globe;--learns that his powers of interrogating Nature break down marvellous soon: yet Nature is observed to keep from him no secrets which he has the ability to ask her to give up. In the meantime, the attitude assumed by certain pretenders to Physical Science at these discoveries, cannot fail to strike any thoughtful person as extraordinary. Those witnesses of GOD'S work in Creation, which have been dumb for ages only because no man ever thought of interrogating them, are now regarded in the light of depositaries of a mighty secret; which, because GOD knew that it would be fatal to the credit of His written Word, He had bribed them to keep back, as long as, by shuffling and equivocation, they found concealment practicable. It seems to be fancied, however, that _that_ fatal secret the determination of Man has wrung from their unwilling lips, at last; and lo, on confronting GOD with these witnesses, He is convicted even by His own creatures of having spoken falsely in His Word[129].--Such, I say, is the tone assumed of late by a certain school of pretenders to Physical Science. What need to declare that to the well-informed eye of Faith,--(and surely Faith is here the perfection of Reason! for _Faith_, remember, is the correlative not of _Reason_, but of _Sight_;)--the phenomenon presented is of a widely different character. Faith, or rather Reason, looks upon GOD'S Works _as a kind of complement of His Word_. He who gave the one, gave the other also. Moreover, He knew that He had given it. So far from ministering to unbelief, or even furnishing grounds for perplexity, the record of His Works was intended, according to His gracious design, to supply what was lacking to our knowledge in the record of His Word.... "Behold My footprints, (He seems to say,) across the long tract of the ages! I could not give you this evidence in My written Word. The record would have been out of place, and out of time. It would have been unintelligible also. But what I knew would be inexpedient in the page of Revelation, I have given you abundantly in the page of Nature. I have spared your globe from combustion, which would have effaced those footprints,--in order that the characters might be plainly decipherable to the end of Time.... O fools and blind, to have occupied a world so brimful of wonders for wellnigh 6000 years, and only now to have begun to open your eyes to the structure of the earth whereon ye live, and move, and have your being! Yea, and the thousandth part of the natural wonders by which ye are surrounded has not been so much as dreamed of, by any of you, yet!... O learn to be the humbler, the more ye know; and when ye gaze along the mighty vista of departed ages, and scan the traces of what I was doing before I created Man,--multiply that problem by the stars which are scattered in number numberless over all the vault of Heaven; and learn to confess that it behoves the creature of an hour to bow his head at the discovery of his