watched the fierce wars which raged in their
sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth,
barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of
plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away,
and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land
rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean,--how, when looking back
upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been,
the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the
features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds,--how must
he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening,
and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by
the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence,--how
must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner
mysteries of animal life, with their strange prophecies, the truth had
at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast
coming to the birth,--man, the moral agent,--man, the ultimate work and
end of creation,--man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals,
vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior
animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy
have quickened,--how must solicitude have grown,--when, after the
dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile,
and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time
had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and
the proud waves of ocean had been stayed,--when, after species and
genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent
of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and
the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how
strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to
darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his
experience,--stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic
vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God's
spiritual universe,--that all _animals_ should die,--that all _moral
agents_ should live. How, in this new creature,--this prodigy of
creation, who was to unite what never before had been united,--the
nature of the animals that _die_ with the standing and responsibility of
the moral agents that _live_,--how, in this parta