Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. MODERN THEORIES OF COSMOGONY AND INTEKPRE- TA TION. Thk Restitution Or Interval Theory. HOARDING the Restitution and Period theories, of which mention has already been made, a brief account will be sufficient. The Restitution or Interval theory, as it is sometimes called, is a kind of link between the literal and period theories. Like the former, it interprets the word "day" literally, but at the same time it postulates an indefinite lapse of time between the first act of creation and the six days of Genesis. In this wise it aims to harmonize the assumptions of the two theories and to blend them into one. According to the interval theory, the creation of the earth, of animals, and of plants was slow and successive, as is evidenced by the facts of geology. But a great cataclysm supervened which destroyed all forms of terrestrial life—whence the fossiliferous deposits of the earth's crust—and reduced everything to chaos. This, we are told, is what is signified by the words, "And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." If, however, the first creation, indicated by the words, "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," was slow and successive, the second creation, or restoration, following the great catastrophe, wasaccomplished in such a short space of time—six ordinary days—that there is left no trace of it for scientific investigation. But this system, proposed by Buckland and favored by Chalmers, Cardinal Wiseman, and other distinguished scholars, has now but few if any defenders, as it is manifestly at variance with some of the simplest facts of geology. " A careful study of the earth's crust and the fossils which it contains," says a well-known French writer, "proves that the cataclysms which were formerly...