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 palæontology, after the Hexameron, nor, for the most part, before it, nothing

is left but to put the whole of that history up to the first appearance of man into the Hexameron; to which we must therefore ascribe a proportionate duration. I have already shown that this is exegetically admissible, and my next task therefore is to prove in detail that assuming the freer interpretation of the six days, the Mosaic record agrees with the scientific history of the earth in so far as that can be said to be scientifically proved.

But you will recollect that in my tenth lecture I showed that two wider interpretations of the six days were exegetically admissible. According to the first, the six days betoken six consecutive long periods in the history of creation, and each of these periods, the existence of which geologists assert to be proved by their investigations, is denoted by one day in the Mosaic Hexameron. According to the second, the six days as a whole correspond to the whole series of periods which have elapsed between the first beginning of things and the creation of man; but these six separate days do not mean six consecutive periods, but only six moments or phases of the creative activity of God, six great heads under which the creating and forming acts of God as they appear in the earth's history may be ranged. The first interpretation of the six days is called the "concordistic," the second the "ideal." Let us consider to-day the development of the first theory.

1

According to Genesis, the order of events in the history of creation is as follows: In the beginning the

1 The principal supporters of both theories were mentioned above, p. 183. Molloy supports both the Concordistic and the Restitution theories.

man.

earth was covered by water, and enveloped in darkness. On the first day God caused the light to appear, and established the regular alternation of day and night. On the second, He formed the atmosphere from a part of the waters which covered the earth. On the third, He separated the water from the land and created the plants. On the fourth, He established the relation which still exists between the earth and the sun, moon, and stars. On the fifth He created the animals of the water and the air; on the sixth, the land animals and Let us for the moment put aside the works of the first and fourth days, and confine ourselves to the others, which refer directly and exclusively to the earth; we cannot avoid seeing that the Biblical account of the creation of the earth harmonizes on the whole with the earth's history as described by geologists. Pfaff observes very strikingly with reference to this: "If we look on the earthly creation as being one from the beginning of the earth up till now, as forming a whole in spite of all changes at different times, it is impossible to describe the events otherwise than is done in Genesis, or to suppose that they occurred in any other order. For in Genesis the separate kingdoms are contemplated separately and apart, without further reference to the changes in the history of each of them, and we are told how they successively made their appearance: the condition of chaos, the mass of waters, the formation of the land, after this the organic world, first the vegetable world, then the animal world represented at first only by inferior water animals, then by land animals, and finally the appearance of man, are represented as occurring in their true sequence,