cities of the empire
were lighted with oil burnt in lamps, he held that the time was not
distant when a carburetted hydrogen gas would be substituted instead;
and, on getting his snug parsonage-house repaired, he actually
introduced into the walls a system of tubes and pipes for the passage
into its various rooms of the gaseous fluid yet to be employed as the
illuminating agent. Time and experience have since impressed their stamp
on these supposed eccentricities, and shown them to be the sagacious
forecastings of a man who saw further and more clearly than his
contemporaries; and fame has since blown his name very widely, as one of
the most comprehensive and enlightened, and, withal, one of the most
thoroughly earnest and sincere, of modern theologians. The bold lecturer
of St. Andrews was Dr. Thomas Chalmers,--a divine whose writings are now
known wherever the English language is spoken, and whose wonderful
eloquence lives in memory as a vanished power, which even his
extraordinary writings fail adequately to represent. And in the position
which he took up at this early period with respect to geology and the
Divine Record, we have yet another instance of the great sagacity of the
man, and of his ability of correctly estimating the prevailing weight of
the evidence with which, though but partially collected at the time, the
geologist was preparing to establish the leading propositions of his
science. Even in this late age, when the scientific standing of geology
is all but universally recognized, and the vast periods of time which it
demands fully conceded, neither geologist nor theologian, could, in any
new scheme of reconciliation, shape his first proposition more skilfully
than it was shaped by Chalmers a full half century ago. It has formed
since that time the preliminary proposition of those ornaments of at
once science and the English Church, the present venerable Archbishop of
Canterbury, Dr. Bird Sumner, with Doctors Buckland, Conybeare, and
Professor Sedgwick; of eminent evangelistic Dissenters too, such as the
late Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. John Harris, Dr. Robert Vaughan, Dr. James
Hamilton, and the Rev. Mr. Binney,--enlightened and distinguished men,
who all came early to the conclusion, with the lecturer of St. Andrews,
that "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe."
In 1814, ten years after the date of the St. Andrews' lectures, Dr.
Chalmers produced his more elaborate scheme of reconciliati
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