"The contest, in its early stages, was carried on by those religionists who construed the Mosaic days of the creation to have been six successive natural daj'S of twenty-four hours each, measured by the revolution of our globe on its axis ; and the objection of the ge- ologist was founded on the obvious impossibility or absurdity that the world could have been stocked with the various animal and vegetable organisms, whose re- mains have been found in the crust of the earth, in the brief period of the six natural daj's that preceded the birth of Adam. The evidence was incontrovertible that for untold ages before that event generation upon generation of extinct animals had lived and died upon the earth.
1. "To meet this difficultj% which threatened to blot out the first ])age of the Scriptures from inspired rev- elation, and which was obviousl}' subversive of the authenticity and inspiration of all Scripture, a host of champions arose, who, instead of examining with pa- tience and testing with care the alleged facts of geol- ogy, recklessly denied their existence, or sought to explain and account for them on whollj' inadequate, and in many instances on false and absurd principles and grounds. Some ascribed the existence of fossil remains to the fiood in the days of Noah ; others to what was termed a plastic power tiuit existed as one
of the natural laws of matter; and others, again, in- sisted that the various sj-stems of rocks were created by the fiat of the Almighty with the fossil remains of animals that had never lived, and of plants that had never grown, imbedded in them. These were the rea- sonings of Granville Penn, Fairholm, Kirb}', Sharon Turner, Gisborne, Taylor, dean Cockburn, etc. ; and of them it is unnecessary to say more than that the progress of scientific discovery has extinguished their arguments, not only without injur}' to the cause of Scripture truth, but with the effect of establisiiing it on a surer basis.
2. "Another class of inquirers sought to solve the difficulty by conceding the well-established facts of geology and the geological explanations of those facts, but suggesting that the imperfection of our knowledge of the original Hebrew at the present day was such as to preclude all certainty of a right interpretation of its meaning. This was the position of BaLbage ; while Baden Powell insisted that the narrative of the crea- tion is couched in the language of mythic poetry, and was not intended to lie a historical detail of natural occurrences. It is satisfactory to know that the ne- cessity for arguments so injurious in their tendencies to the cause of the truth and integrity of the Bible no longer exists; for the precision of the Mosaic phrase- ology will be found confirmed by every step tliat has been taken in the development of the truths of geology.
3. "At an early period of this controversy. Dr. Chal- mers, whose sagacious mind and prudent foresight comprehended the importance of this issue between the facts of geology and tlic language of the Scrip- tures, propounded the proposition that 'the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe'- — that after the creation of the heavens and the earth, which may have comprehended any interval of time and any extent of animal and vegetable life, a chaotic period ensued, when deatli and darkness reigned upon our globe, and the earth became, in Scripture language, 'without form and void,' and all that had previously existed was, by some catastrophe, blotted out, and a new world of light and life produced, by fiats of the Deity, in a period of six natural days, closing with the liirtli of Adam ; and thus the world which now exists was cut oflf from that which preceded it by a period of black, chaotic disorder. The geologist had thus ample room for the existence of all the organisms whose remains are found in the rocks that compose the crust of the earth, and he might labor in his in- vestigation of the nature and order of geological events without endangering the truth of the Mosaic record of the creation" (Kitto).
Against this view Dr. Conant urges several objec- tions {Revised Version of Genesis, p. xx), the force of which, however, may in a great measure be readily parried. 1. The sacred writer himself gives no inti- mation of such an interval. Of course not, since its mention forms no part of his plan. An orywnentum a sikntio is wholly invalid. It is sufficient if a space can be found in point of fact. 2. It assumes that Mo- ses has given us an account of only apart of the crea- tive work. But no one claims that he has given all the details of creation, or even a complete outline of it. His object was mereh' to state so much as stands connected with human history; and on the view in question, this is more perfectly done than b}- any other interpretation, since it was the last creative stage by which the earth was special!}' fitted for man's abode. 3. Science shows no such convulsion in the period pre- ceding man's introduction on the earth. On the con- trary, an innumerable series of such cataclysms are revealed between the various strata of the earth's crust, and there is special evidence of some general ice-wave almost immediately preceding the historic period, in the jihenomcna of drift, bowlders, and stria- ted rocks, all of whicli are everywhere strewn upon the present surface of the globe. 4. Six extended ere-