It is indeed curious to observe how in our version of the Bible this idea of progress in the universe, or of "time-worlds," as it has been called, has been variously replaced by the words "world" and "eternity," owing to the defective ideas prevalent at the time when the translation was made. In the Hebrew Scriptures the term _Olam_, "age," and in the New Testament the equivalent term _Ai[=o]n_ have been thus treated, and their real significance much obscured. Thus when it is said, "by faith we understand that the _worlds_ were framed," or "by him God made the _worlds_,"[22] or that certain of God's plans have been hid "from the beginning of the _world_,"[23] the reference is not to worlds in space, but to worlds in time, or ages of God's working in the universe. So also these ages of God's working are given to us as our only intelligible type of eternity, of which absolutely we can have no conception. Thus God's "eternal purpose" is his purpose of the ages. So when he is the "King eternal,"[24] and in that capacity gives to his people "life everlasting," he is the King of the ages, and gives life of the ages. So in the noble hymn attributed to Moses (Psalm xc.), where our version has, "from everlasting to everlasting thou art God,"[25] the original is, "from age to age thou art, O God." It has perhaps been a defect of our modern science that it has familiarized us merely with the existence of worlds in space, and not with their existence in time. It is only in comparatively modern times that the developments of chronological geology and of physical astronomy have brought before us, not only the long ages in which the earth was passing through its formative stages, but also the fact that still longer aeons are embraced in the history of the other bodies of our solar system, and of the starry orbs and nebulae. These grand conceptions were already embodied in the Hebrew revelation, and were used there as the means of giving some faint approach to a conception of the unlimited existence of God himself, of the ages in which his creative work has been going on, and of the future life he has prepared for his redeemed people.