II.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”—HEBREWS xi., 3.

THUS

US far I have stood upon the defensive, and shown that we teach and believe “none other things than Moses, and the prophets, and apostles, did write." It is proper now that the tables be turned, and it be demanded of our assailants, by what authority they seek to overturn the established faith of the Christian church.

Do the Scriptures teach this new doctrine? No. Its advocates themselves do not pretend this. They only claim that they are silent. "They do not impeach the judgment of those who have formerly interpreted it (the Mosaic narrative) otherwise, and in this respect geology would seem to require some little concession from the literal interpretation of Scripture."-(Buckland, p. 20.) Here it is admitted the Mosaic narrative was literally interpreted, and with judgment unimpeached, in establishing the commonly received and popular interpretation, independent of geological facts. This is virtually giving up the scriptural argument. It is admitting that the independent testimony of

Scripture, literally interpreted, is against the new doctrine. As that testimony is the only infallible rule of faith and practice, when fairly interpreted, according to its own independent meaning, it decides the question against every doctrine contrary to its own. It has been shown that the Scriptures, literally interpreted according to the only known use of language, establish the doctrine which contradicts this new theory. But the rule of interpreting by the aid of language, is indispensable to the attainment of any information from any document. To ask us to give up that rule, is equivalent to a request that we would give up the Bible as a revelation; nay, if the new principle of interpretation be true, it is worse than waste-paper-it misleads those who trust in it. It says one thing, and means its opposite.

In exposing the errors of the theory of geologists, I shall examine their attempt to reconcile it with the Mosaic account; then show its contrariety to it and the other parts of Scripture on the same subject; and then make some remarks on the theory, as occupying the ground of open and avowed infidelity.

1. Examine their reasons for saying that their hypothesis is not inconsistent with the Scriptures. They confine their remarks to the Mosaic narrative, and almost exclusively to the first and second verses of the first chapter of Genesis, as if the Scripture were silent upon the subject everywhere else. This

policy indicates their consciousness of the weakness. of their cause, or their culpable negligence in not searching the Scriptures more fully and accurately before they venture to set aside one of their most decisive announcements.

(a) The first reason is: "It is nowhere affirmed that God created the heaven and the earth on the first day, but in the beginning" (p. 26). This argument would prove that he had not made anything on any of the days; for God is not said to create the light on the first day, nor the firmament on the second, nor the sea and land on the third, nor the luminaries on the fourth, nor sea animals and birds on the fifth, nor land animals and man on the sixth. But in the very way in which he refers these respective works to their proper days, in the same way does he refer the creation of the heaven and the earth to the first day.

(b) Again, it is said: "The creation of each day is preceded by the declaration that God said or willed that such things should be, (' And God said') and, therefore the very form of the narrative seems to imply that the creation of the first day began when these words are first used, i.e., with the creation of light in verse three" (p. 29). But this phrase is used not only at the beginning of the work of the day, but in the middle of it, as in the work of the sixth day, after the creation of the land animals, we read-" And God said, Let us make man" (ver. 26). If this phrase may be used in the middle of the

The

work of the sixth day, it may with equal propriety be used in the middle of the work of the first. difference in the form of speech may be intended to mark the difference between creating and making.

(c) "Many of the fathers supposed the first two verses of Genesis to contain an account of a distinct and prior act of creation. Some, as Augustine, Theodoret, and others, that of the creation of matter; others, that of the elements; others againand they the most numerous-imagine that not these visible heavens, but what they think to be called elsewhere the highest heavens, the heaven of heavens, are here spoken of " (p. 29).

These are mere opinions, and far more than counterbalanced by the concurrent opinions of every department of the church of God, in every age, until this day. Besides, none of their opinions are any support to the doctrine of geologists, that this world was made out of the wreck of a former world.

(d) "In some old editions of the English Bible, where there is no division into verses, you actually find a break at the end of what is now the second verse. And in Luther's Bible, Wittemberg, 1557, you have in addition the figure I placed against the third verse.” But this division in translations is of no authority in fixing the meaning of Moses. Besides, the paragraphs added to the text of the Hebrew Bible were intended to distinguish the different parts of the creation, and not the times in which it was performed. Accordingly, while one of these

divides the work of the first day into two parts, two of them divide that of the sixth into three.

(e) Professor Pusey says (p. 30), "that the words, 'Let there be light,' by no means necessarily imply any more than the English words by which they are translated, that light had never existed before; they may speak only of the substitution of light for darkness upon the surface of this our planet." And yet this same Dr. Pusey has told us, "that the creation of the first day began with the creation of light in verse 3d" (p. 29); that making, when spoken in reference to God, is equivalent to creating. Does he mean by creating the light, an incipient dispersion of dense vapors? Who ever heard such language to express such an event?

(f) This case is said to be of the same kind with astronomical phenomena; and as Moses does not teach astronomy, therefore neither does he teach cosmogony.

But the cases are entirely unlike: first, because the Scriptures contradict the cosmogony of geologists, while they say nothing about the Newtonian system of astronomy; secondly, because, in speaking of the work of creation, the Scriptures use language in the sense in which it was understood at the time when they were written; but geologists give it a meaning which it never had from the foundation of the world until this hour. According to these persons, when God said, "Let there be light" on the first day, and when he made the sun,