striving to learn God's lesson we have the help, as we can receive it, of His Spirit. But, as the truth can only be one, we must test each revelation conveyed to us by all these several methods in so far as they are applicable. If the testimony of the works of God appears to differ from the testimony of the words attributed to Him in the written Word, then our understanding of the one or other must be wrong. If the declarations of His will seem repugnant to our sense of His holiness, then one or other of these conceptions must be wrong. But this result need raise no doubt in our minds that His truth is real, it only must make us doubtful of our own capacity to understand it rightly, and must put us on more anxious investigation of every source of knowledge. It may therefore truly be said of all these methods of revelation of God that these three agree in one.' Power, and wisdom, and love, and each of them infinite, are shown alike by the works, and the words, and the Spirit of God, whether we view Him as Jehovah or Jesus or the Holy Ghost. But they are all so great that their extent lies beyond our utmost comprehension. We faint and fail in the effort to understand; and we can best approach to CHAP. II] PLACE OF FAITH 31 the comprehension of them when we become as little children, content to look up and to receive from the Father the knowledge which He has imparted to us from the foundations of the world, and which still, day by day, He offers to us, if only we earnestly, yet humbly, set ourselves to learn. CHAPTER III CREATION THERE are two histories extant of the creation of the earth. in the sun and moon, in the air and the ocean, and in the mountains and rocks. It is interpreted to us by astronomers and geologists and other students of the laws of nature, who by careful observation and measurement and calculation have come to understand something of the causes that have produced the conditions which we see. The other history is contained in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. It is intended in the following pages to place these two histories in juxtaposition, and to examine how far they agree. If the facts disclosed by human investigation and the written record are in harmony there will be evidence that both are the teaching of God to man. One is written in the stars of heaven, If on a clear night in mid-winter we look out СНАР. ІІІ] NEBULÆ 33 on the southern sky we shall see three bright stars forming a short row, with a fourth at some distance above them and a fifth at a similar distance beneath. These are called the constellation Orion, and the three stars in a row are his belt. A little way below the belt we can make out a patch of light or luminous haze, which is called by astronomers the great nebula in Orion. Similar nebulæ are to be seen in other parts of the sky, and powerful telescopes have enabled upwards of 100,000 to be counted. When magnified they often disclose a somewhat spiral structure, as if sweeping round on a centre, and in different parts there seem to be brighter spots, or agglomerations of the haze of light. By the wonderful recent discovery of spectrum analysis it has been ascertained that this source of light is gaseous matter, diffused over an enormous space and in a state of intense heat; and that it contains several of the elements which occur in our own earth and which have been already found to exist in a like gaseous condition in our sun. It is therefore believed that these nebulæ are solar systems like our own in the process of making; that in the course of millions of æons the incandescent gases of which they consist will be concentrated in the centre into D such a sun as ours, while the brighter spots will be condensed into smaller bodies moving round their sun as our planets do round our sun. Thus, in looking at the nebula in Orion we are gazing at a stage in creation through which in all probability our own globe once passed, and we can recognise the probable starting-point of the successive changes which we call creation. These changes were the result of gradual cooling. The mass of intensely hot gases, out of which our world was formed, existed in the midst of space, and space is most intensely cold. They were, therefore, constantly giving off their heat, or becoming cooler in their circumference, though the mere process of contraction would long maintain their internal or central heat. But as the outer shell grew colder the gases would first become liquid, and, ultimately, such as were least fusible would become solids. While this was going on, the combinations of the elements, which the violent heat had before prevented (under the influence which chemists call dissociation by heat), would gradually take effect, and thus produce the substances of which our earth consists. So among other materials water would be formed, but at first only in the form of vapour, or steam, so long as |