12 THE president's ADDRESS. 



lamentations of Ramah may yet be wailing among distant stars, 

 giving a terrible significance to the old warning that man has to 

 account for every idle word at a future reckoning. 



All these marvels, facts and fancies, must attract the active and 

 imao-inative minds of our day. It is a matter of vital moment that 

 those who are laudably jealous for the cause of revealed religion, 

 should not needlessly place themselves in opposition to the fullest and 

 freest enquiry, and the most impartial search for facts and phenomena 

 on the part of science. 



" Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from Him 

 with whom is no variableness or shadow of turning." He who richly 

 endowed the mind of a Newton to elucidate his laws, of a Butler to 

 deduce profound analogies from His courses in nature, has not, we 

 may trust Him, given choice gifts of perception and demonstration to 

 our Murchisons, Lyells, Millers or Logans to dishonour his works or 

 to falsify aught that he has revealed to his creatures. Let us have 

 faith in our great truths, and not do them or ourselves the foolish in- 

 justice of treating them as dependant on the truth or falsehood of any 

 received theory of Astronomy, Cosmogony or Chronology. 



No record of seons and seons of ages brought up from the deep 

 heart of earth ; no trace of man's work, or of his bones in ancient 

 gravel-bed or protozoic formation, will ever induce the world to sur- 

 render its heritage of glorious truths under the New Dispensation. 

 The most sceptical has failed to give any plausible origin, apart from 

 direct inspiration, for the wonderous system that rose pure, and white, 

 and lucid,— a veritable City of God, shining in stainless beauty and 

 majesty, like His Spirit over the dark waters of an effete and perish- 

 ing Paganism, of blank Atheism, or pantheistic extravagance. Men 

 will not surrender the "Father's house of many mansions," for 

 Stygian rivers and Elysian meadows, or Islands of the Blessed, that 

 shine so drearily in Horatian song or Platonic vision. 



Even those who cling most closely to their favorite " Immutability 

 of Nature," and speak doubtingly of miracle and portent, still cherish 

 in their heart the great home-truths of Eevelation. These great bea- 

 con lights of Time and Eternity still shine, and ever will shine, over 

 the waste of speculative doubt and hinted impossibility, even as when 

 the multitude of the heavenly host, the long drawn lines of Seraphim 

 and Archangel, efPulgent in the white hght of Paradise, were swal- 

 lowed up in the black depths of night, and the quiet stars unmoved 



