HUGH MILLER 49 



ness to his ultimate greatness. But the geological 

 reasoning of Miller has the undoubted merit of being 

 scientific and inductive. In geology the dominant note 

 is, in one word, progress. ' There was a time in our 

 planet,' and it will be noted that the argument is per- 

 fectly independent of the appearance of man, late with 

 himself, early with Lyell, 'when only dead matter 

 appeared, after which plants and animals of a lower 

 order were made manifest. After ages of vast extent 

 the inorganic yielded to the organic, and the human 

 period began, man, a fellow-worker with the Creator 

 who first produced it. And of the identity of at least 

 his intellect with that of his Maker, and, of conse- 

 quence, of the integrity of the revelation which declares 

 that he was created in God's own image, we have direct 

 evidence in his ability of not only conceiving of God's 

 own contrivances, but even of reproducing them, and 

 this not as a mere imitator, but as an original thinker/ 

 Man thus, as Hegel says, re-thinks Creation. But higher 

 yet the tide of empire takes its way. The geologist is 

 not like the Neapolitan thinker, Vico, with his doctrine 

 of recurring cycles in man. The geologist 'finds no 

 example of dynasties once passed away again returning. 

 There has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish 

 of the reptile of the mammal. The long ascending 

 line from dead matter to man has been a progress 

 Godwards not an asymptotical progress, but destined 

 from the first to furnish a point of union ; and occupy- 

 ing that point as true God and true man, as Creator 



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