Now why should this truth be supposed to lie against the teaching of Scripture? The object of Moses in the first chapter of Genesis, is to teach us that all existing matter owes its origin to the God of the Bible, and not to any of the idols of the heathen. “In the beginning,” says that oldest historical record with which we are acquainted, “God created the heaven and the earth;” that is, we apprehend, at some period of the earth’s history, in all probability an undefined and incalculable distance from the present time, God created all matter out of nothing, the universe, these heavens and this earth, began to be at the word of God.
“But afterwards,” says Dr. Pye Smith, in his translation of these words, “the earth was without form and void;” undergoing, we believe, those vast geological changes, those deposits of metal, and those slow accumulations of mineral wealth, by which it was fitted to become the temple, the palace, the workshop, and the home of man. “The first sentence in Genesis is a simple, independent, all-comprehending axiom to this effect, that matter elementary or combined, aggregated only or organised, and dependent, sentient, and intellectual beings, have not existed from eternity either in self-continuity or succession; but had a beginning; that their beginning took place by the all-powerful will of one Being, the Self-existent, Independent and Infinite in all perfection; and that the date of that beginning is not made known.”[[5]]
Dr. Redford says, “We ought to understand Moses as saying, that indefinitely far back and concealed from us in the mystery of eternal ages prior to the first moment of mundane time, God created the heavens and the earth;” and Dr. Harris in the same strain writes thus, “The first verse in Genesis was designed by the Divine Spirit to announce the absolute origination of the material universe by the Almighty Creator; and it is so understood in the other parts of holy writ; passing by an indefinite interval, the second verse describes the state of our planet immediately prior to the Adamic creation, and the third verse begins the account of the six days’ work.”
On this subject we will quote but one brief sentence more—and we have preferred using these quotations to stating the question in our words, thoroughly accordant as they would have been. In Dr. Hitchcock’s valuable work, entitled “The Religion of Geology,” he says, “The time is not far distant when the high antiquity of the globe will be regarded as no more opposed to the Bible than the earth’s revolution round the sun and on its axis. Soon shall the horizon where Geology and Revelation meet be cleared of every cloud, and present only an unbroken and magnificent circle of truth.”
Let these thoughts be borne in mind while we pursue our examination of the solid crust of this globe. We do not
“drill and bore
The solid earth, and from its strata thence
Extract a register, by which we learn
That He who made it and revealed its date
To Moses was mistaken in its age.”