progress and plan and adaptation, as
emanating from a Supreme Will. The question of how the plan has been
worked out will come up for detailed consideration farther on. In the
mean time we have before us the fact that the Bible represents the
cosmos as not the product of a blind conflict of self-existent forces,
but as the result of the production and guidance of these forces by
infinite wisdom.

It is more than curious that this idea of type, so long existing in an
isolated and often depised form, as a theological thought in the
imagery of Scripture, should now be a leading idea of natural science;
and that while comparative anatomy teaches us that the structures of
all past and present lower animals point to man, who, as Professor
Owen expresses it, has had all his parts and organs "sketched out in
anticipation in the inferior animals," the Bible points still farther
forward to an exaltation of the human type itself into what even the
comparative anatomist might perhaps regard as among the "possible
modifications of it beyond those realized in this little orb of ours,"
could he but learn its real nature.

Under the foregoing heads, of the object, the structure, the
authority, and the general cosmical views of the Scripture, I have
endeavored to group certain leading thoughts important as preliminary
to the study of the subject; and, in now entering on the details of
the Old Testament cosmogony, I trust the reader will pardon me for
assuming, as a working hypothesis, that we are studying an inspired
book, revealing the origin of nature, and presenting accurate pictures
of natural facts and broad general views of the cosmos, at least until
in the progress of our inquiry we find reason to adopt lower views;
and that he will, in the mean time, be content to follow me in that
careful and systematic analysis which a work claiming such a character
surely demands.

CHAPTER IV.

THE BEGINNING.

"In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the
earth."--Genesis i., 1.

It is a remarkable and instructive fact that the first verse of the
Hebrew sacred writings speaks of the material universe--speaks of it
as a whole, and as originating in a power outside of itself. The
universe, then, in the conception of this ancient writer, is not
eternal. It had a beginning, but that beginning in the indefinite and
by us unmeasured past. It did not originate fortuitously, or by any
merely accidental conflict of