[Footnote 1:  It would be hardly necessary (but for some remarks in the course of the Gladstone-Huxley controversy) to observe that the term “void” does not imply vacuity or emptiness, as of substance, but absence of defined form such as subsequently was evolved.]

Practically, indeed, there has been no grave difficulty raised over this first portion.  And if it is argued (on the ground of what I have already in general terms indicated) that the term “created” will, on my own interpretation, get us into difficulties, I reply that here, in its position and with the context, there is no room for doubt, for clearly the word implies both the great primary idea of the Divine design or plan formulated in heaven, and the subsequent result in time and space.[1] This will become more clear when I have further explained the subject.

[Footnote 1:  And of course if the true sense be “fashioned” or “moulded,” the question does not arise.]

II.—­THE SECOND PART OF THE NARRATIVE.

But from this point the narrative commences to be more precise, and to exhibit a very singular and altogether unprecedented division of creative work into “days.”

Now I have already indicated my doubt whether we ought to import any unusual meaning to explain this term.

In the first place, the objection that till the movements and relations of the sun to the earth were ordained there would be no measure of a day will not stand a moment’s examination.  Nor will the further objection sometimes made, that even with the sun, a day is a very uncertain thing:  for example, a day and a night in the north polar regions are periods of month-long duration, quite different from what they are in England, or at Mount Sinai.  Obviously, a “day” with reference to the planet for which the term is used, means the period occupied by one rotation of the planet on its own axis.  The rotation of the earth is antecedent to anything mentioned in the narrative we are considering.  In the nature of things, it would have been coeval with the introduction of the prima materies—­at least if any nebular hypothesis can be relied on.  The “day” would be there whether it were obscured by vapours or not, and whether specially made countable and recognizable by what we call the rising and setting of the sun, or not, and whether we were standing in Nova Zembla or in Australia.

Nor is it of much use to refer to the general use of “day” for indefinite periods, which is just as common in the English of to-day as it was in the Hebrew of the Old Testament.  But the double use of the term in different senses has become general, just because it was found in practice that no confusion ordinarily resulted; and surely such a practice would not have been common, or at any rate would have been specially avoided in the sacred volume, wherever any mistake or confusion was likely or even possible.

No one can mistake what is meant when allusion is made to “the day in which God made the heaven and the earth.”  No one falls into doubt when the “days” of the prophets are spoken of—­any more than they do now when a man says, “Such a thing will not happen in my day.”