days as given points in the problem, of being treated geologically. Another of the questions raised, both by the German doctor and the writer in our own country, must be recognized as eminently suggestive. "We treat the history of creation," says Dr. Kurtz, "with its six days' work, as a connected series of so many prophetic visions. The appearance and evanishing of each such vision seem to the seer as a morning and an evening, apparently because these were presented to him as an increase and decrease of light, like morning and evening twilight." And we find the Scottish writer taking essentially the same view. "Each day contains," he says, "the description of what he [Moses] beheld in a single vision, and when it faded it was twilight. There is nothing forced in supposing that, after the vision had for a time illumined the fancy of the seer, it was withdrawn from his eyes, in the same way that the landscape becomes dim on the approach of evening.... From this point of view, a 'day' can only mean the period during which the Divinely enlightened fancy of the seer was active. When all continued bright and manifest before his entranced but still conscious soul, it was 'day' or 'light.' When the dimness of departing enlightenment fell upon the scene, it was the evening twilight." The _days_, then, are removed, we find, by the holders of this view, altogether from the province of chronology to the province of prophetic vision; they are represented simply as parts of the exhibited scenery, or rather as forming the measures of the apparent time during which the scenery _was_ exhibited. We must also hold, however, that in the character of symbolic days they were as truly representative of the lapse of foregone periods of creation as the scenery itself was representative of the creative work accomplished in these periods. For if the apparent days occurred in only the vision, and were not symbolic of foregone periods, they could not have been transferred with any logical propriety from the vision itself to that which the vision represented, as we find done in what our Shorter Catechism terms "the reason annexed to the Fourth Commandment."[18] The days must have been prophetic days, introduced, indeed, into the panorama of creation as mayhap mere openings and droppings of the curtain, but not the less symbolic of that series of successive periods, each characterized by its own productions and events, in which creation itself was comprised. Nothing more probable, however, than that even Moses himself may have been unacquainted with the _extent_ of the periods represented in the vision; nay, he may have been equally unconscious of the actual extent of the seeming days by which they were symbolized. "Visions without dark speeches,"--visions, not of symbolic apparitions, but of actual existences and events, past or present,--may, nay must, have differed from what may be termed the dark hieroglyphic visions; but we find in all visions an element of mere