e outline of those great
events which, in the slow course of revolving centuries, have made
England what she is, her earlier ages seem so far removed from our own
times that they appear to belong to a hoary and most remote antiquity.
But then, when you compare those times with even the existing works of
man, and when you remember that, when England was yet young in
civilization, the pyramids of Egypt were already grey with 1500 years,
you have got another step which impresses you with a doubled amount of
vastness. Double that period, and you come to the far distant moment
when the present aspect of this world was called, by creation, out of
the formless void in which it was before.

Modern science has raised us to a pinnacle of thought beyond even
this. It has commanded us to think of countless ages in which that
formless void existed before it put on the aspect of its present
creation. Millions of years before God called the light day, and the
darkness night, there was, if science speaks true, creation after
creation called into existence, and buried in its own ruins upon the
surface of this earth. And then, there was a time beyond even
this--there was a moment when this earth itself, with all its
countless creations and innumerable ages, did not exist. And, again,
in that far back distance it is more than conceivable, it seems by the
analogy of God's dealings next to certain, that ten thousand worlds
may have been called into existence, and lasted their unnumbered ages,
and then perished in succession. Compared with these stupendous
figures, 6,000 years of _our_ planet sink into nothingness. The mind
is lost in dwelling on such thoughts as these. When you have
penetrated far, far back, by successive approximations, and still see
the illimitable distance receding before you as distant as before,
imagination absolutely gives way, and you feel dizzy and bewildered
with new strange thoughts, that have not a name.

But this is only one aspect of the case. It looks only to time past.
The same overpowering calculations wait us when we bend our eyes on
that which is to come. Time stretches back immeasurably, but it also
stretches on and on for ever. Now it is by such a conception as this
that the inspired prophet attempts to measure the immeasurable of God.
All that eternity, magnificent as it is, never was without an
Inhabitant. Eternity means nothing by itself. It merely expresses the