The infidel felt confident that the arrows which he drew from this quiver would certainly pierce Christianity to the heart. But they rebounded from her adamantine breastplate, blunted and broken; and no one will have the courage to pick them up and hurl them again. The physico-theological school at one time felt certain, that no other theory but an entire dissolution of the crust of the globe at the deluge, could possibly be made consistent with the Bible. More recently, it has been supposed equally necessary, to reconcile geology and revelation, that we should admit the antediluvian continents to have sunk beneath the ocean at that time. Still later, it has been thought quite certain that the surface of the earth bore the most striking marks of a universal deluge, probably identical with that of Scripture. At length, the extreme opinion is now generally reached, that no trace of the deluge of Noah remains. And equally wide and well established is the belief that, amid all these fluctuations of theory, the Bible has stood as an immovable rock amid the conflicting waves. The final result is, that we have only slightly to modify the interpretation of the Mosaic account, in conformity with the laws of language, to make it entirely consistent with the notion that all traces of the deluge have disappeared. Thus, in the midst of human opinions, veering to every point of the compass, the Bible has ever remained fixed to one point. Not so with false systems of religion. The Hindoo religion contains a false astronomy, as well as anatomy and physiology; and the Mohammedan Koran distinctly advances the Ptolemaic hypothesis of the universe; so that you have only to prove these religions false in science in order to destroy their claim to infallibility. But the Bible, stating only facts, does not interfere with, neither is affected by, the hypotheses of philosophy. Often, indeed, in past ages, have men set up their hypotheses as oracles in the temple of nature, to be consulted rather than the Bible. But, like Dagon before the ark, they have fallen to the earth, and been broken in pieces before the Word of God; while this has ever stood and ever shall stand, in sublime simplicity and undecaying strength, amid the wrecks of every false system of philosophy and religion. LECTURE V. THE WORLD'S SUPPOSED ETERNITY.