tion of the length of this period.

If, then, astronomers and geologists assert that the earth was millions,
or hundreds of millions of years in process of preparation for its
present state, by a long series of successive destructions and
renovations, and gradual formations, _there is not one word in the Bible
to contradict that opinion_; but, on the contrary, very many texts which
fully and unequivocally imply its truth. But, as the knowledge of the
exact age of the earth is by no means necessary to any man's present
happiness, or the salvation of his soul, it is nowhere taught in the
Bible. God has given us the stars to teach us astronomy, the earth to
teach us geology, and the Bible to teach us religion, and neither
contradicts the other.

This is no new interpretation evoked to meet the necessities of modern
science. The Jewish Rabbins, and those of the early Christian Fathers
who gave any attention to criticism, are perfectly explicit in
recognizing these distinctions. The doctrine of the creation of the
world only six or seven thousand years ago is a product of monkish
ignorance of the original language of the Bible. But Clement of
Alexandria, Chrysostom, and Gregory Nazianzen, after Justin Martyr,
teach the existence of an indefinite period between the creation and the
formation of all things. Basil and Origen account for the existence of
light before the sun, by alleging that the sun existed, but that the
chaotic atmosphere prevented his rays from being visible till the first
day, and his light till the third.[231] Augustine, in his first homily,
represents the first state of the earth, in Genesis i. 1, as bearing the
same relation to its finished state, that the seed of a tree does to the
trunk, branches, leaves, and fruit. Horsley, Edward King, Jennings,
Baxter, and many others, who wrote during the last two centuries, but
before the period of geological discovery, explained the second verse
substantially as did Bishop Patrick, a hundred and fifty years ago. "How
long all things continued in confusion, we are not told. _It might have
been, for anything that is here revealed, a very great while._"[232]

Some persons, however, have supposed that the chaos of the second verse
succeeded immediately to the creation of the first, and that the six
days' work in like manner followed that instantaneously, or at least
after a very brief interval, because the records of these cycles are
connected by the word _and_, whi