If, then, geology can clearly demonstrate the present state of the globe to have had a beginning; if she can show us the period, by fair induction, when one liquid, fiery ocean enveloped the whole earth; if she can show us five or six economies of organic life successively flourishing and passing away; if she can trace man back to his origin at a comparatively recent date; if, in fact, she can show us that the most important operations on the globe, and the most complicated and exalted organic races, had a beginning; and if astronomy affords glimpses of similar changes,--then why may we not safely leave the subject of the world's eternity an undecided question, consistently with the most perfect Theism? If we can prove that the power, the wisdom, and the benevolence of the Deity have again and again interfered with the regular sequence of nature's operations, and introduced new conditions and new and more perfect beings, by using the matter already in existence, what though we cannot, by the light of science, run back to the first production of matter itself? What though the atheist should here be allowed to maintain his favorite theory that matter never had a beginning? What doctrine of natural religion is thereby unfavorably affected, if we can only show the interposition of the Deity in all of matter's important modifications? Such an admission would not prove matter to be eternal, but only that science has not yet placed within the reach of man the means of proving its non-eternity. And really, such an admission would be far more favorable to the cause of truth than to rely, as theologians have done, on metaphysical subtilties to prove that matter had a beginning. For the sceptical mind will not merely remain unconvinced by such arguments, but be very apt to draw the sweeping inference that all the doctrines of natural and revealed religion rest on similar dreamy abstractions. But is natural theology in fact destitute of all satisfactory proof that the matter of the universe had a beginning? Such proof, it seems to me, she will seek in vain in the wide fields of physical and mathematical science; and the solution of the question which metaphysics offers, as we have seen, does not satisfy. But there are sources of evidence on this point which seem to me of the most satisfactory kind.