Here, betwixt God and his work there are no intermediate agencies,—no pause or rest in the act of coming into being. A material universe is designed, and the substance of it is instantly produced. The inspired historian proves that he was inspired, by the brevity of the history of the event, by the employment of words so perfectly adapted to the nature of the act. He proves farther, that we have here indicated the precise course of creation, and that he meant so to represent it—that the heavens and the earth are of one and the same act—that the physical universe, through all its dominions and remotest spheres, started at one and the same time into being. The sun, moon, and stars were now all formed, as well as our own planet. The stellar systems were everywhere arranged; and the worlds of matter had their places all assigned them through infinite space. This part of the Divine actings must not be confounded with the farther evolution of creation as described in the work of the fourth day, which has reference manifestly to the division of time and the appointment of the seasons, through the revolution of the planetary worlds. The condition of the earth as it first came from the hand of its framer is next alluded to. It was “without form and void,” and involved in darkness; that is, the arrangements necessary to constitute a habitable globe, were not completed. There was no diversity of surface—no division into hill and valley, into seas and rivers; the air, the dry land, and the waters, had not yet assumed their respective places. Form was not yet stamped upon the matter of the globe. Consequently it was also VOID, or without inhabitants. Neither vegetables nor animals were there. They could not exist before these necessary adaptations for life were adjusted. Let the reader note this stage of the work. Marking the precise, definite phraseology of the inspired writer, let him seriously reflect whether he has here before him the first state of the new world, or the shapeless ruined aspect of one of its subsequent geological transformations? None of the elements, he will not fail to observe, have been described as yet existing in separation. The course of creation has not advanced so far; and, if it had done so, no geologist pretends to assert, that at the close of any one of his epochs, the laws of nature were abolished, and all things reverted to their pristine formless condition. With what propriety, then, may it be asked, can an opening be made in this part of the narrative wide enough to embrace, or to have intercalated into it, all the phases of an archaic earth under his numerous formations, and the vast cycles of time in which they had been evolving? The language employed admirably represents what we can well suppose the original physical state of the planet to have been; and that state accords better with the first than with the last, or any of the intermediate series of the geological changes. And the earth was without