_days_, then, are removed, we
find, by the holders of this view, altogether from the province of
chronology to the province of prophetic vision; they are represented
simply as parts of the exhibited scenery, or rather as forming the
measures of the apparent time during which the scenery _was_ exhibited.
We must also hold, however, that in the character of symbolic days they
were as truly representative of the lapse of foregone periods of
creation as the scenery itself was representative of the creative work
accomplished in these periods. For if the apparent days occurred in only
the vision, and were not symbolic of foregone periods, they could not
have been transferred with any logical propriety from the vision itself
to that which the vision represented, as we find done in what our
Shorter Catechism terms "the reason annexed to the Fourth
Commandment."[18] The days must have been prophetic days, introduced,
indeed, into the panorama of creation as mayhap mere openings and
droppings of the curtain, but not the less symbolic of that series of
successive periods, each characterized by its own productions and
events, in which creation itself was comprised. Nothing more probable,
however, than that even Moses himself may have been unacquainted with
the _extent_ of the periods represented in the vision; nay, he may have
been equally unconscious of the actual extent of the seeming days by
which they were symbolized. "Visions without dark speeches,"--visions,
not of symbolic apparitions, but of actual existences and events, past
or present,--may, nay must, have differed from what may be termed the
dark hieroglyphic visions; but we find in all visions an element of mere
representative value introduced when they deal with time, and that they
occur as if wholly outside its pale. These creation "days" seem, in
relation to what they typify, to have been, if I may so express myself,
the mere _modules_ of a graduated scale.

Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one given by
Milton of that vision of the future, which he represents as conjured up
before Adam by the archangel, would be a task rather for the scientific
poet than for the mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us
suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the
Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been
vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of St. John in Patmos, voices
were mingled with scenes, an