But although these high authorities—A Lapide, Tostatus, Saint Augustine—and some others less illustrious than these, are unfavorable to our interpretation, we think it is supported by a preponderance of the best interpreters, both in ancient and modern times. At all events, with such an array of venerable names as we have been able to bring forward in its behalf,—and they are but a few chosen out of many,—no one can deny that we are fairly entitled to hold it without any note of censure, without any suspicion of Theological error. Setting out, then, from this point, that there was a state of created existence prior to the Six Days of the Mosaic history, the question naturally arises, how long did that state of existence endure? Was it for an hour? a day? a week? a month? a century? a million of years? We cannot tell. To these questions the Sacred Text gives no reply. It simply records that in the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth, and that, at some subsequent epoch of time, His decree again went forth, Let there be light, and light there was. One thing, however, is plain, that, if this period existed at all, it might just as well have lasted a hundred millions of years as a hundred seconds. It would be folly to attempt to measure the succession of God’s acts, when he does please to produce effects in succession, according to our petty standards of time. “One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”[131]
And it is not a little remarkable that, long before the discoveries of Geology had suggested any necessity for allowing the lapse of many ages between the first creation of the world and the creation of man, the sagacity of our commentators led them to observe that the duration of this interval is left undefined in the Sacred Record. “How long that interval may have lasted,” says Petavius, “it is absolutely impossible to conjecture.” And Perrerius, as we have seen, declared that it could not be known except by a special revelation. And five centuries earlier, at the very dawn of Scholastic Theology, Hugh of Saint Victor raised the same question, and expressed his opinion that it could not be solved from Scripture. Citing the passage, In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth, he says, “From these words it is plain that in the beginning of time, or rather with time itself, the original matter of all things came into existence. But how long it remained in this confused and unshapely condition the Scripture clearly does not tell us.”[132]
We may go further still. If we are at liberty to admit an interval of indefinite length between the creation of the world and the work of the Six Days, there is certainly nothing which forbids us to suppose that, during this period, the earth should have undergone many revolutions, and have been peopled by countless tribes of plants and animals, which, as age rolled on after age, came into existence, and died out, and were succeeded by new creations. We cannot, perhaps, see the use of all this, nor can we penetrate the motives the Great Creator might have had in bringing into existence such a boundless profusion of organic life. Granted: but then we have studied the Sacred Text to little purpose if we have not yet realized the solemn truth that, to our poor and feeble intellects, His judgments are incomprehensible, and his ways unsearchable. Did He not set His stars in the remotest regions of space, far beyond the reach of unaided human vision, and did they not shine there for ages, though man could see them not? And for ages, too, did not the wild flowers spring up, and bloom, and decay, in many a fair and favored spot of this beautiful Earth, where there was none to admire their splendor, none to inhale their sweetness? Then again, look at that marvellous kingdom of minute animalcules, in number almost infinite, which only within the last few years the microscope has revealed to our wondering eyes. They swarm around us in the air, in the earth, in the water. Millions of them would fit in the hollow of your hand; many hundreds might swim side by side, without crowding, through the eye of a cambric needle. And they too, we can hardly doubt, must have flourished for centuries in countless myriads, unseen and unknown by man. It is impossible for us, in our present imperfect state, to understand the motives of an All-wise Creator in this profuse expenditure of his goodness, this lavish display of His power. How then can we presume to say that He may not have good reasons, though inscrutable to us, for peopling this Earth with many tribes of plants and animals, through a long cycle of ages, before it pleased Him to fit it up for the habitation of man? “Who is he among men that can know the counsel of God? or who can find out His designs? For the judgments of mortal men are hesitating, and uncertain are our thoughts. For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly dwelling presseth down the mind that museth upon many things. And hardly do we guess aright at things that are upon earth: and with labor do we find the things that are before us. But the things that are in heaven who shall search out?”[133]
We have heard it sometimes objected that plants and animals could not have existed without light; and that light was not created until the beginning of the First Mosaic Day. Many curious and interesting facts are adduced in support of this argument. For example, we are reminded that certain Fossil animals belonging to the earliest Geological Periods, are shown by the clearest evidence, to have had eyes constructed on the same optical principles, and accommodated to the same optical conditions, as the eyes of those animals that have flourished on the Earth during the period of history: and such eyes, it is contended, plainly import the existence of light. The answer to this objection may be stated in a very few words. We freely admit that the hypothesis we have been defending would be of little use to account for Geological phenomena, if it did not include the existence of light, during that Period of indefinite duration which we suppose to have elapsed between the first creation of the world and the work of the Six Days. But in truth there is no difficulty in supposing that, during such an interval, light may have prevailed upon the earth, and air, and all the other conditions of organic life, pretty much as they do at the present day. Afterward, at the close of the period, when, perhaps, ages innumerable had rolled by, this planet of ours would have appeared in that condition which is described in the second verse of Genesis: “And the earth was waste and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Then the command of God would have gone forth, “Let there be light:” and at once the darkness would have been dispelled, a new era of existence would have commenced, and the Earth would forthwith have been set in order and furnished, in a special manner, for the habitation of man.
Even as regards the Sun, Moon, and Stars, they too may have existed before the work of the Six Days began. We read, no doubt, that on the Fourth Day, God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night:” and a little farther on it is added that “God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; and the stars.” But then it must be remembered that some of our best Commentators, without any reference to Geology, have taught that, before this command was given, the heavenly bodies were already in existence for three days, and were already discharging the office of dividing day and night. They explain the passage by saying that the Sun, Moon, and Stars, are represented as having been made on the Fourth Day, not because they were then produced for the first time out of nothing, but because the vapors by which they had been obscured were, on that Day, dissipated, and they began to shine visibly in the Firmament of Heaven. If this line of interpretation is admissible, and it seems to us not unreasonable, then we are certainly at liberty to hold, consistently with the Mosaic narrative, that the Heavenly bodies may have been created with the Heavens and the Earth in the beginning of all time; and that on the Fourth Day they were made manifest in the Firmament to rule over the day and the night, and to regulate the course of the years and the seasons.[134]
Again it is urged against our hypothesis that Moses could not have passed over in complete silence such a long and eventful era in the history of the world. Certainly not, we admit, if he professed to write a complete history of the Earth and all its revolutions. But this was not his purpose. Every book, whether sacred or profane, must be examined and interpreted according to the end for which it was designed. Now the end and scope of the Book of Genesis was not to instruct mankind about the movements of the heavenly bodies, or the physical changes of the Earth’s surface, or the laws which govern the material universe. It was, first of all, to impress on the minds of the Jewish people that this world of ours is the work of one only God, distinct from all creatures, and Himself the Creator of sun, moon, and stars, and of every other object which pagan nations were wont to worship: and in the next place, to set forth, briefly and simply, the story of God’s dealings with man in the first ages of the human race. Whatever we may hold, therefore, about the revolutions and changes of the Earth’s surface previous to the work of the Six Days, it is plain that the history of these phenomena did not appertain to the object which the Sacred writer had in view. Consequently he cannot be said, by the omission of these events, to lead his readers into error; he simply allows them to remain in ignorance. What it was his purpose to tell, he tells truly: what did not belong to his purpose, he passes by in silence.
But it is further argued that this long interval of time we have been contending for, is incompatible with the use of the copulative conjunction, by which the several clauses of the narrative are connected together. The Sacred text runs thus:—“In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. And the Earth was waste and empty: and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” Is it possible, we are asked, to admit a period of indefinite length between events thus closely linked together? Our answer is that, according to the idiom of the Hebrew language, the conjunction וְ or וָ (ve or va), which is here employed, while it serves to connect together the clauses of a narrative, does not of necessity imply the immediate succession of the events recorded. The very wide and indefinite signification which belongs to this little particle is well known to all who are familiar with the Hebrew text. It is sometimes copulative, sometimes adversative, sometimes disjunctive, sometimes causal. Very frequently it is used simply for the purpose of continuing the discourse;[135] and this we believe is the true force of the word in the passage under discussion.
An example very much to the point occurs in the Book of Numbers, twentieth chapter and first verse:—“And the children of Israel, the whole congregation came into the desert of Sin.” Here the narrative opens with the connecting particle ויבואו בני ישראל כל העדה—:ו. And yet the reader will find, if he carefully examine the passage, that the event thus introduced by the sacred writer was separated by a period of eight-and-thirty years from those which had been related in the preceding chapter. This conjunction, therefore, does not exclude an interval of eight-and-thirty years between the events which it links together in history. And that being so, there is no good reason for supposing that it should, of necessity, exclude an interval of indefinite length.
The Weakness of this objection may be made even more strikingly manifest by an inspection of the opening words in the first chapter of Ezechiel:—ריהי בשלשים שנה. So little did the notion prevail that the conjunction ו (ve) could be used only to connect together events closely associated in point of time, that here it actually begins the narrative, and is, in fact, the first word of the whole book. In the Douay version the passage is not inaptly rendered after this manner: “Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, when I was in the midst of the captives by the River Chobar, the heavens were opened, and I saw the visions of God.”