IN THE seventh day God finished His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work. And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

This undoubtedly closed the period of so-called creation, and God—the Elohim—rested; and even as each of the six days covered uncountable eons of time, in which consciousness unfolded through the various stages pictured, so on the seventh day of equally vast duration must have proceeded the development and unfoldment of man’s consciousness, gradually fitting and accustoming his animal nature into these new human forms and into the self-consciousness that gave him dominion over all lesser states; and in the course of ages multiplying in ever increasing numbers, so that he gradually overspread the face of the earth.

But now we come to the fifth verse of the second chapter of Genesis, which indicates an entirely different state of conditions from those portrayed in the first chapter, apparently contradicting the creation of man and of vegetation as therein stated.

“And no plant was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up; for Jehovah God had not caused it to rain upon the earth; and there was no man to till the ground.”

If you will turn to the last two paragraphs of the preceding chapter of this treatise, you will note that the