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reason why we should not rejoice in its cheering rays, and in all the lovely hues that it casts upon our path; no reason why we should not reverentially adore the manifestation of "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ our Lord."

Dr. Pye Smith adopts this interpretation, so far as the insertion of an indefinite interval between the creation and the present arrangement of the materials of the earth and heaven is concerned; but he adds to it an explanation of the work of the six days, which certainly startled us on our first introduction to it, and to which we have not been in any degree reconciled by more lengthened acquaintance. We shall give it in his own words :

I must profess then my conviction, that we are not obliged by the terms. made use of to extend the narration of the six days to a wider application than this; a description, in expressions adapted to the ideas and capacities of mankind in the earliest ages, of a series of operations by which the Being of omnipotent wisdom and goodness adjusted and furnished [not]* the earth generally, but, as the particular subject under consideration here a PORTION of its surface, for the most glorious purposes; in which a newly formed creature should be the object of those manifestations of the authority and grace of the Most High, which shall to eternity shew forth his perfections above all other methods of their display.

This portion of the earth I conceive to have been a part of Asia, lying between the Caucasian ridge, the Caspian Sea, and Tartary, on the North, the Persian and Indian Seas on the South, and the high mountain ridges which run at considerable distances, on the Eastern and the Western flauk.

Upon this we shall only remark, that, while we are not disposed to deny that the Hebrew aretz, like the Latin terra, and the Greek KaTolkovμev, may sometimes mean a land or country, instead of the earth generally, we can see no reason whatsoever for thus restricting the meaning here. Geological reasons there can be none; for we have already shewn that the interpretation, which Dr. Smith adopts, answers all the demands of geology, without any such modification as that proposed. And just as little reason is there afforded by pure criticism for the modification proposed. The nature of the case renders a positive refutation very difficult; inasmuch as, although we were to prove that the whole world was arranged in its cosmical order during these six days, it would not necessarily follow that

The insertion of a negative, nostro periculo, may seem to be taking a Bentleian, or ultra-Bentleian liberty with the text of an author; but we are satisfied that we are only doing him justice by rectifying a typographical error. The sentence, as it stands, we cannot at all comprehend; the insertion of the negative not only renders it intelligible, but gives it that very meaning which the context requires. In other respects, as in respect of Italics and Capitals, the extract is precisely as in the text.-ED.

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the narrative in Genesis referred to more than the arrangement of the country contained within the limits specified. But we would ask, whether it is at all likely that the Creator thus performed his work piece-meal, or that he put forth a special issue of creative energy to furnish with beasts and birds and plants a little corner of the earth. Moreover, what are we to say respecting the reason assigned in the fourth commandment for the observance of the Sabbath? If God merely rested on the seventh day from the creation of a district in Central Asia, how was this a reason for the observance of the Sabbath by the Jews in the wilderness, and in the land of Canaan-not to speak of its observance, as obligatory, as we are well prepared to shew that it is, on all men, in all places, and in all ages, to whom the Bible is made known? We know not how it may be with others, but to us it would appear that there were a gap in the reasoning, were that commandment to be written thus:-" Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work; but on the seventh thou shalt not do any work ;-for in six days the Lord rendered the heavenly bodies visible to, and adjusted and furnished' a portion of the earth, lying between the Caucasian ridge, the Caspian Sea, and Tartary on the North, the Persian and Indian Seas on the South, and the high mountain ridges which run at considerable distances on the Eastern and Western flanks. He also in these six days adjusted and furnished' these seas aforesaid, to wit, the Caspian, the Persian Gulf and the Northern part of the Indian Ocean, and rested the seventh day, wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and sanctified it." Such reasoning would not, we have said, commend itself to our understanding; but it is enough for us and for Dr. Pye Smith, that such is not the reasoning employed. Whatever might be said in favour of the restriction in the first chapter of Genesis, it seems utterly inapplicable to the twentieth chapter of Exodus. But the terms, "heavens " and "earth" and "seas," must of necessity have precisely the same extent of meaning in the one of these passages that they have in the other. We believe the reason, that weighed with Dr. Smith to assign this restricted meaning to the term "earth," in the record of the creation, was his supposition, that its meaning must be so limited in the account of the Noachian deluge, and a desire to maintain consistency in his interpretation. We shall have occasion, ere we have done, to examine his reasons for maintaining the partial prevalence of the Noachian deluge; and if we can shew these to be insufficient, then his theory of the partiality of the Adamic creation will fall to the ground of itself.

We trust we have done no injustice to this venerable Divine

in the statement of his views. Assuredly we have not intended to do so; and, if they are not as we have stated them, it is not because we have designed to misrepresent them, but because we have failed ourselves to apprehend them correctly. If here were degrees of inexcusableness for want of candour, we know no man towards whom it would be more inexcusable than towards Dr. Smith-not only on account of the high personal and professional character that he has sustained throughout, we suppose, an almost unexampled length of time, but also on account of the exceeding candour which is displayed in all his own writings. Mistake he may, (as who may not, and who that thinks at all for himself does not, and that often ?); but never does he do intentional injustice to an opponent, and never does he shrink from the avowal of what he believes to be the truth. Such a tribute of respect we regard as well due to this truly venerable man, who has done much for the cause of truth, and whose mistakes will ere long be all forgotten, while his name will be long remembered as that of a champion of truth and righteousness.

We cannot dwell any longer upon this, or at all on any others of the methods employed to evince the harmony between the historical and the geological records, whose main element consists in a modification of the commonly received interpretation of the former. We now pass on to the notice of such as consist mainly in a modification of the commonly received interpretation of the latter.

With the earlier attempts of this sort, we shall not trouble our readers, or ourselves. In truth we are to the full as ignorant of them as it is understood to beseem a reviewer to acknowledge himself to be respecting any thing knowable or unknowable; nor do we deem it likely that the profit would go any considerable way towards compensating for the labour of rendering ourselves acquainted with them. Writing at a time, when men's minds were alarmed with a vague terror induced by the infantHercules Geology of the day, it is not improbable that Burnet and Whiston may have served a useful purpose at the time, by opposing one spectre to another; but we can conceive no good purpose that would be served by resuscitating in these days their long-ago-refuted hypotheses and theories. Requiescant in pace.

The principal writers who have, in recent times, since Geology established its title to be ranked among the sciences, attempted to prove that the geological doctrines generally received are erroneous, and in particular that all the formations of which the earth's crust is composed, have been deposited during the period that has elapsed since the creation of man upon the

earth (an event which Geology and Scripture perfectly concur in representing as having taken place somewhere about 6,000 years ago), are Mr. Granville Penn and Mr. George Fairholme. The work of the former writer we read many years ago; but, as we have not been able to lay our hands on it in this remote corner of the world, we should not have ventured to give any statement of its doctrines on the faith of our recollection, were not our memory refreshed by a short notice of them in Dr. Pye Smith's book, several extracts from the work itself in Mr. Fairholme's treatise, and several allusions in Captain Hutton's work. These notices, extracts, and allusions, all agree in representing the views of Mr. Penn as being almost exactly those of Mr. Fairholme. They may be stated briefly thus. That the period betwixt the creation and the deluge (say 1,656 years) is sufficient to allow of the stratified rocks being formed in the bottom of the ocean by the accumulation of the debris of the land, constantly washed down by the rivers and streams; that the bed of the ocean being thus gradually raised, and the level of the land as gradually depressed, the deluge was the consequence; that that great and awful judgment must have been occasioned by the gradual interchange of level between the former seas and lands; that we are consequently now inhabiting the bed of the ante-diluvian ocean; and that all the fossil remains of animals and vegetables, now discovered in our rocks or soils, were either imbedded in the course of this gradual formation of the secondary strata, under the waters of the former sea (as in the case of the marine productions in chalk, and many other calcareous marine formations), or were thrown into their present situations by the waters of the deluge, and imbedded (as in the case of quadrupeds, vegetables, human beings, and other land productions) in the soft soils and strata so abundantly formed at that eventful period, by the preternatural supply of materials for secondary formations.

Here there are two main points brought under our notice, viz., first, that the whole strata, forming the crust of the earth, were deposited during the 1,700 years that elapsed between the creation of Adam and the deluge, or during the year of the prevalence of the deluge itself; and second, that the surface of the present land was the bottom of the antediluvian sea, and the bottom of the present sea was the surface of the ante-diluvian land. The former of these two points will occupy our attention ere long, when it will be brought before us by Captain Hutton; at present we shall only remark respecting it, that we feel considerable diffidence as to the correctness of our apprehension of Mr. Fairholme's meaning,

and that an attentive perusal of his book has not enabled us to form even the vaguest idea as to the way, in which he would account for the existence of hills upon the earth. With respect to the second point, it will probably be sufficient to remark, that for its establishment, it confessedly requires the expunging of that part of the book of Genesis, which describes the situation of Paradise or the Garden of Eden: and that, in our estimation, its establishment would be all the more firmly secured by the further deletion of a few passages besides. Mr. Fairholme quotes from Mr. Penn a long argument in favour of this diluvial interchange of land and sea, and of the deletion of the description of the primeval Paradise from the sacred narrative. The substance of the argument is no more than this; that there are instances in which glosses or explanatory notes, originally written on the margin of the manuscripts of scripture, have been subsequently introduced, either intentionally, or through the ignorance or carelessness of transcribers, into the text. This argument is followed up by the assertion that the description of Paradise has been thus introduced. Now to this it is sufficient to answer that there is no doubt whatsoever about the soundness of the argument; but there is no reason whatsoever to believe in the propriety of the application of it to the matter in hand. We have no doubt that passages may have been introduced, both into the Old Testament and the New, in the manner described; but there is not the shadow of a reason for believing that the account of the situation of the Garden of Eden is thus spurious, except the single reason of its inconsistency with the theory of Messrs. Penn and Fairholme. "Tell me what are the facts," said the French theorist, "that I may reconcile them with my hypothesis." “Tell us what are the facts," say these hardier speculators, (for the statements of the Mosaic record are the very facts that they have to deal withal,) "that we may deny them, since they square not with our hypothesis." It would have simplified the matter considerably, as we have already hinted, to have carried the denying process a little further, and to have quietly blotted out the narrative of the deluge from the Mosaic record; for, as it stands, it certainly does seem to ordinary understandings, and to every understanding save that of a determined theorist, to describe a very different occurrence from that which is essential to the stability of the hypothesis in question. Mr. Fairholme indeed declares as follows, but our mind is not so constituted as to be able to go along with his reasoning :

In the whole of this narrative, we find no one circumstance to lead us to a supposition that the same earth, or dry land, existed after the flood, as had been inhabited previous to that event; or to contradict the united

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