This conception was
without doubt that of the person or persons who compiled from the
Chaldean and other earlier statements the accounts of the creation
in the first of our sacred books.[13]
Thus, down to a period almost within living memory, it was held,
virtually "always, everywhere, and by all," that the universe, as
we now see it, was created literally and directly by the voice or
hands of the Almighty, or by both--out of nothing--in an instant
or in six days, or in both--about four thousand years before the
Christian era--and for the convenience of the dwellers upon the
earth, which was at the base and foundation of the whole structure.
But there had been implanted along through the ages germs of
another growth in human thinking, some of them even as early as the
Babylonian period. In the Assyrian inscriptions we find recorded
the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of _an evolution_ of the universe out of
the primeval flood or "great deep," and of the animal creation out
of the earth and sea.
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