How could such a scene be represented in words? since it presented none of the familiar features of the actual world. Had he attempted to dilate upon it, he would, in the absence of the facts furnished by modern science, have been obliged, like the writers of some of the less simple and primitive cosmogonies already quoted,[42] to adopt the feeble expedient of enumerating the things not present. He wisely contents himself with a few well-chosen words, which boldly sketch the crude materials of a world hopeless and chaotic but for the animating breath of the Almighty, who has created even that old chaos out of which is to be worked in the course of the six creative days all the variety and beauty of a finished world. In conclusion, the reader will perceive how this reticence of the author of Genesis strengthens the argument for the primitive age of the document, and for the vision-theory as to its origin; and will also observe that, in the conception of this ancient writer, the "promise and potency" of order and life reside not alone in the atoms of a vaporous world, but also in the will of its Creator. CHAPTER VI. LIGHT AND CREATIVE DAYS. "And God said, Let light be, and light was; and God saw the light that it was good, and separated the light from the darkness; and God called the light Day; and the darkness he called Night. And Evening was and Morning was--Day one."--Genesis i., 3-5. Light is the first element of order and perfection introduced upon our planet--the first innovation on the old regime of darkness and desolation. There is a beautiful propriety in this, for the Hebrew _Aur_ (light) should be viewed as including heat and electricity as well as light; and these three forces--if they are really distinct, and not merely various movements of one and the same ether--are in themselves, or the proximate causes of their manifestation, the prime movers of the machinery of nature, the vivifying forces without which the primeval desolation would have been eternal. The statement presented here is, however, a bold one. Light without luminaries, which were afterward formed--independent light, so to speak, shining all around the earth--is an idea not likely to have occurred in the days of Moses to the framer of a fictitious cosmogony, and yet it corresponds in a remarkable manner with some of the theories which have grown out of modern induction.