amount, it seems palpable, that on the one hand there has been an entire destruction of the ancient species, and on the other an entire renovation of species wholly distinct and dissimilar from the former. The older chains of succession have been suddenly terminated, as if broken off at their lower extremities. And the more recent chains, instead of being to be traced through the midway passage of a great geological tempest, for the older formations, those earlier records of our globe hold out no indication of them-the recent chains have after a catastrophe had their first and definite origin. Now the question is, Who or what is the originator ? All the busy processes of nature which are going on around us, fail towards even so much as the formation of an organic being, endowed with the faculty of self-transmission. All the possible combinations which human ingenuity can devise, are baffled in the enterprise. And, save by that peculiar tie which connects the one link of this concatenation with the other, there is not in all the known resources of nature and art, another method by which such a creature can be formed. How then are the first links to be accounted for? Is there aught in the rude and boisterous play of a great physical catastrophe that can germinate those exquisite structures, which during our yet undisturbed economy have been transmitted in pacific succession to the present day? What is there in the rush and turbulence and mighty clamour of such great elements-of ocean heaved from its old resting place, and lifting its billows above the Alps and the Andes of a

former continent-what is there in this to charm into being the embryos of an infant family wherewith to stock and to repeople a now desolated world? We see in the sweeping energy and uproar of this elemental war, enough to account for the disappearance of all the old generations—but nothing that might cradle any new generations into existence, so as to have effloresced on ocean's deserted bed the life and the loveliness which are now

before our eyes. At no juncture, we apprehend, in the history of the world—is the interposition of Deity more manifest than at this nor can we better account for so goodly a creation emerging again into new forms of animation and beauty from the wreck of the old one, than that the spirit of God moved on the face of the chaos-and that nature, turned by the last catastrophe into a wilderness, was again repeopled at the utterance of His word.

20. Those rocks which stand forth in the order of their formation, and are each imprinted with their own peculiar fossil remains, have been termed the archives of nature where she hath recorded the changes that have taken place in the history of the globe. They are made to serve the purpose of scrolls or inscriptions on which we might read of those great steps and successions by which the earth has been brought to its present state. And should these archives of nature be but truly deciphered, we are not afraid of their being openly confronted with the archives of revelation. It is unmanly to blink the approach of light from whatever quarter of observation it may fall upon usand these are not the best friends of Christianity

who feel either dislike or alarm, when the torch of science or the torch of history is held up to the Bible. For ourselves, we are not afraid, when the eye of an intrepid, if it be only of a sound philosophy, scrutinizes however jealously all its pages. We have no dread of any apprehended conflict between the doctrines of scripture and the discoveries of science-persuaded as we are, that whatever story the geologists of our day shall find to be engraven on the volume of nature, it will only the more accredit that story which is graven on the volume of revelation.

21. "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God said that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and the beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and the cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind; and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over

the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image; in the image of God created He him: male and female created He them."

22. We have again to repeat that our reasoning is applicable not to one only but to all the Ante-Mosaic theories. To have place for it indeed, we have only to assume that the world has undergone such revolutions or been the subject of such violent operations as have been destructive of entire species that formerly existed upon its surface. Of this it is admitted by all that there are undoubted vestiges -giving us therefore sound reason to believe, that on the supposition of an eternal world, all the species by which it was peopled at some highly remote period must, by the continuance and repetition of the causes which destroyed several of them, have at length been swept away. The question would thus meet us- -whence arose the species now in actual being? seeing that they have not subsisted from eternity. All nature and experience reclaim against the spontaneous generation of them-thus leaving us no other inference, than that organic structures of collocation so manifold and exquisite could only have sprung from the hands of a designer, from the fiat of a God.

23. There are many who, in expounding the science of natural theology, would shrink from all recognition of scripture as if this were a mixing together of things altogether disparate or incongruous. There is a want, we shall not say of

good feeling, but of good philosophy in this unless we confine ourselves to the express object, of ascertaining how much of evidence for a God is furnished by the light of nature alone. The strength of the argument, upon the whole, on the side of religion, is often weakened by this jealous or studied disunion of the truth in one department from the truth in another; but believing as we do that, instead of a conflict, there is a corroborative harmony between them—we shall advert once more to the Mosaic account of the Creation; and, more especially as the reconciliation of this history with the indefinite antiquity of the globe seems not impossible; and that without the infliction of any violence on any of the literalities of the record.

And the earth

darkness was Spirit of God

24. The following are the two first verses in the book of Genesis. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. was without form, and void; and upon the face of the deep: and the moved upon the face of the waters." Now let it be supposed that the work of the first day in the Mosaic account of the creation, begins with the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters. The detailed history of creation in the first chapter of Genesis begins at the middle of the second verse; and what precedes might be understood as an introductory sentence, by which we are most appositely told both that God created all things at the first; and that afterwards, by what interval of time it is not specified, the earth lapsed into a chaos, from the darkness and disorder of which the present system or economy of things was made