VU1 INTRODUCTION. 



truth "In the beginning, Jehovah created the heavens and the 

 earth." Certainly there was a day Geology demonstrates this 

 when nothing but barren rock and wide spread waters covered 

 the globe. Who but Jehovah called into being the successive 

 races of animal and vegetable life, which have flourished and 

 died ? Whose eye but Jehovah's has seen the myriads of revo- 

 lutions* during which the immense fossil-bearing beds were de- 

 posited ? We cannot comprehend these things; 



"Our noisy years seem moments in the being 

 Of the eternal silence." 



The granite pebble which we roll over, heedless and careless, 

 is older by millions of years than the first created of our race; and 

 when was that being created ? Questions like this, we are forced 

 to say, we can no more answer, than we can tell the form, and 

 number, of the inhabitants of the evening star. 



"But though philosophers have never yet demonstrated, and 

 perhaps never will be able to demonstrate, what was that primitive 

 state of things in the social and material worlds from which the 

 progressive state took its first departure ; they can still, in all 

 the lines of research, go very far back ; determine many of the 

 remote circumstances of the past sequence of events ; ascend 

 to a point which from our position at least, seems to be near the 

 origin ; and exclude many suppositions respecting the origin it- 

 self." And this is the boundary of human knowledge. 



