and of its
Divine Author,--saw also by vision the _pattern_ of those successive
pre-Adamic creations, animal and vegetable, through which our world was
fitted up as a place of human habitation. The _reason_ why the drama of
creation has been _optically_ described seems to be, that it was in
reality _visionally_ revealed.

A further question still remains: _If_ the revelation was by vision,
that circumstance affords of itself a satisfactory reason why the
description should be _optical_; and, on the other hand, since the
description is decidedly _optical_, the presumption is of course strong
that the revelation was by vision. But why, it may be asked, by vision?
Can the presumption be yet further strengthened by showing that this
visual mode or form was preferable to any other? Can there be a reason,
in fine, assigned _for_ the _reason_,--for that revelation by vision
which accounts for the optical character of the description? The
question is a difficult one; but I think there can. There seems to be a
peculiar fitness in a revelation made by vision, for conveying an
account of creation to various tribes and peoples of various degrees of
acquirement, and throughout a long course of ages in which the knowledge
of the heavenly bodies or of the earth's history, that is, the sciences
of astronomy and geology, did not at first exist, but in which
ultimately they came to be studied and known. We must recognize such a
mode as equally fitted for the earlier and the more modern times,--for
the ages anterior to the rise of science, and the ages posterior to its
rise. The prophet, by describing what he had actually seen in language
fitted to the ideas of his time, would shock no previously existing
prejudice that had been founded on the apparent evidence of the senses;
he could as safely describe the moon as the second great light of
creation, as he could the sun as its first great light, and both, too,
as equally subordinate to the planet which we inhabit. On the other
hand, an enlightened age, when it had come to discover this key to the
description, would find it _optically_ true in all its details. But how
differently would not a revelation have fared, in at least the earlier
time, that was strictly scientific in its details,--a revelation, for
instance, of the great truth demonstrated by Galileo, that the sun rests
in the centre of the heavens, while the apparently immoveable earth
sweeps with giddy velocity around it; or of