Instead of being, compelled to argue, as Religion now does, that the whole heavens and the earth, with its twenty miles in thickness of stratified rocks, were made in six actual days, or to interpret "days" to mean vast periods {p. 336} of time, notwithstanding the record speaks of "the evening and the morning" constituting these "days," as if they were really subdivisions of sun-marked time; we here see that the vast Creation, and the great lapses of geologic time, all lie far back of the day when darkness was on the face of the deep; and that the six days which followed, and in which the world was gradually restored to its previous condition, were the natural subdivisions into which events arranged themselves. The Chinese divided this period of reconstruction into "branches" or "stems"; the race from whom the Jews received their traditions divided it into days. The first subdivision was, as I have said, that of the twilight age, when light began to invade the total darkness; it was subdivided again into the evening and the morning, as the light grew stronger. The next subdivision of time was that period, still in the twilight, when the floods fell and covered a large part of the earth, but gradually gathered themselves together in the lower lands, and left the mountains bare. And still the light kept increasing, and the period was again subdivided into evening and morning. And why does the record, in each case, tell us that the evening and the morning "constituted the day, instead of the morning and the evening? The answer is plain:--mankind were steadily advancing from darkness to light; each stage terminating in greater clearness and brightness; they were moving steadily forward to the perfect dawn. And it is a curious fact that the Israelites, even now, commence the day with the period of darkness: they begin their Sabbath on Friday at sunset. The third subdivision was that in which the continents cleared themselves more and more of the floods, and the increasing light and warmth called forth grass and the {p. 337} trees, and clothed nature in a mantle of green. Man had come out of his cave, and there were scattered remnants of the animal kingdom here and there, but the world, in the main, was manless and lifeless--a scene of waste and desolation. In the fourth subdivision of time, the sun, moon, and stars appeared;--dimly, and wrapped in clouds, in the evening; clearer and brighter in the morning. In the next subdivision of time, the fish, which spawn by the million, and the birds, which quadruple their numbers in a year, began to multiply and scatter themselves, and appear everywhere through the waters and on the land. And still the light kept increasing, and "the evening and the morning were the fifth day." And on the sixth day, man and the animals, slower to increase, and requiring a longer period to reach maturity, began to spread and show themselves everywhere on the face of the earth.