of human art is very brief; when we see how every year heralds in important inventions, showing a progression which, in itself, involves a commencement, we must conclude that our race is not indefinite in its duration, but that it had a definite and specific beginning.

b. REPRODUCTION.

§ 74. Taking the ratio of increase of man, as exhibited during the section of history concerning which we have been able to collect statistics, we have no difficulty in determining that, within a specific range of time, man must have commenced to exist. Here geology, as will be noticed more fully under another head, comes in to point out to us exactly the period of animal creation in which the introduction of man took place.

c. WRITTEN HISTORY.

§ 75. Beyond three, or, at the utmost, four thousand years back, we have no trace of the existence of any authentic history. If man was eternal, with those same capacities for narration which the earliest records display in at least an equal degree with the latest, there is no other way of accounting for this silence except on the hypothesis of some great convulsion which tore apart the lines of communication. But if so, the vivid memory of this great disruption would have been recorded by those who stood on this side of the chasm. They would have left for us, in language the most enduring, their testimony to an event so momentous. But, instead of this, we have tradition, both written and unwritten, all tending the other way.

§ 76. To these remarks may be added the following striking observations of Dr. Chalmers :-"After all, they are the direct testimonies, handed down from one to another in the stream of Jewish and Christian authors, which constitute the main strength and solidity of the historical argument for the historical fact of a creation. There might be fitter occasions for entering into the detail of this evidence, but we hold it not out of place to notice even at present the strong points of it. In tracing the course upwards from the present day, we arrive, by a firm and continuous series of authors, at that period, when not only the truth of the Christian story is guarantied by thousands of dying martyrs, but when the Old Testament Scriptures-these repositories of the Jewish story- obtained a remarkable accession to their evidence, which abundantly compensates for their remoteness from our present age. We allude to the split between two distinct and independent, or stronger still, two bitterly adverse bodies of witnesses at the outset of the Christian economy. The publicity of the New Testament. miracles; the manifest sincerity of those who attested them, as evinced by their cruel sufferings in the cause, not of opinions which they held to be true, but of facts which they perceived by their senses; the silence of inveterate and impassioned enemies, most willing, if they could, to have transmitted the decisive refutation of them to modern times; these compose the main strength of the argument for our later Scriptures. And then, besides the reference in

which they abound to the former Scriptures, and by which, in fact, they give the whole weight of their authority to the Old Testament, we have the superadded testimony of an

entire nation now ranged in zealous hostility against the Christian faith, and bent upon its overthrow. **** Now, the truth of the continuous narrative which forms the annals of this wondrous people would demonstrate a great deal more than what we are in quest of: that the world had a beginning, or rather, that many of the world's present organizations had a beginning, and have not been perpetuated everlastingly from one generation to another by those laws. of transmission which now prevail over the wide extent of the animal and vegetable kingdoms."*

* 1 Nat. Theol., p. 183. Constable's edition.

A

CHAPTER VII.

FROM GEOLOGY.

ɑ. ANTERIOR UNINHABITABILITY OF THE EARTH.

We

§ 77. THE conditions of heat and cold prescribe that where the former is brought into contact with the latter, through a conducting medium, the heat will be lost unless there be a process inside for its continued generation. Thus, if we go into a room where the atmosphere is at zero, and find in it a stove-drum with a superficial heat of 80°, we conclude either that the drum is now supplied with heat, bringing it up to this temperature, or that it is gradually cooling from an anterior higher degree of heat. know that the cold air and the hot drum could not have remained in contact any long period without an approach toward the equalization of their temperatures; and, finding that the drum is not connected with any fire, we, therefore, conclude that it has been gradually cooling. Now, the atmosphere around the earth is of a temperature of at least fifty-eight degrees below zero. That of the earth runs up from twenty to an hundred degrees above zero. One of two alternatives is, therefore, correct: either the earth has had a beginning, or it has not. If it has had a beginning, this involves a maker. If it has not, but is indefinitely old, then, as it is not pretended that it contains the power of

the indefinite renewal of heat, the alternative follows that there must have been a period when it was in a state of incandescence. Hence, in either way, we come back to the alternative of supernatural interference at such definite anterior period.

b. SUBSEQUENT CREATION OF SPECIFIC FORMS OF ORGAN

IZED LIFE.

a1. Man.

-we

§ 78. "All observation," says Dr. Hitchcock,* "teaches us that he (man) was one of the last of the animals that was placed upon the earth. In vain do we search through the six miles of solid rocks that lie piled upon one another, commencing with the lowest, for any trace of man. And it is not until we come into the uppermost formations, mean the alluvial, nay, not until we get almost to the top of that, merely in the loose soil that is spread over the surface, -that we find his bones. And yet these, formed of the same materials as the bones of other animals, would have been as certainly preserved as theirs, in the lower rocks, had he existed there. The conclusion is irresistible, and it is acquiesced in by all experienced geologists, that man did not exist as a cotemporary of the animals found in the rocks. At least five vast periods of time, with their numerous yet distinct groups of organic beings, passed over this globe before the appearance of man. This is not a dreamy, hypothetical conclusion, but a simple matter of fact, which has been scrutinized with great care, and by some unfriendly to revelation, who would gladly have found it

* Rel. Truth Illustrated from Science, p. 120.