n to know him by his works. Creation is
thus God's great object lesson for men and angels to learn. But learning
is a process, gradual, slow, from one step to another. Therefore the
object lesson must not be precipitated all in a heap upon the infantile
intellects of the learners, but unfolded by degrees. Geologists assure
us that so it was in the past; that first the lifeless strata were
deposited; next, light was evolved; afterward, fishes, and marine
reptiles, and birds; then came the carboniferous or plant era; afterward
the mammalia; last of all man. You observe here an ascending scale of
creation, beginning with first principles and simple forms, and
ascending to the most complicated; a series of experiments in God's
great lecture-room, illustrative of the various steps of the evolution
of the divine idea. But six thousand years before geology was born Moses
described this same evolution of creation, in the first chapter of
Genesis. As he could not have learned it from any science known in his
day, God Himself must have shown it to him.

The divine idea is still in process of evolution for our instruction. We
behold it in the continual formation of new strata by the destruction of
the old; in the chemical combinations of the elements of the air, sea,
and earth; in the evolution of the grass from the seed, and of the oak
from the acorn; in the development of the insect germ into the
caterpillar, and the butterfly; in the hatching of the egg into the
chicken; and in the growth of the infant into the man. We observe also a
divine development of society, an advance of civilization, a
providential guidance of history, and a fall and disorder among mankind,
with a process of redemption, medical, educational, political and
religious, for the human race. The whole process, therefore, of the
creation, natural history, and moral government of the world, is the
development of a divine idea, according to a divine plan, by the direct
or mediate efficacy of divine power, for the accomplishment of the
divine purpose as revealed to us in the divine word, the Holy
Scriptures. Galen taught that the study of physiology was a divine hymn.
This divine development is to be clearly and sharply distinguished from
the atheistic theory of evolution. They differ in the following
particulars:

1. The divine development of the world is a great fact; the theory of
atheistic evolution is only a baseless theory, a fiction.

2. The divine deve