The sagacity of the poet here,--that strange sagacity which seems so nearly akin to the prophetic spirit,--suggests in this noble passage the true reading of the enigma. The appearance of man upon the scene of being constitutes a new era in creation; the operations of a new _instinct_ come into play,--that _instinct_ which anticipates a life after the grave, and reposes in implicit faith upon a God alike just and good, who is the pledged "rewarder of all who diligently seek Him." And in looking along the long line of being,--ever rising in the scale from higher to yet higher manifestations, or abroad on the lower animals, whom instinct never deceives,--can we hold that man, immeasurably higher in his place, and infinitely higher in his hopes and aspirations, than all that ever went before him, should be, notwithstanding, the one grand error in creation,--the one painful worker, in the midst of present trouble, for a state into which he is never to enter,--the befooled expectant of a happy future, which he is never to see? Assuredly no. He who keeps faith with all his humbler creatures,--who gives to even the bee and the dormouse the winter for which they prepare,--will to a certainty not break faith with man,--with man, alike the deputed lord of the present creation, and the chosen heir of all the future. We have been looking abroad on the old geologic burying-grounds, and deciphering the strange inscriptions on their tombs; but there are other burying-grounds, and other tombs,--solitary churchyards among the hills, where the dust of the martyrs lies, and tombs that rise over the ashes of the wise and good; nor are there awanting, on even the monuments of the perished races, frequent hieroglyphics, and symbols of high meaning, which darkly intimate to us, that while _their_ burial-yards contain but the debris of the past, we are to regard the others as charged with the sown seed of the future. LECTURE THIRD. THE TWO RECORDS, MOSAIC AND GEOLOGICAL. It is now exactly fifty years since a clergyman of the Scottish Church, engaged in lecturing at St. Andrews, took occasion in enumerating the various earths of the chemist, to allude to the science, then in its infancy, that specially deals with the rocks and soils which these earths compose. "There is a prejudice," he remarked, "against the speculations of the geologist, which I am anxious to remove. It has been said that they nurture infidel propensities. It has been alleged that geology, by referring the origin of the globe to a higher antiquity than is assigned to it by the writings of Moses, undermines our faith in the inspiration of the Bible, and in all the animating prospects of the immortality which it unfolds. This is a false alarm. _The writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe._"