SIXTH STROPHE.
And God said, Let the land bring forth living souls after their kind:
Cattle, and creeping things, and land-animals after their kind:
And it was so.
And God made land-animals after their kind,
And cattle after their kind,
And all creeping things after their kind.
Refrain—And God saw that it was good.
And God said, Let us make MAN in our image, after our likeness;
And let him have dominion over the fish of the sea,
And over the birds of the heavens,
And over the cattle,
And over the land,
And over all the creeping things that creep upon the land.
And God created MAN in his own image;
In the image of God created He him:
Male and female created He them.
And God blessed them; and God said unto them,
Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it;
And have dominion over the fishes of the sea,
And over the birds of the heavens,
And over all the animals that creep upon the land.
And God said, Behold, I have given you all herbs seeding seed which are upon the face of all the land,
And every tree which has seed-inclosed fruit:
They shall be unto you for food.
And to all land-animals,
And to all the birds of the heavens,
And to all creeping things upon the land wherein is a living soul,
I have given every green herb for food:
And it was so.
Refrain—And God saw every thing that He had made, and behold it was very good.
And there was evening and there was morning: the sixth day.
EPODE.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished,
And all the hosts of them.
And on the seventh day God put period to the work which He had made;
And He rested on the seventh day from all his work which He had made.
And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it:
Because that in it He rested from all his works which God by making created.
Who can read this sublime composition without feeling that it is "a solemn sonnet freighted with a single thought from beginning to end?" In our English Bible, broken up into verses, and split across into two chapters, it is like an image reflected in a shattered mirror; all its real beauty is concealed. But he who can look upon it with a clear eye, and grasp its real unity, must recognize it as a Sacred Hymn composed probably by Adam, and chanted in the tents of the patriarchs at their morning and evening devotions for more than two thousand years, to commemorate the fact and keep alive the faith that the world is the work of the triune God.
Besides being poetic, the sacred narrative is pre-eminently symbolical—must be symbolical, because the Divine reality could never be intuitively known. The facts transcend all the possibilities of human experience. Whatever knowledge the writer had in regard to the creative process must have been obtained in a preternatural way—that is, it must have been revealed by Divine Omniscience. But such a revelation could not have been communicated in mere vocables. Words are themselves but signs—mere arbitrary signs of images and ideas—and can convey no meaning unless the image or the idea be already before the mind. The only natural hypothesis is that the knowledge was conveyed in a symbolic representation—a vision of the past in a succession of scenic representations with accompanying verbal announcements, like the visions of the future in the prophecies of Ezekiel and the apocalypse of John. The original formless nebula—the primeval darkness—the brooding Spirit producing motion—the consequent luminosity—the separation of the aeriform fluid into atmosphere and water—the emergence of the solid land—the shooting forth of grass and plants—the appearance of the heavenly luminaries—the swarming of the waters with living things, and the appearance of birds of wing in the expanse of heaven—the bringing forth of land-animals—and, finally, the creation of man—all pass before his mind in a succession of pictorial representations of the actual progress of creation. "The sights seen, the voices heard, the emotions aroused, are just those adapted to bring out the very words the seer actually uses, and in both cases the very best words that could have been used for such a purpose. The description being given from the barely optical rather than from any reflective scientific stand-point more or less advanced, is on this very account the more vivid as well as the more universal. It is a language read and understood by all." The words of the inspired writer are descriptive of the "vision pictures," and these were symbolic representations of the Divine realities.