ON GEOLOGIC HISTORY. 599 



laws go necessarily together ; and so long as death reicrns, 

 human creatures, in even the best of times, will continue to 

 quit this scene of being without professing much satisfaction 

 at what they have found either in it or themselves. It will 

 no doubt be a less miserable world than it is now when the 

 good come, as there is reason to hope they one day shall to 

 be a majority ; but it will be felt to be an inferior sort of 

 world even then, and be even fuller than now of wishes and 

 longings for a better. Let it improve as it may, it will be a 

 scene of probation and trial till the end. And so Faith, un- 

 deceived by the mirage of the midway desert, whatever form 

 or name, political or religious, the phantasmagoria may bear, 

 must continue to look beyond its unsolid and tremulous glit- 

 ter, — its bare rocks exaggerated by the vapour into air-drawn 

 castles, and its stunted bushes magnified into goodly trees ; 

 and, fixing her gaze upon the re-creation yet future, — the ter- 

 minal dynasty yet unbegun, — she must be content to enter 

 upon her final rest, — for she will not enter upon it earlier, — 

 *'at return" 



'' Of Him, the Woman's Seed, 

 Last in the clouds, from heaven to be revealed 

 In glory of the Father, to dissolve 

 Satan with his perverted world, then raise 

 From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, 

 New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date. 

 Founded in righteousness, and peace, and love. 

 To bring forth fruits, — ^joy and eternal bliss." 



But it may be judged that I am trespassing on a field into 

 which I have no right to enter. Save, however, for its close 

 proximity with that in which the geologist expatiates as pro- 

 perly his own, this little volume would never have been wiit- 

 ten. It is the fact that man must believingly co-operate with 

 God in the work of preparation for the final dynasty, or exist 

 throughout its never-ending cycles as a lost and degraded 

 creature, that alone renders the development hypothesis for- 



