250 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
too, by a minute scale. There is a tacit reference to the 
threescore and ten years of human life; and its term of a 
day appears long to the ephemera. We turn frora the histo- 
rians to the prophets, and find the dissimilarity of style indi- 
cating a different speaker. Ezekiel’s measuring-reed is grad- 
uated into cubits of the temple. The vast periods of the 
short-lived historian dwindled down into weeks and days. 
Seventy weeks indicated to Daniel, in the first year of Darius, 
the time of the Messiah’s coming. Three years and a half 
limit the term of the Mohammedan delusion. Seventeen 
years have not yet gone by since Adam first arose from the 
mould ; nor has the race, as such, attained to the maturity of 
even early manhood. But while prophecy sums up merely 
weeks and days, when it refers to the past, it looks forward 
into the future, and speaks of a thousand years. Are scales 
of unequally graduated parts ever used in measuring different 
portions of the same map or section — scales so very une- 
qually graduated, that, while the parts in some places expand 
to the natural size, they are in others more than three hun- 
dred times diminished? If not,— for what save inextricable 
confusion would result from their use, — how avoid the con- 
clusion, that the typical scale employed in the same book by 
the same prophet represents similar quantities by correspond- 
ing parts, whether applied to times of outrage, delusion, and 
calamity, or set off against that long and happy period in 
which the spirit of evil shall be bound in chains and dark- 
ness, and the kingdom of Christ shall have come? And if 
such be the case —if each single year of the thousand years 
of the future represents a term as extended as each single 
year of the seventeen years of the past—if the present 
scene of things be thus merely in its beginning — should we at 
all wonder to find that the formation which represents it has 
laid down merely its few first strata ? 
