# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1856_S72
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

72             Dr. Seyffarth's Corrections, etc.

...be done violence to the Word of God once more for their sake. But whoever loves the Word of God from the depths of his heart will not hasten, at the first new discovery, to make an application of it to Holy Scripture, or to interpret Holy Scripture according to it, since by this the order of things is inverted and Holy Scripture, which is supposed to be the standard, is made the thing measured — and, as a rule, measured by a false standard. That we do not speak thus idly, without occasion, or paint a foe merely in order to have something sturdy to strike at, the following instance may show.

As for the time of creation: natural history concludes, chiefly from the nature of mountain formation, to an age of the earth and the world immensely greater than follows from Holy Scripture, and therefore pushes creation back not merely thousands, but hundreds of thousands of years. Theologians of the kind just described are quickly won over and convinced by the new, interesting results, and at once concede that creation took place hundreds of thousands of years earlier than had previously been assumed, and marvel at the former blindness of the expositors of Holy Scripture, who failed to see that this is indeed also written in Holy Scripture. But in order to prove that Holy Scripture teaches in agreement with natural history, strange leaps are required. Holy Scripture says: a thousand years are before the LORD as a day (Ps. 90:4); this saying is promptly turned around: a day is before the LORD as a thousand years, and from this it is further concluded: since, then, the LORD says in his Word that creation was accomplished in six days, nothing prevents these days from being understood as just as many thousands of years, or even — by making a thousand into a hundred thousand, with the same right by which one made a day into a thousand years — as just as many hundreds of thousands of years. No one can talk us into believing, not even by the authority of the most famous natural scientists, that this teaching is the teaching of Holy Scripture. God's Word is clear and simple, and when the LORD says in his Word that in six days heaven and earth with their whole host were created, then we believe the Word of God that in six days, of twenty-four hours each, heaven and earth and every creature were created. For that in the creation account not thousands of years but actual days are meant is shown clearly and irrefutably by the following two reasons: 1. On the sixth day of creation God created man, on the seventh he rested. It is surely only fair that, if one has claimed hundreds of thousands of years for each of the first five days, one should then also grant that the sixth and seventh days were likewise such great spans of time — especially since nothing indicates, and to our knowledge no one has asserted, that the last two days are meant to signify different spans of time than the first five. But then it would follow that the first man, who spent a great part of the sixth and the whole of the seventh day of the