“28.  And God blessed them,” (the human family,) “and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply and REPLENISH the earth.”

Surely the poor, desolated world needed replenishing, restocking.  But how could the word “replenish” be applied to a new world, never before inhabited?

We have seen that in chapter ii (verses 16 and 17) God especially limited man and enjoined him not to eat of the

{p. 335}

fruit of the tree of knowledge; while in v. 22, ch. iii, it is evident that there was another tree, “the tree of life,” which God did not intend that man should enjoy the fruit of.  But with the close of the Tertiary period and the Drift Age all this was changed:  these trees, whatever they signified, had been swept away, “the blazing sword” shone between man and the land where they grew, or had grown; and hence, after the Age of Darkness, God puts no such restraint or injunction upon the human family.  We read: 

Ch. i, v. 29.  “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”

With what reason, if the text is in its true order, could God have given man, in the first chapter, the right to eat the fruit of every tree, and in the following chapters have consigned the whole race to ruin for eating the fruit of one particular tree?

But after the so-called Glacial Age all limitations were removed.  The tree of knowledge and the tree of life had disappeared for ever.  The Drift covered them.

Reader, waive your natural prejudices, and ask yourself whether this proposed readjustment of the Great Book does not place it thoroughly in accord with all the revelations of science; whether it does not answer all the objections that have been made against the reasonableness of the story; and whether there is in it anything inconsistent with the sanctity of the record, the essentials of religion, or the glory of God.

Instead of being, compelled to argue, as Religion now does, that the whole heavens and the earth, with its twenty miles in thickness of stratified rocks, were made in six actual days, or to interpret “days” to mean vast periods

{p. 336}

of time, notwithstanding the record speaks of “the evening and the morning” constituting these “days,” as if they were really subdivisions of sun-marked time; we here see that the vast Creation, and the great lapses of geologic time, all lie far back of the day when darkness was on the face of the deep; and that the six days which followed, and in which the world was gradually restored to its previous condition, were the natural subdivisions into which events arranged themselves.  The Chinese divided this period of reconstruction into “branches” or “stems”; the race from whom the Jews received their traditions divided it into days.