lation has the same name,*) drops its clayey chrysalis to spread its pinions in a purer atmosphere, and bask in the brighter sunshine of a celestial day. The natural world, like the fabled phenix; its allegorical representative, will one day rise from its own ashes and wear a new drapery of beauty and glory. And the church, the city of the living God on earth, will be dissolved only to be built again into the New Jerusalem, the capital city of the new heavens and new earth, whose walls will be precious stones, its gates pearls, its streets pure gold, and the Lord God and the Lamb the temple and the light thereof.

12. After our Saviour had manifested his creative power by feeding a great multitude with a few loaves and fishes, he showed his economical wisdom by saying, "gather up the fragments which remain, that nothing be lost." The same blending of these apparently incongruous attributes is conspicuous in all the works of God. Nothing can transcend his power, when he sees fit to exert it, and nothing can exceed his economy, when the exercise of power is unnecessary. He creates nothing to be lost, provides nothing to be wasted, gives nothing that need not be given. He might have created fertile soils at once, and provided fuel as it was needed, but he chose by a natural and gradual process to collect them as they were not wanted and preserve them till they were. He might have made a plentiful deposit of useful minerals and precious ores on every farm, but he has chosen to scatter them in veins or beds beneath the surface of the earth, and employ our skill and energy to discover and procure them. He might have revealed the natural history of the primeval earth to us in his word, but he chose not to reveal what we might better discover for ourselves, and he has left us to gather that history from the organic remains of primitive ages.

In his providence, God might have led every age and country to make its own inventions and discoveries and improvements, but he has chosen the more economical course of transmitting them from one age and country to another. And he

Tuzn, the name at once of the soul and of the butterfly-its image.

+ 2 Pet. 3: 12, 13. This doctrine of revelation is confirmed by natural science-by the philosophy of cause and effect, no less than the philosophy of analogy.

has suffered nothing truly valuable* to be lost. We often think and regret, that important knowledge has perished forever, but in process of time it proves to have been unimportant, or it is revived just at the time, when it is most needed, and in just such a way, as to render it most curious, interesting and valuable.

In like manner, God might have communicated a distinct revelation to every people of every generation. But what it was man's power and privilege to do, he has left him to do, and made it his duty to collect the scattered portions of revealed truth, promulgate them to all nations, and transmit them to the end of the world. He has communicated barely what it was needful for man to know, and what he could not learn from reason and experience, and of all that has been revealed, there is no evidence, that any thing has been lost.

Thus in all his works, God does all that is necessary, however much it may cost, and nothing that is superfluous, however easy it might be gives nothing that is not valuable, and suffers nothing that is truly valuable to be irrecoverably lost.

13. Another analogy, which forces itself upon our attention as pervading the divine works, is an obvious disregard of human distinctions-i. e. such distinctions of time, space, rank, etc. as men are wont to deem important.

We who are of yesterday and die to-morrow, and are subject to incessant changes and vicissitudes from the day of our birth to the day of our death, attach great importance to the distinction of time. But in the sight of him, who is the same yesterday, to-day and forever, "a thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years." Accordingly men are hurried and fretful in their proceedings, impatient of delay, and ever hastening to the issue. But the divine plan of operations is calm, gradual and deliberate; and though in some of its stages, it may appear imperfect or unwise, it will ultimately prove to have originated and advanced in perfect wisdom.

The divine, untaught in science, looks upon the geological theory of the earth's existence for indefinitely long periods before the creation of man, and exclaims: "How absurd! What! the earth tens of thousands of years in a fluid state a state of ignition even, devoid of living beings or inhabited only by salamanders! And hundreds of thousands of years more, entirely

* Perhaps I should have said nothing essential-nothing whose place cannot be otherwise supplied.

or chiefly covered with water, devoted to the formation of limestone and coral beds, and inhabited only by polypes and lizards and alligators, et id omne genus! For ages without any inhabitants, and for myriads of ages, inhabited only by irrational and hateful animals without any intelligent lord! Who can believe that the Creator was guilty of such weakness and folly !* On the other hand, the infidel geologist looks upon the theological doctrine of the slowly successive periods of revelation, and the protracted delay of the work of redemption with like incredulity and amazement. "What!" he exclaims, "hundreds of generations of immortal beings suffered to live and die in ignorance of God and a future state, and that God revealed to them for the first time in flaming fire, and that future state disclosed only to their agonized sensibilities and their hopeless, endless despair! The only possible scheme of human salvation delayed in its execution for 4000 years, and for 2000 years longer promulgated only to a small minority of the human family! Who dare utter or believe such a libel on the wisdom and goodness of God!"

Now both these objections spring from ignorance and narrow views. The divine, untaught in science, and the geologist, ignorant of revelation, both see, that in some of his works God disregards those distinctions of time, to which we attach so much importance; while they both deny that he acts on the same principle in his other works! But the principle is universal. Revelation lays it down as a general principle, that in his sight," one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day;" and reason would lead us to expect, that the infinite and eternal God would not view time as it appears to us.†

So also the distinction of space and rank, are disregarded by

Is it any less difficult to believe, that the universe was a blank for eternal ages before a single creature existed? Yet so it must have been, unless creatures have existed from eternity. Capt. Symmes argued, that the earth is hollow, because it was absurd to suppose God would occupy so much space with mere inert matter!

The man, who is neither a divine nor a naturalist, (shall I add neither a Christian, nor a scholar,) is the only man who can consistently urge either of the objections specified in the text. He must give up all claim to consistency, who professes to be either, and yet does not admit, that the same objection which he urges against his antagonist, is equally valid against himself.

VOL. XII. No. 31.

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him, who pervadeth alike the atom and the universe, and to whom the loftiest and the lowest of his creatures, are alike less than nothing and vanity. The sceptical philosopher declares it to be unreasonable and incredible, that the God who makes, and sustains, and governs an infinitude of worlds, should so concern himself with our little world, as to give his Son to die for its redemption; and still more improbable that he would condescend to such a concern for obscure individuals, as is implied in the doctrines of a particular providence, personal election, and the indwelling of the spirit.

The illiterate Christian, on the other hand, cannot believe that there are many hundreds of shells once enshrining living animals in a grain of limestone,* and myriads of animalcules in a single drop of water. And many an educated Christian thinks it beneath the Almighty to people a world with polypes, and muscles, and snails, and alligators, and lizards, etc. etc.

But he has given up two thirds of the earth's surface to the fishes and monsters of the deep, and peopled a large portion of the land with lizards, and serpents, and vermin; and may he not have left the whole earth for a time, without an intelligent lord, to be overrun with inferior animals, animals, which we in our reasoning, yet erring pride, are prone to despise? He has created infinitely more animalcules than larger animals, and may not he, who creates them, redeem man? He does form and feed sumptuously every day the snail, and lizard, and serpent, so loathsome and odious to us, though not to him; and may he not elect, and dwell with, and provide for the humble Christian, number the very hairs of his head, and cause all things to work together for his good?

These things are all true, and all spring from the same general principle in the divine government, such a disregard for the distinctions of space and rank, as leads him to lavish his bounty and his grace on places and creatures, which seem too minute to deserve the attention of the great Sovereign of the universe. "If there be one thing" says an eminent naturalist,

"Soldani collected from less than an ounce and a half of stone found in the hills of Casciana, in Tuscany, 10,454 microscopic chambered shells. Of one species of these shells, he calculates, that a thousand individuals would scarcely weigh one grain.”—Buckland, p. 117.

"Hundreds of thousands (of the sufusoria) may be seen in a single drop of water."-Kirby's Bridgewater Treatise.

"more surprising than another in the investigation of natural phenomena, it is perhaps the infinite extent and vast importance of things apparently little and insignificant."* What intelligent reader of the Bible, and of the history of the church, can avoid seeing, that the same characteristic feature pervades the spiritual world from the fall of man in Eden to his complete restoration and final confirmation in the Celestial Paradise!

14. The same end is sought in each of the three kingdoms, viz. the highest happiness of the creature, and the glory of the Creator.

The God of the Bible appeals to his chosen people of old, to say, what more he could have done for them, than he had done; and in the gift of his Son, he makes the same appeal to Christians in the melting eloquence of that tone, which language cannot express.

The God of nature manifests a like intention, an effort, so to speak, to secure the utmost amount of happiness. Every element teems with animal life-every spot is replete with happy existence. The desert air swarms with insects; the wilderness and the solitary place are full of inhabitants suited to the locality.

"So is the great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both great and small beasts." The sea is as amply furnished with vegetables,† and the larger animals, as the land; while the drops of the former like the particles of the latter are densely peopled with animalcules. To multiply happy existence still more, thousands of animals, beyond the number which the vegetable world is capable of sustaining, subsist by preying upon others; and the very carcasses of animals, that die a natural death, furnish food for a numerous army of scavengers, which, while in the act of providing a suitable diet

So also Pliny: See his tam parvis, atque tam nullis, quae sultis, quanta vis, quam inextricabilis perfectis.

Marine, like land animals, depend upon the vegetable kingdom for subsistence, and Brongniart has shown that the existing submarine vegetation seems to admit of these great divisions which characterize to a certain degree, the plants of the frigid, temperate and torrid zones.-See Buckland, p. 451.

The powers of reproduction in the Infusonia are such, that from one individual, a million were produced in ten days; on the eleventh day four millions, and on the twelfth, sixteen millions.-Buckland on the authority of Ebsenberg