the naturalist gives the name of "law;" and from the existence of law, reason infers the existence of a Lawgiver, to devise the plan, to bestow the force, to guide the regularity of observed processes. An atheistic geology therefore is, from the nature of the case, impossible; the very classification of the facts proving the existence of a creating, scientific, classifying mind, prior to the existence of the observed, scientific, classified facts. M. Agassiz justly observes that true classification is the discovery and expression of the Creator's plan. But, inasmuch as science deals only with the things created, it can know nothing of beginnings. Like other infants, it can not describe its own birth, and so can not produce a cosmogony. A scientific cosmogony is a contradiction in terms.

The Bible gives no cosmogony, no description of the evolution of a cooling globe. It simply says, "In the be ginning God created the heaven and the earth;" and then goes on to tell of the deposition of the sedimentary strata, and the successive introduction of plants and animals. For this, among other reasons, the proposed reconciliations of Genesis and geology were all, and always, unnecessary. There could be no conflict between them. They belong to different spheres. The geologist can not describe the process of creation, and Moses does not. It may well be asked, indeed, is there any process from nothing to something? Creation must be instantaneous. Moses, accordingly, merely tells us, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth;" then that an indefinite period of sedimentary formations suc ceeded; and that a few thousand years ago God prepared a part of the earth's surface for the occupation of the existing human race. It is no part of the design of the Bible to teach geology, or any other science which man can learn from God's works; yet no man has ever succeeded in proving that any statement of this ancient

volume contradicts any fact of modern science. When we consider the ideas of the most learned men of surrounding nations of that period concerning the origin of the world, and peruse the fables they have written, we perceive a wondrous contrast with the Bible narrative. Compare, for example, the Chinese story of Pwangku chiseling out the granite heavens, or the Hindoo cosmogony of the sacred egg, and of the emergence of the sacred mount, and the seven seas of milk, melted butter, honey, rum, etc., from an inundation which drowned all the heavens up to the pole-star, with the sobriety and dignity of the Bible, and ask, Whence this astonishing contrast? Contrast the reticence of Moses with the garrulity of our modern savans when they enter upon cosmogony. Worldmaking is one of the strongest passions of the human intellect. How comes it to pass that Moses resists the temptation by which our most sober inductive philosophers have been seduced, to describe the processes of creation, the condensing nebulæ, the igneous nucleus, etc.? The writers who could describe light as "the undulation,' "the flowing," who knew that it existed before the sun, who could describe man's intellectual supremacy, and yet assert his recent arrival on earth, who could describe the sky as the expansion, and hang "the earth upon nothing,"* could surely have speculated upon the development theory.

WHY, THEN, DID NOT MOSES MAKE A FOOL OF HIMSELF

like the Chinese, Hindoos, and evolutionists, by giving us an impossible cosmogony? There is only one power which can restrain the insane pride of the human intellect from intoxicating itself with the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, and becoming as gods, and driveling forth its drunken projects of creation. That power

*Job xxvi. 7.

restrained Moses from astronomical and geological cosmogonies. And when we remember the theological cosmogonies-Hebrew, Patristic, Monkish, Protestant, and Pantheistic-which have been spun professedly out of the allusions of the Bible, so much more absurd than those of the heathen, and so much more mischievous as claiming divine authority, we see that nothing less than divine restraint prevented Moses from giving the world a circumstantial geological cosmogony to be the laughing-stock of future discoverers.

True science, in view of such developments, will maintain a respectful attitude to Scripture. It will fearlessly prosecute its researches into the works of God, and calmly and clearly tell its discoveries. It will not intrude into the domains of revelation, with whose objects, methods and phenomena it professes to have no acquaintance. It will be especially shy of meddling with subjects beyond its own domain, of the visible and tangible, and will feel insulted when men parade their day-dreams of worldbuilding as her discoveries. And, considering how the credulity of Christendom has been of late years abused by all sorts of pretended scientific discoveries, the true philosopher will acknowledge the reasonableness of a little popular incredulity regarding scientific novelties, and more especially if they come heralded as fatal to faith in the Bible; for we have had now eighteen centuries' experience of the truth of Jesus Christ, and it is too much. to expect equal confidence in any mushroom philosophical theory.

The interpreter of God's word will feel equally friendly toward the interpreter of God's works. He well knows there can be no antagonism between them; and when the cry of the discovery of some great anti-Biblical fact is raised, he will not feel at all disturbed. He has heard this alarm often before, but the Bible yet stands. God's

anvil has worn out many a hammer. He will not deny any authentic fact of science because it does not tally with his preconceived notions of Scripture. As the prophetic Scriptures are best interpreted by the fulfillment, so the scientific scriptures are best interpreted by the discovery. For though creation and revelation are both infallible prophets, yet our interpretations both of science and of Scripture are quite likely to prove fallible and erroneous. The remembrance of the blunders of theologians in attempting to construct science out of Scripture, and of the blunders of geologists in extracting a cosmogony out of science, ought to teach both the humility proper to ignorance.

ANTI-CHRISTIAN GEOLOGIES.

As to the anti-Christian theories of geology, past, present, or future, we presume most of our readers are quite satisfied to dismiss them to the care of those who have nothing better to occupy their attention. Their history (as we have seen) up to the beginning of this century, is a succession of wild imaginations and baseless fictions, each eagerly believed for a time, and speedily dismissed for a more attractive successor. And we have also presented the latest discoveries, not of second-hand geologists, but those of the foremost actual investigators of nature, and their experiments upon the constitution and mode of formation of the lowest rocks accessible to man, experiments which utterly demolish the current geological cosmogony of evolution, leaving the whole system in utter chaos. There is no foundation left; no knowledge of materials out of which to rebuild the globe; no known processes of construction; no elements of chronology; no sufficient force in nature for peopling or forming the world. The materials accessible for the construction of a new theory consist of an imperfect knowledge of about

one ten-thousandth part of the earth's crust, and a profound ignorance of the nature and energy of the materials and forces by which the vast mass beneath continually operates upon this little portion of the surface. Yet upon this slender basis, we may rest assured, new anti-Biblical theories will speedily be erected. Doubtless, each of

these geologies in its turn will be demolished by its successor; but that will not deter mankind from making and loving and believing another lie. In the three-score years and ten of a busy life, men who have bread to earn, and families to keep, and souls to save, can not give personal attention to geology, nor solve for themselves the great problems of the universe; if they believe anything on such subjects they must take somebody's word for it, and it is a matter of choice whether a man shall believe Lyell or Moses, Christ or Tyndall. The choice will be determined by the man's disposition; if he dislikes Bible religion he will not believe its prophets; he will receive in preference the allegations of men who, without pretending to revelation from any one who has seen it, describe the interior of the earth. But one would suppose that even the credulity of infidelity would be nauseated with endless impositions; and that common sense would suggest, "As all these geological refutations of the Bible are false, what if its account of God and the world be true?"

This Bible is one of the powers in the moral world. It has existed over thirty centuries, and has revolutionized our own and many other nations, rendering the pursuit of geology, and of science, possible among the descendants of savages. It reveals to us the great fact of the subserviency of physical to moral law; declaring that the last diluvial epoch which swept the habitable earth was coincident with the grossest moral corruption of mankind. It predicts another vast geological revolution, in which the life of earth shall make another grand advance,