Of course, we can fall back upon a miracle as having done all this; but to have recourse to miracles when no miracle is recorded, is just to shake our faith in that all-inspired testimony, that supernatural Book, the existence of which is the great miracle of time. But there are the fossils! How did they come there if the forms of animal life, once inhabiting those remains, had not previously lived and died? Created! What? Created fossils? Then why not, when the Almighty created man, did he not create, at the same time, some skeletons of _man_, and place them in the earth, as he put skeletons of trilobites, fishes, reptiles, and mammals there? Our common sense and reverence both reject the idea. As to the puerile notion that Noah’s flood put them there, did not Noah’s flood overwhelm man as well as animals? and as the bones of man are as durable as the bones of animals, how is it that we never meet with a fossil human skull or thigh bone, or house? We believe that death was a part of the divine plan of God’s creation; that death is a law of all organic life—a necessary law and a most benevolent provision; that the living structure of all animals derives its substance from dead organic matter. We believe that, altogether apart from human sin, preceding and successive generations must be the order of being; for if there were no death, animals would soon pass beyond the limit of provision sufficient for nutritive support, or of localities for suitable habitations. We believe that if there had been no death prior to man’s sin, it would involve the supposition that all animals were herbivorous; whereas, even the little _ladybird_ cannot live without its meal of _aphides_; and, so believing, we find our faith in Scripture deepened when, seeing on every hand the extensive proofs of death, we find man, the moment he lost his lordship and proud eminence, and reduced himself voluntarily to the condition of animalism, immediately brought _penally_ within the influence of that law of death, whose existence he must have recognised in the death of animals from the first day of his creation. Does any one reply, “This is contrary to Scripture?” I ask them what Scripture teaches that the death of _animals_ is the result of man’s sin?—rather would not Scripture sanction the thought that death was a part of the divine plan of God’s creation, and that the certainty of man’s transgression was the reason for giving this constitution to nature? True, Milton sings, in his noble poem, that will live as long as the English language lives— “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe:”