operations as disclosed in the geological history of
the earth and in the present course of nature, must impress us with a
suspicion that long periods were employed in the work. God might have
prepared the earth for man in an instant. He did not choose to do so,
but on the contrary proceeded step by step; and the record he has
given us does not receive its full significance nor attain its full
harmony with the course of geological history, unless we can
understand each day of the creative week as including a long
succession of ages.

2. We have, as already explained, reason to believe that the seventh
day at least has been of long duration. At the close of the sixth, God
rested from all his work of material creation, and we have as yet no
evidence that he has resumed it. Neither theologians nor evolutionists
will, I presume, desire to maintain that any strictly creative acts
have occurred in the modern period of geology. We know that the
present day, if it is the seventh, has lasted already for at least six
thousand years, and, if we may judge from the testimony of prophecy,
has yet a long space to run, before it merges in that "new heaven and
new earth" for which all believers look, and which will constitute the
first day of an endless sabbatism.

3. The philosophical and religious systems of many ancient nations
afford intimations of the somewhat extensive prevalence in ancient
times of the notion of long creative periods, corresponding to the
Mosaic days. These notions, in so far as they are based on truth, are
probably derived from the Mosaic narrative itself, or from the
primitive patriarchal documents which may have formed the basis of
that narrative. They are, no doubt, all more or less garbled versions,
and can not be regarded as of any authority, but they serve to show
what was the interpretation of the document in a very remote
antiquity. I have collected from a variety of sources the following
examples:

The ancient mythology of Persia appears to have had six creative
periods, each apparently of a thousand years, and corresponding very
nearly with the Mosaic days.[58] The Chaldeans had a similar system,
to which in a previous chapter we have already referred. The Etruscans
possessed a history of the creation, somewhat resembling that of the
Bible, and representing the creation as occupying six periods of a
thousand years each.[59]

The Egyptians believed that the world had been subject to a series of
d