Before proceeding to this part of the subject, however, I must pause a moment, in order to point out another mode, in which science may contribute to elucidate Scripture. In the way just described, it may enable the interpreter more correctly to understand the language, but it may also give a fuller illustration to the sentiments of the Bible. Revelation, for instance, represents God as benevolent. Now, if we can derive from the records of geology striking and hitherto unthought-of manifestations of this attribute, we shall make the doctrine of Scripture more impressive; or, if we appeal to the numerous changes which the earth has undergone, and the vast periods which they have occupied, we find that the unsearchableness of divine wisdom, and the vastness of the divine plans, are brought more vividly before the mind, and task its power of comprehension more than illustrations from any other quarter. In short, the principles of religion that derive important elucidation from science, and especially from geology, are very numerous, as I hope to show in subsequent lectures. But I now return to the inquiry, whether the principles of science, and especially of geology, are so well settled that we can employ them in this manner. As to the more mathematical sciences, there will be no one to doubt but some of their principles must be admitted as infallible truth; for our minds are so constituted that they are incapable of resisting a fair presentation of mathematical demonstration. Now, there is scarcely any physical science that is not based more or less upon mathematical truth; and as to the facts in those sciences, some of them are so multiplied, and speak so uniformly the same language, that we doubt them no more than we do a mathematical demonstration. Other classes of facts are less decided; and in some cases they are so insulated as to be regarded as anomalies, to be set aside until better understood. The same grades of certainty exist in respect to inferences from the facts of science. Some theories are scarcely less doubtful than mathematics; others are as strong as probable reasoning can make them; and others are merely plausible. Hypotheses are still less to be trusted, though sometimes extremely probable.