It is no doubt possible to make mistakes and to err by refusing the direct meaning, and giving to the terms an assumed meaning for which there is no real necessity.[1] We have always to be on our guard against giving special meanings to words where they are not required; but granted that caution, there undoubtedly are passages in which either the terms themselves are not plain, or in which they may really have a meaning different from the ordinary one.

[Footnote 1:  As, for example, where persons desirous to get over the plain reference to Baptism in St. John iii. 5, try to explain away the term “water” to mean something metaphorically but not actually water.]

To descend from the general to the particular, it is obvious that the account of Creation in Genesis i., ii. is in such a form that we must assume our own ideas of the term “day” therein employed, and also those to be attached to “created” and similar terms.

In early times, no one would take “day” to mean anything else but an earth day of the ordinary kind, and no one would question whether or not the whole existing animals and plants, or their ancestors, appeared on earth in six such days, or whether anything else was meant.  Again, by the time St. Augustine was writing, a little more knowledge of nature and a little more habit of reasoning about the origin of things was in the world, and that knowledge led people to suppose that creation meant only the making of things “out of nothing,” but that it would take longer than six times twelve hours, so that “days” might mean “periods.”

And people imagined for a long time that—­taking for an example the work in the middle of the narrative—­there was a time when the earth emerged from the tumult of waters, that it then got covered with plants, the waters remaining barren of life; but that when the plants had come up all over the ground, then the waters all at once became full of all sorts of sea-shells, fish, and monsters of the deep, and so on.

They did all this, by naturally assuming that the terms “creation,” “day,” &c., meant what the existing state of knowledge at the time suggested.

At the present day, one would have supposed that every one must feel that while the term “day” might or might not admit of explanation, certainly creation (i.e., terms implying it) did require very great care in interpreting, and very great consideration as to what they really meant But however that may be, we have here a passage which must have an explanation; and which must have an explanation that depends on the state of knowledge.