4.72 Rough Notes on the controversy against Geologists. 



nature and happiness of his rational offspring, who had sunk 

 themselves into degradation of moral character and misery 

 through sin ; and he can see the development of that plan, 

 under the pens of numerous successive writers of various 

 temperaments of mind and views ; with such marked allusions 

 to the manners and events of each passing age, and in such 

 dialects of language too, as render the date of each succes- 

 sive book impossible to be mistaken. In the whole, there is 

 apparent to him that singular moral phenomenon in the 

 history of man, a connected series of steps of the plan evolv- 

 ed one after another in these distinct writings through the 

 lapse of so many ages, downwards nearly to the time of 

 the full completion of the revelation in the perfect light 

 of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. This he con- 

 siders justly to be irrefragable evidence that these men 

 wrote, not of themselves, but moved and guided by the 

 Spirit of God, for on no other supposition can the unity 

 of purpose in such a long series of writings be explained. 

 These writings, now collected, form the Old Testament 

 of our Bibles, which is too apt to be popularly looked up- 

 on as one book only, and thus to loose much of that weight 

 which its character, as a collection of books of widely re- 

 mote times, would impart. That these writings are authen- 

 tic, there is also to the man of a philosophical mind evidence 

 of the strongest kind, besides that which is vulgarly received ; 

 for in addition to their styles and contents, he can perceive 

 a standing miracle setting forth their truth, — the Jews, pre- 

 served as a distinct people until the fulness of Christianity 

 shall overspread the earth, as witnesses to the Divine origin 

 of their law, the heavy yoke of which, though once forced 

 upon them, a reluctant people, by direct prodigies from 

 heaven, they now cling to and venerate. They have watched 

 from the first, as vigilant guardians of the purity of the text 

 of all the sacred writings relating to that law, that no inter- 

 polation in them might be suffered either from among them- 



