ress of the human
mind. These words contain a negation of hero-worship, star-worship,
animal-worship, and every other form of idolatry. They still more
emphatically deny atheism and materialism, and point upward from
nature to its spiritual Creator--the One, the Triune, the Eternal, the
Self-Existent, the All-Pervading, the Almighty. They call upon us, as
with a voice of thunder, to bow down before that Awful Being of whom
it can be said that he created the heavens and the earth. They thus
embody the whole essence of natural theology, and most appropriately
stand at the entrance of Holy Scripture, referring us to the works
which men behold, as the visible manifestation of the attributes of
the Being whose spiritual nature is unveiled in revelation. Scripture
thus begins with the announcement of a great ultimate fact, to which
science conducts us with but slow and timid steps. Yet science, and
especially geological science, can bear witness to this great truth.
The materialist, reasoning on the fancied stability of natural things,
and their inscription within invariable laws, concludes that matter
must be eternal. No, replies the geologist, certainly not in its
present form. This is but of recent origin, and was preceded by other
arrangements. Every existing species can be traced back to a time when
it was not; so can the existing continents, mountains, and seas. Under
our processes of investigation the present melts away like a dream,
and we are landed on the shores of past and unknown worlds. But I
read, says the objector, that you can see "no evidence of a beginning,
no prospect of an end." It is true, answers geology; but, in so
saying, it is not intended that the present state of things had not an
ascertained beginning, but that there has been a great and, so far as
we know, unlimited series of changes carried on under the guidance of
intelligence. These changes we have traced back very far, without
being able to say that we have reached the first. We can trace back
man and his contemporaries to their origin, and we can reach the
points at which still older dynasties of life began to exist. Knowing,
then, that all these had a beginning, we infer that if others preceded
them they also had a beginning. But, says another objector, is not the
present the child of the past? Are not all the creatures that inhabit
the earth the lineal descendants of creatures of past periods, or may
not the whole be parts of one continual s