What are the six days of creative work, and the seventh day--the Sabbath--of creative rest? They are not days of man, they are days of God; and our days of work and rest, our week with its Sabbath, can only be the figure and shadow of that week of God; something by which we may gain some faint apprehension of its realities, not that by which we can comprehend and measure it. Our week, therefore, is God's own direct appointment to us; and His revelation that He fulfilled the work of creation in six acts or stages, dignifies and exalts the toil of the labouring man, with his six days of effort and one of rest, into an emblem of the creative work of God. FOOTNOTES: [15:1] T. N. Thiele, Director of the Copenhagen Observatory, _Theory of Observations_, p. 1. [16:1] T. N. Thiele, Director of the Copenhagen Observatory, _Theory of Observations_, p. 1. [Illustration: MERODACH AND TIAMAT. [_To face p. 25._ Sculpture from the Palace of Assur-nazir-pel, King of Assyria. Now in the British Museum. Damaged by fire. Supposed to represent the defeat of Tiamat by Merodach.] CHAPTER III THE DEEP The second verse of Genesis states, "And the earth was without form and void [_i. e._ waste and empty] and darkness was upon the face of the deep." The word _tehōm_, here translated _deep_, has been used to support the theory that the Hebrews derived their Creation story from one which, when exiles in Babylon, they heard from their conquerors. If this theory were substantiated, it would have such an important bearing upon the subject of the attitude of the inspired writers towards the objects of nature, that a little space must be spared for its examination. The purpose of the first chapter of Genesis is to tell us that-- "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." From it we learn that the universe and all the parts that make it up--all the different forms of energy, all the different forms of matter--are neither deities themselves, nor their embodiments and expressions, nor the work of conflicting deities. From it we learn that the universe is not self-existent, nor even (as the pantheist thinks of it) the expression of one vague, impersonal and unconscious, but all-pervading influence. It was not self-made; it did not exist from all eternity. It is not God, for God made it. But the problem of its origin has exercised the minds of many nations beside the Hebrews, and an especial interest attaches to the solution arrived at by those nations who were near neighbours of the Hebrews and came of the same great Semitic stock. From the nature of the case, accounts of the origin of the world cannot proceed from experience, or be the result of scientific experiment. They cannot form items of history, or arise from tradition. There are only two possible sources for them; one, Divine revelation; the other, the invention of men.