To begin at our own little globe, where exactness is more easily attained, than among distant planets, we find that two of the greatest astronomers, Bessel and Newton, differ from each other in the measurement of the diameter of the earth fully eleven miles. So also the diameter of the earth's orbit is uncertain by 360,000 miles. Now the diameter of the earth, and the diameter of its orbit are the very foot rule and yard stick, as it were, by which astronomers measure the heavens. (_See Humboldt's Cosmos, Vol, I. page 7, and Vol. IV. page 477._) "Let us then be candid," says Loomis, "and claim no more for astronomy than is reasonably due. When in 1846 the great astronomer Le Verrier announced the existence of a planet hitherto unseen, and when he assigned to it its exact position {41} in the heavens, and declared that it shone like a star of the eighth magnitude, not an astronomer of France, and scarcely one in Europe had sufficient faith in the prediction to prompt him to point his telescope to the heavens." So also geology, one of the most recent of the sciences, and in the hands of infidel nurses one of the most noisy, has been found to be unreliable in many particulars. True a wonderful outcry has been raised about the antagonism between the records of the rocks, and the records of the Bible. But no one has yet succeeded in proving such an antagonism; for the plain reason that neither the Bible nor geology says how old the earth is. They both say it is very old. The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The term here translated "in the beginning" signifies, as every Hebrew scholar knows, a period of such remote antiquity, that in Bible language it stands next to eternity. Now if the geologist could prove that the earth is a thousand million years older than the time when Adam appeared upon it, this would contradict no statement of the Bible. So when infidels come to us with their geological theories about the manner in which God made the earth, or in which the earth is said to have made itself, and how long it took to do it, and tell us that they have scientific demonstration from the rocks that the Bible is false, we surely have a right to enquire into the foundation of these theories upon which they have built such startling conclusions. Now it is remarkable that every infidel {42} argument is based not upon the _facts_, but upon the _theories_ of geology. But how does our infidel geologist set about his work of proving that the earth has any given age, say a thousand million years? Why he simply commences with a theory or supposition. Yet a demonstration must rest upon facts, it admits of no suppositions. In examining the crust of the earth we find a great many layers of rocks, one above the other, evidently formed below the water, some of them out of the fragments of former rocks containing bones, shells and casts of fishes and tracks of the feet