The Bible asserted from the first that the present order of things had a beginning.  After ages of investigation, after researches in the realms of physics, arguments in metaphysics, and conclusions by the necessities of resistless logic, science has reached the same result.

The Bible asserted from the first that creation of matter preceded arrangement.  It was chaos—­void—­without form—­darkness; arrangement was a subsequent work.  The world was not created in the form it was to have; it was to be moulded, shaped, stratified, coaled, mountained, valleyed, subsequently.  All of which science utters ages afterward.

The Bible did not hesitate to affirm that light existed before the sun, though men did not believe it, and used it as a weapon against inspiration.  Now we praise men for having demonstrated the oldest record.

[Page 233] It is a recently discovered truth of science that the trata of the earth were formed by the action of water, and the mountains were once under the ocean.  It is an idea long familiar to Bible readers:  “Thou coverest the earth with the deep as with a garment.  The waters stood above the mountains.  At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.  The mountains ascend; the valleys descend into the place thou hast founded for them.”  Here is a whole volume of geology in a paragraph.  The thunder of continental convulsions is God’s voice; the mountains rise by God’s power; the waters haste away unto the place God prepared for them.  Our slowness of geological discovery is perfectly accounted for by Peter.  “For of this they are willingly ignorant, that by the word of God there were heavens of old, and land framed out of water, and by means of water, whereby the world that then was, being overflowed by water, perished.”  We recognize these geological subsidences, but we read them from the testimony of the rocks more willingly than from the testimony of the Word.

Science exults in having discovered what it is pleased to call an order of development on earth—­tender grass, herb, tree; moving creatures that have life in the waters; bird, reptile, beast, cattle, man.  The Bible gives the same order ages before, and calls it God’s successive creations.

During ages on ages man’s wisdom held the earth to be flat.  Meanwhile, God was saying, century after century, of himself, “He sitteth upon the sphere of the earth” (Gesenius).

Men racked their feeble wits for expedients to uphold [Page 234] the earth, and the best they could devise were serpents, elephants, and turtles; beyond that no one had ever gone to see what supported them.  Meanwhile, God was perpetually telling men that he had hung the earth upon nothing.