The credibility of the document in which is found the account of the fall is further impaired by the fact that it contains statements openly at variance with the demonstrations of science. It teaches not only that the world was made in six days of twenty-four hours each, but that the whole planetary system was made in a single day. “He made the stars also.” The discoveries of modern science have lately driven our sacerdotalists to a new and absurd interpretation of the story of creation by alleging that the six days spoken of were not periods of twenty-four hours each, but six indefinite periods of very long duration. But it would be easy to furnish numerous admissions of orthodox scholars that the six days of the creative week were intended by the writers to describe ordinary days, of twenty-four hours each, and not indefinite periods. Any other interpretation Professor Hitchcock has pronounced “forced and unnatural, and therefore not to be adopted without a very urgent necessity.” The venerable Moses Stuart, long professor of Biblical Literature in the Andover Theological Seminary, says: “When the sacred writer in Gen. 1 says the first day, the second day, etc., there can be no possible doubt—none, I mean, for a philologist, let a geologist think as he may—that a definite day of the week is meant. What puts this beyond all question,” the learned theologian adds, “is that the writer says specifically ‘the evening and the morning were the first day,’ ‘the second day,’ etc. Now, is an evening and a morning a period of some thousands of years?... If Moses has given us an erroneous account of the creation, so be it. Let it come out and let us have the whole truth.” The fact is, that the indefinite-period hypothesis does not, after all the quirks and special pleadings, overcome the difficulty. The question arises, Why six indefinite periods? One indefinite period is as long as six or sixty. There is nothing in geology to indicate six periods. One need only consider the attempt to reconcile Genesis and geology to plainly see that the Mosaic record was intended to be taken in its obvious sense. The forced interpretations put upon the Hebrew story to make it appear to be historical and literal truth make it more absurd than it would otherwise appear. Think of Adam created (according to one account) on the second day, and Eve on the sixth day, and then accept the hypothesis that these creative days represent indefinite periods of thousands, if not millions, of years to each day, so that four indefinite periods of thousands of years passed away before Adam had his Eve to be his helpmeet, and what a long, lonely time he must have had! Then how small the human census must have been for unnumbered ages, and how strange the fact that the same writer says that Adam “lived nine hundred and thirty years, and he died;” that is to say, he died several hundred thousand years before the rib was taken from his side to make him a wife!