Permit me, then, to repeat once more, that the narrative is in human language, and uses the human terms “created,” “made,” and “formed,” and that these terms do (as a matter of fact which there is no gainsaying) bear a meaning which is not invariable.  Hence, without any glossing or “torturing” of the narrative, we are under the plain obligation to seek to assign to these terms a true meaning with all the light that modern knowledge can afford.

Now (having already considered the school of interpretation which declines to attend to the exact terms) we can confine our attention to two classes of interpreters.  One explains the term “days” to mean long periods of time; the other accepts the word in its ordinary and most natural sense, and endeavours to eliminate the long course of developmental work made known to us by palaeontological science, and supposes all that to have been passed over in silence; and argues that a final preparation for the advent of the man Adam was made in a special work of six days.

All the well-known attempts at explanation, such as those of Pye-Smith, Chalmers, H. Miller, Pratt, and the ordinary commentaries, can be placed in one or other of these categories.

Now, as regards both, I recur to the curious fact (already noted) that it seems never to enter into the conception of either school to inquire for a moment what the sacred writer meant by “created”—­God “created”—­God said “let there be.”  It is curious, because no one can reasonably say “these terms are obvious, they bear their own meaning on the surface;” a moment’s analysis will scatter such an idea to the winds.  Yet the terms are passed by.  The commentators set themselves right earnestly to compare and to collate, to argue and to analogize, on the meaning of the term “days;” the other term “created” they take for granted without—­as far as I am aware—­single line of explanation, or so much as a doubt whether they know what it really means!

The interpretation that I would propose to the judgment of the Church is just the very opposite.  It seems to me that the word day as used in the narrative needs no explanation; it seems to me that the other does.  As regards the term “day,” it is surely a rule of sound criticism never to give an “extraordinary” meaning to a word, when the “ordinary” one will give good and intelligible sense to a passage.  And looking to the fact that, after all, when the days of Genesis are explained to mean periods of very unequal but possibly enormous duration, that explanation is not only quite useless, but raises greater difficulties than ever, I should think it most likely that the “day” of the narrative should be taken in the ordinary sense.  But of this hereafter.