23. The great under-waters were once imprisoned as though shut behind doors. “Or who shut up the sea with doors when it brake forth as if it had issued out of the womb?” Rotundity of the Earth is here given with the inside water. He saw the young Earth first “clothed in a garment of clouds,” and “thick darkness a swaddling band about it.” He saw the “foundations of the earth breaking up,” as the flood in Noah’s day poured in over the earth. “And brake up the decreed place for it,” and set new “bars and doors.” A change of polarity, and when it took place, is seen. “Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days, and caused the day-spring to know his place, that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?” When have the wicked been shaken out of it, but when “all the fountains of the great deep were broken up?” The finishing touch is added to the Copernican system. “It is turned as clay to the seal.” Allusion is made to the clay on the potter’s wheel rotating to a fixed seal shaping the same. In contrast to its present motion, he saw a former condition with pole pointing to the sun. This was a motion that never exchanged the darkness for light, nor light for darkness, but both remained stationary. “Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof, that thou shouldst take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldst know the paths to the house thereof?” He saw the contrasted appearance of the former earth to her present contour. “The waters are hid as with a stone.” Altogether, the land hemisphere covered the under-waters; “and the face of the deep is frozen.” The face of the deep in the southern hemisphere of the ancient earth was locked in darkness and perpetual ice. He had asked the question, “Out of whose womb came the ice?” Where was it born? This is one of the most perplexing questions in science.