speak, and act as one of old, who had spoken unadvisedly with his lips,-"I have heard of thee with the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee, wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes!"

III.

“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.-HEB. xi. 3.

Here, then, the question might rest, if men would submit their understanding to be taught by Him who is Light.

But as infidels glory in their pretended discoveries as a complete refutation of the claims of the Bible to be a Divine revelation, and as Christians would desire to know how these infidels are to be met, it is proper to inquire into their boasted discoveries. In meeting the infidel philosophers on the common ground of right reason, it is neither wise nor right to abandon the vantage-ground on which the true doctrine now stands, supported by all the evidence of an unbroken chain of historic testimony such as sustains no other documents on earth, the miracles which have been wrought, and the prophecy which has been fulfilled, and is fulfilling before our eyes, the unexampled diffusion of a religion which is at war with all men's natural and corrupt inclinations, and in despite of all that threatened to make its success impossible, and the beneficial influence which it exerts upon individu

als and communities. All this is not to be overlooked in a question which respects the truth of the history, and laws, and doctrines of the Bible. All this mass of evidence must be fairly set aside before any position can be established which could fasten upon that book the charge of untruth. The argument, then, which is with one fell swoop to banish revelation from the earth, and leave us to grope our way in the midnight darkness of unaided reason, is thus stated by Mr. Buckland. (Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise, vol. i., pp. 22, 23): "The enormous thickness and almost infinite subdivisions of the stratified rocks, and with the numerous and regular successions which they contain of the remains of animals and vegetables differing. more and more widely from existing species as the strata in which we find them are placed at greater depths-the fact that a large proportion of these remains belong to extinct genera, and almost all of them to extinct species, that lived, multiplied, and died on or near the spots where they are now found, shows that the strata in which they occur were deposited slowly and gradually, during long periods of time and at widely distant intervals. These extinct animals and vegetables could, therefore, have formed no part of the creation with which we are immediately connected." Here we have the facts and the conclusion; but how they are connected remains a mystery. How long it requires to form these strata no man can tell; and, therefore,

no man knows that the nearly six thousand years of our world's duration, and the creative power of the Almighty, are not sufficient to account for them. The utter inconclusiveness of all such conjectures-for they are nothing more-is established by a parallel instance recorded in Horne's Introduction to the Critical Study of the Scriptures, vol. i., pp. 168, 169: "Decisive as these facts are, it has been attempted to set aside the Mosaic narrative by some alleged marks of antiquity which certain Continental philosophers have affirmed to exist in the strata of the lava of Mount Etna. Thus Count Borch has attempted to prove that volcanic mountain to be eight thousand years old, by the different strata of lava which have been discovered. And in the vaults and pits which have been sunk to a great depth about Etna, the Canon Recupero affirmed that seven strata of lava have been found, each with a surface of soil upon them, which (he assumes) would require two thousand years to accumulate upon each stratum; and reasoning from analogy, he calculates that the lowest. of these strata must have flowed from the mountain fourteen thousand years ago. Nothing can be more fallacious than this argument, if indeed it deserves to be dignified with the name of an argument; for who knows what causes have operated to produce volcanic eruptions at very unequal periods? Who has kept a register of the eruptions of any burning mountain for one thousand years, to say nothing of

three or four thousand? Who can say that the strata of the earth were formed in equal periods? The time for the formation of the uppermost and last is probably not known, much less the respective periods of the lower strata. They build one hypothesis upon another, and to believe their whole argument requires stronger faith than to believe a miracle. Faith in a miracle rests upon testimony, but faith in their scheme must be founded on an extreme desire to prove a falsehood. But the analogy on which it has been attempted to build the hypothesis just mentioned is contradicted by another analogy which is grounded on more certain facts. Etna and Vesuvius resemble each other in the causes that produce their eruptions, in the nature of their lava, and in the time necessary to mellow them into soil fit for vegetation. This being admitted, which no philosopher will deny, the Canon Recupero's analogy will prove just nothing at all. We can produce an instance of seven different lavas, with interjacent strata of vegetable earth, which have flowed from Mount Vesuvius within the space, not of fourteen thousand, but of somewhat less. than fourteen hundred years; for these, according to our analogy, a stratum of lava may cover with vegetable soil in about two hundred and fifty years, instead of requiring two thousand for that purpose. The eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii is rendered still more celebrated by the death of the elder Pliny, recorded in