Samson, the terror of the Philistines; Saul, the first Jewish king; David, the shepherd, warrior, and poet; Solomon, the magnificent; Rehoboam, the foolish; Jerusalem destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar ; the seventy years' captivity; Daniel in the lion's den; the three children in the fiery furnace; the coming of Christ; and all the incidents of the New Testament. Peter Jones believed that the sun stood still at the command of Joshua, and that its shadows wen back on the dial of Ahaz; ravens fed Elijah, who was visibly and bodily carried up into heaven; Elisha made iron to swim, replenished the widow's cruise, brought the dead to life, and his very bones possessed, in their sepulchre, resuscitating power; fire from heaven attested between the true prophets and the false; the walls of Jericho fell down at the blast of trumpets; and the angel of death destroyed the hot of Sennacherib. And though Peter Jones had never read Pope's "Essay on Man," he had pored over the book of Job, had drank in its poetry, and paused over its philosophy; the Proverbs taught him shrewdness, Ecclesiastes had subdued his aspirations, the Psalms had ired his soul, and the Prophets had animated his mind with sublime emotions and mysterious hopes. Thus had the Bible, in his early youth, become a wondrous collection to Peter Jones his intellect was filled with its poetry, its incidents, its miracles, its examples, its warnings, and its promises; and it was to him the Book of the Universe, containing all that was essential to a knowledge of the history and destiny of the human race, and the purposes for which God had created all things.

One day Peter Jones heard a sermon on the Fall of Man. The precher was fluent in his phrases;

talked of Adam walking in Paradise, a complete and perfect man, his faculties all equally balanced, his understanding unclouded, and his propensities under perfect control; happy in himself, and happy in the personal intercourse with his Maker which his innocence permitted him to enjoy. Had he never sinned, he would not have died; the whole human race would have flourished in immortal youth; and those who live now, and who would come after us, would have probably seen in the flesh, and been able to converse with, the great progenitor of humanity. Had man not sinned, man would not have died, and all who have died, would have been alive at this moment: but to remedy the inconvenience which would have resulted from the crowding together of such a mass of immortal beings on this earth, God would no doubt have prepared the means by which portions of the race would have been translated to heaven, without having undergone the pain of death. But man sinned, and man died. When he sinned, all creation felt the curse, and the inferior animals participated in the doom of death. The blackened heavens at tested the wrath of offended Deity; the sterile earth evinced the punishment inflicted on him, who was no longer the image of God, but a poor, weak, igno rant, and depraved creature. The preacher, in the course of his sermon, alluded to the science of GEOLOGY, the tendency of which, he said, was to undermine the authority of the Scriptures, and to lead presumptuous mortals to question the Mosaic account of the creation as if

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He who made it, and revealed its date
To Moses, were mistaken in its àge!"

Let them beware, said the preacher, of the "oppositions of science, falsely so called." The vain imagi

nations of men were not to supersede the certainties of revelation; and let them never forget that while the gospel was revealed unto babes and sucklings, it was hidden from those whom the world esteemed wise and prudent. Science was very well in its proper place: but no science could be true which contradicted the Bible; the Book of Nature must harmonize with the Book of Revelation; if it did not, it was owing to our ignorance.

The sermon excited strange feelings in the mind of Peter Jones. He began to wonder how it was that human beings grew up from infancy to old age, and how it would have been, had man not sinned; whether all human beings would have been created as Adam and Eve had been, or would have had to acquire their experience of life, through the education of infancy, childhood, boyhood, manhood, and declining years. Then, if death had fallen on the inferior creation, as a consequence of Adam's transgression, why was it that we aggravated that doom, by killing and eating beasts, birds, and fish? How was it that plants grew up from youth to age?—that they passed from the vigour of life into the decline of existence? -that the trees, the flowers, and the fruits of the vegetable kingdom were born, lived, and died, even as did the human race? And what was this science of GEOLOGY, against which the preacher had so em phatically warned his auditory? Peter Jones had already met with indications of geology he had heard of it vaguely, but it had passed by him, as something which he did not comprehend. Now, he longed to eat of the FORBIDDEN FRUIT. He wished to know what it was which affected to give more correct information respecting the creation of the world, than the Bible itself; and whilst, on the one hand,

he was impelled by intellectual curiosity, on the other hand, he felt hat impulse of ignorance which made him presume that even he could confute a daring dogmatism, which sought to scale the heavens, and affront the majesty of Revelation.

Peter Jones summoned GEOLOGY into his august presence; and the science obeyed, modestly covered with a veil, yet showing, even as through a transparency, native beauty and complete proportions. She came, attended by Astronomy, Chemistry, Botany, Anatomy, Mathematics. and the Mechanic Arts; ard waited patiently until she were put to the question.

"How bayest thou?" said Peter Jones, "is the earth older than the Bible te'ls us it is?"

"What age does the ible assign to the Earth?" was the interrogative answer.

When I read my Bible," replied Peter Jones, "I find that the very first words ring in mine ears, like a voice from out of an unfathomable abyss-

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'IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED THE HEAVENS ND THE EARTH.'"

It is even so," interposed Astronomy: "but ere thou canst approximate to a perception of these dread words, thou must throw down the thick and lofty wall behind thee!"

Peter Jones st rted truth flashed into his soul. He felt himself to be like a man leaning against a thick and lofty wall, and gazing out into a landscape, terminated only by the horizon. Eternity; behind bim a blank.

Before him stretched
Now did he feel that

behind him there was a prospect as interminable as the one that stretched before him; eteruity past must be as boundless as eternity to come. Yet the wall of his fixed associations was too firmly built to be removed by an effort of the will. Nevertheless, he

climbed, and sought to look back on that enormous interval which had elapsed from the "BEGINNING," until the day when Peter Jones became a thinking creature. The glimpse convicted him almost of blas phemy. Hitherto, he had grovelled in the notion that God was but, as it were, an elder being than him self; the Deity, like himself, had started from a fixed point! Wherefore he sought to humble himself in the presence of his Creator; and returned to interrogate GEOLOGY with an enlarged perception of the fact, that poor, frail mortals are too apt to measure eternity by time, and to count duration by the throbbings of a pulse, or the vibrations of a pendulum.

Geology saw his altered mood; and with a smile encouraged him to proceed.

"The universe," said Peter Jones, "may be of enormous antiquity; to finite faculties, its past duration may be as immeasurable as the existence of God himself. But surely we can arrive at some idea of the time during which the earth has been in existence. It is but a speck in creation; and we know that man has not been in existence above a few thou sand years."

Astronomy replied that if we took, as a standard of measurement, a globe twelve feet in circumference, to represent the sun, the earth, in relation to it, would be but as a large pin's head; it would take a cannon ball, flying at the rate of 480 miles an hour, no less than seventy-six days to cross the sun's diameter; the entire solar system occupied a space, represented by the vague amount of more than two billions of miles; yet was the entire solar system but as a speck in the Milky Way; and the Milky Way but as one universe amongst countless others! And yet Astronomy combined with Geology to affirm that this