Why do we so assert, accentuate, and reiterate this to be the central theme of the chapter? Because through the scientific trend and bias of modern inquiry the essential design of the chapter has got warped, cramped, and twisted till its majestic features have been pushed almost clean out of view, and all attention is concentrated on one trivial, mean, and unreal point in its physiognomy. Its claim to be accounted an integral part of a real revelation is made to hinge on its magical anticipation of, and detailed correspondence with, the changeful theories of modern geology. The idea is, in our humble but decided opinion, dangerous, baseless, and indefensible. The chapter may not forestall one single scientific discovery. It may not tally with one axiom or dogma of geology. Nevertheless, it remains a unique, undeniable, and glorious monument of revelation, second only in worth and splendour to the record of God's incarnation of His whole heart and being in the person of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Redeemer. Consider what this chapter has actually accomplished in the world, and set that against all theories of what it ought to be doing. For our knowledge of the true God and the realisation of mankind's higher life it has done a work beside which any question of correspondence or non-correspondence with science sinks into unmentionable insignificance. Place side by side with it the chiefest and best of the Pagan cosmogonies, and appreciate its sweetness, purity, and elevation over against their grotesqueness, their shallowness, and their degradation alike of the human and the Divine. Realise the world whose darkness they re-echo, the world into which emerged this radiant picture of God's glory and man's dignity, and think what it has done for that poor world. It found heaven filled with a horde of gods, monstrous, impure, and horrible, gigantic embodiments of brute force and lust, or at best cold abstractions of cosmical principles, whom men could fear, but not love, honour, or revere. It found man in a world dark and unhomelike, bowing down in abject worship to beasts and birds, and stocks and stones, trembling with craven cowardice before the elements and forces of Nature, enslaved in a degrading bondage of physical superstition, fetishism, and polytheism. With one sweep of inspired might the truth enshrined in this chapter has changed all that, wherever it has come. It has cleansed the heaven of those foul gods and monstrous worships, and leaves men on bended knees in the presence of the one true God, their Father in heaven, who made the world for their use, and them for Himself, and whose tender mercies are over all His works. From moral and mental slavery it has emancipated man, for it has taken the physical objects of his fear and worship, and dashing them down from their usurped pre-eminence, has put them all under his feet, to be his ministers and servants in working out on earth his eternal destiny.