That the other writers of the Old Testament understood the creative days in this sense, might be inferred from the entire absence of any reference to the work of creation as short, since it occupied only six days. Such reference we may find in modern writers, but never in the Scriptures. On the contrary, we receive the impression of the creative work as long continued. Thus the divine Wisdom says in Prov. viii., The Lord possessed me "from the beginning of his way before his works of old, from everlasting, before the antiquities of the earth." So in Psalm cxlv., God's kingdom relatively to nature and providence is a kingdom "of all ages." In Psalm civ., which is a poetical version of the creative work, and the oldest extant commentary on Genesis i., it is evident that there was no idea in the mind of the writer of a short time, but rather of long consecutive processes; and I may remark here that the course of the narrative itself in Genesis i., implies time for the replenishing of the earth with various forms of being in preparation for others, exactly as in Psalm civ. Perhaps one of the most conclusive arguments in favor of the length of the creative days is that furnished by the seventh day and the institution of the Sabbath. In Genesis the seventh day is not said to have had any evening or morning, nor is God said to have resumed his work on any eighth day. Consequently the seventh day of creation must be still current. Now in the fourth commandment the Israelites are enjoined to "remember the Sabbath-day," because "in six days God created the heavens and the earth." Observe here that the Sabbath is to be remembered as an institution already known. Observe farther that the commandment is placed in the middle of the Decalogue, a solitary piece of apparently arbitrary ritual amid the plainest and most obvious moral duties. Observe also that the reason given--namely, God's six days' work and seventh day's rest--seems at first sight both far-fetched and trivial, as an argument for abstaining from work in a seventh part of our time. How is all this to be explained? Simply, I think, on the supposition that the Lawgiver, and those for whom he legislated, knew beforehand the history of creation and the fall, as we have them recorded in Genesis, and knew that God's days are aeons. The argument is not, "God worked on six natural days, and rested on the seventh; do you therefore the same." Such an argument could have no moral or religious force, more especially as it could not be affirmed that God habitually works and rests in this way. The argument reaches far deeper and higher. It is this. God created the world in six of his days, and on the seventh rested, and invited man in Eden to enter on his rest as a perpetual Sabbath of happiness. But man fell, and lost God's Sabbath. Therefore a weekly Sabbath was prescribed to him as a memorial of what he had lost, and a pledge of what God has