The second characteristic of that state of mind is its admiration of the startling and the vast. In these alone it recognizes the tokens of unlimited power. It is unable to appreciate those more majestic manifestations of power which are discerned by the enlightened eye, when a stupendous scheme is developed, gradually and imperceptibly, but without pause or hesitation through a long succession of ages; when a multitude of seemingly discordant elements are at last brought together in a perfect work; when a power, unseen and unnoticed, slowly but surely overrules the working of ten thousand apparently independent agents, through a thousand generations, and moulds their separate works into one harmonious whole. Such a manifestation of power as this was beyond the grasp of the untrained mind; but to such intellects there was something irresistibly fascinating in the idea of a world rising into perfect existence in a moment, of innumerable hosts of living creatures called into being at a word. Such was the meaning of the account of creation which naturally suggested itself to the untrained mind, and there was nothing in science in those early days to throw any doubt upon it, and so this belief was unhesitatingly and almost universally adopted. Here and there, indeed, some man of deeper thought than his brethren, such as St. Augustine [Footnote: See St. Augustine, "De Genesi ad Literam," Liber Imperfectus, and Libri Duodecim, and also "Confessionum" Liber xiii.], suspected that there might be more in that seemingly simple record than was generally acknowledged; but such men had no means of verifying their conjectures, and their number was very small. For three thousand years the old view was practically unquestioned, it received the tacit sanction of the Church, it gradually became identified in the minds of all with the record itself, and was as much an article of faith as the very Creed.