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thrown up upon the earth's surface,* were found marking upon the earth the stamp of judgment, when first it existed in its pristine paradisiacal perfectness? Is it not a fact, plainly attested by Scripture, that Sheohl or Hades, (in the lowest division of which, called in Scripture "the lowest Hades," the departed souls of the wicked are at present confined) is formed within the earth's bowels ?+ Surely no such place, indicative of the triumph of sin and death, could have existed when all throughout the whole creation was good, perfect and blessed. No place of anguish-no penal prison-house, nor indeed any prison-house can be supposed to have existed in the bowels of the earth then. But this globe, once appointed to be the witness of the life-giving power of God for good, has since become a witness of His destructive power in judgment. What part of the earth's crust (for since Sheohl or Hades was formed, and internal fires began to operate destructively, the earth is but a crust) does not bear witness to the action of violent and destructive agencies, not only by contortion, dislocation, and the like, but by their very constitution? How then can we suppose that any such appearances in the earth's strata existed when first the earth came into its perfected being and was pronounced very good? A direct intervention from God (an intervention not less miraculous, and possibly not more prolonged, than that which first called the earth into being) smote it with the stroke of judgment a stroke that in all probability penetrated like an electric shock to its lowest parts. At first the earth was adapted to the condition which man held in happiness and innocency; afterwards it became altered to meet the condition of man as fallen, and was subjected to the reign of death,—even

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The central fluid [fiery] matter pressing unequally on its confining shell, has at various times cracked it in different directions, and the molten mineral matter, issuing from the fissures, and gradually cooling, . . . . has formed mountain chains over the fissures. Such has been the operation by which the vast ridges of the Andes, which traverse the new continent from north to south, and those of the Alps and Himalaya, which traverse the old continents from east to west, have been formed." (Ibid. § 10.)

For further remarks on the locality of Hades, see note subjoined to this paper. There can be little doubt that the vast mountain chains were thrown up on the earth's surface by the action of fire, were thrown up when Hades was formed within the earth's bowels, not previous to, but after the fall. There was in Hades a part assigned to the blessed; and there the soul of our blessed Lord was during the time that His body was in the grave. It is evident that the interior of the earth was not occupied entirely by fire then.

the very dislocation of the earth's strata and their arrangements (the place of coal fields, metalliferous districts, and the like) being doubtless appointed with anticipative reference to the need of man as fallen, and with a certain reference too, to the destined place which each nation and tribe should hold in human history till the great end shall come. The mere circumstance then, that all present geologic theories ignore these truths, and give no place to the great fact of creation being subjected to the bondage of corruption and the reign of death, is in itself sufficient to invalidate their conclusions. One might suppose from the boldness with which geologists break through the restraints of Scripture when they impede their theories, that they are themselves thoroughly agreed. But they are agreed neither in their theories, nor their facts. What one avers another repudiates. It is impossible therefore, to find any one geologic writer whose statements would not be impugned by some other geologist; and consequently, there is no one fixed geologic theory which can be tested as to the amount of its agreement or disagreement with the Word of God; for no one acknowledged theory exists. All that we can do, therefore, is to select one out of the many published theories; and I have selected that of the late Hugh Miller.

One acknowledgment of Hugh Miller is important. He once supposed with Buckland, Chalmers, and others, that a blank chaotic gap of death and darkness separated the creation to which man belongs, from another that preceded. This notion in his last work he entirely repudiates. He rejects it as utterly inconsistent with established geologic facts. Although still believing that there was a creation of animals and vegetables that preceded the creation to which man belongs, he nevertheless admits that not a few of the animals which belonged to the supposed previous creation, continue still. "No blank chaotic gap of death and darkness separated the creation to which man belongs from that of the old extinct elephant, hippopotamus and hyæna; for familiar animals such as the red deer, the roe, the fox, the wild cat and the badger, lived throughout the period which connected their time with our own." Testimony of Rocks, p. 10. When we remember the many unscriptural theories that have been founded on this supposed "blank chaotic gap," we may be thankful that it is at last renounced even by geologists themselves.*

* The Essayist observes; "this theory (i.e. the theory of the chaotic gap adopted by Buckland and Chalmers) is by no means supported by geological phenomena,

The system of Hugh Miller may be judged of from the following extracts. "The geologist," (he writes) "in his attempts to collate the Divine with the geologic record, has, I repeat, only three of the six periods of creation to account for-the period of plants, the period of great sea-monsters and creeping things, and the period of cattle and beasts of the earth. He is called on to question his systems and formations regarding the remains of these three great periods, and of them only. And the question once fairly stated, what, I ask, is the reply? All geologists agree in holding that the vast geological scale naturally divides into three great parts. There are many lesser divisions-divisions into systems, formations, deposits, beds, strata; but the master divisions, in each of which we find a type of life so unlike that of the others, that even the unpractised eye can detect the difference, are simply three: the paleozoic, or oldest fossiliferous division; the secondary, or middle fossiliferous division; and the tertiary, or latest fossiliferous division. In the first, or paleozoic division, we find corals, crustaceans, molluscs, fishes; and in its later formations, a few reptiles. But none of these classes give its leading character to the paleozoic; they do not constitute its prominent feature, or render it more remarkable as a scene of life than any of the divisions which followed. That which chiefly distinguished the paleozoic from the secondary and tertiary periods was its gorgeous flora. It was emphatically the period of plants-'of herbs yielding seed after their kind.' In no other age did the world ever witness such a flora; the youth of the earth was peculiarly a green and umbrageous youth—a youth of dusk and tangled forests, of huge pines and stately araucarians, of the reed-like calamite, the tall tree-fern, the sculptured sigillaria, and the hirsute lepidodendrons. Wherever dry land, or shallow lakes, or running stream appeared, from where Melville Island now spreads out its icy coast under the star of the pole, to where the arid plains of Australia lie solitary beneath the bright cross of the south, a rank and luxuriant herbage cumbered every foot-breadth of the dank and steaming soil; and even to distant planets our earth must have shone through the enveloping cloud with a green and delicate ray. Of this extraordinary age of plants we have our cheerful remembrancers and witnesses in the flames that roar in our chimneys when we pile up

and is, we suppose, rejected by all geologists whose authority is valuable."

Essays, p. 228.

the winter fire,—in the brilliant gas that now casts its light on this great assemblage, and that lightens up the streets and lanes of this vast city,-in the glowing furnaces that smelt our metals, and give moving power to our ponderous engines. . . The geologic

evidence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of organized being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period of herbs and trees, "yielding seed after their kind." Testimony of the Rocks, p. 134.

Now if we admit the general truthfulness of this description, to what would it amount? It would show that the primæval condition of this earth when it first came forth from the hand of its Creator was one of surpassing loveliness. The whole earth flourished and rejoiced. From pole to pole it was covered with a mantle of verdure and beauty. It had no ice-bound regions in which desolation and solitude reigned -no scorched uninhabitable deserts. The creation when finished was mature as well as in condition perfect. It did not (as many seem to assume) pass through a stage of infancy and gradual growth, and so, slowly attain maturity. Trees, plants, animals when created were, like man, mature. And all, save man, abounded. Food also abounded. Seas, earth, air, were tenanted with life, and creation in all its parts existed in developed perfectness. Such are the inferences to be drawn from the statements of Holy Scripture; and certainly the facts affirmed by Hugh Miller do not invalidate such inferences. They rather confirm.

And now let me ask whether there be any thing strange-any thing improbable in the thought that when sin entered, and when creation, once known as the home of perfectness, was appointed to receive the impress of judgment and to bear witness to the reign of death—is there any thing improbable in the thought that the plants, and trees, and flowers, and all the paradisiacal loveliness of the earth should, as to the original form of their perfectness, disappear, and be, for the most part entombed; and that black coal fields should remain as their memorial, to tell us, in charred and mutilated forms, of an excellency of beauty and strength that once was, but has departed-swept away because of human sin. If it was fitting that the home of man's innocency should be marked by all excellency of perfectness and beauty, it is no less fitting that the abode of his banishment-the earth which he has ruined by his transgression, should present him with memorials which he may disinter, and contemplate, and read in them a record of what his sin has wrought. We might well expect

that a fallen earth should become the grave of its original perfectness, and that, by an act of God's sovereign power as miraculous, and probably not more prolonged, than that by which He first gave to it its completeness. It was not indeed a destruction of the earth, nor of all things in it; but it was a destruction of its primæval condition, and a destruction, no doubt, of many things that had distinctively marked that primæval condition.

But to return to the statements of Hugh Miller. He goes on to say, "The middle great period of the geologist-that of the Secondary division-possessed, like the earlier one, its herbs and plants, but they were of a greatly less luxuriant and conspicuous character than their predecessors, and no longer formed the prominent trait or feature of the creation to which they belonged. The period had also its corals, its crustaceans, its molluscs, its fishes, and in some one or two exceptional instances, its dwarf mammals. But the grand existences of the age, the existences in which it excelled every other creation, earlier or later,-were its huge creeping things,-its enormous monsters of the deep,-and, as shown by the impressions of their footprints stamped upon the rocks, its gigantic birds. It was peculiarly the age of egg-bearing animals, winged and wingless. Its wonderful whales, not, however, as now, of the mammalian, but of the reptilian class, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and cetiosaurs,-must have tempested the deep; its creeping lizards and crocodiles, such as the teliosaurus, megalosaurus, and iguanodon,―creatures some of which more than rivalled the existing elephant in height, and greatly more than rivalled him in bulk,-must have crowded the plains, or haunted by myriads the rivers of the period; and we know that the footprints of at least one of its many birds are of fully twice the size of those made by the horse or camel. We are thus prepared to demonstrate, that the second period of the geologist was peculiarly and characteristically a period of whale-like reptiles of the sea, of enormous creeping reptiles of the land, and of numerous birds, some of them of gigantic size; and, in meet accordance with the fact, we find that the second Mosaic period with which the geologist is called on to deal was a period in which God created the fowl that flieth above the earth, with moving [or creeping] creatures, both in the waters and on the land, and what our translation renders great whales, but that I find rendered in the margin, great sea-monsters."

"The Tertiary period had also its prominent class of existences. Its flora seems to have been no more conspicuous than that of the present

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