ast day is at hand.

Both parties may be right; and yet both may be wrong. Men have always
talked thus, at great crises in the world's life. They talked thus in
the first century; and in the fifth, and in the eleventh; and again in
the sixteenth; and then both parties were partially right and partially
wrong; and so they may be now. What they meant to say, what they wanted
to say, what we mean and want to say, has been said already for us in far
deeper, wider, and more accurate words, by him who wrote this wonderful
Epistle to the Hebrews, when he told the Jews of his time that the Lord
was shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which were
shaken might be removed, as things that are made--cosmogonies, systems,
theories, prejudices, fashions, of man's invention: while those things
which could not be shaken might remain, because they were according to
the mind and will of God, eternal as that source from whence they came
forth, even the bosom of God the Father.

"Yet once more I shake, not the earth only, but also heaven."

How has the earth been shaken in our days; and the heaven likewise. How
rapidly have our conceptions of both altered. How easy, simple, certain,
it all looked to our forefathers in the middle age. How difficult,
complex, uncertain, it all looks to us. With increased knowledge has
come--not increased doubt: that I deny utterly. I deny, once and for
all, that this age is an irreverent age. I say that an irreverent age is
one like the age of the Schoolmen; when men defined and explained all
heaven and earth by a priori theories, and cosmogonies invented in the
cloister; and dared, poor, simple, ignorant mortals, to fancy that they
could comprehend and gauge the ways of Him Whom the heaven and the heaven
of heavens could not contain. This, this is irreverence: but it is
neither irreverence nor want of faith, if a man, awed by the mystery
which encompasses him from the cradle to the grave, shall lay his hand
upon his mouth, with Job, and obey the voice which cries to him from
earth and heaven--"Be still, and know that as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so are my ways higher than thy ways, and my thoughts higher
than thine."

But it was all easy, and simple, and certain enough to our forefathers.
The earth, according to the popular notion, was a flat plane; or, if it
were, as the wiser held, a sphere, yet antipodes were an unscriptural
heresy. Above it were the heavens, in