But the infidel asks us, "Does not the Bible make a false declaration, when it says that the universe was created only some six or seven thousand years ago?" We reply by asking, _Where does the Bible say so_? "But," says our objector, "is not this the doctrine held by the various sects and taught by the various commentators?" That is not the question before us just now. We are not asking what sects believe, or uninspired teachers teach; but, "What does the Bible say." The Bible uniformly attributes the most remote antiquity to the work of creation. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (_Gen. i_, 1). So far from supposing man's appearance on the earth to be even approximately coeval with the creation, human presumption is reproved in the remarkable words, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (_Job, xxxviii_. 4.) In majestic contrast with the frail human race, Moses glances at the primeval monuments of God's antiquity, as though by them he might form some faint conceptions of eternity, and sings, "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting, to everlasting thou art God" (_Ps. xc_, 2). The {161} very phrase _in the beginning_, is in itself an emphatic refutation of the notion, that the work of creation is only some six or seven thousand years old. Geologists have been unable to invent a better, and have borrowed from the Bible this very form of speech, to designate as the _primary formations_, those strata beyond which human knowledge cannot penetrate. This phrase, in Bible language, marks the last promontory on the boundless ocean of past eternity: the only positive phrase, by which we can express the most remote period of past duration. It expresses not a date--a point of duration; but a period--a vast cycle. But one boundary is perceptible to mortals: that where creation rises from its abyss. Created eye has never seen the other shore. Let the geologist then penetrate as deeply as he can into the profundities of the earth's foundations, and bring forth the monuments of their hoary antiquity; we will follow with unfaltering faith. Let the astronomer raise his telescope and reflect, on our astonished eyes, the light which flashed from morning stars, on the first day of this earth's existence, or even the rays which began to travel from distant suns millions of years ere the first morning dawned on our planet: they shall shed a sacred lustre over the pages of inspiration, and give new beauties of illustration to its majestic symbols. But never in this life will geologists penetrate the depth of its mysteries, nor astronomers attain the sublimity of that beginning revealed in its pages. It is placed in an {162} antiquity beyond the power of human calculation, in that sublime sentence with which it introduces mortals to the Eternal, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."