CHAPTER I.

The design of Moses in writing the History of the Creation.Objections stated and answered.

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THE great design of Moses, when composing the first book of his history, appears to have been not only to give an account of the early ages of the world, but to guard the Israelites against the prevailing idolatry of his time, the worship of the heavenly bodies, since known by the designation of Zabaism. With this view, he commences his annals by declaring, that, in the beginning, God created or called into existence the Heavens and the Earth-a phrase which is frequently employed in Scripture to denote not merely the solar system, but all the corporeal substances, whether to us visible or invisible, which are scattered over the regions of boundless space. By this brief sentence he strikes at the root of every disposition to worship the heavenly bodies. These, so far from being gods, are pronounced to spring, in common with the human race, from the will of Jehovah; and hence, in common with the human race, to be creatures continually dependent for support on the power that created them.

At what precise era a work so stupendous was effected, the inspired historian pretends not to make known. He describes, indeed, with sufficient minuteness, the process which our system underwent, when at the command of its Almighty Maker, it emerged from chaos into order; but when it was that God first willed the existence of that universe of which our system forms a part, we are furnished with no ground upon which to hazard so much as a conjecture. That it must have been enterior to the era of the Mosaic cosmogony, that it was probably long anterior to that era, other passages of Scripture have, however, instructed us. We learn, from the Book of Job, that when the foundations of the earth were laid, "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy;" and as these beings must have had some local habitation, Vol. I.-D

we are justified in concluding, that they and the world of which they are inhabitants were in existence, at least, previously to the era of the six days' creation. The first verse of the first chapter of Genesis is accordingly to be read as detailing events quite distinct from those detailed in the verses which immediately follow. It refers exclusively to that moment, be it when it might, when Almighty God first saw fit to exercise his goodness, in bestowing a separate existence upon his creatures.

The same silence which Moses has preserved touching the beginning of time, properly so called, distinguishes his account of the creation of the matter of which our system is composed. We are told, indeed, that "God created the heavens and the earth," and that "the earth was without form and void, darkness being upon the deep, when the Spirit of God moved or brooded upon the face of the waters:" but how long the solar system had lain in this state previous to its reduction into order, we are left without any data from which to draw a conclusion. From this circumstance, an opinion has, we believe, generally prevailed, that the very matter of our system had no existence till within the limited period of six or seven thousand years ago. There is nothing absolutely impossible in this; neither would the idea, though admitted, derogate in the smallest degree from the goodness or glory of the Creator. With Him, and with Him alone, must rest both the power and will to decide when any thing shall begin, as well as when it shall cease to be; and it is very certain that the pushing back of the act of creation, so to speak, millions of millions of years, would bring it no nearer to that which the poverty of human language compels us to call the fountainhead of time. No assignable quantity of successive duration bears any proportion to eternity; and hence, he who is disposed to cavil with the Mosaic history, on the ground that "the glory of Almighty God manifested in his works cannot be limited to the short space of six or seven thousand years," might urge his objection with the very same reason to a period ten thousand times more remote. But as objections have been started by geologists to the Mosaic account, arising out of the discovery of phenomena inconsistent, as they contend, with the notion of the world's extreme youth, it may be worth while to show not only that there is nothing in Scripture forbidding us to believe that the present is but the wreck of a former world, but a great deal, as well in re

velation as in natural science, to induce a persuasion that the case really is so.

With respect to arguments on this head drawn from Scripture, these must of necessity pretend to no greater weight than attaches to every specics of analogical reasoning. We learn there that God is a being whose designs never alter-one in whom "is no variableness, neither shadow of turning ;" and hence we not unnaturally arrive at the conclusion, that the laws by which he now governs, and declares that he shall hereafter govern the universe, must be the same according to which he has governed it in times past. One of these, however, seems clearly to be, that when this earth, or rather this system, shall have served its purpose, it shall pass away, or relapse into chaos, and be suc ceeded by another. "The stars from heaven shall fall, the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up, the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll, and all the host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig-tree." Again, St. John, in the language of prophecy, declares, "I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and heaven fled away, and there was found no place for them; and I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God: and the sea gave up the dead that were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead that were in them and they were judged every one according to their works." No one, we presume, can read these passages without being convinced that they refer to the awful period when this world, having served its purpose, shall be destroyed. But behold the issue. We learn, that "after the present heaven and the present earth shall have passed away, a new heaven and a new earth shall succeed them," and that "the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, shall appear as coming from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." From these expressions, combined and compared, we gather, that though, after the day of judgment, this world shall cease to be as it now is, the matter of which it is composed shall not be annihilated, but being arranged into new order, after a certain duration in chaos, shall give support to a new race of inhabitants. Reasoning from this again, by analogy, we conclude, that it is at least probable that some such occurrence took place previous to the Mosaic cosmogo

ny; and as Scripture nowhere forbids the idea, we shall cheerfully give to it admission, if we turn, in a proper frame of mind, to the sources of knowledge which natural science has opened out to us.

It was observed by a pious and eminent philosopher,* that "as the system of Jupiter and his satellites, is but an epitome of the great solar system to which he belongs, may not this be, in its turn, a faint representation of that grand system of the universe, round whose centre this sun, with his attending planets, and an inconceivable multitude of like systems, do in reality revolve, according to the law of gravitation? Now will our apprehension of chaos and ruin be changed into the contemplation of a countless number of nicely-adjusted motions, all proclaiming the sustaining hand of God!" The ideas excited by such language as this are, indeed, grand and overpowering; yet, as the same author observes, they seem to be justified by reason and analogy, and have accordingly been cherished by every philosopher who has thoroughly understood the Newtonian theory of the universe. It is true that gravitation, which is the basis of that theory, can be considered as nothing more than a mere fact or law of nature, by which all bodies tend towards one another; and if we search for the cause of that tendency, we shall speedily find ourselves compelled to resolve it into the fiat of the Almighty Creator. The same is the case with respect to the centrifugal or projectile force, which counterbalances the force of gravitation: it can be referred to nothing but the same Almighty power, emphatically called by Professor Robison, "the sustaining hand of God." But as we know from universal experience, that God's ordinary operations are carried on not by partial, but by general laws, it seems to follow, that, from the very beginning, the masses of matter which compose this universal system have been so distributed and arranged, as to balance each other; and that, as soon as one subordinate system was reduced to order, and began to revolve round the common centre of the whole, the chaotic masses out of which the other systems were afterwards formed, were made to revolve round the common centre likewise. According to this theory, then, the first great act of creation was not only instantaneous, but universal. God said, Let the universe be, and it arose; though whether in the beautiful order which

*The late Professor Robison, of Edinburgh.

now pervades it, or having some systems only arranged whilst others rolled round the common centre in chaos, as we have no means of arriving at any thing like knowledge, so are we without authority to hazard a conjecture.

Before passing on to other subjects, we esteem it fair towards ourselves, to remind the reader of a fact of which, however, he can hardly be supposed to be ignorant. "It is beyond dispute," says the same learned Professor, whose words we have already quoted, "that several stars in the catalogues of Hipparchus, of Ulugh Beigh, of Tycho Brahe, and even of Flamstead, are no more to be seen :-they are gone, and have left no trace." How is this to be accounted for, and what has become of them? There is no reason to believe, either from revelation or experience, that so much as one atom of matter has been annihilated since the beginning of the world. That matter has changed its forms, passing from confusion into order, and from order into confusion, from vigour into decay, and from the dissolution of one body into the renovation of another, is indisputable ; but nothing, as far as we can discover, has been reduced into nonentity, even by combustion itself. Is it not reasonable then, to suppose, that those stars which have certainly disappeared, were the luminous centres of such systems as our own, and that, having served the purpose for which they were formed, they are now reduced to that chaotic state in which the sacred historian assures us that the solar system was, when "the earth was without form and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep," and that when it shall seem good to the Divine Architect, the matter of which they are composed may again be restored to beauty and regularity of form. Nor is the incontestable fact to be passed over, in the consideration of this theory, that new stars are continually appearing in the heavens. May not these be the restoration to order of systems which had formerly been reduced to chaos, and thereby rendered invisible, so that the process of forming and destroying worlds may have been carried on from the beginning, and may be continued through all eternity, according to the will of the Supreme Creator and Governor of the universe, who neither slumbers or sleeps, and whose eternal Son has declared. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work."

Such are some of many reasons which lead us to believe,

* Professor Robison's Elements of Mechanical Philosophy.