What, then, is the result of such an examination? An absolute certainty that all the things which are seen are temporal,--that every object in the universe which presents itself to the senses has had a beginning,--that the most powerful, penetrating, and delicate instruments devised to assist our senses reach no cause which is not obviously also an effect. The progress of science has not more convincingly and completely disproved the once prevalent notion that the universe was created about six thousand years ago, than it has convincingly and completely established that everything of which our senses inform us has had a commencement in time, and is of a compound, derivative, and dependent nature. It is not long since men had no means of proving that the rocks, for example, were not as old as the earth itself--no direct means of proving even that they were not eternal; but science is now able to tell us with confidence under what conditions, in what order, and in what epochs of geological time they were formed. We have probably a more satisfactory knowledge of the formation of the coal-measures than of the establishment of the feudal system. We know that the Alps, although they look as if they might have stood for ever, are not even old, as geologists count age. The morning and night, the origin and disappearance of the countless species of living things which have peopled the earth from the enormously remote times when the rocks of the Laurentian period were deposited down to the births and deaths of contemporaneous animals, have been again brought into the light of day by the power of science. The limits of research are not even there reached, and with bold flight science passes beyond the confines of discovered life--beyond the epochs of formation even of the oldest rocks--to a time when there was no distinction of earth and sea and atmosphere, as all were mingled together in nebulous matter, in some sort of fluid or mist or steam; yea, onwards to a time when our earth had no separate existence, and suns, moons, and stars were not yet divided and arranged into systems. If we seek, then, after what is eternal, science tells us that it is not the earth nor anything which it contains, not the sea nor the living things within it, not the moving air, not the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars. These things when interrogated all tell us to look above and beyond them, for although they may have begun to be in times far remote, yet it was within times to which the thoughts of finite beings can reach back.