mon described the cycloidal course of the wind, and recorded it in
Ecclesiastes long before Admiral Fitzroy's discovery; as he also
anticipated the doctrine of aqueous circulation in his pregnant proverb:
"Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return
again."--Ecclesiastes i. 7. Job declared the law of pneumatics when he
declared that "God maketh _weight_ for the winds." Long before Madler,
the celebrated Russian astronomer, published his remarkable opinion: "I
regard the Pleiades as the central group to the whole astral system, and
the fixed stars, even to its outer limits, marked by the Milky Way; and
I regard Alcyone as that star of all others, composing the group which
is favored by most of the probabilities as being the true central sun of
the universe," Moses tells us they were known as "the hinge, or pivot,"
of the heavens; and God asks, "Canst thou bind the secret influences of
the Pleiades?" Though Peter was no geologist, and probably incapable of
calculating the ratio of the central heat, he tells us that the heavens
and the earth are "reserved unto fire," literally, "stored with fire."

Equally in advance of modern medical science, thousands of years before
our modern discoveries, the Author of the Bible declared that "the life
is in the blood," and spoke of the slow combustion of starvation exactly
in the language of the most recent physiology, "they shall be _burnt_
with hunger, and devoured with burning heat."--Deuteronomy xxxii. 24.

Here we have scientific truth not discovered for centuries by our men of
science, but revealed by prophets--scientific discovery, in advance of
science--predictions of the future progress of the human intellect, no
less than revelations of the existing motions of the stars. He who wrote
these oracles knew that the creatures to whom he gave them would one day
unfold their hidden meaning (else he had not so written them), and in
the light of scientific discovery, see them to be as truly divine
predictions of the advance of science, as the prophecies of Jeremiah and
Ezekiel, read among the ruins of Thebes or Babylon, are seen to be
predictions of the ruin of empires. Man's discoveries fade into
insignificance in the presence of such unfolding mysteries; and we are
led to our Bibles, with the prayer, "Open mine eyes, that I may behold
wondrous things out of thy law."

4. The ancient charter of the Church was written in the language of one
of the most recent ast