in six days, and rested from his work on the seventh day. Now, the analogy or correspondence is clearly incomplete, unless we regard the Divine work of creation as destined to be resumed at the commencement of the eighth day. But, so far as the heavens and earth are concerned, (and to these alone the sacred narrative refers) we have every reason to believe that, since the hour when God saw his work and pronounced it very good, the work of creation has been intermitted till the present hour. There are intimations in the scripture, from which it appears that the time is not far distant when this creation-work is to be resumed, and, when new heavens and a new earth are to be constructed out of the fire-purified materials of the heavens and earth that now are. If this view of the matter be correct, it will appear that, God's rest still continuing, his seventh day is still running its course; and that our week, consisting of six working days and one day of rest, is a precise epitome or reduced copy of the Divine week. In any other view of the matter, it would seem that the reasoning of the fourth commandment is lax and inconclusive, unless it were intended (as it certainly is not) that the rest succeeding six days' labour should begin on the seventh day and be continued ever after; in short that man is only to work six days, and thereafter work no more for ever.

Such are the main arguments that we employed fourteen or fifteen years ago in support of this interpretation. Our faith in its accuracy was considerably shaken at a subsequent period, by the apparent difference of the order of succession of the geological remains on the one hand, and the recorded works of the several

days on the other. There is indeed a general accordance, but it must be admitted that there is not such a correspondence in the detail, as we should perhaps consider ourselves entitled to expect. Our attachment to it has, to a considerable extent, been revived by the perusal of two works, that we have read with a special view to the composition of the present article, and whose titles we have prefixed to it. The one is Dr. Pye Smith's Geology and Scripture; the other is Mr. Hugh Miller's Footprints of the Creator. Dr. Smith rejects the interpretation in question; but the exceeding feebleness of the arguments, he adduces with a view to its refutation, is to us a ground of presumption in its favour. Mr. Miller is not led by the nature of his subject to consider the question fully; but he clearly shews his belief of the correctness of the interpretation now under discussion; and it is scarcely possible to over-estimate the value of the testimony on such a subject of such a man-a man who is so thoroughly conversant with the geological phenomena, and so rigidly Baconian in his conclusions-a man, re

garding whose former work, on the Old Red Sandstone, Sir Roderick Murchison declared, that he would have given his right hand to have been able to write it,-and who, in his present performance, has so excelled his former self, that the ability he displays might be cheaply purchased, if purchased it could be at all, not perhaps by Sir Roderick's two hands, but certainly at a large ransom.

For mere purposes of defence, we regard this interpretation as rendering the scriptural record impregnable. For this purpose, it is sufficient that this, or any other meaning not inconsistent with the ascertained facts of Geology, may be the meaning of the scriptural narrative, and that it is impossible for the oppugners of that narrative to prove that such is not the meaning of it. To such an extent then at least, we regard the interpretation as valuable, inasmuch as we can confidently challenge any infidel whatsoever to disprove it. For this purpose, it is sufficient that it may be correct; the onus of disproof lies upon the opponents of revelation; and this onus they can neither shake off nor sustain. But without now venturing to be so confident on the subject as we once were, we still incline to the belief that this is really the meaning of the Mosaic narrative. We hesitate between it and the interpretation we are now going to notice, although our leaning is rather towards that which we have now stated.

Perhaps, however, the majority both of Geologists and Divines prefer the interpretation, which, as we believe, originated with a man, to whom, if on such a matter we could be influenced by deference to authority, we should be disposed, both by feeling and by conviction, to defer more than to any other man. That full justice may be done to the interpretation in question, we shall present it in the words in which it was originally pro. mulgated by Dr. Chalmers, nearly forty years ago. It has been repeated in another form in his Evidences of Christianity, and also, if we mistake not, in some other of his works; but we shall give it, as reprinted in vol. xii. of his collected works from the Edinburgh Christian Instructor, where it originally appeared, in a review of Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, in 1814:

Should the phenomena compel us to assign a greater antiquity to the globe than to that work of days detailed in the book of Genesis, there is still one way of saving the credit of the literal history. The first creation of the earth and the heavens may have formed no part of that work. This took place at the beginning, and is described in the first verse of Genesis. It is not said when this beginning was, We know the general impression to be, that it was on the earlier part of the first day, and that the first act of creation formed part of the same day's work with the formation of light. We ask our readers to turn to that chapter, and to read the first five verses of it. Is there any forcing in the supposition, that the first verse describes the

primary act of creation, and leaves us at liberty to place it as far back as we may; that the first half of the second verse describes the state of the earth, (which may already have existed for ages, and been the theatre of Geological revolutions), at the point of time anterior to the detailed operations of this chapter; and that the motion of the Spirit of God, described in the second clause of the second verse, was the commencement of these operations? In this case, the creation of the light may have been the great and leading event of the first day; and Moses may be supposed to give us not a history of the first formation of things, but of the formation of the present system.

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I take a friend to see a field which belongs to me, and I give him a history of the way in which I managed it. In the beginning, I enclosed that field. It was then in a completely wild and unbroken state. I pared it. This took up one week. I removed the great stones out of it. This took up another week. On the third week, I entered the plough into it: and thus, by describing the operations of each week, I may lay before him the successive steps by which I brought my field into cultivation It does not strike me, that there is any violence done to the above narrative, by the supposition, that the enclosure of the field was a distinct and anterior thing to the first week's operation. The very description of this state, after it was enclosed, is an interruption to the narrative of the operations, and leaves me at liberty to consider the work done after this description of the state of the field, as the whole work of the first week. The enclosure of the field may have taken place one year, or even twenty years, before the more detailed improvements were entered upon.

Against this we have nothing to say. But the chief difficulty is, with respect to the heavenly bodies-the sun, the moon, and the stars, which are recorded to have been made on the fourth day. Here is the way in which Dr. Chalmers meets the difficulty:

The creation of the heavens may have taken place as far antecedently to the details of the first chapter of Genesis, as the creation of the earth. It is evident, however, that if the earth had been at some former period the fair residence of life, she had now become void and formless; and if the sun and moon and stars at some former period had given light, that light had been extinguished. It is not our part to assign the cause of a catastrophe, which carried so extensive a destruction along with it; but he were a bold theorist indeed, who could assert that in the wide chambers of immensity, no such cause is to be found.

Such, substantially, is the method of interpretation which, as we have said, is probably most in favor, both with Divines and Geologists. Dr. Buckland supports it in his Bridgewater Treatise, and fortifies it by the opinion of Dr. Pusey, that there is nothing in the scriptural text incompatible with such an interpretation. The only modification that Dr. Buckland introduces into the theory is, that he does not suppose that the sun and moon and the stars were darkened up to the fourth day, and on that day restored to their light-giving office; but that on that day, they were merely " appointed" to an additional office," to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night,'

to be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years." To us it appears that, at the least, Dr. Chalmers's view of the matter is necessary to satisfy the requirements of the narrative.

So far as the mere purpose is concerned of defending the sacred narrative from the attacks of those who strive to show that it controverts ascertained truths, and is consequently not itself true, and therefore not inspired by the God of truth, we think that either this interpretation, or that we formerly noticed, is sufficient to render all their attempts nugatory. There is no reasonable denial of the postulate that the long intervalrequired for the deposition of all the strata, may have elapsed in the interval between the "beginning," when the material elements of our globe were created, and the period when they were arranged as we now behold them. The earth may have been peopled with those vegetable and animal tribes, whose remains are now fossilized "in numbers numberless;" it may have enjoyed the light of the sun, the moon and the stars, and been subjected to all those influences to which it is now subjected through the action of these bodies upon its material mass; and yet the narrative of what was done in the six consecutive days, during which its temporarily-disordered elements were arranged in their present form, may be strictly and literally true. For the purpose of the vindication of scripture, therefore, we care little which of those suppositions we adopt as to the meaning of this particular portion of it. We hold it impossible for any one to show that either of them is illegitimate as an interpretation of the narrative; and equally impossible to show that the narrative, so interpreted, is inconsistent with any one geological fact. Nor do we sympathize in any degree with the fears so pathetically expressed by Mr. Babbage, as to the evil consequences likely to result from thus giving hypothetical interpretations of a few passages of scripture, as if this would give rise or countenance to the notion that the scripture gives an uncertain sound, that its interpreters can make quidlibet ex quolibet, and that the utmost we can attain to is a vague guess as to its meaning. Of the two interpretations that we have spoken of, we confidently believe that one is substantially right, and the other substantially wrong, notwithstanding that we are not able to come to a satisfactory conclusion, as to the rightness or wrongness of the one or the other. The very same thing in kind happens in the most exact of all the sciences. In the science of Optics, for example, the emanatory and the undulatory theory of light are equally capable of accounting for all the phenomena. And although it is probable that every optician has a feeling of preference for the one over

the other, although indeed there are probably very few scientific opticians now-a-days, who do not think the latter to be much more likely to be correct than the former, yet no one thinks he can positively prove the one hypothesis to be correct and the other erroneous. But what then? Does any one ever entertain a doubt as to the soundness of the conclusions of optical science, because it cannot be decided what that light really is which is the subject of it? Assuredly not. And if the case stands thus with respect to one of the most exact of all the demonstrative sciences, is it to be wondered at, that a similar dubiety should occur in the science of interpretation? Or is the Bible to be accused of vagueness or indecision, because, on a subject which is only casually introduced into it, it does not give us all the information that we might desire, or because we may not be able demonstratively to prove the accuracy of a particular interpretation of a particular passage? Surely, we may well wait for more light on the matter, confident that the scriptural narrative is strictly true, and that in due time we shall attain to the correct understanding of it. We never happened to hear as yet of any optician, who deemed that he must refrain from the study of the phenomena and laws of reflection and refraction and polarization, until it can be decided, what is the nature of the light that is reflected and refracted and polarized. Nor is it usual, in any place that we have been accustomed to visit, or in which it has been our lot to sojourn, for men to shut themselves up in dark rooms, in gloomy and sulky expectancy of the decision of this vexed question. We have generally seen the peasant light his dip-light, and the student his Cambridge reading-lamp, and the family circle gather itself around the bright-shining Argand, and the old man bestride his nose with his spectacles, and the young maiden trink herself at the little mirror, and all the affairs of life go on very much as they might be supposed to do, had the rival hypotheses of Newton and Huyghens never existed, or had one of them been disproved as soon as it was mooted. It were well, no doubt, that the question were determined and set at rest for ever; but its determination would not modify to the slightest extent any one of the ways in which man renders the properties of light subservient to his various

uses.

And so, in like manner, it were well if we could decide the precise meaning of this portion of the inspired record; but there is no reason whatsoever, why the want of our ability to ascertain this meaning, should prevent the gladdening of our hearts and homes by the light of heavenly truth; no reason why we should not pay implicit deference to its beacon-warnings; no