Who can read this sublime composition without feeling that it is "a solemn sonnet freighted with a single thought from beginning to end?" In our English Bible, broken up into verses, and split across into two chapters, it is like an image reflected in a shattered mirror; all its real beauty is concealed. But he who can look upon it with a clear eye, and grasp its real unity, must recognize it as a Sacred Hymn composed probably by Adam, and chanted in the tents of the patriarchs at their morning and evening devotions for more than two thousand years, to commemorate the fact and keep alive the faith that the world is the work of the triune God.

Besides being poetic, the sacred narrative is pre-eminently symbolical—must be symbolical, because the Divine reality could never be intuitively known. The facts transcend all the possibilities of human experience. Whatever knowledge the writer had in regard to the creative process must have been obtained in a preternatural way—that is, it must have been revealed by Divine Omniscience. But such a revelation could not have been communicated in mere vocables. Words are themselves but signs—mere arbitrary signs of images and ideas—and can convey no meaning unless the image or the idea be already before the mind. The only natural hypothesis is that the knowledge was conveyed in a symbolic representation—a vision of the past in a succession of scenic representations with accompanying verbal announcements, like the visions of the future in the prophecies of Ezekiel and the apocalypse of John. The original formless nebula—the primeval darkness—the brooding Spirit producing motion—the consequent luminosity—the separation of the aeriform fluid into atmosphere and water—the emergence of the solid land—the shooting forth of grass and plants—the appearance of the heavenly luminaries—the swarming of the waters with living things, and the appearance of birds of wing in the expanse of heaven—the bringing forth of land-animals—and, finally, the creation of man—all pass before his mind in a succession of pictorial representations of the actual progress of creation. "The sights seen, the voices heard, the emotions aroused, are just those adapted to bring out the very words the seer actually uses, and in both cases the very best words that could have been used for such a purpose. The description being given from the barely optical rather than from any reflective scientific stand-point more or less advanced, is on this very account the more vivid as well as the more universal. It is a language read and understood by all." The words of the inspired writer are descriptive of the "vision pictures," and these were symbolic representations of the Divine realities.

The language of the sacred record must therefore be regarded as anthropopathic—the Divine idea being symbolized under the figure of human acts and affections; and from the analogy between the human and the Divine we may conceive not what God is in Himself, nor yet the manner of the Divine action, but the relation of God to the world. We must, however, guard against substituting the human symbol for the Divine reality, and making the human analogy a measure for the infinite Being. "The Sacred Hymn is no more a literal detail of the actual process of creation than the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation is a literal picture of the heavenly state."[194] God is forever above all finite relations. Finite acts and relations may be employed as representative symbols of the Divine, but they can never be adequate representations. Divine creating and moving, commanding and naming, seeing and approving, working and resting, must not be narrowed down to the standard of our finite personality, and conceived under human limitations. The conception of the Deity as standing outside of matter, and moving and fashioning it after the manner of a human artificer, as commanding and naming in human language, as being conditioned in his action by the time-measures which He himself appointed, as expending energy and then resting after the manner of a human laborer, is the rudest anthropomorphism. God is eternal; neither his being nor his action are conditioned by finite measures of time. God is absolute immensity, essential omnipresence. He is "in all and through all" as truly as He is "above and before all." He is a Living Power immanent in all matter, as well as transcending all matter, moving it, organizing it, vitalizing it continually—a Living Power working from within, rather than a mechanical force acting from without.

If the primitive composition standing at the commencement of Genesis be "the Symbolical Hymn of Creation," we are not permitted to regard it as chronological—that is, we are not justified in expecting that it shall conform to time-measures which had no existence prior to the creative act, but which were consequent upon and determined by the creative act. This is obvious both from the nature of things and the character of the composition.

The 106th Psalm is an epic poem—that is, it is a narrative in poetic measure, a history in metrical form. Who will be so unreasonable as to demand that this Psalm shall furnish any chronological data, or conform to any time-measures whatever? Psalms are composed to be sung and excite emotion, not to be merely read and criticised. The poet groups his materials for the best moral effect, and arranges his numbers to secure rhythm and harmony. It is simply absurd to demand that there shall be any chronology—nay, it spoils the grand effect to think of chronology in reading the "Symbolical Hymn of Creation." In fact, we are forbidden to think of time at all by the first word of the exordium, which states the subject of the poem. The Hebrew bereshith, the Greek ἐν ἀρχῆ = in Beginning (not in the Beginning, for the article is not used), has no relation to succession in time. It denotes pretemporality, and is rendered by Meyer, Keil, and others—"before time or in eternity." It is the same thought which is presented in John i. 1: "In the beginning was the Word;" and Tholuck and Dean Alford both read the text, "Before the world was, or before time was." Indeed, the whole poem represents an ideal conception, and not a time-march of phenomena. So assured are we on this point that we confidently affirm that no one who endeavors to think of the creation in its relation to God can ever fall into the anthropomorphic error of saying that "God's ways are like unto our ways," "God's speaking is like unto our speaking," "God's working and resting are like unto our working and resting," and "God's days are like unto our days of twenty-four hours." As Dr. Whedon remarks, "Our traditional unscientific scientific constructions of this chapter are Japhetic interpretations of a Semitic text."

The men who persist in regarding "the day of God" as a natural day of twenty-four hours are involved in numberless inconsistencies when they attempt to carry their rigid preconception throughout the whole Bible. Human or finite measures of time, when applied to any thing God does, can only be accommodated representations to meet our feeble comprehension, and we are constantly guarded, in the Bible itself, against a literal and anthropomorphic conception. "Hast thou eyes of flesh, or seest thou as man seeth? Are thy days as man's days?" (Job x. 4, 5.) To say that God's days of working are like our days is just as absurd and as degrading a conception as to say that God's eyes are "eyes of flesh," like ours. Our time-measures can not condition the Divine action. "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Peter iii. 8); which means that time is as nothing with God, that time does not condition the Divine life or the Divine action, but that it is the Divine action which makes and conditions all time. The beginning of the world is the beginning of time, and time is the duration of the world measured into equal parts by the equable motion of bodies in space.[195] The attempt to measure the creating work of God by days of twenty-four hours is just as absurd as the attempt to measure immensity by a three-foot rule, or to estimate omnipotence by horse-power.

Let any one test the twenty-four-hour measure on such texts as the following: "Your father Abraham desired to see my day." "The day of the Son of Man." "I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day." "If thou hadst known in this thy day." "He shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." "The day of salvation." "The day of judgment." "The terrible day of the Lord." It would be a wholesome and profitable exercise to take up the Concordance and refer to all the texts in which the word "day" stands in any relation to the determinations or doings of God, and it will be found that it is always an indefinite period of longer or shorter duration, and may be twenty-four hundred years, or twenty-four thousand years, just as well as twenty-four hours.

The Hebrew יום (yom), first occurring in Gen. i. 5, is the name of an indefinite period, a cycle of time radically grounded on the primitive conception of division or separation. Light is the first separation. It is "divided from the darkness." "And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night." This is God's own naming, and we must take it as our guide in the interpretation of the subsequent "days." Obviously, it is not the duration, but the phenomenon, the appearing itself which is for the first time called day. Then the term is used for a period, or the whole first cycle of events, with its two great antithetical parts—"And there was an evening, and there was a morning, one day." We look into the sacred narrative to see what corresponds to this naming. What was the night? Certainly the darkness on the face of the waters. What was the day? Certainly the light consequent on the brooding of the Spirit and the commanding word. How long was the day? How long was the night or the darkness? The account tells us nothing about it. There is something on the face of it which seems to forbid such questions. Where are we to get twelve hours for this first night? Where is the point of commencement when darkness began to be on the face of the deep? All is vast, sublime, immeasurable. The time is as formless as the material. It has, indeed, a chronology of some kind, but on a scale vastly different from that afterward appointed (ver. 14) to regulate the history of a completed and habitable world. Whoever thinks seriously on the impossibility of accommodating this first day to the measure of twenty-four hours needs no other argument. The first day is, in this respect, the model of all the rest.[196]

It is equally impossible to reduce the "seventh day" to a chronological standard of twenty-four hours. "And God rested on the seventh day from all his works which He had made." Are we to presume that God "rested" as we rest, because He was weary, and that He needed to rest just twenty-four hours? Is not God "resting" still in the sense in which the word "rest" is here used, viz., to cease doing a particular work? Is not all time since the Creation God's grand Sabbath, in which he is not doing works of Origination, but works of Love and Mercy to our race?

It is obvious that the first and the seventh days can not be days of twenty-four hours; and, furthermore, a clear apprehension of the nature of the first day must open to us the true conception of all the rest. The days are new appearances, new manifestations, new developments in the Creative Week—the great day of God (Gen. ii. 4). According to the analogy of the first day, the evening is the time of a peculiar or partially chaotic condition, like the glacial epoch which closed the Cenozoic and opened the Phrenozoic day. The morning is a new evolution of a new order of things, which carries the world-formation to a higher stage. With each creative morning there comes a higher, fairer, richer state of the earth, until it reaches the Sabbath of the world, the day on which God rested or ceased from his world-creating work, that He might educate and recreate and redeem and glorify the human race.

In these antithetical movements of each creative day we are not necessitated to assume a sudden catastrophe, or any return to the chaos of the first day, any more than we now conceive of night as a sudden return to darkness, or of day as the sudden return of light. There is a steady progression, an orderly movement in the history of each creative day, just as there is in the history of a single solar day. The light does not break suddenly upon the world—the sun rises gradually upon the earth. And so the creative day was a slow development, a gradual evolution out of a prior order of things, by the direct efficiency of God.

It has been insinuated that this is an interpretation which has been forced upon us by the progress of modern science. Theology, it is said, has been perpetually driven from her positions by science, and is now compelled to take refuge in subterfuge and equivocation. The insinuation is as false as it is foul. This mode of interpretation was propounded ages before the science of Geology was known, and was taught by Jewish doctors and Christian fathers for fifteen hundred years. St. Augustine, the father of Systematic Theology, who was born A.D. 354, asks the question, "What mean these days—these strange sunless days? Does the enumeration of days and nights avail for a distinction between the nature that is not yet formed, and those which are made, so that they shall be called morning propter speciem [i. e., in reference to appearing, receiving form or species], and evening propter privationem [i. e., in reference to non-appearance, formlessness, and want of sensible quality]?" ("De Genesi ad Literam," lib. ii. ch. 14.) Hence he does not hesitate to call them naturæ, natures, births or growths; also moræ, delays, or solemn pauses in the Divine work. They are dies ineffabiles; their true nature can not be told. Hence they are called days as the best symbol by which the idea could be expressed. They are God-divided days and nights in distinction from sun-divided. Common solar days are mere vicissitudines coeli, mere changes in the positions of the heavenly bodies, and not spatia morarum, or evolutions in nature belonging to a higher chronology, and marking their epochs by a law of inward change instead of incidental outward measurement. As to how long or how short they were he gives no opinion, but contents himself with maintaining that day is not a name of duration, the evenings and the mornings are to be regarded not so much as measuring the passing of time (temporis præteritionem) as marking the boundaries of a periodic work or evolution. This is not the metaphorical, but the real and proper sense of the word day, in fact the original sense, inasmuch as it contains the idea of rounded periodicity or self-completed time, without any of the mere accidents that belong to the outwardly measured solar or planetary epochs, be they longer or shorter.[197]

These are not the mere fancies of St. Augustine. This was the doctrine of the ablest Christian fathers—of Irenæus, Origen, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzen. Nay more, it was the doctrine of many of the doctors of the old Jewish Church. In more recent times we find Calmet, Burnet, Stillingfleet, Henry More, Lord Bacon, Poole, and others, presenting similar views; and this long before Geology existed as a science, and irrespective of any supposed collision with physical induction. Their opinions and interpretations were therefore no shift for the avoidance of difficulties, but conclusions reached independently on sound principles of Biblical exegesis.

Disregarding the chronology of Archbishop Usher printed in the margin of our Bible, and the division into chapters and verses made by Hugh de St. Cher—both modern inventions which are no part of the sacred record—and purging our minds of those prepossessions which are incident to an uncritical faith, we can now contemplate the Symbolical Hymn of Creation in its simple and original form, as a record of the self-manifestation of God, given in such order and under such conditions that it shall be apprehensible and interpretable by the finite mind.

1. Creation was a gradual process. God did not create a perfect universe at once, but built it up slowly, step by step. A consistent interpretation of the record forbids us to regard "the Creative Week" as a literal week composed of days of twenty-four hours each. Creation is the work of God, and surely the Divine action can not have been conditioned by time-measures which did not exist before, but were consequent upon the act of God. The great cyclical changes in nature produced by the creative Word are the only measures of time. Therefore the "days" of the Creative Week are new appearances, new manifestations, new developments in the creative purpose of God.

The first morning is the appearance of luminosity in the aeriform fluid, or nebulous vapor, whatever science may finally determine that to have been. The Hebrew מַיִם (mayim), from the root ים, which denotes tumultuous, tremulous, or undulatory movement, is used of the waters of the ocean, of the waters above the firmament, of vapor and clouds, because of their susceptibility of tremulous, undulatory motion. The first distinct creative formation was heat, or invisible molecular motion, resulting from "the Spirit of God brooding upon the face of the abyss;" and this heat reveals itself in the phenomena of light.[198] How closely the ideas of light and heat were united in the Hebrew mind is shown by the same word being used for both, with merely a slight difference in pronunciation, אוֹר (ōr) and אוּר (ūr).

The second morning is the appearance of an expanse in the midst of the vapors, dividing the vapors which were below the expanse from the vapors which were above the expanse. The Hebrew רֳקִיֹעַ (rakai), from רֳקַע (to stretch, to spread out), means properly an extension, an expanse. This is the translation adopted by Benisch, Kalisch, Delitzsch, Keil, and Lange. After heat and light, the next creative formation is an atmosphere, with its auroral light and a cloudy canopy.

The third morning is the appearance of land and seas, and the sprouting forth of vegetation, at first in its lowest forms—perhaps as marine plants. The Hebrew אֶרֶץ (eretz) has two significations, "earth" and "land." Whenever it is used in a restricted sense, and especially wherever it is contrasted with "water," the most appropriate rendering is "land." The third creative formation is gross, ponderable matter, whether aggregated by molecular attraction, or compounded by elective affinity, or selected and organized by vital force.

The fourth morning is the appearance of luminaries or light-bearers in the expanse of heaven, which are now "set," or, more correctly, "appointed to give light upon the earth," and to be time-measures in the future world-history. The Hebrew word employed in ver. 14 (מְארֹת), which is unfortunately rendered "lights" in the Authorized Version, is a different word from the "light" (אוֹר) of vers. 3-5. מְארֹת (meoroth) strictly means "light-bearers," or bodies giving light. This distinction is carefully observed in the LXX., DeWette, Benisch, Kalisch, Tuch, Knobel, Delitzsch, and Keil.[199] The fourth creative formation was the establishment of such cosmical conditions or relations as should enable the heavenly bodies to fulfill their light-giving function to the earth. What those conditions were we may not be able to say. The dense clouds and ceaseless showers of the "Age of Rain," which had shut out the light of the heavenly bodies for a geological age, had now passed away, the atmosphere becomes fitted for the transmission of light, and the sun, moon, and stars are visible from the earth. The conditions for a rapid development of vegetable life now exist, and this is regarded as pre-eminently "the Age of Plant-growth."

The fifth morning is the appearance of animal life—life moving in the waters and soaring in the air, marine animals, aquatic reptiles, and birds.

The sixth morning is the appearance of a higher order of animal life, mammals, chiefly designed for the use of a still higher being—for Man, whose appearance is the noontide splendor of the sixth day.

The seventh morning is the commencement of the Sabbath of God, which is devoted to the moral and religious instruction of humanity—the New Creation of the moral world.

The following scheme, furnished by Dr. Winchell, presents at one view the order of the Mosaic record, and at the same time sets forth the harmony between the Mosaic and Geologic records:[200]

2. Creation was cumulative—that is, it was a succession of beginnings or creative epochs, in which new entities or new forces were inserted into the already existing sphere of nature, carrying it forward toward a nobler end.

This, we think, is the natural impression which the reading of Gen. i. makes on the unbiased mind. Each creative word appears as the dynamical basis of a real principium—a beginning of something intrinsically new, and which can not be conceived as the physical result of any pre-existing condition of things.[201] A new entity or a new force was, as it were, inserted in the order of nature; a new impulse was given to matter, or a new direction to existing forces, and from that initial point a new series of developments, which go on in accordance with law—a new succession of births and growths—flows on as a part of the grand totality of effects we call "nature." This is, obviously, the Biblical conception. Here creation does not present itself as a necessary evolution from a first matter or a first force in unbroken continuity, and without any supernatural interposition. Here are clearly defined creative epochs, new beginnings, which have their origin in the creative will and word of God. What these beginnings were is a question of the deepest interest.

A careful study of Gen. i. and ii. has led us to the conclusion that there is something fundamental and radical in the distinction between the creative words with bara (בָרָא) and those with yetsar (יָצַר) and aysah (עָשָׂה). It is, in reality, the distinction between Origination de novo and Formation out of pre-existing materials. There are three instances in which bara occurs in Gen. i. We are fully convinced that in each case it denotes the origination of a new entity—a real addition to the sum of existence.

First Origination (Gen. i. 1): "In the beginning God created [אה = the substance or essence of] the heavens and the earth." This is the reading of Parkhurst's Hebrew Grammar (1813), which has since that time been approved by able lexicographers and commentators. Some of these authorities have been already presented to the reader.[202] But even aside from philological considerations, the context forbids us to regard bara here as denoting "formation," for the product of that creative act was "formless and matter-less;"[203] that is, it was homogeneous, non-differentiated, structureless, and destitute of all sensible quality—an abyss of darkness and death, exhibiting that sole condition of matter, "perhaps its only true indication, namely, inertia."[204] The first created element was the single omnipresent fluid Ether, out of which all gross matter was built by the action of force. As we advance in this discussion we shall find that this is an opinion which is entertained by the first physicists of the age, as, for example, Thomson, Tait, Maxwell, Challis, in England, and Norton and Hinrich in America.

Second Origination (Gen. i. 21): "And God created the great monsters, and every living soul [נֶפֶשׁ הַיָּה = soul of life] that moveth."

The first created animals are here most carefully denoted as "living souls," evidently to distinguish the life now first manifested in nature from the molecular, "bioplasmic" life which organizes the vegetable cell, and builds up the tissues of the animal body. The life here indicated has an individuality which separates it from the universal life of nature. There is now an immaterial entity—a soul, which is an individualized and indivisible centre of force, a soul which has sensation, feeling, perception, and memory, none of which are properties of matter or products of organization. The animal soul is not material, neither is it a function or phenomenon of organized matter; it is a creation, and therefore bara is here significantly employed to denote the origination of something new; a new power or principle is here inserted into the sphere of existing nature.

The second created entity is animal life—Soul—somatic life as distinct and distinguishable from vegetable, molecular, bioplasmic life.

Third Origination (Gen. i. 27): "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him."

The entire paragraph (vers. 26-29) is obviously the record of a supernatural origination. There is a significance even in the change of the creative word. In regard to prior and inferior existences the language is, "Let the earth bring forth!" "Let the waters bring forth!" as though there were some parturient power in nature, or as though nature co-operated with and furnished the conditions and means of the Divine efficiency. But when man is to be created the language is, "Let us make man;" thus placing the origin of man outside the chain of physical causation, and ascribing it to the immediate agency of God. Besides, the creation here spoken of is the production of a spiritual, not a material entity. "God created man in his own image." This creation can not be a formation out of a pre-existent matter, for no form of matter can possibly bear any resemblance to God (Acts xvii. 29). "God is spirit" and man can be like God only in so far as he is endowed with a spiritual nature. Spirit alone can bear the image of God. Whatever may be the teaching of Genesis as to the origin of the human body, be it a formation or a development, there is no uncertainty in its language as to the origin of the human spirit. It is an inbreathing from God. It proceeded directly from Him. By no mere figure of speech, but by a Divine reality God is "the Father of spirits," and man is the offspring and the image of God. This likeness of God lifts man out of the sphere of mere nature—it sets him apart in the essential characteristics and endowments of his being as above nature, and in some sense divine.

The third created entity is Spirit; spirit with its reason, its liberty, its conscience, its susceptibility of Divine inspiration, its capacity for endless progression in knowledge and love.

Here, then, are three entities, matter, life, and mind (= body, soul, and spirit), which had their beginning in an act of absolute creation, and are therefore to be regarded as primordial things.[205] Their existence is the necessary condition of all subsequent formative and developing production, inasmuch as all formation supposes a something to be formed, and all evolution a something involved. These primordial entities are the substratum, or ground, of all the mediate architectonic creation which is effected by the moving and informing presence and agency of the Spirit of God.

This leads us to the consideration of those creative words which are formative, and which always presuppose the existence of real entities as the condition of their efficiency; as, for example, "Let there be light;" "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters;" "Let the dry land appear;" "Let there be luminaries in the expanse of heaven." All the dividings, the gatherings, the organizings, the ordainings, and collocations suppose the prior existence of matter.

We have seen that the first act of absolute creation—the beginning of all beginnings—was the origination of that mysterious entity which is the recipient of impulse, or energy, and the physical substratum of all sensible phenomena. From this initial point, the first formative act was "the moving or brooding of the Spirit of God upon the face of the abyss." All the qualities which matter presents to the senses, all physical phenomena, are the result of this action of the Deity upon matter—that is, they are all manifestations of force.[206] "By various motions of the nature of eddies (vortices) the qualities of cohesion, elasticity, hardness, weight, mass, or other universal properties of matter, are given to small portions of the fluid [ether] which constitute the chemical atoms, and these by modifications in their combination, form, and movement produce all the accidental phenomena of gross matter; and the primary fluid by other motions transmits light, radiant heat, magnetism, and gravitation."[207]

The first distinct creative formation was molecular and radiant energy. "And God said, Let there be light." By this "light" we are not to understand light in its technical sense as distinguished from heat, but rather as including heat, such light, in fact, as we meet with in nature in the light of the sun, the same Hebrew word (אוֹר) being used for both.

The second distinct creative formation was that wonderful mechanical combination of chemical elements we call the atmosphere. "And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the vapors, and let it be a division of vapors from vapors." The Creator has endowed the oxygen and nitrogen of the atmosphere with the power of retaining the aeriform condition under all circumstances, while the aqueous vapor is liable to very great fluctuation. Were there no air surrounding the globe, the quantity of vapor would adjust itself almost instantaneously to any variation of temperature, and the maximum amount possible would always be present at any given place; there could then be no clouds and no genial showers of diffusive rain. "An elevation of temperature would be attended by rapid evaporation, and the amount of water required to fill the space would suddenly flash into vapor; while, on the other hand, a corresponding depression of temperature would be accompanied by an equally sudden precipitation of the aqueous vapor, not in genial showers, but terrific torrents.... The drops, falling without resistance, would be as destructive in their effects as volleys of leaden shot."[208] The presence of a dense medium, such as the atmosphere, retards these sudden changes, and determines the formation of clouds. Thus "the expanse" is admirably adapted to the creative purposes of "dividing the waters from the waters."

The third creative formation was the chemical compounds and their molar aggregation in land and seas. "And God said, Let the waters below the expanse be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry ground appear." The chemical reactions, crystallizations, precipitations, and sedimentary accumulations involved in the creative formation are admirably sketched in Ch. VI. of Dr. Winchell's "Sketches of Creation." The transmutation of the primary fluid into gross matter was something more than a natural evolution—it was a "creative action,"[209] and the exact numerical proportions in which the chemical elements combine must be the result of a distinct creative impulse.

The fourth creative formation was bioplasm, or that vitalized germinal matter which is instrumental in building up the tissues and organs of plants (and animals). "And God said, Let the land sprout forth sprouts; herbs seeding seed, fruit-trees producing fruit after their kind wherein is their seed." The vital force which is concerned in the formation of bioplasm (vitalized matter) must be regarded as distinct, on the one hand, from the physical forces which are efficient in the combinations and aggregations of non-living matter,[210] and, on the other hand, from that sentient, percipient, self-moving principle which constitutes the animal soul. "The 'life' of a man or an animal is very different from what is termed the 'life' of a white blood, or a mucus, or a pus corpuscle; inasmuch as many hundreds of white blood corpuscles, or elemental units of the tissues, might die in man without affecting the 'life' of the man; moreover the man himself might perish, and some of the corpuscles remain alive.... By the life of a man (or an animal) something very different is meant from what we understand by the life of each elemental unit of the organism, and the difference is not merely of degree but of kind."[211] Bioplasm, or cell-life, is generic; soul-life is specific, individual, and indivisible. The former we regard as the direct effect of the Divine life, immanent in nature; the latter is an individualized centre of force, "a delegation of Divine power under limits of necessity." The physical forces are the action of God upon matter, the vital force is the immanence of God in matter. The first is mechanical, the second is vito-dynamical.

The fifth creative formation was the adjustment of the cosmical relations of the heavenly bodies, and the establishment of such atmospheric conditions as rendered the sun and moon the luminaries, or light-bearers, to the earth. "And God said, Let there be luminaries in the expanse of heaven to divide the day and night." What these adjustments and collocations were, we are not able to say. The ultimate cause of the sun's luminosity is yet an unsolved problem. No explanation thus far offered has been accepted as adequate by the majority of scientific men. The statement of Genesis, which ascribes "the appointment of the sun and moon to be light-bearers to the earth" to a distinct creative formation of some kind, is not, therefore, invalidated by science.

The sixth creative formation was the material organisms of the varied species of "living souls" which people the waters; the seventh, of those which people the air; the eighth, of those which people the land. The final creative formation was the body of man, into which God breathed the breath of lives, and in consequence of which he became not merely a living soul, but a spiritual personality, a spirit-being.

The question whether the material organisms in which the varied species of "living souls" are embodied were each the product of a special creation, or whether later and higher organisms were derived from prior and lower organisms by "filiation," so that "new species are new births," is of little consequence to the interpretation of Genesis. The essential element of species is a spiritual entity. Specific existence is a positive existence, an immaterial existence,[212] "a soul of life." "It is not," says Dr. Winchell, "a primordial organic form: it is the life embodied within that form—the principle which rules its existence, moulds its features, determines its instincts, and conserves its specific and individual identity. It is the principle embodied in the ovum—often a mere microscopic organism—which unfailingly holds fast to the specific type, and through all embryonic and immature existence guides the progress of development in one direction, toward one end. Here is more than matter: here is a power which controls matter, controls chemistry—manifests its superiority to body, and asserts its dignity as spirit." The establishment of a genetic connection from the lowest to the highest material organism would not decide the question as to "the origin of species." The origin of species lies back of all material organisms. The species is a "spiritual germ," which acts upon and fashions the material elements, and through them expresses its own characteristics. That therefore which constitutes man a distinct species is not to be sought in anatomical peculiarities, but in spiritual attributes. It is the image of God and the inspiration of God which lifts man out of mere animal nature and makes him a peculiar species—"one genus, and that genus the only one of the order."[213] Nor would this title be affected by any theory about the mode of the creation of his body. There would be nothing more derogatory to Omnipotence, or even to human nature, in the conjecture that man did not become "a living personal spirit" until he had passed through various stages of animal life, than in the doctrine that he was fashioned immediately out of the dust of the earth. There is as much dignity, or, if the reader please, as much humility of origin in the one case as in the other. The former is an extraordinary birth, consequent on some mysterious action of the Deity on the course of nature; the latter is a miraculous formation. The Hebrew text is as favorable to the one hypothesis as to the other. The preposition "of," or "out of," is not authorized by the original. Dr. Whedon reads the whole passage as follows: "And God developed [וַיִּיצֶר] the man—dust of the earth—and breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives, and the man became to a living person."[214] If the body of the second Adam, the Divine Man, was a birth (a miraculous birth), we do not see that any one need be shocked at the suggestion that the body of the first Adam was also an extraordinary or supernatural birth. Science may have free scope to settle the problem on purely inductive grounds.

The following scheme will exhibit our conception of the cumulative character of the creative development: