moulded the heavens and the heavenly host, no more than the ordinary
_nychthemeron_ or cycle of twenty-four hours? The period implied in a
_day_, when used in relation to the inaugural manifestation of
creative power in that vast drama which introduces God to man in the
character of a demiurgus or creator of the world, indicated one stage
amongst six; involving probably many millions of years. The silliest of
nurses, in her nursery babble, could hardly suppose that the mighty
process began on a Monday morning, and ended on Saturday night. If we are
seriously to study the value and scriptural acceptation of scriptural
words and phrases, I presume that our first business will be to collate
the use of these words in one part of Scripture, with their use in other
parts, holding the same spiritual relations. The creation, for instance,
does not belong to the earthly or merely historical records, but to the
spiritual records of the Bible; to the same category, therefore, as the
prophetic sections of the Bible. Now, in those, and in the Psalms, how do
we understand the word _day_? 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 St. 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 sixty 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 this matter is this:--God, by a Hebrew prophet, is sublimely