Temporal Power

"In the beginning," so we are told, "God made the heavens and the earth." The statement is simple and terse; it is evidently intended to be wholly comprehensive. Its decisive, almost abrupt tone would seem to forbid either question or argument. The old-world narrator of the sublime event thus briefly chronicled was a poet of no mean quality, though moved by the natural conceit of man to give undue importance to the earth as his own particular habitation. The perfect confidence with which he explains 'God' as making 'two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night, ' is touching to the verge of pathos; and the additional remark which he throws in, as it were casually, -'He made the stars also, ' cannot but move us to admiratio