The narrative distributes the operation of creation over six days, and divides it into eight distinct acts or deeds. This double divergent arrangement of the material is made to harmonise by the assignment of a couple of acts to the third day, and another couple to the sixth—in each case with a fine and designed effect. We shall take a bird's-eye view of the contents of these divisions. The chapter opens with a picture of primeval chaos, out of which God commands the universe of beauty, life, and order. Nothing is said of its origin. The story starts with it existent. It is painted as an abyss, dreary and boundless, wrapped in impenetrable darkness, an inextricable confusion of fluid matter, destitute of character, structure, or value, without form and void. It is the raw material of the universe, passive and powerless in itself, but holding in it the promise and potency of all existence. For over it nestles, like a brood fowl, the informing, warming, life-giving Spirit of God, sending through its coldness and emptiness the heat and parental yearnings of the Divine heart, that craves for creatures on which to pour out its love and goodness. This action of the Spirit is, however, no more than preparative, and waits its completion in the accession of a personal fiat of God's will, in which the Divine Word gives effect and reality to the Divine Wish. This is a feature of supreme importance, for in it consists the uniqueness of the Bible narrative. In the Pagan accounts of creation we find the same general imagery of dull, dead matter, stirred and warmed into life and development by the action of an immaterial effluence of "thought," "love," or "longing." But in them the operation is cosmic, impersonal, often hardly conscious; in the Bible it is ethical and intensely personal. In them the language is metaphysical, materialistic, or pantheistic; here it is moral, human, personal, to the point of anthropomorphism. They show us creative forces and processes; the Bible presents to us, in all His infinite, manifold, and glorious personality, the thinking, living, loving "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth."