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reverse in the present day. Certain scientists now start with ignoring the 
idea of a God, and, starting thus, it would be a miracle if they ever found 
Him. No attempt is made to reconcile the phenomena of creation with the 
idea of a personal God ; on the contrary, they try to find the best explana- 
tion they can of natural phenomena without reference to any such idea. To 
this fact I attribute many, if not all, the crude ideas, so full of evil results, 
with which men vainly seek to explain the phenomena by which we are 
surrounded. How vain these attempts none adequately feel but those who 
are acquainted with the better way, and who, starting with the idea of a 
personal Creator, have found that the wider their view ranged the more 
perfectly everything fitted in. Some twelve or fifteen years ago my friend, 
Professor Owen, in one of his great works on Comparative Anatomy, 
concluded with a few noble words, in which he asserted, in opposition to 
the various theories which had begun to darken the scientific atmosphere, 
that “ the highest generalizations in the science of organic bodies, like the 
Newtonian laws of universal matter, lead to the conviction of a great First 
Cause, which is certainly not mechanical ” (Owen’s Palaeontology, p. 451). 
Such an admission from a man so able and so fair as Professor Owen well- 
deserves to be treasured up in all our minds. For my part, without pro- 
fessing to be more than a tyro in science, I confess I have watched the 
development of all these theories with great interest, though I cannot say 
with much anxiety. Nay, the discoveries of science have swept away many 
of the difficulties I used to experience in reading the Bible. I never was 
able, until geology began to claim its own, to understand many of the pro- 
phetical declarations of Scripture, e.g., those in Isaiah and the Apocalypse 
regarding the “ new heavens and the new earth,” or where the Psalmist 
says, “ As a vesture shait Thou change them, and they shall be changed ; 
but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.” Without the 
assistance of geology I should never have been able to form a definite con- 
ception of the Psalmist’s meaning; but when I found what marvellous 
transformations in its strata, or outer rind, this earth— and doubtless other 
orbs have all followed the same law — has frequently undergone, I saw at 
once what was meant by the “ earth and the heavens ” being “ changed as 
a vesture ” while awaiting that still greater and more glorious change when 
there will be entirely “ new heavens and a new earth.” If I might quote 
Luther, it was he who said that we now saw this earth only in its work-a- 
day dress, but that hereafter we should see it in its garments of “ glory 
and beauty.” It is only through geology that we can form anything like 
a clear conception of what awaits our planet in the future, because it 
is that science which alone supplies the means of comparing the present 
with the past. 
Mr. D. Howard. — I hardly like to rise for the purpose of offering any 
remarks on Professor Stokes’s paper, because I feel that to comment upon so 
valuable a contribution would, to a great extent, be diluting it. It is a 
paper we shall all be exceedingly anxious to read, and which we shall read 
