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ON GEOLOGIC HISTORY. 297 



It is in tliirf dynasty of the future tliat man's moral and 

 intellectual faculties will receive their full development. The 

 expectation of any very great advance in the present scene 

 of things, — great, at least, when measured by man's largo 

 capacity of conceiving of the good and fair, — seems to be, 

 like all human hope when restricted to time, an expectation 

 doomed to disappointment. There are certain limits within 

 which the race improves ; — civilization is better than the 

 want of it, and the taught superior to the untaught man. 

 There is a change, too, effected in the moral nature, through 

 that Spirit which, by working belief in the heart, brings its 

 aspirations into harmony with the realities of the unseen 

 world, that, in at least its relation to the future state, cannot 

 be estimated too highly. But conception can travel very far 

 beyond even its best effects in their merely secular bearing; 

 nay, it is peculiarly its nature to show the men most truly the 

 subjects of it how miserably they fall short of the high standard 

 of conduct and feeling which it erects, and to teach them, 

 more emphatically than by words, that their degree of hap- 

 piness must of necessity be as low as their moral attainments 

 are humble. Further, — man, though he has been increasing 

 in knowledge ever since his appearance on earth, has not been 

 improving in faculty ; — a shrewd fact, which they who ex- 

 pect most from the future of this world would do well to 

 consider. The ancient masters of mind were in no respect 

 inferior in calibre to their successors. We have not yet shot 



God, but it must have been a miniature image at best ; — the proportion 

 of man's week to that of his Maker may, for aught that appears, be 

 mathematically just in its proportions, and yet be a miniature image 

 too, — the mere scale of a map, on which inches represent geographical 

 degrees. All those week days and Sabbath days of man which have 

 come and gone since man first entered upon this scene of being, with all 

 which shall yet come and go until the resurrection of the dead termi- 

 nate the work of Kedemption, may be included, and probably are in* 

 eluded, in the one Sabbath day ol God. 



