CHAPTER  I

The Creation

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

   Thus God puts His seal upon the forehead of the Bible. Thus, in the volume of Inspiration, with the
first breath of His mouth, He destroys forever the deadly errors of polytheism, pantheism, atheism,
deism, materialism, agnosticism, accidentalism, evolutionism, positivism, naturalism, rationalism,
dualism, two-seedism, fatalism, nihilism, pessimism, idolatry and superstition. This one statement of
the Scriptures is of infinitely more value than all the words of all the uninspired men that ever lived. 
It transports us at once above all human science and tradition and philosophy, above the dark,
interminable, labyrinthine wanderings of the natural mind, beyond the bounds of time to the clear
divine depths of the ancient eternity.  It declares to us, in language of the sublimest simplicity and
truthfulness, that "In the beginning,"  at a period of the distant past unknown to mortals, "God,"
Elohim, the Almighty Trinity, ** Father, Word, and Spirit, the alone Eternal, Self-Existent Being, by
an act of His sovereign will, and for the manifestation of His own glory (Col. i. 16; Rev. iv. 11), the
highest conceivable motive, "created the heaven and the earth," produced from non-existence the
entire universe of matter and of mind (Acts xvii. 24.) Not one atom, not one spirit, through all the
infinity of space, but owes its origin to God. Atoms, to which science reduces all matter, have, with
their determinate weights and volumes, all {he properties of "manufactured articles," and cannot,
therefore, be eternal and self-existent, says Sir John Herschel, the finest*** scientific intellect of the
nineteenth century. The material forces, says the learned and accurate Carpenter, must, in the ultimate
resort, be an expression of will.  Spirit unerringly points away from matter to a spiritual Father, God,
says Dr. Emil du Bois-Reymond, the greatest*** of living physiologists.

 * The leading Scriptures referring to the Creation are: --Job xxxviii.-xli.; Psalms viii., xix., civ.:
Proverbs vii. 22-31: Isaiah xi. 12-31; John 3. 1-10; Colossians i. 16, 17: Hebrews i. 2, 3: xi. 3. The
following Scriptures tell us what God did before the Creation :--Matthew xxv. 34 · Ephesians i. 4; 2
Timothy i. 9.

** Trinitarianism is essentially distinct from Tritheism,  the first affirming the Three-Oneness of God,
and the second declaring that there are Three Gods.  No Christian can be a Tritheist. The ONENESS
of God is the most certain fact and the most prominent article of revelation in all the book of Scripture
and the book of Nature; yet the THREE-FOLD nature of this Oneness--the TRINITY or THREE-
ONENESS of God-- is the second most prominent and important fact revealed in the Scriptures.  It
would be of no consequence to me that the great body of God's people from the beginning of the
Christian era have held this doctrine, that all the oldest Baptist Confessions of Faith declare a belief in
the Trinity of God, that ninety-nine-hundredths of the Primitive Baptists in the United States believe it
or even that my father believed it-- if I did not think the doctrine to be unmistakably taught in the
Scriptures.  The doctrine of the Trinity is obscurely revealed from the beginning of Genesis to the end
of Malachi, and it is clearly revealed from the first of Matthew to the last of Revelation. It underlies
and penetrates the whole of Christian experience from its beginning in the past eternity to its
consummation in the eternity to come. The entire cause of the poor sinner's salvation is the electing
love of God the rather, the redeeming love of God the Son, and the regenerating love of God the
Spirit. Thirty times in the first chapter of Genesis-- twenty-two hundred times in the Old Testament—
is theplurality of the divine nature declared by the use of the word ELOHIM (which literally
means The Mighty Ones) as the name of God (Elohim being the plural form of El, The Mighty One --
not the dual form, meaning but two or a pair, but plural, and the simplest plural oneness that is not
two-fold is three-fold), and in all these instances, where Elohim, referring to God, is the subject of a
verb, or where a pronoun is used in reference to Elohim (except rarely, when there is an allusion to
polytheism), the verb and pronoun are in the singular  number, proving the unity  or oneness  of
the Divine Plurality,  as is also proved by the plural noun Elohim being combined with
the singular  noun Jehovah (the two names together being translated Lord God), twenty times in the
second and  third chapters of Genesis, and nearly three hundred times in the Old Testament. The
plural unity of the divine nature is further shown by Genesis i. 26; iii. 22 · xi. 7; Isaiah vi. 3, 8;
Numbers vi. 24, 26, compared with 2 Corinthians xiii. 14; Exodus iii. 2, 6; Psalms ii; xlv. 6, 7: cx.;
Isaiah ix. 6, Jeremiah xxiii. 6: Zechariah xii. 10: xiii. 7: Malachi iii. 1-4, compared with Matthew iii.
11-12; Genesis i. 2; vi. 3; Psalms civ, 30; cxxxix. 7; Job xxvi. 13; Isaiah xlviii. 16; Matthew i. 18-25;
iii, 13-17; xxviii, 19; John xv. 26; 1 John v. 7; Revelation i. 5, 6, 10;xxii. 1, .3, 17. It is not strictly
Scriptural language to say that there are three persons in the Godhead, although the primitive
meaning of the term person is character, and it seems to me being "wise above what is written" to say
that the Three-Oneness of God Is a Three-Oneness, not of inward nature,but only of outward
manifestation.   God is unchangeably the same in both time and eternity.  Christ says that there is
an otherness as well as a oneness in the Godhead (John xiv. 9, 16, 28); and, unless this language of
Christ be true, I fail utterly to see how there can be a real Father, a real Son and a real Spirit
proceeding from Father and Son; how the Father could send the Son and the Spirit into the world;
how the Son could pray to the Father and be answered by the Father; how Christ could use the
pronoun "I" in reference to Himself, and "Thou" in reference to the Father, and "He" in reference to
the Spirit; how, while Jesus was being baptized in Jordan, the Spirit descended as a dove upon Him,
and the Father spoke to Him from heaven; how Christ could require His disciples to baptize believers
in the name of the Father, and  of the Son, and of the Spirit: and how, after He re-ascended to glory,
He could sit down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.  These facts thoroughly satisfy my mind
that there is an eternal Threeness as well as an eternal Oneness in the divine nature--that there is
something resembling a personal distinction between Father and Son and Spirit, while the distinction
is not the same as that generally understood between persons, because Father and Son and Spirit
areone.  The nature of the Divine Being is the deepest mystery all the universe, and it eminently
becomes all finite, fallible, and fallen creatures like ourselves, not to speculate upon the existence of
the incomprehensible God-- much less to persecute other mortals who cannot exactly pronounce our
own favorite shibboleths on this unfathomable subject; but to receive with childlike meekness and
faith all that is revealed in the Scriptures in reference to God, our Heavenly Father, our Elder Brother,
and our Blessed Comforter.  We cannot understand how the Lord Jesus Christ can be at the same
time, perfect man and perfect God; yet we believe in this duality of His nature.  We cannot
understand, though we are quite conscious of the two fold elements of our own nature, soul and body. 
In our present state, we understand nothing perfectly— we only know in part; but this does not
prevent our believing thousands of facts, all of which are perfectly understood.  We no more
understand the eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience of God than we understand the
Trinity of His being: but still we believe all these to be attributes of the Most High. "The doctrine of
the Trinity," says Prof. Philip Schaff, the most accurate and reliable of uninspired church historians,
"has been looked upon in all ages as the sacred symbol and the fundamental doctrine of the Christian
church, with the denial of which the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the divine character of
the work of redemption and sanctification, fall to the ground.  It distinguishes in the one and
indivisible essence of God three hypostases or persons; at the same time allowing for the insufficiency
of all human conception and words to describe such an unfathomable mystery. Sabellius is by far the
most original, profound and ingenious of the ante-Nicene Unitarians, and his system the most
plausible rival of orthodox Trinitarianism (it is also the least objectionable form of Unitarianism.) It
revives from time to time in various modifications. It differs from the orthodox standard mainly in
denying the trinity of essence and the permanence of the trinity of manifestation; making Father, Son
and Holy Ghost only temporary phenomena, which fulfill their mission and return into the abstract
monad." A very few of our highly esteemed ministers and brethren seem to favor something like this
view: but I do not believe that it is the view of one in a hundred of the Primitive Baptists in the United
States.
 *** In all things, Christ must have the preeminence. --Colossians i. 18

The ablest* minds have always referred the seen universe to an unseen spiritual source; and the facts
of the seen universe continually direct the true scientific mind to that unseen Spirit. "Without
revelation," says Prof. Tayler Lewis, "science is a valley of dry bones, and philosophy a land of
darkness." All natural discoveries and theories, so for as eternity is concerned, have well been called
"an awful nothingness."

* In all things, Christ must have the preeminence. --Colossians i. 18

The spontaneous evolution of nothing into atoms, force and spirit, is the height of unscientific
absurdity. "In prosecuting investigations into the origin of things," says President McCosh, "science
comes to walls of adamant, which will not fall down at its command, and which if it tries to break
through, will only prostrate it, and cause it to exhibit its weakness before the world."  It cannot
account for the origin of these five things: 1st, Matter with its forces; 2d, life; 3d, animal sensation or
feeling; 4th, mind; 5th, conscience.

Biogenesis, or the production of life only from life, is now the accepted doctrine of science.  No
creature power can span that gulf of all gulfs-- the mighty gulf between death and life. The answer to
the riddle of life, says Tennyson, is

"Behind the veil, behind the veil."

To get rid of the necessity of an ever-living personal God, the unbeliever is actually reduced to the
supreme folly of assuming that all matter is, in some sense, alive, conscious and immortal.--Stewart
and Tait’s Unseen Universe, pp. 242, 243. "Since the days of Democritus, atheism has run for shelter
to the doctrine of atoms. Although the microscope has never made an approach to this mysterious
domain, never having brought to light an atom, or a molecule, or even a molecular combination, yet
here in this utterly unknown region, a false science pretends to find life, consciousness, memory,
thought, imagination, reason, will--all that constitutes personality or individuality in our present state
of being." "Science," says Dawson, "does not show the origin of new species, but only of new sub-
species, varieties and races. The influence of a struggle for existence is greatly exaggerated by the
Darwinian school; it gives chiefly depauperated and degraded forms."  The "survival of the fittest" has
no other meaning than the "survival of the survivor," and explains nothing. In seeking to trace the
genesis of man, evolutionists agree that some of the indispensable links in the chain are buried
beneath submerged continents. But the most recent and accurate science declares that the same gulf
which is found today between man and the ape goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the
first period of the age of mammals.

Darwin, the leading naturalist of Europe, though he, contrary to human experience, reason and
revelation, seeks to derive all animate beings from three or four, or even one species, yet admits that
God must have created the first species. Herbert Spencer, the chief infidel philosopher of this century,
dares not attempt to explain, in his pretentious Biology and Psychology, the first appearance of life or
of mind, and confesses that he finds, beneath all phenomena, evidence of an unknown and
unknowable power. *

 *Nineteenth-century Agnosticism (or religious know-nothingism) was first suggested in the

antinomies of Kant, and was first taught in England by two ardent philosophic theists, Hamilton and
Mansel, in the ethical spirit of Kant, but, as President Porter well remarks, has been travestied,
materialized and demoralized by Spencer. Agnostic philosophy has as much reason to pronounce the
mind of man unknown and unknowable because it cannot be discovered by scientific instruments, as
to pronounce God unknown and unknowable because He cannot be so discovered.  A real, an
intelligent, and a morally-governed universe points unmistakably to a real, an intelligent and a moral
Creator and Governor.  A child may know something truly of God, but an angel cannot know Him
fully.  "They who know the least of him," admirably remarks President McCosh, "have in this the
most valuable of all knowledge;  they who know the most know but little after all of his glorious
perfections."  In the hands of a few inaccurate, dogmatic and unreliable leaders, and their weak,
ignorant and credulous followers, Agnosticism (know-nothingism) has turned into Gnosticism, or
Pan-Gnosticism (know-all-ism), whose arrogant pretensions to omniscience are, in the minds of all
thinking men, as ridiculous as they are incredible.

In a region of thick darkness, he would kindly allow us the Athenian privilege of erecting an altar to
the Great Unknown.  Huxley, while acknowledging the unequalled morality of the Bible, would have
the worship, at that altar, chiefly of the silent sort.  And Tyndall, though pronouncing the first chapter
of Genesis "a beautiful myth," declares that "no atheistic reasoning can dislodge religion from the
human heart."

Neither of these four infidels is a  geologist; and it is  geology, more than any other science, that
refers to the events described in the first chapter of Genesis.  The three leading* American geologists,
President J. W. Dawson, of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Professor James D. Dana, of Yale
College, Connecticut, and Professor Arnold Guyot, of Princeton College, New Jersey, as well as
Professor W. C. Kerr, the late learned State Geologist of North Carolina, writing in the year 1882 to
the junior author of this work, avow their unshaken belief in the perfect scientific accuracy of the first
chapter of Genesis.

*In all things, Christ must have the pre-eminence. --Colossians i. 18.

If accurate, as undoubtedly it is, then it was a revelation from God to man, whether made first to
Moses or to Adam or to Enoch; for none but God knew of these events.  And this divine revelation,
made at least 3,000 years before the rise of geology, stamps the whole book, of which it is the only
appropriate and inseparable introduction, as divine. The manifest purpose of the Scriptures is not
scientific, but much higher--it is moral and religious. "The first verse of the inspired volume places
God, as the one all-sufficient Creator, on a height infinitely above every other being; and it is well
fitted to remind us of our dependence on Him, of our responsibility to Him, and of our obligation to
submit to His authority, and to live for His glory."

No fact of science is opposed to any statement of the Bible; it is only the fallible, ever-changing, self-
contradictory theories of some scientific men that are so opposed.  Accurate observers are sometimes
very inaccurate reasoners. The utter absurdity and inconsistency of some of the latest theories of
scientists may be plainly seen by reference to A. Wilford Hall’s Problem of Human Life Here and
Hereafter, Judge J. B. Stallo’s Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, the 38th volume of
the International Scientific Series, published in 1882, and Samuel Wainwright’s Scientific Sophisms,
published in 1883.

"With all their scientific attainments," says Schellen (Spectrum Analysis, pp. 337-8), "the deepest
astronomical thinkers have, in regard to the stars, the same feeling as the little child:

 "‘ Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are!’"

In reference to all the most interesting and important truths of the stellar worlds, the skies are as silent
to men as of old.

The theories (not the facts) of geology seem to violate the laws of logic in basing inferences upon
local, partial and negative evidence, and to commit the fallacy of the vicious circle in deducing the
age of strata from the age of the contained fossils, and then deducing, the age of the fossils from the
age of the containing strata. And theoretical astronomy and geology are at swords’ points today in
regard to both the internal fluidity and the antiquity of the earth. Geology maintains that the earth
consists of a thin crust or shell full of all intensely heated molten mass; while astronomy maintains
that the visible crust of the earth is only one-half as dense and solid as the interior. Geology has been
insisting that the earth is at least a thousand million years old, and even now maintains that it is a
hundred millions; while mathematical astronomy inexorably reduces the age of the earth to about
twenty or even less than ten million years. --Encyclopedia Britannica.  9th edition, vol. 10, p. 297. 
Thus the uniformitarian theory, which Sir Charles Lyell spent his whole life to prove, has to be
abandoned, and the announcement is made in the highest scientific circles that the whole foundation
of theoretical geology must be reconstructed. With the reduction of the earth’s age, and the overthrow
of uniformitarianism, the entire system of an accidental godless evolution falls to the ground. Thus
Jehovah still sets the swords of the Midianites against each other, and vindicates His cause on earth.

True science is always modest. Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest* scientist that ever lived, said, a short
time before his death, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have
been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a
smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me." He did not seem to fear that, if he had been permitted to navigate that ocean, he would
have been in danger of making shipwreck of his faith. He was a firm believer in the inspiration of the
Scriptures. Humboldt, the most distinguished savant of the present century, admits that the challenge
of God to Job (Job xxxviii.-xli.) has never yet been answered. As in ancient times, man is "of
yesterday, and knows nothing"--Job viii. 9. "If any man think that he knoweth anything, he knoweth
nothing yet as he ought to know."--I Cor. viii. 2. "Now we see through a glass darkly, and know" only
"in part."--I Cor. xiii. 12. So that humility is the cardinal virtue as well of reason as of revelation.

 *In all things Christ must have the pre-eminence. –Colossians i. 18.

Moses, the meekest and greatest character in all antiquity before the coming of Christ, and a prophet
like unto Christ (Num. xii. 3; Deut. xviii. 15), was the undoubted author of the Pentateuch (including
Genesis), and the lawgiver of Israel and civilization.  Christ gives Moses and the other O1d Testament
writers all the weight of His own divine authority. --Matt. xvii. 3; Luke xxiv. 44.  "If they hear not
Moses and the prophets," says the glorified Abraham, "neither will they be persuaded though one rose
from the dead."--Luke xvi. 31.  The Bible is the great standing miracle of history.

The Mosaic narrative of creation is the oldest of human records, the original of all cosmogonies,
incomparably superior to all the monstrous pagan and infidel evolutionary cosmogonies, which derive
all objects from one unaided and eternal nature, while Genesis represents God as the Great First
Cause and Governor of nature. "In its great antiquity, its unaccountableness, its serene truthfulness, its
unapproachable sublimity, its divine majesty and ineffable holiness, the Mosaic record towers high
and forever above all human productions."

The old monumental Assyrian records, lately recovered and deciphered by G. Smith, H. Rawlinson
and A. H. Sayce, while corrupted with many human and polytheistic errors, substantially confirm the
Mosaic accounts of the creation, man’s original innocence, temptation, fall and curse, and his
subsequent, great depravity, and the deluge; just as the leading facts of Exodus are corroborated by
the monuments of Egypt.

The creation of the universe was a series of stupendous miracles or supernatural acts, surpassing and
introducing all the other natural miracles of the Bible.  So science finds infinite depths in nature,
inexplicable mysteries or miracles everywhere.  For He who hast made still upholds all things by His
omnipresent and omnipotent power, and the world by wisdom knows Him not. --Heb, i. 3; l Cor. i.
21.  "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things
which are seen were not made of things which do appear." --Heb, xi. 3.  And "the invisible things of
Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,
even His eternal power and Godhead;  so that they [men] are without excuse--Rom. i. 20.  "I had
rather believe" says Bacon, "all the fables in the Legend, the Talmud and the Alcoran, than that this
universal frame is without a mind."  Even Cicero remarks that "those works of nature which require
the minds of so many philosophers to explore them could not, have existed without some greater mind
at the bottom."  The existence of God has been believed by the greatest minds that have ever appeared
on earth-- Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Augustine, Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Euler,
Newton, Leibnitz, Shakespeare, Butler, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hall, Johnson, Kant, Napoleon,
Coleridge, Davy, Chalmers, Miller, Faraday, Herschel, Guizot, Maury and Agassiz, in addition to the
gifted characters mentioned in the Scriptures.  It is, according to the Psalmist, only the "fool" who
"says in his heart, There is no God."--Psalm xiv.1.  Infidelity or atheism has its seat, not so much in
the head as in the heart.  "The argument of Butler’s Analogy is," says John Stuart Mill, the
representative infidel of England, "from its own point of view, conclusive;  the Christian religion is
open to no objections, either moral or intellectual, which do not apply at least equally to the common
theory of deism."  And so the leading American infidel confesses that if there be a God of nature, the
God of the Bible is He. --North American Review, vol. cxxxiii, No. 2, p. 113.

Haeckel, of Germany, runs full tilt against the common sense of the whole human race in maintaining
the dysteleolgy or purposefulness of all things.  Countless instances of design throughout the universe
demonstrate not only the existence, but the infinite power, wisdom, goodness and holiness of the
supreme, designing, creative Spirit.  The unity of the Great First Cause is proved by the unity of plan,
purpose and result;  and the omnipresence, omnipotence, immutability and perfection of God are
shown by the universal operation of His unchanging laws.

Three of the leading peculiarities of the character of God, as vividly portrayed to us in the first chapter
of Genesis, and also in the reminder of the Bible, are His individual personality, His infinite
sovereignty, and His almighty power.  Instead of an unconscious impersonal force, He is as strictly a
person as was Adam.  He creates, He speaks, He sees, He hears, (Psalm xciv. 9, 10,) He enters into a
covenant with man, and punishes man for his disobedience.  With no being to counsel Him, (Isaiah xl.
13,) He creates and fashions all things, sun, moon, stars, world, plants, animals and men, according to
His own will and pleasure (Rev. iv. 11; Daniel iv. 25, 3,5; 1 Timothy vi. 1,5; Romans ix. 15-28);  and
He has but to speak and it is done, to command and it stands fast. --Psalm xxxiii. 9.

According to the infallible testimony of the inspired volume, God is the Most High and the Most
Holy; inhabiting eternity;  immeasurably transcending in rank and in moral purity all the orders of His
creation, men, angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, principalities and powers; 
dwelling in light unapproachable; and reigning sovereignly and majestically over the universe forever
and forevermore, through all the eternities of the eternities.  "Contrasted with the living ideas of these
sublime reverberations, the interminable rows of conceptionless decimals used by science, our
millions and billions, are like the barren x y z of a frigid algebraic computation, as compared with the
endless re-echoing of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus."

There is a deep and instructive significance in the names of God and Christ given in the Bible.  I find
that, of the 9,788 times that the names translated God or Lord occur in the Old Testament, Elohim
(God) occurs 2,225 times, Jehovah (Lord) 6,521 times, Jehovah Elohim (Lord God) 298 times, and
other* Hebrew names of God 744 times;  and that, of the 3,232 times that the names translated God or
Lord or Christ or Jesus occur in the New Testament, Theos (Elohim or God) occurs 1,277 times,
Kurios (Jehovah or Lord) 691 times, Jesus (Jehovah-Savior) 709 times, Christ (Messiah or Anointed)
304 times, Jesus Christ 197 times, Christ Jesus 47 times, and other Greek names of God 7 times.  Or,
of the 13,020 times that the divine name occurs in the Bible, 6,521 plus 298 plus 691 plus 709 plus
197 plus 47, or 8,463 times (which is about two-thirds of all the times it occurs), it either is or
contains the name Jehovah or its equivalent **

 * Three of the other oldest divine names in Genesis are El Olam (the Eternal), El Shaddai (the
Omnipresent), and El Elioun (the Most High), corresponding to time, space and decree.

** The theories of the various authors of Genesis, as based on the use of the two names, Elohim and
Jehovah, are full of self-contradiction, absurdity and impossibility.--McCaul in Aids to Faith, pp. 220-
8:  Lange's Genesis, pp. 105-9.

Elohim (Theos or God) signifies Almighty, and is the general name of God in relation to the world, as

the Creator, Sustainer and Governor of all things.  It occurs thirty times in the first chapter of Genesis,
and is the only name of God in that chapter.  It is in the plural number, the plural of majesty and the
plural of essence (including Father, Word mid Spirit--Gen. i. 26; iii. 22; xi. 7; Matt. xxviii. 19); and,
though plural, it is, when referring to the true God, always, with the rarest exceptions, where there is a
partial reference to polytheism, joined to a singular verb, showing the unity of the Godhead. 
So Christ is the general name of the Messiah or Mediator.

But Jehovah* (Kurios or Lord) signifies, according to God’s own interpretation.   I AM THAT I AM

(Exodus iii. 14), that is, the Eternal Unchangeable Being (Malachi iii. 6; James i. 17; Rev. i. 8),
the Covenant-God  (Gen. ii. 16, 17; xv. 18; Numbers x. 33), and is the nearer, tenderer, more
personal name that God bears towards all His chosen people;  it occurs in the phrase Jehovah
Elohim (Lord God), showing that Jehovah and Elohim are but different names of the same Being--
twenty times in the second and third chapters of Genesis. So Jesus (Jehovah-Savior) is the nearer,
tenderer, and  more personal name of the Mediator;  and, being one with Jehovah (John x. 30), He is
"the same yesterday, and today, and forever" (Heb. xiii. 8.)  Indeed, it was the "Angel of Jehovah," or
Christ, who appeared and spoke to Moses out of the burning bush (Exod. iii. 2), and in the fourteenth
verse is called God, and announces as His name I Am That I Am, and who said to the Jews, "Before
Abraham was, I Am" (John viii. 58.)

 * This incommunicable name of the God of Israel the Jews feared to pronounce, and called it simply
"the name," or "the name of four letters" (yodh he vav he), "the great and terrible name," "the peculiar
name," "the separate name," and shem hammephorash, "the name revealed.''  In reading, they always
substituted for it the word Adonai, Lord.

Thus 8,463 times in the Bible is the EVERLASTING UNCHANGEABLENESS of God towards His
dear children affirmed even in the Divine Name; God "abideth faithful, and cannot deny Himself"   (2
Tim. ii. 13.)  The Moon, representing the Church, may apparently change, and is always thus
changing; * but the Sun of Righteousness, which arises with healing in His wings upon all that fear
His name (Malachi iv. 2),shines with the same resplendence forever. Having loved Israel with an
everlasting love, God draws her with his loving-kindness, makes an everlasting covenant with her,
ordered in all things and sure, puts His fear and law in her mind and heart, forgives and forgets her
sins, to the praise of His glorious grace, rejoices to do her good, and declares that with His whole
heart and soul He will assuredly plant her in the heavenly Canaan  (Jer. xxxi. 3, 31-37; xxxii. 36-41.)
Well might the poet sing :--

"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,

Is laid for your faith in His excellent word!

What more can He say than to you He hath said,

You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled."

"E’en down to old age all my people shall prove

My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love;

And when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn,

Like lambs shall they still in my bosom be borne.

"The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose,

I will not, I will not desert to his foes;

That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,

I’ll never, no never, no never forsake."

* Notwithstanding the Moon's phases, or changes of appearance, caused by her roundness, oracity
derivation of all her light from the Sun, and her monthly rotation upon her axis, she is probably the
most fixed, unchanging conservative body in nature—so should the church be; notwithstanding her
frequent changes of frames and feelings, still her doctrine and practice and devotion to the cause of
God should be absolutely unchangeable. While the Sun causes the purifying currents of the air, the
Moon is the chief cause of the tidal ocean waves which constantly cleanse the inpouring rivers of their
pollutions.  This office of an ever-active sanitary commission is one of the most important functions
that the Moon subserves towards the earth--so the church, like the salt of the earth, should keep her
garments unspotted from the world and thus exercise a salutary influence upon those without.  Her
light, which all comes from the Sun of Righteousness, should shine in the night of the world, so that
men may see her good works, anal glorify her Father in heaven.

Jeremiah, the prophet of sorrow, uses this dear name of the Covenant God 728 times, which is more
frequently than any other inspired writer; and the name Jehovah occurs next oftenest in the Psalms,
681 times. We are thus taught that, in our sorrows and in our devotions, we should especially address
ourselves to God as the Unchangeable King of Zion, our Everlasting Father and Friend.

The Hebrew word translated created is Bara, and occurs 45 times in the Old Testament; its Greek
equivalent,Ktizo, occurs 35 times in the New Testament.  Bara is the strongest word in the Hebrew
language to expressmaking out of nothing (Gesenius' Thesaurus), and it always conveys the idea of
something new.  The only subject of this verb in the Bible is God; He only can create.  Four times in
the Old Testament (Psalm li. 10; Isaiah lxv. 17, 18), and four times in the New Testament (Ephesians
ii. 10; iv. 24; 2 Cor. v. 17; Gal. vi. 15), it denotes a spiritual creation, of which God is the
author.  Bara occurs in three verses of the first chapter of Genesis (verses 1, 21 and 27), in speaking
of the creation of the universe, of animal life, and of man. Everywhere else in that chapter God is said
to have simply made or formed (asah or yatzar) from an already created material. *

 * The phrase "created and made" (Bara and Asah) in Genesis ii 3, proves conclusively that these
words do not mean the same thing.  The literal rendering of the Hebrew, as given in the margin, is
"created to make," that is, produced out of nothing (Bara) in order to form or fashion or prepare
(Asah).

To account for the origin of evil, Plato imagined that evil was inherent in matter, and that matter was
independent of God, and therefore eternal, and not created;  the most of the false philosophical
religions are thus dualistic. But the first verse of Genesis tells us that God created all things; and the
third chapter of Genesis implies that evil or sin originated from the ungodly exercise of creaturely
free-will. Sin is not all attribute of matter, but of spirit.  The most holy God is not in any sense its
cause or author (Gen. xviii. 25; Job xv. 15; Psalm cxlv. 17; Habak. i. 13; I John i. 5)--such a thought
were the most awful blasphemy.  Man’s body, as created, was very good (Gen. i. 31) and not sinful. 
Christ’s body was never the seat of sin (Luke i. 35; Heb. vii. 26); and the glorified bodies of the saints
shall be free from sin. --Rom, vi. 7; i Cor. xv. 42; Phil. iii. 21; Rev. xxi. 4, 27.

God is the only eternal Being revealed to us in the Scriptures. --Gen. i. 1; Deut. xxxiii. 27; Isa. lvii.
15; Romans i. 20; I Timothy i. 17; vi. 16. Angels, as well as men and animals, are His creatures
(Psalm civ. 4; Heb. i. 6, 7; Rev. xxii. 8, 9); and all God’s creatures were "very good" when He made
them.--Gen, i. 31. When and where angels were created, has not been revealed to us.  Some of them,
the non-elect (1 Tim. v. 21), kept not their first estate, but sinned, and left their own habitation,* and
are now reserved by God in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.--2
Peter ii. 4; Jude 6.  There is, therefore, no redemption or salvation for them.  Our Lord speaks of them
as "the devil and his angels."--Matt, xxv. 41.  We learn from Paul that pride was the condemnation of
the devil.--1 Timothy iii. 6.  Left to his own free will, instead of worshiping, he rebelled against the
Son of God.--Hebrews i. 6; Matt. iv. 9. In the form of a serpent he tempted Eve (Gen. iii. 1-7, 14, 15);
and he is the prince of darkness (Eph. vi. 2), the god of this world (2 Cor. iv. 4), the prince of the
power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience (Eph. ii. 2), who
deceiveth the whole world (Rev. xii. 9); is the everlasting enemy of Christ and His people, as shown
by his names, Satan (adversary) and Devil (accuser), and as proved by all the Scriptures; and he will
finally be bruised forever under the feet of Christ and His church (Gen. iii. 15; Rom. xxi. 20), cast into
the bottomless pit (Rev. xx. 2, 3), and consigned to everlasting fire (Matt. xxv. 41).

 * The word "heaven," in Luke x. 18 and Revelation xii. 7, is believed by the best scholars to refer,
not to the glorified state, but to the church militant.

In the first chapter of Genesis, and elsewhere, when speaking of natural things, the language of the
Bible is simple and phenomenal, or according to the first appearances of things to our senses (Heb. xi.
3). It is the language of common life, for all seeing eyes and all conceiving minds of all countries and
ages. Scientific language, which, however, is also phenomenal, is a little further removed from the
senses; but, as human science advances, has to be perpetually corrected; and, in our present state, can
never reach the ultimate fact, and would have been unintelligible for thousands of years; it is,
therefore, entirely unsuitable to Scripture.

While the general agreement of the Mosaic record of creation and geology is very apparent--first,
light and moisture as prerequisites of vegetation, then the latter as the antecedent food of animals,
then animals in an ascending gradation, and lastly man as the superior being for whom the earth had
been made and furnished; still, as geological knowledge is yet very imperfect, no detailed adjustment
of the two accounts thus far made is entirely satisfactory.  There are two leading methods of
reconciliation.

The first method considers that there was a long period, ending with a chaotic catastrophe, between
the first and second verses of Genesis, and buries all the past geological ages in that vacuum, and
maintains that Moses simply describes the creation of the present species of plants and animals--his
object not being to give a full scientific account of the earth, but only to describe briefly the creation
of the objects contemporaneous with man, and then enter upon the religious history of man.  It is
claimed by most Bible scholars that this method is the least objectionable and most respectable.

The second method of reconciling Genesis and geology considers the creative days coincident with
the geological eras, and is preferred by Christian scientists and some eminent scriptural students.
These harmonists maintain that the word yom, translated day (very much like the English word day),
is the most common Hebrew word for an indefinite period--as in the phrases, day of God’s wrath, day
of His power, day of calamity, day of salvation, etc.; that it has three different meanings in the Mosaic
account of creation--in chapter i., verses 5 and 14, meaning first the period of light, and then the
period of light and darkness, and in chapter ii., verse 4, meaning the whole creative week; that the first
six days are God’s days of work, and the seventh His day of rest, which is not yet ended (Heb. iii. and
iv,); that the evening of the first day seems to have been the past eternity of darkness, while the
morning of the seventh divine day, or Sabbath, has scarcely yet dawned upon the world, God still
rested or ceasing from creation, but carrying on His Sabbath Day’s work of redemption; that God is
eternal, and His days are long; that, "one day with the Lord is as a thousand years" (2 Peter iii. 8); that
in the 90th Psalm, which was written by Moses, the author of Genesis, the inspired penman, just after
speaking of the creation of the earth, declares that "a thousand years in God’s sight are but as
yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night" that the days and weeks of prophecy (in Daniel
and Revelation) are vast and extraordinary periods like those of creation; that the ineffable character
of the creative days was asserted by early Christian writers long before geology was thought of; that
there is no mention of a sun to divide the creative days until the fourth day, so that the last three, like
the first three, must have been, not sun-divided, but God-divided days; that the language of the fourth
commandment (Ex. xx. 11) is but the repetition of the language of Genesis, and throws no light upon
the meaning besides implying that man’s Sabbath should be like God’s, one-seventh of his week or
working-time; and that, while God is almighty and could, therefore, have created all things
instantaneously, He did not choose to do so, but took six days for the work, and those days, in
accordance with the general vastness of the whole subject, may have been vast periods, in accordance
with the indications of the fossiliferous rocky crust of the earth twenty miles in thickness, made by
God, and full of the remains of long since extinct plants and animals. The latest and ablest writers of
this class* consider the first and second creative days coincident with the azoic (lifeless) period of
geology; the third and fourth creative days with the eozoic (dawn-life) period, the age of primitive
plants; the fifth day coincident with the palaeozoic (ancient-life) and Mesozoic (middle-life) periods,
the ages of mollusks, fishes, reptiles and birds; the sixth day, the Cenozoic (recent-life) period (or
tertiary and quaternary), the age of mammals, including, at the close, the creation of man; the seventh
day, the period of human history; and the eighth day, the period of the new heavens and new earth, the
Sabbath or rest that remains to the people of God.

 * See Guyot's Creation, Dana's Dana’s of Geology, Dawson's Origin of the World, and Taylor
Lewis's Six Days of Creation.
 

After Moses tells us that In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, he says: --And the
earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters. Both in Scripture and in science, the earth is, of all worlds, the
most important to us now, and therefore more is said about it than about any other. When first made
the earth was a desolate, uninhabited and dark vaporous or aeriform or mass; and so would it have
remained forever but for the omnipotent outgoing of God’s light-and-life-creating Spirit (Job xxvi. 18;
Psalm civ. 30). That Spirit moved (or lovingly, cherishingly, vivifyingly hovered, brooded, throbbed)
over the dark, dead, chaotic mass, and quickened and energized it. And God said, let there be light;
and there was light. God’s Spirit and word cooperate in the work. Light is the immediate result of
molecular activity, and is one of the most mysterious and glorious works of creation. Science does not
yet know what light is. The prevailing undulatory theory is but a revival of the old Aristotelian notion,
and even now in the so-called broad light of most the twentieth century of the Christian era, makes the
most inadmissible demands upon our credulity in asking its to believe in the existence of an
adamantine solid, called luminiferous ether, pervading all space and matter, and exerting upon each
square inch a pressure of seventeen million million pounds (Stallo’s Modern Physics, pp. 115, 116).
Persons who can believe such insane imaginations have no right to ridicule the faith of those who
accept the truths of God’s written revelation. The Hebrew word Aur, translated light includes light,
heat, and electricity, the three prime forces of matter. "Throughout the Scriptures light is not only
good, but an emblem of a higher good--spiritual enlightenment." God divided the light from the
darkness, and called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and the evening and the morning were the
first day. Darkness having preceded the light, evening is mentioned before morning. According to the
divine arrangement, gravitation now began to act, so that the rotary motion of the earth around its axis
was begun, and that part of the earth turned toward the source of light (perhaps the nebulous mass
afterwards concentrated into the sun) had day, and, as the earth continued to rotate, a few hours
afterwards the same part had darkness.* In Deuteronomy iv. 19, and xvii. 3, the sun and moon and
stars are called "the host of heaven."   These bodies are, therefore, included in the term "heaven" in
the first verse of Genesis; and from the fact that heaven is mentioned first, as well as from Job xxxviii.
4-7, we infer that the sun and moon and stars were "created" before the earth, although not "made" or
completed, and fitted for their proper functions, until the fourth day. This view is confirmed by the
use ofBara (create) in the first verse, but of Asah (make or form) in the sixteenth verse. It is the
opinion of the most of scientific men, as expressed in the nebular hypothesis, that the entire solar
system was at first one incandescent mass, which by rotation threw off rings that formed planets and
satellites; and the latter, being smaller, became cool and opaque, while the central mass remained hot
and luminous, and was gradually condensed into the sun. The thick waters (verse second) or watery or
nebulous clouds or photosphere around the earth at that early period, such as are still around the
distant major planets of the solar system, made the space near the earth barely translucent to the
feeble light of the unformed or uncondensed sun --that space not becoming transparent to the solar
light, or the earth not sufficiently cooling and its photosphere not disappearing, and the heavenly
bodies not becoming visible in the firmament, until the work of the second and third days was
finished, and the sun and moon were completed on the fourth day.

 * Some suppose that the light of the first three days was entirely cosmical or worldly, the result and
sign of terrestrial chemical action, the earth being, during the most of that time, intensely heated and
self-luminous; and that, by the alternation of darkness and light on those days, the sacred historian,
speaking anticipatively, means that that rotation of the earth on its axis was then carried on, which
after the appearance of the sun on the fourth day produced the alternation of night and day.

On the second day God made the firmament, and divided the waters above from the waters below,
and called the firmament heaven. Rakia, translated firmament (from raka, to spread out), signifies,
not solidity* but an expanse--the atmosphere--in which fowls fly (verse 20). The earth being still
intensely heated, the lower strata of air became warmer and lighter than the upper, and continually
ascended, and, becoming cooler, deposited their invisible vapor in the form of visible mist or cloud,
while between these clouds and the surface of the earth there was a stratum of clear air; and the earth
radiating its heat into space, and cooling, and crusting over, much of the moisture was deposited, in
the form of water, on its solid surface.  Some think that the work of the second day was the
individualizing of the earth, or the making it an independent sphere, by separating it from the general
mass of the solar system.  Many able physicists believe that the ether supposed to fill the
interplanetary spaces is merely an excessive expansion and attenuation of the atmospheres and
aqueous vapors of the planets.

* The phenomenal appropriateness of even the old Greek and Latin translations of rakia (stereoma,
andfirmamentum, something firm or solid), from which our English word firmament is derived, is
finely illustrated by the following passage in Prof. Tyndall's address before the British Association.
August, 1868: "The blue of the sky is as uniform and coherent as if it formed the surface of the most
close-grained solid; a marble dome would not exhibit a stricter continuity"  

On the third day God collected the waters previously covering the surface of the globe into seas, and
made the dry land or earth appear, and caused the earth to bring forth vegetation. From Job xxxviii. 7
and Psalm civ. 6-9, as well as from science, we infer that, by the action of subterraneous forces, God
uplifted the lower sedimentary (Azoic) rocks where He designed to make continents, and depressed
them into vast hollows where He designed to make oceans and seas, and the water all over the earth
ran into these basins, while the dry land was left to itself.  Then God caused the earth to bring forth
grasses, herbs, and trees*--the three divisions of the vegetable kingdom--each species distinct from
its kind, and having its seed in itself for future propagation.  The language of Moses here is in strict
accordance with scientific facts, though opposed to the evolutionarytheories of a false science (1 Tim.
vi. 20).  According to all human observation, each species of vegetable (as well as of animal) life is
distinct--is "permanently reproductive, variable within narrow limits, but incapable of permanent
intermixture with other species."  We learn from Genesis ii. 4, 5, that God, the author of life, created
the life of each vegetable before it was in the earth.**  All life comes directly from Him in whom we
live and move and have our being (Acts xvii. 25, 28).  Science sustains Moses in representing plants
to have been created before animals.  For the lowest stratified rocks contain large quantities of organic
limestone and graphite-carbon, results of plant life;  the cooling earth was at first more fitted for
plants than animals;  vegetation was needed to rid the atmosphere of an excess of carbonic acid, and
supply its place with oxygen for animals;  and vegetation is the necessary food of animals. (Dana’s
Manual of Geology).

 * The word deshe, translated grass in our version, literally means sproutage, and is believed to denote
the lowest order of the vegetable kingdom, cryptogams, or flowerless plants, which produce minute
spores instead of seeds--; such as seaweeds, fungi, lichens, mosses, ferns, etc. The word esebh,
rendered herb, denotes the higher order of plants called phaenogams, prorogated by seeds; and this
order includes fruit-trees, which were created last.

** Sir Wm. Thomson and Prof. Helmholtz, seeking, to account for the origin of the first vegetable
seeds on the earth, suppose that they dropped from some passing meteor or comet, just as though their
origin on such a body did not need to be accounted for.

On the fourth day God is said by Moses, not to have "created" (Bara), but to have "made" (Asah), that
is, formed and prepared, the sun, moon and stars, for two great purposes--to give light and to divide
time.  He "created" (Bara) the heaven, or heavenly bodies, "in the beginning;" but they were not
completed for their present functions till the fourth day, at which time the atmosphere was so purified
as to be transparent, or the photosphere of the earth almost disappeared, and the sun and moon and
stars were clearly visible in the sky. The word "made" is supplied before "the stars;" and the reference
seems parenthetical. Why this work was postponed to the fourth day, we do not know, says Prof.
Taylor Lewis any more than why Christ’s advent was postponed to the fourth millennium of man’s
history, or why so large a part of the earth is even now a desert or a watery waste, and still a moral
chaos.  The light of the solar system is not even yet wholly concentrated into the sun, but much of it
streams out, in his chromosphere and then in his corona, nearly two millions of miles from his
surface.  Not only were the heavenly bodies intended by the Creator to give us light, but to be our
standard measures of time, dividing it into days and months and seasons * and years, a most important
use for all the duties and relations of life.  Moses dwells more upon the formation of the heavenly
bodies than of any other object besides man--probably to teach us that, although the sun, moon and
stars are the most splendid objects that we behold, still they are not gods to be worshiped (Deut. iv. 19
and xvii. 3), but are the creatures, like all other things, of the great invisible God, who made them, in
part, at least, for the benefit of man, and who absolutely controls them according to His sovereign will
and pleasure.  In the language of the Psalmist, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the
firmament showeth His handiwork." (xix. 1). "They continue this day according to His ordinances; for
all are His servants" (Psalm cxix. 91). The heavenly bodies were made by God for "SIGNS" also. In
their steadfast and permanent radiance, they are glorious emblems of the permanence and
steadfastness of their Creator’s grace towards all His covenant people (Jer. xxxi. 35-37; Psalms lxxii.
5; lxxxiv. 11; lxxxix. 36, 37; Isa. lx.,20; Mal. iv. 2; Matt. viii. 43; 2 Cor. iv. 6; Rev. i. 16).

 * There was no change of seasons on the earth till the sun appeared and produced such change on the
fourth day.   Before that period there was a very warm and moist but equable temperature over the
whole globe; either because the internal heat of the earth was then greater near the surface, or because
the dense aqueous vapors around the earth better retained the heat of the uncondensed nebulous mass
which was afterwards made into the sun.  Such a climate was exactly adapted to the production of the
abundant, gigantic and pulpy vegetation, the ferns and lycopodiums, chiefly characterizing the
carboniferous period, similar to the present climate and flora of some of the islands of the tropics,
where it rains 300 days in the year. When the sun blazed forth in all his glory on the fourth day, and
began the change of seasons, there was a great increase of ligneous or woody tissue in vegetation or
shown by the fossil plants of the Permian system.

On the fifth day God caused the waters to bring forth fish and reptiles, and formed out of the
ground  (Gen. ii. 19) fouls to fly in the open heaven--these being the lower forms of animal life.
"Moving creature is more properly rendered, in the margin, "creeping" creature, or reptile; and "let
fowl fly above the earth" is the more correct marginal rendering (in verse 20).  For the second time in
this chapter, the word "created" (Bara) is used, and now in reference to the great forms of animal life,
such as the huge saurian reptiles, especially the crocodile. (Here rendered "whales," but elsewhere, in
the Old Testament, rendered "serpents," "dragons," and meaning crocodile in at least two passages
(Ezek. xxix. 3 and xxxii. 2).  Moses was familiar with the degrading Egyptian worship of the
crocodile, and therefore here takes especial occasion to declare that this animal, instead of being a
god, is, like all other great animal monsters, but "an humble creature" of the true God.  From a critical
examination of the language of Moses, and from scientific knowledge, President Dawson concludes
that "the prolific animals of the fifth day’s creation belonged to the three Cuvierian sub-kingdoms of
the Radiate, Articulata and Mollusca, and to the classes of fish and reptiles* among the vertebrata." 
Birds also were then first created.  Their numerous footsteps and skeletons are first found in the
Oolitic and Wealden rocks of the reptilian age, or mesozoic period.  The miraculous accuracy of
Moses may be clearly seen by a comparison of his narrative, at this point, with the latest works on
geology.  Only the God who created birds could have inspired Moses to tell exactly when they were
created.  "The Creator, on the fifth day, recognizes the introduction of sentient, animal life
by blessing this new work of his hands."  During the period of the fifth day, "in the warm and moist
atmosphere, overcharged with carbonic acid gas, humble cryptogams attained to the size of stately
forest trees, and luxuriant ferns and kindred plants, being slowly submerged by oscillations of the land
and covered with deposits of mud and sand, were transformed into coal; and thus the land being
repeatedly and slowly raised and submerged, and numerous other similar forests growing and being
carbonized, the vast, coal-beds so precious to civilized man were formed.  In this manner, also, the
carbonic acid gas of the atmosphere was fixed in the coal-beds, and the oxygen was returned to the
atmosphere for the furtherance of animal life."

*  The Elasmosaurus and the Edestosaurus of Kansas attained the length of sixty to eighty feet and
more: while the Hadrosaurus of New Jersey stood erect from twenty to twenty-five feet high, and the
Atlantosaurus of Colorado reached the height of from sixty to eighty feet. The expanded wings of the
bat-like Pterodactyls measured twenty-five feet from tip to tip. (See Prof. A. Guyot's "Creation.")

On the sixth day God caused the earth to bring forth the land animals, especially the herbivorous and
carnivorous mammalia, or quadrupeds, a higher order of animals than those made on the fifth day;
and afterwards, on the same (sixth) day, He created (Bara) man in His own image, and made him,
under the Supreme Lawgiver, the delegated ruler of this lower world.  In the tertiary rocks of the
cenozoic period we see the gigantic skeletons of megatheria, mammoths, mastodons and elephantine
marsupials;  and then, in the post-tertiary or quaternary rocks of the same period, with no chaotic
upheaval, it being still the sixth day, we find the remains of men.  Thus again is Moses supported by
the facts of geology.

Vegetation and all the inferior animals were "brought forth" by the word of God "from the earth" or
"the waters" (Gen i. 11, 12, 20, 21, 24, 25; ii. 19); so that, when they die, not only their body but their
life or spirit returns to its earthly origin (Eccles. iii. 21).  But, though God formed man’s body from
the dust of the ground,He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and  man became a living
soul (Gen. ii. 7).  This makes an ineffaceable distinction between man and all other earthly creatures;
the Almighty and Everlasting Father of spirits directly breathed into man a higher life or spirit; and,
though the body, according to the penalty of the violated law of God, returns to the dust, his spirit, at
death, return unto God who gave it (Eccles. xxii. 7; Luke iii. 38). **

 ** Dichotomy maintains that human nature has only two distinct substances or elements-- body and
soul or spirit. Trichotomy maintains that there are in man three elements, body, soul, and spirit, In the
account of man's creation (Gen. ii. 7) and of man's death (Eccles. xii. 7) only two principles are
mentioned-- that which is called soul in Genesis being called spirit in Ecclesiastes.   See also 2 Cor. v.
1-8: Philip. i. 23, 24; Acts vii. 59.  The Hebrew and Greek terms, in the Scriptures, translated soul,
spirit, mind, heart, and life, are often used interchangeably, and denote the immaterial principal that
man derived directly from God, each of these terms, however, being frequently employed to denote a
particular aspect or function or attribute of that principle. The Greek and Roman philosophers taught
that man had three constituent elements: and, in conformity with the usage of his contemporaries,
Paul says "spirit, soul and body," to express the whole of man's nature (1 Thess. v. 23). In Hebrews iv.
12, the term "heart" includes the two terms "soul and spirit," the lower and higher faculties of the
mind.  In Luke i. 46 47, soul and spirit are the same principle.

As to the origin of the souls of Adam's posterity, it should forever abase the pride of human
philosophy that it is unable to solve this first and nearest mystery of man's existence--it cannot tell
whether each soul is derived by direct creation from God, or by traduction from parents according to
divine arrangement.

The claims of materialistic phrenology have long since been exploded by the scientists of Europe. The
quality is far more important than the quantity of brain; and there has never been a satisfactory
division of the faculties of the human mind, much less an exact localization and mapping of them
upon the surface of the brain.

The everlasting duration of the human spirit (which is hereafter to inhabit the resurrection body, Job
xix. 25-27; Psalm xlix. 15; Isaiah xxvi. 19; Dan. xii. 1-3; Matt. v. 29; x. 28; xxvii. 52, 53; John v. 28,
29; Acts ii. 25-34; xiii. 34; Romans viii. 11, 22, 23; Phillip. iii. 20, 21; 1 Thess. iv. 13-17; 1 Cor. xv.
12-57) is also to be inferred from the fact that man was "created" (Bara, indicating something new) in
God’s image, as well as from his reason, conscience, religious sentiment, hopes, intuitions and
aspirations, and especially from God’s covenant :with man, which raised him above the physical
world, and brought him nigh to God (Gen. ii. 16, 17; Matt. xxii. 31, 32). The fact of man’s great
superiority to all other earthly creatures is to be inferred also from the divine deliberation--Let us
make men (Gen. i. 26). The plural number here is thought by some to be the plural of majesty or
dignity; by the Jews it is thought to refer to God’s addressing the angels as His companions, or the
earth as being the source of man’s body, while God gave him His Spirit; but, by most of Christian
scholars, it is thought to denote the deliberation of the Divine Trinity (see G on. iii. 22; xi. 7).*

 * Mr. Charles Darwin's "Chain of Man's Descent from the Ascidian" (a very small, transparent
pocket-shaped, marine animal, without head or backbone, or organs of sense, or locomotion, or
distinction of sex) is one of the finest products of the modern brilliant scientific imagination, and, to
any person of common sense, is as incredible as the Metamorphosis of Ovid. The so-called "chain" is
a concatenation of conjectural nonentities, of airy nothings, based, not upon knowledge, but,
confessedly, upon want of knowledge.  Such philosophizing is a substitution of Nescience for
Science. The backbone, the breast and the human brain are insurmountable barriers in the way of
selective development, and demonstrate elective design. Mr. A. R. Wallace, "the independent
originator and by far the best expounder of the theory of Natural Selection, differs altogether front Mr.
Darwin on the question of the origin of man. For the creation of man, as he is, Mr. Wallace postulates
the necessity of the intervention of an eternal will, as well for man's body as for his soul, as shown by
the latent capacities of even the savage hand, voice, brain, and conscience." Prof. S. G. Mivart, the
profoundly learned and critical biologist, declares, in his "Lessons from Nature," that "Mr. Darwin, in
his Descent of Man, has utterly failed in the only part of his work which is really important: and if his
failure should lead to an increase of philosophic culture on the part of physicists, we may therein find
some consolation for the injurious effects which his work in likely to produce on too many of our
half-educated classes. Man differs far more from an elephant or a gorilla than do these from the dust
of the earth on which they tread." Even Prof. Huxley admits that "the divergence of man from the are
is immeasurable and practically infinite." Dr. Emil Du Bois-Reymond, professor of physiology in the
greatest German university, that of Berlin, perpetual secretary of the Berlin Academy of Science, and
the ablest biologist now living, declares that Haeckel's '"Human Genealogical Tree" (pretending to
trace man by twenty-two steps to the supposed unicellular Monera, imagined to be the base of the
animal kingdom) "is as authentic in the eyes of a naturalist as are the pedigrees (from God, and
Goddesses) of the Homeric, heroes in the eyes of an historian." Thus the highest living scientific
authority emphatically decides that the "scientific" pagan mythology of the nineteenth century is as
false and incredible as the Latin Greek mythology of three thousand years ago. The average cranial
capacity of Europeans of the Stone Age has been found to have been actually greater than that of the
now living Europeans. The brain of the apes most like man does not amount to quite a third of the
brain of the lowest races of men.

God created but one pair of human beings, and the Bible everywhere implies but one human species
(Gen. i. 27; ii. 7, 8, 15, 18, 21-24; Deut. xxxii. 8; Matt. xix. 4; Acts xvii. 26; Romans v. 14, 19; 1 Cor.
xv. 22. And so the entire drift of present science tends to establish the unity of the human race, and
the perfect truthfulness of the scriptural doctrine. The confusion of tongues at Babel (Gen. xi. 1-9), the
consequent dispersion of men all over the earth, differences of climate, soil, exposure, food, habits
and surroundings, continued for hundreds and thousands of years, have produced the differences
between the varieties of the human race.* The close affinities, physical, mental and moral, of all the
human family; the fertile inter-marriages of all the varieties of the race; and the fact that greater
differences have occurred in the same species of domestic animals than exist between the different
varieties of mankind, confirm the unity of the human race. As may be seen by an observant traveler,
passing from district to district, and from country to country, there are, between all the divergences,
innumerable and almost indistinguishable blendings. All mankind are descendants of Adam; all
sinned and fell in him; all are conscious of their accountability to a higher power; and, as sung by the
church in glory (Rev. v. 9), some have been redeemed by Christ "out of every kindred, and tongue,
and people, and nation."

 * Dr. J. W. Draper (in his Human Physiology, pp. 586-591) attributes the dark color of the negro skin
to the torpidity of the liver, in hot climates, failing to eliminate from the blood a degenerating
haematin, which is rich in iron, and depositing this dark matter in the pigment-cells of the skin. The
prognathous form of the negro skull he ascribes to the same cause, as well as to his savage and
degraded condition in Africa. The black coloring matter underlying the cuticle preserves the surface
of the skin from being blistered by the sun; and the thick woolly hair was designed by Providence to
protect his brain from the fierce rays of the tropics. It is asserted that negro youths have made
extraordinary attainments in the languages and mathematics at college in both hemispheres. About a
thousand years intervene between the deluge and the earliest representation of negro features upon the
monuments of Egypt.

The most recent and careful investigations also prove that the great antiquity (from twenty to a
hundred thousand years) heretofore claimed for man by geologists, ethnologists and philologists, is
not sustained by the facts any more than it is by Genesis; a few thousand years (seven or eight at the
most) are all that are needed to measure man’s duration on earth, according to both the scriptural and
the scientific records. That man was the last created of all earthly organized beings is the clear
demonstration of geology, as much as it is of Scripture. Ussher’s chronology, which generally follows
the Hebrew text, and which, by the order of the British Parliament, appears in the margin of English
Bibles, reckons 4004 years from the creation of Adam to the birth of Christ. As this system is almost
universally employed in history, we use it in this work. But it is proper to state that the Scripture
nowhere gives us any direct information on this subject. Any chronology of primitive times is,
therefore, inferential; and there are some 200 different computations of the period between Adam and
Christ, varying front 3316 to 6984 years. The length of the period from the creation to the flood is
calculated by adding together the ages of the patriarchs at the time of the birth of their oldest, sons, or
heirs; but the numbers in the Hebrew text would thus give 1656 years; the Samaritan,* 1307 years;
and the Septuagint,* 2262 years, for the length of this period. "Nothing in ancient manuscripts," says
Prof. G. Rawlinson, "is so liable to corruption, from mistakes of copyists, as numbers." Letters, which
were easily mistaken by copyists, were originally written for numbers. "Genealogies," says Fausset,
"are clear measures of time only when complete; but the Jewish genealogies, as published, were
frequently abbreviated, the object not being chronology, but to mark ramifications of family and tribal
relationship." The word son was commonly used for descendant.

 * The Samaritan Pentateuch is a translation of the books of Moses into the Samaritan dialect (a
compound of the Hebrew, Chaldee and Syrian made probably about 700 B. C. The Septuagint is the
most ancient and celebrated version of the entire Old Testament Scriptures; it is a translation into
Greek made by the Jews in Alexandria about 280 B. C. and so called either from its 72 translators, or
the 73 members of the Sanhedrin that sanctioned it. In the declining state of the Hebrew tongue, about
the time of Christ, the Septuagint version was in common use among the Jews, and from it were taken
the most of the Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament, which was written in Greek.
 

Au shown by Principal Samuel Kinns, of Highbury New Park College, England, in his Harmony of
the Bible with Science, the following order of fifteen creative events, as taught by science,
corresponds with the order given by Moses:

The creation of the heavens, and heavenly bodies, before the earth.

The appearance of light as the divinely produced result of chemical action and nebulous condensation.

The formation of air and water by the combination of gases surrounding the earth.

After the formation of the older rocks under the water, their upheaval, in many places, above the
universal sea, forming the dry land.

The sprouting forth of the lowest forms of vegetable life, the cryptogamous algae, lichens, fungi, ferns
and mosses, propagated by spores and not by seeds --translated grass in our version.

The appearance of the lowest class of phaenogams, or flowering plants, called gymnosperms, from
having naked seeds, such as the conifers--translated, in our version, the herb yielding seed.

The appearance of a higher class of phaenogams, with nut-like seeds in fleshy envelopes, found in the
middle Devonian and Carboniferous strata--translated, in our version, the fruit-tree yielding fruit (the
higher order of fruit trees appearing when "God planted a, garden" later on (Gen. ii. 8).

The clearing away of the carbonic acid in the atmosphere and of the heavy vaporous clouds, and the
appointment of the sun and moon for lights, signs and seasons, days and years.

The swarming of the waters with numerous forms of life.

The creation of the gigantic saurian reptiles.

The teaming of the earth with winged fowl.

The appearance of the mammoth beasts of the earth.

The appearance of cattle, or the domestic animals.

The appearance of the principal flowers, fruit-trees and cereals (Genesis i. 29)--called in Genesis ii. 8,
the planting of a garden.

The creation of man; after which God ended His work of creation, no new species of plants or animals
having appeared since the creation of man.

Now the number of possible permutations in 15 is found by multiplying together the series of natural
numbers from 1 to 15 inclusive, the product of which is 1,307,674,868,000; so that there may be
about one-and--one-third trillion changes in the order of 15 events. And, as Moses records 15 creative
events in the very same order as modern science, and that too 3000 years before the birth of modern
science, even natural reason would say that there are one-and-a-third trillion probabilities that Moses
was infallibly directed in his narrative by God, to one probability that he was not so directed. With
knowledge of these momentous facts, can any sane mind doubt the divine inspiration of Moses?

It should be carefully noted that in the Mosaic or inspired account of creation, God is continuously
active, and does all the work. "The idea of God creating the universe as a perfect machine, acting
automatically throughout the ages, according to laws established by Himself, whose government He
gives up, is entirely absent," says Prof. A. Guyot; and he declares that this representation of the
continual activity of God in the creation is in perfect accord with the latest and most accurate science.
See his last work, on "Creation."

"In the Mosaic record of creation," says Prof. James D. Dana (in his Manual of Geology, pp. 743-6),
"we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the
arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however
instructed. The account recognizes in creation two great eras of three days each--an inorganic and an
organic. Each of these eras opens with the appearance of light; the first, light cosmical; the second,
light from the sun for the special uses of the earth. Each era ends in a day of two great works--the two
shown to be distinct by being severally pronounced ‘good.’ On the third day, that closing the
inorganic era, there was first the dividing of the land from the waters, and afterwards the creation of
vegetation, or the institution of a kingdom of life--a work widely diverse from all that preceded it in
the era. So on the sixth day, terminating the organic era, there was first the creation of mammals, and
then a second far greater work, totally new in its grandest element, the creation of man." The
arrangement is then, as follows:

I. THE INORGANIC ERA

 First Day—Light cosmical.

Second Day—The earth divided from the fluid around it, or individualized.

Third Day—1) Outlining of the land and water; 2) creation of vegetation.

II. THE ORGANIC ERA

Fourth Day—Light  from the sun.

Fifth Day—Creation of the lower order of animals.

Sixth Day—1) Creation of mammals; 2) creation of man.

"The record in the Bible," adds Prof. Dana, "is therefore profoundly philosophical in the scheme of
creation which it presents. It is both true and divine. It is a declaration of authorship, both of creation
and the Bible, on the first page of the sacred volume."

"The natural was first, and the spiritual afterward," says the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. xv. 46.) Both are the
work of the same unchangeable God; and, therefore, the natural resembles, and is typical of, the
spiritual (Psalm li. 10; Isaiah xliii. 15; lx. 2; lxv. 16, 18; Mai. iv. 2; Matt. xiii. 1-23; Acts xxvi. 13;
Eph. ii. 10; iv. 24; 2 Cor. iv. 6; v. 17; Gal. vi. 15). The first chapter of Genesis, then, in its spiritual
application, teaches us the absolute dependence of man upon the Triune God (Father, Word and
Spirit) for salvation. The almighty power of the Most High must create him anew; the sovereign
efficacy of the Spirit of Love must move upon his dark, disordered heart; and the all-healing beams of
the Sun of Righteousness must arise upon his redeemed and penitent spirit. The divine command has
gone forth (Psalm xxxiii. 9) for him to be fruitful in good works (Gen. i. 28; John xv. 16); the
indwelling Spirit of Christ enables him to obey from the heart (Gal. iv. 6; Psalm xxxvii. 31; Jer. xxxi.
33), and to bear--"some thirty, some sixty, and some a hundred-fold "--the fruit of "love, joy, peace,
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance" (Gal. v. 22, 23.) These fruits
of the Spirit are not the cause, but the result of his spiritual renewal (Isaiah lv. 8-13); the tree having
been made good, the fruit is good (Matt] vii. 17.) He does not depend upon any works of his own for
salvations, (Matt. xxv. 37-39); being born of God, he believes that Jesus is the Christ (1 John. v. 1),
and, believing in the finished righteousness of Christ as his own (Jer. xxiii. 6; John xix. 30), he enters
into Sabbath, or rest (Heb. iv. 3; Gen. ii. 1-3). Being married to Christ, or alive unto God, he is dead
to the law (Gen. ii. 18; Rom. vii. 4; Gal. ii. 19); and he serves in newness of spirit, and not in the
oldness of the letter (Rom. vii. 6; Gal. ii. 20; 2 Cor. iii. 6-18), loving God because He first loved him
(1 John iv. 19), and loving those who bear His image (1 John v. 1), and thus truly fulfilling the law
(Rom. iii. 31; xiii. 10), and bringing forth fruit unto God (Rom. vii. 4). Yet, during all the days of his
earthly sojourn, while the old man abides with the new, there will be an alternation of darkness and
light, of evening and morning, to keep him properly humble (Deut. viii. 1-16), to remind him of " the
pit whence he was digged" (Isaiah li. 1; Psalm xl. 1-3) and of the divine origin of all his strength and
righteousness and comfort (Isaiah xlv. 24; xlix. 13). But he has been new-created in the image of the
Son of God (Gen. i. 26; Rom. viii. 28-39); formed from the pierced side of Christ in His death-sleep,
he is united to Him by faith (Gen. ii. 21-24; John xix. 34; Eph. v. 23-32); and the all-giving and all-
sufficient grace of the electing and justifying Father, and the dying and redeeming Son, and the
quickening and sanctifying Spirit, shall abide with him through all his days and nights, his trials and
changes, and shall bring him off more than conqueror at last over every creature-foe, and perfect the
good work begun in him (Psalm cxxxviii. 8; Philip. i. 6; Heb. xii. 2; Rev. i. 8), and give him complete
dominion over his redeemed body and spirit (Gen. i. 28; Rom. viii. 23; Isaiah xxxv. 10; liii. 11), and
conform him entirely to the likeness of his Redeemer (Psalm xvii. 15; Philip. iii. 21), and dispel
forever the last shadow of darkness and sorrow (Isaiah lx. 18-20; Rev. xxi. 25), and translate him,
amid the inconceivable glories of an eternal Sabbath (Gen. ii. 1-3; Heb. iv. 9), to the Heavenly (Gen.
ii. 8-10; Rev, ii. 7; Matt, xxv. 34), where God shall dwell with him, and    wipe away all tears from his
eyes (Rev. xxi. 3, 4), banishing forever all the evils of the earthly Eden, temptation, and sin and
sorrow, and death, elevating him to beauties and splendors and joys never imagined on earth (1 Cor.
ii. 9; Rev. xxi. 1-22), pouring into his soul the uncreated and unclouded brightness of the divine
nature (Rev. xxi. 23-25), and giving him to abide eternally in the Lamb of Life, with all whose names
are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, beside the crystal River of Life, beneath the perennial Tree of
Life (John x. 28; Rev. xxi. 27; xxii. 1-2), where, as a king and priest unto God and his Father, he shall
reign forever and ever.  (Rev. i. 6; xxii. 5).

What a strong consolation is afforded in these blessed and infallible promises to every poor, humble,
contrite, mourning children of Adam, weary with a sense of sin, and thirsting to drink of the pure
fountain of life, and to be washed from all his defilement in the cleansing blood of Christ, and made
whiter than snow! It is a truth more certain than all the perceptions of sense and all the demonstrations
of mathematics, that every such child of God, thus born of the Divine Spirit, and consequently
exercised by spiritual desires, shall be entirely purified from sin, and shall reach eternal joys in the
presence of his God and Fathcr (Psalms ciii. 13-18; cvil. 1-31; cxxxvi. 1-26; Isaiah xli. 10-20; liv. 5-
10, 17; lv. 1-13; lvii. 15; Jer. xxxii. 37-41; Mai. iii. 6, 16-18; Matt. v. 3-6; John iv. 10-14; x. 27-29;
James i. 17; 1 Peter i. 1-5; Rev. xxii. 17).

On the seventh day, as Moses informs us (Gen. ii. 1-3), God ended and rested from His work of
creation, and, therefore, blessed and sanctified that day. Science confirms this statement, and declares
that no new species of vegetable or animal has appeared on earth since the introduction of man. In
saying that God "rested," the historian does not mean that "the everlasting Creator" was "weary"
(Isaiah xl. 23), but that He simply ceased from the work of the material creation on earth. That
cessation, or divine Sabbath, yet continues; God still, however, carries on His Sabbath-day’s work of
providence and redemption (John v. 17; Heb. i. 3). "His resources are infinite; not baffled by the fall
of man, He proceeds, according to His eternal purpose, to work out the grand plan of redemption.
After a dark evening and night of 4900 years, the Sun of Righteousness at length arose, and began to
dispel the gloom; but, after the lapse of nearly nineteen centuries, we still see but the gray dawn of
God’s Sabbath morning, which we yet firmly believe will brighten into a glorious day that shall know
no succeeding night" (Rev. xi. 1.5; xxi. 25).

As man was made in the image of His Creator, he, too, was, according to the divine arrangement, to
work six days, and then rest from his ordinary bodily and mental labors on the seventh day (Gen. i.
28; ii. 15; Ex. xvt. 22-26; xx. 8-11), and to "sanctify" or set apart that day from a common to a sacred
use by devoting it especially to the worship of his Maker (Lev. x. 11; xix. 30; xxiii. 3; Deut. xxxiii.
10; Luke iv. 16; Acts xiii. 14, 15, 27; xv. 2l).* "The Sabbath was made for man," says the Lord of the
Sabbath (Mark ii. 27); if properly observed, it would be a blessing to the whole human race. Man
needs, not only the night for rest, but one-sevenths of his days also for rest. As proved by both
physiology and history, this rest exercises a most beneficial influence on man’s physical, mental and
moral nature. A change of employment is a rest; as God devotes His Sabbath to the work of
providence and redemption, so it is a great blessing to man to have a frequently and regularly
recurring day for solemn reflections upon his relations and obligations to his Creator and fellow-
creatures, and upon his eternal interests. Still, "man was not made for the Sabbath" (Mark ii. 27); he is
not to idolize the Sabbath, or observe it in the oldness of the letter, with pharisaical rigidity and
hypocrisy** (Isaiah i. 13; Matt. xii. 1-14; Mark ii. 23-28; Luke xiii. 11-17; John vii. 22-24; Romans
xiv. 5, 6; Col. ii. 16; Gal. iv. 9-11). The Christian is especially to remember that the Sabbath is but a
shadow or type, of which Christ is the substance (Col. ii. 17; Heb. iii. and iv.), who ended the work of
His eternal redemption by rising from the dead on the Lord’s Day (Matt. xxviii. 1-6; Heb. ix. 12; Rev.
i. 10); and as a "holy priest" should he evermore offer up to his adorable Redeemer the spiritual
sacrifices of heartfelt thanksgiving and praise (1 Peter ii. 5; Psalms ciii. 1-,5; cviii. 1-32; 1 Thess. v.
16-18).***

 * Servants and domestic, animals were also to be allowed to rest (Exodus xx. 10; Deut. v. 14). Only
the covetous and carnal were impatient of the Sabbath restraints (Amos viii. 4-52). Works of necessity
and mercy and religious service were in full accordance with the spirit and design of the Sabbath day
(Matt. xii. 1-13: Luke xiv. 5).

 ** The formalistic, self-righteous Pharisees, substituting an ostentatious ritualism for spiritual piety,
held to a multitude of so-called traditions of the elders, which they pretended to have derived, by oral
transmission, from Moses himself, and to which they attributed a higher authority than even to the
written law. They resolved all religion into manifold and burdensome law. "Upon the single topic of
the observance of the Sabbath, their Mishna (or second law) contains thirty-nine general rules, under
each of which are numerous subordinate precepts, each with specified exceptions. Their labyrinth of
casuistry, like that of the Roman Catholic Jesuits, was an instrument for evading moral obligations,
and for committing iniquity under the apparent sanction of law."--G. P. Fisher. "After the exile and in
the hands of the Pharisees the Sabbath became a legal bondage rather than a privilege and
benediction. Christ, as the Lord of the Sabbath, opposed this mechanical ceremonialism, and restored
the true spirit and benevolent aim of the institution. When the slavish, superstitious, and self-righteous
sabbatarianism of the Pharisees crept into the Galatian churches and was made a condition of
justification, Paul rebuked it as a relapse into Judaism. In the gospel dispensation the Sabbath is not a
legal ceremonial bondage, but rather a precious gift of grace, a' privilege, a holy rest in God in the
midst of the unrest of the world, a day of spiritual refreshing in communion with God and in the
fellowship of the saints, a foretaste and pledge of the never-ending Sabbath in Heaven. The due
observance of it in England, Scotland and America is, under God, a safeguard of public morality and
religion, a bulwark against infidelity, and a source of immeasurable blessing to the church, the state,
and the family."--P. Schaff. It must be stated, however, that in no passage of the New Testament is the
first day of the week called the Sabbath.
 *** Neither the New Testament nor the literature of the early centuries mention any explicit
appointment of the 0rst day of the week as a day of Christian worship, or of the Lord's Day, or
Sunday, as a substitute for Saturday, the Old Testament Sabbath enjoined in the Decalogue But the
New Testament, shows that the special, religious commemoration of the Lord's Day was a
spontaneous exhibition of Christian feeling that sprang up under the eye of the Apostles, and with
their approval. Any formal decree abolishing the old, and substituting a new Sabbath would only have
offended the weak Jewish Christians. The Sabbath and marriage were instituted by God Himself in ,
not for the Jews only, but for the whole human race. The penalty of death for the violation of the
Sabbath was not threatened at its institution in Eden, nor even written in the Decalogue, or moral law,
on the tables of stone: but it was a peculiar feature of the Hebrew judicial or civil law (Ex. xxxi. 14;
Num. xv. 31-36), typifying the spiritual death of those who, while professing to have entered into the
true Sabbath or rest by believing in the finished redemption of Christ, yet, really depend upon their
own works for salvation (Heb. iii., iv.). The Sabbath was instituted by God to commemorate both His
first or natural and His second or spiritual creation (Gen. ii. 3: Ex. xx. 11: Deut. v. 15): to remind men
of Him, their Creator and Redeemer: to turn their thoughts from the seen and temporal to the unseen
and spiritual: to afford time for religious instruction and for the public and special worship of God: to
give recuperative rest to sinful, toiling humanity; to be a type of that rest which remains for the people
of God; and to be a sign of the covenant between God and His people (Ex. xxxi. 13, 16, 17: Ezek. xx.
12). It is thought that nine-tenths of the people derive the greater part of their religious knowledge
from the services of the sanctuary.

     The Roman Emperor Constantine, 321 A. D., made Sunday a lethal holiday, allowing only
necessary agricultural labors on that day. Leo VI., about 900 A. D., repealed the agricultural
exemption, thus thoroughly establishing Sunday as a day of rest. Alfred the Great, about the same
time, forbade work, trade and legal proceedings on Sunday in England. "Calvin's View of the fourth
commandment was stricter than Luther's, Knox's view stricter than Calvin's, and the Puritan view
stricter than Knox's. The Puritan practice in Scotland and New England often runs into Judaizing
excesses. About the year 1600, a strong Sabbath movement traveled from England to Scotland, and
from both of these countries to North America, the chief impulse being given in 1595 by a book
entitled The Sabbath of the Old and New Testament, written by Nicholas Bound, a learned Puritan
clergyman of Suffolk. Archbishop Whitgift and Chief Justice Popham attempted to suppress the book,
but in vain--considering the Puritan Sabbath theory a cunningly concealed attack on the 'Church of
England,' by substituting the Jewish Sabbath for the Christian Sunday and all the ' Church' festivals.
At last King James I. brought his royal authority to bear against the Puritan Sabbatarianism, and
issued his famous 'Book of Sports' in 1618, afterwards republished by his son, Charles I., with the
advice of Archbishop Laud, in 1633. This curious production formally authorizes and commends the
desecration of the evening of the Lord's Day by dancing, leaping, fencing and other 'lawful
recreations,' on condition of observing the earlier part of the day by strict outward conformity to the
worship of the 'Church of England.' The court set the example of desecration by balls, masquerades
and plays on Sunday evening; the rustics repaired from the houses of worship to the ale-house or the
village-green to dance around the May-pole and to shoot at the mark. To complete the folly, King
James ordered the book to be read in every parish 'church,' and threatened clergymen who refused to
do so with severe punishment. King Charles repeated the order. The people not conforming with the
King's decree were to leave the country. The popular conscience revolted against such an odious and
despotic law, and Charles and Laud, for this among other causes, were overwhelmed in common ruin.
The Puritan Sabbath theory triumphed throughout the British Isles and the American colonies, the
citizens of which countries have never been willing to exchange it for the laxity of Sunday observance
on the Continent of Europe, with its disastrous effects upon the attendance at public worship and the
morals of the people." The Sabbatic view of Sunday is incorporated in the Presbyterian, the
Congregational and the Baptist Articles of Faith. In 1678, under Charles II., all labor or business,
except works of necessity or charity, were forbidden by a statute which may be regarded as the
foundation of all the present law on the subject in England and the United States.

"The Old School Baptists "says Elder S H. Durand of Pennsylvania, in the "Signs of the Times," "do
not observe the first day of the week as the Jewish Sabbath, for Christ and his Apostles gave no such
command; but they refrain, on that day, from all works excerpt those of necessity, for these three
reasons: 1st, the law of our country forbids unnecessary work on that day, and we are commanded to
obey the higher powers (Romans xiii. 1-5): 2, it is the day universally appointed for religious
meetings, and it is a good thing that we can have one day in the week for the public worship of God
without distraction Item business: and 3d, the Apostles and early disciples appear to have met
regularly on the first day of the week, though they also met on other days and from day to day. When
the child of God believes on the I oral Jesus Christ, he ceases from his own works, as God did from
his, and enters into rest, and all the remainder of his life is really God's holy Sabbath with him, and all
the days and nights of the week he should not (to his own works or speak his own words (Isaiah lviii.
13, 14)."

The phrase, "Lord’s day," occurs only once in the Bible--in Rev. i. 10: but the same Greek adjective
for Lord's, kuriakos, occurs in 1 Cor. xi. 10, applied to "the Lord's supper," a literal as well as a
spiritual feast: and the phrase, "the Lord's Day," is used to designate the first day of the week by the
following writers of the second century: Barnabas, Ignatius, Irenseus, Justin Martyr, Melito,
Dionysius of Corinth, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian.

  Christ particularly honored the first day of the week, not only by rising from the dead on that day,
but also by repeatedly visiting His disciples, after His resurrection, on that day (John xx. 19, 26). The
Apostles, too, it would seem, habitually assembled on that day (Acts xx. 7; I Cor. xvt. 1, 2; Acts ii. 1.)
The day of Pentecost; was the first day of the week, because it was the fiftieth day after the
resurrection of Christ, which took plaice on the first day of the week. Without any formal
commandment in the New Testament, but no doubt by Divine arrangement (Eph. i. 10-13), ever since
the resurrection of Christ, the Christian church, delighting to honor their Lord, has observed the
Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, as the Sabbath, or Holy Convocation, Day of the New
Dispensation *; but Christian forbearance on this subject is inculcated in Rom. xiv. 5, 6, and Col. ii.
16, 17.

 * At first, both days were kept: the Apostles, like Christ, worshiped with the Jews in their synagogues
on the seventh day, until the Jews persecuted and prevented them (Matt. xii. 9; xiii. 54; Luke iv. 16,
44; Acts xiii. 5, 14-52; xiv. 1-7; xvii. 1-9, 17; xviii. 4).

The division of time into weeks, even among the patriarchs, is shown by Gen. viii. 10, 12; xxix. 27,
28.

With the Israelites, not only the seventh day, but the seventh week, and seventh month, and seventh
year, and seventh septenary of years, were, by Divine appointment, peculiarly sacred (Deut. xvt. 9-12;
Lev. xvt. 29-~4; xxv. 1-55). Seven is the representative sacred number of the Scriptures, and is the
symbol of Divine completeness, and marks a Divine work, in judgment, or mercy, or revelation (Gen.
iv. 24; vii. 4; Rev. i. 4, 12, 13, 20; ii. 1; v. 1, &c.)*

 * Numbers in Scripture often have a symbolical rather than a mere arithmetical value. The half of
seven, which is three-and-a-half  (time, times, and a half, three days and a half, three yours and a half,
forty-two months, 1,260 days or years), is the symbol of human agency or evil cut short, the time of
the church's pilgrimage and persecution (Dan. vii. 25: Matt. xxiv. 22; James v. 17; Rev. xi. 2, 3, 9: xii.
6). Two denotes intensification, requital in full. and testimony (Gen. xli. 32; Job xlii. 10: Rev. xi..8).
Three is, like seven, a Divine number (Matt. xxviii. 19; Gen. xviii. 2, 13:1 Sam. iii. 4, 6, 8: Rev. iv. 8).
Four symbolizes world-wide extension (Dan. ii. 40: vii. 2: Rev. vii. 1). Eight is the sign of a new era
and life, after seven has been completed (Gen. vii. 7; xvii. 12: Ex. xxii. 30: Lev. xiv. 10). Ten
represents perfected universality (Gen. xiv. 20: Ex. xxxiv. 28; Matt. xxv. l; Luke xvii. 12). Five, the
half of ten, is the penal number (Lev. v. 16: Num. xviii. 16. Ten raised to the third power, which is
1,000, represents the world pervaded by the Divine (Rev. xx. 2-4, 7). Seventy; the product of seven
and ten, represents the people of God in worldly captivity or wandering, when their sorrows are
multiplied (Gen. xlvi. 27; Ex. xv. 27. xxiv. 1: Jer. xxv. 11). Twelve is the church number (Gen. xlix.
28: Matt. x. 2; James i. 1: Rev. xxi. 12, 14). Twelve squared and multiplied by 1,000, the symbol of
the world divinely perfected, gives 144,000, the number of sealed Israelites (Rev. vii. 4; Eph, iv..30).
Twenty-four represents the elders of the Old and New Testaments combined (Rev. iv. 4: Gen. xxxv.
22; Luke vi. 13. Six, the half of twelve, is the world kingdom broken, or the world given over to
Judgment (Rev. vi. 12-17 ix. 13-21: xvi. 12-16): it is next to the sacred seven, but can never reach it.
Six raised from units to tens and hundreds (666), the number of the beast (Rev. xiii. 18), shows that,
notwithstanding, his progression to higher powers, he can only rise to greater ripeness for judgment.
Fourty symbolizes trial, chastisement and humiliation (Gen. vii 4; Deut. Viii.2; Jonah iii.4; Matt. iv.
2).--Fausset's Bible Cyclopedia.

In the sacred narrative of creation, we witness the gradation from dust and grass to man. How
wonderful the series! And, at each progressive step, everything is pronounced good by the beneficent
Creator, as showing beauty and perfection in itself, as well as pleasure and satisfaction in His own
mind.

What a spectacle then was there for angels to behold--this noble, erect, God-like being, the creature
man, swaying his sceptre over this beautiful new-made world, which his Maker had given him to
possess and enjoy! Compare it with the condition of things since the fall, and great will be the
contrast.

As this lord of the lower creation stood forth gazing on the universe spread out before him, he
contained his wife in his side and the countless billions of the human race in his loins. He named * the
cattle and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the fields as his Maker presented them to him. Thus
was his divinely given power of observation and of speech brought into exercise; and he was also
taught his need of a suitable companion, which neither himself nor any of his inferior earth-derived
fellow creatures could supply. They had been produced by God entirely from earthly materials; but he
had been animated by the Divine Spirit and formed in the image of his Maker.

 * The first names given to animals were not arbitrary, but were either imitations of their peculiar
utterances, or significant of their peculiar qualities or uses.

In what respect was man in the image of God, and in what respect was he not in the image of God?
He could not be like Him in body, because God is a Spirit and has no body. Man’s body, though
beautiful and the topmost piece of the material creation, being the sum and crown and glory of all, yet
was made of the dust of the ground of pre-existing matter--was of the earth earthy, and unto dust must
return. No image of God here.*  But in his soul or spirit he could, and no doubt was, in the image of
God. "His spirit, like that of the angels, was an immediate creation of God. His ‘breath of life’ was, as
it appears, more than a mere quickening principle, a vital force, enabling the man as a mere animal to
move and perform acts of natural life; but it embraced much more than this--even a rational, ever-
enduring, and accountable spirit, now mysteriously united to his animal nature, over which it is to
preside and rule. The body with all its powers and members is but the instrument of the soul, a
tabernacle in which it dwells, while conversant with this lower world (Gen. ii. 7; iii. 19; Eccl. xii. 7;
Acts vii. 59; Matt. x. 28). And it was in this, his soul or spiritual nature that man was made like God.
God is a Spirit, and man in one sense is a spirit (Heb. xii. 9, 23). Yet we do not regard this as an
emanation or efflux from God Himself; it is not a part of the divine nature or essence, but is a created
dependent sprit, distinct from God, yet partaking of His likeness as a spirit, in its measure."--C. C.
Jones, in "History of Church of God."

 * It is clear from the Scriptures that man's bodily form is similar to the form of the spiritual bodies of
Christ, of the angels, and of glorified saints (Gen. xviii: Joshua v. 13:15: Judges xiii. 6, 16, 22: Dan.
iii. 25; ix. 21; Luke ix.. 30, 31; Rev. xxii. 8, 9). The microscope reveals millions of natural objects
invisible to our naked eyes; air, and other gases, though material, are invisible to us; even so spiritual
forms are real and shall be visible to us whom our eyes are opened (2 Kings vi 17).

The respects in which man was made in the image or resemblance of God were: the possession of a
soul or spirit, which, by the sovereign will and sustaining power of God, was to endure forever;
intelligence; self-consciousness; free will (before the fall); uprightness; and dominion over the inferior
creatures.

But Adam* was alone: "And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will
make him a helpmeet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam’, and he
slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the Lord
God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is
bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, ** because she was taken out of
man. ** Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife; and they shall be
one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed’ (Gen. ii. 18, 21-
25).

* The word Adam in Hebrew means red earth; the form is the same in all numbers, so that the original
signifies either man or men--either the first man or all mankind contained seminally and
representatively in him.

** Tsela, here translated rib, generally means aide, and is here rendered by the. Septuagint pleura, a
piece of his side. The females of the lower animals were altogether separate in their formation from
the males; but woman was formed out of man, to teach us the closeness, tenderness, and
indissolubility of the marriage bond, and of the spiritual union of Christ and the church (Gen. ii. 14;
Matt. xix. 3-6; Eph. v. 23-32). Woman was not made from man's head, to rule him, nor from his feet,
to be trampled upon by him, but from his side, to be his loved and honored, loving and reverential
companion (1 Cor. xi. 8, 9; Eph. v. 22-83: I Pet. iii. 1-7).

Thus was the institution of marriage ordained and carried into successful operation by the Almighty,
who gave Eve to Adam for his wife. And as it was in the beginning, so it should be now and onward,
to the end of time, throughout the world, one woman for one man--one man for one woman--united in
the holy bonds of wedlock, at marriageable ages. "The providence of God is in harmony with His
word, and this blessed arrangement since, in a most wonderful manner, He keeps up, in the natural
increase of the race, the numerical equality of the sexes, at marriageable ages, and that over the whole
earth and ever since its foundation; and then continually stretches out His hand against transgressors,
who by multiplying wives would disturb this great law; and He subjects them to sure evils in the form
of family divisions and strifes, bitter wrath and cruel revenge, diseases, sudden and shameful deaths,
ungoverned and wicked offspring, decayed fortunes, and various other judgments."--Gen. iv. 23, 24;
xvi. 1-16; xxx. 1-27; xxxvii. 1-36; xix. 1-38; and chapters vi., vii., etc.

 * The Hebrew for man in the 23rd verse is ish, meaning man of earth, or husband, Adam's
designation of himself; the Hebrew for woman in that verse is isha, the feminine of ish, and therefore
meaning man-ess, or female man, or wife.

 "The design of marriage is to promote the comfort and happiness of mankind, the legitimate
propagation of our species, the perpetuation of a virtuous, honorable seed in the church, and purity of
life and manners on the earth."--C. C. Jones. This law was frequently violated in the patriarchal and
Mosaic dispensations, and during the Christian dispensation it has been set at naught by Roman
Catholics, Mohammedans and Mormons; but our Lord Jesus Christ strictly enjoins its observance, and
points to the first couple as an example for all future generations.--Matt. xix. 3-9. They who violate
this law must receive the penalty due to their crimes.