creation by a period of chaos. But whereas, according to the ordinary theory of restitution, both the creation spoken of in the Hexameron and the preceding period of chaos extended over the whole earth, according to Smith they were both local, and only extended over a few provinces in Central Asia; in which while light and life continued in other lands, for a time death and darkness reigned, and the waves of a chaotic sea covered everything, until at God's command the light broke through again, and dry land appeared. After this, in the space of a week, certain plants and animals were created, and last of all man appeared.

of the beginning of God's creative activity, but of the beginning of the earth in its present form. The expression "In the beginning" does not refer to the actual beginning of time, but to the beginning of the period which Moses intends to describe; the Hebrew word “ bara does not mean "to create," but "to form." "The sun had become extinct" before the beginning of the six days; it had been the source of light on the earth during the previous geological periods, but had then become a dark body. On the first of the six days, which were all of twenty-four hours' duration, God formed, probably by electricity, a provisional fount of light which was independent of the sun; on the fourth day the sun got back its light-giving power. The moon resumed her functions, with the sun, on the fourth day. As" the stars" are mentioned as well as the sun and moon in the account of the fourth day, we may assume either, that "all the stars became extinct at once, and were reorganized in one day," or we may take "the stars" to mean "the planets." Probably, however, the word "stars" in Gen. i. 16 is a later interpolation. The period of formlessness and void which preceded the Hexameron corresponds to the Diluvial age or quarternary period; one of the glacial periods was probably produced by the extinction of the sun; the creation which is described in the Hexameron followed one of the two periods which French geologists call Diluvium gris, and Diluvium rouge.

This modification of the theory of restitution would no doubt be free from the objections made by H. Miller in the extract I have quoted, but it will not be necessary for me to prove that the grand description of the creation of things with which the Bible begins, is intended to mean more than a creation which was limited to some hundred square miles and some hundred kinds of plants and animals.

The new pre-Adamite. hypothesis, which has been brought forward in recent years by English believers in the Bible,' is connected with this extraordinary theory of Smith's; according to this hypothesis the ancestor of the Caucasian race was part of the local creation maintained by Smith; the ancestors of the lower races existed before that creation, and outside the region where it took place. There is nothing too extraordinary to be invented at some time by somebody.

1 Cf. Zöckler, Die Urgeschichte, p. 110; Gesch. der Beziehungen, ii. 775.

XVIII.

GEOLOGY AND THE BIBLE: THE CONCORDISTIC THEORY.

In the sixteenth lecture I showed that we cannot prove that the Biblical account of creation and the certain results of geological inquiry are in harmony, if we hold fast to the literal interpretation of the six days, and suppose that only six periods of twenty-four hours elapsed between the beginning of God's creative activity and the creation of man. We are forced to transfer the formation of all the fossiliferous strata to the period which followed the creation of man, and according to the unanimous and well-founded opinion of all modern geologists this is out of the question. In my last lecture I showed that geology will not allow us to suppose that all the history of the earth and its organisms up to the Cainozoic period took place before the Hexameron, and during the age which preceded the condition of formlessness and void which is described in the second verse of Genesis; so that the Hexameron itself only describes the formation of the earth in the last and still existing period, and the creation of the present or so-called recent animal and vegetable world. If, therefore, we cannot place much of the history of the earth and its organisms, as it is set forth by geology and paleontology, after the Hexameron, nor, for the most part, before it, nothing

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