12
THE BATTALION.
lurid flash and glare, such as we witness—only it was on an
infinitely grander scale—during the play of elements in a
thunder-storm at night. It was a thunder-storm of universal
matter. Masses of star-dust, the material of worlds, began to
surge and clash and break and gather and disperse and rush
again together, rallying, finally, as the finger of the A1 might} 7
stirred them up, around centers of gravitation, separating
into systems, of which some central point would afterward
become the sun, changing, as they gathered apart, from the
gaseous to the liquid state, condensing still more into glowing,
white-hot solids, with an incandescent atmosphere of fused
matter about them, like our sun—such is an outline of the
process that must have taken place. And it does seem won
derful that the feature of it which would have impressed man
most—had there been man to see—is seized upon by the writer
to color the picture most vividly—I mean the creation or de
velopment of light. It is the point at which man can first
form some conception of the facts. God’s intervention was to
institute a class of formless elements so rapid and so stupen
dous in its continuous reach that the universe was illuminated
by it. This is the picture.
“ And God saw the light, that it was good, and the even
ing and the morning were the first day.” Not an evening an'cl
morning of sunrise and sunset such as we know, but a night
of thick darkness and absolute cold and silence in which mat
ter was motionless, dead, nr definable, succeeded by a dawn of
motion, heat light, ceaseless elemental storm and evolving
worlds—such is the sketch of the first creative day. The
same process goes on during what is called the second day.
[ Verses 6, 7, 8 ]. Here we are impressed with the idea that
the writer’s personal theory is made to play a part in the nar
rative. It was the belief of the ancients that the atmosphere
above us supports a great crystal arch or expanse, called here
the firmament, and that this firmament is the partition be
tween heaven and earth ; that rains and hail fall literally as
the windows of heaven are opened. Largely in accommoda
tion to this belief, the work of the second day is described as
the location of this firmament or expanse. Tinged as the