1. Creation includes not only the bringing into existence of matter, but all its undeveloped forces and changes. Revelation, upon this subject, is suggestive, rather than exhaustive, of what we need above what Nature shows, to trace creation back to God. The greatest difficulty in reading this poem understandingly, is in rightly rendering the phenomena noticed upon the second day. Figures of metonymy abound. As a rule, figures once used in prophecy are not changed when used by another prophet. Hence, we may derive benefit by seeing how other prophets have used them. Job had made the gathering of suns at the creation of light a morning in figure. Moses is about to use the same figure, and beholding the darkness of chaos preceding, he extended the figure to an evening preceding. This is the only day that pertains to light and darkness. The second day will be analogous in contrast. Whatever be the one, the other will contrast. The evening of Earth is given. “And the Earth was without form.” The contrast will be the Earth in form, for morning. 2. To read these allusions understandingly, every sentence must be cosmologically analyzed in the light of our present knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, philosophy, geology, and rhetoric. There is a grand suggestion of progress, couched in the figure of morning succeeding evening. The morning of each day is a complete contrast to its own evening; and yet the morning of that day is only the evening of the day following. The morning of the sun, with hosts of God’s angels rejoicing, is only the evening of the prospective globe, upon whose disk shall be perfected, in knowledge and true holiness, beings in God’s own image. The sun has perfected his day, in which Moses beholds the evening of the second. 3. He is looking at our system, as from the voids of space, as a whole; with its gathered sun and its immense ring of prospective planets. It is now shown him that a change is to take place in the ring, which will result in the form of a globe. To that part of the ring he draws near. The first phenomenon noticed was a separation in the ring between the “waters above, and those below.” The gases thus uniting in one substance, soon left this firmament ring of the sun, and had a firmament of its own, called heaven, or visible expanse. The Hebrew word translated “firmament” implies something tangible, and yet it was used to denote the visible expanse.