God of the Bible demands. "The spirit that moved on the waters" (Narayana), whose attributes had never been understood or acknowledged by the people, was deprived of its originally pure character, and converted into a separate god Vishnu. It was believed that the latter assumed nine successive incarnations; that he offered himself up as a sacrifice, in order to create the world; and that he resigned his divine nature, and came down upon earth in human form, in order to deliver the world from evil. Besides Vishnu, Siva was added to Brahman, as a principal god; first both were equal, and then even superior to his power; these three, together with their wives, form the trinity, or trimurtis, representing the Creation, Preservation, and Destruction of the World. The old cosmogony of the Hindoos is, indeed, so indistinct and ambiguous, that it left ample scope for the most diverging interpretations; very different, and almost opposite, schools have founded their systems on the same texts. The Vedas and the Book of Manu, those ancient sources of Hindoo literature, gave rise and support, on the one hand, to the Puranas, with their gross and material idolatry; and, on the other hand, to the Vedantas, with their sublimizing and spiritualizing speculations. From the four Vedas alone eleven hundred different schools derived their tencts; and much disagreement and confusion exist in the Hindoo theology with regard to the gradation of persons intervening between the Supreme Being and the created world. No distinct system of theology is derivable from the Vedas; in one place, Indra is the most powerful and the first of all gods; in another the sun: now three deities, the earth, the air, and the heaven, are mentioned, as equally potent and primeval, and now it is the great Spirit which is the soul of all beings; and often very different attributes are ascribed to the same deity. This vagueness of conception prevailing in the ancient religious books of the Hindoos, is acknowledged as a fundamental defect, even by the most profound students and

the most zealous admirers of Hindoo literature. No aberration of this kind could happen with regard to the Hebrew cosmogony. The first chapter of Genesis is, in spite of its sublimity and grandeur, so plain and simple, so calm and unequivocal, that a fanciful exposition is utterly impossible, and can only be attempted by those who defy all reasonable rules of a sound interpretation. If Mosaism has even been derived from the same soil as many other Eastern religions, the germs developed themselves freely and independently, and reached a degree of loftiness and vigour which they attained in no other creed.

The vast matter of the earth was covered with water, "as with a garment." But over this shapeless chaos works, in mysterious majesty, the spirit of God; He hovers over the waters; He is not identical with matter, but its Lord, whose will stirs the stagnant mass; the chaos is no cause, not even a secondary one, of the world; and the infinitude of His wisdom and His love prepares a creation of order and beauty. The COSMOS is about to be framed.

If we were not accustomed to the most phantastical contortions of the Hebrew text, we should express our utter astonishment at the opinion, that between the first and second verse lie the fall of the angels, and the warfare of Satan, not mentioned for some recondite reason; that the consequence of this rebellion was the transformation of the originally beautiful world into a fathomless abyss, the government of Satan - but that hell and Satan were ultimately conquered by the spirit of God that watched over this desolation, so, however, that many beautiful parts of nature have been disfigured by the diabolical powers, and show no longer the pure work of God; or that "the first creation, which arose and perished thousands and, perhaps, millions of years before the appearance of man, was a failure, an ungodly perversion, in consequence of the interposition of Satan and his powers." The aberrations of profound minds, if they unfortunately indulge in mystic spe

culations, are more dangerous, and often more absurd, than the empty superficiality of shallow reasoners. We suppress, therefore, the almost endless reveries which have been based on the simple grandeur of our chapter; incredible theories have been deduced from it; ingenuity and sophistry have been equally busy; truth and error have been mixed; almost all metaphysical theories of heathen and Christian philosophers have been discovered in our text by far-sighted thinkers; -till, at last, the quiet, impartial critie, astonished and bewildered, sees himself launched on an infinite sea of mysticism, and needs all the energy of his mind to reach again the safe shores of common sense. Will our readers blame us, if we do not notice this wild, and often unintelligible, jargon? We, for our own part, confess, that nothing but the sense of the importance of our subject has armed us with the necessary patience and courage.

FIRST DAY.

We resign with reluctance, from want of space, the very interesting task of making a systematic comparison between the Mosaic and the other ancient cosmogonies. The analogies are both surprising and instructive. At every step we meet with familiar features. But the Biblical account combines and concentrates the valuable elements which are scattered in all, whilst it is absolutely free from the perverse and often absurdly phantastical traits which disfigure the rest. It has a unity of principle prevading the whole, which we elsewhere seek in vain; and that principle, too, is at once simple, sublime, and eternal. The materials for such comparison are spread in numerous ancient works. We have, however, in the notes on the first chapters, tried to point out the similarity or divergence, wherever this was feasible in a brief compass.

The dreary, shapeless matter of the earth was sufficiently prepared for assuming order and organisation; God's loving care had begun to spiritualise the inert mass by bringing its elements into motion. But as long as it was enclosed in darkness, it had, practically, no existence; in order to call it positively and virtually into being, it was necessary to make it visible and, therefore, the first Divine act was the creation of LIGHT; or rather its separation from the obscurer elements in which it had been enveloped (ver. 4). It will not be necessary to enter deeply into the long-disputed question, how light was possible before the formation of the celestial bodies from which it emanates (ver. 14-19). It will suffice to remind the reader, that ancient, and even more recent philosophers suppose, beyond the sphere of the most distant stars, a region entirely luminous, an empyrean heaven; and they believe, that the nebuke are this bright region seen

VER. 3-5.

through an opening. Anaxagoras maintained, that the upper or ethereal world is filled with fire. Seneca observed, that, occasionally, apertures are formed in the heavens through which we perceive the flame occupying the background. Huygens, in his description of the nebula of Orion, remarks: "One would say, that the celestial vault, being rent in that part, allows us to see the more luminous regions beyond"; and Halley writes, with regard to the nebula of Orion and Andromeda: "In reality, these spots are nothing else than the light coming from the regions of the ether filled with a diffuse and inherently luminous matter"; and the same astronomer, by no means orthodox in his theological views, remarks, with reference to our question: "These nebulæ reply fully to the difficulty which has been raised against the Mosaic description of creation, in asserting that light could be generated without the sun. Nebula manifestly prove the contrary; several, in effect, offer no

trace of a star at their centre." Whether the Hebrew writer, in supposing that light existed independently of the sun, intended to convey a similar idea, it is difficult to decide; he nowhere makes a distinct allusion to this theory; he seems, more probably, to hold, that on the first day the luminous matter was created, spreading through infinite space in its rarified state; but that, on the fourth day, it was condensed into the light-giving bodies for the benefit and advantage of the earth. Thus, we have another instance of the two chief acts of Divine creation; first, the production of matter, and then its arrangement and organization; it was necessary to point out, that light did not exist before the world; that man does not owe it to the sun or the moon, which it is, therefore, a criminal folly to worship; that it was not the primary matter of the universe, as Heraclitus and Empedocles maintained; but that it sprang into being by God's will and command. That, indeed, according to modern theories, luminous nebulæ are the first materials of the world, if we go back to the origin of all things; that the sun is in itself no bright orb, but that its brilliancy is emitted from a highly luminous atmosphere which surrounds it, and which does not prevent the body itself from being inhabited; that the appearance of the zodiacal light or the aurora borealis seems to prove the existence of luminous matter besides the sun; and that light, like heat, exists in a latent or concealed state in every object of nature: - these suppositions affect in no manner the Biblical narrative, neither where they are in harmony, nor where they are in antagonism with it; they concern us as little as the ludicrous query, whether God had, before the creation of light, been in darkness; or the still more absurd question, how God passed His time before the

Creation; and we leave these improprieties to the well-known severe and ironical strictures of St. Augustin and Luther. We might compare the results of our scientific researches with the notions of antiquity; this is a task both important and interesting; but we must not expect to find the former identical with the latter; we cannot wish, that the human mind should have made no progress in the lapse of three millenniums: we cannot desire, that so much intense mental labour, so much earnest perseverance, should be wholly unrewarded. The human race is not, as heathen poets sang in gloomy despondency, doomed to the fruitless efforts of the Danaids, incessantly toiling, and never advancing; mankind has made progress in the knowledge of God; their intellects have penetrated deeper into the mysteries of His works;-let us hope, that their hearts have equally progressed in love and purity; that the increased light was attended by an increased warmth.

With striking sublimity the first Divine creation is introduced: "And God said, Light be, and Light was." "God speaks, and it exists, He commands, and it stands there"; the words of God imply behests; they are not mere sounds; they are things, they are essential objects; even heathen philosophers quoted our verse as an example of sublime diction; and the Hebrew language is peculiarly adapted for brief, pithy, and majestic exclamation; it is as lofty as it is concise; it is the language of religion, and the fit garment of those ideas, which were destined to humanize the world.

Light and darkness were mixed in the chaos; both are now separated, to form the distinction between day and night. But the darkness of night is widely different from the darkness of chaos; the former stands under the

influence of universal light; the latter prevailed before the separation of the elements, an impenetrable gloom. The Persians counted, therefore, the night among the beneficial and celestial things, though no religion attached such holiness to light as that of Zoroaster, and though Ahriman, the evil principle, was the prince of darkness, who had even maliciously attempted to corrupt the pure and brilliant light of Ormuzd, but was by this god hurled back into his abodes of darkness. We need not urge, that the astronomical or sidereal day was impossible before the existence of the sun; the expression, "evening and morning, one day," denotes merely the space of time equivalent to our twenty-four hours, the civil or calendar day, for which the Hebrew language has no proper term. Other cosmogonies, also, introduce light before the sun; the Great Spirit of the Hindoos dispelled the gloom even before the creation of the water; Ormuzd dwelt from the beginning on a throne of light; Indra, the god of light, was born before all other immortal deities; and the root which in many of the Indo-Germanic

languages signifies god, denotes the brilliant or light-spreading Being. The gods of light and fire, of the air and the morning-dawn, are in the system of the Vedas among the earliest gods. That the Israelites, and many other ancient nations, counted their days from evening to evening is universally known. Some tribes numbered the time ordinarily after nights; as, for instance, the Salii; and the English expressions, sennight (seven-night), fortnight (fourteen-night), etc., remind us of the same usage. But the origin of this custom is scarcely to be traced back to the reminiscence of the first day of creation, when a night of chaotic darkness was followed by a day of light; but it is to be referred to the lunar months and lunar years which formed the basis of chronology among many nations. In fact, in other countries the days were differently computed; the Indians and the later Babylonians reckoned them from one sunrise to the next; the Umbrians from noon to noon; the Roman priests, and the civil authorities, the Egyptians, and others, like ourselves, from midnight to midnight,

The original matter called into existence by Divine omnipotence (ver. 1) partly consisted of, and partly was covered by, water (ver. 2); this chaotic mixture, at first involved in darkness, had been surrounded with light (vers. 3-5); but it formed still one undivided mass, without shape or proportion; it was, therefore, the next act of the celestial will to separate it into two well-balanced parts, which might individually be made the basis of further creations. The firmament, or expanse of heaven (ver.8) was framed. The clear blue sky became visible. It

consists of the condensed clouds, and assumes thus the appearance of a firm and solid substance. Thus the waters were partly congregated above this firmament, partly beneath it: the conglomerated matter was divided into heaven and earth, and the firmament marks the separation. The waters above it are reserved as the stores of rain; those beneath it form partly the vapours of the air, and partly the seas, streams, and fountains of the earth.-God calls the firmament heaven (ver. 8); it is, therefore, perfectly appropriate, if the regions above the firmament

E