20 



all-pervading substance, which vibrates knowledge to our wondering 

 ken out of the unfathomable depths of space, are you prepared to take 

 here your stand ? may you not yet find other and still finer links be- 

 yond ? and if you should, must not the very form of expression, the 

 instantaneous connexion of the thing made with its Maker, — " He spake, 

 and it was created " — become as little scientific, as it is, to the under- 

 standing of all men, superlatively impressive and sublime? 



You see, Gentlemen, what my meaning is. Had it pleased God to 

 endow the ministers of religious truth with supernatural knowledge of 

 the mysteries of nature, they could not have used that knowledge to 

 any practical purpose ; they could not have used it so as to carry the 

 truths they were commissioned to preserve, into the hearts and imagi- 

 nations of mankind ; and so entirely sensible were they themselves of 

 this, that on subjects thus passing the power of language, they not only 

 meddled not with any system of science, but passed over popular ideas, 

 and the common senses of words, to those highly figurative expressions, 

 which are best adapted to impress transcendental truth. 



Who, then, would expect to find in Genesis the chronology or se- 

 quence of Creation ? who can think that he upholds the authority of 

 Scripture by literal constructions of such a history, by concluding from 

 them that the earth was clothed with trees and flowers before the sun 

 was created, or that the great work was measured by six rotations of 

 the earth upon her axis ? It scarcely needed the evidence of physical 

 or geological science to teach us that such a mode of interpreting the 

 sacred writings is utterly unsound : when the same author speaks of 

 man as created in the image of God, every one perceives that this is 

 one of the boldest figures which language can produce ; and in what 

 but a figurative light can we view the days of Creation ? what can we 

 find in such a description but this truth — that the six grand classes of 

 natural phcenomena were, all and each, distinct acts of Divine power, 

 and proceeded from the fiat of a single Creator'^ 



Here, Gentlemen, is a second instance of one of those great points 

 of accordance, where all the conclusions of human science coincide 

 with revealed religion, and none more remarkably than that which has 

 been so falsely termed irreligious Geology ; for as Astronomy shows 

 the unity of the Creator through the immensity of space, so does Geo- 

 logy, along the track of unnumbered ages, and through the successive 

 births of beings, still finding in all the uniform design of the same 

 Almighty power, and the varied fruits of the same unexhausted good- 

 ness. 



Thus, Gentlemen, we have seen in this comparison of two collateral 



