Peter. "For of this they are _willingly ignorant_, that by the word
of God there were heavens of old, and land framed out of water, and
by means of water, whereby the world that then was, being overflowed
by water, perished." We recognize these geological subsidences,
but we read them from the testimony of the rocks more willingly
than from the testimony of the Word.

Science exults in having discovered what it is pleased to call an
order of development on earth--tender grass, herb, tree; moving
creatures that have life in the waters; bird, reptile, beast, cattle,
man. The Bible gives the same order ages before, and calls it God's
successive creations.

During ages on ages man's wisdom held the earth to be flat. Meanwhile,
God was saying, century after century, of himself, "He sitteth upon
the sphere of the earth" (Gesenius).

Men racked their feeble wits for expedients to uphold [Page 234] the
earth, and the best they could devise were serpents, elephants, and
turtles; beyond that no one had ever gone to see what supported
them. Meanwhile, God was perpetually telling men that he had hung
the earth upon nothing.

Men were ever trying to number the stars. Hipparchus counted one
thousand and twenty-two; Ptolemy one thousand and twenty-six; and
it is easy to number those visible to the naked eye. But the Bible
said, when there were no telescopes to make it known, that they
were as the sands of the sea, "innumerable." Science has appliances
of enumeration unknown to other ages, but the space-penetrating
telescopes and tastimeters reveal more worlds--eighteen millions
in a single system, and systems beyond count--till men acknowledge
that the stars are innumerable to man. It is God's prerogative "to
number all the stars; he also calleth them all by their names."

Torricelli's discovery that the air had weight was received with
incredulity. For ages the air had propelled ships, thrust itself
against the bodies of men, and overturned their works. But no man
ever dreamed that weight was necessary to give momentum. During
all the centuries it had stood in the Bible, waiting for man's
comprehension: "He gave to the air its weight" (Job xxviii. 25).

The pet science of to-day is meteorology. The fluctuations and
variations of the weather have hitherto baffled all attempts at
unravelling them. It has seemed that there was no law in their
fickle changes. But at length perseverance and skill have triumphed,
and a single man i