Uses of the Word "Day." 147 No man is able to determine the duration of the first three days, the sun not being conditioned, light and darkness depending upon circumstances with which we are unacquainted; and what about day in the Arctic regions, where there is a six months' night? That the now ordinary time was not meant, seems clearly indicated by all the days being called one"the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens" (Gen. ii. 4). To insist upon twenty-four hours as the limit, now that we have exacter knowledge, both of Scripture and Science, is to make knowledge useless. The light was day, the darkness was night. In contrast with this, evening and morning are used to designate the creative period; and on the seventh day, as if to show that the Sabbath day is not yet ended, neither evening nor morning is mentioned. Evening and morning, speaking exactly, do not include a day, are only parts of it; do not mean darkness and light, but the creative period-the period of strong and beautiful worldbuilding process: "it was evening and it was morning, day one." The extent of duration must be fixed according to the nature of the realities signified. Take a few examples"Thou art to pass over Jordan this day," the day meant a time not ending till after the death of the speaker (Deut. ix. 1). The "day of temptation" (Ps. xcv. 8) was a period of forty years. In Josh. iv. 6, "the time to come" is literally "tomorrow." In Ps. xc. the words, "A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night," seem to show that if Moses wished to indicate long age-periods, he would use the word "day." We conclude that "the days are representative terms, on the same scale as work and rest. . . . All alike denote Divine realities answering to human ones in precisely the same manner. Truly as God's work is similar to our work, His rest to our rest, so are His days to our days." When, in the cosmogony, we read of six days, we have no more right to suppose that in six periods, every one of twenty-four hours' duration, God made all things; than we have to suppose that He literally gave Hebrew names to things, and rested; we are to understand 1 "The Week of Creation : " Geo. Warrington. that He created all things in such periods of time as might to man's finite mind be most fitly represented by six days.1 Two difficulties now meet us 1. If the days mean vast periods, a great space should be occupied by plants only, then by plants and fish, after that by plants, fish, other animals, in layers answering to the time of their creation; but no such separateness exists-the organisms overlap both in place and time. 2. If day means age, the ages would, according to the figure used, be separated by long intervals of darkness destructive to life. Solution 1.-The creative process of plants and animals was by orderly advance to the higher organisms; and is rightly represented, as it would appear to man, in succession. There was a time when no life existed, then came the rudimentary plants, then moving creatures of the water, after that land animals. The preparation for and initiation of all life was, doubtless, by somewhat similar and, to a certain extent, simultaneous operation. Life, in the sea, did not wait until vegetation had done a perfect work; nor had the sea become full before the land began to be inhabited. There were no grand tenantless forests on the shores of vast dead seas; wherever nutritious plants grew, there animals existed. This fact explains and justifies the Scriptural use of the word "day;" in one sense, the almost simultaneous origination of initial creative processes is represented; and, in another sense, the vast ages of orderly progressive evolution are comprehended. Solution 2.-Light and darkness seem purposely excluded, as if to guard us against thinking that a literal day was meant. Evening and morning appear to be chosen because they do not mean day and night. After the fifth verse neither light nor darkness is mentioned. Light is called "day," not as meaning twenty-four hours, but that brightness which was produced by operation of the Holy Ghost; and the darkness is called "night," to denote that chaos out of which light was brought. Any one of sufficient attention may observe that, in the fifth and in the eighteenth verses of the first chapter of 1 "The Week of Creation:" Geo. Warrington. The Fourth Commandment. 149 Genesis, "day" and "night" are spoken of separately, and in contrast with the "evening" and "morning" in verses 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31. In fact, as in Dan. viii. 26, "the vision of the evening and the morning which was told is true; for it shall be for many days." The real difficulty arises out of the Fourth Commandment"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor the stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it” (Ex. xx. 8-11). "In reading through the eleventh verse it is extremely difficult to believe that the seventh day is a long period, and the Sabbath day an ordinary day; that is, that the same word 'day' should be used in such totally different senses in the same short sentence, and without explanation."1 This difficulty, fairly met, establishes the verity of the symbolism. The word "day" is not used in two different senses. As the day of toil to man, so is the day of rest; and as the day of work to God, so is the day of repose. The true difficulty is creation is continuous, no break exists anywhere, processes now in operation perpetuate the primeval operation. "Deus operatur semper, et quietus est." God's life is all Sabbath and no Sabbath. The Mosaic account implies a cessation and change in world-development, there not having been any such change; consequently, Gen. ii. 2, 3, is only ἀνθρωπινὸς λόγος, adapted to early unphilosophical conceptions. Human labour in producing, is a symbol of the Divine act in creating; man's repose is a figure of Godly rest. How long did it take God to create the world? Not so long in the Divine lifetime as a week is in man's lifetime. Grand as is the universe, vast as are its operations, many and various the inhabitants, the whole must be regarded by man as not so great a task to God as a week's work to himself. The days. 1 46 Essays and Reviews," Mosaic Cosmogony: C. W. Goodwin, M.A. are all the same, and are all symbolical. Suppose that Moses meant-For six successive Divine days, in which moments are years, God's hand worked; on the seventh Divine day, not yet concluded (Heb. iv. 3–9), He began to rest. Let all holy men, as made in God's image, observe God's rule. Would not such a meaning add greatly to the force of the Divine command? In it is a moral measure for all time, and the key-note of providential arrangements. In it is a peculiar majesty, specially suited to the grandeur of creation revealed by the growth of science; and the withholding of a true interpretation until now, affords proof of original inspiration. The sanctity and safety of the Sabbath are not shaken, but assured; built on truthful, not erroneous interpretation. We may not presumptuously take any day we please as a seventh of our time; the day was fixed, first, by Divine command; and, now, is settled by Scriptural example and Christian use. Our days, our weeks, our Sabbaths, our work, our rest, are appointed, made holy, linked to God. We liken them to a ladder, set upon the earth, by which we climb to heaven. They are as a pathway across the territory of time; one end vanishes in the past to possess the antiquities of God, the other is lost in the great world-times of the future. The sacred week has not yet been measured by science-as to its duration, nor comprehended—as to its work; on the use we make of our own day in it depends our weal or woe in future life. We men shall rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things; "Or reach a hand through time to catch The far-off interest of sins." Our conclusion, as to the days' vast extent, receives support from two works lately published on chronology. The writer shows that the Babylonians were acquainted with a solar period of 1460 years, and with a lunar period of 1805 years. The latter having been discovered by observation, not by calculation, some idea may be formed of the immense antiquity of Babylonian astronomy-already, even in the second "Die Daten der Genesis: " Jules Oppert.-(From the "Nachrichten von der k. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen," No 10, 1877.) "Salomon et ses Successeurs : " Jules Oppert. Paris, Maissonneuve & Cie. 1877. Chaldean Chronology. 151 millennium before the Christian era, familiar with those periods. The author states that the chronology, as found in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, is "original and unfalsified ;" and agrees with the chronology of the corresponding periods of Chaldean tradition. As to the time occupied by creation, where the Bible reckons one hour, the Chaldeans computed 10,000 years. The seven days, or 168 hours of the Bible, are the 168 myriads of years of the Chaldean historian, Berosus. In the antediluvian period, a Bible-week answers to five years, or a "Doss" of months in the Chaldean chronology the proportion being as 23 to 6000, and 23 years including 1200 weeks. As the divisor 23 occurs three times in the chronology of the antediluvian patriarchs, so the divisor 6000 occurs three times in that of the Chaldean antediluvian kings. Whether or not further investigation will confirm the antiquity asserted by Jules Oppert remains to be seen. Our own argument has been worked out independently. We are asked "Why the larger interpretation, supposing it to be correct, was not earlier and forcibly given?" We reply-The true interpretation may have been lost, as the Chaldean History was lost; or, we may say-It would have been useless, men could not have understood it. Men, studying Nature all these thousands of years, have not attained to a full knowledge of it; no wonder that they are imperfect in interpretation of Scripture. Philosophy has been many ages in progress, yet how little is that progress! We may be sure that a faultless interpretation of Scripture will not be inconsistent with a perfect knowledge of Nature. The sacred language is not only for the mass of mankind—incapable of reasoning, but for those who are able to give a reason for the hope that is in them, men like Newton and Pascal, Butler and Paley, competent in the domain of scholarship. God's Word abides in the same letter, while reason and science change their language, but it expands within its own limits for verification of the Divine origin, for contentment of our emotional and intellectual requirements. No addition can be made by human ingenuity to the amount of revealed information; spiritual and material substance are alike of God, and cannot be added to; but-as we obtain deeper, wider, more |