it, "for man and for beast." Then it says, "God made two great lights." Now here the word is not Owr, which I told you signifies light; nor is bara used, which means create, but aasah, to constitute; he constituted two great lights: the word is not light, the Hebrew word for which is Owr; but maowroth is the Hebrew used for the sun and moon; and literally translated it is, "He constituted the sun and moon two torch-carriers, or light-bearers, to the earth and the human family." God no more made the sun and moon then, in the sense of creating them, than he created the rainbow when he appointed it as the symbol and sign to Noah that another deluge should never occur. It seems to me plainly evident, that the record of Genesis, when read fairly, and not in the light of our prejudices, and, mind you, the essence of Popery is to read the Bible in the light of our opinions, instead of viewing our opinions in the light of the Bible, in its plain and obvious sense, - falls in perfectly with the assertions of geologists, that the globe may be hundreds of thousands of years of age. All that is asserted, is God's primal creation and his subsequent arrangement of its surface, or his furnishing of the house for the habitation and comfort of man, leaving all that existed long prior to that to be discovered by the labors of science, his word only undertaking and professing to teach things that belong to our everlasting peace.

But there is one subject which I confess is a difficult one, and it is the only difficult one. Some geologists, I know, may smile at my proposed solution, and some of my hearers may be dissatisfied, but I cannot help it; I only state my own belief, the result of my own reading. The difficulty is this: Geology proves that death existed in our globe long prior to six thousand years ago. I say the evidence to my mind, from reading — from careful and dispassionate reading upon this very point- conveys an irresistible impres

sion that death existed in our globe hundreds of thousands of years ago, very long before the present surface, configuration, and arrangement of the earth on which we now live. Now, the question is, how to reconcile this with what seems to be plainly asserted in the word of God, that death is the result of sin, that man sinned, and therefore death has passed upon all. I assert this, that, explain it as you like, no honest man, reading the New Testament, or the Old Testament, can avoid concluding, that if there had been no sin, there never could have been any death. How then do we explain the fact that death did exist in the lower races prior to the creation of man? For instance, in addition to millions of dead creatures, we find one of these Saurian monsters excavated from the depths of the earth with a smaller animal in its jaws, having crushed it just as it had seized its prey. We find others, with the remains of smaller creatures in their stomachs, eaten, but not fully digested when death seized upon them. We find, too, remains of animals furnished with what are called carnivorous teeth. The ox's teeth are called graminivorous, because fitted for the mastication of grain or grass; the teeth of lions, of cats, and of dogs, are called carnivorous, because made to feed upon flesh, to tear and devour. . Now we find, I say, in these ancient remains, clear proofs of carnivorous races that lived upon flesh, and must have fed upon other animals. Anybody who will read carefully what has been stated, and the facts that prove it, must come to the same conclusion. Several theories have been invented to explain this. A distinguished minister-distinguished for his piety as well as for his scientific attainments has alleged that man was originally designed or made capable of dying, and meant to die, and would have died, but that his death would be contingent upon his eating, or non-eating of the forbidden. tree; that is, so constituted that he dies if he eats of that

fruit, but if he had not eaten of it, though still mortal, the sentence would have been suspended, and he would not have died. Another theory is that of Jeremy Taylorthat man and all animate creatures were meant to die, whether man had sinned or not, and that in case of his never having fallen, death would have been a beautiful transference, like the twilight, or, as they call it in the north of Scotland, gloaming; where the twilight of evening blends almost imperceptibly with the twilight of the next morning that man would have been gradually translated without the pang, the agony, and the shame of dying. But the third idea, which I really think is the right one, is that man was not meant constitutionally to die; that wherever death is, there is the projected shadow of that great sin that crept into the world, and dragged down on us with it all our misery and all our woe. And I believe, at the same time, that the animals created after Adam, and constituting what geologists call our dynasty, were not originally designed to die, and that their carnivorous structure was an anticipatory arrangement, and that in every case sin and death are inseparably connected. That the lower animals are involved in man's sin, is plain in many instances of the Bible. At the flood, for instance, the animals were all punished and destroyed because man had sinned. We have repeated instances in the Bible, of the lower races suffering because of man's transgressions. I believe that is but the continuance of a law which began with man's fall, and that in consequence of man's fall it is literally true, as the Apostle asserts, that the whole creation groans and travails, waiting to be delivered, and that a day of emancipation will come. I am one of those who believe that the brute creation are not in their normal state; that the poor horse, overworked in the omnibus, is not where he was meant to be; that the poor bird, devoured by the hawk, is exposed to a contin

gency superinduced by sin. I believe, no less surely, that when the lord of creation fell, the whole of his dynasty fell with him; and that when creation's lord shall receive the reins of creation again into his hands, his whole dynasty will be elevated and redeemed with him.

Still we fall back upon the question, "How happens it that death was before man fell?" My humble solution is this: First, Geology does not show death to have occurred prior to the creation of man in the case of a single animal constituting the creation of the first six days of the week; secondly, Geology does not adduce one instance of the remains of man amidst the fossiliferous remains of previously existing races; thirdly, the amount of its disclosure is this, then, that death takes place amongst the peculiar race of animals that existed prior to the creation of man. But as the Bible asserts that death is the result of sin, we are thrown back upon this question, "Is there any record of any sin having occurred prior to man's creation?" We find God speaking to Adam of sin, as if Adam knew what sin was, and also of death, as if he had some idea of what death meant; and we find that the great representative and agent of sin, called "that old serpent," Satan, walked the world, had access to its fairest spots, and tempted man; and we read in the Epistle of Jude of "the angels who kept not their first estate:" now, I do not assert that the angels' sin was the cause of the death that existed prior to Adam's creation, but I do assert that we have the fact that sin occurred prior to man's creation; and it does not seem unreasonable, or contrary to analogy, to say, that the disorganization of all animal being, prior to Adam's creation, may be the rebound and the result of the sin of those angels who kept not their first estate, and rebelled against God, whose residence may have been this very earth, prior to its fitting up for the dynasty of man.

I have thus, briefly, looked at that difficulty, the existence of death prior to the creation of man. I will now draw such instructions as it seems to me the investigations we have been pursuing fairly teach.

First, then, it appears, that all the discoveries of recent science, instead of contradicting the plain assertions of Scripture, either leave them untouched in their own inspired supremacy, or cast an indirect, but illustrative, light upon them. Secondly, we have the most irresistible proof of what is called the nou-eternity of the globe. You will recollect, that when one of the great Christian naturalists affirmed that there were all the traces of design in our globe, and therefore the proofs of a Creator, infidels replied, "It has ever been so." By this they asserted the eternity of the globe, and therefore got rid, by one extravagant assertion, of a clear and impressive evidence of a designing, wise, and glorious Being. But now Geology has positively discovered whole races of animals were at once extinguished, and forthwith there started a new race, totally unconnected with the previous; then that new race was extinguished, and succeeded by another new race. In other words, we can just prove, as plainly as if we saw God making worlds, that God has interposed in the history of this globe some twenty times, and created at once, by a fiat of omnipotent power, successive races of dynasties of living beings. We have, therefore, in that fact, irresistible proof that the globe is not eternal, but, on the contrary, the scene of successive creations, and that God has interposed again and again with acts of creative power.

We receive from Geology the most powerful evidence of the existence of God. I have shown that there are proofs of creative power interposing and starting new races; and such creative acts are, of course, irresistible proofs of a Creator, who originated and produced them; nothing, to