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plants that power omnipotent could create, or wisdom infinite contrive, formed the curtains to their nuptial bed. Their food the fruits, their drink the crystal well; with juice of grape, that cheers the heart of God and man. The fishes of the sea, the fowls of the air, and the beasts of the field, were their

servants.

About them, frisking, play'd

All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase,
In wood or wilderness, forest or den;

Sporting the lion ramp'd, and in his paw

Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,

Gambol'd before them; the unwieldy elephant,

To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreath'd
His lithe proboscis; close the serpent sly,
Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine

His braided train, and of his fatal guile
Gave proof unheeded. Others on the grass
Couch'd.

MILTON, Book IV., 340.

Angels, and the Lord of angels, were their companions. Perfect and upright, reflecting their Great Maker's image in their souls-their heads crowned with dignity and honour-their hearts pure as innocency-their bodies healthful, and enduring as immortals-their atmosphere invariable, and more genial than that of any climate now on earth. In league with the beasts of the field, they needed no clothes to cover, nor house to shelter and protect them. Rebellion being cast down to hell, (shortly, perhaps, before the fall, about ninety years after the creation, for Satan and Adam were created nearly on the same day, Satan on the first, Adam on the sixth; the former about five in the morning, the latter about nine, perhaps,) there was nothing to hurt or destroy in heaven above, or on the earth beneath. Well might the great Creator, when He surveyed the heavens shining in all their glory, and the earth smiling in all her beauty when He beheld His six days' work complete and perfect, pronounce, with the greatest complacency and delight, that All was very good. But, alas! the morning of this world, which shone without the smallest cloud, was soon awfully overcast. Soon the crown of innocence and obedience was cast from the head of the lord of this world, and moral, together with all physical evil in its train, entered, never to depart till the earth and these visible heavens be no more. Sceptics may doubt, and infidels may madly disbelieve; but the problem how it entered had never been solved, unless the Scriptures had informed us, That by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and death passed upon all men, be cause all have sinned. Disorder, discord, hatred, disease, and

death, have entered, and defaced the natural and moral world; both of which, reason coincides with revelation in declaring, must have been originally perfect, coming from a Being of order and perfection absolute. Overlooking many more ancient and eventful engagements since the Scottish nobility suffered at the battle of Halidon Hill, 19th July, 1333; and at Neville's Cross, 17th October, 1346; and her king, at Sauchie Burn, 18th June, 1408,-awful must have been the havoc on the 24th June, 1314, 9th September 1513, 1805, and 1815, on the fields of Bannockburn, Flodden, Austerlitz, and Waterloo, ere the sun, which arose calm and serene in the east, shone red like blood in the west. Dreadful was the loss of human life in the advance to, and retreat from Moscow in 1812, when Bonaparte left 433,000 men, and, in 1813, where he lost 300,000. The fishes of the sea must have been gorged with human carnage, and the sea itself dyed with blood, when the invincible Armada was dispersed and destroyed, and, like Pharaoh's host, overwhelmed by the blast of the Lord and the breath of His nostrils, and the floating worlds of France and Spain were wrecked and sunk on Trafalgar's coast. From 1793 to 1815, we annihilated the navies of France, Spain, and every kingdom that Bonaparte stirred up against us. The Lord fought for Britain. Will He do so now, when we have leagued with the man of sin-are, by statute, profaning the Sabbath-and, by the pretended science, geology, (See Pye Smith's Geology, First Impressions of England, and the Bass Rock,) are openly, avowedly, and unblushingly, aiding and abetting infidelity? The Almighty made the flood the instrument of effecting all that is paraded by geologists. Was He not able? Could He not make that powerful instrument sufficient to lay the slate, the lime, the coal, the salt, the sandstone, the chalk, the ironstone, the clay, &c., all pure? Could He not raise all the hills and mountains, without keeping the centre of the earth boiling like a seething caldron? The infidel dreams of geologists are gratuitous assertions, assumptions, suppositions, unfounded inferences, and deductions,-begun by Hutton, carried on by Playfair, supported by Candlish, Cunningham, Fleming, Miller, Rose, Lyon, W. L. Alexander, and his protege, Mr. Wight, Burnside, Doune, poor man George Lawson, Selkirk, and the majority of the voluntary Synod, and many, too many more; while the Bible accounts for all that has passed, or shall pass upon this earth till time be no more. God is true; the Bible is His Word. Therefore the Bible, like its Author, is the very truth. Pye Smith, in his Geology, incontrovertibly shews, that the

whole of the Geological Society of London, consisting of about 3000 gentlemen, clerical and lay, are deeply tinged with infidelity. Geology, as taught, is incipient infidelity, and, conjoined with Popery, the curse, the plague-spot, the certain ruin of Britain, if timely repentance, and mercy undeserved, do not prevent. There is no science that contravenes the Bible and teaches infidelity, but geology. Dr. M'Crie had better not gone snacks with Hugh Miller, Esq. Oh! had his father been alive! But all must dabble in geology who aspire to be great. But its path is the way to hell, leading down to the chambers of death, (Exod. xx 11; Gen. i.) We know we are right, in spite of all men. God is on our side. We have His infallible Word, and right reason, and common sense. Mr. Miller's and Pye Smith's, like the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, by somebody in his secret chambers, leads directly to Atheism It carries absurdity, inconsistency, impossibility, in the very face of it. We speak advisedly. It is a thousand pities to see Mr. Miller prostituting the best of talents to the service of the wicked one-garbling the Bible -creating doubts where he well knew none existed-producing the infidel opinions even of an Isaac Taylor, who says, in thus mentioning the relation of modern sciences to Christianity, We are not thinking of anything so small and incidental as are the alleged discrepancies between the terms of Biblical History, in certain instances, and the positive evidence of science. All such discordancies, whether real or apparent, will find their proper means of adjustment readily and finally in due time. We have no anxieties on the subject. Men easily shaken in mind, will rid themselves of atoms of faith, which, perhaps, they once possessed, by the means of difficul ties such as these. But it is not from causes so superficial that serious danger to the faith of a people is to be apprehended. If that be not the very essence of latitudinarian infidelity, we know neither the name nor the thing. The discrepancies between the terms of Biblical History and the positive evidence of science, the science of geology, forsooth,

are small and incidental. Is it a small thing, that geology get a local habitation and a name between the first and second, or first and third verses of the first chapter of Genesis! where, H. Miller says, between the creation of the matter of which this earth is composed, as annunciated in the first verse, and the earth's void and chaotic state, a thousand creations might have interrupted. Would Faustus Socinus, or even Hume or Voltaire, have made a bolder assertion? (See Pye Smith and Wight.) But, to make a long tale short, they shall not

get there, but like a flea, or a bug, or some baser interloper. (See Pye Smith for the alleged discrepancies.) As to the positive evidence of the science of geology before the flood, it is nowhere to be found within the limits of the creation of God. We demand written evidence more credible than the Bible. The atoms of faith, so lightly treated, are the existence and attributes of Jehovah,-His eternal law and everlasting Gospel. Everything depends upon the veracity, the unchangeableness of God; the ordinances of day and night, (Jer. xxxi. 35-37 ;) seed-time and harvest, summer and winter, (Gen. viii. 22.) These are important atoms; but what are these to the Divinity, the atonement of the Son-the personality and the influences of the Spirit-all the blessings of the new and well-ordered covenant? These are all atoms depending on the truth and immutability of God. (See Robert Walker's Sermon on 1 John v. 11.) Will the name of Walker-the reasoning of Walker in that sermon-have no weight in the Court of Session, the House of Lords, or, what is more awful, impartial, dispassionate, and irreversible, the Court of Heaven? Atoms of faith! And must the precious atoms of faith, unfaltering belief in the whole of God's revealed will, be given to support heaven-daring, hell-preparing geology. Tell it not in Gath, (2 Sam. i. 20.) We do not care a boddle for Isaac Taylor, Hugh Miller, nor all the infidel geologists on earth, (Psal. lxii. 9 ;)-infidel clearly, if they allow any miscalled science to darken, dissect, dismember, or contravene, or come in collision with the Word of the living God, (Psal. xix. 7.) Perish every science that may put in jeopardy the science of salvation. Mr. Miller may shelter himself behind what he reckoned three great names, the green sward now covering one of them-talk absurdly of his five or six creations, and the mighty deeds of limpets, mussels, and crabs— sinking, in the most profound bathos, by the work-day week drawing fast to its close, and to-morrow being the Sabbath. He might talk of the puerilities, although, so far as he kept in generals, like Mr. Miller in his analogy, they were rather the virilities of Mr. Cockburn, the Dean of York. And saying, that no cataclysm could have produced diversities of style, each restricted to a determinate period,-no cataclysm could have arranged an infinitude of entries in exact chronological order, or assigned to the tribes and families which it destroyed and interred, distinct consecutive periods and formations. Admitting all this to be correct, whereas it is completely, he knew, the reverse, the question is not, what such a cataclysm could do? but what the Almighty could do

with such a cataclysm? The cataclysm itself would have done terrible things; but what He who sent it could do by it, who can estimate! That is the proper statement. Could the Almighty destroy the earth to the extent of about five miles, by opening the fountains of the great deep; and could He, by the flood, lay the clay roofing-slate, the lime-stone, the sandstone, like Craigleith quarry, the 30 to 50 seams of coal, sandstone, and shale, the iron-stone, the salt, the clay, the chalk, &c., &c., all pure, all in the same order, from the east to the west, and the north to the south? Could he imbed all the fossils by the waters of the flood? Dare Mr. Miller say He could not? We admit none of his mays, buts, ifs, digressions, deductions, inductions. Could the Almighty do all that has been done by the flood, and by the other machinery of Omnipotence, in the brief space of a year? If He could, geology, infidel, unscriptural geology, which no real Christian could retain or disseminate, is gone for ever. The critics are all tarred with the same stick. The Witness of October 31, 1846, and even the First Impressions of England, when collected and partly enlarged, by telling that he was helped to Exodus ii. 1-3, carefully concealing or overlooking verse 4, was suggested by Mr. Stuart of Cromarty. Very good for a minister of the Church of Scotland, and he alleged he was the last of that genus or species in that place,-very commendable for him, to teach one of his hearers to garble and destroy the Bible, to falsify and pervert the Word of the God of truth. Some things should never be known. Mr. Miller has made the earth and clay press heavily on the breast of Mr. Stuart. He has sold himself, like Ahab, to do evil in the sight of the Lord. He should not implicate his fathers, Chaliners and Stuart, when they are gone to the land of deep forgetfulness. Leave that to Pye Smith. We may meet Hugh Miller again; in the meantime, let him admit in the Witness, what he dare not deny, that he now sees that the Almighty God could have easily and perfectly laid all the strata, and embedded all the fossils, by the flood of Noah ; and that, like Dr. Nichol, with the infidel Nebular Theory-not unallied to Mr.Miller's geology-he must now withdraw it. Those whom he has perverted and corrupted, may retain it, like Mr. George Lyon, who keeps all he gets; but he will relinquish it for ever. Do not let him say again, The Christian has nothing to fear, the infidel nothing to hope, from the great truths of geology. Geology is simply an expansion of view in the direction of the eternity that hath gone by. Let him blush at the stupidity of the latter, and

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