2. _The sacred narrative is poetic, symbolical, and unchronological._ It is a noteworthy fact that the early literature of the most ancient nations was poetic--the natural, spontaneous product of that earliest stage of mental development in which the conceptions of God and of nature were determined by subjective feeling and native sentiment, and not by reflective thought. The "Vedas" of the Hindus, the "Iliad" of the Greeks, the "Eddas" of the ancient Germans, were each the product of an age in which "prose was unknown, as well as the distinction between prose and poetry." The earliest Hebrew compositions are of the same character; and it is reasonable to assume that a primitive revelation to the progenitors of our race would be accommodated to this earliest phase in the development of mind. The Book of Genesis opens with a _Psalm_--"the inspired Psalm of Creation"[188]--"a grand symbolical Hymn of Creation." "The rhythmical character of the passage, its stately style, its parallelisms, its refrains, its unity within itself, all combine to show that it is a _poem_."[189] Here is the same organic unity which marks the 104th Psalm, or the Lord's Prayer, or the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Or, if we go out of the Bible for illustration, it combines with lyric breadth of treatment and stateliness of movement all the compactness of a "solemn sonnet freighted with a single thought from beginning to end." Analysis of its interior structure exhibits a most artificial synthesis, founded upon well-known sacred numbers. It has, first, an _Exordium_, the proemial part. Then it is articulated into six _Strophes_. Finally there is the _Epode_, or peroration. The six strophes separate naturally into two groups, in which there is a balance and correlation of parts celebrating the first three and the last three concordant steps in the creative movement--the _Strophe_ and the _Antistrophe_. The exordium states briefly the subject of the poem: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The first three strophes unfold the creative development of the receptacles: 1. A. The luminiferous ether. } "The heavens 2. B. Waters and the firmament between the waters. } and the earth." 3. C. Dry land above the waters, with plants. } The second three strophes (or, more correctly, antistrophes) unfold the creative development of the occupants: 4. A. The light-bearers: sun, moon, and stars. } "And all the hosts 5. B. Water-animals and birds. } of them" (Gen. ii. 1). 6. C. Land-animals and man. } The epode, or peroration, fills up the sacred number 7--the symbol always of permanence and repose. "Thus the heavens and the earth (the receptacles) were finished, and all the host of them (the occupants); and on the seventh day God put period to the work which he created by fashioning," etc.[190] _THE SYMBOLICAL HYMN OF CREATION._ EXORDIUM.