1856.] Science and the Bible. 115
"
The heavens and the earth," as before stated, is obviously a
comprehensive expression for all existence — then a lifeless existence
in the extremest sense. The earth was not the earth in denned outline ;
for, if we may take our translation as correct (and Professor Lewis
and others give it the .preference), it was "without form, and void,"
actually formless, and merged in the great " deep," over which the
Spirit of God afterwards brooded.
VII. The earth gradually brought to a condition in which dry land and seas existed. Geology,
as we have observed, has taught that the earth was once in complete
igneous fusion; and this would imply a heat at the surface equal at
least to that of melted iron. Granting this, there are conditions of
its waters and atmosphere, and of its rocky mass, which may be partly
followed out ; and when we know better than now all the effects of heat
on the elements and their compounds, we may perhaps be able to write
out the history of those times of chaos. It obviously involved a
gaseous condition of the whole ocean, whose waters, if now placed
evenly over the sphere, would make a layer averaging two miles in
depth. From this state, there would have been a passage to successive
stages of condensation, as the cooling went on. Finally, the waters
would descend and envelop the surface ; and afterwards, by unequal
contractions of the still cooling earth, the dry land would have
appeared.
As
it would have required a temperature of at least 500 or 600 deg.
Fahrenheit to have retained so much water in the state of vapor, the
surface of the earth could not have been much below this, when the
ocean descended to its place. It was still a highly heated earth and
ocean, and the atmosphere must' have been dense and murky with foul
vapors. In Job there is a sublime description evidently of this period
(38:8—10). Jehovah says: " Who shut up the sea with doors . . . when I made the cloud the garment thereof and thick darkness a swaddling-band for it, and
brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, and said,
Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves
be stayed." From such a state, the earth gradually emerged,
Flickr
Stumbleupon
Scribd
