130 
CORRESPONDENCE. 
set aside the headship of Jesus—the Son of Man—as the object of the 
eternal, unchangeable purpose of God the Father. 
But I press the difficulty of death farther yet. Geologists tell us 
that many species of animals found, in the strata of the later pre-human 
eras are absolutely identical with those which at present inhabit this 
world. Thus, the older Pliocene formations of the Tertiary period con¬ 
tain existing species to the amount of 60 to 70 per cent, of the whole 
(Lyell, in Geol. Proc., 1841). Among these are all the three species of 
Deer now inhabiting these islands, the ancestors of which were con¬ 
temporaneous with the Mammoth of Siberia, and with the great Cavern 
Bear, and the fossil Tiger of the Yorkshire caves. 
ISTow, suppose a Christian geologist and myself chanced to be walking 
on Ascot Heath at the moment when the royal hounds had brought a 
noble stag to bay. We witness the distress of the animal; his vain 
efforts at escape or defence; his agony as the life-blood pours from his 
throat under the fangs of his assailants; and his convulsive throes of 
death. I ask my friend, “ Whence come the sufferings of this creature, 
incapable of persoaal sin ?” He would doubtless answer, being a Chris¬ 
tian, “Death is entailed upon its race because of the fall of Man, its 
federal Head.” Ho other answer could be given, since there can be no 
exception to the category of “the whole creation,” or “ every creature” 
(naGa y icn'cris), which is spoken of as involved in Man’s lapse, and wait¬ 
ing for Man’s glory. 
But I rejoin to my friend,—“ That cannot be; for you tell me that 
this race of stags has been dying, generation after generation, ever since 
the middle Tertiary period; that is, long ages before Man was created. 
Death certainly did not come upon the red deer as the result of Adam’s 
sin, since it was already a dying race long before.” 
I do not see what answer he could make. If he should assert that 
some previous Head of Creation had entailed death on the cervine race, I 
would reply, that (waiving the objections I have already brought against 
such a hypothesis, as subversive of the headship of the Lord Jesus) 
this would involve the absurdity of the creatures’ surviving the dynasty 
of their representative, with whom they had been identified, and carry¬ 
ing the punitive results of his sin into the dominion of a new federal 
Head. It would involve, too, the intolerable supposition, that, from day 
to day, when God, surveying his handiwork in detail, pronounced it 
good, and at the close of the sixth day took an infinite complacency in 
it as a whole,—in that, “behold it was very g ood,”—death was already 
lording it over many of the creatures, and had been doing so all along, 
transmitting into this new creation the ruin and decay of a former one! 
Probably I shall be met with the hackneyed remark, “ the Bible is 
not intended to teach us science.” How few who make this remark 
kno w what the Bible really is intended to teach ! It is not a mere code 
of laws: it is not a book of ethics. Heither is it, as many Christians 
seem to think, a mere book of instructions to man, as to how he may be 
delivered from the wrath to come. Blessed be God! there is this in it; 
bat, oh ! this is far short of the mind of the Holy Ghost in revelation. 
