2. "That at a recent epoch, our planet was brought into a state of disorganization, detritus, or ruin, (perhaps we have no perfectly appropriate term,) from a former condition."
3. "That it pleased the Almighty, wise and benevolent Supreme, out of that state of ruin to adjust the surface of the earth to its now existing condition,--the whole extending through the period of six natural days."
"I am forming," continues Dr. Smith, "no hypotheses in geology; I only plead that _the ground is clear_, and that the dictates of the Scripture _interpose no bar_ to observation and reasoning upon the mineralogical constitution of the earth, and the remains of organized creatures which its strata disclose. If those investigations should lead us to attribute to the earth and to the other planets and astral spheres an antiquity which millions or ten thousand millions of years might fail to represent, _the divine records forbid not their deduction_."--_Script. and Geol._ p. 502.
Says Dr. Bedford, "We ought to understand Moses as saying, _indefinitely far back, and concealed from us in the mystery of eternal ages, prior to the first moment of mundane time_, God created the heavens and the earth."--Smith, _Script. and Geol._ 4th edit.
"My firm persuasion is," says Dr. Harris, "that the first verse of Genesis was designed, by the divine Spirit, to announce the absolute origination of the material universe by the Almighty Creator; and that it is so understood in the other parts of holy writ; that, passing by an indefinite interval, the second verse describes the state of our planet immediately prior to the Adamic creation, and, that the third verse begins the account of the six days' work."
"If I am reminded, in a tone of animadversion, that I am making science, in this instance, the interpreter of Scripture, my reply is, that I am simply making the works of God illustrate his word in a department in which they speak with a distinct and authoritative voice; that "it is all the same whether our geological or theological investigations have been prior, if we have not forced the one into accordance with the other."--(Davidson, _Sacred Hermeneutics_.) "And that it might be deserving consideration, whether or not the conduct of those is not open to just animadversion, who first undertake to pronounce on the meaning of a passage of Scripture, irrespective of all the appropriate evidence, and who then, when that evidence is explored and produced, insist on their _a priori_ interpretation as the only true one."--_Pre-Adamite Earth_, p. 280.