which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy
twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls
more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes
a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that
God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto
verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are
creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery
of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest
intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All
Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in
which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange
wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen
spirit--profound and active beyond the lot of humanity--would have found
ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly
asking what these strange things might mean.

With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed
creation,--as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,--must not
that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine
Worker,--scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the
inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to
depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately
to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the
chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with
him, how thoroughly must he not have seen, and with what bitter
malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and
that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his
powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained
an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had
rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically
spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the
quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know!
"Shall he that coutendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that
reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or
canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?" With what wild
thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the
tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter
mockeries must he have