We see a succession of animals each adapted to its mode of living, in period succeeding period, and race succeeding race.

During these long periods Man was not there. There is found no remains of his organization, none of his works. There is no stone squared, or rounded, by his tool. There is no fragment of a building now found as a monument of his power, skill, and industry.

The

At the close of the last epoch water spread over the earth. Geologists prove it. Bible declares it.

Probably, the earth lay long in that state, yet the desolation may not have been so long as in the desolation of the previous periods, because the earth had reached a higher preparation for the next great work, the new arrangement, the creation of Man.

Thus with the best geologists, as Ansted and others, we have followed as briefly as possible, nine distinct periods of life and death. Destruction produced by heat and water, or changing elements, and a new state of things produced by the power and wisdom of God.

The progress of God in his work has been still onward. If animals more and more perfect appeared, period after period, it is consistent to suppose that God will proceed in the same

way in his great works, as the geologist has proved he has done, and as each system of organized beings has been advancing in perfection, so he will continue; nor is there anything inconsistent in the fact that God commenced and completed his work of arrangement, and the creation of organized and living beings in six days. His power was equal to it.

If this is called miraculous, well cannot God work a miracle?

If this be said to be contrary to the usual mode of God's working, how can this be proved?

Nor can a single geological fact be produced contrary to the declaration.

While there is a majesty, a dignity, a power, wisdom, and benevolence in the Mosaic account, which no scheme, excluding God from the immediate action in his great work, can for a moment equal. It was, indeed the very exhibition which the case required, to show God as superior to all the heathen gods, of which the world was then full.

The approaching work was entirely consistent with the manner of God's working; consistent with his character and dignity, and worthy of the sovereign of the universe. It was an event

which intelligent beings must have expected. If they were acquainted with the previous periods of advancement, they would have judged that a greater and nobler work was to be done in the prosecution of the benevolent designs of God. The difference between the coral worm and the elephant and mastodon is immensely great, and an immense variety of animals, more and more perfect in each period, had been created to fill up the intermediate links in the chain of being.

From such facts, animals still more perfect were to be expected. Nor would it be at all unreasonable to suppose that a being more perfect still would be brought on the earth, especially when we reflect that numerous as were the animals, not one of them could know, love, honor, or serve, or see the glory of God in his. works.

The regular process in all the previous periods shows that a new state of advancement was in exact accordance with geological facts; and great and long as had been the preparation, it had been neither too long nor too great for the reception of the noble creature to be placed on earth; a creature so vastly beyond any previous creation.

FIFTH EPOCH.-13th Period.

MOSAIC ACCOUNT OF CREATION.

THE first announcement of the new work is in the words, "and the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters, which covered the earth."

The immense quantity of water on the globe is not generally well understood; and doubts are entertained in some minds of the possibility of such a fact, yet in truth only one fourth of the globe is land, and three fourths water. The Pacific Ocean alone has a greater area of water than all the dry land on the globe. It covers fifty millions of square miles, and seventy millions when the Indian Ocean is included ; and so great is its depth, that a line five miles. long has not reached the bottom. The Atlantic is five thousand miles wide, and reaches from pole to pole, and lions of square miles.

covers twenty-five milBesides these immense bodies, we have the Mediterranean, the Black, the Caspian, and the Baltic seas.

Nor are we to ascribe sterility and solitude to this iminense mass of waters, for it really appears more abundantly crowded with inhabit

ants than the air or the surface of the earth. Probably the sea at all depths swarms with living creatures, as countless worms and creeping things, besides hosts of fishes without number, some so small as to require a microscope to see them; some so imperfectly formed as to resemble jelly, some armed with formidable teeth, some with a sword, and some, as the whale, an immense mass of floating oil, fifty or sixty feet long.

These creatures seem as endless in form and magnitude as countless in numbers, and some as defenceless as others are powerful and ferocious.

Thus in the immense waters of the oceans, the great end of God, in the multiplication of life, is constantly carried on. Nor, indeed, is the bed of the ocean less beautifully clothed with submarine vegetables than the dry land with herbs and forests.

Thus God surveyed the watery waste before him.

This is all the history of the earth in its primitive state which God saw proper to give to The command and consequence, so much and so long admired for its sublimity, was given, "Let there be light, and there was

man.