We are consequently informed that in the beginning—­there is no practical need for defining further—­“God created the heavens and the earth.”  Here the question arises whether the Hebrew “bara,” which is a general term, alludes to the first production of material, or to the moulding or fashioning of material already (in terms) assumed to exist.  I think that the conclusion must be that the best authority is in favour of the idea of absolute origination of the whole;—­the bringing the entire system into existence where previously there was a perfect blank.  But even if the secondary meaning of “fashioned” or “forged” be allowed, we have still an intelligible rendering.  For in that case the first origination of matter is tacitly assumed by the term itself, and the statement would be, that the matter of the future cosmos so existing, the Divine Artificer fashioned or moulded it into the orderly fabric it has come to be.

The narrative then at once refers to our earth, with which, and with its inhabitants, the whole volume is to be in future directly concerned.  “The earth was (or became) without form and void (chaotic), and darkness was on the face of the deep (or abyss).”

We have no positive knowledge of what the first condition of terrestrial matter was, apart from Revelation.  The remarkable discoveries that the spectroscope has enabled, and the facts learned from the physical history of comets and meteorites, can do no more than make what is known as the “nebular hypothesis” highly probable.  But it is amply sufficient for our purpose to point out, that if it is true that matter originated in a nebulous haze to the particles of which a spiral rotatory motion had been communicated, and if (confining our attention to one planet only) that attenuated matter gradually aggregated in a ring or rings, and then consolidated into a solid or partly solid globe, then the results are briefly, but adequately and sublimely, provided for by the form of the Mosaic statement.

Matter thus aggregating would have developed an enormous amount of heat, and there would have been a seething mass of molten mineral matters, with gases and other materials in the form of vapours, which would have gradually cooled and consolidated.  Vast masses of water would in time be formed on one hand, and solid mineral masses on the other; the latter would contract as cooling progressed, causing great upheavals and depressions and contortions of strata.  And before the advent of life-forms, it is not difficult to conceive that the first state of our globe was one which is intelligibly and very graphically described as being “without form and void.”  Nothing more than that, can, from actual physical knowledge, be stated.[1]

It is also stated that this confused elemental state of our earth was accompanied at first by darkness.  Material darkness that is—­for the potentiality of light and order was there; the SPIRIT OF GOD “moved” (or brooded) upon the face of the abyss.  This presents no difficulty of interpretation, and may therefore be passed over for the present.