cosmogony, indeed, gives the succession of natural births; and that
succession will doubtless be more and more confirmed and illustrated as
geology advances. But as to the time, the duration, of this cosmogony,
it is the idlest of notions that the Scriptures either have or could
have condescended to human curiosity upon so awful a prologue to the
drama of this world. Genesis would no more have indulged so mean a
passion with respect to the mysterious inauguration of the world, than
the Apocalypse with respect to its mysterious close. 'Yet the six
_days_ of Moses!' Days! But is any man so little versed in biblical
language as not to know that (except in the merely historical
parts of the Jewish records) every section of time has a secret and
separate acceptation in the Scriptures? Does an _aeon_, though a
Grecian word, bear scripturally [either in Daniel or in Saint John] any
sense known to Grecian ears? Do the seventy _weeks_ of the prophet
mean weeks in the sense of human calendars? Already the Psalms, (xc)
already St. Peter, (2d Epist.) warn us of a peculiar sense attached to
the word _day_ in divine ears? And who of the innumerable
interpreters understands the twelve hundred and odd days in Daniel, or
his two thousand and odd days, to mean, by possibility, periods of
twenty-four hours? Surely the theme of Moses was as mystical, and as
much entitled to the benefit of mystical language, as that of the
prophets.

The sum of the matter is this:--God, by a Hebrew prophet, is sublimely
described as _the Revealer_; and, in variation of his own expression,
the same prophet describes him as the Being 'that knoweth the
darkness.' Under no idea can the relations of God to man be more
grandly expressed. But of what is he the revealer? Not surely of those
things which he has enabled man to reveal for himself, and which he has
commanded him so to reveal, but of those things which, were it not