-- forms of vitality, and from thence to the higher. And after great cattle and beasts of the earth had, in due order, succeeded inanimate plants, sea monsters, and moving creatures that had life, the moral agent, man, enters upon the scene. Previous to his appearance on earth, each succeeding elevation in the long upward march had been a result of creation. The creative fiat went forth, and dead matter came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and plants, with the lower animal forms, came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and the oviparous animals, birds and reptiles, came into existence. The creative fiat went forth, and the mammiferous animals,cattle and beasts of the earth,- came into existence. And, finally, last in the series, the creative fiat went forth, and responsible, immortal man, came into existence. But has the course of progress come, in consequence, to a close? No. God's work of elevating, raising, heightening, — of making the high in due progression succeed the low, still goes on. But man's responsibility, his immortality, his God-implanted instincts respecting an eternal future, forbid that that work of elevation and progress should be, as in all the other instances, a work of creation. To create would be to supersede. God's work of elevation now is the work of fitting and preparing peccable, imperfect man for a perfect, impeccable, future state. God's seventh day's work is the work of Redemption. And, read in this light, his reason vouchsafed to man for the institution of the Sabbath is found to yield a meaning of peculiar breadth and emphasis. God, it seems to say, rests on his Sabbath from his creative labors, in order that by his Sabbath day's work he may save and elevate you. Rest ye also on your Sabbaths, that through your co-operation with him in this great work ye may be elevated and saved. Made origi nally in the image of God, let God be your pattern and example. Engaged in your material and temporal employments, labor in the proportions in which he labored; but, in order that you may enjoy an eternal future with him, rest also in the proportions in which he rests. One other remark ere I conclude. In the history of the earth which we inhabit, molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, had each in succession their periods of vast duration; and then the human period began, the period of a fellow worker with God, created in God's own image. What is to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repetition of the past? an introduction a second time of man made in the image of God? No. The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records, finds no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty -"the kingdom"-not of glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form of man. In the doctrine of the two conjoined natures, human and Divine, and in the further doctrine that the terminal dynasty is to be peculiarly the dynasty of HIM in whom the natures are united, we find that required progression beyond which progress cannot go. We find the point of elevation never to be exceeded meetly coincident with the final period never to be terminated, the infinite in height harmoniously associated with the eternal in duration. Creation and the Creator meet at one point, and in one person. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been a progress Godwards, not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of union; and occupying that point as true God and true man, as Creator and created, Monarch of all the future! we recognize the adorable LECTURE FOURTH. THE MOSAIC VISION OF CREATION. THE history of creation is introduced into the "Paradise Lost" as a piece of narrative, and forms one of the two great episodes of the poem. Milton represents the common father of the race as "led on" by a desire to know "What within Eden or without was done and straightway Raphael, "the affable archangel," in compliance with the wish, enters into a description of the six days' work of the Divine Creator,—a description in which, as Addison well remarks, "the whole energy of our tongue is employed, and the several great scenes of creation rise up to view, one after another, in such a manner, that the reader seems present at this wonderful work, and to assist among the choirs of angels who are spectators of it." In the other great episode of the poem,- that in which the more prominent changes which were to happen in after time the earth are made to pass before Adam, he is represented as carried by Michael to the top of a great mountain, lofty as that on which in a long posterior age the Tempter placed our Saviour, and where the coming events are described as rising up in vision before him. In the earlier episode, as in those of the Odyssey and Eneid, in which heroes relate in the courts of princes the story of their adventures, there is but narrative and description; in the upon later, a series of magnificent pictures, that form and then dissolve before the spectator, and comprise, in their vivid tints and pregnant outlines, the future history of a world. And one of these two episodes, — that which relates to the creation of all things, must have as certainly had a place in human history as in the master epic of England. Man would have forever remained ignorant of many of those events related in the opening chapters of Scripture, which took place ere there was a human eye to witness, or a human memory to record, had he not been permitted, like Adam of old, to hold intercourse with the intelligences that had preceded him in creation, or with the great Creator himself, the Author of them all; and the question has been asked of late, both in our own country and on the Continent, What was the form and nature of the revelation by which the pre-Adamic history of the earth and heavens was originally conveyed to man? Was it conveyed, like the sublime story of Raphael, as a piece of narrative, dictated, mayhap, to the inspired penman, or miraculously borne in upon his mind? Or was it conveyed by a succession of sublime visions like that which Michael is represented as calling up before Adam, when, purging his "visual nerves with euphrasy and rue," he enabled him to see, in a series of scenes, the history of his offspring from the crime of Cain down to the destruction of the Old World by a flood? The passages in which the history of creation is recorded give no intimation whatever of their own history; and so we are left to balance the probabilities regarding the mode and form in which they were originally revealed, and to found our ultimate conclusions respecting them on evidence, not direct, but circumstantial. The Continental writers on this curious subject may be regarded as not inadequately represented by Dr. J. H. Kurtz, Professor of Theology at Dorpat,-one of the many ingenious biblical scholars of modern Germany. We find him stating the question, in his Bibel und Astronomie (second edition, 1849), with great precision and clearness, but in a manner, so far at least as the form of his thinking is concerned, strikingly characteristic of what may be termed the theological fashion of his country in the present day. "The source of all human history," he says, "is eye-witness, be it that of the reporter, or of another whose account has been handed down. Only what man has himself seen or experienced can be the subject of man's historical compositions. So that history, so far as man can write it, can begin with but the point at which he has entered into conscious existence, and end with the moment that constitutes the present time. Beyond these points, however, lies a great province of historic development, existing on the one side as the Past, on the other side as the Future. For when man begins to be an observer or actor of history, he himself, and the whole circumstantials of his condition, have already come historically into being. Nor does the flow of development stop with what is his present. Millions of influences are spinning the thread still on; but no one can tell what the compound result of all their energies is to be. Both these sorts of history, then, lie beyond the region of man's knowledge, which is shut up in space and time, and can only call the present its own. It is God alone who, standing beyond and above space and time, sees backwards and forwards both the development which preceded the first present of men, and that which will succeed this our latest present. Whatever the difference of the two kinds of history may be, they hold the same position in relation both to the principle of the human ignorance and the principle of the human knowledge. The principle of the ignorance is man's condition as a creature; the principle of the knowledge is the Divine knowledge; and the medium between |