l, so it was equally predetermined that the dynasty of responsible,
fallible man should be succeeded by the dynasty of glorified, immortal
man; and that, in consequence, the present mixed state of things is not
a mere result, as some theologians believe, of a certain human act which
was perpetrated about six thousand years ago, but was, virtually at
least, the effect of a God-determined decree, old as eternity,--a decree
in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme. In
looking abroad on that great history of life, of which the latter
portions are recorded in the pages of revelation, and the earlier in the
rocks, I feel my grasp of a doctrine first taught me by our Calvinistic
Catechism at my mother's knee, tightening instead of relaxing. "The
decrees of God are his eternal purposes," I was told, "according to the
counsel of his will, whereby for his own glory he hath foreordained
whatsoever comes to pass." And what I was told early I still believe.
The programme of Creation and Providence, in all its successive periods,
is of God, not of man. With the arrangements of the old geologic
periods it is obvious man could have had nothing to do: the primeval
ages of wondrous plants and monster animals ran their course without
counsel taken of him; and in reading their record in the bowels of the
earth, and in learning from their strange characters that such ages
there were, and what they produced, we are the better enabled to
appreciate the impressive directness of the sublime message to Job, when
the "Lord answered him out of the whirlwind, and said, Where wast thou
when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast
understanding." And I can as little regard the present scene of things
as an ultimate consequence of what man had willed or wrought, as even
any of the pre-Adamic ages. It is simply one scene in a foreordained
series,--a scene intermediate in place between the age of the
irresponsible mammal and of glorified man; and to provide for the upward
passage to the ultimate state, we know that, in reference to the
purposes of the Eternal, he through whom the work of restoration has
been effected was in reality what he is designated in the remarkable
text, "The Lamb slain from the _foundations_ of the world." First in the
course of things, man in the image of God, and next, in meet sequence,
God in the form of man, have been equally from all eternity
predetermined actors in the same great s