Now, on a review of all this wondrous History, I profess myself at a loss to see what special note of impracticability it presents that I should hesitate to embrace it, in the plain natural sense of the words, with both the arms of my heart. That it is not such an account of the manner of the Creation as you or I should have ourselves invented, or anticipated, or on questionable testimony have felt disposed to accept,--is very little to the purpose. Apart from Revelation, we could really have known nothing at all about the works of the Days of the first Great Week. Ejaculations therefore concerning the strangeness of the record, and cavils at the phraseology in which it is propounded, are simply irrelevant. There exists however a vague suspicion after all that the beginning of Genesis is a vision, or an allegory, or a parable,--or anything you please, except true History. It is hard to imagine _why_. If there be a book in the whole Bible which purports to be a plain historical narrative of actual events, _that_ book is the book of Genesis. In nine-tenths of its details, it is as _human_, and as matter of fact, as any book of Biography or History that ever was penned. _Why_ the first page of it is to be torn out, treated as a myth or an allegory, and in short explained away,--I am utterly at a loss to discover. There is no difference in the style. Long since has the theory that Genesis is composed of distinguishable fragments, been exploded[294]. There is no pretence for calling this first chapter poetry, and treating it by a distinct set of canons. It is a pure _Revelation_, I admit: but I have yet to learn why the revelation of things intelligible, where the method of speech is not such as to challenge a figurative interpretation, is not to be taken literally: unless indeed it has been discovered that a narrative must of necessity be fabulous if the transactions referred to are unusually remote and extraordinary. The events recorded are unique in their character,--true. But this happens from the very necessity of the case. The creation of a world, to the inhabitants of that world is an unique event.