or as late origin as man. "This consideration," he
says, "induces me to believe that the last province in time was
completed by the coming of man, and to maintain an hypothesis that man
stands unique in space and time, himself equal to the sum of any
pre-existing centre of creation or of all--an hypothesis consistent
with man's moral and social position in the world."

The seventh day, then, was to have been that in which all the
happiness, beauty, and perfection of the others were to have been
concentrated. But an element of instability was present in the being
who occupied the summit of the animal scale. Not regulated by blind
and unerring instincts, but a free agent, with a high intellectual and
moral nature, and liable to be acted on by temptation from without;
under such influence he lost his moral balance in stretching out his
hand to grasp the peculiar powers of Deity, and fell beyond the hope
of self-redemption--perpetuating, by one of those laws which regulate
the transmission of mixed corporeal and spiritual natures, his
degradation to every generation of his species. And so God's great
work was marred, and all his plans seemed to be foiled, when they had
just reached their completion. Thus far science might carry us
unaided; for there is not a true naturalist, however skeptical as to
revealed religion, who does not feel in his inmost heart the
disjointed state of the present relations of man to nature; the
natural wreck that results from his artificial modes of life, the long
trains of violations of the symmetry of nature that follow in the wake
of his most boasted achievements. But here natural science stops; and
just as we have found that, in tracing back the world's history, the
Bible carries us much farther than geology, so science, having led us
to suspect the fallen state of man, leaves us henceforth to the
teaching of revelation. And how glorious that teaching! God did not
find himself baffled--his resources are infinite--he had foreseen and
prepared for all this apparent evil; and out of the moral wreck he
proceeds to work out the grand process of _redemption_, which is the
especial object of the seventh day, and which will result in the
production of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness. In the seventh, as in the former days, the evening
precedes the morning. For four thousand years the world groped in its
darkness--a darkness tenanted by moral monsters as powerful and
destruc