Cije Creation 51 llcccul tUotk of (&ob c c A DAMS f.fpiffffitfm^Bg'vf.a, College in tkfj Colony" • iLniBisAmr • Gift of 19S-1 This book was digitized by Microsoft Corporation in cooperation with Yale University Library, 2008. You may not reproduce this digitized copy of the book for any purpose other than for scholarship, research, educational, or, in limited quantity, personal use. You may not distribute or provide access to this digitized copy (or modified or partial versions of it) for commercial purposes. THE CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. BV THE AUTHOR OP 'LIFE OF CHRIST," "THE BIBLE, A SCIENTIFIC REVELATION," ETC. f- A a-ms , C haY Jag CA-vC? • God, what a Chemist art Thou. SECOND EDITION REVISED. NEW YORK : JAMES POTT, PUBLISHER, 12 Astor Place, 1883. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by POTT & AMERY, 'jit the Clerk'g Office of the District Court of the United States for tho District of South Carolina. 81b ?*D PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. HTWELVE years have elapsed since the first edition of this book was published, and there has been no decade, since Christ, when science, theology, and criticism have made greater progress, and every stage of investigation has tended to con firm its theory. Some errors of the first edition have been cor rected, and there may be others remaining for the reasons formerly given. But there has not been one fact advanced that disproves the theory of four geological epochs ; nor one that shakes the proba bility of the sudden creation of the physical uni verse within the last six thousand years, and in six natural days, as it is revealed in the Bible. Some one objected to the statement, that nations iv PREFACE. who have no Bible have no science. They have none comparable to the modern science of Chris tendom, and the little retained on astronomy was derived from the revealed source, and preserved by tradition. And, on page 43, " moral being" is put for mankind, in contradistinction from the animals. In the deep-sea dredgings of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were found examples of the way the oldest geological deposits were made, and fossils were found embedding in them like species extinct millions of years ago, according to popular geologi cal reckoning. The Challenger found, south of the' Cape of Good Hope, in deep soundings, many species identi cal with those on the coast of England and. Nor way, and in the Arctic Ocean, and also with species that were supposed to have been long ago extinct. The chalk mud in the Atlantic Ocean is a con tinuation of the oldest cretaceous deposit, which was supposed to have ended when Europe was ele vated above the water. No globigerinae live in cold water, and chalk forms only in warm currents, and so they teach us where warm Gulf-water once flowed in former times. And the Bexyx, now living in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is found fossil in the chalk, which perfectly refutes the opinion of its great antiquity. PREFACE. v And in the Cambrian formation, where it was once said no life existed when it was deposited, mollusks and crustaceans have been found ; and animal and vegetable remains also have been found in the oldest granite. And, until recently, batrachians of living types, which were regarded as recent, have had their fos sil remains discovered in palaeozoic rocks. The spectroscope has revealed the unity of the matter ofthe universe; and the liquefication of gases has taught us how creation began, and confirmed the probability of its simultaneous origin, begin ning according to the Mosaic narrative. Another proof that the earth has not existed many thousand years, is the fact tLat the sun could not have lasted so long without exhausting its heat. It is estimated that about seven thousand horse power is radiated every second from every square foot of its surface ; but there is no evidence that God keeps up the forces of nature by any such process as stoking the sun, and we must wait until we know more about the heat, because the air is colder the higher you ascend above the earth. But the scientific theory controverts its own opinion, that the earth is millions of years old. It is not only improbable, but impossible, that there ever was a great Glacial or ice period, when vi PREFACE. Europe and North America were covered with ice. If the sun were exhausting its heat, it was warmer formerly than now, and such an epoch was impos sible ;' and the geological formations, up to lat. jo degrees prove that it was warmer there when they were deposited, at the present ice belt, than now. And the whole fossil world proves that ice and cold are of comparatively recent times. And operations in nature at the present day teach positively how all the boulders and drift of Europe and America were produced. Nearly two thousand miles of coast, from Massachusetts to the east of Greenland, has been covered with drift ice and icebergs since last February, coming from Baffins Bay and Davis Strait and beyond Greenland, bring ing down boulders and drift earth, teaching us what was the condition of Europe and America while they were submerged, which every intelligent geol ogist admits they once were, and showing how the icebergs and drift ice produced the phenomena on their surfaces, as they are now doing on this two thousand miles of coast and off all their soundings. And one more conclusive fact against the Glacial theory is, that the cold and ice of the earth depend on the elevated land above the water. As the land rises, the cold increases ; and the cold of the Arctic increases as the land shuts out the Gulf Stream from Ir REFACE. Y"ii entering there ; and Iceland and Greenland have their ice regions extending, so that they will be eventually uninhabitable. Some idea of the power of water currents to change the submarine surface can be inferred from the way they transport rocks and earth on the land. Last year, at an inundation in California (1881), rocks weighing hundreds of pounds were rolled, in a current running fifteen miles an hour, like peb bles, and gullies were made six feet deep and a hundred yards wide, and rocks and rubbish were piled up twenty-five feet deep in a few hours. But it would take a larger volume than this to record all the facts of a similar kind collected by the writer, since it was written, to prove its theory. And, as was said in the first edition, the writer does not expect to live to see it established, but he has more faith in it than he had twelve years ago. St. Mary's Rectory, Oct. 20, 1882. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Three Divine Revelations.— Science in its Infancy. — Bible Science True. — Four Geological Epochs.— The Deluge. — Creation Finished. CHAPTER II. The Bible and Science. — Theologians and Scientists. — Primeval Tradition. — Design in Creation. — Formularies. — No Bible, no Science. — Man. — Unity. — Numbers. — De velopmen t. CHAPTER III. The Bible.— Scientific Formula.— God.— The Earth.— Time.— Light.— Astronomy. — Four Divisions of the Animal Kingdom. — Blood the Animal Life. CHAPTER IV. The Bible and Science do not Conflict.— Geological Errors. — The Earth's Antiquity. — Theory of the Universe. — Geology in its Infancy. — Gulf Stream. — The Earth's Axular Motion. CHAPTER V. Creation's Beginning.— Mosaic Cosmogony. — Light. — Ring Theory. — No Worlds Forming. — Oxygen Discovered. — Creation suddenly Pro duced. x CONTENTS. CHAPTER VI. Law of Motion in the Water.— Diurnal Rotation.— Infusoria and Algae in Crystalline Rocks.— Equatorial Currents.— Testimony of the Moun- tains. CHAPTER VII. Oceanic Currents.— Upheaval of Continents,— The Atlantic Gulf Stream. —Deep Sea Soundings.— Bay of Mexico.— Saragossa Sea.— Climate. CHAPTER VIII. Volcanic Agency. — No Internal Fire. — Earth's Heat. — Extent of Volcanic Force. — Continents Upheaved. — Extinct Craters. — Earthquakes. CHAPTER IX. Mineral Kingdom. — Species. — Primary Light. — Law of Matter. — Pagan Cosmogonies. — Incubation. — Chemistry. CHAPTER X. The Vegetable Kingdom. — Mechanical Forces. — The Earth's Vitality.— Bible's Consistency. — Three Classes. — Two Departments. — The Earth's Age. — Prof. Agassiz. CHAPTER XI. Animal Kingdom. — Elements.— Four Departments.— The Incarnation.-" Species. — Deep Sea Soundings. — Coral Reefs. CHAPTER XII. The Fossil World.— Drift.— Fauna and Flora.— Carboniferous Age.— Arctic Plants.— Animal and Vegetable Remainsin Crystalline Rocks. — Man Contemporary. — Sea Soundings. CONTENTS. xi CHAPTER Xni. The Earth the Perfect World of the Solar System.— Time Began.— The Earth the Sanctuary of Creation. — God's Favorite World. — Prepared for the Incarnation. CHAPTER XIV. The Coal's Testimony. — Geological Epoch.— Coal Beds.— Decrease of Water on the Globe. — Drift Plants. — Primitive Flora. CHAPTER XV. Fossil Man's Testimony.— No Prehistoric Man. — Man the only Tripartite Animal on Earth.— Modern Human Anatomy like the Oldest Fossil Remains. — Not to be looked for in the Oldest Strata, because all Marine. CHAPTER XVI. Testimony of the Deluge. — It was Universal. — The Oldest Tradition con firms the Bible. — Chkist and S. Peter testify to It. — Belts of Diluvium establish It. — Fossils, and Meteorology, and Geology con firm It. CHAPTER XVII. Drift, Iceberg, Glaciers : These the Result of the Elevation of the Land —The Force of Water. — Glaciers Local. — Never a Glacial Period.— Gulf Stream. CHAPTER XVIII. Creation Finished. — The Earth created for Man and the Incarnation. — Finally to be Spiritual. — All Things denote its Recentness. — The Church. — The Universe to pass through one more Final Change. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. CHAPTER I. Three Divine Revelations. — Science in its Infancy. — Bible Science True, — Four Geological Epochs. — The Deluge. — Creation Finished. God has made three great revelations to man, I. Creation, II. the Bible, III. the Incarnation. The first reveals God's physical laws ; the second His moral laws ; and the third His life, by whichHe manifested His power in working miracles, and con trolling the laws of the moral and physical world, and proved that He was the God who created Na ture, and gave life to man and all living creatures and things. There is an intimate relation between these revelations ; we know the two later were of 8 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. comparatively recent dates, and as the former was only a stage of preparation for the latter, it is probable that it also was comparatively recent. Human science is in its infancy ; scientists are continually changing their principles ; but neverthe less advancing towards truth. Their errors have come chiefly from the fact, that they have studied the laws of Nature, without reference to the later inter pretation of them given in the Bible, and from the teaching of God's Incarnate Son. And theologians have made similar errors, because they have studied the later revelations without refer ence to the older laws of Nature. Creation is a history of God's physical works stereotyped on matter, and every fossiliferous rock is a page of the earth's history, and every fossil is a sentence, and every " fault " in the strata is a record of some revelation, which has taken place on its sur face. There is no possibility of conflict in any laws of God given in these revelations ; and no greater evil can be done to science or religion than to represent any such conflict. There are perplexities, arising from our imperfect knowledge of the relations of those laws, but they are caused by the imperfect understanding of them by the scientist or theologian. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 9 The three revelations have the same hidden pecu liarities, but each indicates the same infinite wisdom, power, and love of their Author, and prove that one mind contrived the whole. There is a great deal which passes for science, which is only speculation ; but the laws of these three revelations teach the same lesson, tend to one point, " pour their united currents into the one great ocean of truth," and jointly testify that one God is their Author, and that all of them are of compara tively recent origin. The laws of chemistry, of the ocean currents, of volcanic agency, which cause all the changes taking place on the earth, are the same now as they always have been. And while external nature does not fur nish any clue, to determine the time or manner of its origin, these laws do, and by studying them we can learn how long the earth was in taking its oblate spheroidal form, and how long it is probably since these processes began. The written revelation being later in time than Creation, begins with an account of that, thus con necting itself with it, and then tells how long God was in creating the world, and the order in which the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms followed, and without this written history man never would have come to any other conclusion, than that the 10 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. earth and matter are eternal, because that was the opinion of the wisest philosophers who ever lived who had not the written revelation. The Bible corrects this false impression, and gives many details respecting the origin and organization of matter, which modern science confirms so far as it is able to cope with these higher mysteries. It says, " that in the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth ;" not the beginning of eter nity, because it had none, but in. the beginning of time ; all three of the revelations belong to^ this epoch ; this describes the creation of the elements of which they were made, because the narrative goes on to tell of other Divine operations, by which they were completed. The Hebrews had three Heavens, St. Paul says : first, the sky around the earth ; second, the heavenly worlds, which were created at the same time as the earth, and where the angels dwell, who were created at the same time as man, or a few days before ; and third, God's eternal kingdom, where He dwelt before creation began. The elements of the Heavens and the earth were created, according to the Mosaic account, in one mass in space, and darkness was one of the elements of the chaotic mass ; for God says, " that darkness is a cre ated element. (Isa. 45. 7.) CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. H Next followed the creation of light, — not sun-light, but the etherial fluid which fills all space, and is present in everything in nature, the imponderable force, which caused the separation of the mass of creation into worlds, and the organization ofplanets and systems. Until this the earth and all the worlds were held " in darkness as in a swaddling band." With the creation of light, or electricity, for the Bible uses the same word for the original element and lightning, chemical action began, the chaotic mass began to form into spheres or globes, and sepa rate into systems ; and subsequent exercise of Divine power, fitted each world for the part the Creator de signed it to play in the great role of time. Both revelations teach that matter was created sud denly, and rapidly organized, so far as the earth is concerned. And this warrants the belief, that all the other Bible statements respecting creation are true. Indeed, we know that we are indebted to the Bible for some of our most familiar terms and knowledge ;" the division of time into days, weeks, months, and years comes not only from the Bible, but by the laws impressed by God on matter as they are revealed in the Bible. Why should we receive them and many other things, and yet reject others which are as likely to be equally true ] It is the presumption of human reason, which thinks it- 12 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. self wiser than God, that causes such unbelief. Any attempt to understand Creation must fail, un less it is looked on, not only in connection with the writ ten revelation, but also. as an antecedent part, and a preparation for the Incarnation of God in His own works. It is a popular idea that the Incarnation was designed to remedy the defects of creation, as if it were an after thought of the Divine mind ; but so far from this, the Bible teaches, that the great and eternal purpose of Redemption was antecedent to creation; St Paul says, that the saints of God were chosen in Christ, " before the foundations of the world ;" so that creation was only preparatory to the Incarnation of the Son of God, whereby His Divine attributes could be revealed to intelligent created be ings, and His divine life shared, and His glory en joyed by them. I. THE CREATIVE EPOCH. The Bible teaches, that creation took place in six 'natural days of the revolution of the earth on its axis, and the chronology of the Bible, which the people of God have preserved, says it was within the last six thousand years ; and the latest discoveries in geology, and the best established laws of Nature corn- firm this teaching. Side by side stands with this teaching, in the Bible, the account of man's fall, and God's promises of the Incarnate Redeemer, and that CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 13 the seed of the woman should break the serpent's head, and introduce the kingdom and reign of the Son of God on earth. Man waited four thousand years for that, and all God's promises proved true, why then should we doubt His words respecting the natural world 1 The written revelation reveals four great epochs : the creative, the productive, the destructive, and the regenerative, and geology shows that there have been four such epochs. On the first day of the first epoch, God created the elements of matter and the imponderable forces of light and darkness, which caused organization to begin in the chaotic mass, and made globes form, and axular motion begin, and on the second day the firmament was made, and the worlds and systems separated and extended in the fir mament, and arranged in their places, and began to move in their orbits ; the third day the earth had ta ken its oblate spheroidal form, and its mineral king dom was made by the separation of the solid ma terials from the aqueous magma, in which they had floated, the dry land appeared, and the vegetable kingdom was created ; the fourth day organization had so progressed in the other worlds that they be gan to shine in the firmanent, and " to give light on the earth," (Gen. 1. 15;) the sun, moon, and stars were all made for this purpose, (Gen. 1. 16, 17.) 14 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. thus ended God's vast operations with the chemistry of creation. The fifth day God began the animal kingdom, but only birds and marine animals were created that day ; and finally, on the sixth day, the terrestrial animals, and lastly man were created, and laws were impressed on all the members of the ani mal and vegetable kingdoms, by which they could multiply themselves, and be fruitful, and God com manded them to fill the earth and the sea. " Thus, says God's account of creation, the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which He had made ; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which Fie had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it ; because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made." It was not a great geological period, on which God rested, nor a great geological period which God sanctified, but a natural day which He made holy for man, and which the race has observed for nearly six thousand years ; and it was on six such natura] days that creation was made, and all mankind believed this, in every generation since, until within the pres ent century ; and the masses of tht people believe it now, because no real discoveries in geology or as tronomy have ever yet been able to shake, much less CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 15 overthrow it, and this I call the creative epoch. II. THE PRODUCTIVE EPOCH. The productive epoch began immediately after the six days work of creation ; the revolution of the earth caused the water to flow round the globe taking with it sand, and wearing away the materials of the crystalline rocks, and formed the azoic sedimentary strata, azoic, because the vegetable and animal king doms had not then furnished life enough to fill the rocks with their remains as they did later in time. Nevertheless the remains of vertebrate animals have been found in the Oriskany sandstone, which is sev en hundred feet thick in Pennsylvania, and belongs to this epoch. But God had ordered the vegetable and animal kingdom to increase, and be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the sea and land, (Gen. 1. 22, 23,) and as soon as they had obeyed this law, — the proto zoa and zoophytes, or lower forms of marine animals, and marine plants began to enter the carboniferous limestone and shales, and the new forming rocks, and made the fossiliferous strata. And as we ascend, traces of vegetable and larger forms of animal life appear, and coal, salt, limestones, marls, and other materials, with which man in the last regenerative age was to run his marvellous career. This period lasted sixteen hundred and fifty-six 16 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. years, and man played only an unimportant part in it. A gigantic flora and fauna soon began to flourish and everything was on a vast scale ; man lived a thousand years, only ten generations, and three men reached across the whole epoch, for Adam lived two hundred years with Methuselah, and Methuselah and Noah were cotemporaries for six hundred years, the former dying the year of the Del uge, or being drowned by it. The vegetable world was many hundred feet above the present level of the ocean, and flourished in a moist tropical climate ; and the water around the globe was soon filled with myriads of protozoa, and the lower types of mollusks, vertebrata, radiata, and articulata ; and the fossiliferous rocks abound with their remains, which are mostly marine, and were de posited in deep water; and they have stereotyped their history on these stony pages, and from that we learn that the structure of one continent or mountain chain is a type of the geology of the whole globe. That was the reign of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and man played an unimportant part there ; the gigantic flora furnished food for the gigan tic fauna, for most of the extinct land animals were herbivorous, and thus they equalized the carbonic acid and oxygen of the atmosphere, which they reciprocally produced, as they have done ever since. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 17 Besides the huge animals, which abounded in the sea, its waters were filled with immense numbers of protozoa, whose remains formed vast deposits of lime stone, sandstones, and marls ; and these remains ut terly demolish the Darwin development theory, by proving that these four divisions of the animals then existed, and some of the species are so identical with those now found in tropical seas, that the most practical naturalist can discover no distinction be tween them. When the productive period had developed to its greatest extent, and prepared for a new epoch, where man was to play a more important part, both the an imal and vegetable kingdoms were suddenly over whelmed, by a catastrophe which not only swept away the Old World, but also prepared for the expansion of other animal and vegetable life, which had been kept in narrow limits under the primeval order of things. III. THE DESTRUCTIVE EPOCH. The earth tells us, in its rent and torn strata, and upheaved formations, that it has had one grand and universal destructive period ; but the Bible alone gives an explanation of the reason and manner of the catastrophe. " The Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth ; both man and beast, and every creeping thing and 18 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. the birds of the air, ana everything that is in the earth shall die." (Gen. vi. 7 .) " The same day Noah entered the ark, the fountains of the great deep were broken up," and Job speaking of this event says, " the flood was poured upon the earth's founda tions," as if all the superficial covering of the earth was carried away by the rising water. And it is evi dent that submarine volcanic action attended the out pouring waters from the heavens, because of the broken and tilted condition of the older rocks over all the globe, which form the axes of the mountains, and prove that they have been raised by internal forces. The cause of that volcanic action was the same as has ever since produced it. During that period be tween creation and the deluge, vast quantities of veg etable matter had been drifted by the equatorial cur rents over the globe and deposited at various points, as the coal beds prove, and simultaneous combustion took place then, and was the force which raised the submarine deposits, and when the waters subsided left the coal and other minerals above the sea, where we now find them. This epoch lasted ten and a half months. In forty days everything was covered with water and des troyed, and for one hundred and ten days more the earth remained submerged before the waters began to subside. The results produced were so fundamen- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 19 tai, that the animal and vegetable kingdoms were destroyed, and the earth's foundations disturbed, and the constitution of the air was affected, and a new meteorological condition was prepared when the del uge subsided. The increased bulk of land above the water reduced the temperature of the ah and water, and the poles were left frozen regions, which they never had been before. This diluvial epoch was part of God's original plan of creation, His finishing work on it, adapting it to the reign of man, and other orders of animals and plants from those which had prevailed. The original fauna and flora, except what was in the ark, and such marine animals and seeds as could be preserved a long time in water, perished. And a new soil was formed, from the diluvial matter, and drift from the arctic, which was deposited at the sub sidence of the water, adapted to the new. fauna and flora, which were destined to overspread the earth, and that had been kept under during the productive epoch, by the more luxuriant tropical vegetation, and by the condition of the temperature, and could not spread until this preparation of new soil had been made for them. The surging waters of the submerged earth, in their revolutions around the globe, for three hundred days, tore up and put in solution all the loose soil, 20 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. and also dissolved and washed away the surface of recently deposited limestones, chalks, and marls, and mixed them up with the former soil, and adapted it to produce cereals, plants, and trees of a hardier growth, and suited to man, and the new orders of an imals, which were to overspread the earth, animals that were created at the same tim*e as the others, but which had been kept down, as the flora had, by want of suitable conditions for them to spread. Besides this, by the upheaval of the land, coal, minerals, and metals which before were in the deep sea were laid bare, when the waters receded, and made accessible to man, while the ruins of the old world added to his resources, and to help him to run his career of an ever advancing civilization. IV. THE REGENERATIVE EPOCH. When the destruction ofthe primitive world was completed, God said to Noah, " Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy son's wives with thee. Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cat tle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth." Geology shows that there is one grand line of de marcation, and but one, between the ancient order of things, or the animal and vegetable fossil world and CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 21 that now living ; and that ninety-five per cent, of the species existing in the adjoining geological strata of the old and new world are identical. With that new epoch the animals and plants, or their seeds which Noah preserved in the ark, and which were adapted to man and the world under a new order of things, began to spread over the earth. I call this the Regenerative epoch, because the earth was regenerated by its baptism in water, and made with a larger surface of productive soil, and adapted to the spread of new animal and vegetable life, having special reference to the reign of man. And also because the grand purpose of God, to re veal Himself more fully to man, and to reveal more fully the design of creation, by the Incarnation of His eternal Son in man's nature, and the regeneration of the race by His sacrifice and atonement, and its restoration from the power of satan and death, were to be accomplished. This was to be a more spiritual epoch, and within it the Holy Spirit was to come among men to abide, and impart higher spiritual knowledge, and prepare the way for the world's next and final regeneration by fire, when Christ comes again inHis glory. Science confirms the teaching of the Bible, that the earth will probably pass through such a change. The bulk of the ocean is diminishing continually ; 22 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. geologists say the continents are rising, but this pro cess is going on so rapidly, that before many centuries the earth would not be able to support its animal and vegetable life ; and the earth, air, and water are charged with oxygen to such an extent, that a slight chemical change would kindle the whole into a burn ing mass of flame. St. Peter describes this last change, St. John speak ing of it says, a new heaven and new earth will suc ceed it. Then God's great work of redemption will be complete, the earth will have a new resurrection with man, and creation will be finished by being made eternal, and the reign of Christ, as King of saints, will begin. Thus the created and written revelations agree, in sounding the funeral knell of our world and all creation ; when " the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the earth and all therein shall be burned with fire." The hand of God holds these forces back, for there are forces in operation daily sufficient to precipitate the result, but St. Peter says, "they are reserved" until Christ is ready to come, when they will form part of the Divine pyrotechny, which is to give awful sublimity, to the coming of the Son of God in His glory to judge the world. The Bible and science accord, and they prove that CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 23 there was but one plan, and one end designed by cre ation. And it is only when we look at nature in con nection with redemption, that we catch any ade quate view of God's design in creation, and its vast r e- lations to his moral government, and see that it was probably recent, because it is so soon to come to an end. CHAPTER II. The Bible and Science.— Theologians and Scientists.— Pr'meval Tradition. —Design in Creation— Formularies.— No Bible, no Science.— Man. — Unity . — Numbers. — Developmen t. The Bible bears internal evidence that it is of su perhuman origin, because it relates events which took place before man had an existence, and it foretells his end on earth, and things which will transpire af ter the last man has disappeared from the earth. St. Paul says, the Bible was written for man's in struction, (Rom. xv. 4 ;) and it is the only Book in the world which professes to be a revelation from God, the Creator of man, and his world, which has any internal evidence to support its claim. It is the only book which teaches us who that God is ; and when and how He made us and our world ; and gives us laws to regulate our conduct towards Himself and our fellow men, which laws are founded on man's nature and conduce to his highest moral, intellectual, and physical happiness. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 25 It is the only infallible guide mankind has ever had in the hands of a priesthood from God, to teach him how to rise to a higher degree of civilization and refinement, in this life, and given him the hope and assurance of a nobler life hereafter; because it is the only one which has had the Church of God as its keeper and witness. It is the only book in the world which describes man's nature, and explains the mystery of His mortality and immortality, half flesh and half spirit, united by a living soul, and reveals the secrets of his in ner spiritual life, and shows them to himself on its written records, as he finds them, twisted, by his consciousness and conscience, into every fibre of his being. We find there a picture of our own hearts and of the hearts of all men in the world around us ; and the good and bad of both sexes, who lived one, two, three, and four thousand years ago, are exact ly like those we meet every day. The Bible contains the only history, of the earth and its inhabitants, for twenty-five centuries after its creation. And it is the only book that gives any satisfactory account of the origin of man, and nations, and gov ernments, and of the rise and fall of ancient empires and dynasties. 26 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. It is the only one which plainly foretold the In carnation of the Son of God, and that furnishes a contemporary and detailed account of the extraordi nary events, which attended this Incarnation. Now if all this be true in the Bible so far as it re lates to man psychologically and historically, then it is highly probable, that whatever it says on scien-, tific subjects is equally true. The writer has heard both theologians and scien tific men assert, that the Bible was not given by God to teach men science. But more than ten years ago he began to doubt the assertion ; and investigations patiently and perseveringly pursued ever since have led to the fullest conviction, that both parties are mistaken ; and that the Bible contains absolute scien tific formularies relating to the origin of creation, and to some of its grandest phenomena. It is therefore proposed to set forth some of the grounds, and to show so far as modern science has furnished a clue to interpret them, the evidences that the Bible is a scientific revelation of thfl whole vast work of creation, and all the physical phenom ena of the universe, so far as they come within reach of scientific investigation and analysis. Indeed the opening sentence of the Bible, " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," refutes the assertion that it was not given to teach man science ; CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD 27 because it begins with the account of the creation, and of the materials of the universe, the knowledge of which constitutes all physical science ; and this is all that man knows of its origin. And it is year by year becoming more and more evident, that a clear understanding of the Bible formularies is absolutely essential to a full knowledge of both the laws of na ture and the written laws of God ; and that they are twin sisters and parts of one whole of divine revela tion. And as if in confirmation of this truth, St. John, who wrote the last Gospel, and was most be loved by Jesus, and drank deepest of His wisdom, begins it with the same initial word as Moses began Genesis, and adds in explanation, that the Word ' created all things ;' while Jesus Himself speaks of Creation and the law, as parts of one inseparable whole. Not that the Bible makes such a revelation in de tail, as enables us to discover the natural laws ; for creation is the older revelation, and it is by the study of nature, that we have learned to rightly interpret the Bible. Laws are impressed on matter, which it has taken mankind six thousand years to find out. For example, oxygen has existed ever since creation, yet it was not until the last quarter of the last cen- ury that it was discovered ; and the person who knows nothing of chemistry never could tell the 28 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. meaning of the formulary for that gas. So also does the Bible contain the divine formula ries of facts revealed with scientific precision, but which have laid in shadow there, and incapable of interpretation, until physical science had advanced enough to enable us to interpret them. The Psalmist said, three thousand years ago, " It is God who teacheth man science." — Then the old primeval traditions, which Noah and his sons received from Adam, were comparatively fresh, or were dying out, as the last glory of primeval art and architecture did with the erection of the temple; but the words were written by divine inspiration ; and though the Hebrews possibly knew not much of science as we now have it, God knew all about it, and He in spired the Psalmist to write for all time. And we now see the truth of the words, because God has made two revelations to man, one physical and one written, and both of them are scientific revelations. The revelations in nature are identical with those in the Bible ; both are obscure and hidden, and neither can be found out without searching for them. There is no science of astronomy, or chemistry, or botany, or geology, laid down in the Bible ; and yet there are great formularies there, each one of which gives the law on which our whole systems rest. And this is identical with the revelation of CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 29 spiritual truth ; there are no dogmatic statements on the nature of the Godhead, no systematic body of Divinity, no detailed form of the Christian Church, or even of the forms by which its sacraments are to be administered, or its priesthood ordained ; and even the great doctrines of the Incarnation and Atonement are set forth in a hidden and mysterious way, by inti mations, suggestions, and incidental remarks. Thus there is a perfect analogy between these revelations, and in both, man is left to the exercise of his faith and reason, to discover the fundamental truths which lie at the foundations of both revelations ; and faith is to be exercised on the physical revelation, for St. Paul says, " By faith we understand that the worlds were made." All know what the Bible is ; no definition of that is needed ; but the term science is so variously used by different writers, that it is necessary to define the sense in which it is used here, namely, to ex press the general knowledge of all the physical laws which relate to matter as God has revealed it, in the constitution of the heavens, the earth, and the Bible, which embraces not only our solar system, but also the whole created universe, so far as it comes within reach of human observation. Creation is a revelation made to man for the same purpose, though not for all the purposes, that the 30 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. Bible was. The Psalmist says, " The heavens de clare the glory of God, and the firmament showetb His handy work ;" and the Bible begins with the ac count of creation, and gives that the precedence, be cause it is the older revelation ; and it connects the two together, because they form parts of one com plete whole, and because neither can be fully inter preted or understood without the other. Thus we are led to expect, from the opening sentence in. the Bible, that it is a scientific revelation ; because if science be a kno wledge of God's physical laws, and the God of the Bible were the Creator of the heavens and the earth, then the inference logic ally follows, that the world was made in accordance with those laws, or on scientific principles, and must be expressed in scientific formularies ; because it de scribes nature, tells how God made it, and how long He was in creating it ; and how He works by laws ; and actual investigation and analysis show that it was made in accordance with established laws. There is nothing in the natural history of man and the earth more marvellous than the light which modern science has thrown on the Bible ; it has been a torch to guide man into some of its deepest mys teries, and to enlighten some of its darkest recesses, which had been hidden in obscurity from creation to our day. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 31 It has not only opened to us new views of God and nature, and enlarged man's capacity to grasp the revelations of physical truth revealed in the Bible ; but it has also increased his faith to believe its spir itual doctrines. — The discoveries of the telescope and microscope have extended man's knowledge of the vastness of space and the universe, and ofthe minuteness and perfectness of its invisible creatures and things ; while chemical research into the elemen tary laws of matter has revealed nearly all that man can know of them, in his present state, except the origin of a few ofthe elements and of life. And this research into the laws of nature has fur nished continually cumulating evidence of the design of an infinitely wise Creator, running through the whole plan, reducing conflicting elements to a perfect unity, and harmony, and order, and showing that these relationships are the same over all the world, and have been so from the beginning of creation. And they not only testify to the wisdom, and power and glory of the Creator, but they also prove that the God who revealed the Bible is that Creator, because some of the most wonderful of these laws are there embodied in divine formularies, which have re mained uninterpreted since the revelation was made, waiting for man to advance in knowledge of the phys ical revelation, by which alone he would be able to 32 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. explain them. The scientific formularies were re vealed by God, in that dark, hidden and mysterious way, as it seemed to the generations who preceeded us, because they were not essential to salvation ; be cause the Bible is a book designed for, and adapted to man in all his various stages of intellectual as well as moral development ; and they were so revealed as to stimulate and exercise the human mind, and help to educate it, by exciting the desire to investigate these laws, until it had reached its highest degree of knowledge, and run the whole career of its earthly destiny. And another remarkable proof that both revela tions are from the same One only-living and ever- true God, is, that these truths respecting physical things are hidden in the Bible, exactly as the laws of nature are in matter, as conception, incubation, growth, and development are in the mineral, vegeta ble, and animal kingdoms ; as the metals and pre cious stones are hidden in the primary strata and fis sures of rocks, where they have waited until man dis covered the power of steam, and learned to harness it and make it dig, and draw, and crush the ores ; hid den that they might not be discovered and wasted, before man wanted them to help him run his last and highest career of Christian civilization ; hidden so that when they were discovered, man would be com- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 33 pelled to dig deep to get them, and that none might obtain them but those who had faith, and courage, and patience to dig. But few persons reflect on the fact, that a large portion of all history and all human knowledge comes from the Bible, even the names of most famUiar things ; and there is no knowledge of any divine truth on earth, except as it is derived from that sin gle Book of God. And it is evident that man could no more make a system of astronomy or geology without the Bible, than he could make a system of theology without it. Those philosophers who tell us the Bible was not given to teach man science, may ridicule this opinion; but if it be not true, why is it that the nations of the earth which have no Bible, have no science ] And why is it, that every step and wonderful stride which natural history, and as tronomy, and chemistry have made in our times are found foreshadowed in the Bible 1 For it is a fact that thus far, formularies have been found there, which when they are interpreted agree with and con firm the scientific discoveries. The fact that the Bible begins with the account of creation is a strong presumptive probability that both are the works of one God ; and we shall see, as we go on, that every step of comparison between them proves the probability more and more conclusive. 34 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. Creation is the older revelation, and, unlike the Bible, was stereotyped from the beginning, and has not passed through the hands of transcribers, and there is no mistaking the history God has written there ; and while St. John teaches us that the Word Who created all things also made the world's great Creed, St. Paul confirms the truth that both are parts of but one great whole of revelation, in these re markable words, " the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being un derstood by the things which are made, even His eternal power and Godhead. Another powerful argument to confirm the truth that the God of the Bible is the Creator of men, is, not only that his body is found by analysis to be made of the same elements as the earth, as the Bible says ; but also everything which it relates of his spir itual nature, of his will and conscience, is perfectly true ; and while the Bible was adapted to the gener ations which bad no science, and to every stage of enlightenment through which the race has passed, and has always been the foundation of all human laws, it yet continues to be the foundation of modern civil law, as well as moral, and has not only kept up with the advancing civilization and sci ence of the race, but is now actually far in advance of it ; while our modern science has helped us to in- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 35 terpret its truths, and shown us that some of our grandest discoveries are there revealed with scientific precision, while others are waiting the further pro gress of science to interpret them ; and there is this other analogy in both, that their very beginnings are tangled webs which we cannot unravel ; the more we learn of each the more we see that both are reve lations of the one only ever-living and true God. There is a continuous and connected chain of rela tions running through the Bible and nature, where they speak of the kingdom of God on earth, (the Church) and of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, and of the forms of minerals, plants and animals, based on certain numbers, which prove as conclusively as can be proven by facts and words, not only that God is the Author of both revelations, but also that they are inseparably connected parts of one grand whole. But the most powerful arguments, to prove that one God is the Author of both revelations, are found in the facts of the unity and design running through them ; that all creation seems to be an outshad- owing of the threefold personalities of the Triune God, revealed in the Bible, for the whole universe is composed of the three primary elements of spirit, force, and matter ; and that one mind not only plan ned both, but all are parts of one grand divine idea, 36 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. and that the whole creation was but an essential pre liminary to the Incarnation of the Son of God, whose human nature was formed from its elements ; the one nature reaching down to man and matter, the other nature, Spirit, uniting man and matter to God, and showing that Redemption is only the perfecting work of creation. Again the Bible division of creation, which is also the scientific one, is into three grand divisions — suns, moons, and stars ; and these revolve in one space, out- shadowing the Trinity in the unity of the Godhead ; and if we descend lower to the elements of matter, the bulk is composed chiefly of the three chemical elements of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen ; or if we turn to the air, which Job says God has made as a garment, to cover it from the cold of space, and to shield it from the scorching sunlight, that is com posed chiefly of the three elements of oxygen, nitro gen, and vapor ; a wonderful type of the Creator, be cause they are three distinct atmospheres, not chemi cally united as the elements are in water, but me chanically mixed so as to form but one atmosphere. Or again if Ave look at our own globe, there is the same mysterious number three, in its animal, vegeta ble, and mineral kingdoms ; or if we look at man, who is made out of these three kingdoms, who stands at then head, in the likeness of the Creator, the con- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 37 necting link between matter and spirit and the Crea tor, he is a mysterious trinity of body, soul, and spir it. And is not all this proof, that the " eternal pow er and Godhead " of the Creator, the " invisible things of God," are clearly seen, and may be under stood by the things which He has created ] Again, the numbers, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 90, etc., are of continual recurrence in the Bible and in nature, and they are spoken of in connection with the king dom of heaven, and the Church on earth, and the other kingdoms into which matter is divided, in such ways as prove that all are connected together, are made after one plan, and are the product of one mind. It would take volumes to give an outline of these analogies ; take a few examples of familiar ones ; there are seven natural sounds, seven colors, seven mineral forms, seven cervical vertebrse in every mam mal, seven days in a week, seven years in the epochs of man's life, and ten sevens are its limit, and seven appears often in botany, and chemistry, and mineralo gy ; and the number occurs in the Bible in spiritual matters in the same way ; and seven spirits before the throne of God ; seven wicked spirits among men ; seven angels, seven trumpets at the end of the world, and seven golden candlesticks in the Church ; a seventh of man's time devoted to God. So also does the number twelve set forth some of the mysterious 38 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. relationships between God's various kingdoms. Jacob and Ishmael each had twelve sons, who founded several ancient nations ; the twelve sons be came twelve princes of twelve tribes on whom the kingdom of Israel was founded ; twelve pillars were made for its altar ; twelve stones with the names of the twelve tribes in the breastplate of the high priest, where God's presence shone ; all this foreshadowed the twelve Apostles, and connects the Church on earth with the future City of God, which is to have twelve foundations, and twelve gates, the name of an Apostle in each ; and the Tree of Life bearing twelve manner of fruits ; and what is this but making all creation parts of one stupendous whole 1 And these laws overthrow the infidel theory of the development of man ; and though there is a law of selection influencing all species, it has no such for mative influence as is represented. Of this we have incontrovertible proof among the fossil. remains, be- cause there are four grand divisions of the animal world, and two of the vegetable, and they were the same at the dawn of creation as they now are ; and they have continued the same through all the geological epochs ; and there has been no more change in these natural laws of God than in His moral laws-; and the wisdom, and the plan, and the design of creation have never changed ; the oldest radiates, protozoa and cryp- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 39 togams were produced as they now are ; and a wonder ful confirmation of the whole truth is, that the de terioration of man is recent ; no fossil remains of a Caffre or Hottentot even have been found ; but the oldest resemble the highest types now living. And these facts not only prove the falsity of the infidel's theory, but they also prove the design, wisdom and power of the Creator in His laws, and the unity of His plan, and that one mind and one God is the Author of both the Bible and the Creation. CHAPTER IH. The Bible.— Scientific Formula.— God.— The Earth.— Time.— Light.— Astronomy. — Four Divisions of the Animal Kingdom. — Blood the Animal Life. In the last chapter some examples were given, of the relations which exist between God's natural and spiritual kingdoms, showing the wonderful marks of design in creation, and that these relations prove that both were planned and executed by one mind, and are parts of one connected whole, because the analogies of both are alike, and hence the works of nature must be the thought of the same God ; while the dynamical and spiritual laws of these revelations are so alike in their operation, and mind and matter are so connected together in creation, that there ap pears to be no law apart from God, and that the uni verse is but a reflection of His being, and of the spir itual world, impressed on matter. And now every year the discoveries of the natural laws embodied in creation, are bringing into clearer CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 41 light the mysteries of the written revelation ; and we are learning that force is the power which connects the natural and spiritual, worlds; and we are able to understand St. Paul's words, that " God upholdeth all things by the word of His power ;" and this gives us a glimpse of the mutual relations, of the visible and invisible sides of creation of which we know as yet but comparatively little, and really nothing except from the allusions scattered through the Bible. Those numerical and geometrical relations and connections are too subtle and hidden, to be compre hended in man's present physical state ; they belong to the spiritual side of creation, they are spiritual truths reflected upon matter, and they will be com prehensible to us only when we shall be raised in our glorified bodies, and in our future life, where the higher laws will be as exhaustless themes for our study and contemplation as the visible and natural laws. are here. Theologians have taken from the Bible all the nomenclature of their systems ; the words God, spirit, angel, satan, sin, righteousness, regeneration, re demption and the like, are all terms revealed by God, concerning truths of which man knows nothing, except as he has learned them from the Bible, and there could be no system of theology without them. But it is no less true, that the scientific nomenclature is de^ 42 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. rived also from the Bible. God himself gave the names of sun, moon, stars, earth, land, sea, water, heat, cold, light, air, wind, as well as the names to the plants, animals and minerals ; these and gold silver, iron, lead and the like are derived from the Bible. And many of them are fundamental terms, without which there could be no system of science any more than there could be of theology without the others ; in both cases they are the terms on which the systems are based. Every person familiar with the elements of mathe matics and chemistry knows, that they have formula ries consisting of letters of the alphabet and numer als, which are called symbols, and are used in solv ing problems, or expressing different values or sub stances, or chemical elements, and are incomprehens ible to one who has never learned them as Arabic or Chinese letters are to those who have never learned them. This is the scientific mode of representing unknown quantities and substances, and it was evi dently derived from the Bible, however unconscious the originators may have been of the fact, because God does there represent both natural and spiritual truth in the same way; for single words, and letters, and numbers do there contain and convey the revela tions of God, in both physical and supernatural things in the same way. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 43 The wisdom in God is so infinite that by His word He imparts life, and organization, and beauty to mat ter ; and by a single prefix or suffix to His written Word, He reveals some great doctrine, or whole sys tem of theology and science. That is, words are the arch or key to a doctrine or science; and in some cases it has taken centuries of progress of mankind to develope the formularies ; and it is proposed here to take two of the older of these, one theological and one scientific, and by tracing their development to explain what is meant by a Bible formulary. The first theological formulary in the Bible is the word God. The Hebrew word for God is Elohe, but here the original is Elohim, a masculine plural noun, meaning literally the Gods. Here there was signified, that there is more than one Person in the Godhead, but no explanation is given of the mystery ; it was a Divine formulary, which God gave, and left to the revelations of ages, and the time of the Incar nation of His Eternal Son to be explained, and to show that there are three Persons, no more and no less, and that they are One God. The Elohim created the heaven and the earth, and these two words also are formularies for all the ma terials of creation, and include all that belongs to their completion ; that He is their Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, for no created moral being is finished 44 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. until he has passed through these three stages. This then is the formulary revealing the oldest mystery of eternity, the profoundest mystery of God's theology, the doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity. And although no explanation is given with the name of God, yet at verse fifth there is a beginning to unfold the formulary, saying, the Spirit of Elo him moved on the face of the waters ; and again at verse twenty-six it is used in a way to more plainly express the fact of a plurality of persons in the God head, saying, "Let us make man;" and yet no inti mation is given of their number, and although the Jews knew there were three persons, it never was clearly revealed until four thousand years after; and it was not until twenty-five hundred years later that God was known to His people by more than one di vine name, Ex. vi. 3 ; but after His descent on Mount Sinai the three different names of the Holy Trinity were all used. While the original formula- ary expressed the unity of the Godhead, the form of the word was a symbol to express that there were unknown personalities involved, and when the three names were created, they expressed that there was a Trinity of the Unity, and that that Trinity is the self- existing Creator of all things and the source of all beings. And this doctrine slowly grew into greater clear- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 45 ness century after century, by the revelation of new prophecies, and the interpretation of the older ones, until the Second Person of the Trinity was Incarnate, and by His own death and resurrection, and ascen sion, brought life and immortality to light, and re vealed who the persons of the Godhead are, by His great commission to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but it was not until the Second Person of the Trinity had taken a human nature into His Divine being, that the formulary was fully explained. The term heaven and earth are similar scientific formularies of the whole work of creation ; and these are more difficult to interpret than the foimer, be cause the Bible does not explain them, but they are left to the development of the mind and knowledge of the human race, as it has grown under the light of the knowledge of God, to investigate the laws of matter ; and because the physical laws were not de signed to be understood, until man had reached the last stage of his mortal development, under the full knowledge of the glorious eternal life, which the coming of the Holy Ghost was to shed abroad in our world. Indeed it has been only since the revival of learn ing and the reformation of the Church, which follow ed it, that man has been able to find out the elements 46 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. of matter, the correlation of forces, and the laws which govern them, and our modern science in this department is hardly a century old; and we are just finding out that the natural and spiritual worlds seem to meet, at the boundaries of the elements of matter, in the correlation of its forces, since they have no dis coverable commencement that can be traced, and each one refers to another, and all to some antecedent force, and the human mind cannot form an idea of force independent of God, for causation is the will of God. No one man has ever learned much about the fun damental laws of matter ; it has taken the growth of nations and generations to develop individual men, who, under the influence of progressive light, have made important discoveries ; and then it has taken a new period of growth to develop another mind to ap ply and generalize the laws which were discovered ; and prophecy foretold, that it would be only in the last day of time, that knowledge would run to and fro, and reach its climax. The scientific formularies are so abstract and concise, and the unknown quantities they contain so many and so vast, and they are so connected with spiritual things, that it is impossible for the hu man mind in its present state to fully grasp them, while science has not yet advanced enough to enable CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 47 it to eliminate the yet unknown quantities. It has brought us however to the verge of those infinite laws which underlie the whole universe, and enabled us to look into some of its depths and over a large expanse of its surface. The term earth is a symbol for the material part of the whole universe ; it is an expression for all the metals, and minerals that formed manifold combina tions with the gases and electricity which now con stitute the earth's bases, and the two latter abound everywhere in the solar system, and created uni verse so far as the spectroscope has enabled man to penetrate it. We have learned that light consists in the vibrato ry motions of the particles of a luminous fluid ; that matter exists in molecules of force, by the reciprocal action of which all the phenomena of creation were probably originally produced, and by which all nature has ever since been continued, and that motion com municated produces radiant heat; with all this ac quired, we have yet but just begun to demonstrate the full meaning of the symbolic term, earth ; while we have learned also that if the motions of the worlds of our solar system * were to be suddenly arrested, the whole mass would immediately change to its original chaos. But possibly the meaning of a Bible formulary may 48 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. be best explained by the term day ; God calls the evening and morning of the first epoch of time, a day ; and He defines His meaning with scientific pre cision. The evening and morning, or the light and darkness, He called day and night; this was one re volution of the earth on its axis. God knew times of ignorance would come, when men would lose the knowledge of this term, and of time, which Adam had ; but He knew also that the revival of knowledge would explain it. The word was a formulary to explain all the divi sions of time; weeks, and months, and years, are af terwards mentioned, but no definition is given of them as there is of a day ; yet the other terms are scienti fic, and based on the laws of the revolution of the planets. This was a clue to explain the other terms, and to preserve the knowledge of them ; because it being known that a day is the revolution of the earth on its axis, it would be easy to discover that a week is a division of the moon's motion in its orbit ; that a month is the completion of it, and that a year is the revolution of the earth around the sun. Thus the measurement of time is based on the laws of nature ; while the name given to that measurement is from the law of revelation. These divisions of time founded on the motions of the planets are scientific, and if science had not taught CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 49 us these motions, we could not explain the formula ry. So is it, and so has it been, and so will it be un til the end of time with all the Bible formularies. And man certainly would never have thought of di viding time into days, weeks, and years, unless God had done it for him. These examples of Bible formularies already given, show that . science owes its oldest, and most fanuliar terms to God's written revelation, and if we look more critically at the Mosaic account of creation, we shall be more convinced that it was for thousands of years far in advance of modern science. For example there are two kinds of light men tioned by Moses. When he speaks of the creation of light, he uses the word '* aor," which is the only word the Hebrews had for electricity, and denotes the ethereal fluid, which fills all space. But when God created the sun and moon to give light, the " two great lights," He uses the term " maarath," which signifies "light bearers," so God does not represent them as the source of light ; and modern science teaches us that light consists in the vibratory motions of the particles of the luminous, ethereal fluid which fills all space ; and thus Gene sis and not its disputers is found to be correct, ac cording to the best and most recent discoveries in science. 50 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. The first scientific fact in the Bible is, that, after the materials of creation, God made the light. It was on the third day before the sun and moon were created, and this has been cavilled at as a blunder of Moses ; but recent discoveries teach that Moses knew more than modern objectors to this fact; because space is now known to be filled with a subtle ethe real fluid, no way dependent on the sunlight, but which is a cause of its brightness. Those examples were selected not because they were regarded as conclusive, but only as introducto ry, because they so stand in the Bible, and being the most difficult to demonstrate, they prepared the way for the consideration of the later formularies, and help to give a clue by which to explain them. There are manifold allusions to the phenomena of nature in the Bible, and they are made by writers of various degrees of culture and intelligence, and they extend through fifteen centuries, and not one of them has made a statement at variance with our advanced science ; it is said, to be sure that they knew nothing of science, because they speak of the rising and set ting sun, and like expressions ; but this is popular language ; scientific men use the same expressions, and in no age could they make themselves under stood by the masses in any other way. The later Bible formularies by Job, and the Psalm- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 51 ist, and the Prophets actually describe some of the great discoveries of modern science, though it is pro bable that the men who wrote them did not under stand all their import. Astronomy is the grandest field for human science to explore, and that furnishes the strongest evidence that the Bible teaches scientific truth with scientific accuracy ; the fact of the motion of our solar system is mentioned by both Job and the Psalmist ; and the latter says God has set the sun as a tabernacle in the heavens, that its " going forth is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit unto the end of it;" while Job, with divine precision tells us the motion proceeds from Pleiades, (Job xxxviii, 31,) and one of the ablest modern astronomers tells us that Alcyone, the central star of that group, is the central sun around which our solar system and the universe probably re volve 7 If any one doubts whether Job's words teach the doctrine of the motion of the universe, let him con sider these two things ; 1st. Job was born in the third generation after the deluge ; the age to which he lived determines this with Divine accuracy ; he there fore lived contemporary with Noah more than a cen tury ; Noah lived six hundred years with Methuselah ; and Methuselah lived two hundred and sixty-one years with Adam, and consequently Job's knowledge 52 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. was derived third mouthed from Adam, and was the truth taught him by God, and so the true system of the universe ; and Josephus confirms this, for he says the sons of Adam knew the great Astronomical Cycle of six hundred and twenty years, and so must have known the true system and motion of the solar sys tem. And 2d, if this left any reasonable doubt on the subject, the words of the Psalmist seem to be an explanation of the formulary of Job, where he says the going forth of the " sun is from the end of the heavens, and his circuit unto the end of it." Moreover this teaching, on the grandest truth of astronomy, is accompanied by equally specific scien tific statements of many minor truths respecting the laws of nature ; and of things which have been only lately explained by our modern scientific research. The Bible teaches the revolution of the earth on its axis, of the four grand divisions of the animal king dom, the scientific measurement of time, the cycloidal currents of the ocean and the air, the origin of fossil remains, the origin of dew and rain, and the cause of the slight density of tbe earth, a fact which science has discovered but cannot explain without the help of the Bible. A few more examples, showing the di vine accuracy with which the Bible states scientific truths, will suffice to show that the Bible does teach science as well as theology, and in the same way. The CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 53 Psalmist says, God founded the earth on its "bases," and modern science teaches that the bulk of the ma terials of the earth consists of three great acid, al kaline, and neutral bases ; again Job says, God made a weight for the air, and Galdeo, thirty-five centu ries after, first proved the truth by actual experi ment ; Job also says, the wind moves in spiral cir cles, and modern observation confirms it, and proves that all storms rush in cycloidal courses. Again, Job and the Psalmist say, " God hangeth the earth on nothing," and science confirms it, because it teaches that the earth gravitates towards the sun, and that the earth literally hangs on nothing. Again, the Bible says, " rain drops, and dew distils ;" science tells us the first is caused by the segregation of par ticles of vapor in the air ; and that dew is the con densation of vapor floating in the air near the earth's surface. Again, the Bible teaches that God gives the snow like wool ; and it is only in . modern times it has been discovered, that it acts like a blanket in protecting the earth from the cold. These facts seem certainly to establish the truth it was proposed to prove. There are also formularies for physiological laws in the Bible, that have taken men nearly six thousand years to find out. The seed of the woman is such a formulary, and it is only in modern times that sci- 54 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. ence has discovered that the human race is propaga ted from eggs as all other animals 'are. Another physiological law is that the life is in. the blood, that its corpuscles are vital motors, and its cir culation the force by which man breathes, and thinks, and acts. The old Hebrews understood these things which modern science calls new discoveries ; and the Bible says " Blood is the life." Thus it is evident that the scientific as well as theological names for familiar things are from the Bible ; and that an intimate relationship exists be tween natural and revealed truth ; and they are insep arable parts of a revealed whole ; and though we cannot now discern the beginning or end of these re lations, there is no reasonable doubt that one God is the Author, and will be the Finisher of them. CHAPTER IV: The Bible and Science do not Conflict.— Geological Errors. — The Earth's Antiquity.— Theory of the Universe.— Geology in its Infancy.— Gulf Stream.— The Earth's Axular Motion. Physical science knows nothing of the mysteries of the Incarnation ; all spritual truth is beyond its proper sphere. But theology includes the investiga tion of both revelations. The language of the Bible was not designed to be used for scientific purposes, and science has nothing to do in its practical oper ations with this branch of revelation. It has been often said, and created alarm among some theologians, that the Bible will have to give way before advanc ing science ; but so far from this modern science is helping to explain the Bible, and it will have to sub mit to its interpretation, before it can reconcile its own conflicting opinions respecting creation, the unity of mankind, the origin of species, and the uni versality of the deluge, and other like disputed phys ical phenomena. 56 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. One reason why geologists have failed to make a true system of geology has been because they have gone back and attempted to begin with the dawn of creation, instead of reasoning from physical changes now going on back to those which have been taking place from the beginning. It is the commonly received opinion of some of the ablest scientific men of our day, that the earth was created mdlions of ages ago ; that there have been successive creations of animals and plants, in great floral provinces, and that man and the present order of things are the result of the last creative epoch, and that this alone is of comparatively recent date. The writer sees no objection to this theory, and no difficulty in reconciling it with the Mosaic account of creation, if the evidence furnished substantiated the theory, for there can be no conflict between the revelations of God. Moreover the writer be lieved this theory for more than twenty years ; and he here sets forth some of the facts, furnished by this school of philosophers, which led him to change his views, because their facts overthrow the theory. These phdosophers tell us, that the Bible was not given to teach men science ; that its account of crea tion relates only to the last great epoch, and that the fossil remains of the animal and vegetable kingdoms confirm their theory. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 57 The chief cause of the misunderstanding, between theologians and scientists has been, that formerly, the one studied theology without science, and the other studied science without theology, and both are parts of God's revelation to man, and neither can be un derstood without the other. But the facts furnished by the ablest scientific men in Europe and America, in astronomy, geology, chemistry, together with all the most recent investi gations of the laws of the elements and forces of mat ter, conflict with their theories, and establish beyond a reasonable doubt, not only the recentness of the creation of all the elements which make up the bulk of the matter of the earth, but also the nearly simul taneous creation of every living plant and animal now living, or which has ever lived upon it ; and that the present order of animals and plants are the lineal descendants of those created by God, and to which Adam gave names ; which names, that is, all which occur in the Bible, they have ever since retained. It may be asked, if this be true, how is it possible that the theory of the great antiquity of the earth could be believed, or adopted by learned men? The reason is apparent on reflection, and an examin ation of the origin and progress of modern science ; for it is unquestionably true in science as in religion, that whatever is new is false; not new discoveries 58 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. but new doctrines, for by new is meant only that which varies from the truth, as it was known when first revealed. And it is evident from history, that from creation until within the last two centuries, though intima tions to the contrary may have been made, no doubt was entertained respecting the recentness of crea tion Moses, David, Isaiah, Christ, St. Peter, and St. Paul, and St. John, and the fathers and doctors of the church, down to the seventeenth century all speak of it either as recent, or passing rapidly through changes to a higher condition. Bishop Andrews, in his " Meditations and Devo tions," dwells on each day's work by God, and on Sunday says, " Glory to Thee, O Lord, all glory be to Thee, who didst, as on this day, create the ligbt, and command it to shine on the face of the deep," and so on of each day's work untd the seventh. All this was unfalteringly believed until the revi val of learning, when Copernicus revived the true theory of the universe, which we call the Pythago rean, but which Josephus tells us was known by Adam and his sons, and so is the divine system ; and until Galileo revived the other true theory of the re volution of the earth on its axis, and Kepler discov ered and taught the vastness of space. All this aroused the human mind to the vastness and grand- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 59 eur of the universe, and the study of geology began the next century, and as it advanced, the earth being a part of this vast solar system, it seemed probable that the duration of matter would be somewhat com mensurate with the eternal existence of God, and its infinite extension in space. This was a natural con clusion for men to come to, who investigated the laws of God as they exist in matter divorced from His written revelation concerning them. It was natural, because the Greek philosophers, under similar cir cumstances, had come to the same conclusion ; and so modern geologists, amazed by marine strata many hundred feet thick, which they supposed must have been millions of ages forming, and by fossil remains of animals which no longer exist, undertook to make geological theories to place the earth in harmony, as they supposed, with its vast duration. This, the writer believes, gave rise to modern geology; But the truth is, that practical geology is yet only in its infancy. In the last half of the last century, the ablest scientific men in Europe violently disputed with one another as to the origin of fossil remains, and some of the most learned declared that they had never been the abodes of living things, but were formed from lime or slime by the action of the sun, or some unknown cause ; while in the first half of the present century, some of the ablest scientific men 60 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. have changed some of then- fundamental principles, several times within the writer's memory. All this proves, that geologists have as yet no satisfactory theory of geology. Modern geologists have failed to form a true sys tem of geology from the same cause, that the ancient Greeks failed to make a correct system of astronomy. The Greeks observed well and collected their facts well ; but they lacked the knowledge of the " Law of Motion," which prevails in our solar system, and without that, it was impossible to form a true system of astronomy. And modern geology is now in a similar condition, living geologists have observed well and collected facts well ; they have found out that fire and water are the two great agents God has used in making the crystalline and sedimentary rocks, which constitute the bulk of the earth's surface ; and they have gener alized their facts very well according to the theories which they have assumed. But they have failed to form a stable system of geology, because they have not yet applied that universal law of motion in the water, which has existed from the beginning, and is the cause of the great oceanic currents, that have de posited every marine strata on the globe ; and the crystalline, as well as the sedimentary rocks were all deposited by that law. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 61 God always works by law, and that He did so in laying the superficial strata of the earth is testified to by the internal evidence of the rocks themselves, by the uniformity which prevails in every quarter of the globe where explorations have been made. The number of strata, the materials, and the thickness of each stratum, and of the whole depths of the rocks found in the borings for Artesian wells, in California and the Atlantic States, and in Europe, prove that the deposits were made by a common and universal law, prevading from the equator to each pole ; and until that law was understood, for it is now operating as it has done from the beginning, only on a reduced scale, it was impossible to do anything more than guess, as the geologists have done, as to how, or when, or how long ago the various strata were de posited, or how old they are. And there is now no longer reasonable doubt but that in a few years, for law is absolute when it is established, our own pre sent system of geology will appear as absurd to us as the complicated, cumbersome, and absurd system of ancient Greek astronomy does, and as the ridiculous disputes of the scientific men of the last century re specting the origin of fossil remains now do, to us. About fifteen years ago personal observations ex tending over the operations of the Gulf stream for several hundred miles, between Tortugas and Cape 62 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. Florida and the Bahama Islands, together with facts furnished me by the engineer, in charge of the forti fications erecting at Tortugas, led me to believe that the operation of that current was a part of a un iversal law of motion of the sea, which . had formed all the marine sedimentary deposits on the globe ; and subsequent investigations have confirmed the be lief ; and that it must be by the study of that law, for it is in operation now, and depositing new strata ex actly as it has done from the beginning, only on a narrower scale, that we must arrive at some proxi mate conclusions, as to the age of the earth, and the time and manner of its creation. And it is proposed, by and by, to show that the re volution of the earth on its axis produces that cur rent, and that from the beginning, two great equato rial currents, causing many other currents in the ocean, have been flowing round the globe up to the poles, and back in Arctic currents to the equator, in a perpetual flow ; the water at first having been seve ral thousand feet higher than its present level, and by that law of motion all the marine strata on the earth have been deposited. One satisfactory proof of the existence of this law is the fact that it is in operation now, and there is no marine deposit forming on the globe except under its operation, and recent explorations in deep soundings CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 63 for laying the Atlantic cable show that deposits, like the oldest Silurian, are now being deposited with the same characteristic fossil remains, and elsewhere un der the same law, the fauna and flora from every quarter of the globe are entering into contemporary formations, and exploding the theory of the elevations and depressions of the earth at vast intervals, when first marine and then terrestrial surfaces were ex posed, which are evidence not only of the simulta neous creation of all things, which are now and ever have been on earth, but also that they are of compar atively recent date. About two or three centuries ago astronomy was the great battle-ground between science and theology. The contest was long and severe ; the Roman Church sdenced Galileo, but truth prevaded, and we have found out not only that the Bible and science did not disagree, but that to this time the Bible has continued far in advance of science. The scientific discoveries confirmed the Bible, and enlarged the boundaries of human faith; and the recent discovery that our solar system is in motion, which the Bible has taught for three thousand years, proves how far ahead its revelations have always been of science, and that there is no parallax between the law of the Bible and the facts of astronomy. This law would have remained unexplained if science had 64 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. not advanced so as to interpret it, and our research into other laws by chemistry, and other investigations, is about to do the same thing for geology ; for we are just finding out that crystalline rocks are of chemi cal composition, and so were suddenly consolidated, while the Gulf stream is teaching us that banks of sand thousands of feet thick, and coral reefs thou sands of miles long have been formed in a few cen turies, and fossil remains from deep sea-soundings teach no less conclusively, that the oldest fossil re mains were tbe ancestors of those now living, and all testify that all creation is of comparatively recent origin. Creation is God's oldest revelation and oldest book of nature. It was stereotyped from the beginning, and there is no mistaking its teachings ; it must be inter preted by help of the Bible, which is a later revela tion, and without which it cannot be understood. CHAPTER V. Creation's Beginning.— Mosaic Cosmogony. — Light. — Ring Theory. — No Worlds Forming. — Oxygen Discovered. — Creation suddenly Pro duced. The grandest question to be solved in geology is the early history of the earth, because all others de pend more or less on that. And it is certain that the popular theory of the immense antiquity of the globe is opposed to the principles of natural phdoso- phy. This has been clearly shown in the contro versy between Sir W. Thomson and Mr. Huxley. It is no less apparant, from its influence on the mind of those who adopt it, that the tendency of such a belief is to infidelity. The fact that God created the whole world in a few natural days, as it is described in the Bible, gives a clearer and fuller view of His personality, power, and wisdom ; whde the other be lief tends to separate Him from His works, and leads to Pantheism, or that the universe is God. The Bible teaches that creation had a beginning, 66 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. and that God created it, and what the elements and forces which He used were ; and by research into the laws of the revelations, we learn that the kingdom of nature revealed in creation, and the spiritual kingdom of Grace revealed in the Bible, make up the whole universe of God. And we are just now finding out, that the Mosaic account is a definite scientific description of the orig inal act of creation, and that one revelation cannot be understood without the aid of the other, for exactly as man has advanced in the knowledge of the Bible, has he been able to interpret the laws of nature. It is true that creation indicates that there is something superior to it, yet what that something is, could not be learned without the Bible ; for reason can only teach that it were as likely to be fate as God ; a chain of endless causes, without beginning and without end, and so excluding both God and chance. But with the Bible as the interpreter of creation, the vast work kindles up with the glory of the Divine Author, and all that comes within reach of man's in vestigation seems but the reflection of the threefold Personalities of the Godhead, woven into and im pressed on matter and force. The Mosaic Cosmogony represents the first act of God, in beginning creation, as making the heaven? and the earth ; the elements floating in a great and CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 67 void deep, seem to have included all the ponder able matter of the universe, " the H eaven and the Earth," all the mineral and chemical elements which were to make the acid, and alkaline, and neutral bases. The second act of creative power was the mov ing of the Spirit on the face of the deep, and simul taneously with this moving God said, " Let there be Light," The Psalmist says, God created darkness but He formed the light, making it of an antecedent something ; what that something is, is not revealed any further than that " God is light ;" and He " clothes Himself with light as with a garment ;" it is an etherial fluid which fills all space, and all things, and is the source of all the imponderable elements of creation; heat, electricity, and magnetism, seem to be different combinations of light. Indeed the Hebrew word AOR there translated light means light ning or electricity ; it was created three days before the sun and moon, and instead of being dependent on them, gives intensity to the sunlight. And this exactly agrees with science, which teaches that .sun light consists of vibratory motions of the ethereal light. Before the entrance of light into the " great deep" the earth was without form and void, existing only as part of the elementary mass ; but the light caused a separation between the ponderable and imponderable 68 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. elements, for the motion communicated by the Spirit of God caused not only the separation of the element ary materials, but also the organization of germinal spores or cells of worlds and systems floating in the aqueous magma of matter and etherial fluid, and the laying the foundations of each world and system; the whole mass being magnetized, each electrified globe began to separate from the mass, and to revolve on its own axis, and thus was the first day's work finished. These gigantic chemical agencies and imponderable forces, under God's immediate direction, gave motion, form, and organization to the mineral kingdom. Sir John Herschel says, in a lecture which I read a few years after writing the albove, "the Hebrew word Aor suggests the idea of the fundamental, the pri meval, the antecedent, and superior in point of con ception to all other products or results of creative power in the physical world, that it fills the universe, and gives assurance of a uniform and all pervading energy to the extremest regions of space." . . . "A mechanism almost beyond comparison complex,, minute, and powerful, by which that influence or movement is propagated." Thus he came to the same conclusion from the scientific stand-point I arrived at from the theological. The Bible says nothing definite of the worlds be yond our system, except that they were simultaneous- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 69 ly created, because we cannot exhaust the mysteries of our own world in our present life, yet the revela tion of the unity of creation enlarges our know ledge of God's power and wis dom, and adds to His glory. The theory of the detachment of rings, by the ro tation of the chaotic m ass, is not in accordance with chemical laws, as the separation and aggregation by electrical action is. Neither is it probable that " the great deep," was ever in an intensely heated condi tion, because the sun was created the third day, and the moon and stars were not made to shine untd that day, all being from one mass, but of different densi ties. Chemistry teaches that organization would take place in elementary matter at the centre, by the in troduction of electricity. God was present directing the work, and He says, that the earth is founded on " the water floods," that crystallization is around an intensely compressed aqueous centre, and the known density of the earth confirms the theory. If any great chemical change were to suddenly take place in the earth, and air, and universe, the whole mass would probably be resolved into its original ele mentary condition, without form and void as it is represented in Genesis. That wonderful invention, the spectroscope has ad vanced our knowledge, and done more to prove the 70 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. Bible theory of Creation than all other discoveries from Adam to our day. It reports that the matter of the sun, and remotest fixed stars, and nebulae is identical with the chemical elements of the earth ; that all are homogeneous, governed by common laws, and so all of simultaneous creation. Mr. Huggins argues, because he finds matter in different stages and degrees of density that new worlds are forming. But he offers no satisfactory proofs to confirm his theory. It is thus far only speculation, because observation has not been pro longed sufficiently to show that such a process is going on ; but on the contrary, as no world is known to have been formed, it is more probable that St. Peter's account is the true one, that these elementary worlds, and spores of worlds, were part of the original crea tion, and " are reserved," or waiting the exercise of an other creative epoch for completion, when the present Heaven and Earth, Kosmos, or whole material uni verse, will pass through its last great change, and out of this second grand, creative, universal action will come a new Heaven and a new Earth ; then God's vast work will be finished, and matter like man will be eternal. If this Divine revelation be true, it gives im mense weight and probability to the opinion, that all Creation is of recent date, that man, as a son of God, was created in the morning of time, and is destined CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 71 to play his grandest part on the theatre of creation, after both that and himself have passed through their last great change, and have been made spiritual and im mortal. Then God's work will be finished according to His original plan. It was only when the Son of God was ending His Incarnate life by death on the cross that He said " It is finished " ; and through death creation will finally be finished. The term day is used by God, in His revelation to man, and He so defines its meaning that it cannot be misunderstood easily ; the light He called day, and the darkness night ; and then added, the evening of darkness and the morning of light made up the whole period of the first day. This referred to what would be a day when the six days' work was com pleted; but it certainly was a day measured by the revolution of the earth on its axis, because ever since creation the daily rotation of the earth has caused common darkness and light ; and it is a revelation of scientific exactness, because we know that diurnal motion is so unchangeable, that it has not varied one-three-hundredth part of a second in the last three thousand years ; so no words could express God's meaning more plainly. This is God's revelation that the earth's rotation was fixed on the first day of time, as ordained for man, and as it has continued ever since. And this 72 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. shows the unsoundness of a supposition, set forth by the geologists who contend for the earth's great an tiquity, that its rotation in the beginning was so rapid, that no animal life could have existed had it been created, and it has been shown also that philosophy controverts the theory as plainly as revelation. There is infinite wisdom displayed in the sacred narrative, in stating the term day, and then when the sun and moon and stars were formed to intensify the period, to reiterate again that the rotation of the earth on its axis made day and night. .. Thus the Bible makes the first day's work to con sist in the production of the three great original forces of nature, matter, light and motion ; I say forces, because both matter and light consist of mole cules of force, and motion, if it does not consist of similar molecules of force, is so correlated with the others as to be inseparable in creation ; and it helped the incubation and organization in the " great deep," and is the divine force which has ever since been one of the agents in driving all the mechanism of the universe. Science teaches that heat, electricity, and magnet ism are probably only different forms of light ; the former have no commencement that can be traced, but they refer back to an antecedent force. Thus there is seen to be a correlation of these orig- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 73 inal forces of light and motion with each other, and a combination of them with the elementary matter, which make up the vast work of creation, binding it all together in one inseparable universe, making it a symbol ofthe unity ofthe Godhead, existing in three divine persons ; and so, as St. Paul says, a shadow of the invisible God the Creator. Every molecule of matter has a law impressed on it as unchangeable as God, and the microscope can not detect the difference between animal and vege table cells until they begin to develope, which they do by an unchangeable law, which continues to the end of their existence. Because we cannot demonstrate, that heat, magnet ism, and electricity are only different properties of light, by any instrument or process now known, it is no evidence that we shall not be able to do so. It is less than a century since oxygen was discov ered ; and it is no more strange, that light should take those different forms, than that oxygen should exist in air, water and most of the rocks which form the earth's crust, as well as in most animal and veg etable substances. And if we consider that until within the last cen tury the nature of the air, water, and rocks, as well as sunlight, were not known ; and that the geology of the earth, and the cause of animal and vegetable 74 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. species are yet matters of speculation ; and that even the Christian religion, which is of such infinite moment O 7 to us, is so little understood, that doctrines utterly opposed to it are called Christian, we ought not to be suprised that matters of this kind are but in their " swaddling clothes," especially when practical men have only recently begun to investigate them. The latest research into the laws of nature and the geological strata of the earth proves, that it had such a beginning ; and that God has never created but in one way, whether it were a monad or a world, or system of worlds, since all organized beings and things begin from germinal cells, and develope under the power of light,moisture, andheat, until theyreach their normal forms ; and this agrees with St. Paul's graphic description of creation, that "the worlds were framed together by the word, of God, so that those things which are seen, were not made of those things which do appear." And if the worlds were framed to gether, as science teaches us they now are, then they must have been made not only simultaneously, but it must have been done within a few natural days of the revolution of the earth on its axis, as it is de scribed in the Bible. The last chapter aimed to show, that the Bible and science agree that Creation was a sudden act of God, and probably finished within the number of common CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 75 days named in Genesis. The Psalmist says, that " Thou, Lord, in the beginning, hast laid the found ations of the earth," as if it were sudden, and so making it more wonderful; and again he says, "God founded the earth on the seas, and established it on the waters;" and Geology testifies that it was so made ; and this controverts the infidel theory, that the earth was formed of nebulous matter, and its animal and vegetable kingdoms were developing for mill ions of years from animal and vegetable cells, until all things attained their present order. And it also renders it probable, that, if the Mosaic account of Creation is true, so also the Mosaic Chronology is true, and that it took place within the last six thousand years. Indeed modern science has removed all the diffi culties respecting the suddenness of Creation, since it has taught that light moves thousands of miles in a second, that electricity passes along a wire with incalculable speed, and the earth is a magnetized globe ; for by this, without any miraculous inter position but the will of God, after He had formed the germs of the worlds at their several places in " the great deep," the remotest fixed star would begin to move simultaneously in its orbit quite as easily as the earth. But the Mosaic account represents the introduc- 76 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. tion of light as a preparatory step, while the next creative act of God was, that on the second day, He said, " Let there be a Firmament in the midst of the waters ;" it was one Firmament separating and yet uniting all worlds. The waters were divided from the waters in the great deep, not only forming the Firmament, which we call space, but arranging the worlds and systems, which before were included in " the great deep," or face of the waters, and so com pleting the mechanism of Creation. That the term Firmament means space is certain, from its use at verse seventeenth, where it says, God set the sun and moon in the Firmament of Heaven, which is space, where they now are. And this was St. Paul's "fram ing of the worlds" together; and the most sublime exercise of creative power, because the Bible repre sents it not as the result of external forces alone, but as a concurrent movement of the Spirit of God, and so His will co-operating with the forces, and setting the System ofthe Universe in motion, on its majestic and undefinable pathway through space, and thus was completed the second day's work, and the order of Creation. And here we reach the beginning and completion of Creation in one vast system ; and this is the furthest point to which the two Divine revelations God has given man go ; and the whole is made up of CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 77 Matter, Light, and Motion, and they are to this moment its whole and inseparable elements, without which Creation would not have begun, and without which it would not exist for an hour. And all this shows that there is a marvellous analogy between the correlations of the forces of Nature, and the mysteri ous personalities of the Godhead, for God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, each are said to have created all things, in different parts of Holy Scripture; and in both cases it is above the power of human reason to grasp, because it can not trace the relationships, nor form an idea of one of the persons of the Godhead, nor of one of the forces of Nature, without the others. This is all that God has revealed to us, respecting the general work of Creation, in the Bible ; all the rest relates to preparing the earth for becoming the abode of man. And we see this wonderful analogy of correla tion in the spiritural kingdom, which God is building up on earth out of the material kingdom of Nature, and which was introduced here to carry on the work of Creation to its higher stage of redemption. The Father sent the Son to be the Head and Founder of the kingdom; the Son came and Redeemed Creation from the curse ; and the Holy Spirit is now working for its sanctification. The fourth act of Creative power was on the third 78 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. day, when the land and water were separated on the Earth, by the gathering of the waters into one place, and the Creation of the vegetable kingdom; and while this was going on in this world, changes were taking place in other worlds with reference to this. For as soon as the earth was ready to bring forth vegetable life, the next day the sun and moon and stars were ready to shine, and to support and increase that life. And it is also said, that they had other relations to man and his world ; God set them to measure Time, to be for seasons, for years and months, and weeks, and days, and to give light upon earth, and they have ever since continued to do so. But it is objected that the stars testify against the theory of their recent creation, because it takes light fifty thousand years to come from the remotest nebula? which shine on the earth. The inspired record removes this difficulty, because it says, God created the stars to give light on the Earth, and that they did so simultaneously with their creation. And the Almighty- power was wondrously displayed by this mighty miracle. And the most recent scientific experiments on star light prove, that it exerts a considerable influence on the earth's heat ; and so a simultaneous influence of starlight on the Earth, at the moment they were il luminated was probably as essential to the perfection CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 79 of the work of Creation, as the creation of the stars was to the unity of the whole plan. The Mosaic account is definite and particular on this point. It says (Gen. 1. 17) that God made the stars and set them in the Heavens to give light on the Earth, and that they did so, as a part ofthe fourth day's work of Creation. This looks as if God fore saw the objection which would one day arise, and provided beforehand an explanation of it. According to the Mosaic record there was but one collection of dry land, and but one sea, and Asia was certainly the centre of the original Continent. Its form was changed by the Deluge, but its foundation remains covered with diluvial deposits. It is now eight thousand miles from East to West, five thou sand from North to South, and is not only the native land of man, but also of the whole vegetable and animal kingdoms ; all may be traced back there, as the Home from which they began their migrations over the earth ; to that centre all languages, and religion, and arts may be traced, and to this day it contains two-thirds ofthe twelve hundred millions of the people on the globe. And the annals of a nation, which had its birth on that continent, is the central point in our world's history, and its records are the only reliable current which reaches back from our day to the Creation of man and his world. 80 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. This extraordinary fact, that the continent of Asia differs from all the other continents on the globe, being longest from east to west, and not ham-shaped like the others, is another kind of proof that it had its origin, and took its form in accordance with another law, or rather by the same law, when the equatorial current flowed unobstructedly around the globe, and so confirms the Mosaic account of one original conti nent in the beginning. CHAPTER VI. Law of Motion in the Water. — Diurnal Rotation. — Infusoria and Algse in Crystalline Rocks. — Equatorial Currents.— Testimony of the Moun tains. The whole surface of the earth bears internal evi dence that water was the great dynamic, which laid its foundations and deposited on them the overlaying sedimentary strata. Besides the general law of motion, in all the water of the globe, caused by the moon's attraction, pro ducing the daily rise and fall of water, and so called the law of the tides, there is another universal law of motion, causing a continual and connected flow of the water of all the oceans, and making the great oceanic currents, which begin in two equatorial currents, flowing in spiral curves to the northern and southern poles, and returning to the equator, bringing back cold water and icebergs, thus keeping a perpetual exchange of hot and cold water. This law is caused by the rotation of the earth on 82 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD its axis ; I call it the Law of Motion in the Water ; and it has deposited or formed every marine strata on the surface of the earth. The Bible represents the elementary materials of the globe as originally in a chaotic fluid of land and water, and that it was not until the third day after the creation of light, that crystallization had so far taken place that the dry land appeared. And actual experiments prove, that the magnetizing of such materials would cause the whole bulk to rotate on its shortest axis, and separate and distribute the elemen tary materials in solution according to their several densities ; and the primary crystalline rocks and the metals found chiefly in them prove that they were so separated and deposited in deep water, and consolida ted there by tbe operation of such a law. And this law has been in operation ever since, and by it all other marine strata have been formed. The ancients probably knew nothing of Geology, because they did not know of this law ; and with the exception of the fact that the Icelandic chronicles mention that the Northmen knew of that part of the great current which flows up to Iceland, and which they met on their voyage westward, there is probably no other evidence outside of the Bible, to prove that they knew anything of the equatorial currents, which have flowed uninterruptedly ever since the earth CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 83 began to rotate on its axis. The motion of the solid parts of the globe being from West to East, the water falls back from East to West, and so acts as a counterbalance to its motion, and probably prevents a sensible oscillation of the globe, which might otherwise be felt ; and the fossil history of the earth, as we shall by and by show, proves that this law has been in operation from the beginning of creation. This diurnal motion is caused by the law which makes the planets revolve in orbits, the planes of which pass through the centre of the sun, and the earth rotates because it is a magnetized globe, and connected by that force which magnetizes it to our solar system. The currents caused by this force are variously modified by the influences of evaporation at the equator, by the different densities of warm and cold and salt and fresh water, and by the trade winds, whde some of the currents are but the efforts of the water to regain the equilibrium disturbed by the dai ly rotation. The Bible gives a formulary of the original equato rial stream, saying, the stream is turned about in spiral curves that it may do whatsoever God com mands it on the face of the earth. And science interprets this formulary, by proving that all currents in the sea describe their curves of motion in the 84 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. planes of great circles. Job gives the first division of two currents, one falling off on each side of the equator to the north, and the other to the south pole ; the whole equatorial current is called "the water course," and then says, "God divideth the water course ;" for the overflowing water, driven back by the earth's rotation, would pile up to overflowing, and fall back in curves to the poles ; because it is a law of all fluids in motion, that they move in curves, and go from point to point by the shortest courses. The earth was certainly created on scientific prin ciples, because science is a knowledge of the laws of nature ; and just as certainly as the nitrogen in the air is fixed there by a determined law of the Creator so certain is it that the oxygen in the water, and in all the primary rocks was put there by the same original and determined law of God, and that these laws have not been changed one iota since the be ginning ; and we learn from them that creation is purely a scientific work, and by studying and explor ing its laws now, we learn exactly what it has been, and how those laws have been operating from the first moment when God called them into existence. This equatorial current, therefore, has been flowing from the beginning, but at first it flowed round a single continent many thousand feet above the pres ent level of the sea, for "God gathered the water CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 85 into one place," and the dry land appeared. And there has been a gradual exsiccation of that original water going on ever since, the cause of which will be by and by explained, and that has produced new continents and islands which have divided the sea as it now is. When the equatorial current flowed unobstructedly around the globe, it distributed the newly formed materials and spread them over all its surface in deep water, and laid the foundation of the new conti nents and islands. Dr. Jenzsch, of Gotha, who has devoted himself for some years to microscopic lithographical re searches, announces that he has discovered prodigious numbers of infusoria and rotiferse intermingled with algas in various kinds of crystalline and volcanic rocks. Some of them were petrified in the midst of then* life-functions. Thus every year new discoveries are teaching us that life had begun while the pri mary rocks were forming, and that all things on earth were of nearly simultaneous origin. The vast deposits of elementary materials, silex, mica, horneblend and similar minerals, originally- minute particles, were transported in solution in the water, and scattered loosely over the submarine floor of the sea, and deposited in strata according to their several densities in deep water, and the founda- 86 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. tions of Europe, Asia, Africa and America were laid when the water was probably several thousand feet above its present level. Since then nearly all the great islands like Green land and Australia, and the British Islands, and all the peninsulas of India and China were formed ; while the Equatorial current has changed its original course by the drift it had deposited in Central Africa and between North and South America. The Arctic current once flowed down the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains across the whole valley of the Mississippi and the United States and laid all the in ferior chains of mountains ; but as it formed new land it was driven eastward, until it has reached its present narrow limits in Davis Straits ; and the whole coast of the United States, of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador, were all formed between the Arctic and Equatorial currents as the water decreased, which it has done from the begin ning. The Rocky Mountains do not run up to the Arctic, which is proof of this law, but the northern part tends westerly from lat. 60 ° , and makes the peninsula of Alaska exactly as it would have formed had the equatorial current passed in a large stream into Behrings Straits, and descended on the east side of the chain. The inclination of the earth's pole, of twenty-three CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 87 and a half degrees, made the Equatorial and the Arctic currents very different from what they would have been had the pole been perpendicular ; and the distribution of the land and the peculiar formation' of its continents and islands, like a bacon ham, broad at the North and tapering at the South, prove the Bible record true, that there was at first but one continent north of the equator, near Central Asia, and that parts of it were carried by the above cur rents where they now lie. The proof of this is, that the continents are all of one form, and their materials are all homogeneous ; and that the bulk of all the land yet remains north of the Equator. The Equatorial current first began in what is now the Indian Ocean, and this confirms the Mosaic record that the creation of man and time began in Central Asia, because the first revolution of the earth would begin time, and begin it where the earth began to revolve. That current flowed over what is now Africa and Mexico, and the northern part of South America, and divided in the Pacific Ocean, one branch passing up over the northern part of North America, into the Arctic Ocean, and returning towards the Equator, on the east coast of America, and between these two currents were deposited the foundations of North America. The other half of the Equatorial current flowed 88 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. towards the Antarctic, and found its way into the general circulation in a polar current, between what is now Cape Horn and Cape of Good Hope, on one side, and into the Indian and Pacific Oceans on the other ; where it continues to flow to this day, and it laid the foundation of South America between its two currents; and it is the polar currents which have kept the Atlantic Ocean open as it is this day. The Arctic current swept easterly in an immense curve, whirling part of its waters over to Asia, and pouring them down into the Indian Ocean, and meeting the Equatorial current both there and in the Atlantic at lat. 60 ° , and between these currents Greenland and Kamtchatka were deposited. Actual explorations of the earth, testify to the fact that the warm water of the Equatorial current once flowed up to lat. 60 ° , and that tropical marine plants and infusoria and, zoophytes once lived there, with a testimony that no human logic can shake. The same law and result operated in the Southern Hemisphere, the Antarctic current pouring up to the pole swept easterly, in similar curve to the Arctic, and whde part of its water returned to the Equator through the Atlantic Ocean, part was whirled on and found its way into the Indian and Pacific Oceans, as it does to this day, and between these currents Aus tralia was deposited as Greenland was in the Northern CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 89 Hemisphere. The Pacific current moves the whole bulk of that mighty ocean for thousands of miles, where it is uninfluenced by trade winds, or by the differing densities of salt and fresh water, no fresh rivers of any magnitude emptying into it, and where the bulk of the ocean is flowing through the temper ate zones, so that some, other dynamic than those, which are commonly supposed to cause the current, must be sought for ; and diurnal motion not only ac counts for it, but also explains many of its phenome na, which are unexplainable on any other theory. That is the primary cause of the law of motion in all the water of the globe ; by that law all the marine strata formed since the original six days' work of creation have been deposited, and it is now at work as it has been from the beginning, only on a vastly more limited scale, laying the foundations of new peninsulas, and islands and continents. And this is confirmed also by the fact that there is not a mountain, hill or valley in any quarter of the globe, except a few alluvial and sand hills, which does not show by its outward form and inward structure, that it resulted from this law ; while the collateral ranges which often occur, make the land scapes to look as if they had once been rolling oceans of sand and water that had suddenly settled into dry land. 90 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. But perhaps the best proof of the law is the fact that the banks of Newfoundland now forming between the Equatorial current and the Arctic stream coming down Davis Straits, have the same form as the conti nents and islands now above water ; while there is forming in the mid Atlantic Ocean an immense con tinent, which has all the characteristics of the old blue clay and older silurian formations, with some mollusks and radiates like the older formations, and there are also examples of the flora of Asia, Africa, and America, and remains of Arctic and Tropic fish and animals, depositing with them. The Bible represents the water as once twenty feet above the highest mountains, and thin strata of a quarter of an inch thick on some of them ; and the terraces in all quarters of the globe, some two or three thousand feet above the level of the sea, and coal formations at great elevations filled with tropical plants and animals, and the marine sand stones which cover them, all prove that they were deposited in estuaries and rivers, where the Equatorial current once flowed, and that they were left bare by the receding waters of ancient seas. All the marine Arctic fossils prove that parts of Europe and America have recently risen from such an ocean ; all the primary rocks of. the Northern Hemisphere prove by their courses and dip that they were deposited bv CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 91 such currents ; while the fossils above our Western lakes prove that until recently they were under such an ocean. The water has rapidly decreased from creation, as it is now doing, by sub-marine volcanic action changing it into steam and combining it in crystalline rocks, by the abstraction of the minerals held in solution there, and conversion of them into solid materials. The mountains testify to this truth. The highest peaks are in Asia; the Andes are half a mile lower, and the Rocky Mountains and the Alps two and a half mdes. Most of the inferior ranges run diagonally to these, which shows that they were formed by the same law of Motion in the water, but after the Equatorial current had been obstructed by the forma tion of land in Central Africa and between North and South America, and after the currents had both begun to flow nearly as they now do ; and when new land had formed from the North pole Southward and had depressed the Equatorial current down to about lat. 50 ° . Another substantial proof of this theory is seen in two other things, namely : the fossil history of the earth, and the courses and force of the currents as they now exist. The force with which the waters of the Indian Ocean flow towards Africa, and the Atlantic towards America, and the mighty rush of the polar currents, which heave up its millions of 92 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. acres of ice, and bear them towards the Equator from both poles, prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that it the Equatorial parts of Africa and America, and the land between the northern part of Asia and America were to suddenly sink below the level of the sea, all the now divided currents would as suddenly unite, and the ancient Equatorial and Arctic currents would resume their original course around the globe, in the manner which nas been described. CHAPTER VII. Oceanic Currents. — Upheaval of Continents. — The Atlantic Gulf Stream. — Deep Sea Soundings. — Bay of Mexico. — Saragossa Sea. — Climate. When the Equatorial and Arctic currents flowed almost unobstructed from the equator to the poles, they wore away, transported, and deposited the ele mentary materials ofthe earth, as has been described. The evidence of this is, that the primary rocks rest ing on the earth's crystalline foundations are compos ed of triturated quartz, mica, feldspar, and clay slate ; whde these again have been worn away and trans planted to new localities, and thus enlarged the ara ble area of the earth. The surface of the globe furnishes evidence that the equatorial current was once suddenly interrupted, and its original bulk greatly diminished, and its course changed by submarine convulsions, and the whole broken up into what now constitutes the Oceanic currents ; this is confirmed by the Bible 94 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. which says the foundations of the great deep were broken up at the deluge. The upheaval of Africa and the Isthmus of Darien broke up the equatorial current, and caused it to seek new channels to the poles ; it could not pass across Africa, and could not flow north because of land in that direction and so was forced south, and flowed round the Cape of Good Hope, forming the Lugullus current, and the African current in the Atlantic, which crosses over to Brazil and there divides, mak ing the Brazil current which runs south, and the Gulf Stream running into the Gulf of Mexico. It is only recently that experiments have been made to ascertain the courses of these currents, and this chiefly in the - Northern Hemisphere ; but the flora of India, of Africa and Brazil have been traced along their course, and found at Iceland ; wbile the acaleph, called by the sailors the Portuguese man-of- war, which has its birth in the Indian Ocean, travels down the great equatorial current, and follows its two grand divisions over all the globe, being found in the seas of all the globe from the equator to both poles ; and thus proving that all the waters and cur rents are united in a world embracing circulation And it also teaches us how the flora of the tropical, temperate, and arctic regions were deposited in ancient marine strata, thousands of miles from the CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 95 localities where they grew ; and also how unsatisfac tory is the theory of geologists, who account for those fossil remains by the rising and falling of the earth's surface or temperature which M. Arago has demon strated has not changed one iota in two thousand years. These Oceanic currents perform the same functions now that they did before their interruption ; they are hot and cold water pipes running all around the globe, thus equalizing the temperature of the air and the water, and transporting mud and sand to form new soil, then conveying to it seeds to clothe it with verdure. Columbus was the first person who reported any phenomena connected with the equatorial current and it was not untd late in the last century that the Atlantic Gulf Stream, which is the smaller branch of it, began to attract the attention of scientific men, and Dr. Franklin, whose mind received its first direc tion to scientific subjects from the great grandfather of the writer who was the father of . science in this country, being the first private citizen in the Ameri can Colonies, who imported philosophical instru ments and books for his own use, and devoted his leisure hours to its study. The Doctor gratefully acknowledged his indebtedness by a reference to the fact in his Autobiography,; but he himself has the 96 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. honor to be the first person who proposed to turn the Gulf Stream to the advantage of commerce and nav igation. Since then many experiments, in different parts of the ocean, have proved that the Gulf Stream flows from the Indian Ocean, towards the Cape of Good Hope, one branch running into the Atlantic, passes down the coast of Africa to the equator, crosses to America, and then dividing, sends one branch down to Cape Horn, and the other up to form the current which flows between Cuba and Florida, and down the coast to the north of Europe, Iceland, and the Arctic Ocean. Fruits and seeds from Asia, Africa, and South America have been picked up in Florida and Europe, so fresh that they would grow, and all the flora of the Florida Keys was brought there by the Gulf Stream, and differs almost totally from that on the main land ; and at the Orkney Islands, ten degrees north of the Arctic washed and ice bound shores of Labrador, the warm water of the Gulf Stream prevents the pocls from freezing. There is a larger Gulf Stream in the Pacific Ocean, the equatorial current taking warm water to both poles, and bringing back cold water in return. Com paratively little is known of that, because the ocean is less navigated, and its crossing currents perform CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 97 their circuits and find a level for their crossing waters in seas which cover more than half of the earth's surface, that are filling up yearly with new reefs, islands, and lavas with extraordinary rapidity, so that it is impossible it could have been so doing for ten thousand years, for if it had, tne whole bed of that vast area would have been already converted into crystalline rocks, reefs, and islands. The northern branch flows towards Behrings Straits, and has deposited materials which almost obstruct its entrance there, so that some of the current returns into circulation down the west coast of America. The southern branch flows down to the Antarctic and is less known, but the Humboldt current is most powerful and carries few bergs along the Chillian coast, while the main ice drift is towards the Falk- lands on one side, and the Cape of Good Hope on the other, where there is scarcely any motion of the water. This is a fact which no navigators are able to explain, except perhaps on the supposition that there may be strong submarine currents at a great depth below the surface. The rapidity with which mud and materials in solution in water travel has been tested by experi ments, and we learn from it how tropical flora was deposited all over Europe before the upheaval of Africa. Mud and material in solution in water, when 98 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. the velocity is three miles an hour, sink two feet an hour, so that in a current twelve hundred and twenty- four fathoms deep, they would float twenty-eight days, and travel two thousand one hundred and six teen miles before they were deposited. The superficial particles in the middle of the stream move slower than those at the side, and a velocity of three inches in a second, at the bottom of a current, tears up fine clay, whde a twelve inch velocity removes gravel, and a velocity of three feet in a second takes along stones of the size of an egg ; and we learn from the operations along the margins of these currents, how these forces separate materials of different densities and form the different geological strata. And there is now depositing in the Atlantic Ocean, in two thousand fathoms depth, sedimentary materials, and infusoria, mollusc a, and radiata like those found in the oldest Silurian formations. The United States exploring expedition found such sound ings in the North Pacific in 1853, and soundings for the Atlantic cable in 1860 brought up from one hun dred and forty-eight fathoms mud and clay resembling the blue clay of England, which contains the remains of many extinct mammals ; and this will have im bedded in it the fauna and flora of the present day as that had of that age. From soundings 7,000 feet deep ninety-five per cent of the mud was remains of the CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD 99 globigerinas, some of them living, and the same as exist in the oldest sedimentary rocks. An echinoderm was raised from the same depth (an asteridse) showing that formations like tbe oldest fossiliferous strata are now making in the deep sea. Before this naturalists contended that no animal life could exist at such a depth. The report of the survey for the French cable (1869) says, after leaving the Irish coast and taking a northern direction, the soundings pass down a gentle slope of sand, increasing in depth 200, 800 and 900 fathoms, which is maintained across the ocean until the American continent is approached, and there is not the slightest trace of shoal or rock the whole distance. But the great marvel of this survey in connection with the recentness of creation is, that all along that great deep from 1,700 to 2,000 fathoms, there is a continuous soft bed of mud mixed with myriads of the most minute shells of various forms, chiefly of the diatomaceas, perfect in organization and so exquis itely small as to be visible only under the most powerful microscope. These are of the same species as those found by Lt. Berryman, and prove that the whole bottom of the Atlantic is covered with the remains of these minute animalculae; and that new deposits of their debris are now being made, which 100 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD wdl form the same kinds of rock, which were formed in the deep seas of the primeval ocean before the Deluge. Islands and continents are now forming above and below the water, exactly as they did in ancient times. In the Bay of Mexico a submarine island is forming by mud from the Mississippi and other rivers empty ing in there, while every easterly storm throws thousands of tons of marine sand and shells over it in thin strata, i have seen the current of the Gulf Stream between Cuba and the Florida Keys, which runs easterly commonly at four and a half knots an hour, in a north easterly storm running west erly at the same rate ; and one storm like that would send marine sand and shells over that formation to the shores of Texas ; and each annual freshet of the Mississippi makes a great fresh water fluvial stra tum in the deep sea, and every storm throws a marine deposit over that ; so that in one thousand years it will probably be filled up so near the surface as to form an Island, and there will be alternate strata of marine and terrestrial formations, numbering more than a thousand, similar to those now seen in many parts of the globe, that were formed in the same way, but which geologists declare were made in the pro cesses of millions of years by the alternate rising and sinking of the land. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 101 In some places alternate tides of fresh and salt water make alternate strata of marine and land deposits, while every great storm throws up tons of gravel and sand from the sea. This has always been going on, and the fact overthrows the theory of any immense length of time in forming ancient strata. A great continent is forming in the Atlantic Ocean, between Cape Verde, the Azores, and West India Islands, in the Saragossa Sea, two thousand miles by three hundred and fifty, which is receiving materials from the Arctic regions, from Davis's Straits, and from the tropical and temperate regions of Asia, Africa, and America, all borne to this sea, where they are deposited according to fixed laws, and form ing stratified rocks and coal, for thousands of logs from the rivers of these countries find their last resting place there. The surface of that sea is stag nant, and the surface waters 10 degrees warmer than the surrounding Atlantic. I once saw floating, near where the Caribbean Sea empties into the Bay of Mexico, a palm tree seventy feet long, kept perpen dicular in the water by an immense root, the trunk thirty feet above the sea, floating down to that stdl water or to Iceland, and no wind or earthly power could stop it untd it reached its final resting place. Were that formation upheaved suddenly it would pre sent some of the characteristics ofthe old continents. 102 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. The current from the Indian Ocean sets towards Africa with such force, that, near Madagascar, it is said to run at seven knots an hour. And one proof that it is caused by the diurnal motion of the earth is, that the water piles up from the reaction on the east coast of Africa so that it is sixty feet higher in the Bay of Bengal than at Cape Comorin, and the reaction from the east coast of America makes the water thirty-six feet higher at Gaudaloupe, than it is at Havana, where it finds an outlet through the Straits of Florida ; and the same phenomenon occurs where one of the currents strikes the coast of Europe ; the water is raised so that there is a perpetual flow of surface water into the Mediterranean Sea; while the meeting of the Arctic Current and the Gulf Stream off Newfoundland piles the water back to Labrador, and a strong current sets back along the coast of the United States, which is felt to the mouth of the Mississippi river. And the rapidity with which land forms under the agency of these currents may be seen by the fact, that Chinese history shows that six hundred years ago there was an open sea to latitude seventy, and in the northeast part of the empire land has since formed to latitude sixty-three, four hundred and twenty miles ; and the skeleton of a whale and the hull of a vessel have been found eight hundred mdes inland; and marine fossds on the CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 103 steppes of Russia, prove that they were not Ions: ago marine sand banks ; and the whole valley of the Mississippi formed in a similar way, and quite as rapidly, soon after the equatorial stream was divided up into the Oceanic currents. When the original equatorial and arctic currents were broken up by volcanic action, and by the for mation of new land, which obstructed their courses, and turned them into new channels, they made the present oceanic currents ; and these have continued to perform the same functions in the econ omy of nature, and for the enlargement of the habit able parts of the earth, that those had done from the beginning. They keep up the circulation of hot and cold water, they purge the ocean, and by their per petual motion increase the evaporation of the sea and not only equalize the temperature of the air, but also furnish the moisture which causes the rains to wash and cleanse the air, and without them, both water and air would soon become incapable of sup porting life. And besides this, they grind up the rocks, and transport the mud and sand, which con tinually enlarge the habitable surface of the earth; and all the animal and vegetable life, which were created many thousand feet above the present level of the sea, have followed the receding waters down to the shores of the ocean, exactly as they are now 104 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. doing. And it is the climate which determines the boundaries of the floral and faunal provinces over all the earth. The Potomac river is the most northern, point at which tropical plants will live ; there are many plants growing wild in the neighborhood of Fortress Monroe, identical with those found in the woods of Florida, whde the live oak, which is one of the most magnificent trees in the world, where it grows on the borders of the Florida prairies, is a poor scrub tree in Virginia ; and I have picked from the beach there a wild rice growing, the seed of which probably was drifted by the ocean currents from the continent of Asia. And this is practical proof of the unsoundness of the theory of those who hold that plants were created in great independent provinces. And it must be by the study of the operations of these currents now, that we shall learn all that can be learned of the operations of the original currents, and ascertain with some reasonable probability, from actual induction, what is the probable age of the earth. There are many other facts, connected with these currents, which go to confirm this theory of the man ner in which God created the earth, and of the laws which He imposed on it, to cause it continually to grow from a fluid into a solid state, and which it is CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 105 not a part of the plan of this work to detail. But this theory will be established, because it is based on the laws of God ; and it will not only set tle the fact of the recentness of creation, but also revolutionize the whole modern system of Geology, and establish the fact, that the earth has had but four great geological epochs, CHAPTER VIII. Volcanic Agency. — No Internal Eire. — Earth's Heat. — Extent of Volcanic Force. — Continents Upheaved. — Extinct Craters. — Earthquakes. Modern chemistry has settled the old dispute among geologists as to whether God used fire or water in forming the earth, and shows that both helped to lay its foundations, and that they have been struggling together ever since, changing it from a fluid to a solid state, and forming its present surface. The term volcano is commonly applied to moun tains which emit smoke and water or lava ; and yet the largest volcanic eruptions in all ages have taken place from plains and the bottom of the sea. Chemi cal action began at creation, and heat and fire are but modifications of the substance called light in Genesis. because chemical affinity results from electricity and CREATION A RECENT WORK OE GOD. 107 the friction of homogeneous bodies produces heat and fire, whde the contact of heterogeneous bodies causes electricity, and chemical force can be converted into electricity, and most chemical action produces it ; and it has been one of the great dynamics which has acted extensively in every age, and every quarter of the globe, in enlarging its solid area. The foundations of the earth furnish internal evi dence, that this force took place first under the water, before a living plant or animal had been crea ted, and formed the crystalline rocks which are the lower crust, and girdle the interior of the globe, because they are unstratified, and without fossd remains. The Psalmist, in his poetical description of the beginning of creation, says : "He shot out light nings and discomfited them. Then the channels of waters were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered." These foundations show that such action did sud denly take place over all its outward surface at least, and probably suddenly and simultaneously through the whole mass, and electrified it, and formed that crystalline floor which is found in every quarter of the earth on digging into its surface. There were no mountain craters at that creative epoch, and the rocks themselves bear witness that they were formed beneath deep waters under a heavy superincumbent 108 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. pressure, that the electrical action extended over the whole globe, and was of short continuance, and sud denly ended. All along the past ages volcanoes have been at work for a time, and then ceased ; but there is a marked difference between ancient and-modern lavas, between the old and new volcanic rocks ; and they prove that at first there was no animal or vegetable life on the earth ; but that both kingdoms have con stantly enlarged, and by their decay furnished new materials for volcanic action, and for enlarging the solid parts of the globe. The oldest crystalline rocks abound with silex, hornblende, feldspar and mica, and quartz in crystals, while they are rare in modern lavas, but silica is abundant. The older lavas of Mount Vesuvius differ from the more modern ones, the latter being more scoriaceous and less crystalline. This volcanic action is not the result of vents from internal fires of a burning globe that is slowly cooling, for if it were, the phenomena would be very different from what they now are ; all the materials thrown up are such as exist at the surface ; while the heat does not decrease as it would if such were the case ; for the whole surface would gradually cool, or else gradually heat, and at last fall in upon the melted interior. And besides this, volcanic action would be as likely to occur at one point as another, which observation CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 109 teaches us is not the case ; and craters once opened would burn until the end of time, while there are ten extinct craters in South America for every active one, and France and Italy abound with them. The moon's attraction proves that the earth is not hollow ; and science demonstrates that it cannot be solid, according to the law of pressure acting on the surface, otherwise its specific gravity would be greater, because at the centre, steel would be com pressed to one-fourth its bulk ; and it cannot be melted lava, because the poles are thirteen miles nearer the centre than the equator and if it were, both poles would be volcanic vents instead of ice bound regions, and doubtless Job's theory, which is confirmed by the Psalmist, is the true one, that the interior of the earth is a compressed fluid, hidden, and held by a girdle of crystalline rocks, (Job 38, 30.) All the general heat of the earth arises from the latent heat caused by its magnetized state ; and from the sunlight, which intensifies the former, because all expansion in metals or bodies exposed to the sun is produced by the expansion of the latent heat in them, and it is these combined causes, which make the heat of the earth increase one degree for every sev enty or eighty feet as we descend into its surface so fai as the sun's power reaches. Actual experiments prove that most of the earth's 110 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. heat is derived from the sun, because deep mines which are hot when first opened lose their heat af ter being exposed to the atmosphere for a time, which would not be the case if the heat came from below. And it appears to be the reflection of the sunlight from the earth, which causes most of the heat at the surface, because five miles up in the air, there is no difference between its warmth in its rays or in the shade, In one deep mine in Cornwall, a point has been reached at which the temperature not only ceases to increase, but begins to decline ; and experiments at various places prove, that there is no general ratio of increase of heat as you descend into the earth, which is universal ; until recently it was held as a sci entific dogma, that the heat of the atmosphere dimin ishes as we ascend in a fixed ratio, and this also has been proved erroneous. Though it is undoubtedly true, that the magnetic condition of the earth is inti mately connected with all volcanic action, as it ap pears to be also with disturbances in the electrical state of the air. This is also confirmed by the physical conditions of the two polar circles, which differ greatly in conse quence of the different degrees of sunlight received by them. In the Arctic sunshine raises the thermom eter to 70 ° , and removing it to the shade the mer- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. Ill cury falls to the freezing point. The thermometer has a range of 120 ° , and the climate is dry, calm, and variable, nothing can exceed the beauty of its summers ; there is an endless blaze of sunlight, the air, sea, and earth teeming with life, and plains glow ing with richly tinted flowers. The Antarctic region is in direct contrast to all this, because of the lesser degree of sunlight which it receives, It has a marine climate, and so more equable, and though wet and stormy, it is not subject to extremes of temperature, and as it receives more warm water than the Arctic, it is probably warmer in winter, whde the change of the seasons makes but little change in its frozen waters. There has been a gradual increase of volcanic agenoy within the last geological epoch, and there are probably four hundred submarine and other eruptions yearly ; but all of them rise from local causes ; there is no vol cano now active that is remote from the sea ; the old antagonism of fire and water, which began at creation has continued ever since, though like everything else greatly modified ; the infusoria, mollusca, and radi- ata have laid the foundations of islands and conti nents, over deposits of iron, lime and sulphur, and wood and chemical action has ignited these masses, and water converted into steam has upheaved and melted them, and formed crystalline rocks and vol- 112 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. canic mountains, or prepared new materials for the Oceanic Currents to transport and form into new land. And how extensive these operations in nature are, may be seen in the fact that there are limestone for mations more than a thousand miles long, and it is estimated that there are sixteen thousand cubic feet of carbonic acid in twenty feet of limestone ; and one-half of all the minerals on the globe, even to the precious stones, are chiefly silex and oxygen, which is one of the constituents of water. It is evident that a law was impressed on the elements of matter, by which the antagonism of fire and water has been continuously at work from the beginning, in diminishing the bulk of the water and enlarging the surface of dry land. The earth was prepared to grow by a process of incubation; and this growth can be traced back through all the past geological epochs and formations, to the time when the whole crust was in a state of fusion. Potassia, soda, iron, sulphur, lime and carbon which exist everywhere in nature, and are always present in volcanic eruptions, will ignite under various circumstances and produce combustion. The decom position of water follows, and with the steam volcanic action, and the change of sedimentary deposits into crystalline rocks, with which the oxygen from the CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 113 water largely combines, granite being more than half oxygen, and the water is converted into solid rock. The power of hot water in effecting such changes is seen above ground, where warm springs at only 130 ° Fah. convert the surface of hard marbles into soft paste ; but under pressure it makes hard rocks fluid. And not only this but ah and iron both be come combustible under great pressure, and the hardest iron becomes soft without any pressure when long exposed to salt water with carbonate of lime in solution. I have seen an anchor which had been so exposed for fifty years, that was so soft that it could be cut like cheese with a penknife ; and experiments prove that sulphur and iron when sunk in the ground and exposed to moisture produce combustion. We are not at a loss, therefore, to know how internal fires are kindled in the materials of iron, wood, and minerals which are continually being buried in the deep sea. There were probably no violent volcanic upheavals until the end of the productive epoch, and the materials then deposited in the ocean around the whole earth were ignited simultaneously at the time of the Deluge. The ocean drift, deposited between Creation and the Deluge in the sea, formed a consid erable part of the continents of Europe, Africa, and America, and they were upheaved simultaneously. The materials thrown up do not differ from those on iI4 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. the surface, because in some places strata are ex posed at an angle of forty-five degrees for a hundred mdes, and the lowest strata would be sixty or seventy miles deep if it were perpendicular, and yet they are homogeneous ; while materials which were once in the bottom of the sea a thousand feet deep, are now four mdes up the mountains, but do not differ from the same formations on the surface of the earth. Prof. J. T. Hunt, in a lecture on the chemistry of the primeval earth, says: "The action of heat upon many buried sedimentary rocks, however, not only softens or melts them, but gives rise to a great disen gagement of gases, such as carbonic and hydrochloric acids, and sulphur compounds, all results of the reaction of the elements of sedimentary rocks, heated in the presence of the water, which everywhere fills their pores. In the products thus generated we have a rational explanation of the chemical phenomena of volcanoes which are vents through which these fused rocks and confined gases find their way to tbe surface of the earth. In some cases, as when there is no disengagement of gases, the fused or half fused rocks solidify in situ, or in rents or fissures in the overlay ing strata, and constitute eruptive or plutonic rocks like granite and basalt." Again he says " all volcanic and plutonic phenomena have their seat in the deeply buried and softened zone CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 115 of sedimentary deposits of the earth, and not in its primitive nucleus, accords with the conclusions already arrived at relative to the solidity of the nu cleus, with the geological relations of these phenom ena." " The earth if not solid to the centre, must have a crust several hundred mdes in thickness, which would probably exclude it from any participa tion in the plutonic phenomena of the earth's surface, except such as would result from its higher temper ature communicated by conduction to the sedimen tary strata reposing upon it." This theory, first advanced by Sir John F. W. Herschel is precisely like the one worked out by the writer before he saw that. But it may be asked, if volcanic action rises from local causes, how comes it that when volcanoes have burned for more than two thousand years, as Etna and Vesuvius are known to have done, that they do not exhaust the materials ? Hundreds ot craters have ex hausted the local elements and have ceased ; and the reason why others continue to burn is that masses, of minerals burn slowly, smouldering most of the time, but kindling into greater activity as they reach sub terranean springs of water, then the steam combining with the minerals forms melted lava, which is forced up and discharged from the vent. The sudden crea tion of steam, and its explosive force tears up the 116 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD surrounding rock, and in this way extends the subter ranean channel along which the lava flows ; and this way it works for miles away from the crater, follow ing the course of the combustible strata, and making a lava-duct, through which it pours its melted lava, it may be for a hundred miles, at every new eruption, until it reaches the original vent. Under such pres sure steam would render the hardest rocks as fluid as water, and penetrate masses of limestones miles in thickness, This accounts for the travelling undula tion and quaking of the earth, often for hundreds of miles from the centre of disturbance, the motion always proceeds from the centre in circles or ellipses, and these indicate proximity to the centre and the nearness of danger, because there fissures occur and the earth is liable to rise or sink. There are large rivers which sink and are connected subterraneously with the sea, through those ancient lava-ducts, -that were formed when the land was under water. The sources of earthquakes are chiefly in forma. tions of the productive epoch; their greatest depth not more than eight or ten miles ; and the disturbance is often hundreds of miles from the focus. California feels shocks from the Arctic and South America, and England from Iceland and Italy. The repose of volcanoes for years, even centuries may thus be accounted for. For example, suppose CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 117 an ignited subterranean mass to be smouldering at a distance from the volcanic vent, and the superincum bent earth to be so great as to prevent the escape of gases and smoke, they would make their way down the subterranean tunnels and escape at the crater. Whenever it burned to some point to let in more water, more steam would follow and temporarily in crease fire or smoke at the vent ; this process would sometimes go on slowly untd a great cavity for yards or even miles was formed, and then water breaking in subterraneously from the sea might make a sudden expansion and bring down the superincumbent earth, and form a great lake ; this has been done in Europe Asia, and America, a long distance from the volcanic crater. The vast extent of these operations, and the rapid ity with whichthey go on may be estimated by a few- examples. At one volcanic eruption in Japan a mountain was formed eleven thousand feet high ; at another in the Hawaian Archipelago (1800) a bay twenty miles long was filled with lava by one eruption, and land formed four miles long in the sea. There is a crater there, lifted from the sea recently, 13,500 feet high and nine mdes in circumference, with sand and corals nearly up to the crater, and five hundred feet above the sea coral beds ; another eruption poured out a 118 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. river of lava forty miles long, half a mile wide, and two hundred feet thick ; another (1867) lasted twenty days, raised a cone three hundred feet high, and ran like a river, filling up ravines, burning forests, and rushing hissing into the sea ; another stream, from three to nine miles wide, ran seventy miles and filled the sea where it was one hundred and twenty fathoms deep. Until lately it was believed that the extinct volca noes in Italy had ceased before it was- inhabited by man. The neighborhood of Rome is encrusted with lava, parts of it basalt, now the hardest stone, and proofs are multiplying daily that beneath that crust the country was peopled whde the volcanoes were active ; and what were regarded as prehistoric erup tions are assigned to the times of the early kings of Rome. There has been discovered at Marino, fifteen miles from Rome, under lava which was broken up for cultivation, a hut built of masonry, with vases ranged on ledges round the walls, of tbe Etruscan style, and on the floor was the skeleton of an old man, who was probably suddenly overwhelmed by e volcanic eruption. , All Iceland is volcanic. It has ranges of mountains over six thousand feet high ; and Hecla, which has violent eruptions about every fifty years, is nearly five thousand feet high and growing all the time. In 1784 a submarine eruption, forty miles distant, formed CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD, 119 an island five hundred miles square of solid lava. Iceland has furnished another example of equal extent ; one eruption poured a stream of lava ninety miles long, and from seven to twelve miles wide, and in its course it filled a chasm six hundred and fifty feet deep. But in former times these operations were on a much larger scale. Now most of the volcanic eruptions are, as they were formerly, under the sea, and on each one of them millions of tons and mdes of water are convert ed into crystalline rocks, and new islands are fre quently formed by them in the deep mid ocean, and St. Helena is an example of one thrown up in the Atlantic. The Indian Archipelago from Asia to Australia is of recent volcanic origin, with Borneo as its centre, extending over thirty degrees of latitude and thirty- five of longitude, and there gold, tin, iron, copper, and diamonds are found. And this proves that the metals and minerals are now deposited, where water is converted to steam, as it was in the first creative epoch, and that the earth has been growing from the beginning, and that all the difference in the various volcanic regions is caused by the difference of the materials on which the volcanic agency acts. In the Alps metamorphic action has taken place on a grand scale in comparatively recent times ; gigan- 120 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. tic rocks form its highest peaks, and in the talcose granite, Mount Blanc has species of shells like those existing in recent times. - The limestones, and schists, and micacious and tal cose slates pass insensibly into the strata of the later oolitic cretaceous formation, testifying to their recent origin, and also that they are but altered ves tiges of these formations. Evidently some of the primary and secondary fossiliferous rocks have been changed into crystalline schist. Moreover the granites, once supposed the oldest rocks, ten thousand feet high, have formed every cen tury from the creation, covered with nummulitic limestones, and have fossils like some living species, and on the Alps, twice as high as the Alleghanies shells are found differing but little from those now living in the North Sea. The evidence of subterraneous connection of vol canic craters with the sea was first proved in 1538, when sea-mud was thrown up with volcanic ashes from Vesuvius crater; but since then it has been proved in different parts of the globe. About thirty years ago, a British officer made a survey on the coast of Iceland ; soon after it was completed a submarine eruption took place, and new soundings were at once made, and it was found that for more than one hundred mdes, and in places CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 121 several hundred fathoms deep, crystalline rocks had filled the sea up to within sixty or seventy fathoms of the surface. And similar changes are now going on from Vic toria to Kamtschatka on one side of the globe, and from Van Diemau's Land on the other side of the globe to the Antarctic Ocean, condensing the sea into crystalline rock, from one hundred feet to a thousand fathoms in thickness. Indeed the margins of the Arctic Ocean have always been the sites of frequent and violent volcanic action ; and these have changed the courses of their currents. The channel between Asia and America is almost closed ; and that between America and Greenland and Europe is being rapidly fiUed up. In 1861 an eruption took place in the Antarctic, which raised the crystalline rocks so near the surface of the sea as to cause the melting of vast fields of polar ice, which produced torrents of rain from the condensing vapor that reached to the coast of America. And the rapidity with which these changes are now going on proves conclusively, that the world cannot be many thousand years old, because if it were the whole sea would have been converted into solid stone. The great earthquake which reached the Sandwich Islands August 7th, 1860, and South America the 13th, probably had its focus in the Pacific Ocean, 122 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. where an immense continent is forming transverse to the Andes and the Pacific Islands. An idea of the changes made in the bottom of the sea may be in ferred from the fact that the tidal wave caused by the eruption extended to California and Japan, and dis turbed one-half of the water surface of the globe. The rising of the bed of the sea elevates the water and gives it a momentum withdrawing the water from the remotest point to which the shock extends, and this is followed by the immediate return of the water carried by its momentum much higher than its former level. CHAPTER TX. Mineral Kingdom. — Species. — Primary Light. — Law of Matter. — Pagan Cosmogonies. — Incubation. — Chemistry. Mineralogy is that branch of science which teaches us the properties and composition of minerals ; and here we take one step beyond that grand and incom prehensible display of Divine power, in the chemistry of nature, which produced the elements in the chaotic mass described in Genesis, where God was present and by His Spirit separating that mass into worlds and systems, and preparing the way for the operation of the laws impressed on matter, which produced crystallization and the earth's mineral kingdom. Many of these established laws come within reach 124 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. of human investigation and analysis, and individually and collectively they testify to the simultaneousness and recentness of their own and the earth's creation. This, therefore, is the first page of the earth's his tory which can be read to understand how it was created. Electricity appears to be the force which gave form to the minerals, which are now in a crys talline state. They are chiefly composed of gases and elementary matter, and their species consist chiefly of compounds in union with oxygen that make the stable-oxides, silicium and oxygen, form quartz, the most abundant mineral ih nature, and the least liable to change ; and aluminum unites with oxygen to form alumina, a constituent of sapphire, emery and clay, and is almost as abundant in nature as quartz. There are groups of minerals of chemical origin; the hydrogen group, magnesium, calcium, sodium, &c. ; the carbon group, boron, carbon, silicon &c. ; the oxygen group, oxygen, fluorine, &c, and these all unite in various ways' to form new com pounds. And they are intimately connected with the vegetable and animal kingdoms, because oxygen with hydrogen and carbon forms plants, and oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen combine to form animal substances. Recent experiments prove that many metals, even when well hammered, absorb quantities of CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 125 gases, and exposure to a high temperature increases the absorbing power ; some metals absorb two thou sand times their volume of gas. There are several hundred mineral species, and in these we trace more clearly the wisdom of the Creator, and with what perfect knowledge He prepared the earth for the vegetable and animal kingdoms, which He intended to create and support on it; and the Mineral Kingdom "has been to Chem istry what Astronomy has been to Mathematics, the cause of many important improvements." And it is a modern science, because although Theophrastus and the elder Pliny wrote and made a catalogues of the minerals then known, the ancients knew nothing of the analysis of them ; and it is only within the last hundred years that anything like a useful nomen clature and system were made. When therefore we consider that without this knowledge, it is impossible to understand how many geological strata were formed, because the term mineral is applied to all the solid materials of the globe, it is not strange that no reliable system of geology has yet been formed ; and moreover the men who have devoted themselves to this branch of science have not always been practical geologists. But progress in this department has now prepared the way for a generalization of the whole known 126 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. ground of speculative geology ; and has furnished satisfactory data on which a system, based on estab lished laws, may now be erected. Our first aim, therefore, in determining the recentness of the creation of the mineral kingdom, must be to ascertain what are the elements of which the earth is composed, and what are the laws by which they take organized forms. "A mineral is any natural production formed by the action of chemical affinities, and organized when it becomes solid, by the power of crystallization;" or it is "a salt composed of one or more acids combined with one or more bases," and the term is applied to all the solid mate rials of the globe ; but mineralogists distinguish between those which are chemically and mechanically combined, and consider the latter only as belonging to geology. But as each kind is composed of the same elementary materials, and both kinds were formed in the beginning, they will here be grouped without that distinction as making up the mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom was first in the order of Creation, and out of that both the vegetable and animal kingdoms were formed. By the analysis of the minerals, therefore, we must discover what were their original elements, and how they combined, to ascertain how old the earth is, and how long it is ince" it was created ; whether by slow processes CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 127 extending through millions of years, or whether it was suddenly called into being. Oxygen and some of the other elementary gases seem to be but different forms of light, as electricity and magnetism are, differently combined, and on these subtle elements our world is budt up. And these different forms of force and matter seem to result from different degrees of compression, or con densation, or modifications arising from its various powers of attraction, or cohesion in the elementary materials. Chemists generally agree that caloric is material, and it seems to be condensed etherial light ; electricity is certainly material ; both are impondera ble, and their particles repel each other, and both are attracted by all bodies, and all bodies radiate them. Many bodies dissolving absorb caloric, and fluids congealing evolve it ; and again on turning to vapor, absorb it. It moves with great velocity, radiates in all directions, and makes its way through all bodies, and thus proves that it is only a form of light. Indeed, oxygen and hydrogen gases seem to be bat visible manifestations of the positive and negative properties of electricity ; and water, which they pro duce by one of their combinations, is nothing but these opposing forces reconciled and reduced into a more material and fluid form ; because if a positively and negatively charged wire be put in water, the 128 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. positive will give off its oxygen, and the negative its hydrogen ; so that the oxygen in the air and the water has the same property of light, differing only in degree of affinity, and reconciled by laws inherent in itself. All this accords with the words of the Psalmist, that the introduction of light created the foundations of the earth. That primary light is the creative power in nature secondary or sunlight is the productive power in nature ; the former is "the Mother Light and Mother Fire," which fills all space and all things, and helped to form all the inorganic elements in which crystalli zation began, and by various combinations formed all the imponderable elements ; and these again, making new combinations with the ponderable elements, formed the whole mineral kingdom. The further the analysis of the laws of light are carried, the more plainly is this doctrine seen to be true. Sunlight is limited to external action on the mineral kingdom, and also makes the etherial fluid brighter ; the first organizes matter, the second perpetuates organized life ; the first fills all space, the second is limited to our solar system ; the first is a symbol of the unity of the Godhead, tbe second is a symbol of the three fold personalities of the God-head ; and by its three fold forms of heat, light, and actinism, reveals the doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity. Such is the CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 129 lesson we find written on the foundations of the earth. And it seems probable that chemical action is light acting on atoms, while electricity is another form of light disturbing larger bodies. There are many manifestations of primary light in the laws of nature ; and there is not a mineral or substance which is not in some way modified by it, for latent heat is in everything, and it seems to be solidi fied light ; whde the tenuity of the air, the brightness of heat, the fluidity of water, the expansiveness and force of steam, the motion of the winds, and the hardness of the diamond, are seemingly but the varied manifestations of its presence or combinations. This fluid is so much more subtle than the gases, that it is incapable of analysis ; and light and dark ness are the two grand formularies which God has given us of His whole work of Creation. These are the boundaries which He has set to our investiga- tions ; all beyond them is His, hidden in God for Time, and scientific research can go no higher. Nev ertheless the unity of the plan and the infinite wisdom of the Creator is seen, even where our reason can not reach ; because we do discover that other elements have been formed from them, and out of them nearly all creation was made. By actual experiments on the elements of matter, we discover that it is a fundamental law of nature 130 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. that the most opposite things will most readily unite ; and on this law the whole mineral kingdom is based, and by its action has grown to its present state. Nor is it any more extraordinary that the diamond, which is solidified carbon, should be a form of light, than that white solid quartz should be composed of fifty per cent, of solidified oxygen. To be sure oxy gen does not exist anywhere alone in nature, as the etherial light does, but it enters into combination with almost every element, and is everywhere present as the supporter of combustion and of life ; and it forms combinations with hydrogen, which is the lightest of the gases, sixteen times lighter than oxy gen, and the destroyer of animal life ; and also with nitrogen gas, which quenches fire. These antago nistic elements have been the chief agents in playing the mighty part, by which the whole kingdom of nature was consolidated, and the mineral kingdom made. When we have discovered a law of matter, we know it has always existed ; for it is true of God's physical as well as written revelation, that his works and laws are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. And we can reason with perfect confidence of both the past and the future from a known law. For example, it is certain that four parts of nitro gen and one part oxygen formed air from the begin- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 131 ning of creation as they now do ; and that two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen formed water ; and that the oldest quartz rock is one atom of silicium and three atoms of oxygen, and what the Bible calls light has always caused chemical action and crystallization ; and that every mineral on the globe has combined according to certain laws instituted by God. The gases are permanent aeriform fluids, and they have always united with the acid and alkaline bases, in the same proportions, and by certain unchangeable laws. For example, they have always united with one another in the following ratios, as they do with other bodies in similar well-known ratios : 100 parts oxygen unite with 200 parts hydro gen, 100 parts ammonia with 50, 100 carbonic acid and 100 nitrogen with 50, 100, 150, 200, and 250 oxygen, &c. These are established laws, and by means of them were formed the three great classes of acid, alkaline, and neutral bases, and from them, by means of new combinations, resulted the three grand divisions of matter into water, land, and air ; and from these have come the three great mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, which make up our globe. Here we have solid ground of law to stand on, for when the organization of the earth was completed, there was then, as now, these three great classes and 132 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. then several genera : the Acid, Alkaline, and Neu tral Bases. The first class includes all bodies made acid by uniting with oxygen; class second, all which become alkaline by uniting with other bodies ; class third does not unite with oxygen, but with the acid and alkalines ; and from the various combinations made by these bases the whole mineral kingdom was formed. God created the ponderable elements of the heavens and the earth in a chaos, which He calls "Darkness on the face of the deep ;" and the intro duction of light, and the imponderable elements, into that chaos caused crystallization and organization, and completed the mineral kingdom. This is the interpretation of the Mosaic account of creation, as it is interpreted by science. And that same antago nism of light and darkness manifested in fire, air, and water, has been the cause of the continued volcanic agency, by which the globe has ever since been gradually changing from a fluid to a solid state. "The Mother Light" was the mother of the elements of electricity, magnetism, and caloric ; and these with the elements of the Mother Darkness formed oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon ; and these are the first combinations that come within reach of human analysis, because the laws which formed them are CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 133 beyond the powers of the human mind to investigate now. But we can trace the laws by which they unite to form ah, water, and other substances; and these warrant the belief that all the bases are formed in a similar manner, and that by means of their man ifold combinations God created the whole material universe ; and to God darkness and light are both alike. Reason and research can go no higher than this, because but few of the bases are found in their sim ple forms in nature ; and it is only by reducing them by chemical decomposition that their elements are discovered. Carbon is an acid base, and in the dia mond it is hardest of all the minerals ; but under the blow-pipe in the air, it changes into carbonic acid gas, leaving no residuum. Acid and alkaline bases are very corrosive in their natural state; but united they form harmless salts. And of one hundred simple substances, on which the whole kingdom of nature is built, about sixteen con stitute the bulk of the materials of the earth. In deed, carbon and sdica of the acids, and aluminum potassium, sodium, and calcium of the alkalines comprise nearly the whole substance of all the rocks and sods, are most widely distributed over the globe, and no plant or animal can exist without them. And the wisdom of God is seen in this plan of ere 134 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. ation, in His marvellous design, reaching down to these elementary materials,and the unchangeable laws which govern them, because they are so arranged with reference to special results, as to play their part in forming the mineral kingdom, and to sustain the animal and vegetable kingdoms which were to follow it ; so arranged that they should not only be gin creation, but serve in the economy of its growth and preservation; so prepared and distributed that they would sustain the vegetable and animal king doms until the end of time. And no one but an infi nitely wise, and intelligent, and Almighty being could have foreseen the end from the beginning, and so adapted His works to make them produce such perpetual and wonderful results. The fact that the earth was created as an egg, and once floated in a wo mb of water, is taught in all the oldest heathen cosmogonies ; and these are the pri meval traditions of mankind. The process of incuba tion began with the introduction of light ; caloric, heat, electricity, and magnetism being but the various combinations of it which caused organization, form, and growth. And science teaches that there is a universal law in Nature,by which all organized beings, from the invisible protozoa to the elephant have been produced, according to this law, from a germinal principle. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 135 Actual experiments prove that creation not only began in a few elementary gases, but that the whole mineral kingdom was made out of them. For exam ple oxygen forms five combinations with nitrogen, and it helps to form forty-eight species of salts in various combinations with iron ; and carbon and oxygen combined form essential constituents in twenty-four different minerals ; and many diffe rent kinds of minerals and carbonates exist in a fixed state, and in great abundance in nature, as a part of the composition of limestones, marble, and chalk. And when the carbonate of lime, or white marble, is exposed to a red heat the carbonic acid is expelled. And oxygen and hydrogen in com bination with carbon from pit coal, elastic bitumen, and other resinous bodies ; and graphite, or black lead, is carbon with a trace of iron in it. All bituminous coal is made up of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, azote, and oxygen. Burnt carbon exists in wood turned to charcoal, and this is carbon com bined with oxygen, and readily changes to car bonic acid, and unites with other substances to form rocks. Indeed all minerals are made of burnt com pounds, called burnt, because combustion consists in their union with oxygen, and the production of stable oxides. Ammonia, the most abundant alkaline basis in 136 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. Nature, in its pure state is a gaseous substance, 300 parts hydrogen, and is decomposed readily by elec tricity. Chlorine has a strong affinity for hydrogen, and united with it forms hydrochloric acid, which with other elements makes a class of salts. One atom of oxygen and three of silicium form silica, which constitutes one-half of the mineral substance of the globe; while it is dissolved by steam at a high temperature, and held in solution in warm water, and forms one hundred different silicates, including many primary rocks, and most of the hardest precious stones, and comprises about forty- five per cent, of the earth's crust ; while oxygen makes up fifty per cent, of the ponderable matter of the globe. The following table shows how largely oxygen en ters into the composition of some of the most abun dant rocks ; of 100 parts of granite 48 are oxygen and 52 metallic base ; basalt is 43 and 57 ; gneiss is 47 and 53 ; most of.the sandstones and quartz are about equal parts of each. These are some of the manifold combinations the gases make by means of heat, cold, and pressure; and they suffice to show that it is probable that all the bases originated by chemical and mechanical agencies from gases and a few elements, because they can be reduced to them again. But the quantities and CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 137 qualities of some elements are so changed by chemical action, that they cannot be restored to their original condition. The peroxide of lead parts with its oxy gen easily by heat ; but the deutoxide requires a high temperature ; and the protoxide will not give up its oxygen to any amount of heat. And these are boundaries to our investigations into the origins of matter, and the testimony of this whole kingdom is, that, whenever it was made, it was completed with all the rapidity of chemical action, and so proves that the earth could not have been millions of years in laying its solid foundations. Another proof of the theory is seen in the fact, that the elementary forces, and matter, and gases which first united to form the metals and minerals must have been simultaneously created and com bined, because chemists now can perform similar operations, and the gases are both combined and re leased by electricity; while oxygeD, and muriatic acid that is formed from hydrogen and chlorine gases, which do not unite of themselves, when electricity is added, unite and form water, chlorine being set free. From these examples we learn that the earth has grown by a process of incubation, as all eggs do, from a few gases in combination with a few acid and alka line and neutral bases. And although we cannot grasp all the materials nor ascertain their constituents 138 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. as we can in smaller eggs ; yet as God's laws are always the same, we find a miniature process in a hen's egg, which is chiefly oxygen, hydrogen, nitro gen, and carbon, in their proportions 22, 7, 16, 55, with a few atoms of sulphur, phosphorus, and calcium. And all these examples prove that the whole work of creation went on rapidly, and that by combinations of a few, all elementary substances of the whole min eral kingdom were formed ; because but few of the bases are ever found alone in nature, but are always in combination with some one or more of the others. The large majority of the minerals chemically com pounded are salts more or less complicated in their nature ; and as experiments prove that all these combinations take place with great rapidity, it is an incontrovertible demonstration that whenever creation did begin, the earth attained its change from a gaseous to a solid form in a very short time. There are various allusions to the work of Creation in Genesis, and commentaries on it are scattered throughout the Bible, which corroborate this theory : "God hath founded the earth upon the seas, and prepared it on the waters ;" and again, ' 'He hath founded it upon its bases." These descriptions exactly accord with all that we can learn of Creation, from analysis and scientific CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 139 research. And there are many proofs that all the metals and minerals were once in solution in water, that crystallization began then, and that they were rapidly consolidated and deposited ; and that the whole crystalline crust of the earth now rests on some fluid element in a highly compressed state. And first, all the heaviest metals are either found in narrow veins in the primary rocks, in every quar ter of the globe ; or they are in positions which show that they were of contemporary formation. Second, gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, &c, are rarely found pure, but almost always in combination with each other, or some other metal or mineral in minute quantities, such as antimony, arsenic,' sulphur, and the like. This proves that they once floated together in an original magma, and were suddenly and simul taneously separated and deposited, exactly as they would now do if they were again put in solution. And thirdly, the best proof of it perhaps is the fact that the sea to this day continues to hold millions of tons of metals in solution, such as sulphites of am monia, soda, lime, magnesia, alumina, iron, zinc, copper, tin, and silver ; with chlorides of potassia, soda, barium, and calcium ; and carbonates of soda, ammonia, lime, and iron ; nitrates of potassia, lime, and magnesia ; and sdicates of iron, silica, iodine, and bromine, with many other acids and gases, and are 140 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. now every year separated by volcanic action, and deposited precisely as they were in the beginning, by chemical changes taking place in the deep water of the sea. Chemistry teaches us how many of these changes are effected. It shows how some metals are fused by heat, and others are unreducible by heat alone ; and that oxygen has an almost universal affinity for other simple substances, there being hardly any that it will not combine with. And sulphur unites with metals to form sundry sulphurets which are found in many geological formations. And iron is distributed all over the earth in its native state, mixed with lead, copper, and earthy substances, and also in large masses once supposed meteoric, as having fallen from the sky. And the earth is full of examples of the ways, by which elementary matter, forces, and gases united to form the earth, the water, and the air as they now exists and have existed from the beginning. It is estimated that every cubic mile of sea water holds two and three-quarter pounds of silver in solu tion, and some of the other materials are vastly more abundant. Sulphide of silver exists everywhere in nature, and it has all been drawn from the sea ; it is dissolved by salt, and converted into chloride of silver, and this is taken up by the plants and animals, and CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD 141 enters into their blood and fibres ; so that sea plants have twenty-six times as much sdver in them as sea water. Sdver and gold unite in thirteen different proportions in nature. And all these minerals have been decreasing from the beginning, and giving up then- union with the water to enlarge the solid surface of the globe. Oxide of tin and bisulphate of copper have been found in the mines in England six hundred feet below the surface, in a matrix of primary quartz and slate rocks ; and subsesqui-arseniate and carbonate of iron are found in the copper veins of the oldest rocks, and the primary limestones show traces of oxide of iron under the blowpipe ; and the carbonate of lime in the sea, especially in the tropics, is now consolidating gravel, sand, shells and clay into solid rocks. Indeed the Mediterranean delta of the Rhone is solid rock, which has formed recently from the springs contain ing carbonate of lime which empty into it. We are able also now to show the difference between the sea water which existed before and since the deluge, by the fossd sea water which is often found enclosed in the crystals and pores of the pri mary rocks. " These," says Prof. T. S. Hunt, " are vastly richer in salts of lime and magnesia than those of the present sea, from which have been separated by chemical processes all the carbonate of lime of our 142 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. limestones, with the exception of that derived from the sub-aerial decay of calcareous and magnesian sdicates belonging to the primitive crust." And from all this united testimony, bearing on the fact of the rapid formation of minerals, it is evident that the earth was suddenly and recently formed ; that it could easily have taken place in six natural days, and as easily within the last six thousand years ; or at any rate if it did not, there is no particle of evi dence, either in the materials or the laws which are known to govern them, to prove that the earth is any older than that, and that all the laws and analogies and probabdities are against any great antiquity. CHAPTER X. The Vegetable Kingdom.— Mechanical Forces.— The Earth's Vitality.— Bible's Consistency.— Three Classes.— Two Departments.— The Earth's Age. — Prof. Agassiz. The course of creation has been traced through its initial stages, until the earth is seen to be a solid globe, and made so by the formation of a mineral kingdom. Thus far God worked with the chemical and mechanical forces of nature ; but now we are to trace the operations of His wisdom on a new field of organized vegetable life, and functions, and growth. Here we advance one step beyond the creation of organized minerals, and this testimony is more useful in helping to solve the problem of the antiquity of the earth, on which it was created, and out of whose mineral kingdom the vegetable was formed, for anal ysis shows that it is formed of the same elementary materials. Then God gave to matter power to bring forth vegetable life, and to produce seed by which a vegetable kingdom would be continued forever on the earth. The Bible says that on the very third day on which the land was formed, God said, " Let the earth bring 144 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth, and it was so." And the order and continuity of creation are remarkable : the first day Pie created the heavens and the earth, and said, "Let there be light ;" the second day He said, " Let there be a firmament or space ;" and the third day, '• Let the waters be gathered together and the dry land appear ;" and also, that same day, " Let the earth bring forth grass." The commands follow one ano ther in the same words, and consecutively, as if all were one connected event, exactly as science teaches us they were. And thus we are taught that God gave the earth a vitality of its own, which caused plants and seeds to grow, and a vegetable kingdom to be formed as soon as the mineral kingdom was made ; and there is a beautiful progressive order represented in the creat ive work ; as vegetables will neither live nor grow without sunlight, they were not created until the eve ning of the third day, so that the sun, which was to be made to shine the following morning, might pre serve and increase them ; for observation teaches that the different rays of the sunlight have different pur poses to accomplish in the economy of nature, the yellow ray causing the radicule of seeds to shoot downward; the blue ray causing the plumula to shoot CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD 145 upward ; and the red ray giving the propelling force to both, and giving the stamina to both stock and branches. And this power was created at the moment it was needed. And thus there is traced a mutual relationship, and dependence of tne different parts of creation on one another : as soon as the mineral kingdom was pre pared, the vegetable kingdom was formed as suddenly as that had been, and in full perfection, and as soon as it was ready for sunlight it began to shine ; and there is no evidence that a single plant has been created, or any really new plant been developed from any other, from that day to this, though culture has produced many varieties. Another evidence of the consistency of the Bible account of creation is seen in the fact that'it repre sents three days as occupied in the formation of the mineral kingdom, which extended through the whole diameter of the earth, while but a few hours of the closing third day were employed in clothing the earth with the vegetable kingdom. Who but God the Creator could have given such a beautiful synopsis of creation ? Or who but He would have taken such pains, or would have thought of recording the differ ence of time used in these different parts of His works'? Thus showing His own consistency, that though he created by a simple effort of His wdl and 146 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. word, that he worked by means, and in accordance with fixed laws. And the following synopsis of the vegetable king dom shows that there is a visible shadow of the Creator impressed on the foundations of this kingdom as there was on 'the mineral ; because the whole vegetable world, with its three hundred and fifty thousand living and fossil species, consists of three simple classes, the Dicotyledons, the Monocotyledons and the Acotyledons ; and the whole kingdom con sists of but two divisions, the Phenogamous and Cryptogamous ; and the marvellous wisdom of God is seen in the simplicity of its arrangement : the first class has all its seeds double-lobed, the second has them single-lobed, and the third has no lobes ; the first grow by adding new wood outwardly, the second grow by adding new fibre inwardly, and the third grow from granules, and chiefly by adding to their ends. And fossil history proves that these three classes have existed from the beginning, and that they have always grown by the same law as they now do. The Cryptogamous are the connecting link between the mineral and vegetable and animal kingdoms, and they are the boundary between inanimate organized mine ral forms and organized vegetable and animal life, whde the two latter terminate in cells which are s& CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 147 alike that the microscope cannot detect the difference between them until they begin to develope, and some vegetable germs have a locomotion, Thus science testifies not only to the unity of creation, but also to the probability of its simultaneous formation, as is represented in the Bible ; and so consequently, that the Mosaic days were not geological epochs but natu ral days ; for the vegetable kingdom could hardly have waited a long epoch for the sun to shine on the following day. In the last chapter it was said that the vegetable kingdom is composed of the same elementary mate rials of oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, which make up the bulk of the earth, air and water ; and it is by the same chemical affinity that unites the earth, rocks and water, that the more highly organized and vitally endowed vegetable structures are brought together, and united in their various tissues and forms. If therefore we can ascertain the age of the vege table kingdom, it wdl help to teach us something respecting the former, because, as has been shown, both were of nearly simultaneous origin. And this wdl be a standpoint from which to rise to higher proofs furnished by the animal kingdom, when that comes up for examination, and also because the fossd vegetables helped to furnish the parchment in which our world's history began to be written, as soon as 148 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. the mineral tablets were formed; there they were stereotyped from creation, and there the records re main to this day. The cryptogamous or flowerless plants are the low est form of vegetables, and the shortest lived ; so they died first, and they are nearly all marine in the oldest fossd rocks, and few in number ; and this confirms the Bible account of creation ; otherwise these rocks would be filled with them ; while as we ascend the geological series of strata, these plants increase, land plants appear after a time, and all widen until the destructive epoch. Everywhere below the old red sandstone the cryp togams prevail, and the plants found in the strata above are so fragile that they could not have been preserved in any other way than by their soft matrix. These are deposited in strata all over the globe, up to the Arctic, where no other plants can live, and like the infusoria, they have formed strata, and extensive hills, and beds of marl, and in modern times the great barrier of Victoria, four hundred miles long, and of unknown depth. And when we come to the coal beds we find higher forms of vegetable life, not because they were then created, for we find the oldest forms, and others like existing plants. And this proves they were contem porary in formation with the oldest silurian; the coal CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 149 has many land plants only because it was deposited later in time, when the longer-lived plants had in creased, and in a different locality, not in the deep sea as the former was. This will be more fully discussed in the chapter on the coal formation. Thus by a law which God impressed on the plants at creation, they were formed to be witnesses of the truth of His written word, and to help to teach man kind when and how creation began, and how long it has existed ; and all do testify to its comparative recentness. Because these plants are now making their records as they have done from the beginning, and the deep sea is everywhere filled with them from the equator to both poles ; and if the earth were only fifty thousand years old, the sea would have been converted into solid matter, because these little plants have worked conjointly with the polyps and infusoria in extracting minerals from the water, and with vol canic action in forming new rocks and soils. And they prove also that all the plants were simultaneously created because the higher forms of dicotyledons are found in the older fossil rocks ; and series of land plants increase as we ascend the geological strata, and if the earth were millions of years old, or if the fossil strata had not formed rapidly, these plants would have been vastly more abundant than they are, and in this way they furnish unshakable testimony, 150 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. that both the mineral and vegetable kingdoms were created in the manner described. And this is internal evidence, founded on the laws of their being, proving that the vegetables were formed nearly simultaneously with the minerals. But a yet stronger proof exists in the fact that millions of tons and acres of what are now the earth's mineral foundations were once vegetable matter. As the cryptogamous plants increase with great rapidity, they helped to form fossil strata ; they first mingled with the protoza and polyps, and afterwards formed a matrix of solid rock, on which the earth's fossil history is written. The spores of the desdimidese some of which are marine and parasites of the algse, having each joint and cell of organized sdex, which they draw from the water to fill up their tissues, are found in the oldest sdurian rocks, and the flint formed by them is so hard that it is thrown from volcanoes unchanged, and they increase in varieties until an epoch is reached where a great gap occurs, when whole genera of plants were destroyed, and a new vegetable epooh begins. Then the ancient flora suddenly ceased to exist ; but new land was formed by the catastrophe which destroyed them, to support the vegetable forms of higher orders ; and from that time the flora that now prevails began to reclothe the earth. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 151 The antediluvial flora differed from that now exist ing, although all that now live then lived ; but those which were created to prepare the world for a larger population predominated; but since the deluge those which were for man's use have gained the ascendency- there was not much soil adapted to the now prevail ing flora before the deluge, and those which lived before that could not now spread, because there is no sod except within the tropics adapted to them. The present races of men and languages and animals and plants may be all traced to one epoch, the age of Noah and his sons. Before the deluge there were 500 species of ferns, 250 are found in the coal, and these other plants which are how chiefly shrubs were then great soft and spongy trees, which decomposed rapidly and helped to form the coal ; four-fifths ot the plants in in the oldest fossil rocks are ferns, and now the world has but sixty species, and those found in New Zealand are identical with the oldest fossil ferns, and Mr. Mot ley found them growing, on an island in the Indian Ocean, thirty feet high, and with trunks like those in a fossil state. In this chapter, which was published as a newspa per article in 1866, it was said, " I here venture the prediction that Professor Agassiz, after examining the fauna and flora of Brazil, which he has not before 152 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. seen, will change some of his opinions respecting the extinct species of both the fauna and flora of the ancient world, and admit that fossil remains, which he says have not lived, according to his theory, for mdlions of years, now live in the waters and grow in the forests of Brazil. He returned in 1867, and delivered a number of lectures in New York, and the following extracts from one of them confirm the opinion I then expressed. After stating that he had found two thousand more fishes than were known before, he describes several types of fishes, and then adds, " To these groups belong all the fishes known on the earth ; and to these groups may be referred all the fishes that have lived in all times." Again he says, " I may without exaggeration say that the form of the young of the fishes of the earliest days of creation resemble the form of the young of the fishes of our day in the most striking manner, which shows again what an intimate link there is, whether material or intellec tual, throughout the creation, from the beginning to the end, and from one point on the surface of the earth to the other." CHAPTER XI. Animal Kingdom. — Elements. — Four Departments. — The Incarnation. — Species. — Deep Sea Soundings. — Coral Reefs. The vegetable kingdom shows the wisdom of God in the creation of inanimate forms, and functions, and life ; but the animal kingdom is a step beyond that ; it is the third grand division of our world, and the most wonderful and perfect in its organization, having not only life and motion, but also intelligence. And as many animals have bony frames and shelly cover ings, they are more indestructible than the plants ; and so their testimony, recorded in the rocks, is more important as to the time of their creation and the probable age of the earth. The vegetable kingdom was created on the third day, and on the fourth the sun and moon were made to shine ; thus as soon as light and food were ready for the animals, on the fifth day the Bible says, God created the fish and birds. Thus the remarkable 154: CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. order of creation, heretofore noticed, was continued, and the whole work was connected and consecutive, exactly as science teaches it must have been. Because the animals are formed from the same elements of oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, which make up the bulk of the mineral and vegetable king doms ; only in the minerals the oxygen predominates, in the vegetables the hydrogen, and in the animals the nitrogen. Thus it is evident that all were created of the same materials, on a common plan, and in an ascending scale ; the minerals are organized, the plants have organization and life, and the animals have these, and instinct and locomotion ; and the fact that besides the unity and order of the plan of creation, the same chemical affinity which caused the organization of the minerals and vegetables, also causes animal organization, renders it probable that the whole was of a nearly simultaneous creation. And besides this, animal being is dependent on the minerals and plants ; from the one the animals get their solid materials, and from the other their tissues and fluids. The minerals were essential to form soil for the plants ; and the vegetables were essential for food for the animals ; and the animals were essential to man for food, and to help him in his labors. Thus there was a mutual relationship in the order in which they were created. God teaches this, " to every beast CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 155 on the earth, and every fowl and creeping thing on earth, .... I have given every green herb for meat." The vegetables and animals both start from a single cell, but the growth differs greatly ; the animals from a yolk, and the plants from a central cell ; and because the former have instinct and motion they are called animate beings. On the fifth day God created the fish and the birds; on the sixth the land animals, and at its close man, and to him God gave dominion over all that He created on earth. Man yet holds this rank, and it is collateral testimony to the truth of the whole record. And here we see the same consistency as in the whole work ; birds and fish are higher acts of creative power than minerals and plants, and a whole day is assigned to their creation, and another whole day to the creation of land animals and man. Thus to His most complex works God devoted the most time, for the department of mollusks has more orders and classes than the vegetable kingdom. The Bible divides the animal kingdom into four de partments — living creatures, cattle, creeping things and beasts, and science not noticing that fact has dis covered these divisions, and named them the radiata, mollusca, articulata and vertebrata. And there are many proofs that these four departments were simul taneously created, and that they have continued unin- 156 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. terruptedly on earth from that day to this, through all the revolutions the earth has passed through; aud that all widened and spread according to the same laws, and exactly as the plants did, until they reached a certain epoch, the shortest-lived animals dying first and becoming fossil, and the others following exactly in the order of their longevity, until a certain epoch, when a great catastrophe swept away whole genera, families and orders and classes of these departments; and after which a new faunal epoch began, and the animals which now live began to repeople the world, until the fossil and living species amount to half a million ; and this last order has continued to this day, for all the differences in species are explained by changes which are daily going on before our eyes ; while the descendants of some of the oldest fossils yet live in the tropic seas, so like the former that no human eye can detect the difference between them, and the analysis of the oldest fossil remains proves that they are composed of the same elementary mate rials as the living species. And thus it is evident that the vegetables and animals began to run their won derful courses together, and to prepare the materials for man to accomplish his more marvellous destiny ; and that both ascended step by step from the lowest forms of life, until the present order of nature was attained. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 157 We have seen that the elements of the minerals, plants and animals are the same ; that the two latter grew from a few departments, genera, classes and orders ; that the lowest types died first, and that all multiplied and produced varieties, and some died out from time to time, exactly as they now do ; and the testimony of the whole is that they were of nearly simultaneous creation, and that they began to record their history as soon as they were created. The animal kingdom finished the earth's creation, but man was formed as its apex, before God ended His work and pronounced all very good. Everything was made with reference to him, and he with refer ence to the Incarnation of his Creator. And here is an explanation of Saint Paul's words, that the eternal power and godhead are clearly seen in creation (Rom. i, 20) ; because the earth is one globe, consisting of three kingdoms, differing from each other yet of the same elements, and making a unit of the whole ; while what is more remarkable, the last created ani mal kingdom consists of four departments, and with man at its head, mysteriously foreshadowing the doc trine of the Incarnation of the Godhead in the Man Christ Jesus,- being thus an anticipatory synopsis of the last revelation which God designed to make of Himself in the gospel. 158 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. Animal life evidently began with the protozoa, which are infinitely small organized beings, with great degrees of complexity, having the largest free dom of motion, wonderfully varied forms, and existing in such numbers as to defy computation even with the microscope. The brachionoeae are among the largest animalcules having silicious shells, and it takes more than a mil lion of them to fill a cubic inch, but they are not large enough to be discerned by the naked eye, except as animated points, moving rapidly through the watery drop which forms their ocean ! Of. this and allied genera or famdies there are, however, others, which though equally complex in their organizations, are vastly more minute. Of the genera salpina, euchlanis, monostyla and others, all having elegantly sculptured silicious shells, there are some of which at least ten to twenty millions could find room in a cubic inch of space. Of simpler forms of life the minuteness is still more wonderful. There are thousands of species of these animals, and it is evident they were created at one time, because they prevail from the equator to the "poles, and are found in all the oldest fossiliferous rocks, and in all formations up to those, now living, lately dis covered in the deep sea. They give the colors red, green, and yellow, to many of the rocks, and they make CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 159 mountain chains thousands of feet high, and others are deposited on the tops, sides, and at the base of the crystalline rocks, which were once covered by the sea, and have been left bare by its receding waters. Their remains are composed of silex, iron and lime, which they extracted from the water ; some have shells and others have none, and some are indestructible by the most powerful acids, and even by volcanic fires. Untd within a few years it was supposed no life existed in the deep sea ; but in the deep soundings for the Atlantic cable, infusorial remains were found which proved, on microscopic examination, to be forming a deposit like the blue clay and chalk of England, the former of which holds the remains of extinct mammals ; and were this to be thrown up it would show the remains of polar animals, and others from the rivers of North America, and of men who have perished by shipwreck. And in recent sound ings in the North Pacific Ocean, from soundings of from five to seven thousand feet radiata have been brought up alive, with their stomachs filled with glo- bigerinse, and the beds of the ocean everywhere are being filled with the remains of the same order of animals which are found in the oldest rocks. In sounding for the French cable at the depth of 2,435 feet chalk mud was found ; the water at great depth 160 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD contained an excess of carbonic acid, and dissolved organic matter, and animal life extended to the great est depth, and all the marine invertebrate animals were represented there, a dentalium, a crustacean, annelids and zephyrea crinoids, echinoderm, hydroid zoophytes and foraminifera, with abundance of vit reous sponges. These are the characteristics which prevailed in the earliest stages of the productive epoch immediately after creation, and the same kind of fossiliferous rocks are now forming as belong to the earliest epoch, while the higher forms of life which are entering into these formations are those belonging to the present day. The mollusca, radiata and articulata are the next longest lived animals to the protozoa, and the fossili ferous rocks are filled with their remains, next exactly in the order of their longevity ; and whole orders of articulata, like the tubulibranchiates and entomostra- cans; ofthe radiata like the rhizopods, actinoids and crinoids; of the mollusca like the branchifers,branchi- opods and bryozoa, have not only left their remains all along the past epochs but have widened from the points at which they begin to this day. That is, they were not swept away by the catastrophe which destroyed the plants and land animals, because they are marine and lived through that destructive epoch without diminution. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 161 But what is most wonderful, and the strongest proof of the simultaneousness and recentness of the creation of the whole animal kingdom is, that two orders of vertebrate animals, the ganoids and placoids, have left the testimony of their bony remains all along the past; both begin at a point with few remains, and widen all through the productive epoch, and while the ganoids have since diminished, the placoids widened to the present day, when mdlions of both are living in the oceans. Besides this, sand and shell stones, coral reefs and crags are now forming, and embodying in them the same kinds of palaeozoic remains that are found in the oldest fossil rocks. Indeed I have seen along the margins of the tropical gulf stream, all these within the circumference of 500 miles, and I have picked up there ten at least out of fifteen of the examples which Agassiz and Gould give in their Principles of Zoo logy, page 223, sec. 470, which are said to be most unlike those now living, and the oldest forms of life. The orthoceres now are only as many inches as some of the ancient ones were feet long ; but the cyatho- phylla and chaetetes are identically the same ; and they are so abundant on the Bahama sandbanks that a boatload of them could be gathered in a few hours, and yet geologists tell us that there were intervals of millions of years between these formations. But 162 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. fossd history teaches us that all kinds of fossil rocks and remains which appeared first have continued to be formed from then to this day ; they are forming now in tropical seas, and I have seen the water there as full of medusae, at certain seasons, as ever the pri meval seas were, and so as to discolor the water for leagues. A distinguished scientist has lately published his opinion, that the Florida coral reefs are one hundred and .fifty thousand years old. The writer believes he based his opinion on the supposition that all Florida is a coral reef, and the reefs themselves more than a thousand feet thick; whereas the reefs and peninsula are oolitic Umestone, and the coral is a mere super ficial covering, and the corals had no more to do with making the foundations of the reef than they had with the granite below on which they rest. Corals budd only where limestones and comparatively shoal water exist ; but in the Indian Ocean reefs have been built recently twenty-seven feet in a single year, and this would make twenty-seven thousand feet in a thousand years, which is nearly as high as the highest moun tains on the earth ; yet on such testimony we are asked to believe in the immense antiquity of our world. CHAPTER XII. The Fossil World.— Drift.— Fauna and Flora.— Carboniferous Age.— Arctic Plants.— Animal and Vegetable Remains in Crystalline Rocks. — Man Contemporary. — Sea Soundings. The preceding chapters on the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, furnished strong proofs that they were all created almost simultaneously, or as parts of a connected whole. And the entire fossil history confirms that opinion, and shows that all three of them have played an important part in the prepa ration of those divinely stereotyped plates. But in nothing is the fossil history of the globe more important than in the testimony it gives against the infidel theory of developement, because no single plant or animal has been found in a fossil state which was changing from one genus to another. If these theories were correct there would be millions of such remains ; that there are none is proof that there were no such transformations, and the comparative fewness of varieties prove that the earth has had no millions of years of past history. Besides this some classes and orders of plants and animals found in the oldest 164 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. fossil state are now living, and some fishes even more abundant than they were in the primeval seas, proving that the regenerative age has been longer than the productive one. Another important fact to which they testify is, that the creation of the plants and animals took place many thousand feet above the present level of the sea, and that the continent on which the luxuriant primeval vegetable world grew was surrounded by a world-encircling ocean, many thousand feet deep, and that the shortest-lived marine plants and animals first became fossil, and were deposited in different parts of the ocean, and at various depths, on the tops and sides and at the base of crystalline rocks, which were beneath the sea ; and that they have since been laid bare by the receding Avater ; because everywhere, as we descend from the mountains and hills towards the sea, the plants and animals widen and increase in numbers and variety. This fact enables us to account for the striae and boulders, which will be done in a chapter on the Drift, thousands of feet up the mountains ; and it will show that there were no glaciers before the deluge, and that the plowings on the rocks were made since by stranded icebergs, which gradually melted, and then flowed on to the equator, impelled by swift arc tic currents, exactly as we now see them sweeping CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 165 icebergs from both poles into the Atlantic Ocean. It also accounts for the crests and brows of the moun tains thousands of feet high, which yet bear the marks of having been dashed against by the waves of the sea, and for mountain channels and beds which were once washed by ocean currents. These little historians show that the fauna and flora of the primeval world differed essentially from the present forms, not because the present ones were not created, but because there was but little sod adapted to the higher orders, the larger part of it having been made by the deluge. The evidences are that the oldest fossd vegetable plants and animals are chiefly of marine and tropical character, and are found deposited thousands of feet above the present level of the sea; and as we descend from the mountains towards the sea the higher forms of life increase. Granites ten thousand feet high are covered with marls and limestones having fossil re mains, like species now living in the tropics; the bulk of the coal also is there ; and in the Alps, at points twice as high as the AUeghanies, there are fossd remains like those growing on the borders of, or living in the North Sea. And whde the oldest fossil formation holds chiefly marine flora, land plants are found there, but very few, because it was formed in the deep sea ; whde in 166 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. strata nearly contemporary deposited in shoal water, many higher forms of plants appear, thus proving that both existed together ; and all over the globe some examples of the seven great classes of the animal and vegetable kingdoms have been found in strata, where a few years ago it was boldly said that at that epoch none of the higher forms had been created. All along their course they have left their records, not written on the sand but on solid rock ; and they prove that the antediluvial fauna and flora continually increased from creation, until a grand catastrophe swept them away ; and from that epoch a new fauna and flora began to overspread the earth ; and that the classes of plants and animals which occur only occasionally in the older formations began to take the preced ence; and that they have been widening and spread ing ever since, exactly as the older species did before. And we see on what sandy foundations the theory of the great antiquity of the earth rests, by the continual changes the holders of the theory are compelled to make, to harmonize it with the new discoveries in fossil remains which are continually being made. Only a few years ago it was said no animal could have lived in the carboniferous age, and since then men and many other mammals are known to have CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 167 lived ; at the same time it was said that no land plants or animals existed in the silurian epoch, now it is known that some of the highest types flourished ; once it was said that the plants and animals of all the continents differed ; now it is known that there is but little difference, except as it is caused by climate and geological formation, and that all certainly came from a common centre — two hundred European plants are common to Australia ; the cedars of Lebanon, and England, and the Himalaya mountains are of the same family ; and of three thousand phenogamous plants in the United States, four hundred grow in Europe ; and everywhere the greatest difference in species is between those countries most widely sepa rated by water. Mr. Motley found growing on the cone of an extinct 'volcano in Java twenty genera of European plants, and some of the species were identical. Indeed the tropical vegetation in all equatorial regions is similar to the ancient flora. The arctic plants of North America, Greenland, Europe and Asia, are nearly all of the same species, and the cereals yet grow wild in their original home on the plains of Central Asia ; and the rapidity with which new varieties form, by laws impressed on them by the Creator, proves that these kingdoms have no great antiquity, for if they had we should have 168 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. millions of varieties where we now have but thous ands. The same is true of the animals. The Swedish geologist, Nordenskiold, has recently discovered (1868) bituminous gneiss twenty-two feet thick in the crystalline stratified rocks of Scandinavia; it contained the remains of plants or animals, show ing both carbon and hydrogen embedded in layers of gneiss and mica-schist. He says infiltration was impossible there ; therefore organic life existed in what has heretofore been considered an azoic age. The formation was made, according to former com putation, millions of years before life is supposed to have existed on the earth, and it proves that organized life was nearly coeval with the oldest crys talline rocks, and new discoveries every year are pushing animal and vegetable life back nearer and nearer to the dawn of creation, and showing conclu sively that all animal and vegetable life was nearly conte'mporary with the oldest mineral organizations, and that all things were not only of simultaneous creation, but also that creation was a comparatively recent act, while operations to enlarge the solid parts of the globe, or to change its fluids to solids, have been going on everywhere, from the beginning to this day. There are fossiliferous strata six hundred miles long abounding with mollusks and vegetable matter, CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 169 with azoic rocks above and below, unstratified, except a little hard blue and black slate, which show how impossible it is to decide anything respecting anti quity from the position of geological strata alone. Formerly the presence of extinct species of ele phants, oxen, rhinoceroses, &c, was considered as the dividing line between the palaeozoic age and human history, whde now it is proven that man was cotem porary with them, and that many persons perished with them in a great catastrophe, which swept then- remains all over the globe. Besides- this, the remains of animals are found changed to mineral substance in many different places, proving that animal life existed millions of years ago, according to present geological theories. The following extract from a western paper (October, 1868), is an example of such a change : The petrified head of an extinct animal was found near Pleas ant lake, Sullivan county, on Tuesday a week ago. It was about the size of a dog's head, but had a pair of horns just below the eyes, and another pair midway between the eyes and ears. One of the eyes is almost as perfect as when the animal was in the flesh, and the socket of the other, with the optic nerve in the centre, is quite plain. The beast must have been as large as a yearling colt. The head has become a blue flint. There are also many examples showing how rap idly this process takes place, where human bodies, known to have been buried but a few years, have become solid limestone. 170 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. Recent soundings in twenty-five hundred fathoms prove that the bottom of the ocean is a fine soft mud, which is neither sand nor earth, but the remains of once living creatures, and they exist in such quanti ties that no figures can compute them, and they are forming strata like the oldest fossiliferous rocks. The sea is filled with myriads of infusoria, and they suck their flinty shells from its minerals, and die with such rapidity that their remains fall like a continual mist of chalky or flinty particles on the bottom of the sea, and form strata thousands of feet thick, which in time become hills of chalk, sand and clay, and are filled with fossdiferous remains. Marine animals feed on one another, from the monad to the whale, who consumes tons of infusoria weekly, and voids their flinty remains to stock the general bulk ; whde a medusa, which has nine stom achs, has been found to have 70,000 of the shells of the diatomaceasinone of its stomachs. From aU this testimony it is evident that the foun dations of mountains are now being laid in the deep sea, as the ancient ones were, and that the existing mountains are of comparatively recent date ; because they are pyramids filled with fossd remains, which tell their own story, and that not long ago they were swimming in the waters of a neighboring sea ! CHAPTER XIH. The Earth the Perfect World of the Solar System.— Time Began.— The Earth the Sanctuary of Creation. — God's Favorite World. — Prepared for the Incarnation. The course of creation has been traced through the elementary stages of its formation, and it has been shown from laws established by the latest investiga tions of science, that the beginning of creation was not a slow development, extending through immense geological epochs and ages of time but was a sudden act of divine power. And few things are more re markable than the confirmation which the revelations Lord Ross ' telescope has made respecting the recent- uess of creatioh. All its revelations are not only in harmony with the Bible, but they throw floods of new light upon it ; they teach us that all the materials of creation are homogeneous ; that the plan is a unit, and that the visible universe was set in motion by one impulse and at the same time. 172 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. It shows that there are three parts to creation, our solar system, the nebulae, and the fixed stars ; that the solar system is the centre and the most highly finished part of the whole ; that the earth is the only world where creation is carried to the highest stage of per fection ; that it is situated in that part of our solar system where the planetrforming power was most in tensely exercised, and where the power and wisdom of the Creator were most potently displayed. The earth is one of the spores of matter thrown off from the chaotic mass of creation, when light was let in upon it, and worlds and systems took their place in the firmament. It is but a small planet in our solar system, but it makes a part of it, and therefore was of simultaneous creation. The laws of matter which prevail here are universal, and they form part of the history of God's work of creation. Every stratum of the earth is a page of its history, and every fault in the rocks is a record of some revolution or disaster? and each fossil remain is a sentence of its history. It is an oblate, spheroidal planet, eight thousand miles in diameter, twenty-five thousand miles in cir cumference, turns on its axis a thousand miles an hour, and bowls along its trackless orbit, which is more than three billions of miles in extent, at the rate of sixty-eight thousand miles an hour. God says its solid part is laid upon water. Ps. 136 : 6. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 173 The earth appears to be the only world of our solar system where God's creative power was exercised in the largest degree ; because here the mineral king dom, which is the basis of all creation, has produced out of its elements a vegetable and animal kingdom such as science teaches us exist in no other world of our solar system. No person can read the inspired record of the creation of the earth, without being impressed, with the fact, that God created it to occupy a very promi nent place in the system to which it belongs. The first sentence begins with the declaration, that God made the heavens and the earth as the first day's work, although it existed in the mass, distinguishing it by calling it by its name, when no such eminence is given to the moon and stars ; and the vegetable kingdom was organized on earth before He made the sun and moon and stars to shine on the earth. Gen. 1 : 9-14. This was conferring especial distinction on the earth, and giving it the precedence among the world's of our solar system. And when the sun and moon and stars were created, God says, their special object was to make a more marked division of time between the day and the night, and to mark the seasons of days, weeks, months and years on the earth, and " to be for lights in the firmament to give light upon the earth." And science 174 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. teaches us that the sunlight of no other planet is so brilliant and productive as the earth's, because our atmosphere softens, and yet deepens the intensity of its rays, and no other planet receives them through such a medium. If earthly kings spend large sums to light their capitals with gas, and make them cheerful during the dark hours of night, why should we doubt that the King of kings should be equally thoughtful for this world, which occupies such impor tant relations to Himself. Again, there are other things revealed in the Bible, respecting God's interest in the earth, which corrobo rate those statements and show that the earth occupies a high place in the esteem of its Almighty Creator. For example, He blessed and pronounced the earth very good in detail, when His work was ended ; this is not said of the sun, moon or any star. Again, He came visibly and personally upon the earth, and held communion with Adam before he sinned. Again, He said, after He withdrew His visible presence, that " I am in the midst of the earth." Exodus. 3 : 22. And again, the earth is the Lord's. " I hold up the pillars of the earth." Ezekiel says, He is " God of heaven and the earth ; and Job, " When God created it all the sons of God shouted. The Psalmist, He visited and watereth the earth ; the earth is full of the good ness of the Lord. And again, " It is full of the riches CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 175 of the Lord, and of his mercy." Isaiah says, " The Earth is God's footstool ; and Zechariah that the eyes of the Lord are through all the earth. He is also said to be the Great King over all the Earth, and the Judge of all the Earth, and to dwell on the Earth. And the New Testament furnishes a climax to all this testimony, giving the proofs that God the Father spake several times to His Incarnate Son, when He came on the Earth, that men heard His voice, and what He said, and that they saw the wonders which attended God the Holy Ghost, when He descended upon the earth, to take His abode until Christ shall come again to judge and destroy the earth. Now, when we consider these last facts concerning God's interest in the earth, and that He now has a kingdom here in which He dwells, it is not improbable that He made the Sun, and Moon, and Stars to give light here. Indeed one can hardly read the Bible, without com ing to the conclusion, that, the whole universe was created with reference to the earth and man, and that the one was made for the other, and both with special reference to the Incarnation of the Creator in its ma terials — and was the first stage of preparation for that event which wras a new act to prepare it for its final change into a spiritual universe, where eternal habi- 176 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. tations wdl be formed for all the millions who have lived on the earth, and when this will be, after chang ing into a spiritual world, the Capital of one empire embracing the whole created universe. This is fully warranted by one of Chirst's last promises to His dis ciples, that He was going to prepare places for them, and all the worlds around us are in an embryonic stage, and many of them are passing through great changes, and getting ready for the final one. God is more particular in His description of the earth, ofthe manner in which He created it, and what He created it for, than He is of any other world, and from many allusions in the Bible we learn that the earth never was an intensely heated gaseous. globe, which gradually cooled to its present condition, and that its interior never vv'as a molten melted mass of mineral and metal, and that it is not now compressed to the hardness of steel at its centre. The Psalmist describes the creation of the earth exactly as if it was formed by the manipulation of Al mighty God, while standing in the laboratory of the universe, and producing it by a chemical suddenly act, for he says : "The Earth is the Lord's, and all that therein is ; the compass of the world, and they that dwell therein. "For he hath founded it upon the seas, and pre pared it upon the floods," which is evidently from the CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 177 original word, on the greac oceanic currents ; and geology confirms the statement, because the crystalline crust of the earth was once a sedimentary deposit. Science teaches us that the Sun is about the densi ty of water ; that Mercury and Venus within the Earth's orbit are fiery solid bodies ; that Mars, the next planet outside, has only half the Earth's light and heat ; that the planets beyond are watery worlds ; the nebulae are patches, and whirls, and shreds of light ; and the fixed stars are mere vaporous and im mense globular masses of luminous matter. This exactly agrees with the Bible, which says God made the heavens and the earth at one time, and that He prepared the Earth alone to be a habitable world ; this is said of no other world, and in many ways and places the Bible represents the Earth as the most im portant world in our system. It says the Sun and the Moon and the Stars were created with reference to the Earth, and not the Earth for them. Again the Bible does not say that God separated the water from the land, and so formed a mineral kingdom in any other world than this. But on the contrary it teaches that the mineral kingdom was made with the design of forming an animal and vegetable kingdom out of it, and all with reference to man, and man with ref erence to the Incarnation of the Creator. The Earth was to be the sanctuary of Creation ; here God estab- 178 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. lished His Church, here He became Incarnate, and here He now dwells by His holy Spirit : this makes the Earth the Holy Land of Creation? God Himself speaks of the Earth as the world on which He bestowed the most pains, and because He made it for man's abode We know the Earth has changed from a fluid to a more solid condition ; but the nebulae and fixed stars seem to have remained as they were in the beginning ; they pass through some changes, but probably of no more consequence to them than the changes in the clouds of our heavens are to us. They are the nucleu ses of new worlds, waiting the second Advent of the Creator, when they will receive a new impulse of crea tive power and be made eternal. The Bible account of the second day's work of Crea tion wonderfully agrees with this revelation of science. It says : "God said let there be a firmament or space between the waters and the waters," separating the worlds of water from the Earth ; this was the arrang ing of the whole system, framing it together and set ting it in motion on its majestic revolutions, framing all together and completing the second day's work. And science confirms this theory, showing that all the worlds revolve on their axes, and while the Earth, Venus, Mercury, and Mars revolve in twenty-four hours, all the large and less dense bodies revolve in CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 179 less than half that time ; this shows that all are gov erned by a common law, and originally had one mo mentum, and began to revolve simultaneously ; and because some have retained their original gaseous and vapory density, they retain also the greater rapidity of revolution ; while the planets on which a further exercise of creative power was made for perfecting our solar system, and solidifying some of them, have diminished their rates of revolution, and this is in ac cordance with known mechanical laws. From all this it is evident that the Earth is the only world which is perfected; the only one in the "Tem perate Zone" of creation ; within its orbit is a Torrid Zone, without is an Arctic Zone ; here alone matter exists in a mixed fluid and solid state, surrounded by an atmosphere adapted to animal and vegetable life ; the only one where creation is carried to the highest perfection. Finally, if we consider that the Earth was created to be the world of the Incarnation of its Creator, that He has always had a visible kingdom on it, and a visible control over its affairs ; that He came down on Mount Sinai 2500 years after its creation; and was Incarnate fifteen hundred years later in Judea, and has ever since been dwelling here by His Spirit ; both the design of the creation and the rapidity witn which these events have transpired, show that it is not prob- 180 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. able that the antecedent preparations were very long delayed, whde the unfinished state of most of the worlds in our system, and of all beyond it, seem to prove both the newness and unfinished state of crea tion ; and so the probability that man was created in the beginning, and is destined to play his grandest part, as a son of God, in its future history, when the whole shall have been finished according to the origi nal plan. CHAPTER XIV. The Coal's Testimony. — Geological Epoch. — Coal Beds. — Decrease of Water on the Globe. — Drift Plants. — Primitive Flora. The coal formation belongs to the vegetable king dom, but it occupies so large a place in the geologi cal structure of the globe that its testimony requires a chapter to itself. Coal is any vegetable substance which has been buried in the earth, and changed by chemical and mechanical forces into an inflammable mineral. It is found in every quarter of the globe, mingled with almost all kinds of fossiliferous rocks up to the now forming alluvial, where vegetable matter is being de posited to eventually form new coal. Coal began to form soon after the vegetable king dom was created ; and at the same time with the old est fossdiferous rocks ; both plants and animals in creased as time progressed, until a period when some 182 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. great catastrophe interrupted the formation ofthe coal, and swept away whole families and orders, and class es of both plants and animals, and prepared the way for the new order which now prevails on the earth. The coal has internal testimony of its own , written all along its course in the contorted and twisted older stereotyped plates of the fossil strata, testifying that there was but one geological epoch between the time of Creation and the deluge. It is a new and improv ed edition of the older fossil history on the rocks, graven with deep black lines of carbon, and is inca pable of interpolation or erasure. The evidence of this is, that the same genera of plants and animals found in the coal are found also in the lime and sand stones, the shales and conglomer ates, accompanying the coal, not that the species are exactly alike, but the differences between them are similar to the varieties which we now see in the same plants and animals, The microscope shows that coal is the ruins of the gigantic primeval flora, which once prevailed over all the world. The luxuriant spongy vegetation of mos ses, and reeds, and ferns, and spongy plants predomi nated, and their decomposition made the matrix to hold the palms, and conifers, and higher orders of plants whiGh were yearly swept down by the floods to swell their bulk. They were drifted with clay and CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 183 sand and deposited where they now are, they prove also that the universal fauna and flora were of com paratively short duration, and suddenly came to an end. All that are now lowlands were then under water, and all the vegetable matter came from one continent, drifted by ocean currents, was chiefly tropical, and bears marks of water drift, and most of it has risen from the sea, or lagoons, and rivers where it was de posited. The coal measures consist of many strata of coal alternating with shale, limestone, conglomerate and sand stones, lying chiefly between the Arctic and tro pic of Cancer. The coal beds are mostly in troughs and valleys without much difference in dip, except where they have been disturbed from below, and were deposited in lagoons, lowlands, or the sea exactly as coal is now forming in the Arctic seas, or in the val ley of the Mississippi and Amazon. In the latter two million square miles are annually overflowed, and hills forty feet high covered with water for weeks, each inundation carries thousands of square feet of mud charged with vegetable matter forming shales, and drift wood and other vegetable matter to make coal, which is deposited in eddies and narrow channels. These measures are fourteen thou sand feet thick in some places, and are connected 184 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. chiefly with the secondary fossiliferous rocks ; never- . theless the disconnection of the coal fields, and the different floors in which they rest or are roofed, in the same region, prove that though it was not all de posited simultaneously yet one flora prevailed through out the epoch and while great lithological changes were rapidly taking place. The coal beds vary in thickness from an eighth of an inch to many feet, and every where the flora is homogeneous, and begins with the shortest lived plants, the higher forms increasing as we ascend while a uni versal luxuriant flora prevailed, which was near the end of the productive epoch, when it was suddenly interrupted, and all the coal was buried by a deluge which swept away that universal flora. Whether this vegetable matter was deposited in swamps, rivers, or the ocean, every year storms and freshets covered the deposits with thin strata of mud or sand according to the length of the storm or freshet, thus making inter vening strata between the vegetable deposits. The plants and animals of the coal are larger than their representatives in our day, but are similar to many now living in the tropics, thus proving that the heat and moisture of that epoch were greater than at present. The gradual diminution of the sea is proven by the terraces and ridges of sand and gravel on all the CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 185 continents, and the drainage of the coal measures. The heat which raised them caused chemical action, and made the vegetable matter give off its carburett- ed hydrogen, and become a pulpy mass, and the diff erent degrees of heat and pressure formed the diff erent kinds of coal, anthracite being the most con densed and richest in carbon, The chemical action is visible in the structure of the coal; coking, splint and cherry coal are reticula ted, and have ceUs filled with straw colored volatile bi tuminous matter ; the cells in coking coal are few and elongated ; in cherry- coal there are two kinds of cells, one like the former, and the other smaller ; in cannel coal the first ceU is commonly wanting, and the sec ond abundant. There are no valuable coal beds above the red sand stone, and this proves it was formed after the pro ductive epoch. Some of the oldest are covered by newer formations, such as new red sand stone,, which have patches of coal. All over the globe the meas ures have the same relative positions, were deposited in eddies, between the equatorial and arctic currents, and the series of stratified rocks show that the epoch was universal and of short continuance, or the coal would have been more abundant. In Pennsylvania and Scotland the coal measures are from five to seven mdes in thickness resting on lime 186 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. stone and mill stone grit floor a mile deep, three or four hundred strata, three or four hundred feet thick, accompany the seventy or eighty coal beds with which they alternate ; and the bluish gray limestone under laying the coal contains fossil fish and vertebrate re mains like the crocodile. The coal region of North America extends from the British Provinces to the Rocky Mountains, and contains mdlions of tons ; yet all that is accessible is exhaustible, and will be used up in a few centuries if the earth's population continues to increase as rapidly as it has done, and to use coal as it is doing ; and this is a new proof that this world is not designed to be of long con tinuance. Enormous as their masses are, it is evident from formations now making in tbe valley of the Amazon, that one thousand years would have been sufficient to form the whole series. The sand stones are combined by lime, salt, and gelatinous matter from the sea, hardened by heat or pressure, and prove that the vegetable matter associ ated with them was drifted by water, and deposited while the rocks were forming, and that the different strata mark the occurrence of storms, and the inter ruption of the flow of the vegetable matter. The mountain limestones often alternate with the coal beds, and have the same fossd zoophytes, mollusks, fucoids &c. above and below the coal. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD, 187 The casts of the trees in the sand stone, and the trees standing erect in the coal, prove, that they were drifted there as sawyers and snags of the Mississippi, now drift into the sea, with their roots downward, and when water logged, they sank as they now do, and sand and vegetable matter drifted around them. And the stagmaria which are the roots of ancient trees, found every where in the coal, prove that the vegetable matter of the coal epoch was chiefly from large trees, mostly of a soft and spongy nature, like the cabbage palm of our day, which were swept away from lowlands, by yearly inundations, as they are now from the lowlands of Asia and South America. A satisfactory answer to the plausible objection, that the vegetable matter was not drifted from a dis tance because the leaves of ferns and other plants and trees are so well preserved, and that they could not have been floated in water, but must have grown where they are, is, that many of the plants and trees are found roots and branches, proving that they were torn up by the roots, by inundations, and under such circumstances the leaves would adhere to the stems and keep fresh for weeks, until they could drift from where they grew, to where they now are, while evidently many grew near where they were de posited, exactly as now the upper Amazon sends down drift plants and trees in the same way. 188 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. The testimony of the coal to the fact, that the flora of the primitive world was alike everywhere, and tropical, is remarkable ; the fossil rocks intimate this. but the coal testifies to the fact, and also to the other facts, that the vegetable world was created far above the present level of the sea, that the flora has followed its retreating waters to their present level, and that the vegetable kingdom gave up its shortest lived plants first to death, that the higher families, and orders, and classes came to their burial exactly in proportion to their longevity, that all widened with time, until a universal flora prevailed, and then suddenly was de stroyed. Fossil history proves that there was no independent carboniferous age, for the same fossils, animal and vegetable, occur above and below it. There are sixty eight different strata of trees one above the other in the coal measures of Nova Scotia, which are accounted for by the rising andfalling of the land. But the geological formations testify against the theory, and declare that the coal beds were deposited beneath the sea, by trees carried by the ocean currents as logs now are from the Mississippi and other rivers, and sunk there when water logged, with roots down wards, and the intervening strata mark the annual storms, which threw up mud and sand, and all of them were probably formed within a few centuries im CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 189 mediately before the deluge. And all this is substan tial testimony to the theory of the recentness of Crea tion, and to the fact, that the productive epoch was of short duration, and a stage of preparation for man. CHAPTER XV. Fossil Man's Testimony. — No Prehistoric Man. — Man the only Tripartite Animal on Earth. — Modern Human Anatomy like the Oldest Fossil Remains. — Not to be looked for in the Oldest Strata, because all Marine. Before examining fossil man's testimony respecting the time of his creation, it may be well to look into the theory of pre-historic man, and the stone, iron, and bronze ages, in which they are said to have lived. The theory hardly deserves serious consideration, if we did not hear of a scientific congress in France, listening to an interesting paper on such subjects which nevev had an existence. Take inspiration from the Bible, and it remains a perfect history of the origin of man, his language and formation into tribes, kingdoms, and empires, which is confirmed by the oldest records and monuments, and both testify that there never were any such men or ages. The remains claimed to belong to them take us CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 191 back no further than a few centuries before the Christian Era. They are found nowhere except along the tracks of the wandering tribes, who first pushed out from the centres of ancient civilization, and be came rude by wandering. And if there is any re liance to be placed on the memorials which these barbarians have left in their tracks, or on the monu ments and written records which the civilized peoples have transmitted to us, there never was an epoch when a stone, or bronze, or iron age universally pre- vaded on earth. But that condition of mankind has existed ever since, soon after the dispersion of the human family on the plains of Shinar, contempora neously with the higher civilization, exactly as it now does. The remains of those peoples mark the differ ent degrees of civilization, wealth, and improvement, which those tribes preserved after they had wandered from the original centre, and show how much of the arts they retained after they had become barbarous. The same thing exists now. The Esquimaux and Indian tribes of America and the South Sea Islanders belonged to the stone age until very recently. Though some of them, who lived near copper and iron ores, used them contemporaneously, and so made a bronze and iron age ; while the natives of Mexico and the southern parts of North America retained more of their original civilization, wrought gold and silver, 192 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. and preserved architecture and other arts among them. And the evidence respecting the pile builders of the Swiss lakes, is proved to have less foundation for historical records show that some of them are only two centuries old. The evident unsoundness of this theory is seen in this single fact : if man began his career as a savage, and gradually worked himself up to his present civ ilization, the proofs of it would be found about the well known centres of civilization, such as Babylon, Nineveh, Memphis in Egypt, Persia, and India. But no such remains are cited from these points, because there never were any there ! The oldest ruins there tell us of magnitude, power, and magnificence such even as the world now has not ; they teach us that the race began its career in all these localities with a knowledge of Government, that architecture, and sculpture, and music and various arts, and poetry, and painting flourished. These prove that after the Deluge man began a new career of civilization, and to build a new world, with the benefit of all the experience of an antecedent age, of high cultivation. The splendid remains of Assyria and Egypt, the earliest empires founded after the Deluge, are proba bly only lower types of the magnificence of the antediluvial world, when men lived so long that they CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 193 were able to bring the arts and sciences to the highest perfection, and while they retained some at least of the knowledge which God taught Adam before his fall. The high degree of wisdom and intelligence possessed by Adam is evident from the fact, that God brought all the animals He created to him to give them names, and the name Adam gave God recog nized. It was not until after the dispersion of mankind from the plains of Shinar, that there were any heathen who knew not the true God, or lost the original knowledge of the race ; and St. Paul teaches this distinctly, saying, that they fell into barbarism because when "they knew the true God, they glorified Him not as God." The book of Job, written two hundred and fifty years after the Deluge, informs us that courts of law, commerce, gold and silver coined money, and valua ble works of art were common in his day, the monu ments dug up in our day, from the ancient centres of civdization prove it ; the history of the Israelites in the wilderness, fifteen centuries before Christ, shows that they worked in gold and silver, and brass, and carved all the most precious stones, even to the dia mond ; and Josephus tells us that the sons of Adam worked in metals and made organs and musical instruments. And in the presence of such testimony 194 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. Mr. Lyell and his disciples bring up, from the out skirts of civilization, a few relics of savages to prove that God created His sons of men, in His own like ness, in savagery ; and try to show what all the monuments of man's earliest civilization declare to be unfounded. Occupying the place man does as the head of the animal kingdom, and having a bony frame, some parts of which are as indestructible as those of any other animal, and having with other animals written his history with his fossd remains upon all the ages he has lived in, that history is deeply interesting, as furnishing evidence of the time when he was intro duced upon the earth, and as deciding the question, whether he began his career simultaneously with tbe extinct races of animals, or when he was introduced upon the earth. The analysis of the human body shows that man was created out of the same elements as other animals and plants ; and fossil history proves that there was a time, when he did not exist on earth, that the oldest remains are as perfect in organization as those of men now living. The problems to be solved therefore are, When was man created] How long ago ? And what is his relation to the other animals 1 That man is a created animal, and stands at the head ofthe animal kingdom, no intelligent mind will CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 195 deny. But there is a dispute about his relation to that kingdom ; whether he was developed by laws, impressed by the Creator on matter, or whether he was created as the crown, and head, and perfection — the last great work of the kingdom ; and whether in one locality or many. And his fossil remains incon- trovertibly establish the facts as they are related in the Bible. Scientists have tried to determine man's place in creation, and to discover some physiological distinc tion, by which he is separated from all other animals ; but it has been in vain, there is none, except a little more volume of brain, and a slight difference in the form of the hand ; he is only the last link in the chain of life, which begins with a monad and ends Avith man. He does not essentially differ anatomically from the order of mammals next below him. Yet, while he does not essentially differ physically from the other animals, he does differ psychologic ally from them in an eminent degree. He alone has a three-fold being — body, soul, and spirit, in the like ness of God ; all other animals are dual, having only body and soul ; he alone is a moral, intellectual, vol untary free agent, a being endowed with reason and conscience, capable of thoughts and ideas, and of conveying them to others ; and above all, he alone is capable of knowing who his Creator is, and of ren- 196 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. dering an intelligent obedience to his laws. These are the things which prove that man is the son of God, is immortal, and distinguish .him from all other animals. This is the being whom infidel science would have us believe is of the earth earthy ; who developed from a little cell into a monad, and then into a fish, and on to a reptile, to a gorilla, and at last to man. If it were so, it would not destroy the necessity for an infinitely wise Creator, nor impair His infinite wis dom; for who but the God ot Revelation could have impressed such a law of development on the original cell, or who but He created such a wonderful cell. The same infidel science teaches that there have been several immense geological epochs, extending through millions of centuries, where man was passing through these changes ; whde another shade of the science which denies all that, admits that there have been different creative epochs, and man was not made until the last one, when the present order of things arose, only a few thousand years ago. Both theories are not only thoroughly infidel, but man's fossil remains hopelessly demolish them. For they are found in such places, and mingled in with the remains of such, and so many extinct animals, that they force upon us one of these two conclusions, either that man was created with all the perfected CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 197 organization he now has millions of ages ago, or else that the whole animal kingdom was created simul taneously with him. While, then, man has a body, life, and locomotion like the other animals, he has a moral, spiritual nature like the angels, which they have not, and he is the connecting link between celestial and terrestrial things. The earth is his mother, but God is his Father; he came out of the earth, and his body is oxygen, and hydrogen, and nitrogen, in its first ele ments ; he has all the materials of the earth, which prove that he was not developed from slime, but partakes of the nature of his mother. He has his appointed time to live ; would chance assign three score and ten to a chance developed thing 1 and at death, when placed in the conditions favorable to fossdization, he writes his history on the rocks, as the other animals do. And these rocks tell us when man came upon the earth, and who were his original cotemporaries, and they testify with a testimony not to be overturned, but by the destruction of what the Bible calls "the everlasting hills," that he had his beginning, with the beginning of the oldest protozoa and extinct mollus ca, articulata, and radiata as well as vertebrata ; that he has passed through all the revolutions they have. They teach us that he never was at the base of 198 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. creation, but always its crown ; and the great princi ples of zoology confirm this teaching ; and that man is both the type and the perfection of the four grand departments of the animal kingdom. In his first embryonic stage he resembles a fish ; in the second a reptile ; in the third, a bird ; in the fourth, a mammal ; and lastly, he is man, the only three-fold, moral, in tellectual, and voluntary agent on earth. And fossil history proves, that man now is exactly like what he was when first created ; for the oldest remains have the same organization as those of living men. No ancient skulls of an inferior race have been found ; only one approaching a low type is men tioned by Mr. Lyell. This fact alone demolishes the development theory ; because man's remains have been found in limestones and shales millions of ages old, according to geologists, but none of the oldest remains show man emerging from a gorilla, much less inferior animals, but everywhere he is perfect as now. Some of these fossil remains testify, that they were simultaneously created with the four grand de partments of the animal kingdom, and were coeval with the oldest fossd remains found on the earth ; and also that man has lived through all the revolu tions which have taken place on our globe, and that there never has been but one epoch of creation. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 199 If plants or animals had been created at more than one time, there would be not only strongly market geological lines separating these epochs, but also divisions in the orders of animals and vegetables ; but there are none, and fossil history says, this is true of the whole animal and vegetable kingdom. We have a tolerably correct history of the last nineteen centu ries, and there is no record of the appearance of a new plant or animal, except as new varieties have been developed from previously existing ones. Man's remains become fossilized in three ways ; first, by falling into soft mud and becoming embedded, and being converted with the mud into stone; second, by being infiltered with mineral matter and becoming what is called petrefaction ; and third, where the bones leave only their cast in the rocks, the animal substance disappearing. Commonly only the solid parts of men are thus preserved, but there have been cases where even the wrinkles and veins of the flesh were preserved, and where the process took place so rapidly, that it was rather a work of preservation than of death and burial. Some of the breccias, schists, and limestones enclose the remains in a matrix harder than the original bones ; and these have been preserved for five thousand years, and they will last until the end of the world. And thus has the wisdom of God stereotyped all His 200 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. works from the beginning, and recorded on the rocks and everlasting hills the history of the origin and expansion of the animal and vegetable life on earth, all along its course from creation to our day. As no human remains will be long preserved unless they are deposited in water, or buried in mud, or infiltered with mineral, it is not to be expected that they will be found in the oldest fossiliferous formation; the oldest strata were all deposited in deep ocean. There are but few remains of land animals, until we come to the third series of ascend ing fossil strata ; there should be none of man or animals before this, according to the Mosaic account of creation ; their absence proves the truth of Gene sis, which says man lived then a thousand years, and the land animals are all longer lived than the marine species found in the oldest geological formations. The shortest lived animals and plants occupy exclu sively the oldest fossiliferous rocks ; many genera tions of them would live and die, before a single land animal would be likely to perish under conditions to secure its preservation in a fossil state. Less than half a century ago Baron Cuvier said that no human remains had been found in the strata which hold the remains of extinct animals, and none of the apes or any quadrupeds, and so he argued that they were created before man and it is CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 201 now said by some that there are no such remains in any formation older than the tertiary, unless they have been carried there by some modern agent. If these statements were true, they would be a death blow to the Mosaic record ; we should be compelled to let geology establish itself on its ruins. But modern explorations furnish facts, solid human remains, which controvert both assertions. And since Cuvier wrote, the richest deposit of mammals has been found in the secondary series of stratified rocks, and the tracks of quadrupeds and birds and men have been discovered in the old red sandstone, which is the beginning of that series ; and the remains of man have been found enclosed in the secondary rocks, and in the diluvium, and drift with the remains of extinct animals, in different parts of the globe. Before Cuvier's death, twenty animals, said to belong to "extinct and wholly unknown species, since the earth was peopled by its present inhabitants," were found in the strata known to be of recent formation, and with them some animals of living species. And with their remains were found fragments of pottery, flint, spear and arrow-heads, the rude work of human hands, testifying that men then lived. And every year living species are being traced back to more and more remote epochs, show ing that all have existed together from the beginning 202 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. and that all now living are descendants from original parents, whose remains are buried in the oldest fossil strata. Another reason, why no human remains are to be looked for in the oldest strata, is, that there are but three deaths of men recorded for the first nine hun dred years after creation ; and these were probably buried in the earth and soon turned to dust. And as all the oldest fossil rocks are marine, and but few casualties would occur among a pastoral. people, it would be centuries before a death would occur where the remains would be likely to be preserved. It is, therefore, probable that for one thousand years after creation the remains of no single man became fossil. But that many died soon after that, is evident. The absence of man's fossil remains in the oldest fossiliferous strata, is no evidence that he did not then exist on earth, because those strata are all marine, and contain only the remains of marine and short lived animals. Nevertheless, they do teach us, that the whole stream of animal and vegetable life gradu ally widened, from the time when life first appeared on earth, until this age, and that there has been an almost uninterrupted continuity of every form of life now existing, except as they have been varied by the changes which produce variations, which are com monly called species ; while all along these ages the CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 203 older forms have perished, as they are now doing. The dodo has died out this century ; the condor and ostrich, the lion and the whale are fast disappearing ; and the same is true of some plants. Geologists admit that there is a difficulty in tracing the signs of man's existence, from his fossil remains, through the periods where he is known to have existed ; and of course it is more difficult to discover them in the earlier stages, before he began to tra verse the oceans, and to be drowned under conditions where his remains would be preserved in a fossil state. The first generation after the Deluge lived 450 years ; the second lived 250 years ; and but few deaths occurred probably for five hundred years after the Deluge, which would be likely to contribute to fossil history. And if we look to the great centres of the earth's second population to Assyria, Egypt, and India, there are no remains of their original population. Even the. pyramids furnish nothing older than the time of Moses. While then there should be no fossil remains of man in the oldest formations, they have been found in the secondary limestones and schists, which were deposited between Creation and the Deluge ; and, also, in the diluvium and drift, in caves and fissures of rocks mixed up with the oldest species of extinct 204 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. animals ; bones of all ages, from the infant to the old man. These latter were evidently deposited by the subsiding waters of some terrible catastrophe, which suddenly swept away man and beast, and involved some marine animals with them in the gen eral destruction. They bear internal evidence of their cotemporaneousness, because all alike have marks of being worn and drifted in water ; and they are of one age, because, when subject to analysis, all the bones are found to have about the same amount of animal matter. These diluvial deposits, and some of the drifts, which were originally diluvium, since changed by Arctic currents, are found in Europe, Asia, and America, having human remains lying side by side with the remains of the extinct mastodon, rhi noceros, hyenas, oxen, horses, whales, and many other animals. Human remains have been found in a clay forma tion, in Saxony, in a bed with the extinct races of animals, the thigh bone of a man was dug up eight- , een feet below the surface, and right above the human remains was an extinct species of rhinoceros. Suppose the clay was alluvial, it would not relieve the difficulty about the rhinoceros ; if the latter were washed out of an older formation, so must the human thigh have been, for it was eighteen feet below them. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 205 It is true that but few fossil remains have been found in solid rocks, because comparatively few rocks have been examined. But some have been found, and they show that man existed millions of years ago, according to commonly received geological calculations. In the last century two such bodies were found one in Europe, in a primary limestone, and the other in America, in a primary schistose formation, three thousand miles apart. One was found at Gibraltar (1748), while laborers were blasting limestone rocks fifty feet above the level of the sea, to raise batteries near the old mole for the fortifications. The entire body of a man was found infiltered with mineral sub stance, and so perfectly preserved that the wrinkles and veins of the flesh were distinctly seen. This rock is one of the oldest fossiliferous rocks, harder than marble, and considered by geologists millions of years old. In the latter part of the century, while excavations were being made in the rock at Quebec, for fortifica tions there, a human skeleton was found. This was, probably, older in the geological series than the for mer, and deposited there long before the other. Both were, certainly, antediluvians, who had been drowned and entombed in mud, which had turned to stone more than four thousand years ago ; and there 206 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. they would have remained until the end of the world, if the Divine Creator had not caused them to be brought to light to testify, for Him, against the popular theories of Creation. Every year is bringing to light some new proof, that civilized man was contemporary not only with the oldest extinct species of animals, but also with the oldest sedimentary rocks. In 1868 a petrified human skeleton, nearly per fect, was found at Sauk Rapids. In 1869 the im prints of man's feet were discovered in the shale overlaying the coal, three hundred feet below the surface in Western Pennsylvania, and a few days after another was found at Towanda. All of them are millions of years older than the remains found at Memphis, which are said to be a hundred thousand years old, according to present geological reckoning. Scientists say human flesh will not become fossil ; but living witnesses say, a dozen bodies have been found in that state in America within the last twen ty-five years ; one at Key West, Fla., washed up in the hurricane of 1846 ; one in Madison Co., in this State in 1864; one in Richmond six years ago ; and other bodies have been found, where petrifaction was partial and the process going on ; in California a pig, toads, and lizards have also been found petrified. CHAPTER XVI. Testimony of the Deluge.— It was Universal. — The Oldest Tradition con firms the Bible. — Christ and S. Peter testify to It. — Belts of Diluvium establish It. — Fossils, and Meteorology, and Geology con firm It. Sacred history, in the Old and New Testament, declares, that the Noachian Deluge was universal. The Son of God refers to it as an historical event, and Geology testifies that there has been such an univer sal irruption of the sea over the land, which swept away mankind and the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms then existing. And besides this, that was an original part of the plan of Creation, a pro gressive work of God, for preparing the earth for the spread of forms of animal and vegetable life, differing from those which prevailed before the Deluge, and also a larger area adapted to man under a higher degree of mental and moral culture; and finally that it is a proof of the recentness of Creation, and of the growth of the earth from a fluid to a more 208 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. solid form. In every generation, since the revival of learning, there has been an alarm manifested by theologians, because God's written and created Revelations seem ed to be in conflict. There seems now to be a similar irreconcilable discrepancy between the teaching of scientists, not science itself, and the Bible, respecting the universali ty of the Deluge. And it is proposed to compare the written and physical facts respecting the Deluge, and to show that there is no antagonism between them, but that the scientific theories are utterly controverted by the physical facts found in the diluvium. The apparent difficulties have always been reconciled, as soon as the laws were better understood, and the day has now gone forever, when there is either danger or probability of any conflict between them. Each alarm and trial has strength ened the confidence of Christians in the written Rev elation, and infidelity has withdrawn from the contest worsted by the conflict. It is thirty-four centuries since Moses compiled the Bible, from older records, and incorporated the law into it, which God delivered on Mount Sinai, and it is eighteen centuries since the Son of God was incarnate on earth and spake the words, and did the deeds, and lived the life recorded in the Gospel. CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 209 And this last revelation quickened the human mind, increased its moral and intellectual force and power to understand the laws of God ; and ever since then, art and science and theology have advanced gradually towards higher degrees of perfection. And yet in all these centuries there has not been discovered a shadow of antagonism between the written and physical laws of God, and discoveries in science far from proving detrimental to the progress of Christianity, have in every instance been found to help to expound the higher mysteries existing in the newer spiritual revelation. Science has marched steadily on notwithstanding the cries of alarm of those who have too little faith in God, until it proved that their fears were groundless, and a perfect har mony was shown to exist between facts and revela tions, which were regarded as irreconcilable. The account of Creation and the history of the primeval world are contained in twelve pages of the Bible, and one fourth of that record is devoted to describing the Deluge. Now error and falsehood deal in generalities ; if they descend to particulars they are open to detection. Everything in the Bible respecting . this great catastrophe is harmonious. Noah preached one hundred and twenty years warn ing mankind of its approach, and all things relating to it are detailed with extreme minuteness. The 210 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. picture of the scene is drawn with a divine power and vividness, which carries conviction of its truth. I. Why God Sent it. — God said unto Noah "The end of all things is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence." II. It would be Universal. — "Behold I, even I, do bring a flood of water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh (the whole animal kingdom), and everything (the whole vegetable kingdom) that is in the earth shall die." III. Why God saved Noah. — For thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation." IV. How God saved Noah. — "Make thee an ark of gopher wood, come thou and all thy house into the ark." V. What else God told Noah to save. — And every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort, male and female. And take all food that is eaten for thee and for them." VI. The size of the Ark.— "The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, and the breadth fifty cubits, and the height thirty cubits. The ton nage of this ark is equal to forty thousand tons, or to ten of the largest ships of the line, one of which car ries twelve hundred men and stores and ammunition for a six months' cruise. It would therefore carry twelve thousand men and provisions for that time, CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 211 and would have ample room for all the land animals and food for their support, for one year, because there are but one thousand species of mammals, in cluding the marine animals." VII. Time of the Deluge. — "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, and in the year of the world Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-six. In the 600th year, 2d month, and 17th day of the month the Deluge began." VIII. — How the Deluge began. — "The foundations of the great deep were broken up." That is, there was universal volcanic action over the whole globe, ac companied by intense rains for forty days. IX. — How high the water rose. — "All the high hills under the whole heavens were covered. Fif teen cubits upwards did the waters prevail, and the mountains were covered. There were no high mountains before that ; Geology testifies to this. X. The result of the Deluge. — The consequences which followed show that the Deluge was universal. "All flesh died that moveth upon the earth, both of the fowls, and the cattle, and the beasts, and every creeping thing ; and every man and every living sub stance was destroyed." Language could not depict more certainly its universality, and God wisely men tioned the birds to show that it was not a partial covering of the earth,.otherwise the birds would have 212 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. flown to the dry land beyond. XI. How long the water remained on the Earth. — "The water prevailed upon the earth for one hundred and fifty days," or about five months. "And the waters returned on the earth continually ;" or, more literally, flowed around and around, the globe. Diluvial strata prove that there was once a great equatorial current flowing around the earth, passing up to each pole, and returning again to the equator. XII. When the water subsided. — After one hundred and fifty days the waters began to subside and they were exactly one hundred and fifty more in disappearing. In the year of Noah 600, 2d month, 17th day, be gan the Deluge ; 601, 1st month, 1st day, the water dried up ; 601, 2d month, 28th day, Noah went out of the Ark, nearly two months after the water dried up. The ancient traditions of mankind confirm the Bible. The Golden Age was one of equal tempera ture over the globe, and consequently there were no mountains then ; and these hills must have been low, because in one month and twenty-seven days after they were visible Noah left the Ark ; fossil history testifies that tropical fauna and flora flourished up to latitude seventy, and the air and water were warmer CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 213 before that destructive epoch. Now, there is a par ticularity in all this, besides the details respecting leaving the Ark and when the water dried up, which shows that they describe a real event, and are told as simple truths. And the whole reads like a Revela tion from God, who planned and executed the catas trophe. It shows the same careful attention to the order and fullness of incidents, the same completeness and perfection which are seen in all God's works. The water swept every living thing on earth, ex cept what was saved in the Ark, or could survive in the water. Great varieties of animals, which had existed from the beginning, suddenly became extinct, and were overwhelmed by water, as both the remains and their localities testify. The objections urged against the universality of the Deluge, are the insufficiency of accommodations for all the animals and their food in the Ark. These have been answered already, and its tonnage proves that it would have carried many more animals, and food for their subsistence for the time, than there were in the Ark. The other objections are that there was not a sufficiency of water on the globe to pro duce an universal deluge, and that there are no satis factory evidences of such a deluge on the face of the earth. All geologists agree that the primeval world had 214 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. more water and less land surface than at the present time, and that the highest mountains are of compara tively recent growth. There were many volcanoes near the end of the productive epoch probably all over the globe, and the water pouring into them would generate suddenly vast quantities of steam, and cause the elevation and rending of its whole surface. That such a result took place is proved in many ways. And yet calculation shows that if all the mountains now were strewed over the surface of th e globe, a rise of the ocean of twenty feet would cover them entirely. The fossil remains prove that there were no ice bound polar regions before the Deluge, but that a warm equatorial current flowed to both poles, and produced a uniform temperature over all the globe. The primitive hills were elevated by the universal submarine volcanic action, which raised all the water on the globe, its tidal wave sweeping from the equa tor to both poles. This would produce an elevation of the water, and denuding currents, which would soon put all the loose soil on the globe in solution and take it to the new submarine localities, andform new land when the water subsided. And if there be added forty days and nights of rain, such as always follows submarine volcanic action, which turns water into steam, to ascend and be con- CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 215 densed by the air and return in deluging rains, we hardly need to attribute the Avater to a supernatural cause, though the Bible says it was. Three years ago a submarine volcanic eruption in the Antarctic Ocean caused deluging rains on the coast of South America, several thousand miles dis tant. St. Peter says the world or constitution of the earth, which was before the Deluge, perished ; and scientific exploration confirms his testimony, because the fossil flora and fauna testify to a higher tempera ture and greater luxuriance of life before that event. Winds and storms result chiefly from cold, caused by the condensation of the air in polar and mountain regions ; and geology testifies that there were neither icebergs nor mountains before the Deluge, and that the meteorology of the earth differed essentially from its present state, and proves the Mosaic record, that there was neither rain nor mountains until that catas trophe elevated them. Cuvier said, "It is in vain to look for forces now acting on the surface of the globe powerful enough- to produce the revolutions and catastrophes of which it bears the traces." The two best proofs of the Deluge are the two great belts of diluvium, equi-distant from the Equa tor north and south, of clay, sand, and gravel filled 216 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. with boulders, and spread over Europe, Asia, and America, in the north, reaching from the Arctic regions to latitude 36 ° in North America, and from Cape Horn to latitude 40 ° in South America. Some of the strata are several hundred feet thick, and all of them having characteristics showing that they were deposited nearly simultaneously, and resting on all geological formations up to the tertiary. The Deluge lasted nearly a year, and new deposits were made after all living things had sunk and were buried beneath the water. This diluvium is found three and four thousand feet above the level of the sea ; and, while the fossils in the rocks below are marine, the remains in the diluvium are both marine and land, and were deposited in fresh water ; and the piles in which it is laid testify that the action wras violent and extensive. The su perficial deposits between these belts are small, but in the former are found animal and vegetable re mains, the ruins of an older world, chiefly from a tropical climate. If the earth were suddenly sub merged below the ocean, all the water would be driven towards the equator, carrying everything which would float there ; and the stream would di vide and fall off in two great spiral currents towards each pole, to return to the equator, and between the ascending and descending currents there would be CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 217 two great eddies into which everything floating would be carried and sink. This is precisely what we now find was the case at the Deluge ; all North America east from Behrings Straits to Baffins Bay, down to latitude 40 ° was once such an eddy between two currents ; and all the northern part of Asia and Europe from Behrings Straits was another such eddy and there the drift of the old world in the Northern Hemisphere now lies Through that Strait the equatorial current has flow ed ever since the earth began to revolve on its axis, though it is now almost closed, only thirty-six miles across, from the drift materials deposited there, form ing islands and shoal water. The frozen coast abounds with fossil bones and shells, and hundreds of species of extinct animals, mixed with species now living are found on both continents ; and in America down to Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota, and Wyoming Territories or States ; while in Asia it appears as if half the animals of the antediluvian world were piled up there. Thousands of tons of ivory have been shipped from Siberia, and elephants have been found there inclosed in ice so fresh that dogs ate their flesh, showing that thevwere carried there soon after death, and frozen into the ice as witnesses for God ; for these animals never lived there ; their remains are so abundant that 218 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. the elephants could not have stood upon the space they cover side by side, while the same kinds of fos sil remains have been found in clay and gravel, and caves of the earth elsewhere, showing that all were overwhelmed in a general catastrophe, which reached from the equator to the pole. And these remains are often accompanied by fossil human bones, and fossil wood, lignite, loam, marls, sand, gravel, and mixed with shells, fish bones and human imple ments, proving that man witnessed the general ruin. Besides this the diluvium is stratified and unstrati- fied, and the water worn materials consist of frag ments of various formations, sometimes masses of drift materials, arranged in such way as nothing but such an universal inundation could. The results of the beginning and end of such a Deluge were very different ; the first deposits would be huge and in piles ; the last regular and often stratified ; and the living animals borne away by the water would float many days before they sank, but many crushed and torn by floating trees and drift materials would sink all along the course, exactly as we find individual fossil remains of extinct species and tropical animals, in every part of the United States and in Europe. The vast volcanic upheaval raised the whole bulk of the land, and changed the temperature of the globe when the waters subsided, leaving both poles CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 219 centres of perpetual ice, and this accounts for the huge animal remains which were entombed and frozen there, and which have been preserved to our day to testify to the way in which they were de stroyed. The present meterological condition of the earth is four thousand and two hundred years old; and the great change which took place is incidentally verified by the Bible, which says the rainbow was set in the clouds after the Deluge, whereas it would have been there before if the meterology had not changed. That change of climate had no connection with the changes caused by the variation of the magnetic poles, but was the result of changes in the propor tions of land and water; and those diluvial deposits have been changed since, by Arctic currents and" volcanic upheaval, and the changes of river courses, and drainage of lakes in various ways, but they can be accounted for as they are on no other satisfactory theory. Niagara Falls and the Western lakes testify to a general Deluge ; the one began to wear away when the formation was left dry, and the fresh water was left by the receding water. There are three hundred and fifty strata of shale and limestone visible, the one deposited in the begin- 220 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. ning and the other at the end of the productive epoch. When the water subsided the rocks were soft and Avore away rapidly, and so the Falls are about 4,000 years old ; if they were 20,000 years old at the rate they are now wearing, all the lakes above them would have been drained long ago. The strata vary from one or two inches up to twelve feet; each one was an annual deposit, and storms made the intervening divisions. Should these extend a thousand feet below the river, they might have been made in less time than the productive period. The diluvial materials around the Falls and around Lewistown are homogeneous, stratified, and so were deposited near the end of the destructive epoch, when the subsiding waters daily felt the influence of the lunar tides. It is diluvial drift brought from the Arctic, and in a place dug to build the Suspension Bridge, I found shale twenty feet below the surface well stratified and so soft as to crumble at the touch, and in a stratum of sand, gravel, and stones fifteen feet below the surface I picked out five shells chiefly marine and Arctic, with one land shell similar to one picked up by - me twenty years ago near the Moro Castle in Cuba. On the following day I saw a gen tleman gathering shells from the rocks in the river, and found one of the species identical with the fossil CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 221 one found by me. Such is the testimony of Niagara Falls and its surroundings to the recentness of a uni versal Deluge, and as a part of the work of Crea tion itself. The submarine area of our globe liable to volcanic agency is continually increasing, and as that was the active cause of the Deluge, so does it appear proba ble that it will be the agent, when it again becomes universal, by which the elements will be made to melt with fervent heat, and pass away with a great noise, and the end of the world will be brought about. CHAPTER XVII. Drift, Iceberg, Glaciers : These the Result of the Elevation of the Land — The Force of Water. — Glaciers Local. — Never a Glacial Period.— Gulf Stream. The structure of the whole globe has been exam ined, by help of known physical laws, and the light of written revelation. And it remains now only to complete the testimony, to the recentness of Crea tion, to notice some minor phenomena, and of the latest date, which have made the last changes on the earth's surface, and thus finish the work proposed. No view of the earth's surface can explain its visi ble phenomena, Avithout a consideration of the three things named at the head of this chapter, because they are the causes of some of the most apparent phenomena daily visible everywhere on its surface. Drift in Geology is a term applied to earth and rocks which have been drifted by Avater, and distrib uted over a country Avhile it was submerged. Many CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 223 geologists suppose that there have been several great epochs, during Avhich these deposits Avere made ; but the materials themselves and the uniformity of their trends in different countries testify to the contrary, and prove that there has been but one continuous epoch since the Deluge ; but that it has disturbed the diluvium in many ways and places, transporting and changing it into drift. All the drift is the result of the Arctic currents which flowed over the diluvium as soon as it was de posited, and has been ever since disturbing it. This is evident, because the Arctic and Antarctic currents are now producing exactly the same results, and de positing drift wherever they flow. The Arctic cur rent once flowed doAvn east of the Rocky Mountains, and as it has been gradually crowded easterly it has deposited drift materials along its course, until it reached its present limits between America and Greenland. During the time this has been going on by the elevation of the land, and the diminution of the water the Arctic current deposited drift all along its course from the wind mountains in Dakotah Territory to Labrador. It consists of clay, sand, and gravel filled with boulders, some of which were diluvial, and have since been changed into drift. Fragments of lava are found on the bluffs of Wyo- 224 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. ming Territory, which were brought there from Ore* gon, and the volcanic region North- Avest, when the Arctic current flowed down the Eastern side of the Rocky mountains. Prof. Hitchcock says, "Even since the drift period careful observations and measurements have convinc ed me that the waters of the ocean have stood from two to three thousand feet above their present level in New England, and have either been drained off gradually, or the continent has been raised." This is true of the Avhole of North America, and there is a declivity from the foot of the Rocky mountains in a South-Easterly direction to Labrador, and the Wes tern edge of the present xlrctic current- Immense icebergs flowed down from the Arctic la den with earth and boulders tearing up the diluArium and scratching and grooving the rocks over which they passed, depositing detritus all along their course, and changing the aspect of the surface of the land. Dr. Kane saw icebergs five hundred feet high grounded in fifteen hundred feet depth of water ; and they were much larger probably when the Arctic current extend ed many hundred miles further west, and they would deposit thousands of tons of sand and boulders as they grounded, and the ice melted as they floated towards the Gulf Stream. The absence of fossils in the drift generally proves that the soil was removed at a time CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 225 when the water was continuously disturbed. This theory also explains another matter, that ge ologists have found it impossible to reconcile Avith their theories ; and that is, why the beds of drift clay and sand in Canada and about our western lakes, have shells like species now living on the sea coast. These deposits are five hundred feet above the sea and are formed like a fan with the narrowest part toward the sea, whde the true drift has a fan like form also with its narrowest part from the sea. This is easdy explained, if we suppose the conti nent then under wrater, and the Arctic flowing as has been suggested ; because when the West India Is lands were thrown up by submarine volcanic action, a tidal wave would easily sweep back the shells from the shallow waters, and deposit them where they now are in that form. Dr. Whewell says, "a single wave would carry a single mass along with its own velocity, or give mo tion to a series of masses but a small distance," It is certain that the cause was different, that produced the fossiliferous drift, from that which spread the other over the whole continent, and this satisfactori ly explains it ; and it is evident that these tidal waves have been the cause of many phenomena, which could not be explained until their operation was better known, as it has been in the last few years. 226 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD There are many proofs that the boulders are the results of icebergs. First, they increase in size as the Arctic is approached ; and second, the boulders are like the ledges north of them. In Russia they have been traced eight hundred miles, and they have been found several thousand feet high on the mountains in Europe and America. At the Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, I have seen one on the brow 5000 feet high, looking down into the valley of the river, of many hundred tons weight, and resting on a base of only a few feet square. The land has risen in every case since they were deposited. Their usual course is N. N. W and S. S. E the exact course the ice bergs now flow down Davis Straits. Recently a boulder was dug up at Fall River, R. I., in sixty feet depth of gravel, resting on granite, and weighing five thousand tons. North and South of the Equator the boulders are from ledges of rocks, which occur between them selves and the poles. The next most powerful agent at work on earth after icebergs is the Glaciers. There are two kinds of glaciers, one formed on the margin of the Arctic seas and lands, and another in mountain regions ; and the former is in fact the father of the icebergs, and their operations are often confounded. They are fields or immense masses of ice formed in deep mountain vallies. They are often mdes in extent, and move CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 227 gradually doAvn the sides of the mountains bringing tons of earth and rocks. The popular theory, is, that the frigid and temper ate zones once had a great ice period, and that by its agency, during the forming and dissolving of the ice, much of the loose materials on the earth's surface was transported and deposited where it now lies. But unfortunately the fossil history of the globe proves that there never Avas such an epoch ; and all the moun tains on the globe lift up their lofty heads in testimo ny against it ; because if they were ten thousand years old their heads would have been worn down by the frost and storms, and at their bases would be millions of acres of debris, which are no Avhere to be found. Icebergs and Glaciers are formed from snow, which falls in the Arctic or mountain regions in winter, and is changed gradually to ice. The mass acquires a crystalline hardness by degrees, partly by the power of the sun, which melts it in summer, and partly by the elevated temperature it meets in descending into lower latitudes and regions. The glaciers first become snow ice, which is cement ed by the infiltration of water, which freezing often finally converts it to crystalline ice. Glaciers depend on the form of the mountains. The Alps are the only mountains in Europe having glaciers of the first order, though there are others 228 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. croAvned with perpetual snow. These glaciers occur in mountains having many peaks and deep circular vallies, where the siioav accumulates, and finally the immense weight causes it to slide slowly out and to descend ; and they will last a long time after they have descended to a point where they never could have formed. There are four hundred glaciers in the Alps between ten and twenty miles long, from one to one and a half miles in breadth, and six hundred feet thick. These as they descend deposit vast piles of gravel, sand and boulders, called moraines. Rocks are striated and polished by their grinding over them- but they never produced the drift. Whereas the ice bound coasts Avhere the icebergs come from are hundreds of miles in length, and floes of ice are seen travelling down from the Arctic, and these alone account for the vast deposits of drift brought by the currents which drift the icebergs. It is said by some Geologists, that Britain was once united to the continent of Europe, and the Thames flowed northward and united with the Rhine and Elbe in forming an estuary, and the climate was then very severe, and glaciers abounded in the mountains, and rein deer and musk oxen fed on the plains. When that estuary existed, France and all the low lands of Britain Avere under the sea, and there were no rivers to run, and no plains to feed on ; and the glaciers CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 229 which are said to have come from the mountains were icebergs from the Arctic, which then floAved over Europe passing out at Avhat is now the sea of Arabia, the equatorial current coming across Africa, and as cending to the Arctic Avest of the British Isles as it noAV does. Hence Ave find both tropic and Arctic fos siliferous remains in England and France, because the ascending and descending currents Avere then near each other and drift from the Arctic and Arabia and India Avas thrown into the great eddy, which the British Isles and Western Europe then formed. We know that this Avas so, because we see the same op eration going on in different parts of the globe in the same way. Cocoa nuts, and pieces of various tropical plants are often picked up on the coast of Iceland' and millions of tons of tropical drift wood are carried by the Gulf Stream to the Arctic regions yearly, and a thousand years hence, should our knowledge be lost, future geologists, Avhen the marine formation now making there should be thrown up or left bare, would say, Iceland once had a tropical climate, and once an Arctic climate, because tropical and Arctic fossil re mains are found there. That is if they reasoned as Geologists now do. But all things in and upon the Earth, so far as they have been examined thus far, prove that the Earth and all things on it Avere created within a comparatively recent time. CHAPTER XVIII. Creation Finished. — The Earth created for Man and the Incarnation. — Finally to be Spiritual. — All Things denote its Recentness. — The Church. — The Universe to pass through one more Final Change. The whole course of the visible Creation has been examined, and the vastness of God's operations in its chemical construction has been found so mysterious in its beginning, and so gigantic in extent, that no human mind can fathom it. Yet we have seen that science is a practical knowl edge of God's physical works, which are so related to Theology, which embraces the whole science of God, that man, in his present state, is incapable of comprehending it except by means of the light, let down to him through Christ, the Sun of Righteous ness, in the rays of Creation, Revelation, and the In carnation ; and that all life in Creation came from Him, as all the spiritual life in the Church of God came through Him, and He is the central point in all CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 231 the past, present, and future history of Creation and Redemption. But, Avhile we do not knoAv enough of these reve lations to compare the one AA'ith the other, and no hu man mind can understand the relation betAveen them, vet they all testify that one mind contrived them, and that they are parts ofa connected Avhole, and the two latter are but a completion of the original plan, by which Creation is being carried on to perfection ; that the same God Avho is the Author of the Bible is the Author of them, and all are of comparatively recent date. We do not know God's Avhole motive for creating the system of Nature, nor even ourselves, but we find ourselves cast up into the ocean of being, at a very recent date, and as God says, He created the earth for man, Psalm 115, 16, and made man to be Lord of the earth, and have dominion of all things on it, and we see ourselves to enjoy this sovereignty, it is reasonable to conclude that not much time in tervened between the Creation of the three Kingdoms of Nature, which Avere designed especially for man, and his introduction to the Lordship over them. And so perhaps the strongest proof and argument for the Recentness of Creation are found in the fact that the Creation of the Earth was a primary and essential stage of preparation for the Incarnation of 232 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. the Son of God, and therefore no great length of time would be likely to intervene, between the tAvo Avonderful events which are so connected, that no human mind can separate them, or tell Avhen, or where, the one begins, and the other ends. Because without Creation, there could have been no Incarnation of the Son of God in the elements of matter ; and without the Creation of worlds there could be no Advent of the Son of God on the earth ; and without the Creation of man, no Incarnation of the Son of God, in man's nature; and without the Fall of Man there would have been no necessity for a Redeemer, and unless man Avere regenerated, and raised to a spiritual life superior to matter there would be no resurrection for him from the dead, or as- scension to spiritual worlds ; and unless Christ comes again, and there is a destruction and resurrec tion of worlds, Creation never Avill be finished and so there never will be any stability and eternity to the created universe, because it is now in an unfinish ed state. We knoAv, that the Incarnation of the Son of God, this last and most important event, which resulted in sending the Holy Spirit into this Avorld, to carry on the work of Creation here, to a higher stage of spir itual being,, took place only nineteen centuries ago ; and it was so recent, and followed so soon after, man's CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 233 creation and fall, that it fully warrants the opinion, that the minor preparations for that transcendent event Avere also of comparatively recent date. Then again all the wonderful events, connected with God's moral government of our world, have moved rapidly; Adam lived but a few days or Aveeks in Paradise ; his fall and expulsion were almost simul taneous ; the Deliverer was promised immediately ; the destruction of mankind for sin folloAved in 1656 years by the Deluge ; the JeAvish Church lasted but 1500 years, and all the civil and sacred history of our world shows, that the rise and fall of nations, the loss and revival of knowledge and civilization, were but stages of preparation for the coming of the Son of God. And all these preparations were made Avithin the period of four thousand years. Noav the Incarnation- of the Son of God was the completion of all sacrifice, He was the lamb of God slain from the foundation of the Avorld ; all ended in Christ. So also Avas the Incarnation the completion of all creation, because God and matter were united in Christ, and creation can be carried no higher. But the Incarnation had one yet higher object to attain in the future, that Avas to inaugurate the Church of Christ, and by the coming of the Holy Ghost to prepare a Kingdom, in which man's nature can be perfected and prepared for the higher life, to 234 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. which he Avill be introduced, when Creation passes through its next and last stage and becomes eternal. The Church of God is iioav a kingdom among men, ruled by Christ, its Head, in Heaven, empoAv- ered by His Spirit abiding in it on earth, recruiting its material citizens, and, by regenerating them, giv ing them an eternal life, and thus doing God's finish ing work, creating them anew into the likeness of God, changing parts ofthe physical creation into the form of moral being, giving immortality to intelligence and fitting it to praise forever its adorable Creator. Thus being born out of the kingdom of nature, we are reborn into the kingdom of grace or Spirit, and fitted for the future stage to Avhich the kingdom of Nature will be advanced, when Christ comes again and Creation is finished, and the Avhole univeise will become the abode of angels and glorified men. Thus in Christ's two fold nature, as the God-man, is the mystery of our oavii being, and of all Creation explained. All creation tending upwards to Christ to be redeemed by Him, and to be sanctified' by His Spirit ; nothing in creation will ever be able to rise above this standard, and all things Avill be perfected and eternal, when they receive the last touch from His creative power at the Resurrection. St. John thus describes that sublime act. "I saAV a neAV Heaven and a neAV Earth ; for the CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 235 first Heaven and the first Earth Avere passed away ; and there Avas no more sea." Soience teaches that such would be the result of universal volcanic action; the deluge reduced the wa ter on the globe immensely, and a similar eruption Avould finish it ; so it appears as if the change of the earth from a physical to a spiritual condition Avill be effected by laws iioav in operation. "And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold I make all things neAV." "And He said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." If therefore there are to be but six thousand years between the Creation of man, and Christ's second ad vent, to finish His work of Creation, which both Saints Peter and John assure us will then take place : How improbable it is, that there Avas any long in terval of preparation % How consistent Divine Reve- lation is with itself? And as this final Avork of the destruction, and resurrection of the worlds is rep resented as destined to take place, by the melting of the elements and almost simultaneous restoration of them in the form of new worlds, and as it is predict ed to take place Avithin two thousand years after Christ's first advent, it affords the highest probability that the original Creation Avas one simultaneous act 236 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. of the will of God, effected in six natural days, and Avithin the last six thousand years. God reneAved His explanation of the nature of the Mosaic day in the fourth commandment, Avith great solemnity, saying, it was to be kept holy because in six days He created the Avorld, and on one such day rested, as if His truth and glory were involved in the fact ; because tnereby He shoAved the magnitude of His poAArer, by the rapidity Avith which the work Avas done, and if He did not create in six days, Avhy not? How long Avould it take God to do such a work ? Who doubts that He could do it as easily in six days as in a million of years \ The Incarnate Son of God Avas nine months in the Blessed Virgin's Avomb, and lived only thirty three years on earth ; His ministry lasted but three and a half years ; His crucifixion was accomplished in three hours ; His spirit was absent but three days in Par adise ; He remained on earth but forty days after His resurrection ; He ascended suddenly to Heaven, at noon day ; in ten days He sent the Holy Ghost to ad vance Creation to sanctification, He has been gone from the world but little over eighteen hundred years ; fulfilled prophecies indicate that the time of His second advent is drawing near rapidly ; and it is therefore probable, even if we had no revelation, that Creation took place not very long ago, and CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 231 therefore th at our re A'elation is undoubtedly true. Nevertheless both the Bible and creation teach us humility; Avhat an incompetent judge our reason is of God's Avays, hoAV necessary a revelation is for us, and that with all Avhich God has revealed, hoAV hopeless it is for man, to know anything of his laAvs except as he approaches them Avith an humble spirit, and reads them as He has revealed them in the joint revelation of His works and words. We have seen that there is probably a chain of connection in all things belonging to our world; that the hand of a living Almighty God is visible in all the links of that chain ; and that it is only through the Incarnation ofthe Son of God we can ever arrive at any knowledge of God, because, so far as human reason and research go, the immediate end of Creation was not to showHis power, but to reveal His love and glory through Christ, and it is only through Him we are able to untwine the knotted and twisted coils of the universe, which come within reach of our obser vation. Science teaches that the life of the universe will as surely come to an end as the life of the animal and vegetable kingdoms ; there is a connection between the sun's spots and the earth's meteorology, and its magnetism is disturbed by them ; if its elements melt, so must all the elements of the solar system. 238 CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. God is light, by this attribute He pervades the universe sustains it Avith the energy of His mighty poAver, with out interfering with the laws of matter, and by His Avill the last great change will be made, and the Avhole universe prepared to be the inheritance of the Saints in light, and the original work will be finished. Finally these were the best ways by which God could make his unseen life known, so that man could acquire a knoAvledge of it, and be made a partaker ot His eternal life and glory. This is God's explanation of His whole work of Creation. And as all had ref erence to man, it is both reasonable and highly prob able, that both were coevally created. Science shows that Creation began as Revelation describes it, and that it will end probably as it is there predicted; and this ought to be sufficient to establish our belief, that the chronology of the Bible is equally true ; that man was created in the daAvn of Creation, and destined by God to answer the grandest design of his being, and run the most marvellous partof his career, a,s the Son of God, when creation, like himself, has passed through its last great change and become eternal. The writer's task is done. His aim has been to furnish the sand, mortar, and bricks with which some practical geologist may build up a system of geology CREATION A RECENT WORK OF GOD. 239 in harmony Avith God's Avritten revelation. In dealing Avith so many different branches of sci ence, Avith which much of the Avriter's knoAvledge was necessarily derived second hand, and engrossed as he has been mainly with parochial work, it is not possible but that he should have made some errors ; but he feels confident that the general principles of his theorem will be one day established ; and grateful to our heavenly Father for the ability he has given him to discuss the subject, and praying that it may redound wholly to His glory, he bids adieu to a la bor Avhich has occupied more or less of his time, and been a toil of pleasure at intervals for many years. INDEX, Comma after a number means continuity .—20, 2, 6, 6,