92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



clared that in the beginning the heaven and earth were created, not 

 by a thousand conflicting deities, but by one supreme and indivisible, 

 and that He hath given all things a law that shall not be broken ? And 

 we may compare the vast infinities of time and space, that long ascend- 

 ing order, that gradual progress demanded by geology, with the words 

 in the sublime ninetieth psalm, read at the burial service: "A thousand 

 years in thy sight are but as yesterday which is past, and as a watch 

 in the night." Surely the view of the gradual preparation of the 

 earth for mankind is grander than that which makes him coeval with the 

 beasts which perish, and we ought to honor the archseologist who by un- 

 hasting, unresting research revealed in all their length and breadth the 

 genealogy and the antiquity of man and of his habitation. He rent 

 the veil and showed the long vista of the temple of the Most High, not 

 made with hands '^ Apparet domus intus, et atria longa patescunt^ 

 Not the limitation but the amplification of the idea of God is the result 

 of the labor of such a student, and not the descent but the ascent of 

 man is the outcome of his speculations. If, as he used to say, we have 

 in our bones the chill of the contracted view of the past in which till 

 now we were brought up, the enlargement which he eifected of that 

 view ought to give a warmth, a fire to our soul of gouls, in proportion 

 as we feel that we are indeed not the creatures of yesterday, but the 

 heirs of the ages and worlds that have perished in the making of us. 



As to the likeness of the general spirit of the method of science 

 to that of the Bible, the Bible is a model to the student in its 

 slow but increasing purpose of revelation, through sundry times 

 and divers manners, warning each succeeding age to have its eyes 

 open and every member of the human race to be the disciple that 

 is, " scholar," as the founder of Christianity called his followers. To 

 invest the pursuit of truth with the sanctity of a religious duty is 

 the true reconciliation of religion and science. Such a union has been 

 the special glory of the great school of English geologists, and the 

 two pioneers of the science at the time when it had to fight its way 

 against prejudice, ignorance, and apathy, were both honored dignita- 

 ries of the English Church ; and now within these walls there rests 

 beneath the monument of Woodward one who was the friend of 

 Sedgwick and the pupil of Buckland. He followed truth with a 

 sanctified zeal, a childlike humility. For discovering, confirming, rec- 

 tifying his conclusions, there was no journey he would not undertake. 

 From early youth to extreme old age it was to him a religious duty 

 fearlessly to correct all iiis own mistakes, and he was always ready to 

 receive from others and reproduce that which he had not in himself. 

 In his mind science and religion were indivisible. The freedom of re- 

 ligious inquiry in the national Church, the cause of humanity in the 

 world at large, were to him as dear as though they were his own per- 

 sonal and peculiar concern. There is unusual solemnity in the thought 

 of his passage into the eternal world, on which, as in a shadow or 



