"By the phrase _in the beginning_," says Doederlin, "the time is declared when something began to be. But when God produced this remarkable work, Moses does not precisely define."
"We do not know," says Sharon Turner, "and we have no means of knowing, at what point of the ever-flowing eternity of that which is alone eternal,--the divine subsistence,--the creation of our earth, or any part of the universe, began." "All that we can learn explicitly from revelation is, that nearly six thousand years have passed since our first parents began to be."
"The words in the text," says Dr. Wiseman, "do not merely express a momentary pause between the first fiat of creation and the production of light; for the participial form of the verb, whereby the Spirit of God, the creative energy, is represented as brooding over the abyss, and communicating to it the productive virtue, naturally expresses a continuous, and not a passing action."
"I am strongly inclined to believe," says Bishop Gleig, "that the matter of the corporeal universe was all created at once; though different portions of it may have been reduced to form at very different periods. When the universe was created, or how long the solar system remained in a chaotic state, are vain inquiries, to which no answer can be given."
"The detailed history of creation in the first chapter of Genesis," says Dr. Chalmers, "begins at the middle of the second verse; and what precedes might be understood as an introductory sentence, by which we are most appositely told, both that God created all things at the first, and that afterwards--by what interval of time it is not specified--the earth lapsed into a chaos, from the darkness and disorder of which the present system or economy of things was made to arise. Between the initial act and the details of Genesis, the world, for aught we know, might have been the theatre of many revolutions, the traces of which geology may still investigate," &c.
"A philological survey of the initial sections of the Bible, (Gen. i. 1 to ii. 3,)" says Dr. Pye Smith, "brings out the result;"
1. "That the first sentence is a simple, independent, all-comprehending axiom, to this effect,--that _matter_, elementary or combined, aggregated only or organized, and _dependent, sentient, and intellectual beings_ have not existed from eternity, either in self-continuity or succession, but had a beginning; that their beginning took place by the all-powerful will of one Being; the self-existent, independent and infinite in all perfection; and that the date of that beginning is not made known."