Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/30

 26 opinion of Dr. Chalmers, recorded in the following passages of his Evidence of the Christian Revelation, chap. vii.:— "Does Moses ever say, that when God created the heavens and the earth, he did more, at the time alluded to, than transform them out of previously existing materials? Or does he ever say that there was not an interval of many ages between the first act of creation described in the first verse of the Book of Genesis, and said to have been performed at the 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 hearth." 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 Gods created the heaven and the earth in the first day, but in the beginning; this beginning may have been an epoch at an unmeasured distance, followed by periods of underlined duration, during which all the physical operations disclosed by Geology were going on.