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scrutiny with the same results. Everything is in accordance 
with true science. I may summarize them thus : — 
1. In the beginning God gave a perfect existence to the 
earth. 
2. By some cause here unexplained the earth became 
ruined. 
3. The character of that ruin was a crust broken up, the 
mountains levelled, the waters covering the whole surface 
of the earth, the previous light turned into gross darkness. 
4. The Holy Ghost brooding over the whole, instilling a 
renewed life. 
5. Through six successive stages God restored the earth. 
These five principles are in exact accordance with observa- 
tions and natural science. They are the only true account of 
geological phenomena which the world has yet seen. 
They involve also another subject of inquiry and thought, 
which the non-theistic philosophers of the day would do well 
to ponder. 
Why all that ruin to which all geology bears witness ? 
The Bible furnishes a clue, if not an answer : — 
If there was sin before Adam, there was ruin before Adam. 
May not the one have been connected with the other ; and so 
this earth have been the battle-field between sin and holiness, 
— the theatre of probation — a spectacle to angelic worlds ? 
The limits of this essay do not permit me to apply the same 
principles to the narrative of the Noachic flood, with all its 
interesting questions of the redistribution of animals, and of 
the families of men. That Mosaic narrative throws a flood of 
light upon these questions. Without it we could not tell — 
1. Why there are no historic nations south of the Torrid 
Zone. 
2. Why there are no land animals south of the same zone 
which could not have crossed that zone. 
3. Why, with regard to language, philologers have been 
compelled to divide mankind into three great divisions. 
I pass on, however, to another aspect of the scientific in- 
terpretation of Scripture : its suggestive character in the 
scattered notices of natural phenomena. It is often said that 
the Bible was not written to teach science, and therefore we 
need not look for infallibility in its scientific allusions. This 
principle would degrade the sacred volume to a human level. 
If the book be divine, all its statements must be true. The 
word of God, like the works of God, does not present truth in a 
scientific method but in separate phenomena, leaving to men 
the task of arrangement and systematizing. As in the one, so 
in the other, we approximate to a perfect system from age to 
