This verse is commonly taken as indicating a creation of light for the first time in the entire cosmos or universe.  And if it be so, there is no objection, on any scientific ground, to the assertion that there was once a time when as yet the vibrations and waves which we connect with the idea of Light, had not yet begun.  It is true that nebular matter, as now observed, is believed to be, partially at any rate, self-luminous.  But this fact, supposing it to be such, is not inconsistent with a still earlier time when light had not yet begun.  From the “wave-theory” of light, which is one of those working hypotheses which are indispensable, and which, in a sense, may be said to be demonstrated by their indispensability, it can clearly be seen that if light is caused by rapid vibrational movement, there must have been—­or at any rate there is nothing against an authoritative declaration that there was—­a moment of time when the first vibrational impulse was given, when, in fact, God said “Let there be light, and there was light,” before which also there was “darkness upon the face of the deep.[1]”

[Footnote 1:  It also needs only to be remarked, in passing, that we are really in complete ignorance as to the light-medium, the “luminiferous-ether” outside the comparatively thin stratum of our own terrestrial atmosphere.  We do not know whether there might not have been a condition of the medium in which, up to the moment of a creative fiat, it was incapable of transmitting light-waves.]

There is no necessary connection between the creation of light per se, and the existence of any particular source (or sources) of light to our planet or to other planets.

No justification is now needed for such a remark, and the almost forgotten cavils of one of the “Essays and Reviews” may still survive as a “scientific” curiosity, to warn us against too hastily concluding that (in subjects where so little is really known) the Bible must be wrong, and the favourite hypothesis of the day right.

But as a matter of fact, the text, especially when read in connection with Job xxxviii., need not be taken to refer to any original creation of light in the universe generally, but merely to the letting in of light on the hitherto dark and “waste” earth.  The command “Let there be light” was followed on the next day by the formation of a firmament or expanse.  So that all the verse necessarily implies is, that the thick clouds and vapours which surrounded the earth were so dealt with, that light could reach the earth:  the light was thus divided from the darkness, and the rotating globe would experience the alternation of day and night.

The “day” having thus been created formally (so to speak), the Divine Author proceeds to mark, by His own Procedure, the use of the “days” which He had provided for the earth.

On this view, of course, the origin of light as a “force”—­the first beginning of its pulsations—­is not detailed, any more than the origin of electric force, or heat, or gravitation.