The reader will recognize that there is not the least exaggeration in this. It is plain matter of fact, as I have endeavoured to show in the earlier chapters of this book. Everywhere we see force ready to be evoked by the proper method. Everywhere we see molecular motion, and a perpetual combination and resolution of elements and compounds, whether chemical or mechanical.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE INTERPRETATION SUPPORTED BY OTHER SCRIPTURES.
In interpreting the narrative before us, we have an important aid which has hardly received the attention it deserves. I allude to the other passages of Scripture which were written by men undoubtedly familiar with the Book of Genesis.
Now, in more than one of them, I find the idea that the Creation spoken of is the Divine work in heaven, and not the subsequent and long process of its realization on the surface of our globe, fully confirmed.
In the beautiful thirty-eighth chapter of the very ancient Book of Job, we find a distinct allusion to a time when God "laid the foundations" of the earth, prescribed "its measures," made a "decreed place" for the sea, and framed the "ordinances of heaven," and this in presence of the heavenly host assembled—