say, that you are very slender in the philosophy of history and historical evidences, for it is a ground you scarcely ever deign to touch upon. But surely it is a distinct subject of inquiry. It has its own principles, and its own probabilities. You must pronounce upon the testimony of Moses on appropriate evidence. It is the testimony of a witness nearer than yourselves to the events in question; and if it be a sound testimony, it carries along with it the testimony of a Being who was something more than an actual spectator of the creation. He was both spectator and agent. And yet all that mighty train of evidence which goes to sustain the revealed history of God's administrations in the world, is by you overlooked and forgotten; and while you so readily lift the cry against the unphilosophical encroachment of foreign principles into your department, you make no conscience of elbowing your own principles into a field which does not belong to them.

"But it is high time to confront the theory of our geologist with the sacred history with a view both to lay down the points of accordancy, and to show in how far we are compelled to modify the speculation, or to disown it altogether.

"But, generally speaking, geologists are not guilty of disowning the act of creation. It is in theorizing on the manner of the act, (and that, too, in the face of testimony which they do not attempt to dispose of,) that they make the most glaring deviation from the spirit and principles of the inductive philosophy. We have no experience in the formation of worlds. Set aside revelation, and we cannot say whether the act of creation is an instantaneous act, or a succession of acts; and no man can tell whether God made this earth and these heavens in a moment of time, or in a week, or in a thousand years, more than he can tell whether the men of Jupiter, if there be any such, live ten years or ten centuries. Both questions lie out of the field of observation; and it is delightful to think, that the very principle

I

which constitutes the main strength of the atheistical argument, goes to demolish all those presumptuous speculations in which the enemies of the Bible attempt to do away the authority of the sacred historian. • The universe,' says Hume, is a singular effect;' and we, therefore, can never know if it proceeded from the hand of an intelligent Creator. But if the Creator takes another method of making us know, the very singularity of the effect is the reason why we should be silent when he speaks to us; and why we, in all the humility of conscious ignorance, should yield our entire submission to the information he lays before us. Surely, if without a revelation, the singularity of the effect leaves us ignorant of the nature of the cause, it leaves us equally ignorant of the modus operandi of this cause. If experience furnish nothing to enlighten us upon this question, Did the universe come from the hand of an intelligent God, it furnishes as little to enlighten us upon the question, Did God create the universe in an instant, or did he do it in seven days, or did he do it in any other number of days that may be specified? These are points which natural reason, exercising itself upon natural appearances, does not qualify us to know; and it were well if a maxim equally applicable to philosophers and to children, were to come in here for our future direction, that what we do not know we should be content to learn ;' and if a revelation, bearing every evidence of authenticity, undertakes the office of informing us, it is our part cheerfully to acquiesce, and obediently to go along with it.

6

"On this principle, we refuse to concede the literal history of Moses, or to abandon it to the fanciful and ever-varying interpretations of philosophers. We fear that the slower revolution of the earth round her axis, is too gratuitous to make the admission of it at all consistent with the just rules of philosophizing; and there is, therefore, no other alternative left to us, but to take the history just as it stands. We leave it to geologists to

judge, whether our concluding observations allow them room enough for bringing about a consistency between the first chapter of Genesis and their theories. In the mean time, we assert that the history in this chapter maintains throughout an entire consistency with itself; a consistency which would be utterly violated, if we offered to allegorize the days, or to take them up in any other sense than that in which they obviously and literally present themselves. What shall we make of the institution of the Sabbath, if we surrender the Mosaic history of the creation? Is it to be conceived that the Jews would understand the description of Moses in any other sense than in the plain and obvious one? Is it to be admitted, that God would incorporate a falsehood in one of his commandments, or at least prefer a reason for the observance of it which was calculated to deceive, and had all the effect of a falsehood? We cannot but resist this laxity of interpretation, which, if suffered in one chapter of the Bible, may be carried to all of them, may unsettle the dearest articles of our faith, and throw a baleful uncertainty over the condition and the prospects of the species.

"We have heard it preferred as an impeachment against the consistency of the Mosaic account, that the day and night were made to succeed each other antecedently to the formation of the sun. This is very true; but it was not antecedent to the formation of light; it was not antecedent to the division of the light from the darkness; it may not have been antecedent to the formation of luminous matter; and though all this matter was not assembled into one body till the fourth day, it may have been separated and made to reside in so much greater abundance in one quarter of the heavens than in the other, as to have given rise to a region of light and a region of darkness. Such an arrangement would, with the revolution of the earth's axis, give rise to a day and a night. Enough for the purpose of making out this succession, if the light formed on the first day was

unequally dispersed over the surrounding expanse, though it was not till this light was fixed and concentrated in one mass, that the sun could be said to rule the day.

"And here let it be observed, that it does not fall upon the defenders of Moses to bring forward positive or specific proofs for the truth of any system reconcileable with his history, beyond the historical evidence of the history itself. A thousand systems may be devised, one of which only can be true, but each of which may be consistent with all the details of the book of Genesis. We cannot, and we do not offer any one of these systems as that which is to be positively received, but we offer them all as so many ways of disposing of the objections; and while upon us lies the bare task of proposing them, upon our antagonists lies the heavy work of overthrowing them all before they can set aside the direct testimony of the sacred historian, or assert that his account of the creation is contradicted by known appearances.

"We crave the attention of our readers to the above remark; and, satisfied that the more they think of it, the more will they be impressed with its justness, we spare ourselves the task of bestowing upon it any farther elucidation."

NOTE X. p. 77.

The conclusion of the same paper by Dr Chalmers, in the last note, we here insert, containing his suggestions of a pre-adamite world-suggestions, be it remembered, published twenty-three years ago.

"We conclude with adverting to the unanimity of geologists in one point, the far superior antiquity of this globe to the commonly received date of it, as taken from the writings of Moses. What shall we make of this? We may feel a security as to those points in which they differ, and, confronting them with one

another, may remain safe and untouched between them. But when they agree, this security fails. There is no neutralization of authority among them as to the age of the world; and Cuvier, with his catastrophes and his epochs, leaves the popular opinion nearly as far behind him, as they who trace our present continent upward through an indefinite series of ancestors, and assign many millions of years to the existence of each generation.

"Should the phenomena compel us to assign a greater antiquity to the globe than to that work of days detailed in the book of Genesis, there is still one way of saving the credit of the literal history: The first creation of the earth and the heavens may have formed no part of that work. This took place at the beginning, and is described in the first verse of Genesis. It is not said

when this beginning was. We know the general impression to be, that it was on the earlier part of the first day, and that the first act of creation formed part of the same day's work with the formation of light. We ask our readers to turn to that chapter, and to read the first five verses of it. Is there any forcing in the supposition that the first verse describes the primary act of creation, and leaves us at liberty to place it as far back as we may; that the first half of the second verse describes the state of the earth (which may already have existed for ages, and been the theatre of geological revolutions,) at the point of time anterior to the detailed operations of this chapter; and that the motion of the Spirit of God, described in the second clause of the second verse, was the commencement of these operations? In this case the creation of the light may have been the great and leading event of the first day; and Moses may be supposed to give us, not a history of the first formation of things, but of the formation of the present system; and as we have already proved the necessity of direct exercises of creative power to keep up the generations of living creatures, so Moses may, for any thing we