ITS SACRIFICIAL CHARACTER. 377 there is no real basis on which to rest the doctrine of divine forgiveness, or of saving mercy. If Christ did not in very deed bear the penalty due to transgression, it is morally impossible that hope can ever be awakened in the human breast. There is a voice within ever passing the sentence of condemnation on sin, and therefore if sin has not been punished in the sufferings and death of the Saviour, the penalty still impends over our race, and must be inflicted in all its weight and fulness. It was the discovery of this deep and mysterious truth-the truth of atonement for sins by the death of Christ, which relieved the mind of the great apostle of the nations, after his three days of mental distress and spiritual agony, and which, till life's last moment, so endeared the Saviour's work to his heart, both as a man of God and a minister of reconciliation. Nor can we wonder that Luther should have been, for an equal number of days, sleepless, speechless, and all but motionless, under the idea that the Son of God had come not to bear the curse and the condemnation of sin, but to execute and carry into effect the sentence of death on guilty man. Nor was it till he perceived and took unyielding hold of the truth of Christ's death being a true and proper sacrifice for sin, that he leaped to his feet, and triumphed over law, and sin, and death, and hell, and all the powers of darkness. And believe me, that nothing but this doctrine can bring adequate relief, support, or consolation to our own minds in the hour of deeper spiritual conflict, or in the season of inward darkness and desertion. If we ever are the subjects of that profounder experience, which is the mysterious lot of some of God's children, we shall turn to this truth with intensest solicitude, and cling to it as the soul's only hope against despair. Nor shall we be able to relieve and comfort the minds of others, but as we can show them, and assure them, that for sin a full atonement has been made, because for sin the full punishment has been borne in the sufferings and death of Him who came to give his life a ransom for man. This it is which must give distinctiveness to our ministry as those who profess to preach Christ the crucified. Veil this one truth and we conceal the very glory of the Christian scheme. Take away from its magnitude, or its grandeur, and our ministry becomes powerless;-it has neither life nor soul; neither force nor fire. Deny that the sufferings of Christ were really and truly sacrificial in their character, and from that moment we cease to have a gospel to make known. A body without a soul is not a man, and yet we might as well speak of that cold, lifeless, motionless form being a man, as speak of any system of truth being a message of mercy to the guilty and the condemned from which the idea and the fact of sacrifice for sin are carefully excluded. Expiation for human guilt through sacrificial suffering and death is the very essence of Christianity. It is this alone which makes any man's ministry vital. This is the truth which is to impress and recover humanity. This it is which has built up and conserved the Church of God in all ages; and on this we must ever depend as that through which the Spirit acts on the conscience and the heart in bringing men to Christ. It never has failed. It never can be unfruitful. It is that which nourishes divine life in the soul here, and in it we shall find that which will ever add to the fulness of this life in a higher and more perfect state of being. Let go what we may, let us keep firm and abiding hold of this. Let us lift high the Cross of Christ, and let neither veil nor covering fall over its glory. Let us point to that Cross as revealing the unuttered and unutterable love of God. Let us set forth Him who there died as mighty to save, and tell every child of our common fallen humanity, that while on his arm, as the Creator of all things, there rests the weight of all worlds; -on his heart, as the Redeemer of man, there rests the salvation of countless myriads of lost and ruined creatures. Let us lovingly assure them, that while He stands before them, clothed with infinite perfection, he is yet filled with boundless grace, and that they need not fear to commit themselves to his saving and redeeming power. Let us tell them there is more of efficacy in His blood, than there is of guilt in their sins ;—that there is more of worth in His obedience, than there is of demerit in their transgressions, and that He, whom we call by the endearing name of Saviour, is able to do for them exceeding abundantly above all that they either ask or think ;—that washed in His blood, clothed with His righteousness, accepted on the ground of His mediation, transformed into His likeness, and in fellowship with His life, they may boast of a deathless heritage of blessing;—and more still ;— that being justified freely by grace through the redemption that is in Him, they can, even from the lower ground of earth, look up into an open heaven, and that when the moment comes for them to drop the last link of the chain which binds them to this mortal sphere, they will be received into the circle of the glorified, and with the spirits of the just made perfect be for ever free to expatiate amid the light and the glories of a sublime and sinless immortality. During this immortality, both they and we shall turn to that throne whose lowest step no seraph's foot has ever touched, and the soul fixing her now clear, strong eye on Him who there wears our nature still, will give utterance to her own deepest life, and love, and joy, in these adoring words-THOU HAST REDEEMED US UNTO GOD BY THY BLOOD; -while from heaven's vast and countless throng there will rise the one loud universal burst of praise:-Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing:-blessing, and honour, and glory, and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever."" Such is the merest outline of the reasonings and inductions embodied in this masterly essay on the great central truth of our common Christianity-the sacrificial death of the Redeemer of men. The argument is cumulative; and nobly does it advance, step by step, until it leads us to the height of a moral demonstration. We hail the publication of this GEOLOGY. 379 small volume as a most valuable contribution to the theological literature of the age; and we sincerely hope the discourse will find many a reader among the clergy of all denominations, the students of our universities, colleges, and the friends of the grand verities of the evangelical system everywhere. ART. VIII.-The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. By HUGH MILLER. Edinburgh: Constable and Co. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co. EVEN in our selfish state of existence, cold indeed must be that heart that does not throb with emotions of pity and sympathy for an orphan child; and to a still greater degree are those emotions excited, when the existence of that orphan commenced not until its mother had ceased to be. Its winning infancy, its fond developments, exist not for her who brought it forth; and we turn away with sad depression from the contemplation of such a scene. scene. It is with some such feelings we regard the work before us. Its author lived but to complete his work, when his overwrought powers gave way, and he passed from the sublunary The book comes before the public as his posthumous child, and, as such, has peculiar claims upon our notice and reverence. Nor can we help mingling with it a feeling of deep sadness as we track our way through its pages; for, its profoundest truths and greatest flights we regard as so many birth-throes, every one of which had its share in the destruction of the mighty brain which conceived them and brought them into existence. Under the influence of such feelings, we shall at present simply point out a few of the beauties of the work, reserving for a future occasion an examination of its principles. And this we may safely do; for, whether we agree or not with Mr. Miller's geological views, there is a tone of such deep reverence pervading the language in which he propounds them, that it must find a responsive echo in every Christian heart. He supposes that the Almighty caused a phantasmagoric picture of the Six Days to pass before the eyes of Moses, and that he describes these appearances. He thus saw each great Day or Eon, under its most characteristic aspect, thus: "Let us suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been vouchsafed; and that, as in the vision of St. John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A great darkness' first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the 'horror;' and as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, 'Let there be light,' and straightway a grey, diffused light springs up in the east, and casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming, vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One heavy, sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes fainter -it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer, and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night. "The light again brightens-it is day; and over an expanse of ocean without visible bound the horizon has become wider and sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great seainvertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale, and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmosphere scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or grey smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere they lie, thick and manifold—an upper sea of great waves, separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like them, too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent atmosphere, of a firmament stretched out over the earth, that separates the waters above from the waters below. But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and the morning have completed the second day. "Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud; but the scene was changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap by the Silurian or Old Red coral zoophytes ages before, during the bygone yesterday; and beats in long lines MR. MILLER'S VIEWS. 381 of foam, nearer at hand, against a low winding shore, the seaward barrier of a widely spread country. But, at the Divine command, the land has arisen from the deep-not inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea level; and a yet further flat has covered them with the great carboniferous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests, of cone-bearing trees-of palms, and tree-ferns, and gigantic club-mosses, on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dark marsh or sluggish But there is a general lightening of the sky overhead: as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern-covered bank and long-withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from openings of dark unclouded blue; and, as day rises, and the planet of morning pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter green; and as the sun declines amid even richer glories than those which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full-orbed in the east-to the human eye the second great luminary of the heavens-and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and sea. tem "Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land and ocean. There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and the bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives its interest and novelty from a feature unmarked before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food, while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening over the narrow seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleams of their wings the thick woods. 6 And ocean has its monsters; great tanninim pest the deep as they heave their huge bulk over the surface, to inhale the life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a 'seething pot or cauldron.' Monstrous creatures, armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat, rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal life, and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues unremittingly its few simple ends-the support and preservation of the individual, propagation of the species, and the protection and maintenance of the young. VOL. XLI. C C |