to all other religious elements of it, as to the ideas of the unity, omnipotence, and wisdom of God, of his creation through the creative word, of the perfection of his works, of man bearing the image of God. We should even see that idea of God which presents itself to us out of all other characteristics of that record in such spotless purity and sublime magnitude, sink down to a decided insignificance through the identification of the divine days of creation with our earthly days of twenty-four hours. All this certainly brings near to us the question: do we make a correct exegesis, do we correctly _read_ that record, when we think that the author, because he speaks of days, must necessarily have understood earthly days, such as we know now? We readily perceive how interpreters have arrived at this view. The divine sections of creation in the Mosaic account show themselves too decidedly as days to make possible any other interpretation than to take them as days. Now from experience we do not know of any other days than of earthly days of twenty-four hours; {298} and therefore the conclusion naturally follows, that the author also took the divine days of creation as such earthly days of twenty-four hours. A simple reference of the same to periods, so that we should again think of fixed periods of the earth or of the world, would especially pervert the literal sense--would entirely remove from the account the idea of "day" which is so essential to the author of the record, and thereby render obscure the archetype of the divine week of creation for the human divisions of time; and the looked-for harmony between the Biblical days and the geological periods of the earth would by no means be established by such an identification of the days of creation with the periods of the world: for the geological or even the cosmic and astronomical periods are nowhere in congruity with the Biblical days of creation. But the question, however, is: are there not evidences in the Biblical account itself which show that the author did _not_ take these days as creative earthly days of twenty-four hours? We have to answer this question decidedly in the affirmative. In the first place, it is an established fact that these days of the week of creation were also, according to the meaning of the author, _days of God_. Now that such days of God, even with the most childish and simple worldly knowledge of that early period of mankind, so soon as such a pure _idea of God_, as appears from the whole account, is at the bottom of the conception, can no longer be _identical_ with the days of the creature, is to be inferred beforehand with the greatest probability from the purity of that idea of God, and is even expressly {299} confirmed by special evidences in the record itself. We have to mention no less than four of them.