004. One Week’s Work

One Week’92s Work

Gen_1:31 : ’93And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.’94

From Monday morning to Saturday night gives us a week’92s work. If we have filled that week with successes, we are happy. But I am going to tell you what God did in one week. Cosmogony, geology, astronomy, ornithology, ichthyology, botany, anatomy are such vast subjects that no human life is long enough to explore or comprehend any one of them. But I have thought I might in an unusual way tell you a little of what God did in one week, and that the first week. And whether you make it a week of days or a week of ages, I care not, for I shall reach the same practical result of reverence and worship.

The first Monday morning found swinging in space the piled-up lumber of rocks and metal and soil and water from which the earth was to be builded. God made up his mind to create a human family and they must have a house to live in. But where? Not a roof, not a wall, not a door, not a room was fit for human occupancy. There is not a pile of black basalt in Yellowstone Park nor an extinct volcano in Honolulu so inappropriate for human residence as was this globe at that early period. Moreover, there was no human architect to draw a plan, no quarryman to blast the foundation stones, no carpenter to hew out a beam, and no mason to trowel a wall. Poor prospect! But the time was coming when a being called man was to be constructed and he was to have a bride; and where he could find a homestead to which he could take her must have been a wonderment to angelic intelligences. There had been earthquakes enough and volcanoes enough and glaciers enough, but earthquakes and volcanoes and glaciers destroy instead of build. A worse-looking world than this never swung. It was heaped-up deformities, scarifications, and monstrosities. The Bible says it was without form. That is, it was not round, it was not square, it was not octagonal, it was not rhomboid. God never did take any one in his counsel, but if he had asked some angel about the attempt to turn this planet into a place for human residence, the angel would have said, ’93No, no; try some other world; the crevices of this earth are too deep; its crags are too appalling; its darkness is too thick.’94

But Monday morning came. I think it was a spring morning and about half-past four o’92clock. The first thing needed was light. It was not needed for God to work by, for he can work as well in the darkness. But light may be necessary, for angelic intelligences are to see in its full glory the process of world-building. But where are the candles, where are the candelabra, where is the chandelier? No rising sun will roll in the morning. No moon or stars can brighten this darkness. The moon and stars are not born yet, or if created, their light will not reach the earth for some time yet. But there is need of immediate light. Where shall it come from. Desiring to account for things in a natural way you say, and reasonably say, that heat and electricity throw out light independent of the sun, and that the metallic bases throw out light independent of the sun and that alkalies throw out light independent of the sun. Oh, yes! all that is true, but I do not think that is the way light was created. The record makes me think that, standing over this earth, that spring morning, God looked upon the darkness that palled the heights of this world and the chasms of it and the awful reaches of it, and uttered’97whether in the Hebrew of earth or some language celestial I know not’97that word which stands for the subtle, bright, glowing and all-pervading fluid, that word which thrills and garlands and lifts everything it touches, that word the full meaning of which all the chemists of the ages have busied themselves in exploring, that word which suggests a force that flies one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, and by undulations seven hundred and twenty-seven trillions in a second, that one word God utters’97Light! And instantly the darkness began to shimmer, and the thick folds of blackness to lift, and there were scintillations and coruscations and flashes and a billowing up of resplendence, and in great sheets it spread out northward, southward, eastward, westward, and a radiance filled the atmosphere until it could hold no more of the brilliance. Light now to work by while supernatural intelligences look on. Light, the first chapter of the first day of the week. Light, the joy of all the centuries. Light, the greatest blessing that ever touched the human eye. The robe of the Almighty is woven out of it, for he covers himself with light as with a garment. Oh, blessed light!

I am glad this was the first thing created that week. Good thing to start every week with is light. That will make our work easier. That will keep our disposition more radiant. That will hinder even our losses from becoming too somber. Give us more light, natural light, intellectual light, spiritual light, everlasting light. For lack of it the body stumbles, and the soul stumbles. O thou Father of Lights, give us light! The great German philosopher in his last moment said, ’93I want more light.’94 A minister of Christ, recently dying, cried out in exultation, ’93I move into the light!’94 Mr. Toplady, the immortal hymnologist, in his expiring moments, exclaimed, ’93Light! Light!’94 Heaven itself is only more light. Upon all superstition, upon all ignorance, upon all sorrow, let in the light. But now the light of the first Monday is receding. The blaze is going out. The colors are dimming. Only part of the earth’92s surface is visible. It is six o’92clock, seven o’92clock, eight o’92clock; obscuration and darkness. It is Monday night. ’93And the evening and the morning were the first day.’94

Now it is Tuesday morning. A delicate and tremendous undertaking is set apart for this day. There was a great superabundance of water. God by the wave of his hand this morning gathers part of it in suspended reservoirs and part of it he orders down into the rivers and lakes and seas. How to hang whole Atlantic Oceans in the clouds without their spilling over except in right quantities and at right times was an undertaking that no one but Omnipotence would have dared. But God does it as easily as you would lift a glass of water. There he hoists two clouds each thirty miles wide and five miles high, and balances them. Here he lifts the cirrus clouds and spreads them out in great white banks as though it had been snowing in heaven. And the cirrostratus clouds in long parallel lines so straight you know an infinite Geometer has drawn them. Clouds which are the armory from which thunderstorms get their bayonets of fire. Clouds which are oceans on the wing. No wonder, long after this first Tuesday of Creation week, Elihu confounded Job with the question, ’93Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds?’94

Half of this Tuesday work done, the other half is the work of compelling the waters to lie down in their destined places. So God picks up the solid ground and packs it up into five elevations, which are the continents. With his fingers he makes deep depressions in them, and these are the lakes, while at the piling up of the Alleghanies and Sierra Nevadas and Pyrenees and Alps and Himalayas, the rest of the waters start by the law of gravitation to the lower places, and in their run down hill become the rivers, and then all around the earth these rivers come into convention and become oceans beneath, as the clouds are oceans above. How soon the rivers got to their places when God said: ’93Hudson and James and Amazon, down to the Atlantic; Oregon and Sacramento down to the Pacific.’94 Three-quarters of the earth being water and only one-quarter being land, nothing but Almightiness could have caged the three-fourths so that they could not devour the one-fourth.

Thank God for water, and plenty of it. What a hint that God would have the human race very clean: Three-fourths of the world water. Pour it through the homes and make them pure. Pour it through the prisons and make their occupants moral. Pour it through the streets and make them healthy. There are several thousand people asleep in Greenwood, who, but for the filthy streets of Brooklyn and New York, would have been today well and in churches. Moreover, there never was a filthy street that remained a moral street. How important an agency of reform water is, was illustrated by the fact that when the ancient world got outrageously wicked, it was plunged into the Deluge and kept under for months till its iniquity was soaked out of it. But I rejoice that on the first Tuesday of the world’92s existence the water was taught to know its place, and the Mediterranean lay down at the feet of Europe and the Gulf of Mexico lay down at the feet of North America and Geneva lay down at the feet of the Alps and Schroon Lake fell to sleep in the lap of the Adirondacks. ’93And the evening and the morning were the second day.’94

Now it is Wednesday morning of the world’92s first week. Gardening and horticulture will be born today. How queer the hills look, and so unattractive they seem hardly worth having been made. But now all the surfaces are changing color. Something beautiful is creeping all over them. It has the color of emerald. Ay, it is herbage. Hail to the green grass, God’92s favorite color and God’92s favorite plant, as I judge from the fact that he makes a larger number of them than of anything else. But look yonder! Something starts out of the ground and goes higher up, higher and higher, and spreads out broad leaves. It is a palm tree. Yonder is another growth, and its leaves hang far down, and it is a willow tree. And yonder is a growth with mighty sweep of branches. And here they come’97the pear and the apple and the peach and the pomegranate and groves and orchards and forests, their shadows and their fruit girdling the earth. We are pushing agriculture and fruit culture to great excellence in the nineteenth century, but we have nothing now to equal what I see on this first Wednesday of the world’92s existence. I take a taste of one of the apples this Wednesday morning, and I tell you it mingles in its juices all the flavors of Spitzbergen and Newton pippin and Rhode Island greening and Danvers winter-sweet and Roxbury russet and Hubbardston nonesuch, but added to all and overpowering all other flavors is the Paradisaical juice that all the orchards of the nineteenth century fail to reach. I take a taste of the pear, and it has all the lusciousness of the three thousand varieties of the nineteenth century; all the Seckel and the Bartlett of the pomological gardens of later times, an acidity compared with it. And the grapes! Why, this one cluster has in it the richness of whole vineyards of Catawbas and Concords and Isabellas. Fruits of all colors, of all odors, of all flavors. No hand of man yet made to pluck it or tongue to taste it. The banquet for the human race is being spread before the arrival of the first guest. In the fruit of that garden was the seed for the orchards and gardens of the hemispheres. Notice that the first thing that God made for food was fruit, and plenty of it. Slaughter-houses are of later invention. Far am I from being a vegetarian, but an almost exclusive meat diet is depraving. Savages confine themselves almost exclusively to animal food, and that is one reason that they are savages. Give your children more apples and less mutton. The world will have to give dominance to the fruit diet of Paradise before it gets back to the morals of Paradise. May God’92s blessing come down on the orchards and vineyards of America, and keep back the frosts and the curculio. But we must not forget that it is Wednesday evening in Eden, and upon that perfect fruit of those perfect trees let the curtain drop. ’93And the evening and the morning were the third day.’94

Now it is Thursday morning of the world’92s first week. Nothing will be created today. The hours will be passed in scattering fogs and mists and vapors. The atmosphere must be swept clean. Other worlds are to heave in sight. This little ship of the earth has seemed to have all the ocean of immensity to itself. But mightier craft are to be hailed today on the high seas of space. First, the moon’92s white sail appears and does very well until the sun bursts upon the scene. The light that on the previous three mornings was struck from an especial word now gathers in the sun, moon, and stars. One for the day, the others for the night. It seemed as if they had all within twenty-four hours been created. Ah, his is a great time in the world’92s first week. The moon, the nearest neighbor to our earth appears, her photograph to be taken in the nineteenth century, when the telescope shall bring her within one hundred and twenty miles of New York. And the sun now appears, afterward to be found eight hundred and sixty-six thousand miles in diameter, and put in astronomical scales, to be found to weigh nearly four hundred thousand times heavier than our earth; a mighty furnace, its heat kept up by meteors pouring into it as fuel, a world devouring other worlds with its jaws of flame. And the stars come out, those street lamps of heaven, those keys of pearl, upon which God’92s fingers play the music of the spheres. How bright they look in this Oriental evening! Constellations! Galaxies! What a twenty-four hours of this first week’97solar, lunar, stellar appearances. All this Thursday and the nights immediately before and after it employed in pulling aside the curtain of vapor from these flushed or pale-faced worlds. Enough! ’93And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.’94

Now it is Friday morning in the first week of the world’92s existence. Water, but not a fin swimming it; air, but not a wing flying it. It is a silent world. Can it be that it was made only for vegetables? But, hark! There is a swirl and a splashing in all the four rivers of Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. They are all a-swim with life, some darting like arrows through split crystals, and others quiet in dark pools like shadows. Everything, from spotted trout to behemoth; all colored, all shaped, the ancestors of finny tribes that shall by their wonders of construction confound the Agassizs, the Cuviers and the Linn’e6uses and the ichthyologists of the more than six thousand years following this Friday of the first week. And while I stand on the banks of these Paradisaical rivers watching these finny tribes, I hear a whirr in the air and I look up and behold wings’97wings of larks, robins, doves, eagles, flamingos, albatrosses, brown-threshers, creatures of all color, blue as if dipped in the skies, fiery as if they had flown out of the sunsets, golden as if they had taken their morning bath in buttercups. And while I am studying the colors they begin to carol and chirp and coo and twitter and run up and down the scales of a music that they must have heard at heaven’92s gate. Yes, I find them in Paradise on this the first Friday afternoon of the world’92s existence. And I sit down on the bank of the Euphrates and the murmur of the river, together with the chant of birds in the sky puts me into a state of somnolence. ’93And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.’94

Now it is Saturday morning of the world’92s first week and with this day the week closes. But oh, what a climacteric day! The air has its population and the water its population. Yet the land has not one inhabitant. But here they come, by the voice of God created! Horses grander than those which in after time Job will describe as having neck clothed with thunder. Cattle enough to cover a thousand hills. Sheep shepherded by him who made for them the green pastures. Cattle superior to the Alderneys and Ayrshires and Devonshires of after-times. Leopards so beautiful, we are glad they cannot change their spots. Lions without their fierceness and all the quadrupedal world so gentle, so sleek, so perfect. Look out how you treat this animal creation, whether they walk the earth or swim the waters or fly the air. Do you not notice that God gave them precedence of the human race? They were created Friday and Saturday morning, as man was created Saturday afternoon. They have a right to be here. He who galls a horse or exposes a cow to the storm or beats a dog or mauls a cat or gambles at the pigeon-shooting or tortures an insect, will have to answer for it in the Judgment Day. You may console yourself that these creatures are not immortal and they cannot appear against you, but the God who made these creatures and who saw the wrong you did them will be there. Better look out, you stock-raisers and railroad companies who bring the cattle on trains without food or water for three or four days in hot weather, a long groan of agony from Omaha to New York. Better look out, you farmer riding behind that limping horse with a nail that the blacksmith drove into the quick. Better look out, you boys stoning bullfrogs and turning turtles upside down and robbing birds’92 nests.

But something is wanting in Paradise and the week is almost done. Who is there to pluck the flowers of this Edenic lawn? Who is there to command these worlds of quadruped and fish and bird? For whom has God put back the curtain from the face of sun and moon and star? The world wants an emperor and empress. It is Saturday afternoon. No one but the Lord Almighty can originate a human being. In the world where there are in the latter part of the nineteenth century over fourteen hundred million people, a human being is not a curiosity. But how about the first human eye that was ever kindled, the first human ear that was ever opened, the first human lung that ever breathed, the first human heart that ever beat, the first human life ever constructed? That needed the origination of a God. He had no model to work by. What stupendous work for a Saturday afternoon! He must originate a style of human heart through which all the blood in the body must pass every three minutes. He must make that heart so strong that it can during each day lift what would be equal to one hundred and twenty tons of weight. About five hundred muscles must be strung in the right place and at least two hundred and fifty bones constructed. Into this body must be put at least nine million nerves. Over three thousand perspiring pores must be made for every inch of fleshly surface. The human voice must be so constructed it shall be capable of producing seventeen trillion five hundred and ninety-two billion one hundred and eighty-six million forty-four thousand four hundred and fifteen sounds. But all this the most insignificant part of the human being. The soul! Ah, the construction of that God himself would not be equal to if he were any the less of a God. Its understanding, its will, its memory, its conscience, its capacities of enjoyment or suffering, its immortality!

What a work for a Saturday afternoon! Ay! Before night there were to be two such human and yet immortal beings constructed. The woman as well as the man was formed Saturday afternoon. Because a deep sleep fell upon Adam and by divine surgery a portion of his side was removed for the nucleus of another creation; it has been supposed that perhaps days and nights passed between the masculine and feminine creations. But no! Adam was not three hours unmated. If a physician can by an’e6sthetics put one into a deep sleep in three minutes, God certainly could have put Adam into a profound sleep in a short while that Saturday afternoon and made the deep and radical excision without causing distress. By a manipulation of the dust, the same hand that molded the mountains molded the features and molded the limbs of the father of the human race. But his eyes did not see and his nerves did not feel and his muscles did not move and his lungs did not breathe and his heart did not pulsate. A perfect form he lay along the earth, symmetrical and of God-like countenance. Magnificent piece of Divine carpentry and omnipotent sculpturing, but no vitality. A body without a soul. Then the Source of all life stooped to the inanimate nostril and lip, and, as many a skilful and earnest physician has put his lips to a patient in comatose state and breathed into his mouth and nostril, and at the same time compressed the lungs, until that which was artificial respiration became natural respiration, so methinks God breathed into this cold sculpture of a man the breath of life, and the heart begins to tramp and the lungs to inhale and the eyes to open and the entire form to thrill, and with the rapture of a life just come, the prostrate being leaps to his feet’97a man!

But the scene of this Saturday is not yet done, and in the atmosphere, drowsy with the breath of flowers and the song of bobolinks and robin-redbreasts, the man slumbers, and by an’e6sthetics, divinely administered, the slumber deepens until without the oozing of one drop of blood at the time, or the faintest scar afterward, that portion is removed from his side which is to be built up the Queen of Paradise, the daughter of the great God, the mother of the human race, the benediction of all ages, woman the wife, afterward woman the mother. And as the two join hands and stroll down along the banks of the Euphrates toward a bower of mignonette and wild rose and honeysuckle, and are listening to the call of the whip-poor-will from the aromatic thickets, the sun sinks beneath the horizon. ’93And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.’94

What do you think of that one week’92s work? I review it not for entertainment, but because I would have you join in David’92s doxology: ’93Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty;’94 because I want you to know what a homestead our Father built for his children at the start, though sin has despoiled it; and because I want you to know how the world will look again when Christ shall have restored it, swinging now between two Edens; because I want you to realize something of what a mighty God he is and the utter folly of trying to war against him; because I want you to make peace with this Chief of the Universe through the Christ who mediates between offended Omnipotence and human rebellion; because I want you to know how fearfully and wonderfully you are made, your body as well as your soul an Omnipotent achievement; because I want you to realize that order reigns throughout the universe, and that God’92s watches tick to the second, and that his clocks strike regularly, though they strike only once in a thousand years.

A learned man once asked an old Christian man who had no advantages of schooling, why he believed there was a God, and the good old man, who probably had never heard an argument on the subject in all his life, made this noble reply: ’93Sir, I have been here going hard upon fifty years. Every day since I have been in this world I have seen the sun rise in the east and set in the west. The north star stands where it did the first time I saw it; the seven stars and Job’92s coffin keep on the same path in the sky and never turn out. It isn’92t so with man’92s work. He makes clocks and watches; they may run well for awhile, but they get out of fix and stand stock-still. But the sun and moon and stars keep on this same way all the while. The heavens declare the glory of God.’94 Yea, I preach this, because I want you to walk in appreciation of Addison’92s sublime sentiment when he writes:

The spacious firmament on high

With all the blue ethereal sky

And spangled heav’92ns, a shining frame,

Their Great Original proclaim.

In reason’92s ear they all rejoice

And utter forth a glorious voice;

Forever singing, as they shine,

’93The Hand that made us is divine.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage