lii BIOGEAPIIICAL SKETCH. 



into the air, or disrupted by measureless forces, and projected in 

 mountain-ranges high into the heavens. All this may we see, and even 

 date the various events with nearly as much certainty in regard to past 

 time, as we now do human occurrences which refer to the period of the 

 Olympiads. For the Almighty Creator, infinitely beneficent in regard 

 to the wants of his creatures, and thrifty in the use of means, has left 

 imperishable monuments and inscriptions of the past operation of his 

 laws, more durable than the pyramids, and more legible than the 

 hieroglyphics of the Egyptian porphyries. He has engraved on our 

 natures, as well as in the record of revelation, " Seek, and ye shall find ; 

 knock, and it shall be opened unto you." In the exercise of this 

 high endowment of our nature, we glorify in the highest degree the 

 attributes of our Creator ; and who is he that shall dare to say such 

 pursuits are unholy or opposed to the ends of man's being? That 

 person, if such there be, is an anachronism in time, and a traitor to his 

 being. Better that he should never have been, or that he should have 

 lived amidst the darkness of the middle ages, than that he should deck 

 himself out in the pride of ignorance, as in a marriage garment, and 

 mislead the helpless prejudices of the unlearned. Truly that man 

 arraigns the wisdom and beneficence of God, and vilifies the dignity of 

 his own nature.' 



AgaiB, in 1854, lie wi'ote tlius to a relative : — 



* It has never yet been pretended that there has been a divine revela- 

 tion expounding the knowledge of the natural world. The Almighty 

 has given lis reason, and left us, by the adequate exercise of that power, 

 to investigate the laws and order of Creation. Take Astronomy, and 

 see what has been done in it. Is there any educated person now living 

 that believes " that the siui was made to rule by day, and the moon by 

 night," as servile attendants on the earth ? — No ; not one. Does any 

 one noAV believe that the sun loUs round the earth ? — No. Yet in 

 former times the imiversal belief of mankind at the present day was 

 denoxmced as a damning heresy, opposed to the Bible. Geology is noAV 

 passing through the ordeal that Astronomy did in the daj's of Galileo. 

 When the ignorant and bigoted fail in reason and argument, they raise 

 the yell of intolerance, and charge the science with infidelity. The 

 odium of the term serves their end for a time, but what follows ? This 

 denounced infidel doctrine, after the lapse of a few years, becomes the 

 accepted faith of all mankind, philosophical and religious. When, 

 therefore, in a good cause the imputation of infidelity is raised, one 

 need not be ashamed of it. There can be no two truths in Nature 

 opposed to each othei*. True religion and true science can never be 

 irreconcileable. As regards the creation of the world, the evidence is 

 as clear that millions and millions of years must have elapsed between 

 the first appearance of life on tlie earth and the present day, as that 



