The lives of the one class all work, those of the other all play!
In the second place, the account of each day's creation concludes with
the refrain "and the evening and the morning were the first (or
other) day." Now evening and morning are terms which mark the luminous
gradations between night and day, and these phenomena, like night
and day, depend on the earth's revolving on its axis and presenting
different portions of its surface to the sun. Evening and morning
clearly imply a space of twenty-four hours, and the writer of Genesis,
whoever he was, would probably be surprised at any other interpretation
of his words. It is sometimes argued, as for instance by Dr. M'Caul,
that these primeval days were of vast and unknown duration, the evening
and the morning not being dependent on their present causes. But this
supposition could only apply to the first three days, for the sun, moon,
and stars were created on the fourth day, expressly "to rule over the
day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness." The
fifth and sixth days, at least, must be understood as of normal length,
and thus the chronological difficulties remain. All animal life was
brought into existence on the last two days, and therefore the Bible
still allows an antiquity of less than six thousand years for the
world's fauna. Geology and Biology allow millions of years. Here then
Science and the Bible are in flagrant and irreconcilable contradiction.

The fact that the writer of Genesis represents light as existing three
days before the creation of the sun, the source of light, has frequently
been noticed. One learned commentator supposed that God had infused a
certain "luminosity" through the air, which was not exactly the same
as the light of the sun. But light is not a _thing_; it is a phenomenon
caused by definite laws of astronomy and optics. Such explanations are
but fanciful refuges of superstition. "God said let there be light and
there was light," is not the language of science and history, but the
language of poetry. As such it is sublime. We find a similar expression
in the Vedas of the Hindoos: "He thought, I will create worlds, and they
were there!" Both become ridiculous when presented to us as a scientific
statement The physical astronomer knows how worlds are formed, as well
as how their movements are determined; he knows also the causes of
light; and he knows that none of these processes resembles the accounts
given in t