because the strength of some material will not correspond to the ideal, or some curve of stability has been miscalculated.  Not only this:  man may create, as a sculptor, the ideal form for his to-be statue, or the dramatist his character; but the perfect realization, either in marble or in an actual being, may be impossible; the ideal remains “in the air.”  The ideal, therefore, is not the major part of “creation” in a human work.

But with the Divine work it is otherwise.  The Divine thought in Creation and its result are separated by no possibility of failure.  Given the matter and the laws of force and of life, directly the Great Designer has uttered His thought to those that are His builders, they must infallibly and without discord, work through the longest terms, it may be, of an evolutionary series, till, every transitional condition passed, the final form emerges perfect.

Our very verbal definition, admitting as it does “derivative” creation, implies this.  We all speak of ourselves as “created.”  How so?  We are not produced ready made.  Nor do we wholly solve the matter by saying that we are “created” because we are born from parents who (if we go far enough back) originated in a first production from the hand of Nature.  We are really “created” because the design—­the life-form of us, which matter and force were to work together to produce—­was the direct product of the Divine Mind.[1]

My question, therefore, of the Genesis interpreters is:  Why will you insist on the text meaning only the second element in Creation—­the production on earth, and not the Design or its issue in heaven?

The former we could find out some day for ourselves; we have found out some of it (though only some) already; the latter we could never know unless we were told.  Surely it is the “dignus vindice nodus” in this case.  To tell us the earth’s history within a brief space would be impossible, and would have been for ages unintelligible if it could have been told; to tell us of God’s creation is possible—­for it has been done; and the record, unless misread, is intelligible for all time.

The narrative, if it is a revelation of Divine Creation in heaven, takes up ground that none can trespass on.  None can say “it is not so,” unless either he will show that the words will not bear the meaning, or that the context and other Scripture contradict it.

[Footnote 1:  “In Thy book were all my members written, while as yet there were none of them” (Psa. cxxxix. 16).

“How did this all first come to be you? God thought about me and I grew.”—­Macdonald.]

So soon as the matter of earth and heaven (and all that is implied therewith) originated “in the beginning,” the narrative introduces to our reverent contemplation the solemn conclave in heaven, when, in a serial order and on separate days, God declared, for the guidance of the ever potentially active forces, and for materials ever (as we know) seeking combination and resolution,[1] the form which the earth surface is (it may be ever so gradually) to take and the life-forms which are to be evolved.