"
Theologians, having thus settled the manner of the creation, the
matter used in it, and the time required for it, now exerted
themselves to fix its _date_.
The long series of efforts by the greatest minds in the Church,
from Eusebius to Archbishop Usher, to settle this point are
presented in another chapter. Suffice it here that the general
conclusion arrived at by an overwhelming majority of the most
competent students of the biblical accounts was that the date of
creation was, in round numbers, four thousand years before our era;
and in the seventeenth century, in his great work, Dr. John
Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and one
of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his time, declared, as the
result of his most profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures,
that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created all
together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that
"this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on October
23, 4004 B.
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