The creation, for instance,
does not belong to the earthly or merely historical records, but to the
spiritual records of the Bible; to the same category, therefore, as the
prophetic sections of the Bible. Now, in those, and in the Psalms, how do
we understand the word _day_? Is any man so little versed in biblical
language as not to know, that (except in the merely historical parts of
the Jewish records) every section of time has a secret and separate
acceptation in the Scriptures? Does an aeon, though a Grecian word, bear
scripturally (either in Daniel or in St. John) any sense known to Grecian
ears? Do the seventy _weeks_ of the prophet mean weeks in the sense
of human calendars? Already the Psalms (xc.), already St. Peter (2d
Epist.), warn us of a peculiar sense attached to the word _day_ in
divine ears. And who of the innumerable interpreters understands the
twelve hundred and sixty days in Daniel, or his two thousand and odd days,
to mean, by possibility, periods of twenty-four hours? Surely the theme of
Moses was as mystical, and as much entitled to the benefit of mystical
language, as that of the prophets.
The sum of this matter is this:--God, by a Hebrew prophet, is sublimely
described as _the Revealer_; and, in variation of his own expression,
the same prophet describes him as the Being 'that knoweth the darkness.'
Under no idea can the relations of God to man be more grandly expressed.
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