[Footnote 1: As, for example, where persons desirous to get over the
plain reference to Baptism in St. John iii. 5, try to explain away the
term "water" to mean something metaphorically but not actually water.]
To descend from the general to the particular, it is obvious that the
account of Creation in Genesis i., ii. is in such a form that we must
assume our own ideas of the term "day" therein employed, and also those
to be attached to "created" and similar terms.
In early times, no one would take "day" to mean anything else but an
earth day of the ordinary kind, and no one would question whether or not
the whole existing animals and plants, or their ancestors, appeared on
earth in six such days, or whether anything else was meant. Again, by
the time St. Augustine was writing, a little more knowledge of nature
and a little more habit of reasoning about the origin of things was in
the world, and that knowledge led people to suppose that creation meant
only the making of things "out of nothing," but that it would take
longer than six times twelve hours, so that "days" might mean "periods."
And people imagined for a long time that--taking for an example the
work in the middle of the narrative--there was a time when the earth
emerged from the tumult of waters, that it then got covered with plants,
the waters remaining barren of life; but that when the plants had come
up all over the ground, then the waters all at once became full of all
sorts of sea-shells, fish, and monsters of the deep, and so on.
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