LESSON IV.
Knowledge of G o d — G o d considered in His
Works — W o r k of the Six Days. First Day. Explanation of the words : In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth—This first expression is the basis of Science—Darkness covered the face of the deep: Explanation. And the Spirit of God moved over the waters: Explanation.
Image of Baptism.-—Creation of Light; rapidity of its propagation.—Colours; their advantage.
Having contemplated God in Himself, let us contemplate Him in his works; they will relate his glory, and, better than all arguments, explain his infinite perfections to us. We have seen that God has existed from all eternity; not so with us, In the beginning, nothing of all that we see around us existed; nor did we ourselves exist. There was no heaven, no earth, no sun, no mountains, no rivers, no sea, no animals, no men, no angels.
God resolved to create all these things. But how would He do so?
Where would He find materials with which to form this magnificent universe?
You are aware that when a man desires to build a house, he requires a supply of stones, brick, wood, iron. The first cabin should still be unconstructed, if man had to create its materials. But God’s power is very different from ours: He spoke, and all things were made; for He who can do all things accomplishes whatever He desires by a simple word.
From all eternity God had conceived the idea of the world. At the time marked out for it, He uttered his thought; thati s,He expressed his thought outwardly by his Word; in short, He spoke, and all things were made. The mode in which man, the image of God, performs his works may give us an idea of the creation.
When a man desires to build a house, for example, he begins by conceiving an idea of it; then, at the fixed time. he says: Let the house be built.
If the effect does not immediately follow the expression, it is because man, not being omnipotent, cannot accomplish what he desires by a command. He must supplement his weakness by a multitude of labourers and materials, all which requires time.
But it is no less true that man’s works are the expression of his thoughts, as the world is the expression of God’s thought.
To know how powerful and fruitful was the Word that created the universe, let us hear the account of the Creation with the same sentiments of admiration penetrating our souls as if we had been present at this great work, and had seen, at each word of the Creator, that wondrous multitude of creatures, so various and so perfect, spring forth from nothingness.
Before our eyes will be unfolded a magnificent book, the first in which God desires that the children of men should read the lesson of his existence, glory, power, goodness, and all his other perfections.
This admirable book was written by God in six days. Whether each of these days was a revolution of twenty-four hours, or a longer space of time, is a question left to the disputations of philosophers.l
What it is important to remark, is, that God was not pleased to create the World instantaneously or suddenly, but gradually, hereby to teach us that He is free to act as He pleases. The following is the order in which He called forth creatures from nothingness :—
In the beginning God created heaven and earth. In the beginning; that is, at the beginning of all things, when God began to create the world.
In order to satisfy the legitimate curiosity of a certain class of our readers we shall add to the work of the Six Days some notes on Geology . The most advanced scholars shall be our guides, and thus the Catechisms all be found, so to say, in the most advanced post of science. Geology is a science which has for its object the knowledge of the terrestrial globe. It studies the interior structure of the earth, and the organic remains found therein, together with the laws regulating the formation of these things. Not to deprive Geological solutions of the merit which is due to them, it is well to remember that this science is only yet in its infancy, that geologists are not acquainted with a sufficient portion of the globe to form a system absolutely perfect. The deepest mines are only, in regard to our planet, like the punctures of a pin in the skin of an elephant.
We must also remember that geology was, for a long time, the arsenal in which impiety sought for weapons against the faith. Like all other sciences, it was enrolled by philosophers under the standard of incredulity, to make war upon the Bible. But it has grown; in growing, it has become enlightened; and to-day it renders homage to Religion. It asks the hand of Religion to support it, as a delicate girl asks her mother‘s arm to support her tottering steps.
“Surely it must be gratifying,”says Cardinal Wiseman on this subject, “ to see a science, formerly classed, and not, perhaps, unjustly, among the most pernicious to faith, once more become her handmaid; to see her now, after so many years of wandering from theory to theory, or rather from vision to vision, return once more to the home where she was born, and to the altar at which she made her first simple offerings; no longer, as she first went forth, a wayward child, but with a matronly dignity, and a.priest-like step, and a bosom full of well-earned gifts to pile upon its sacred hearth.” (Lectures on Science and Revealed Religion, vol.i.p.307.)
On the duration of the days of the Creation there exist among geologists two opinions.
The first maintains that these days were periods of indeterminate length, and considers this explanation necessary in order to account for geo logical phenomena; the second holds that they were only ordinary revolutions of twenty-four hours, and denies the need of any other explanation.
The first is supported by several reasons, of which we shall now present an abridgment : — I
1. The word day in Hebrew, as in Latin, French, and other languages, is often used to denote a long period of time, an epoch. Even in Genesis, Moses desired, first of all, to point out the creation of the universe in general, whose principal parts, in our regard, are heaven and earth. In these few words he places the
himself employs it thus. For having detailed the successive works of the Creation, he makes a kind of recapitulation of them, saying: These are the generations of creatures, in the day that the Lord God made the heaven and the earth.(Gen.i.4.) Now, the word day, in this passage, evidently does not mean a space of twenty-four hours, but rather the six days or six epochs of the Creation ,and corresponds to the word time or period. It has the same sense in a great many other passages of Scripture.
2. Our days of twenty-four hours are regulated by the revolution of the earth in presence of the sun. Now, asks M. Deluc, how could Moses, when speaking of the first day or epoch, have known how to assimilate it to our days of twenty-four hours, since these days are measured by the revolution of the earth on its axis, in presence of the sun, and the sun was not brought forth until the fourth day, or epoch, to shed its light on the earth? Moses, therefore, did not refer to a day of twenty-four hours, but rather to a period of indeterminatemlength.
3. St. Augustine says that the days of Genesis cannot be assimilated to spaces of time, as easily conceived, as are days like ours, of twenty-four hours. (De Genes. ad. litt., iv. 16, 44.) And elsewhere he expresses himself thus: “ Qui dies cujus modo sint aut Bgrdifiicile nobis, aut etiam impossible est cogi tare, quanto magis diceré ? ” ( e Ciz‘it. Dei, lib. i., 0. xi. Bossuet asserts in his Elevations surles mgstcres, that the six days were six different progressions (lllaSorm.,VeElévat.)
M. Frayssinous, in his Conferences, says that it is allowed us to behold in these six days so many indefinite periods. To these authorities might be added the names of many illustrious geologists, as Burnet, Whiston, Deluc, Kirwan, Cuvier, 8m.
4. Physical facts announce that between the time of the creation of the first organic beings on the surface of the globe, and that of man, numerous modifications, or, if we choose, several cataclysms took place, and annihilated species primarily created, to which at a later period our present races succeeded. In the vegetable kingdom, the primitive species, to which nothing analogous can now be found, are, among others, the horse-tail or shave-grass, and gigantic ferns ; and, in the animal kingdom, mammoths, buried, like the vegetables of which we have spoken, in the lowest strata of the earth, where the action of the deluge could never have disarranged anything.
Now, as it is demonstrated that the Creation was not the instantaneous product of a blind, impetuous force, but the gradual work of a free, enlightened will, the succession of these ancient generations, of which we no longer find a living trace on the surface of the globe, cannot have occurred in an interval of times of as short as six days. On the contrary ,it is plain that those revolutions, which witnessed the birth, life, and death of such gigantic creatures, must have extended over a long course of ages; and as to each of them corresponds a. class of species totally different from those which had at first been destroyed, as well as from those which should afterwards be destroyed, the creation of organic beings must have been gradual and not instantaneous. (MarceldeSerres, Oosmogonz'e de Moise, p. 18 ct seq.)
Such are the principal reasons with the authorities that support the first opinion. Let us now present the set that favours the second:—
- The Hebrew word day in Scripture often signifies an epoch, but then the whole before our eyes. He then descends to particulars, mentioning what was done on each day of the great week.
- (Greg. de Nye.lib.in.H'emaemeron. CyrilAlex.contraJulian,lib.ll. Aug.
context easily determines the sense in which it must be taken. Now, in the first chapter of the Bible, where this term is repeated even six times, there is nothing to indicate that it should receive any other signification than that which is most natural and common to it. During six- days you shall labour , says Moses to the Israelites , and on the seventh you shall rest ,-for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth ,and on the seventh he rested. (Erod. xx, 11.) Moses here employs the same term to express the days of Creation and ordinary days; would not language persistently equivocal have inevitably cast minds into an error, which Moses could have so easily prevented? Besides the constant tradition of the Jews is that the Mosaic days were only periods of twenty four hours. (See a learned article by M.Drachin Anna leede philosophia chrét'ienne.) -
2. Geologists, who are partisans of the indefinite periods, pretend that morning, mane, means the beginning, the aurora of a period or creation, and evening, vespere, a revolution, a catastrophe, a destruction of this same creation ; and thus they explain the origin of fossils in the various geological formations. But, at the outset, this is a
confusion of languages, and an excessively bold, arbitrary interpretation.
Again, on the first day, God makes the light; on the second, He makes the firmament. Moses, to denote the end of these days, avails himself of the word vespere, evening: if this word means a catastrophe, a ruin, a destruction, of what destruction was there question at the end of the two supposed periods?
Was it the annihilation of the light or the firmament? Will any one dare to maintain one or the other ?
Moreover, for what purpose would God destroy at the end of each day the work which He had created at its beginning, and which He had found good And if He thus destroyed successively, at the end of each period, the productions of each preceding one, He therefore created them anew on the morning of the following periods. Moses acquaints us clearly enough with the special work of each day ; but where does he speak of the restoration of a work previously destroyed?
Donotallthin, on the contrary, in his account, manifestly concurs to make us believe that the work of each day continued to subsist entire and perfectly good, such as it came from the hands of an omnipotent and supremely wise Creator ?
3. The partisans of the periodic days, in order to be consistent, are obliged to admit that the most ancient rocks, those of transition, should contain only the remains of vegetables, and not the remains of animals, since the latter were not created till after the fourth day ;and yet the lowest transition layers, such as the coal group, contain the remains of marine and land animals, and many kinds of air-breathing insects, mixed together with fossil plants. The system is, therefore, in direct contradiction with geological facts. The very impossibility of reconciling the convulsive action of those revolutions, which should have destroyed every creation, with the arrangement of rocks in regular stratification proves the evident result of a gentle and gradual deposit.
4.Our modern geologists, struck by the foregoing difficulties, which appear inexplicable to them, place all those convulsions, of which the interior of the globe everywhere offers us undoubted traces, in the period which elapsed between the first and third verses of Genesis, and they say that the opinion of a period of time of indefinite duration, preceding the organization of the
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Gm.addlitt.lib.1,cap.111.) How many doubts are cleared away in the few words: God created heaven and earth! How many errors dissipated? How many salutary truths revealed? What would Adamic world, is at once founded on the most natural inter rotation of the first verse of Genesis, and the irresistible conclusions to which the study of geological phenomena leads us.
Let us mention a few of the authors who uphold this opinion. M.Desdouits requires that the Mosaic account should be excluded from every geological discussion on the origin of our planet, or the history of the stratified formations which compose its crust.
“No,”says this learned gentleman,“geological facts are not contained in Genesis. The six days of the Creation are manifestly natural days, or times of equivalent duration. Now, geological facts, however they may have been brought about, cannot enter into such an exceedingly narrow scheme.
Therefore they do not belong to the work of the six days. But they are not posterior to it, since they suppose many convulsions of the earth. Therefore they area nterior to the six days of Genesis. Moses does not mention these facts to us, because they are foreign to the history of man, and to the organization of the earth, such as at length G o d prepared it for us.’ (Uninersit. 0ath., t. 111, p. 457.)
“It is clear,”says M. Jehan, “that the expression, In the beginning, means an unlimited space of time between the first act, which brought forth from nothingness the elements of the material world, and the chaos, or last revolution, which is referred to in the second verse, and which was the evening of the first day in the Mosiac narrative. It was during this interval, whose extent may have been immense, that occurred that long succession of events, which settled the mineral structure of our globe, such as by the investigations of science it is found to be, and which accordingly placed our planet in perfect harmony with the wants of the human species, for whose habitation it was ultimately destined.
“ The sacred narrator commences by proclaiming briefly that heaven and earth received their existence at an unassigned period—consequently, that they are not eternal; then, without pausing to satisfy a vain curiosity with the description of a state of things intermediate and altogether foreign to man, to w h o m the sacred narrator is to teach moral not scientific truths, Moses comes to the particular history of an order of events immediately connected with the origin and the destiny of that creature whom God is about to form to His own likeness.” (Nounean Tmitédcs Sciences6201.,p.313,etseq.)
Cardinal Wiseman is of the same opinion, and says that the theory of indefinite epochs, “ however laudable in its object, is not certainly satisfactory in its results. He adds: “And what objection can there be in supposing that, from the first creation of the rude embryo of this beautiful world to the dressing out thereof, with its comeliness and furniture proportioned to the wants and habits of man, Providence may have also chosen to keep a similar ratio and scale, through which life should have progressively advanced to perfection, both in its inward power and in its outward development? If the appearances discovered bi geology shall manifest the existence of any such plan, who will venture to say that it agrees not, by strictest analogy, with the ways of God, in the physical and moral law of this world?
Or
who will assert that it clashes with His sacred word, seeing that in this indefinite period, wherein this work of gradual development is placed, we are left entirely 1n the dark?"
(Lectures on Science and Revealed Religion, vol. i. p. 309.) ' _ ' Buckland, the Cuvier of England, maintains the same opinion, and this our reason do without this light, save perchance ever seek, but never find.