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and political. It lays down, indeed, no scientific theories, but 
scientific matters are approached and touched upon perpetually 
by its writers, men ignorant of science, and belonging to 
similar classes to those who of old burdened every page with 
unscientific nonsense. Yet on all these grounds it is in the 
judgment of vast numbers of men of the highest learning, 
absolutely unscathed by all the appliances of modem investi- 
gation. If the Book were not what we believe it to be, it 
could not, in this vulnerable condition, have stood such per- 
sistent and searching criticism. It has come forth from the 
fiery ordeal of the last quarter of a century better known, better 
understood, freer from mistaken interpretations than it has 
ever been. 
This field of investigation has been diligently and worthily 
cultivated by this Institute. But there is another ground 
altogether on which the assault is now made, and on which 
the self-complacence of modern thought has often adjudged 
the victory to the assailant. You may answer every objec- 
tion — geological, topographical, arithmetical, and all the rest 
of the motley array — and you are then met with the point- 
blank assertion that the natural indeed exists, or seems to 
exist, whichever it may be, but that there is no supernatural. 
That the Book, therefore, is venerable, majestic, a repertory 
of noble thoughts, and a true record of ancient traditions and 
of the legends which were believed of old, but nothing more. 
That miracle is impossible, or at any rate can never be proved, 
and that, to say nothing of the miraculous facts recorded in 
those pages, the very idea of a revelation, being a super- 
natural communication from Grod to man, must be prima facie 
discarded. Does not the very recital of this dismal belief 
seem to us like one of those sea fogs which some sudden in- 
draught of air has often brought over the landscape ? We 
stood on a promontory ; seaward a dark gloom was brooding 
over the waters; but around us a midday sun was bathing in 
light and warmth the rocks, the grass, the trees, the abodes and 
the works of man. Onward steals the fog, and all is changed; 
each object, indeed, is there; the sun himself has lost no 
particle of his radiance, but he is lost to sight, and cold, dank, 
and dark and cheerless is the face of Nature. So is it with 
that fog of scepticism and that Eternal Sun. Must there, 
then, ever be that cold cheerless separation ? May not one 
ray of truth glint down from the supernal throne to give some 
glimpse of light, some glow of warmth, to this poor darkened 
world ? Has there not been — can there not be — anil revela- 
tion ? 
There are greater depths of darkness yet before us ; still 
