CONSISTENCY OF GEOLOGY WITH SACRED HISTORY. 435 



after their creation, were in the course of reproduction, life, death, 

 deposition, consolidation, and preservation. ; v ,: ;;,;^ 



We will not enquire whether almighty power inserted plants and ani- 

 mals in mineral masses, and was thus exerted in working a long series 

 of useless miracles, without design or end, and therefore incredible. 

 The man who can believe, for example, that the Iguanodon, with his 

 gigantic form, seventy feet in length, ten in height, and fifteen in girth, 

 was created in the midst of consolidated sandstone, and placed down 

 one thousand or twelve hundred feet from the surface of the earth, in 

 a rock composed of ruins and fragments, and containing vegetables, 

 shells, fish, and rolled pebbles ; such a man can believe any thing, 

 with or without evidence. If there are any such persons, we must 

 leave them to their own reflections, since they cannot be influenced 

 by reason and sound argument; with them we can sustain no discuss- 

 ion, for there is no common ground upon which we can meet. 



The order of the physical events, discovered by geology, is the 

 same as that recorded by the sacred historian ; that is, as far as the 

 latter has gone, for it was, evidently, no part of his object to enter 

 any farther into details, than to state that the world was the work of 

 God, and thus he was naturally led to mention the principal divisions 

 of natural things, as they were successively created. 



The Bible is not a book of physical science, and its allusions to 

 physical subjects are, in the main, adapted to common apprehensions. 

 Still, the creation and the deluge, although they have a momentous 

 moral bearing, are, in their nature, entirely physical. Why should 

 any one refuse to attend to a history of these two stupendous events, 

 merely because that history professes to have proceeded from the same 

 author as the work itself; and why should we suppose that the brief 

 notices of the great physical facts, connected with a physical creatioji 

 and a physical destruction, are not correctly stated, in this earhest 

 and most venerable of histories ? 



If all our discoveries regarding the surface and the interior of the 

 planet tend, when properly understood, to confirm the credibility of 

 both these events, and to enable us to discriminate betw^een the cir- 

 cumstances and evidence which belong to them respectively — what 

 moral consideration can, in this case, forbid a happy application of 

 the discoveries of science, and why should science refuse to lend its 

 aid to the support of moral truth ! 



The question then recurs ; — how can the amount of time be found, 

 consistently with the Mosaic history, for the order of time is the same. 

 The solution of this difficulty has been attempted in the following 

 modes. 



