saw that it was good.' His ideals are always realised. The divine
artist never finds that the embodiment of His thought falls short of
His thought.

'What act is all its thought had been?
What will but felt the fleshly screen?

But He has no hindrances nor incompletenesses in His creative work,
and the very sabbath rest with which the narrative closes
symbolises, not His need of repose, but His perfect accomplishment
of His purpose. God ceases from His works because 'the works were
finished,' and He saw that all was very good.

4. The progressiveness of the creative process is brought into
strong relief. The work of the first four days is the preparation of
the dwelling-place for the living creatures who are afterwards
created to inhabit it. How far the details of these days' work
coincide with the order as science has made it out, we are not
careful to ask here. The primeval chaos, the separation of the
waters above from the waters beneath, the emergence of the land, the
beginning of vegetation there, the shining out of the sun as the
dense mists cleared, all find confirmation even in modern theories
of evolution. But the intention of the whole is much rather to teach
that, though the simple utterance of the divine will was the agent
of creation, the manner of it was not a sudden calling of the world,
as men know it, into being, but majestic, slow advance by stages,
each of which rested on the preceding. To apply the old distinction
between justification and sanctification, creation was a work, not
an act. The Divine Workman, who is always patient, worked slowly
then as He does now. Not at a leap, but by deliberate steps, the