60 ON INCREDULITY WITH RESPECT TO GEOLOGICAL FACTS. 
degrees has worn for itself a channel 160 feet deep, backwards 
and backwards through the strata. Of course some parts of the 
strata were softer than others and were more quickly worn away, 
but Professor Huxley considers that a probable calculation shows 
that something like 10,000 years have been employed in forming 
the gorge. 
Then there is an astronomical proof of the earth’s age, which 
was brought forward by Mr. Lucas in a lecture he once gave in 
Wycombe, which I think very important. Let it be granted 
first that the earth and all the planets and stars were created at 
the same time. We learn this from the Bible ; and it is easy to 
see that the earth being a portion of the Solar System, that system 
could not exist as it is without it; the insertion of the earth (had 
it not pre-existed) or the abstraction of it (now it does exist) 
would disturb the ‘harmony of the spheres.” Similarly our 
Solar System is an integral portion of one vast assemblage of 
systems, the destruction of any one of which must bring about the 
destruction of the whole. All, then, were created at once. Now 
there are certain stars, or masses of stars, so distant that the light 
travelling from them takes 60,000 years to reach this earth: many 
people who do not know how this is found out refuse to believe 
it, but no student of astronomy or of trigonometry would disbelieve 
it. We can see these stars, their light has reached us; ?.e., the 
rays of light now entering the eye through the telescope started 
from these stars 60,000 years ago; therefore the stars were then 
in existence, and as the earth was also, the earth must be até least 
60,000 years old, Grant this, and there is no limit we can put to 
its age. 
Time prevents me taking up other points on which people are 
incredulous ; I trust, however, that sufficient has been said to 
show that geologists have sufficient grounds for at least the pro- 
bability of their theories, however startling they may at first 
appear. Geology does not, and cannot, contradict the Bible when 
rightly studied ; the earth is just as much the work of Gop as the 
Bible; both are occasionally misread, but that does not prove the 
study of either to be unlawful; both tell the same wondrous tale 
