highest example of animal life yet produced by
the originating Cause, it would be unphilosophic to deem him capable of
producing a higher example. And, while we are thus reasoning, man
appears upon creation,--a creature immeasurably superior to all the
others, and whose very nature it is to make use of his experience of the
past for his guidance in the future. And if that only be solid
experience or just reasoning which enables us truly to anticipate the
events which are to come, and so to make provision for them; and if that
experience be not solid, and that reasoning not just, which would serve
but to darken our discernment, and prevent us from correctly predicating
the cast and complexion of coming events; what ought to be our decision
regarding an argument which, had it been employed in each of the
vanished creations of the past, would have had but the effect of
arresting all just anticipation regarding the immediately succeeding
creation, and which, thus reversing the main end and object of
philosophy, would render the philosopher who clung to it less sagacious
in divining the future than even the ordinary man? But, in truth, the
existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer
those of Hume. The footprint on the sand--to refer to his happy
illustration--does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many
footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a
higher level; and, founding at once on an acquaintance with the past,
extended throughout all the periods of the geologist, and on that
instinct of our nature whose peculiar function it is to anticipate at
least one creation more, we must regard the expectation of "new heavens
and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness," as not unphilosophic,
but as, on the contrary, altogether rational and according to
experience.

Such is the bearing of geological science on two of the most important
questions that have yet been raised in the field of natural theology.
Nor does it bear much less directly on a controversy to which, during
the earlier half of the last century, there was no little importance
attached in Britain, and which engaged on its opposite sides some of the
finest and most vigorous intellects of the age and country.

The school of infidelity represented by Bolingbroke, and, in at least
his earlier writings, by Soame Jenyns, and which, in a modified form,
attained to much popularity through Pope's famous "Essay," a