thiest pool of mud,
are as orderly in their arrangements, as perfect after their kind, and
as wisely adapted to their station, as the angels before the throne of
God. And as man never saw, so he has no language to describe, a state of
original disorder; for every word he can use implies a previous state of
regularity; as disorder tells of order dissolved; confusion of previous
forms melted together. So the poets who have tried to describe a chaos
have been obliged to represent it as the wreck of a former state.

Both the Bible language and the Bible narrative correspond to the
philosophy and philology of the case; for, by the use of the substantive
verb, in the past tense, implying progressive being, according to the
usual force of the word in Hebrew, we are told literally, "the earth
_became_ without form and void." God did not create it so, but after it
was created, and by a series of revolutions not recorded, it became
disordered and empty. The Holy Spirit takes care to explain this verse,
by quoting it in Jeremiah iv. 23, as the appropriate symbolical
description of the state of a previously existing and regularly
constituted body politic, reduced to confusion by the calamities of war.
Again, he explains both the terms used in it in Isaiah xxxiv. 11, by
using them to describe, not the rude and undigested mass of the heathen
poet, but the wilderness condition of a ravaged country, and the
desolate ruins of once beautiful and populous cities: "He will stretch
out upon it the line of _confusion_, and the stones of _emptiness_." In
both these cases the previous existence of an orderly and populous state
is implied. And finally, we are expressly assured, that the state of
disorder mentioned in the second verse of Genesis i., was not the
original condition of the earth--Isaiah xlv. 18--where the very same
word is used as in Genesis i. 2, "He created it not, _teu_,
_disordered_, in _confusion_." The period of the earth's previous
existence in an orderly state, or that occupied by the revolutions and
catastrophes which disordered its surface, is not recorded in Scripture.

The second period is that of disorder, which must have been of some
duration, more or less, and is plainly implied to have been of
considerable length, in the declaration that "the Spirit of the Lord
moved"--literally, _was brooding_ (a figure taken from the incubation of
fowls)--"upon the face of the waters." But no portion of Scripture gives
any intima