showeth his handiwork. But the law, also, of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The heavens are our witnesses; earth is full of our depositaries; truth must spring up where the Creator hath sown it; and philosophers at last must be its tributaries. The Christian may well rejoice in the progress of science, and gladly give it a free and unfettered course. Knowledge shall be the stability of the times of the Messiah; and the mind of man, enlightened in the knowledge of the word and works of God, shall be freed from the nebulosity which enshrouds it, and the light shall be divided from the darkness. And then shall the greatness of his works be seen, and the truth of his word be made manifest. But although, compared to that full flood of light, only the first flush of dawn may seem to be arising now over all the subject before us, whence, we ask, came this light, were it far fainter than it is? Is it not enough to scare away the children of darkness from the field which they have assumed as their own? What invention of man ever bore a similitude to truths ever previously unknown and only newly discovered, like that very record which skepties have assailed? And how are all imaginative cosmogonies of former ages swallowed up by that of Moses, as were the rods of the Egyptian magicians by that of Aaron? Can our great calculators tell what is the sum of the improbabilities that such an analogy, if not founded on fact, would have subsisted or could be traced from first to last between the observations of Sir W. Herschel, the opinions of La Place, the accumulated and classified discoveries of geologists, and the short and simple record of Moses? Before Herschel handled a telescope, or La Place had studied the laws of planetary motion, or Cuvier had touched a fossil bone, what Vulcanist, or Neptunist (combating whether the crust of the earth was of aqueous or igneous origin), or other uninspired mortal, could have described the order of succession, in the creation of the heavens and of the earth, and marked in six successive periods the rank of each, in so close conformity with the recent discoveries both of astronomy and geology, when the name of science can be attached to these words, like the man who, three thousand years ago, could humanly know nothing of either from the mud of the Nile or from the sands of the desert? What man on earth, from the beginning of the creation, ever recorded its history with such conformity to existing observations and discoveries, as did He of whom the scripture saith, God made known his ways unto Moses? And has not this word its visible illustration in the first page of the Pentateuch, as well as in every prophecy which he uttered? And may we not finally ask whether the testimony, borne |