ings are contrivances of man, not
works of God, and their aim is to invite him to adore that which is
merely his fellow-creature, that which he has the divine commission to
subdue and rule. So our primitive Puritan turns away. He will rather
raise an altar of rough stones in the desert, and worship the unseen yet
real Creator, the God that has no local habitation in temples made with
hands, yet is everywhere present. Such is the moral elevation to which
this revelation of origins raises humanity; and when there was added to
it the farther history of primeval innocence, of the fall, and of the
promise of a Redeemer, and of the fate of the godless antediluvians,
there was a whole system of religion, pure and elevating, and placing
the Abrahamidae, who for ages seem alone to have held to it, on a plane
of spiritual vantage immeasurably above that of other nations. Farther,
every succeeding prophet whose works are included in the sacred canon,
following up these doctrines in the same spirit, and added new
treasures of divine knowledge from age to age.

But admitting all this, it may be asked, Are these ancient records of
any value to us? May we not now dispense with them, and trust to the
light of science? The infinitely varied and discordant notions of our
modern literature on these great questions of origin, the incapacity
of any philosophical system to reach the common mind for practical
purposes, and the baseless character of any religious system which
does not build on these great primitive truths, give a sufficient
answer. Farther, we may affirm that the greatest and widest
generalizations of our modern science have, in so far as they are of
practical importance, been anticipated in the revelations of the
Bible, and that in the cosmogony of Genesis and its continuation in
the other sacred books we have general views of the universe as broad
as those of any philosophies, ancient or modern. This is a hard test
for our revelation, but it can be endured, and we may shortly inquire
what we find in the Bible of such great general truths.

Many may be disposed to admit the accurate delineation of natural
facts open to human observation in the sacred Scriptures, who may not
be prepared to find in these ancient books any general views akin to
those of the ancient philosophers, or to those obtained by inductive
processes in modern times. Yet views of this kind are scattered
through the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and are