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.dt The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Neptunian, or Water Theory of Creation, by J. M. Woodman
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.h1
The Neptunian or Water Theory of Creation
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The Neptunian or Water Theory of Creation.
By
Rev. J. M. Woodman,
Professor in Natural Science, Chico Academy, Cal.
Author of “God in Nature and Revelation,” “The Song of Cosmology,”
“Star Dates of Human History,” “The Song of the Morning
Stars in Creation’s Grand March.”
“If they speak not according to thy word it is because
there is no truth in them.”
San Francisco:
Bacon & Company, Book and Job Printers,
Corner of Clay and Sansome Streets.
1888.
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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year A. D. 1888,
By J. M. Woodman,
In the office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington, D. C.
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.sp 4
.h2
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
.sp 2
#CHAPTER I.:chap1#
Three Theories of Creation Reviewed in the Light
of Admitted Facts #9#
#Section 1.:sect1-1#
The Plutonic or fire theory stated #15#
Centro-centrifugal theory #16#
Heated Nebulous theory #17#
The increase of heat in mining shafts no evidence of a hot
center #19#
The admitted sedimentary nature of primitive granite destroys
the Plutonic theory #22#
The theories of metamorphic rock not sustained #23#
Mining shafts increase in heat according to chemical action #25#
Causes of volcanoes and geysers explained #26#
Geologists dissatisfied with the fire theory. Submarine
volcanoes #28#
Diatoms found in the earliest stratified rock #31#
#Section 2.:sect1-2#
The Neptunian theory stated #32#
All matter created at once in cold gas. God’s power needed
to move matter. The first cosmological division #33#
Probable length of it. The first condition of our globe in
form #35#
#Section 3.:sect1-3#
The facts of science support the Neptunian theory. In
quantity, order and constituent elements of rock #36#
The three ways that gases combine into rock #36#
How rock can swim in water #38#
Explorations made of the Atlantic #39#
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We once had a hemisphere of land, and one of water #40#
The climate was tropical, as attested by shells, coral, coal,
and saurians #41#
Also by tropical animals, flowers, and tropical vegetation #42#
Water raised the mountains #45#
Sea bottom seen there #46#
Rise and depressions of earth. Cause of glacial epoch #48#
#Section 4.:sect1-4#
Such a world physically adapted to man #50#
The accumulating evidence that our earth is essentially a
ball of water #53#
The reasons the Antediluvians had no rainbow #54#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER II.:chap2#
The Neptunian Theory was first Brought to Light
in the Book of Job, dated in the Stars. Epidramatic
Oratorio #55#
Orient the place for such a poem #57#
First question established #58#
The indictment against piety amended #59#
The prologue ended with Satan confounded #59#
These persons all representative characters #60#
Starting the drama of history. Piety endures the trials of
all ages #61#
Job rewarded on the field. Flood passed #64#
Surrounded by universal idolatry #65#
Certain chapters Messianic #66#
Resurrection reached #68#
The enemies boast of the secular arm of law #69#
The Reformation reached #70#
The voice of space #72#
Dead organic matter, as fossils, speaking #73#
An explanation of the story of Joshua’s miracle. The
three friends silenced. Secular education personified #75#
True loyal prayer, against unsupported illegal faith, and
prayer without faith #77#
The Copernican system seen by Job, with the sedimentary
nature of granite #79#
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The rotundity of Earth with the inside water #81#
The birth-place of ancient icebergs #83#
The telegraph seen and dated #84#
Description of certain fossils #85#
The grand future of the church of the living God #86#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER III.:chap3#
All the Scripture References to Cosmology are in
Harmony with the Book of Job. Earth Standing
in Water. Flood Caused by Overflow of the Sea.
Once in a Ring of Gases. Above the Waters #87#
Moses gained his first ideas of Creation here #88#
Power born in the hand of God #88#
Gravitation accounts only for centripetal power #89#
A steam world born but not yet swaddled #92#
It is swaddled in gathering and condensing #93#
Tracing gases into rock #95#
To what days the Mosaic time is unadapted #96#
What the Mosaic days of creation do mean #96#
General and Special Providence #99#
.sp 2
#CHAPTER IV.:chap4#
The Six Days of Moses Full of Scientific Suggestions
Showing the Work of God to the End of Time #100#
#Section 1.:sect4-1#
The work of the first day #101#
Meaning of deep #102#
Figures of speech. A ring of waters in fluid gases first
called firmament #103#
These days are not literal #104#
#Section 2.:sect4-2#
The work of the second day #105#
Meaning of create. Must be read in the light of scientific
facts #107#
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Moses’ point of observation. First firmament tangible #107#
Moses, in vision, confined to the history of our globe. The
history of other planets not given #109#
#Section 3.:sect4-3#
The work of the third day. The steam world commences
to liquify #110#
The scientific problem of a probable pole-changing solved #112#
One end only in sunshine #112#
Why it did not rain on the earth #113#
The cause of the first chilled climate. When it turned to
torrid #115#
#Section 4.:sect4-4#
The account of the fourth day in figure of metonymy #116#
Recent coal periods #119#
#Section 5.:sect4-5#
The work of the fifth day. Contrasts are found in the sea,
diatoms begin in the Gneiss rock #121#
The whale of the Miocene is the contrasting animal, as
morning #122#
The order of the existence of animals by Moses agrees with
facts #123#
Science and the Bible claim substantially the same thing
in reference to Special Providence #125#
#Section 6.:sect4-6#
The work of the sixth day. Beasts are the evening. Man
is the morning #127#
Our race sprang from Adam #128#
The cleansing of the air was essential to the introduction
of man #129#
Recent volcanoes argue the correctness of the Mosaic account #130#
We have not even yet reached the climax of good breathing #132#
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.sp 4
.h2
INTRODUCTION.
.sp 2
The question as to what kind of reading shall
yield us the most exquisite enjoyment, largely
depends upon our ability for self-development.
Taste in reading, as in eating, is often an educated
faculty. The relish that we now have for
many kinds of food, we had to acquire. We all
have faculties for intellectual, moral and spiritual
enjoyment, in lines of thought corresponding.
These must be developed by use. Reader, you
have the ability, if you will allow it to be developed,
of enjoying a perusal of this sublime subject.
Mere sensational reading like emotional religion
has its field of enjoyment, its rills of happiness;
but it is changeable and uncertain. Songs
of praise and devotional reading have a higher
place in the human soul, lasting in their nature.
Observation and historical research open another
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field of enjoyment. Language and location
of places may become a passion in the mind.
The study of causes in nature, at best but secondary,
may hold the mind in a sweet revery of
delight; but these are mere rills of comfort compared
to an open sea, to the ability of reading
and comprehending first causes, in the light of
prophetic declarations.
We are thrilled in the presence of relics of ancient
history. The sight of a mummy, known
to be an ancient person of historic note thrills us
with admiration and agreeable wonder, as in the
case of Rameses II. Three thousand years seems
a long time; yet it is easy to obtain almost any
where a fossil, fish or shell, representing as many
million of years. No where else are the “Footprints”
of God so plain, measuring the long ages
of time, as seen in the Bible.
The fact that you have not been accustomed
to read on this subject is no reason why you
should not begin at once, and experience the increased
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reverence for God, the captivating engagement
of thought, and the exquisite enjoyment
of soul, as a result. Do you still ask what
practical benefit will this knowledge be to you?
Let us rather ask what harm will come from a
general impression that the cosmological utterances
of the Bible are so tangled up in a network
of scientific suppositions, as to cause even good
men to drop them, as parts of God’s inspiration
to man. Such results are already produced all
over the land.
The Bible has been assailed on its cosmological
sayings. Shall it be defended? If you are
so fortunate as to be entrenched in the belief
of the inspiration of the Scriptures, while you
are unable to give a reason for the hope within,
your friends may not be so fortunate. Your
children, it may be, will return from school, intent
upon showing you the discrepancies with
the established teachings of science. If these
things are, as they purport to be, given by inspiration
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of God, they can never be made to harmonize
with an illogical and untruthful cosmology.
How important, then, that we should have
the right theory.
The disciples of Jesus were asked, “Have any
of the rulers of the Jews believed on him?”
Perhaps before you purchase you ask, Have any
men of scientific notoriety endorsed these views?
Of the many scores of good words given by editors,
lawyers, doctors, ministers, teachers, and
professors in colleges, I have room only for a few.
Prof. David Swing of Chicago said: “The Neptunian
theory of creation, as presented in Dr.
Woodman’s book, is the most logical presentation
of cosmology that I ever read. He writes
in a calm and truthful style.” The late Prof.
Norton of the Cal. State Normal said: “You
have chosen an opportune time for the presentation
of your book, for the theories of cosmology
are on the eve of a mighty revolution, in which
the water theory is likely to come to the front.”
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Prof. Reid, President of the State University,
said: “The subject, as you present it, is wonderfully
in accordance with what we see in Nature;
and it is still more wonderful that you should
find it so beautifully set forth in the Bible.”
Prof. LeConte, of the same University, said:
“Your theory is a wide departure from everything
hitherto written upon the subject. I will
say this of it; it accounts for more unexplained
phenomena than any theory before presented. I
will give you this item, which I know to be correct.
The Magnolia tree in the Tertiary period,
grew and blossomed as far as 80 degrees north.”
Numerous bodies of clergymen have endorsed
the theory as a just and beautiful presentation
of Scripture; many as the “only theory with
which Moses’ Genesis of Creation can be reconciled.”
The say-so of others may satisfy the
indolent and careless, but to enjoy the subject
you must read and digest these grand truths for
yourself.
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.sp 4
.h2 id=chap1
CHAPTER I. | Three Theories Reviewed in the Light Of Scientific Facts.
.sp 2
In the study of Nature, aided only by natural
phenomena, effect, suggesting cause, is everywhere
apparent. These effects variously compounded
point with accuracy only to secondary
causes. First causes are hidden far behind all
existing appearances.
Unaided nature leaves man to seek first causes
only by hypotheses. As might be expected, on
the same subject scientists widely differ in theory.
Such reasoning must ever leave a large margin
for opinion.
Notwithstanding the uncertainty of all such
modes of reasoning, still that hypothesis must
ever possess the greatest weight, that best accords
with the largest number of existing facts.
Reasoning a priori, from the providing care of
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nature’s God, as seen in stores of coal, oil, iron,
copper, and various kinds of precious metals, we
might reasonably conclude that he who created
the intellectual as well as the religious nature in
man would carefully provide for the full gratification
of both. Knowing God’s nature, reason
would suggest that what is wanting in nature
must somewhere be supplied by special revelation
of God.
The book of nature coupled with the Bible
would be a necessity; not only for a complete
worship, but for a full cosmology. We should
expect the two volumes, when rightly rendered,
to correspond. A noted atheistical lecturer upon
cosmical changes stated in a series of lectures
in Chico, Cal., that the “Bible theory of creation
is decidedly watery. By the statements of this
book, we should conclude that the center itself is
one vast body of water, holding upon its bosom
a crust of earth.” As a believer in the Plutonic
theory, and having no reverence for the Bible, he
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added, “What fool does not know better?” What
he gave as a “Bible Theory,” we will assume as
a scientific hypothesis; and rest the proof of the
same upon the facts in nature which scientists, in
advocating the Plutonic theory, have given us.
It will be the object of this chapter to show
that the more recently developed facts in geology
point unmistakably to the Neptunian theory of
Creation. This will be done by comparing the
three theories, and each with lines of facts which
have been well established. It will be necessary
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect1-1
Section 1 | To State the Plutonic Theory of the Schools.
.sp 2
1. That all matter existed, or was created in
a primeval state of heat. One hypothesis is, that
all matter of our system was concentrated in one
heated ball as a central sun.
2. That planets are portions of this matter,
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thrown off by a rapid rotary motion of the sun.
Properly named, this theory was the centro-centrifugal
theory, now quite out of date. That
this theory might be true, the sun must have turned
upon its axis with a velocity sufficient not only
to destroy gravitation at its surface, now twenty-seven
times that of the Earth, but with a force
capable of throwing Jupiter, fourteen hundred
times the size of the Earth, out into space four hundred
and seventy-five million of miles, and Neptune
over two billion of miles. When we consider that
our sun now turns on its axis only once in twenty-seven
days, we conclude that a vivid imagination
must have supplied the machinery necessary
for such astounding results in the very face
of forbidding facts. This theory made no provision
for the encircling waters, sufficient to
wrap the entire surface of the globe three miles
deep, nor for the enveloping atmosphere. Gradually
this ancient theory has been modulated into
the Nebulous Theory.
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3. The more popular teaching of today is,
that matter existed in a highly heated state in the
form of a diffused cloud. Steel, in his “Fourteen
Weeks in Geology,” suggests that “From
unknown causes, this cloud-matter began to revolve
about a center or sun. This nucleus drew
matter direct to itself from all parts of our system.
Other portions revolving were thrown off,
and formed new centers for planetary gathering,
as they respectively took up their orbicular march
about the sun. This fiery mist is supposed to
have come together in a heated state. The planets,
at least, have since been cooling, though as
yet having but a thin crust.” To this theory of
primeval heat, in some form, all our text books
conform. A theory so long and so universally
accepted might be supposed to have some solid
facts upon which to rest. But really it has
less to sustain it than had the Ptolemaic theory of
Astronomy: that, at least, had observation in its
favor, but this fails even here. It is a curious
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circumstance in this guess work of results, that
whether heat is made to increase on an average
one degree in fifty feet, as given by many geologists,
or one degree in one hundred feet, as given
by others, precisely the same results are reached,
viz., fifty miles crust, and intensely heated matter
beyond. This assumption is based upon the supposed
fact that the internal heat traverses the
rock by conduction. If this were true, then the
degree of heat gained in any one hundred feet of
rock, as you descend into the Earth’s crust,
would be the approximate measurement of any
other hundred feet in the same shaft; but the reverse
of this is true. No two measurements seem
to be alike. The miner, as a practical geologist,
in this regard knows that this heat is generally
caused by chemical action of the rock upon which
you have let in air or water, or both. This heat
is found to vary according to nature of the rock
which you expose. If the rock is rich in pyrites
of iron or lime, in any of its numerous forms,
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then disintegration is abundant and much heat is
generated; but, on the other hand, where all
disintegrating elements are wanting, there is no
perceptible increase of heat.
4. The theory of the continued increase of
heat, according to the ratio noticed as you sink a
shaft a few hundred feet into the Earth’s crust,
if it proves anything proves too much, and is
therefore false. Experiments extensively made
in the Virginia mines of Nevada, and particularly
in the Foreman Shaft, show the increase to
be very uneven; differing from one degree in
twelve feet to one in two hundred feet. It even
grows colder as you descend some kind of rock,
a degree in one hundred feet. The degree of
heat is always regulated and gauged by the rock
you pass. If the rock will disintegrate readily,
it gives out more heat; but if the rock may lie
exposed in the sun and rain without disintegration,
it throws out no heat in the shaft. Yet from experiments
made in the Foreman Shaft, notwithstanding
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these varieties of rock, yet at the 2,100
foot level it is found that the average increase is
one degree in twelve feet. At this rate, at twenty-five
miles towards the center you would encounter
heat above 4,300 deg. Fahr. Chemists will admit
that, after due allowance for pressure at such
a depth, yet the granite with all known substances
would fuse at this heat. The Plutonic hypothesis
makes the crust in Nevada less than twenty-five
miles, perhaps the weakest on the continent.
Experiments in Mexico, upon this line of reasoning,
would make the crust twice as thick. Now
from a well established law in philosophy, a pressure
upon liquid on the inside of a cylinder imparts
its pressure to every part of the cylinder at
the same time. A pressure capable of breaking
the crust in any place should, at least, cause all
the openings to emit lava at the same time. But
this is not the historic action of volcanoes; one
emits while another sleeps.
It is a historic fact observed within the present
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century, that a volcanic mountain rose up from a
comparatively level plane in Mexico, in one night,
to the height of 1,695 feet. On the assumption
that lava comes from the center of the earth, why
should not the above pressure have found the
weaker crust, and Nevada have been the place of
eruption instead of Mexico? and why should not
the three hundred open vents of Earth have emitted
lava at the same time? The theory will not
bear philosophic tests.
The Russian report of the increase of heat is
only one-fourth that given in Nevada. Who believes,
therefore, that the crust there is four times
as thick as in Nevada? The whole subject shows
that the increase of heat in the shaft proves nothing
as to the interior of Earth, and nothing as to
the thickness of its crust.
5. To establish the Plutonic theory, it is at
least necessary to demonstrate that the granite,
which all hold to be the under rock, is the unstratified
Plutonic foundation of all stratified rock.
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Recent facts have demonstrated that the granite
is a sedimentary rock, or rock deposited in water.
This being admitted, although contradicting the
teachings of all the older text books, some writers,
among them is Steel, in order to harmonize
the Plutonic theory with these stubborn facts,
have assumed that the primitive granite, which
by the theory must have been trap or lava, has all
been worn away by disintegration of water and
ice, or both; and again, by water deposited as we
now find it. But what was a white-hot globe of
lava doing, while water and ice were tearing and
grinding its lower crust to powdered sand? We
have secondary granite, but its structure is very
different from primitive granite. Besides containing
hard pebbles and boulders of other stone, it
is friable, and easily disintegrated under exposure.
It is a bad theory that is driven to such unheard-of
suppositions for its support. Nothing is more
evident, if the granite is the under rock, and sedimentary,
as represented and known to be, than
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that the Plutonic theory is completely without
foundation.
6. The modern theory of metamorphic rock,
occasioned by internal heat, is also false. This
theory maintains that the granite, slates, and marble
existed so near to the great body of internal
heat that they must have been metamorphosed.
Facts demonstrate that these rocks, as a rule, were
never in heat equal to 700 deg. Fahr. Such a
heat will readily disintegrate any of these formations.
Any one can demonstrate this by melting
a little lead upon a piece of slate, marble, or granite.
The furnace is found to be the best general
test of the origin of rock. Lava, having been in
a melted state, will not disintegrate up to the melting
point, but, as a rule, will readily melt at the
white heat. Granite, the slates, marble, and rock
in general, of a sedimentary formation, will disintegrate
at a comparatively low heat, but they
will not melt, except with alkaloids, or flux, and
then only at a very high degree of heat. This
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test shows all the primitive rock, including injected
seams, to have been formed in the sea, with
no heat to change their structure since. There
are a few exceptions to the rule of disintegration,
as clay rock.
7. If the granite were not sedimentary, we
could not account for the great quantity of sedimentary
rock this side. Among the authors of
our text books there seems to be a general vagueness
concerning the origin of stratified rock, except
in regard to coal, which all admit came out
of the air. If we should assume that the granite
was lava, but all the stratified rock since, until
you reach the region of conglomerate, came from
the air, how shall we account for the close similarity
in appearance and structure of the gneiss
and granite? Theory has piled thirty or forty
miles of this sedimentary, stratified rock above
the granite; whence did it come? Any openings
in the granite would let up only lava. Whence
the material for sediment? We shall, farther on,
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show that all primitive rock, like the coal, came
from the gases of the atmosphere once enveloping
this globe.
8. Our best scientists now readily unite with
the keen sighted miner in accounting for this increase
of heat as you pass down the shaft, on
entirely different principles from those stated in
the text books. Prof. Joseph Le Conte says that
“Chemical action of air and water upon the
rock, as you descend into the Earth’s crust, is
undoubtedly the cause of the increase of heat.”
Again he says, “This heat is regulated and
gauged by the constituents of the rock that you
pass.” Now admitting that the rock, as a rule,
would show an average increase of heat down to
the Carboniferous system, or even to the Devonian,
yet there is rock enough beyond that contains
so much less carbon, as to show such a decrease
of heat that must more than counteract
all the increase above. Whether we follow up
the old hypothesis, with the laws regulating heat
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by conduction or chemical action, the theory is
utterly without foundation. The late Prof. Norton,
of the California State Normal, said in a
lecture at Pacific Grove, in 1883, “Every living
geologist that I know of in the world will admit,
for he knows, that the granite was a sedimentary
rock.” This sentiment of his speech being reported
to Le Conte, he replied, “In this position
Prof. Norton is undoubtedly right.” It is thus
seen that the Plutonic theory in our text books
is at variance with modern experiments, and is
proved to be utterly false.
9. Volcanoes and geysers were formerly supposed
to settle the question in favor of the old
theory. The phenomena of both are such as to
strongly argue against it. Most geysers are
known to be caused by chemical action of rock.
We instance those in Hot Spring Valley, Cal.,
near Lassen Buttes. No one, having noticed the
various colored mud-pots and mounds of pulpy
rock thrown up by these boiling cauldrons, can
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come to any other conclusion. A few geysers
may be exceptions, having been caused by water
trickling over heated rock in proximity to volcanoes.
These prove nothing as to the center of
the earth, until it can be established that this
body of lava is in the center of the earth. A
multitude of facts in connection with volcanic action
demonstrate that lava does not proceed from
a common center.
A few we will here give. (1.) Lava varies in
color according to the color of the stratified rock
found in the vicinity. Thus, between Reno and
Wadsworth, Nevada, may be seen a red ledge of
sedimentary rock. Close by are found quantities
of red lava, being the same shade of red found
in the sedimentary. Pieces of rock may be seen,
one side showing the sedimentary strata, and the
other partially melted. Lava everywhere, probably,
is only sedimentary rock melted. (2.)
Volcanic disturbances are local, which they could
not be if they proceeded from a common center.
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(3.) The existence of great quantities of ashes, so
light as to float on the surface of water, argues
the consumption of some burning material, as of
coal. Nothing of this would exist in matter that
had primarily been collected in liquid, and had
ever been in a fused state. Something must have
been burning to produce the ashes. (4.) The
fact of all the great upheavals of plateaus and
mountains having been this side the Carboniferous
system of deposit, where the burning material,
sufficient to produce volcanic effect, was
extracted from the air and laid down as rock,
argues in favor of a power much nearer than
force, generated from a primeval sea of lava.
Burning coal as a source of heat, and steam as a
power, are ample to account for every volcanic
disturbance, however it may have been modified
by electric forces.
10. Most geologists are dissatisfied with the
fire theory, and are looking about for a revolution
in the teaching of the science. Professor
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Norton said, “We are upon the eve of a perfect
revolution in the science of geology.” Agassiz
said, “The Plutonic theory loses ground as soon
as brought to scientific tests.” Again he uttered
with decided emphasis, “If the center of our earth
were molten lava, as hot as represented, a crust
of rock fifty miles thick would melt, and, in the
space of a few hours, fall into the great sea.”
A teacher of geology in one of our large colleges,
who had just finished a lecture upon the
Plutonic theory, said, “I have given that theory
because it is the teaching of all our text-books;
but I do not believe it. Many facts now coming
to light show that the Water theory is destined
to come to the front.”
11. The fact that submarine volcanoes happen,
without letting the ocean into the great sea of
lava, shows that no such sea is there. But for
the money and reputation invested in school books
upon this defunct theory, it would have been,
before this, consigned to the Plutonic hell of the
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Greeks, from whence, it is more than probable, it
originated.
12. Many admitted facts are utterly inconsistent
with this theory. We will stop to notice but
two.
(1.) It is a generally admitted fact, that the entire
land portions of the explored earth, including
Greenland to the 80th parallel, were either in a
tropical or semi-tropical climate, from the beginning
of sedimentary rock, up to and far into the
so-called Alluvium deposit, and even to the historic
age. “The climate of England was warmer
than any now known on the earth.” Sir Chas.
Lyell stated, that the only exceptions breaking
in upon this uniformly warm climate were temporary
changes during the great glacial epochs.
This uniform heat could not result from the present
auxiliary motion of the earth, nor with any
good reason can we assert that the internal fires
ever modulated the surface climate so much as one
degree. Scientists are a unit in affirming that, for
// File: 031.png
.pn +1
the last four thousand years, there has been no
perceptible influence from this cause, upon our
climate. A rupture of the earth’s crust, and a
change of pole three thousand miles, and a complete
change of pole-pointing, resulting in our present
alternating seasons, has probably happened
within the “historic age,” and probably within
five thousand years. This could not be upon the
Plutonic basis. Our earth could not part, and
swim off upon a globe of melted lava.
(2.) Diatoms are now known to have existed,
coequal with the deposit of all stratified rock.
This is a well verified fact, but utterly inconsistent
with the Plutonic theory. Upon this theory,
the early crust of Earth must have remained at
a white heat. Water could not lie upon it at all.
Hence, both deposits in water and animal life
would be out of the question. The fact of both, to
say nothing of the well established fact of the sedimentary
nature of granite, must ever brand the
theory as contradicting the plain facts of nature.
// File: 032.png
.pn +1
These facts equally refute the more modern notion
of metamorphism of rock. The very waves
of the sea unite in a chorus with the rocks, “The
Plutonic foundations of the earth’s crust exist only
in the imagination of man.”
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect1-2
Section 2. | We will State the Neptunian Theory as a Hypothesis.
.sp 2
1. All matter was created at once, and is correlative.
2. In its primary condition it was in cold gas;
diffused in equilibrium in that portion of space
now occupied with systems: it follows that gravitation,
heat, form, motion and power would in
this state be wanting.
3. A power, outside of created matter, must
transform this substance from the inertia of rest
to that of motion. No sooner was a center of matter
gathered, than gravitation acted upon all
// File: 033.png
.pn +1
parts of the universe. The centers of all systems
must commence at the same time, or one system
would tend to blend with another, and nature
would be thrown out of equilibrium. The entire
period of gathering must have been with relative
exactness. It follows that, at the beginning
of motion, all matter must be put in motion. Such
gases as were destined to constitute the sun would
move directly for it; and such gases as were destined
for globes would move in a circle around
the center. Such order must have formed the
poetic choir of suns, “When the morning stars
sang together.”
4. The shaping of systems, sending forth
light, heat, gravitation and power, may well be
called the first cosmological division of matter.
This included the heavens, and prospective planets,
as yet without form, and floating in a ring of
chaotic gases.
5. At the close of this division, our sun had
been gathered out of a field of space, extending
// File: 034.png
.pn +1
each way more than twenty trillion of miles.
If these light gases had moved in a straight line
at the rate of thirty miles per hour, it would
take ninety million of our years to reach the center.
Poetically speaking, there existed a condition
of matter when force, light, gravitation, motion
and form were sleeping in the inertia of rest.
This was followed by a period of motion to and
about a central sun. Geologically speaking, the
earth, as yet, had no form. The matter that
would form planets was all floating in a revolving
ring about the sun.
The objective view of this ring, with reference
to the gathered center, would be a solar firmament.
The fluids above had not yet been separated
from fluids below, hence the firmament was
continuous. Earth, without form, was yet sleeping
in chaos. It awoke in form when a second
division of matter, with no measured duration as
yet, had been accomplished.
6. A vast field of hydrogen united with its
// File: 035.png
.pn +1
equivalent of oxygen; and, in super-heated steam,
evolved out into space, and took shape as a globe.
These divisions antedate geologic time. Geology
must begin with sedimentary rock. The globe of
steam must liquify and pass back to the ring, and
through it toward the sun. In doing so, it took
an atmosphere with it that shows the source of
all our rock. When taking its true orbit about
the sun, it was a vast globe of cold water, holding,
by gravitation, a dense atmosphere in its embrace,
rich in material for submarine rock. For
a while the deposits were very rapid, and a great
quantity of pulp of rock was formed, before any
hardening took place. This accounts for the unstratified
condition of granite. All the first rocks
would be submarine, hidden deep in the sea.
Nearly eighty miles depth of deposits took place
before dry land could appear.
7. Contrasts marked the beginning and close
of the first two divisions. If we follow this order
in this third division, we must wait until
// File: 036.png
.pn +1
the Devonian forests showed the renewed touch
of the creative hand, giving life in contrast to inorganic
matter, with which the globe started into
form, and took its position as a planet of our
system. Such is the Neptunian theory in part,
touching first causes in cosmology.
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect1-3
Section 3. | The well established Fact of Science look toward, and defend this Theory.
.sp 2
1. In the relative quantities of sedimentary
and lava rock. By far the greater portion of
rock of all lands is sedimentary. Lava is the exception.
If the source of supply is an internal
sea, 7,880 miles in diameter, the reverse of this
would most likely be true.
2. In the relative order of the two kinds of
rock. Except in very restricted locations, sedimentary
rock is at the bottom, in the middle, and
at the top of the earth’s crust. Lava has never
// File: 037.png
.pn +1
been found as an integral part of the supposed
bottom rock.
3. The constituents of all rock indicate the
water theory. All rock is known to be a combination
of gases. The coal is admitted to have
been gathered from the air, through the agency
of vegetation. There are three ways gases may
be combined into rock:
(1.) Through the agency of water alone. Such
was the primitive granite; and such are the modern
stalactites.
(2.) Through the agency of diatoms living
in the water. These creatures are absorbents.
They absorb the minerals of the water, and form
stone. Such are lime, chalk and coral.
(3.) They may be absorbed into vegetation, and
then hidden away in the waters, until changed
into coal.
(4.) Sandstone and conglomerate are formed
from eroded material of other rocks.
(5.) The melting of sedimentary rock in proximity
// File: 038.png
.pn +1
to burning beds of coal has formed the
lava.
(6.) Chimneys of rock crossing the lower
strata, as of quartz and granite, are now known
to be of water deposit. The word dyke is improperly
applied to them. These circumstances all
point to a center of water.
4. The question with many will arise, How
can rock rest upon water? The answer is, Upon
the principle of the compressibility of liquids.
Water compresses a twentieth part in a thousand
atmospheres. Thirty-three feet of water is
equal to one atmosphere. Thirty-three thousand
feet would compress one-twentieth part. We have
a geometrical series, with a ratio of 1.05. In 79-1/2
miles we have twelve and three-fourths terms. The
sum of the series will equal 19.127, calling 33,000
feet one, without compressibility. Now as the average
rock, under salt water, weighs only one and
a half times as much as water, we have to multiply
twelve and three-fourths by one and a half
to get its relative weight. This we find to be
// File: 039.png
.pn +1
19.125. At 79-1/2 miles in salt water, the weight
of water equals rock of the same thickness. As
rock displaces only its bulk of water, it will swim
like an egg in strong lye at this depth.
5. The explorations which have been made
of the Atlantic ocean go to sustain the Neptunian
theory.
(1.) They think that they have established
the fact that we had a connected land hemisphere,
and a hemisphere of water. Lieutenant Maury
made such extensive explorations of its contour
and bed, as to well nigh demonstrate the above
position. His report is, that the trough-like appearance
of its bed, the corresponding walls on
either side, being nearly perpendicular, showed
that the continents were once together. On
either side of the Atlantic the sounding line
showed a gradual deepening of water for about
two hundred miles from shore, when suddenly the
depth became too great for measurement. This
only confirms what Guizot wrote upon the same
subject over fifty years ago.
// File: 040.png
.pn +1
In a small treatise he endeavored to prove that
the continent showed a rent hemisphere of land,
once altogether. That it had been rent asunder
by some great convulsion of nature, and by water
carried away from Africa and Europe, with which
North and South America were formerly connected.
His theory was, that continents and islands
are but floating remnants of a once connected
hemisphere.
(2.) Such a rupture could only be maintained
on the hypothesis of a center of water. Should
the earth open its crust, letting the ocean into its
interior of melted lava, it would resemble a
bomb.
6. We shall, therefore, assume that we had a
land hemisphere, and that the north pole was in
the center, and pointed directly to the sun throughout
its entire orbit. This would involve the fact
that the south half of the globe was in darkness,
and locked in ice, as a great Antarctic sea.
(1.) We argue this from the widely extended
// File: 041.png
.pn +1
remains of the polyp-builders. This animalcule
inhabits only warm waters. His remains are
found widely distributed in every zone from the
Lower Silurian up. Iowa and Minnesota show
as nice coral in their strata as is now found in the
torrid seas.
(2.) From the widely scattered remains of
tropical shells. They conclusively show that a
warm ocean once covered the continents. Sir
Chas. Lyell mentions the tropical nature of the
shells about England and Labrador, and that
“They indicate a very warm climate, more uniformly
warm than any now existing on the
Earth.”
(3.) From the remains of saurians; such as
the icthyosaurus, which, like the crocodile of the
Ganges, is found only in warm waters. Darwin
saw one in the bank of the La Plata. No land
is without their remains.
(4.) From the widely spread coal beds of
Earth. Nothing in geology is better established,
// File: 042.png
.pn +1
than that this is the product of tropical forests.
All countries boast of their coal veins. Anthracite
coal is often found in the frozen rocks of
Greenland. A vein of the best coal, ten feet
thick, was found in Nova Zembla, now covered
with ice. Good coal is also found in the northern
part of Alaska. A genial climate once covered
these places.
(5.) From the remains of tropical animals.
The evidence is conclusive, that gigantic elephants
in countless herds once roamed the arctic
regions of Siberia. His remains have been found
in all lands, except the Scandinavian peninsula.
The mastodon was his near neighbor, and his
bones are generally found in the same regions.
These animals depended on grass for subsistence.
They could not endure a cold winter, nor live
where snow lies on the ground for even a short
time. We now find their remains where snow
now lies from four to eight months in a year,
and from two to twenty feet deep. From the
// File: 043.png
.pn +1
region of Russian Siberia alone, more than eighty
thousand pounds of their ivory have been sold in
a single year. Whence, then, this warm climate,
so uniform and general? It cannot be accounted
for on internal heat. Heat, sufficient to warm an
arctic atmosphere, if coming from the ground,
would destroy all animal life, either of water or
land. Geologists agree that it has not been affected
so much as one degree for the last four
thousand years. But we have positive proof that
these animals existed down to the period of human
existence. They probably have not been exterminated
five thousand years. Internal heat
cuts no figure in their existence. Only one hypothesis
accounts for these tropical phenomena,
viz., a land hemisphere, with pole in the center,
pointing directly to the sun.
(6.) The sudden change of climate in some
past time argues a rapid change in the axillary
motion of the earth, preceded by a general rupture
of the earth’s crust. It was so sudden, that
// File: 044.png
.pn +1
animals were locked up in arctic ice, and have
been preserved to our day, with flesh entire.
(See the word Mammoth, W. Dictionary.) The
change of pole must have been very sudden, or
animals, slain by the convulsion, would have
decayed at once.
(7.) The widely spread tropical flowers and
fruits sustain this theory. The palm tree flourished
in Europe and Central Asia; also in the
northern part of North America. The magnolia
blossomed at least 80 degrees north. Sir
Charles Lyell claims that the earlier vegetation
was generally tropical. Grass evidently flourished
in all lands, the year round.
7. The nature and condition of the early
rock attest the water theory. Had the crust
begun upon a ball of lava, at a white heat, the
ocean, readily boiling, would be thrown into
the air, where it would be condensed, and by
gravitation thrown back upon the thin crust.
This would often give way, and the whole volume
// File: 045.png
.pn +1
would enter the interior and explode the
entire crust into atoms. In such case we should
expect to find the under rock a broken mass of
displaced lava. But we find the granite to have
been so calmly deposited in water, and it retains
its place so well, that we split it with the rift
of sugar pine. Geologists estimate the earth’s
crust from fifty to one hundred miles thick.
Upon the Neptunian theory we at least have
seventy-five miles without a particle of lava, or
so much as the scratch of an iceberg. The early
geologies spoke of dykes of lava, injected into
granite. The furnace shows these to be water
seams. No well attested lava has ever been
found there.
8. The period of the great upheavals supports
this theory. No grand mountains reared
their lofty heads to the clouds, until this side the
Carboniferous system of deposits. It is more
probable that burning coal must have been the
cause of the heat, and the expansion of steam
// File: 046.png
.pn +1
the power, that rent the Earth’s crust; and the
eighty miles pressure of waters suddenly liberated
would bring up the granite, with all under
rock, to the surface. Lava then proceeds from
local deposits of melted rock, that had been
stratified. If it came from a common center of
a primary melted mass, there would be no occasion
for ashes. The abundance of these ashes
shows the consumption of some burning material,
as of coal. The very witnesses which the Plutonic
believers have placed upon the stand prove
quite the reverse of their theory.
9. Facts show that the substance of all
mountain chains was once deposited in the sea.
Baron Von Humboldt remarked, “Upon the tallest
mountains yet reached by the footsteps of
man you may witness the ancient sea bottom.”
Conglomerate shells with sand, hardened into
rock in the ancient seas, are now found in all
lands thousands of feet above the sea.
10. The rise and depressions of the Earth’s
// File: 047.png
.pn +1
crust are proofs of the water theory. Lands
having large rivers, carrying more debris or silt
into the ocean than the weight of her vegetation,
decaying, are rising; as has been demonstrated
in North and South America, Europe, Asia and
Africa. The terraces left attest the truth of
this position.
Lands having more vegetation or ice than the
weight of the debris carried into the sea are
sinking. Witness Greenland and the Pacific
Isles. But these islands could not well sink into
a sea of burning lava, without letting in the
surrounding ocean; in which case the entire
crust would be destroyed.
11. The crowning reason for believing in the
Neptunian theory is found in the great glacial
drift period. The Neptunian hypothesis of the
poles of the Earth is sufficient to account for
the ice that constituted the drift. The ancient
equator would mark the bound between darkness
and light; and would be situated so as to
// File: 048.png
.pn +1
manufacture icebergs the whole length of this
largest circle.
The depressions of the lowlands beneath the
sea are accounted for in the great upheavals.
On an average, rock weighed out of water is
one and two-thirds times as much as when weighed
under water. All the strata of mountains
and plateaus lifted from beneath the waters
weigh one and two-thirds times what they did
before being disturbed.
Geologists tell us that the Earth’s crust was
depressed six to seven thousand feet. This
would enable the ice to flow over the surface,
the bergs being of enormous depth. The lowlands
of every continent have been thus plowed.
The evidence exists in every valley and far up
the sides of all mountains. This evidence is by
no means confined to scratches on the rock, but
the water-washed gravel and polished pebbles
equally attest its action. You can hardly sink
a shaft in valley or hill without encountering
// File: 049.png
.pn +1
them. With the present inclination of the Earth’s
pole to the elliptic no such quantity of ice can
possibly occur. No iceberg has ever yet been
seen in tropical waters. There never yet has
been enough at one time within historic note,
to counteract the influence of the Gulf Stream
about Norway and Iceland.
How different the ancient drift! Then the
ice penetrated all open seas, caused by submergence.
It plowed alike the Brazilian mountains,
the Sierra Nevada, and the Appalachian.
It chilled the seas to the very center of the submerged
hemisphere; and England witnessed the
dwelling of the reindeer in her borders, while it
lasted. According to Sir Chas. Lyell, the temperature
sank from the uniformity of our intensely
warm climate to the chilliness of melting
ice. The cold was now as uniform as the
heat had before been constant. The north pole,
pointing directly to the sun, would bring the
whole land hemisphere within perpetual sunshine;
and consequently, when above the sea,
// File: 050.png
.pn +1
would be in a tropical or semi-tropical zone to
the very edge. This climate would continue
as long as the land could hold back the ice,
which had been accumulated at the equator.
But no sooner did the lowlands become submerged,
than the ice would change the climate,
wherever it could in large quantities accumulate.
As it plowed every river, plain, and gulch, the
fauna, adapted to the former climate, would
naturally lose their existence. Such is the history
of the drift. Ninety-seven per cent. of all
land animals died. By the slow process of disintegration
of the mountains, the hemisphere was
again raised, and its former beautiful climate
restored.
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect1-4
Section 4. | How was such a World adapted to Man or strictly speaking,| Man to such a World?
.sp 2
1. The even climate of such a world would
tend to his longevity, and be most genial to his
feelings.
// File: 051.png
.pn +1
Man’s nature calls for an even climate. Now
by art he tries to even up the climate of the
year.
(1.) Less than two-thirds of the lighted hemisphere
could have been covered with dry land.
Many bodies of water are known to have been
included within the areas of land. The pole,
pointing directly toward the sun, must have been
near Gibraltar. Allowing that land extended
in every direction, four thousand miles or more,
we should then have an open sea of from fifteen
hundred to two thousand miles, intervening between
the edge of the hemisphere of land, or
perhaps more properly, the quartosphere of land,
and the region of perpetual ice.
(2.) On the sunny side of such a globe, being
at first entirely water, a rapid evaporation must
have taken place; and most, nearest the north
pole. This would give rise to currents, both of
air and water, to flow toward it, as a source of
supply. Counter currents of both would follow.
// File: 052.png
.pn +1
Currents of either starting near the equator
would be cold and possess a motion greater than
the earth, a few degrees toward the pole. This
would send both towards the northeast, until
meeting the return currents of wind, which
would cause variable winds; but a most genial
climate must have surrounded the earth, at least
forty degrees wide.
(3.) Such a climate, with such facilities for
evaporation, would provide the way for perpetual
harvest. The open sea to the edge must have
been constantly filled with floating ice. Cold
breezes, often laden with thick fog, would float in
over the edge of the land. This may account
for the long hair which covered the mammoth
elephant of Siberia and California. No winds
are more penetrating than those coming from
large bodies of melting ice; yet under a perpetual
sunshine the vegetation must have been abundant.
2. We add by way of recapitulation:
// File: 053.png
.pn +1
(1.) That everywhere, and with each new
discovery in science, the evidence is accumulating
that our globe is essentially an immense ball
of cold water, with a crust of earth covering the
under waters as with a stone; while a portion
of water above is held in the earth’s lap.
(2.) Until recently, the continents and islands
were together in one vast body, with the axillary
center pointing to the sun.
(3.) That fragments of the broken hemisphere
have been spread out upon the seas, often
standing with just their tops out of water as
islands.
(4.) Inasmuch as this Earth is a magnet, the
deposit about the pole was of the nature of a
load-stone. This existed as a mountain, which
by the force of the waters was bodily removed
to the present north, nearly three thousand
miles. It was thus we had a change of times
and seasons.
(5.) That the alternation of day and night,
// File: 054.png
.pn +1
heat and cold, summer and winter, seed-time and
harvest, are results following this great change
in the Earth’s polarity.
(6.) That the existence of the rainbow,
caused by the declination of the sun toward the
horizon in the Earth’s present motion, is a reminder
of what is, and will remain to be, in contrast
to what was, and would have been, until
the end of time, had no cause occurred making
it necessary for this radical change.
Earth’s climate was changed,
(a) By changing the magnetic currents of
Earth, in removing the pole locally three thousand
miles away.
(b) By withdrawing the attraction the former
pole had for the sun, and pointing it to an
empty place in the north, now one degree and
a half from Polaris.
(c) By inclining the Earth’s pole twenty-three
and a half degrees to the ecliptic. “He
changeth times and seasons.”
// File: 055.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap2
CHAPTER II. | The Neptunian Theory of Creation was first brought to Light| in the Book of Job.
.sp 2
1. Like Homer, who dated his poem in the
rising of the star Sirius, so Job dated his book
in the Pleiades, while the sun was gaining his
vernal equinox in the star Alcyone of this constellation.
The Septuagint speaks of Job’s age at
the commencement of his trial as being one hundred
years. By the closing statement appended
to his book, we learn that he lived after his restoration
one hundred and forty years. This
makes his age two hundred and forty at his
death. Alcyone marks by precession of the
equinoxes 2100 years B. C. The great period
of his longevity indicates a time antedating
Abraham’s day by more than two hundred
years.
// File: 056.png
.pn +1
2. This book is an epi-dramatic Oratorio of
human history. It is epic, in that it gives the
history of a real life; dramatic, in that it dramatizes
human history, by the inspirations of these
actors, with the religious intuitions of all ages.
The poem as a whole shows the contending forces
that develop character; the struggle of man’s
redeemed nature against the tendencies of a series
of degenerate ages, as far down as the full
triumph of Christ’s reign; followed by the long
prosperity that awaits the Church. It also sets
forth the longings of the human intellect for a
knowledge of first causes; and its crowning success
when Nature is studied in connection with
the revelations of God’s Word. The Book of
Job was evidently the only Scripture that the
world had for at least eight hundred years. The
introduction shows Job to have been a person
adapted to great reverses of fortune, rich, pious,
prosperous, happy, and respected. Two spirits,
either of which may take form, but neither being
// File: 057.png
.pn +1
dependent on form or locality, are present in
their religious gatherings as they have ever been
in ours. That objective figures come before our
imaginations in reading this part of the poem,
only shows the high character of the production.
3. The first question between God and Satan
is that hackneyed one of all history, viz: Is piety
a selfish ebullition of the human heart or a divinely
planted principle? Satan takes the first statement,
God the latter. Satan affirms that a sudden
reverse of fortune will change the aspect of Job’s
piety, and he will then curse God to his face.
Great principles are best tested by suffering.
Nor is it necessary that every one should suffer in
the same direction to show forth the same. The
world is full of delegated suffering; the few for
the many, and sometimes one for all. Job is the
right man in wealth, station, influence, and habits
of mind to personify piety in its relation to the
world’s progress.
4. The Orient is the place, and that period of
// File: 058.png
.pn +1
the world the time, for the rich figures of speech
found in the two scenes of this unparalleled production.
Of the two forces meeting us in life, inviting
our attention and co-operation, one must
and but one can, at the same time, receive our
homage. The one inclines you to and gives you
credit for all good; the other inclines you from
and gives you no credit for any good. The
princely man of the Orient is suddenly confronted
with absolute bankruptcy and bereavement of all
his children, without the chance of speaking the
parting good-bye. Satan expected the question
settled in his favor, by a sudden outburst of passion,
in vindictive hate to God. But listen!
“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb (earth),
and naked shall I return thither. The Lord gave,
and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the
name of the Lord.” The first scene is ended with
Satan completely foiled. But, some one might
say, the question only covered Job’s outward
prosperity. True, his wife is left to him, but she
is a part of himself.
// File: 059.png
.pn +1
5. Again the sons of God are together in worship.
Satan begs leave to amend his indictment
against piety. “Touch his bone and his flesh
and he will curse thee.” Job is smitten in a manner
calculated to break down his patience. The
patience of his wife having become exhausted,
she is influenced to give her vindictive advice in
the line of Satan’s desires, “Curse God, and
die.” “Thou speakest as a foolish woman.
What! shall we receive good at the hand of
God, and shall we not receive evil?”
6. The prologue of scene second ends with
Satan confounded. The incoming circumstances
show God’s present proposition to be that true
piety will not only endure, without tarnish, what
Satan in his ill will has proposed, but it will survive
and develop in strength in the ages to come,
until it shall triumph over every foe. To refute
all satanic charges to which history will give
rise, God proposes to try it in this person, under
the leading intuitions governing the masses of all
// File: 060.png
.pn +1
ages, past and to come. Three supposed but mistaken
friends hear of Job’s calamity, and resolve
to condole his misery. These are ranked within
the family of God’s sons. These men are kings
in their time, and are supposed to be entitled to
a hearing. Their mistakes will make them really
Job’s enemies. Such are the coadjutors that
Satan is about to have brought to his aid. They
find Job in keen anguish of body, incapable of
recognizing his friends.
7. These persons are all representative characters,
whose intuitions will partake of the nature
of the epochs of human history, through which
the prophet Job is about to be taken. Job personifies
piety; Eliphaz, reverence in tradition;
Bildad, special Providence as a rule of action;
Zophar, ignorance, the mother of devotion. Beginning
with the fall of man, each epoch of human
history is to stamp the prevailing religious intuitions
of the masses upon these men.
8. Piety must be tried under all. Until the
// File: 061.png
.pn +1
enlightened age of the world is reached, piety
will have little to cling to but faith in God, and
that in the face of appearances. Such is the
drama about to be enacted. Six grand epochs of
historic time must be passed to reach even the
present time. (1.) Deism of the antediluvian
world. (2.) Special Providence as a rule of
action following the flood, and out of which grew
the building of the Tower of Babel. (3.) He
was left alone through materialistic worship in
idolatry, as in Abraham’s time. (4.) He was
confronted by a superstitious looking-behind, as
in Persia’s time. (5.) Tempted with an abnormal
ambition, as in Alexander’s time. (6.) He
must be surrounded by the ruling necessities of
commercial selfishness inaugurated by Rome, and
transmitted by circumstantial links in the progress
of civilization to our own time.
9. Human history in the drama starts in with
a wail. Job, with the intuitions of a deist, bewails
his very existence. As he looks to the future
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there is not one ray of hope. “Thou (God)
shalt search for me in the morning but I shall not
be. He that goeth down to the grave shall come
up no more.”
Where now is that oft repeated declaration of
Satan, that piety, at best, is only a selfish looking
forward to rewards in the future? The piety of
Job survives this terrible ordeal. The blinding
intellectual fog of deism could not lose his point
of compass.
Creeds may be good as sign-boards directing
the traveler, but they go but a little ways in determining
the action of the truly pious. As he
approaches the flood he beholds the “numbering
of man’s days on the earth.” And, as the reality
bursts upon his vision, he experiences a perfect
revolution of intuition. All is special Providence
now.
10. The flood is passed in chapter eight, and
“man’s days become as a shadow.” The law of
God’s natural Providence, in cause and effect,
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is by Job and his friends completely ignored.
His own condition will look him in the face with
terrible effect, asking an explanation. To such
an ordeal, with Bildad framing an enthusiastic
argument upon the evidences of special Providence
in the affliction, was Job brought. He
can logically prove Job to be one of the worst of
men. “Doth God pervert judgment?” To Job
he saith, “If thou wast pure and upright, surely
now he would awake for thee.” Job with his
intuitions cannot see why the argument is not
sound. “I know it is so of a truth.” To work
thus upon the nerves of a sick man, who has been
shut off from comprehensive views of God’s general
Providence in law, is well calculated to break
him down in impatience toward God. But Job
replies, “If I say I am perfect it shall also prove
me perverse. Though I were perfect, yet would
I not know my soul; neither is there any daysman
betwixt us, that he should lay his hand upon
us both.” Zophar replied, “Know therefore
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that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity
deserveth.” Job replied, “I could speak
as you do if I were in your stead.” “Though
he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” Job claims
an honest integrity of purpose, though denying
perfection in attainment.
10. For this noble stand he is rewarded on
the spot with a prophetic view of what forms the
first chapter in the “Little Book” of star-dates.
Tracing time back by the precession of the equinoxes
to where the sun crossed its spring equinox
in Orion’s belt, he saw the commencement
of man. Tracing the same line forward to the
end of our race, where indeed time ends, he
saw that it rested in Ash or the Great Bear
(margin) incorrectly translated Arcturus; new
version, Great Bear.
Looking to the same kind of date of his own
time, he saw the sun crossing the Pleiades.
Looking at the full inauguration of Christ’s
Kingdom on earth, represented by the termination
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of Job’s own sufferings, he saw the time
measured in the Summer Solstitial colure going
from under the Altar. “Thou madest Ash, Orion
and the Pleiades, and the chambers of the
south.” Here commences the “Little Book,” alluded
to so often in prophecy, with four of the
most important dates of history, but sealed upon
the back part until the opening of the same by
the “Lion of the Tribe of Judah” to his servant
John. Here, perhaps all unconscious of
their bearings on future history, he is picturing
in the heavens, and dating by means of the precession
of the equinoxes, the long periods, revolutions,
changes and triumphs his sufferings were
to take him, followed by the long prosperity of
the Church of Christ in the latter day.
11. Representing the reign of universal idolatry,
and consequent ignorance of the masses,
and preceding the anxious inquiries concerning
immortality by Confucius, Socrates and Plato,
Zophar is prepared to fill in his part of the drama.
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The question of the resurrection is discussed
in the light of nature, in Chap. 14. He is compelled
to leave it as an open question, only wishing
that it might be true. “Oh that thou wouldest
hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest
appoint me a set time, and remember me.” He
nears the time of the general expectation of Messiah’s
appearance on earth.
He closes to allow Zophar, the representative
of those Scribes and Pharisees in their tradition,
to speak again. This is found in the fifteenth
chapter.
12. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth, inclusive,
Job personifies Christ. Hence these
chapters are Messianic. “They have gaped upon
me with their mouth, they have smitten me
upon the cheek reproachfully. My days are extinct,
the graves are ready for me. God hath
delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me
over into the hands of the wicked. Are there
not mockers with me? For thou hast hid their
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heart from understanding.” Many of these sentences
are quoted into the twenty-second psalm,
recognized by all commentators to be Messianic.
This Special Providence, as a rule to depend upon,
watched Christ on the cross; it triumphed
over the fact that God did not deliver him.
Here it is in prophecy: “The snare is laid for
him in the ground. It shall devour the strength
of his skin, even the firstborn of death, it shall
devour his strength. His confidence shall be
rooted out of his tabernacle. His remembrance
shall perish from the earth. He shall be driven
from light into darkness, and chased out of the
world. He shall neither have son or nephew
among his people.” Isaiah, quoting the sentiment,
asks, “Who shall declare his generation,
for his life was taken from the earth?”
The Messianic voice is personified from the
grave. The grave speaks the facts of history.
“He hath put my brethren far from me, and my
acquaintance are verily estranged from me. My
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kinsfolks have failed, and my familiar friends
have forgotten me. They whom I loved are
turned against me. Why do you persecute me
as God?” In the nineteenth chapter Job has
reached the resurrection. How changed the
voice! “Oh, that my words were now written!
Oh, that they were printed in a book! That
they were graven with an iron pen, and lead in
the rock forever.”
13. “For I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon
the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy
this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”
Ignorance is not satisfied with the report “that
he is risen from the dead.” “The triumph of
the wicked is short. Though his excellency
mount up to the heavens, yet he shall perish forever.
He shall fly away as a dream.” The days
of apostolic teaching and suffering passed, Christianity
debauched by a state religion, ignorance
again put forth as a dying gasp, a few platitudes
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in defense of God and against piety. Chap. 20.
Job answered by referring man’s conduct in life
to a future judgment. Chap. 21. Reverence in
tradition exhorted Piety to speedy repentance.
Chaps. 23 and 24. Piety is searching directly
for the true God.
14. Special Providence, ignoring law, boasteth
of his secular strength. “Is there any numbers
of his armies?” Here in the poem civilization
reached the dawn of the Reformation. Chap.
26. It begins in the line of science. The rocks
begin to speak. “Dead things are formed from
under the waters.” The orbicular motion and
the present pole-pointing of the Earth, according
to the Copernican system, is seen. “He stretcheth
out the north over the empty place, and
hangeth the Earth upon nothing.” How exactly
in accordance with the history of scientific reform,
that this knowledge should begin in small
fragments of truth. A glimpse of the ancient
pole-pointing is seen. “He hath compassed the
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waters with bounds, until the day and night come
to an end”; or until the end of light begins with
darkness. He saw the great “change of times
and seasons” caused by the Noachian flood.
“He divideth the sea with his power, and by
his understanding he smiteth through the proud.
Lo these are parts of his ways; but how little a
portion is heard of him! but the thunder of his
power who can understand?”
15. Job enters upon the Reformation in science
with a prophet’s view of the desperate efforts
put forth, by scientists of our own period,
to reach first causes by analytical deduction and
hypothetical reasoning; and this unaided by any
light claiming to come by inspiration of God.
His harp seemed attuned in the most exquisite
niceness of poetic finish, to that class of modern
pretenders who talk of the fullness of nature’s
laws, while they disbelieve in the existence of nature’s
God. He opens the twenty-eighth chapter
with certain admissions, as to points of knowledge
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obtainable from phenomena of nature, followed
by questions suggestive of the paucity of all
things seen to unfold a true and full cosmology.
“Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place
for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of
the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone.”
Now beholding the futile efforts of Naturalists to
reach first causes he exclaims, “There is a path
which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s
eye hath not seen. The lion’s whelps have not
trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. He
putteth forth his hand upon the rock; he overturneth
the mountains by the roots. He cutteth
out rivers among the rocks, and his eye sees every
precious thing.” This and more is freely
conceded as yielding a grand field for geological
thought. “But where shall wisdom be found?
and where is the place of understanding? Man
knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it found
in the land of the living.” Right here, beholding
the observations through heaven-pointed lenses,
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that man may read first causes in the stars, he
gives the poetic reply of space. “The depth
saith it is not in me.” Now beholding the kindled
expectations in the student of the seas, as he
traces her currents, measures her waves and tides,
and reaches her deepest deposits, the sea is made
to report, “It is not with me.” But may not
wealth and position gain it from the schools?
He answers: “It cannot be gotten for gold, neither
shall silver be weighed for the price thereof.
It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with
the precious onyx, or the sapphire. The gold and
the crystal cannot equal it; and the exchange of
it shall not be for jewels of fine gold. No mention
shall be made of coral or of pearls; for the
price of wisdom is above rubies. The topaz of
Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued
with pure gold.”
Disappointed in reading first causes in all these
resources man still inquires: “Whence then cometh
wisdom, and where is the place of understanding?
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Seeing it is hidden from the eyes of
all living, and kept close from the fowls of the
air.” Let now the dead fossil speak. May not
the entombed life of forty millions of years open
up this subject to man?
16. Destruction and death say, “We have
heard the fame thereof with our ears. God understandeth
the way thereof, and he knoweth
the place thereof; for he looketh to the ends of
the earth, and seeth under the whole heavens,
to make the weight of the winds, and he weigheth
the waters by measure. When he made a
decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning
of the thunder; then did he see it and declare
it.” But how shall man gain this true wisdom of
causes? “He that cometh to God must believe
that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that
diligently seek him.” It is the voice of the Saviour,
he who “walked in the garden.” Men
must be drawn toward God before they can see
him in his word. “And unto man he said, Behold
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the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and
to depart from evil is understanding.” It cannot
be doubted that more reverence for God, and
less egotistical trust in self, would greatly aid
the wisest thinker of the present day. We have
had altogether too much of that feigned or real
pity for the Bible, as unfortunate in its allusions
to science, deserving to be ranked with the superstitions
of the untutored masses of the unlettered
ages. It is true that prophetic allusions
to scientific subjects are usually poetic, but none
the less specific and definite for this. These allusions
embody a true objective view, leaving to
science the task to subjectively work out the true
condition of things presenting such phenomena.
Thus prophecy poetized upon the “Place for
light, and the home and house for darkness; and
the path leading to the bounds between them.”
Scientifically explained, one pole of the Earth
must have pointed steadily to the sun, leaving
half the globe in perpetual darkness.
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17. Joshua is said to have commanded the
sun and the moon to stand still, and they obeyed
him. Subjectively rendered the sun went not
down, during one night, which could have been
objectively accomplished by a mirage. As this
would answer the purpose for which the phenomena
is reported, it is highly probable that this is
all that is meant. Again, God made a firmament.
But firmaments called heaven are not things
made. Subjectively rendered, he made a globe,
from which the visible expanse is seen. These
figures of speech, and especially the one called
metonymy, run all through prophetic sayings.
The heart’s willingness to accept the truth is often
necessary to the intellect’s perceiving it.
18. The Reformation has made some considerable
progress, and Job’s three mistaken friends
begin to see their errors, and acknowledge themselves
silenced. Job’s renewed ability to speak,
and the readiness with which he handles the
subject of each passing event, shows that the
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darkness is passing away, and the teachings of
these dismal ages are being counteracted.
19. A far more formidable enemy, in the
person of Elihu, is about to arise. He represents
Secular Education, in unbelief of the inspiration
of God, or the existence of true piety. He
reasons that all men are essentially alike, imperfect;
that heredity, inclination, education and
surrounding circumstances account for all the
difference in men. That Job, having claimed upright
intentions before God, has committed a
grave offence. His God is one of cause. “I
will fetch my knowledge from afar: he that is
perfect in knowledge is with thee. My lips shall
utter knowledge clearly. All flesh shall perish
together.” What is this but infidel Deism?
How different the expression of the wise man!
“Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward,
and the spirit of the beast that goeth
downward to the earth?” The one is mortal, the
other immortal. For some cause Job is silent,
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though again and again challenged to the combat.
Let us apply a little history to the prophetic
drama. French Atheists, in a convention in 1808,
put forth eighty-three counts, any one of which
was claimed sufficient to prove the Bible to be
uninspired. Sir Charles Lyell, himself a Deist,
wrote, “Of these counts, not one of them remains
today. Science has laid them aside as untenable.”
20. We have three distinct views of prayer,
represented in Bildad, Elihu and Job. Bildad’s
view is, “If deserving, you can have all you ask
for, without reference to law. All that you
need is faith to perpetuate the line of miracles.”
Elihu’s view was essentially expressed by the
Professor who threw down the challenge, called
the prayer gauge. Its substance was, “Prayer
changes no effect following cause. It cannot
mitigate the death rate in a hospital.” Job’s
position is that prayer may be beneficial when in
harmony with God’s laws. There are three
realms, viz, physics, mind and spirit. Mind is
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higher than physics, and, within bounds, rules
it; spirit is higher than either, and within
bounds rules both: that prayer to God, ever
subject to “Thy will be done, not mine,” may
increase the power of the spirit in man over the
lower realms of law, thus securing wonderful
help from God, according to his expressed will
in law. This does not necessarily involve miracle
in the answer God gives. It is in harmony with
the law of the spirit, that God within the spirit
greatly increases its power over mind and matter.
This was the secret of Job’s power over his
contestants. This power Elihu denied. Secular
Education will readily admit that God, by his
direct power (which is Special Providence),
created matter, again set it in motion, again gave
life to portions of it, etc., and then deny that
God would listen to the cry of his children for
spiritual or material help. This modern Elihu
has completely ignored the efforts of God to help
the would-be scientists to phenomena and principles,
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which would link his knowledge of nature
in happy relation with first causes. Hence in the
end, like Elihu, he is destined to be completely
confounded.
21. Two thousand years ago, science established
the Ptolemaic theory of Astronomy. It
taught it for eighteen hundred years, when the
Copernican theory forced its way to the front.
And now, it is evident, the true theory was
clearly taught in God’s first book of Inspiration,
called Scripture. A few years since, Elihu, as a
learned professor, would take a piece of granite
in his hand, and learnedly talk of the crystals
formed, as it slowly cooled, as the first crust
formed upon the sea of lava.
22. Now, the same professor talks to his class
of the sedimentary nature of the rock, and the
crystals formed under great pressure in the deep
sea. Four thousand years ago, the Bible gave
this knowledge to the world. For some cause,
Job is reticent while Elihu speaks. He speaks
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as a “beast of power, rising up out of the
earth.” But God has something to say as to who
shall stand in the coming ages. Piety will stand
up, and God will answer as by the power of
the whirlwind. Chap. 38. “Gird up now thy
loins like a man, for I will demand of thee, and
answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid
the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou
hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures
thereof, if thou knowest, or who hath stretched
the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations
thereof fastened, or who laid the cornerstone
thereof?” Marginal reading “made the cornerstone
to sink.” Balancing order, in exact equipose,
is proclaimed in science. “Not one star
could be spared,” say the Solons of Philosophy,
“without throwing all into the greatest confusion.”
The balancing of the primary gases,
as each sun gathered in the beginning, was seen
by Job. “When the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”
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23. The great under-waters were once imprisoned
as though shut behind doors. “Or who
shut up the sea with doors when it brake forth
as if it had issued out of the womb?” Rotundity
of the Earth is here given with the inside
water. He saw the young Earth first “clothed
in a garment of clouds,” and “thick darkness
a swaddling band about it.” He saw the “foundations
of the earth breaking up,” as the flood in
Noah’s day poured in over the earth. “And
brake up the decreed place for it,” and set new
“bars and doors.” A change of polarity, and
when it took place, is seen. “Hast thou commanded
the morning since thy days, and caused
the day-spring to know his place, that it might
take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked
might be shaken out of it?” When have the
wicked been shaken out of it, but when “all
the fountains of the great deep were broken
up?” The finishing touch is added to the Copernican
system. “It is turned as clay to the
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seal.” Allusion is made to the clay on the potter’s
wheel rotating to a fixed seal shaping the
same. In contrast to its present motion, he saw
a former condition with pole pointing to the sun.
This was a motion that never exchanged the
darkness for light, nor light for darkness, but
both remained stationary. “Where is the way
where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where
is the place thereof, that thou shouldst take it to
the bound thereof, and that thou shouldst know
the paths to the house thereof?” He saw the
contrasted appearance of the former earth to
her present contour. “The waters are hid as
with a stone.” Altogether, the land hemisphere
covered the under-waters; “and the face of the
deep is frozen.” The face of the deep in the
southern hemisphere of the ancient earth was
locked in darkness and perpetual ice. He had
asked the question, “Out of whose womb came
the ice?” Where was it born? This is one
of the most perplexing questions in science.
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24. Where was the ice born that once plowed
such deep furrows over hill and dale, that
climbed the rugged mountain, and filled ancient
river beds with three thousand feet of drift? In
vain do you ask where the ice came from that
scooped out the Yosemite Valley, or laid the
deep beds of water-washed pebbles along the
Sierra Nevada mountains. God has answered
it in giving the ancient polarity, by which the
mighty deep of one half the globe was covered
with ice. Again, “Who hath divided a watercourse
for the overflowing of waters, or a way
for the lightning of the thunder?” Our earth
is a magnet. The way of the lightning produces
spiral effects on plants and cyclones from the
equator to each pole. The earth being divided,
forming the Atlantic Ocean, and the pole being
locally changed on the globe, a new way for the
lightning is formed. This poem is wonderful for
its flights of prophetic views. The vision, from
comprehending the phenomena attending the
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globe in its antediluvian state, now changes to
a mode of communication by telegraph of our
own time. To identify the century in which it
would appear, he resorted to the third clock of
the heavens, measured by precession. He noticed
that beautiful cluster of stars called the Pleiades
at the usual time of Zenith measurement,
in the evening, standing over the January thaw,
followed in a few days with Orion’s belt in the
same place. At the time of Job’s captivity the
Pleiades rose to the Zenith on the 10th day of
November. By the slow action of precession
they have moved eastward, until now they come
to the Zenith on the second day of January.
Only eighteen days elapse before Orion’s belt
stands in the Zenith to look down on sealed rivers,
as the thaw is over.
25. “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of
the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?” The
time in this poetic allusion is our present century.
The phenomena seen is employing lightning as a
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messenger. “Canst thou send lightnings that
they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?”
Proceeding to give the habits and instincts of a
few representative animals in natural history,
Job proposed to sit down and say no more.
26. But God proposed to gird him for the
description of two representative fossil animals
of the Middle and Tertiary ages. For the ruling
king of saurians, he described Ichthyosaurus
under the title of Leviathan. For the king of
the Myocene period he described the Megathareum
under the title of Behemoth. God opens
the understanding of Job’s three mistaken friends,
and makes demands for repentance and reparation.
Job becomes their intercessor. The captivity
of Piety ends here. The “times of the gentiles
are fulfilled.” “The sanctuary is cleansed.”
“Babylon is fallen.” “The white horse appears,
and Jesus reigns King of kings and Lord of
lords.”
27. Now commences the grandest era of Job’s
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life. It is double in prosperity to all going
before. The time for its continuance is very
long. The universal respect that will be shown
the church, the voluntary contributions in liberal
free-will offerings, the abundance of peace and
prosperity, are well diagrammed and set forth in
the closing events of Job’s life.
Elihu will still talk of the “Twilight of
Christianity,” but faith is looking for the dawn
of Christ’s triumph, when the dragon, “like
lightning,” must “fall from the heavens,” and
nations will hail with joy the reign of righteousness.
“Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye
lifted up ye everlasting doors; and the King of
glory shall come in.
“Who is this King of glory? The Lord, strong
and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. The Lord
of hosts; he is the King of glory.”
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.sp 4
.h2 id=chap3
CHAPTER III. | All the Scripture References to Cosmology are in Harmony| with the Book of Job.
.sp 2
1. Peter must have understood the import
of this divine poem, when he wrote, “For this
they are willingly ignorant of, that by the word
of God the heavens were of old, and the earth
standing out of the water and in the water.”
So also “The earth, that then was, being overflowed.”
2. So Solomon understood the poem. Personifying
the eternity of wisdom, under things
timely, he wrote, “Before the mountains were
settled, before the hills were brought forth.”
Notice the sedimentary character of the mountains!
“While as yet he had not made the
earth (in form). When he prepared the heavens,
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I was there; when he set a compass (circle)
upon the face of the depth (space).”
3. The spirit of this poem must have inspired
the Psalmist, when he ascribed thanks unto
“Him who stretcheth out the earth above the
waters.” And again, “He hath founded it upon
the seas, and established it upon the floods.”
4. Moses must have possessed this sublime
poem in the wilderness. By an easy succession
of steps, he could find his way back to where
suns, in gathering, kept time to the marching
forces of Jehovah, as a well trained choir.
“When the morning stars sang together.” Not
content here, he sought farther aid of God, and
swung out into the voids of space, where heat,
light, force, and gravitation slept in the embrace
of chaos; yea, still farther back to when and
where matter was not. He heard God speak
matter into existence. It was from this vision he
wrote, “In the beginning God created the heaven
and the earth.” As it came from the hand of
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God, “It was without form, and darkness was
upon the face of the deep.”
Matter without form is in gas; and to be in
equilibrium, it must be equally diffused in all that
portion of space now containing matter. Inertia
would incapacitate its moving. Without motion,
light was impossible; without centers, gravitation
had not commenced. Such was matter in the
darkness of chaos without form, called night. A
force from without must overcome inertia, and
give birth to form, light, heat, gravitation, and
power at the same time. This power is brought
to our view in the following sublime sentence:
“And the Spirit of the Lord moved upon the face
of the waters” (fluids). Gravitation acts instantaneously
throughout space. Therefore the gathering
of any one center as a sun, would necessitate
the gathering of every central sun in relative
accord.
5. Gravitating centers account for centripetal
motion only. Acted upon by gravitation alone,
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all matter within each system would start for the
center direct. Hence, centrifugal force also must
have been imparted to all that portion of gaseous
chaos, destined to become planets. With these
two forces acting upon them, they would naturally
assume the shape of an immense ring about the
sun. Those gases destined to make our sun,
must have traversed a space of not less than
twenty trillion of miles; possibly, in some directions
thirty trillion of miles. The center would be
small at first; and should these gases float thirty
miles per hour, it would take ninety million of
our years to gather the sun complete. In such
condition, from the voids of space Moses beheld
our system, and noticed that the “waters above
the firmament were not separated from the waters
beneath.” If from a tall mountain we behold
a rainbow, when the sun is quite low we shall see
a complete circle of prismatic colors. If one
should report that the colors above the firmament
were not separate from the colors beneath the
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.pn +1
firmament, we should readily understand that the
bow was continuous as a circle. Now imagine
these colors tangible gases, and a sun placed in
the center, and you have some faint conception of
the grand objective view of the prophet, as he beheld
the first morning of creation. The condition
in darkness, unmeasured by time, he had called
night. The condition in light, unmeasured by
flight of years, he called morning. “And the
evening and the morning were day first.” The
vision, from contemplating matter as divided
into systems, now changes to prospective Earth,
as yet without form. If the lack of form constituted
its evening, then, when it gains a form,
it will be its morning. The gases that were to
form earth, then lay diffused in the firmament
ring.
6. A spark would unite a field of Hydrogen
and Oxygen, and cause a division in the ring, as
a new element much lighter, formed in space in
the condition of superheated steam. Its lightness
// File: 092.png
.pn +1
would cause it to evolve outside the ring, and
take the form of a globe. “And God made the
firmament,” and he called it “heaven,” which is
the visible expanse of a half circle or sphere
above our heads; “and he divided the waters
which were under the firmament, (the first, which
was a tangible circle) from the waters which were
above the firmament.” The Earth is in form, but
has, as yet, but two gases; and these unite in
steam. The second day of creation ends without
a “footprint” for the unassisted geologists to
trace. Well may Job refer man to the voice
of the Lord for the wisdom of first cause and
the early changes of matter. This newly formed
firmament, or visible expanse, which, by figure of
metonymy means a newly formed globe, differs
materially from the ring substance of the sun,
which gave rise to the term firmament. This
second firmament is not made of tangible gases,
nor is its appearance to dwellers on the earth continuous.
Hence, the making of this firmament is
// File: 093.png
.pn +1
the objective description of the formation of our
Earth as a globe. With a world of steam in
globe form, the second age or day of creation
ended. The matter, that gathered would constitute
Earth, while floating in chaos was called
evening. When the globe took its form, though
only a world of steam, it was called morning.
“And the evening and the morning were the
second day.” No measurement of twenty-four
hour days had commenced yet. Having followed
our globe out into space, the prophet now confines
his observations to this single planet. He beholds
the outside liquifying, and he follows it
into its present orbit. He made no mention of
the “swaddling band,” it took out of the ring as
it passed back toward the sun. This had been
well noticed by Job, as well as the manner of the
first deposits. But he noticed the appearance
of dry land; and the introduction of terrestrial
vegetation, and described them as cryptogam
“having the seed in itself.” He had followed
// File: 094.png
.pn +1
the gathering together of the waters as a grand
sea, and the inorganic deposits as a long evening;
and now, to bring out a grand contrast, as morning,
he waited until the forests sung the praises
of God’s creative hand in bestowing life. “And
the evening and the morning were the third day.”
But this vegetation grows in the veiled light,
much as the gray of twilight. This twilight is
the evening of the fourth day. Contrasting with
it is pure sunlight. The Carboniferous age of
the world cleared the air of these deadly gases,
and let in the sunshine upon the earth. This
was morning. In noticing this, he is reminded
that this globe is occupying his entire attention;
and yet God made all the planets and suns of the
heavens. So the source of light is again noticed
and its proper name given to it, and the relation
it sustains to our own time noticed and recorded,
“The sun to give light by day.” In a similar
manner the moon and the stars were all noticed.
As vegetation had now arrived at its climax,
// File: 095.png
.pn +1
Moses closed this age, making the cryptogram
in the gray twilight the evening, and its contrast
the gay flower basking in clear sunlight the morning.
“And the evening and the morning were
the fourth day.”
7. Gases are combined into rock through the
agency of air and water. There are three methods
of conveying or changing gas into rock. The
first is by gases mingling directly with the water.
This gave us the larger portion of sedimentary
rock. For aught that science has yet discovered,
the entire bed of primary granite was made
in this manner. The second is by combining the
gases by means of diatoms and polyps of the
seas. These animals do not depend upon vegetation,
but draw their nourishment directly from
the waters. Their remains constitute large portions
of sedimentary rock. The marble and chalk
are formed almost entirely of their remains, while
all sedimentary rock this side the granite contains
more or less of their remains. A third way
// File: 096.png
.pn +1
is by gases combining in vegetation. Anthracite
coal is ninety-six per cent. carbon, combined
through vegetation.
8. It is evident that the days of creation were
not given to mark an order of time. (1.) Creation
commenced before time. (2.) Without
motion there could be no measure of duration.
(3.) The fifth day includes all the fourth and
part of the third; and could therefore be no order
of time.
9. They were not designed to mark an order
in the deposit of rock. All stratified rock, from
the Gneiss to the Myocene deposit, is included
in the fifth day. They do not, therefore, give a
progressive order of deposit.
10. They were designed to give two mornings
of inorganic changes of matter, with two
contrasting evenings; two organic changes, as
mornings of vegetation, with contrasting evenings;
two organic changes, as mornings of animals,
with contrasting evenings. These days are
// File: 097.png
.pn +1
all spoken of as noting a beginning, a middle,
and a close. The beginning and close are contrasts.
This mode of measurement may have
been derived from Job 9:9—“Which maketh
the Bear, Orion, and Pleiades.” Here is Orion,
marking the colure line of the Spring equinox at
the creation of man; the Bear, marking the same
Spring equinox at the end of time; and Pleiades,
marking the date at which these visions
came to the prophet. Thus we have the beginning
and ending of the human race in contrast,
and a middle date of passing events. Thus, with
Moses the vision of creation opens with the creation
of all matter, and the first day ends with
the morning of light. The inertia of rest in
chaos intervened. The Earth, without form, and
the Earth, in form, is contrasted, the second day,
with a separated firmament of the sun intervening.
In the third day, we have evening commencing
with two gases in the form of a steam
globe, contrasted with the waving forests of the
// File: 098.png
.pn +1
Devonian age of geology, with the millions of
years of deposits of inorganic substance intervening.
The language explaining the fourth day
seems to be about the sun, moon, and stars. But
that these might shine in on the Earth, there
was involved the idea of removing the Earth’s
“swaddling band,” alluded to by Job. Hence
the language involves an evening of twilight in
which Cryptogams, as the beginning of Earth’s
vegetation, would contrast with the flowers basking
in clear sun light, while the slow process of
how God caused the sun to shine in on the Earth,
by working this dark band of gases into its crust,
intervened. Nowhere is this rule seen so clearly
as in the language pertaining to the fifth day.
Here, the infusoria of the sea is made to contrast
with the whale; while birds intervene. These
diatoms began in the deposit of the Gneiss rock.
The whale is found in the Myocene and since.
The solitary reign of beasts is noted as evening,
contrasting with the reign of God’s people as
// File: 099.png
.pn +1
“priests and kings unto God,” at the close of
time. Intervening are the events of human history.
Thus, every day of the six is shown by
contrasts.
11. A general providence runs in law, evolving
progress as far as Nature’s law is adapted;
but when Nature fails to meet any new want,
special providence steps in, with additional forces
to supply the deficiency. Space was an empty
nakedness, and God created matter therein. Matter
was without form and void, and God started
it in motion. Matter was without life, and God
created the life. The beasts of the field were
without a moral spirit. And God made man in
his own image, blessed with immortality, and
capable of attaining to eternal life. For farther
particulars, see Sec. 4.
// File: 100.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap4
CHAPTER IV. | The Phenomena to which allusions are so freely made in the “Six| Days of Moses,” suggest certain scientific necessities, replete| with geological information, which demonstrate the progressive| work of God, for matter, in matter, by and through matter,| and above matter, to the end of time.
.sp 2
Two books give a revelation of God, Nature
and the Bible. Except for purposes of intelligent
connection, as a rule, the revelations of one
are not repeated in the other. Revelation on the
subject of cosmos is evidently intended to supply
parts, which nature is not adapted to unfold.
Each stands as a part of a great whole; that the
true student of nature may be thoroughly furnished
with proper text books, which, when
rightly understood, are conjointly harmonious,
// File: 101.png
.pn +1
connected, and exhaustive. If man would attain
even the faintest ability to measure the
“footprints of God” in nature, or fathom the
relation of first causes in creation, he can ill afford
unacquaintance with either book. The Bible
is given as a supplement to God’s voice in nature.
Creation, shown in harmony with the testimony
of the rocks, confirms the testimony of
Moses. The unsupported hypotheses of men
have led some to deplore the “mistakes of Moses.”
A better acquaintance with both books will lead
them, it is thought, at least to respect his great
prophetic knowledge, in outlining creation’s origin
and forces.
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect4-1
Section 1. | The Work of the First Day.
.sp 2
1. The account, given in Genesis, of creation
is in the form of an Epic Poem. As a treatise
on any subject, it would be incomplete. Its design
// File: 102.png
.pn +1
seems to be to give, in the form of poetic
suggestions, the connecting links to unite creation
with creation’s God. For such a purpose,
it is the grandest and most complete of all productions
of the pen. Six of these days are
marked by contrasts, “called evening and morning”
but the seventh is peculiar, having neither.
The sixth is said to close God’s labor with matter.
Unmeasured duration is, doubtless, the
seventh.
2. The “deep,” when used in reference to the
heavens, means immensity of space; as: “darkness
was upon the face of the deep.” Darkness
is the normal state of space. Not dependent on
matter, it is eternal. Moses saw all matter
created at once. God’s work, as revealed here
for matter, is in harmony with correlation of
matter in science.
3. By a beautiful figure of metonymy, poets
speak of a part implying the whole. Such is the
word “Earth,” as first introduced in this production.
// File: 103.png
.pn +1
“And the earth (all matter) was without
form.” Inertia holds all in rest. An act, fiat,
or work of God, above matter, is requisite, to set
it in motion. “And the Spirit of the Lord moved
upon the face of the deep.” A system formed
with a center of light is noted. All systems are
members of this choir.
4. Science would suggest, that, if a ponderous
globe, as our sun, should gather in a field of
gases, though trillions of miles in diameter, all
gases, within its drawing sphere, must either go
toward the sun, or be thrown around it in a circle.
Such was the ring of waters, or fluids, first
called a firmament. A most minute directing
of Providence is here suggested. It extended
to each molecule of gas, and its appropriate
place was determined. Before that grand movement
of the Spirit of God, there was nothing
with which to measure duration, and time had
not commenced. No centers—no gravitation.
No motion—no light or force. All this is suggested
// File: 104.png
.pn +1
in matter “without form.” Suns only
had form at the close of the first day. As systems
revolved, measured duration might have
commenced at the revolutions of suns about a
grand center. One day at the sun would be
twenty-seven of ours; one year, eighteen thousand
of ours. This first day of creation may have
been one hundred million of years. It included
the length of these contrasts to a climax, darkness—light.
The one reigning over all matter,
the other forming from matter, under the direction
of God.
5. If the first is a literal day, so are the seven.
If the first is poetic, so are the seven. That
the first was not literal, is evident in that the
“Earth was without form” as yet. Hence there
was no twenty-four hour measurement. Day is
also used to signify a nation’s history. It is not
that. It is also used to signify the life of an individual.
It could not be that. “A day with the
Lord is as a thousand years.” It is evident that
// File: 105.png
.pn +1
Peter was merely hinting at the indefiniteness, as
to time, of the Mosaic days. It remains, then,
that it is a cosmological day, without exact measurement
of time. It certainly includes all that
period of chaotic darkness before time commenced.
Should these gases move across the radii of
our system with the speed of light, it would take
thirty-five days; but should the gases move like
an atmosphere in space, it would take more than
ninety million of years to gather the sun. The
greater probability is that these contrasted conditions
of the first day, poetically described without
any exact measurement, if measured, would
extend through more than one hundred million
of our years.
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect4-2
Section 2. | The Work of the Second Day.
.sp 2
1. Creation includes not only the bringing
into existence of matter, but all its undeveloped
// File: 106.png
.pn +1
forces and changes. Revelation, upon this subject,
is suggestive, rather than exhaustive, of what
we need above what Nature shows, to trace creation
back to God. The greatest difficulty in
reading this poem understandingly, is in rightly
rendering the phenomena noticed upon the second
day. Figures of metonymy abound. As a
rule, figures once used in prophecy are not changed
when used by another prophet. Hence, we
may derive benefit by seeing how other prophets
have used them. Job had made the gathering of
suns at the creation of light a morning in figure.
Moses is about to use the same figure, and
beholding the darkness of chaos preceding, he
extended the figure to an evening preceding.
This is the only day that pertains to light and
darkness. The second day will be analogous in
contrast. Whatever be the one, the other will
contrast. The evening of Earth is given. “And
the Earth was without form.” The contrast will
be the Earth in form, for morning.
// File: 107.png
.pn +1
2. To read these allusions understandingly,
every sentence must be cosmologically analyzed
in the light of our present knowledge of astronomy,
chemistry, philosophy, geology, and rhetoric.
There is a grand suggestion of progress,
couched in the figure of morning succeeding evening.
The morning of each day is a complete
contrast to its own evening; and yet the morning
of that day is only the evening of the day following.
The morning of the sun, with hosts of
God’s angels rejoicing, is only the evening of the
prospective globe, upon whose disk shall be perfected,
in knowledge and true holiness, beings in
God’s own image. The sun has perfected his day,
in which Moses beholds the evening of the second.
3. He is looking at our system, as from the
voids of space, as a whole; with its gathered sun
and its immense ring of prospective planets. It is
now shown him that a change is to take place in
the ring, which will result in the form of a globe.
To that part of the ring he draws near. The
// File: 108.png
.pn +1
first phenomenon noticed was a separation in the
ring between the “waters above, and those below.”
The gases thus uniting in one substance,
soon left this firmament ring of the sun, and had
a firmament of its own, called heaven, or visible
expanse. The Hebrew word translated “firmament”
implies something tangible, and yet it
was used to denote the visible expanse.
4. The first firmament was composed of tangible
gases or waters, so called; the second is
the expanse of heaven. The cause of the separated
waters is seen in what follows. These
fluids that evolved out, leaving the ring separated,
are now in a condition that they only have
to be gathered together into one place to be a
sea. It was then steam. The suggestion is
that an immense field of oxygen and hydrogen
had united by the spark which separated the
ring, and as the union was superheated steam,
it evolved out into the voids of space as a globe.
It is plain then “And God made a firmament in
// File: 109.png
.pn +1
the midst of the waters,” means he made a
globe, from which the visible expanse is seen.
The vision now places the prophet upon this
globe, the changes of which will occupy his attention
to the end.
5. Whether any or all the planets were
formed at the same time, we are not told. No
allusion is made to them except an incidental one,
on the fourth day, so that all things should be
traced back to God as their Maker. If the
union of two gases took out a segment of the
ring, leaving it “separated,” it would only be
temporary, as the ring would close up again.
Whether our planet was the first, third, or last
formed, no mention is made. The vision is designed
henceforth to unfold what we need to
know of Earth, not found in nature. Our globe
in chaos of gases, sweeping around the sun in
the form of a ring, is evening, being “without
form.” Our globe in steam, having a firmament
of its own, is in shape, and this is “morning.”
// File: 110.png
.pn +1
Solomon must have given such an interpretation
to the account of the second day.
Prov. 8:27. Tracing the unmeasured age of
wisdom, “Before the mountains were settled,
before the hills, while as yet he had not made
the Earth, when he prepared the heavens, I
was there; when he set a compass (or circle)
upon the face of the depth.” A globe of steam,
possibly highly charged with electricity, revolving
in an orbit outside the ring of planetary
gases, was all that constituted Earth at this time.
“And the evening and the morning were the
second day.”
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect4-3
Section 3. | The Work of the Third Day.
.sp 2
1. A globe of vapor in contact with the cold
voids of space must condense or liquify. The
beginning would be upon the outside; constantly
growing heavier according to bulk, it would
work its way nearer to the sun. Having become
// File: 111.png
.pn +1
a center of attraction, and coming back to
the now closed-up ring, it would claim a portion
of the same as an atmosphere. Increasing now
its centrifugal force, it gained an orbit inside
the ring, still drawing nearer the sun. Job’s
attention had been called to the earth’s appearance
in this “gathering” process. “When I
made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick
darkness a swaddling band for it.” Moses began
the third day as the globe began to condense.
“And he gathered the waters together into one
place; and he called the gathering together of
the waters, seas.” While the globe was in a
condition of vapor, the waters were firmament
waters; and the word firmament answered very
well for both globe and visible expanse. Hence,
“God made a firmament” by figure; covered
both. But as soon as gathered, there was a distinction.
Now only the expanse, holding yet a
cloudy vapor, could be called firmament, or
heaven; and the gathered waters he called seas.
// File: 112.png
.pn +1
2. Science claims that the present pointing
of the pole of the Earth, and its inclination to
the ecliptic, could not produce such a warm
climate as the Earth once enjoyed. This fact,
in connection with the Earth covered with ice, at
a remote period of the past, confounds the mere
seeker of cause in nature’s laws. The ancient
pole-pointing is sung by Job. According to his
description of light and darkness, one pole of the
Earth must have pointed directly to the sun
throughout the year. And as that warm climate
was uniform, it must have turned on its axis
not only daily, but as does our moon in reference
to Earth, once over in its entire orbicular
journey. Its enlightened hemisphere was never
in darkness; its dark hemisphere was never in
light. According to Job’s statement, both light
and darkness were stationary. “Where is the
place where light dwelleth? And as for darkness,
where is the place thereof, that thou shouldst
take it to the bound thereof, and that thou
// File: 113.png
.pn +1
shouldst know the paths to the house thereof?”
All our deposits then hung as gases in the air;
one-half of which science proclaims to have been
oxygen. In the language of Solomon, the mountains
before rising must have first “settled” in
the sea. The psalmist saw that God spread out
the earth upon the waters, that he founded it
upon the sea, and established it upon the floods.
Job saw that the very corner foundation stone
was made to sink. Moses rushes the deposits
all into the evening of the third day, to the appearance
of dry land. “And God said, Let the
waters under the heaven (the new firmament) be
gathered together unto one place, and let the dry
land appear.” Here are eighty miles deposit
made in the sea, all of which came out of the
air and water. During this time Moses says,
“The Lord God had not caused it to rain on the
Earth.” “The plant and the herb of the field
had not yet been made.”
3. With such a pole-pointing, only one end
// File: 114.png
.pn +1
of the Earth could receive deposits, and the
sun could take hold only of that end. Job alludes
to a convulsion in which “The proud
were shaken out of it, that the sun might take
hold of both ends of it.” 38:13. Before this
change, “The waters were covered as with a
stone, and the deep was frozen.” Deposits are
now made from the air at the rate of four hundredths
of an inch in a year. At this rate it
would take, possibly, eighty million of years to
reach the surface. Our globe was never a rain-less
planet.
4. The allusion to its not having rained on
the earth, is an allusion that the deposits were
yet beneath the waters, until the “dry land
appeared.” Following the changes of organic
life up to the time of the deposits of the “Old
Red Sand Stone,” where God spread out the waving
forests of the Devonian plain, he had found
the fit contrast to the inorganic deposit of the
evening.
// File: 115.png
.pn +1
5. The climate of the first part of the third
clay was chilled to the temperature of melting
ice. The latter part was torrid. The equator
marked the bound between perpetual sunlight
and perpetual darkness. Along this equator a
line of open sea would beat against a line of perpetual
ice. The spray and vapor from the open
sea, going south, would be rapidly converted
into snow and ice, increasing the thickness and
gravity of the ice. At length, breaking by its
own weight, it would drift into the open sea.
During the first part of this day, there was nothing
to prevent this drift-ice finding its way to the
very north pole. The sea, therefore, would be
at a temperature of 32 degrees Fahr.
6. After the deposits neared the top, and before
dry land appeared, the larger bergs were
kept back, and tropical waters resulted, followed
by the same climate upon the dry land, as it appeared.
At the close of this day there existed
many kinds of water animals, but they did not
// File: 116.png
.pn +1
form a suitable contrast with what Moses had to
start with, as evening. These were inorganic deposits
from the air. The organic deposits of the
Devonian forests are the morning. “And the
earth brought forth the tree, yielding fruit, whose
seed was in itself (cryptogams) after his kind.”
“And the evening and the morning were the
third day.”
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect4-4
Section 4. | The Work of the Fourth Day.
.sp 2
Up to the Carboniferous time of deposit, the
air had never been sufficiently cleared of its dark
clouds of deadly gases, to admit sunshine on the
earth. Vegetation had not reached a climax. No
mention is to be made of animals existing, until
this climax is reached. It will be reached when
the sun shall have taken off the “swaddling
band” of her childhood, and depositing the same,
as coal, in the earth, shall give the earth a clothing
of flowers. Non-flowering plants are evening,
// File: 117.png
.pn +1
the contrast will be the flowering plant in the
sunshine.
1. By figure of metonymy, again he traced
the progress of deposits through the sun, which
God had made, with the moon and stars. The
labor of the sun to clear the atmosphere, calling
for immediate help of God, was long and persevering.
Poetically, the narrative is enriched by
this elegant figure, in putting cause for effect.
As now from the earth for the first time he beholds
the clear sunlight, he doubtless is reminded,
that in mentioning the creation of this center
of attraction in our system, he had given a name
which indicated a specific property of the sun,
viz, light; whereas it also had heat and force.
Now, calling it by a generic name, and remembering
also that in describing the origin of Earth
no mention had been made of the rest of the
heavens, he incidentally mentions that God made
them all, without attempting the individual history
of either. His mission is to trace in progress
// File: 118.png
.pn +1
the contrasting changes of God’s work in the
Earth. And to his text he adheres.
Since the sun is the only source of permanent
natural light within our system, and since Moses
had made light to contrast with the darkness of
chaos in the first day, it seems strange that any
intelligent reader should understand him to speak
of the bringing into existence of the great orb of
light the fourth day. Shining in on the earth is
all that is noted.
2. Sir Charles Lyell, the great English geologist,
gives us the process by which sunlight was
let in on the earth during the carboniferous age.
This age corresponds to the fourth day of Moses.
The dark band of gases intercepted the clear
rays of sunlight, so that a somber hue of gray
covered the earth, as in twilight. Vegetation
must slowly do the work of depositing these gases,
until diminished so that fire, or flame, could
be supported. Such was the resinous and oily
nature of all vegetation of that period, that a
// File: 119.png
.pn +1
stroke of lightning might set the world on fire,
to burn for six months or a year. Some of the
carbonated growth of the forests would be hidden
away beyond the reach of flame. In this condition
it would ripen into coal. But enough carbonic
acid would escape, to intercept the clear
rays of the sun, and another period of deposit
would set in. In the Nova Scotia coal mines,
alone, he had noticed one hundred of these burnings,
implying a long period of deposit between
each. It is thus the long ages struggled, to enable
the sun to kiss the vegetation into bloom.
The widely scattered coal beds of this period
show that the whole earth was covered with a
tropical forest. Large veins of this coal are
found in Greenland, Nova Zembla Island, Tasmania,
and the Melville Islands.
3. We have had subsequent periods of deposits
of carbon in forests that produced coal.
But the coal formed since that age is generally
soft. One short coal period occurred this side
// File: 120.png
.pn +1
the great upheavals of mountains. This coal is
found on the Pacific Coast, and yields only forty-four
per cent. carbon. The best coal had its origin
before the flowers. In Moses’ prophetic vision
of the work of the sun, he grasped certain
points in the future of astronomy.
4. He noticed the use an enlightened civilization
would make of the motions of the heavens.
He noticed the Zodiac divided into signs,
and time measured by three clocks of nature,
called “days, years, and seasons.” The season
clock is by the precession of the equinoxes,
consuming 25,000 years in a circle. Michael,
the archangel, used this term in explanation
of the “long time” that would elapse before
the final end. With the clear sunlight,
the climax of vegetation was reached. Two inorganic
mornings and two vegetable mornings
have been noted; two animal mornings remain
to finish the work of God with matter.
“And the evening and the morning were the
fourth day.”
// File: 121.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect4-5
Section 5. | The Work of the Fifth Day.
.sp 2
1. The contrasts of evening and morning of
the fifth day are found in the sea. The contrasts
of the sixth upon the land. The evening of the
fifth began with the “moving things of the sea,”
ending with the “whale.” With the exception of
the first day, the fifth must have extended
through a much longer time than all the others
put together. The contrast between moving
diatoms of the Gneiss rock, and the whale of the
Miocene in size, is apparent. But the contrast is
in a higher sense. All this long period to the Tertiary
rock, gave only egg-producing animals.
This was not high enough in the scale of animal
existence to have the next evening, which must
begin with the fifth morning, to form a contrast
with man. The type of the highest of mammals
must be reached, and that in the sea. This was
found in the whale. Beside, the whale is intimately
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connected with the great geological change
caused by the drift period. Here ninety-seven
per cent of the previous animals of the earth became
extinct. Following the drift, there came
into existence nearly all the animals that now
roam the Earth. This day, then, covers all the
changes of the fourth, and most of the third; and
of course has nothing to do with a measure of
time, or order of deposits.
2. For aught we now know, the starting of
animal life was in the time of the deposit of the
Gneiss rock—here we find shells. From here
onward was heard the voice of God, “Let the
waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature
that hath life.” This life, at first, was very
simple; and small as simple. It required only
the nourishment derived from water for its support.
No animals of any considerable size are
found until vegetables were furnished for their
food. Those of the earlier period had to be protected
from the carbonated waters by a bony
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covering or ivory scales. Scorpions, spiders, lizards
and frogs might breathe the carbonic acid
of the fourth day; but no warm-blooded animals
are known to have existed until after the sun
shone in upon the Earth, as a fixture.
3. Here Moses noticed the existence of
“fowls of the air.” In the ichthyosaurus he
might have found the contrast in size, but not
in type.
4. He passed on down to the “whale as morning.”
After the Carboniferous deposits, the
tracks of birds and reptiles are found in the ancient
sands of the shores of the waters. Gigantic
saurians and voracious fish ruled the sea
for untold ages; but as they all were oviparous,
or egg-producing, they are ranked in the evening.
Reaching the type of the ruling land animals
of the next day, Moses pronounced the
morning with the whale.
5. It remains a mystery, how any one knowing
anything about geology can find fault with
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the order of the Mosaic record. So far as
Moses has mentioned order, it is: moving animals
in the sea, air animals, mammals. The order
of science may be more explicit. Substantially
it is protozoans, mollusks, radiates, articulates,
vertebrates, mammals. There is no conflict,
nor even deficiency. The term used by Moses
is designedly generic; covering all moving
creatures of the waters. The history of the
rocks is in exact accord with the testimony of
Moses; and both verify common observation, viz:
each kind of animal produces its own kind.
6. The poise of the Earth to the sun was
such as to give an ice-flow, whenever for any
cause a great subsidence of the hemisphere took
place.
The largest happened when the last and highest
mountains were raised. As a consequence,
the period called the Drift followed, when the
reindeer made his home in the vicinity of England.
Most tropical animals were destroyed.
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A new race of placential mammals was to be
introduced; the type of which is found in the
sea, able to endure the revolutions of the Drift.
Hence the wisdom displayed in selecting this
animal, as a representative of morning.
7. The Scripture claim of special providence
is in harmony with the defence of the same in
science. Providence is general, when wrought
out in due course of law; special, when it is a
power added to nature. Special providence is
not a rule of action, but the exception. Science
claims this much in nature. I refer to the admissions
of such men as Huxley, Tyndal and
Darwin. Prof. Huxley says: “No scientist of
the present day will venture the affirmation, that
matter is eternal. Should one be found, his
brethren would rise up in court, and object to his
testimony, as he would be incompetent to testify.”
If not eternal, it was created by God’s special
power. Prof. Darwin says: “Some of our
brethren have tried by experiments, to prove
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spontaneous life from inorganic matter, but they
have failed, and, from the nature of the case,
they must ever fail.” “There must have been
a first life, I think five forms, I know there must
have been one from which life could proceed.”
Special providence again is needed to start life.
The same principle would apply as many times
as the earth may have lost its living forms. Sir
Charles Lyell would assure you that the fires of
the Carboniferous period alone deprived the
earth of all land and fresh water animals, plants
and seeds, at least one hundred times. Yet it
was supplied between each. Prof. Tyndal says,
“Do you ask me 'May inert matter rise up and
live?’ I answer directly, 'No, life must have
been created.’” Here then in science are the
Deists’ endorsements of exactly what every enlightened
Christian believes in reference to the
covenant of salvation. This is the doctrine of the
science of today, viz: that “God made all matter
at one and the same time; that by special
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power he put all parts in motion at one and the
same time; that his eye is over all, ready to supply
what is needed above what the machinery
of nature can perform.” Carry out this principle,
and you have the manifestations of the true
God in Jesus, and every Bible theory of the New
Covenant.
.sp 2
.h3 id=sect4-6
Section 6. | The Work of the Sixth Day.
.sp 2
1. Beasts, with a perishable spirit, are the
evening of the sixth day. Man without an immortal
spirit is the morning. Here we shall find
the grandest contrast of any of the six days. Historic
man is the morning, extending to the end
of God’s work, in reference to matter.
Duration ceases to be measured at the close
of this day. Solomon alludes to the contrasts
found in this day. “Who knoweth the spirit
of the beast, that goeth downward; and the spirit
of man, that goeth upward?” For a long time
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these animals, without a spirit to be preserved,
ruled the earth as kings, “without any one to till
the soil.” Jungles and forests, mountains and
dales, lakes and caves, alike afford no facts inconsistent
with this statement of Moses. Should
science ever confirm the existence of a race prehistoric,
resembling man, it will doubtless be
shown that they were not a contrast with beasts,
and have no connection with our race.
2. Our race undoubtedly sprang from Adam
less than six thousand years ago. Prehistoric
man, like evolution, rests upon the hypotheses
of men, always unsafe; but in this case unsupported
by a well-attested fact. The former may
claim the intuitions of that class of persons ever
looking up the genealogy of Cain’s wife; the latter
has the common sense of the average man
against him. Upon this subject, as upon every
other upon which the Bible pretends to speak,
“If they speak not according to what is written,
it is because there is no truth in them.” By special
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revelation man saw that by a special providence
of God, he caused the ground to become
the mother of man; and from this creation proceeded,
by the same special providence, a help-meet
for man. She has ever proved herself the
great help in the march of civilization. Facts
show that man gloriously contrasts with the
highest types going before.
3. It is not yet a settled question that the air,
for any number of thousands of years before
Adam, was sufficiently cleared of deadly gases as
to admit of human breathing. On looking upon
the coal veins of Pennsylvania, we need no argument
to show that man could not have breathed
the carbon that hung in the air of that period of
deposit. The mute faces of the coal beds of
Ohio forbid man’s existence then, although these
succeed the former by millions of years. Geologists
agree that the Pacific deposits of coal have
been this side of the great upheavals of the large
mountains. If man had been living then, the
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carbonic acid of the air would have strangled the
life out of him. When we take into consideration
how very slowly a continent rises out of the
ocean, and that both the Atlantic and Pacific
coasts had to rise over five thousand feet to expose
their fruitful valleys; and also how very
long a period had to elapse after, before the air
would be laid into the ground by vegetation, we
shall readily see the force of this proposition,
viz: The very calculations which science has
given us bring the deadly gases very near to the
time given in Genesis for the creation of our present
race.
The volcanic periods of the world’s history
argue against the early habitation of the Earth
by man. Every volcano is a vent for the escape
of deadly gases, caused by the consumption of
oils and coal in the Earth’s strata. The enormous
quantity of coal consumed is but faintly indicated
by the amount of ashes thrown out. The
mountains give evidence of recent volcanic disturbance,
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greatly exceeding the present. Ancient
river beds are found into whose channels the debris
of the mountains had been dragged by the
great ice-flow, until leveled over to the height
of several thousand feet; then the volcanic era
covered, in places, this drift fifty or sixty feet
thick; thus preserving the silt from being
dragged away, as the waters receded. The fact
that we had a coal period following, shows that
man in the volcanic period, and for thousands of
years after, could not breathe the air. Our active
volcanoes are reduced to about three hundred.
Still the air is polluted in many ways. Smelting
works, forges and gas plants all pollute the air.
Every cesspool, every whiff of burning tobacco,
adds its quota to air-corrupting. Each year contributes
to deposit a portion of the remaining
carbon of the air. Rich valleys of warm zones
are not yet healthy. We still go to the mountains
for invigorating air.
5. Evidently, we have not yet reached the
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climax of good breathing air. Nature discourages
the thought, that man could have continued
his race, in any time, much previous to that
given for the creating of Adam. The morning
of the sixth day is in progress. Prophecy presents
the coming man greatly improved over the
present. “My Father worketh hitherto, and I
work.”
6. This morning ends, when the angel stands
one foot upon the land, his right hung over the
sea, with his left hand pointing to heaven, proclaiming
that time shall be no longer. “And
God rested from all his labor.”
.sp 4
.dv class='tnotes’
.ul
.it Transcriber’s Notes:
.ul indent=1
.it Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a\
predominant form was found in this book.
.if t
.it Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (italics).
.if-
.ul-
.ul-
.dv-