SCRIPTURE AND GEOLOGY. 105 
evident that giving light to the inhabitants of the earth is one of 
the offices they are appointed to fulfil. Nor do they regard them- 
selves as becoming worse Christians as they become better as- 
tronomers. It is said also that the heavenly bodies were placed 
in that firmament, which in the 7th verse is represented as having 
waters under it, and waters above it, and to be therefore within the 
limits of the earth's atmosphere. 
There is nothing in the discoveries and speculations of sound 
and accurate geologists, that will be found to militate against the 
Christian faith, when the objects of the revelations of God are 
well understood. It appears never to have been the object of the 
Deity to communicate to his creatures physical truth ; to teach 
them astronomy, or chemistry, or geology. He leaves them to 
make advances in the sciences by means of the faculties he has 
given them, and only instructs them in their duties to himself, 
and to each other, arising from their relations to Him as their 
Maker, and to each other, as fellow creatures. We may perhaps 
say with truth that this is the only object worthy of the interpo- 
sition of the Deity ; that it would be beneath the Divine majesty 
to teach those elements of the sciences, which we shall discover 
in due time by the exertion of our own intellectual powers. 
It being then the object of the Deity to communicate moral 
truth, the sacred penman does not enter into any minute philo- 
sophical details. In giving an account of what took place on the 
earth before the creation of man, he does not write a system of 
geology, and tell in what succession, and at what intervals, the 
strata of Palestine, England, or America, assumed their present 
form and were consolidated. The introduction of such matter 
into a book intended in the first instance for the simple and un- 
polished Hebrews, and afterwards, for the instruction of the poor 
and ignorant of every country and every age, would evidently 
have been inexpedient, and a proof that the writer was not under 
the guidance of an influence proceeding from above. In speak- 
ing of man, God must use the language of men, or he will not be 
understood. As in giving an account of the creation of the 
heavenly bodies, the expressions of Moses are evidently accom- 
modated to the first, and familiar notions of mankind, derived from 
the sensible appearances of the earth and heavens, so throughout 
the whole history of the creation, the leading object seems to be, 
not to tell us by what particular process the various bodies around 
us came into existence from nothing, but to let us know in lan- 
guage the best fitted for the purpose that could be employed, that 
it was by successive exertions of Almighty power, that the earth 
was brought into its present form and condition — a truth which 
the discoveries of geology abundantly establish. 
It is supposed to be the opinion of every respectable living 
geologist, that, the earth had existed, and been inhabited byliving 
creatures, and subjected to various catastrophes and changes, many 
thousands of ages before the creation of man. But all thosemore 
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