of these two topics on the same field of vision? That on which, above all other things, Mr. Faber would most assuredly desire to fix the attention of his readers has been passed over by our correspondents in silence; whilst already have we been called upon to sound something like the note of anxious controversy on the comparatively unimportant point.

It is true, Bishop Warburton had, in a measure, led the way to this discussion; for he had likewise commenced ab ovo. And we should by no means do justice to Mr. Faber if we did not state, with some distinctness, the actual connexion of this mainly irrelevant topic with the rest of his admirable work. Bishop Warburton, it seems, in the plenitude of his creative imagination, had formed the hypothesis (would it be believed?) of a state of human existence prior to the location of our first parents in the Garden of Eden. They were placed somewhere else, and for some unknown period, according to the Bishop, with their different graminivorous, seminivorous, and fructivorous propensities, to eat of the productions of the third day's creation. This, it seems, instantaneously afforded them their allowed and allotted food; whilst the slower process of vegetation was proceeding in the newly planted Garden of Eden; into which they were, in due time, themselves transplanted. Here, as the Bishop proceeds, they became, for the first time, though but conditionally even then, immortal. Here they found the tree of life, the pledge and source of immortality; and here, for the first time, the prohibited article, the tree of knowledge. This was their partial, and their first revelation. Before they had been in a state of nature; and naturally and essentially mortal, like "the beasts that perish;" although, indeed, the subjects of a sort of natural religion. And to this state, it is added, (mark the bearing on Mr. Faber's Patriarchism), they were again reduced after the fall; and in

this state, purely mortal, and the subjects of natural religion, mankind remained, through the whole of Patriarchism, till the giving of the Law. The Law, indeed, itself made no difference in the grand point at which this great theorist is perpetually aiming; namely, the absence of all knowledge of a future state; and by consequence a present equal distribution of rewards and punishments to virtue and vice. And finding out or making out this equal distribution, in all antediluvian, diluvian,and postdiluvian catastrophes ; and roundly asserting this system of nature, natural religion, and natural mortality, &c., through a long and indefinite period; the Bishop comes at last to cut from under Mr. Faber the very ground on which his first, or Patriarchal, Dispensation rests. It leaves him without any fair or legitimate revelation to appeal to (excepting the transient and abortive paradisaical revelation, and some occasional ones after), till a period, long posterior even to the dispensation of the Law of Moses.

Now, Mr. Faber, in return for this most wild and insupportable hypothesis, destructive of all true Patriarchism, determines, on his part, to cut away from under Bishop Warburton the ground upon which he stands. And, to begin from the beginning, he overthrows the first position, of a state of human existence prior to the settlement of Adam and Eve in paradise. This the Bishop had argued, on the ground that paradise could not have grown to maturity, with all its various and exquisite productions, in time for their reception on the first day of their creation: whilst the seeds which he understands to have been sown on the third day, might possibly in the time have sprouted forth, in ordinary luxuriance, sufficient for the general sustenance. Impossible, retorts Mr. Faber, without a miracle as great as that which you deny in the case of Eden. In short, Mr. Faber concedes to Bishop Warburton the whole period of time

necessary for the vegetation of the "pleasant garden :" he admits that seeds were first created, and then sown, and then gradually matured to trees and vegetables; but upon this he springs his own hypothesis, that the vegetables on the third day, as well as all the other productions or effects attributed to the other days of the demiurgic week, had a space of not less than SIX THOUSAND YEARS in which to commence and to carry forward their various and leisurely operations. Thus do we find Mr. Faber conducted to the point at which he has thought it advisable to introduce the new cosmogony: and, although we believe he is himself responsible for the particular interpretation with which our readers are already familiar, and which fixes the precise proportion of the demiurgic day, yet the general theory of geology connected with it, is not to be so much considered of Mr. Faber's construction, as the general conclusion of the present fashionable geologists, with Cuvier at their head, grounded, they tell us, upon very extensive and conclusive investigations. Mr. Faber quotes at great length the corresponding opinions of Parkinson in his Organic Remains, (Mr. Faber's author, indeed, for this new and lengthened series of creation,) and Cuvier in his Theory of the Earth, with references to Deluc, Dolomieu, Jameson, and most especially to Professor Buckland; which latter able and eloquent theorist has, to the astonishment and admiration of the world at large, found evident traces of a superficial Deluge, lying far above all the more solid and fossilized strata of the earth; and has determined our own position to have been, before the Flood, the habitation of hyenas, and a court for every strange and unclean beast. In short, the Deluge is understood to have been but the last of a series of revolutions which Cuvier, par éminence, has discovered, or rather conjectured, to have successively desolated our globe. And these revolutions,

involving, till now, indefinite periods, and preceded by as indefinite periods of formation, have been of late considered by geologists as necessary to account for, and as sufficiently accounting for, the underground phenomena.

"Time," as observes the animated Granville Penn, in his Mineral and Mosaic Geologies, "is the great idol of modern mineral geologists." Imagine only the duration of long and distant epochs, and we shall have a full and casy account, at once of the beauties of paradise, the peopling of the earth and seas, the overspreadings of terrene vege tation, and even the production of the sun, moon, and stars. Now time, it is true, Mr. Faber also required, to procure food convenient for our first parents, to be ready immediately upon their creation; and this in paradise itself. And the want of this time appears to us the only necessity incumbent on Mr. Faber, for introducing his idea of the lengthened periods of creation, and giving the general theory of geology now so much in vogue. Much, however, as we regret the introduction of this geological episode, which, as far as the present work is concerned, we think might have been avoided; much as we could rather have wished to have seen it made the subject of an entire separate work, in the hands of so competent and philosophical a writer as Mr. Faber; we are not able to pass it over, as it now stands before us, without some general observations on the whole subject; more especially, as we are aware, from circumstances before alluded to, of its general interest ;-hoping, nevertheless, that our readers will still give us credit, in paying this tribute to modern science, for our sense of the far greater importance of one line of Mr. Faber's invaluable publication, when treating its own subject of the three dispensations, than of a whole volume upon matter so purely conjectural.

For, we must now ask, in what

manner, or by what connecting links is modern Geology connected with The-ology? Theology is derived from Revelation; and, as we apprebend, consists in arranging revealed facts and doctrines, according to the best lights we are able to derive from reason and experience, with a view to the final end of that Revelation. One important department of it consists in investigating the evidences, internal and external, upon which we are to recognise the authority of the sacred volume. Now, amongst the external evidences of the sacred volume, it has been deemed important to bring to some general agreement the external appearances of the natural world, with what God has been pleased to reveal to us in His own word respecting it. And this agreement, sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, has been always considered, when to be had, as very interesting; and never more so than in the natural history of the Flood, and the marks impressed, or thought to have been impressed, by it on our habitable globe. The localities of the Holy Land could not afford a more interesting illustration, to the modern Christian traveller, of the sacred history of Israel; than the apparent geological phenomena used to afford to the Christian philosopher of the sacred history of the Flood.

"The argument," says Mr. Faber,

"seemed valuable, at once for its brevity and its conclusiveness; for no doubt, where marine exuvia are discovered, there at some period or other must have been the waters of the ocean: and, as such, it was constantly adduced as a most powerful auxiliary to that mass of arguments by which the truth of this grand historical fact has been so triumphantly and so incontrovertibly established." vol. I. p. 121.

But now all is changed. Modern discoveries have been made which have led to reasoning, or rather to speculation and to hypothesis. Inquiries have been set on foot, how the Flood was produced; how it operated; how it effected the alleged

phenomena; and whether, in fact, it effected them at all. And the result of these inquiries at present seems very generally to be this, that, however the Flood was produced and carried on, these phenomena were no part of its effects: and the speculations-we fear commenced by men indisposed or indifferent to the Sacred Record-have been entirely conceded. So far as respects the evidence, arising from the lower strata of the earth, in behalf of the Mosaic Flood, they are considered as having nothing at all to do with the subject.

How then does the subject now stand? The men who speak and think entirely independent of Revelation, carry back the period of creation, or rather formation, to indefinite lengths of existence and operation; and leave the chronology and fact alike, both of the Creation and of the Deluge, to answer for themselves. But far otherwise the pious, eloquent, and imaginative believer. He too must account for the phenomena of the soil; but he must do it consistently with revelation; and, some how or other, must illustrate revelation by them. Hence at two ends of the argument come forth-we know not which is the most worthy of his honourable compeer-Mr. Faber on the one side, and Professor Buckland on the other. Mr. Faber assists us to carry back sand years, by an hypothesis framed the history of creation many thouon the words of Scripture; and Professor Buckland discovers his "Reliquiæ Diluviana," his proofs of the Deluge, in the now safely trodden dens of voracious antediluvian hy

enas.

coveries, it is true, is nothing, nor The majesty of these diseven to be thought of, in comparison with their aptitude to the existing phenomena. In the one case, hyenas are, certainly with no poetical, though physiological, beauty, converted into prophets of the Deluge: in the other, the magnificence of antediluvian, we had almost said of antemundane, revolutions, is les

sened by the necessary lameness and impotence of the reasoning, which finds them in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.

The real point now before us is this; whether, or not, we choose to have the systems or hypotheses in question admitted into the ranks, and honoured with the name, of Scriptural Theology? That is, whether or not we shall still join issue with the unbeliever, and claim the external evidence of nature in support of the Mosaic Creation and the Mosaic Flood; or whether we shall at once prudently decline this external evidence altogether, at least till the philosophers have really settled among themselves whether there are symptoms in nature of any Deluge, strictly so called, or of any Creation. Really, for ourselves, we are disposed to say, at least to trust, that our faith doth not stand in the weakness of man, but in the power of God." It does not appear clear to us from Scripture, that we are to turn for external evidence from the fact of the Deluge, or the act of Creation, to any particular existing phenomena. Scripture does not profess, as we understand it, to tell us, how the Flood took place, and what Reliquiæ or Ossemens Fossiles it was to leave, and how placed, under the earth; nor how creation was conducted during the alleged period of six days, with their intervening nights. It tells us in the general, that this beautiful and stupendous fabric of nature which we behold, came forth, in all the majesty of light and order and life, at the fiat of its all-wise and Almighty Creator, And it tells us, that, by some means or other, the original structure of the globe underwent a most fearful subversion, at least submersion, by a Flood, for the pride and apostacy of the race that inhabited it. The single visible phenomenon, that exquisite and most truly Divine emblem of mercy, the "bow in the clouds," is pointed out in the Divine Record, as an external evidence,

or rather memorial, of the Flood which preceded it. Of the rainbow, it is true, from the 'science of optics we accurately know the physical formation; but as soon should we insist on making the problem of the rainbow in optics a part of our theological investigations, as we should think ourselves bound, as theologians, to investigate the Divine method of creating or of drowning the world. Least of all should we, in what may most justly be called the infancy and prattle of Geology, adopt this or that discovery, or theory, as an illustration either of the Deluge or the Creation.

Professor Buckland, it is true, in resigning summarily all evidence for the known fact of the Flood in the lower strata of the earth, acts in consistency with what we conceive to be the law of genuine hypothesis, in looking for other phenomena which may serve to illustrate that event. We know that the event took place, upon infallible authority. We think its effects are not traceable in one line of Geological research; therefore we are warranted in thinking at least about its effects in another line. And if we have the misfortune of thinking we have found them in so very minutely philosophical a corner as among the bones of water-rats, or the dust of bears, we are not to be deterred from entertaining our thoughts by any reflections from those who have not closely investigated the subject. The only question that remains to us, with Professor Buckland, is this, at what period of the demonstration shall we really accept these thoughts as the wishedfor external evidence of the Mosaic Flood.

But we are not so clear in our concessions to Mr. Faber. We have, it is true, now unaccountable strata under the soil; but we know not that we have any call whatever to find an account of them in holy Scripture. We may account for them, if we please, by one, two,