beginning, and those more detailed operations,
the account of which commences at the second
verse, and which are described to us as having
been performed in so many days ? Or, finally,
does he ever make us to understand that the
genealogies of man went any farther than to fix
the antiquity of the species, and, of consequence,
that they left the antiquity of the globe
a free subject for the speculation of philosophers
? ”
It has long been matter of discussion among
learned theologians, whether the first verse
of Genesis should be considered prospectively,
as containing a summary announcement of that
new creation, the details of which follow in the
record of the operations of the six successive
days; or as an abstract statement that the
heaven and earth were made by God, without
limiting the period when that creative agency
was exerted. The latter of these opinions is
in perfect harmony with the discoveries of
Geology.
The Mosaic narrative commences with a declaration,
that “ In the beginning God created
the heaven and the earth.” These few first
words of Genesis may be fairly appealed to by
the geologist, as containing a brief statement
of the creation of the material elements, at a
time distinctly preceding the operations of the
first day: it is nowhere affirmed that God created
the heaven and the earth in the fir s t day,
but in the beginning; this beginning may have
been an epoch at an unmeasured distance, followed
by periods of undefined duration, during
which all the physical operations disclosed by
Geology were going on.
The first verse of Genesis, therefore, seems
explicitly to assert the creation of the Universe;
“ the heaven,” including the sidereal systems ;*
“ and the earth,” more especially specifying
our own planet, as the subsequent scene of the
operations of the six days about to be described :
no information is given as to events which may
have occurred upon this earth, unconnected with
the history of man, between the creation of its
component matter recorded in the first verse,
and the era at which its history is resumed
in the second verse; nor is any limit fixed
to the time during which these intermediate
events may have been going on : millions of
millions of years may have occupied the indefinite
interval, between the beginning in which
God created the heaven and the earth, and the
* The Hebrew plural word, shamaim, Gen. i. 1, translated
heaven, means etymologically, the higher regions, all that seems
above the earth : as we say, God above, God on high, God in
heaven; meaning thereby to express the presence of the Deity
in space distinct from this earth.—E. B. Pusey.