Other cosmogonies, though bearing unmistakable
evidence of their descent from the Mosaic, have had successive deposits,
in successive series, of mythological strata. This stands towering out
in lonely sublimity, like the everlasting granite of the Alps or the
Himalaya, as compared with the changing alluvium of the Nile or the
Ganges. As the serene air that ever surrounds the head of Mont Blanc
excels in purity the mists of the fen, so does the lofty theism of the
Mosaic account rise high above the nature-worship of the Egyptian and
Hesiodean theogonies. "In the beginning God made the heavens and the
earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face
of the deep. And the Spirit of God brooded over the waters. And God
said, Let there be light, and it was light. And God saw the light that
it was fair, and God divided the light from the darkness. And thus there
was an evening and a morning--one day!" What is there like it, or to be
at all compared with it, in any mythology on earth? There it stands,
high above them all, and remote from them all, in its air of great
antiquity, in its unaccountableness, in its serene truthfulness, in
its unapproachable sublimity, in that impress of divine majesty and
ineffable holiness which even the unbelieving neologist has been
compelled to acknowledge, and by which every devout reader feels that
the first page in Genesis is forever distinguished from any mere human
production.
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