Truth is, and always must be, coincident. There can be no real contradiction between the truth of Scripture and the truth of Science. Whatever is true in one department of God’s agency, must be true when compared with his works in any other department. As an illustration we may notice one particular in which Geology and Scripture move towards the same point in proving the recent introduction of man. We take up a chart of the earth’s crust, and examine it so far as that crust is open to our investigation: eight miles depth or height we know pretty accurately, and in all these accumulations we find one concurrent testimony. If we take the Azoic period of the earth’s crust, and search through the granitic rocks of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall; or if we pass on to the Palæozoic period, and examine the Old Red Sandstone, the Carboniferous system, or other formations; or, extending our researches, investigate the secondary formations, the Lias, the Oolite, and the Chalk, and so on until we arrive at the Tertiary period of the earth’s history; _all the testimony is one_; there is no contradiction; there are no fossil boats or sofas; no fossil beds or books; no fossil boys and girls; no fossil knives and forks; so far as the teachings of Geology go throughout all these vast periods it says, “there was not a man to till the earth;” they declare that man is not so old as the earth, and that all its fossil remains are pre-Adamite. Now why should this truth be supposed to lie against the teaching of Scripture? The object of Moses in the first chapter of Genesis, is to teach us that all existing matter owes its origin to the God of the Bible, and not to any of the idols of the heathen. “In the beginning,” says that oldest historical record with which we are acquainted, “God created the heaven and the earth;” that is, we apprehend, at some period of the earth’s history, in all probability an undefined and incalculable distance from the present time, God created all matter out of nothing, the universe, these heavens and this earth, began to be at the word of God. “_But afterwards_,” says Dr. Pye Smith, in his translation of these words, “the earth was without form and void;” undergoing, we believe, those vast geological changes, those deposits of metal, and those slow accumulations of mineral wealth, by which it was fitted to become the temple, the palace, the workshop, and the home of man. “The first sentence in Genesis is a simple, independent, all-comprehending axiom to this effect, that matter elementary or combined, aggregated only or organised, and dependent, sentient, and intellectual beings, have not existed from eternity either in self-continuity or succession; but had a beginning; that their beginning took place by the all-powerful will of one Being, the Self-existent, Independent and Infinite in all perfection; and that the date of that beginning is not made known.”[5]