to bow to measures of worldly policy, of secular interest, of political ambition? God forbid, that the nature and genius of the Christian religion should ever be so mistaken by its professed advocates, or debased by its false friends, as to be thus perverted! Let the words of its divine Founder never be forgotten by us: "My kingdom is not of this world."MORELL. SCRIPTURE AND GEOLOGY. Though we cannot assign a cause for the general reduction of the reptile class, save simply the will of the All-Wise Creator, the reason why it should have taken place seems easily assignable. It was a bold saying of the old philosophic heathen, that "God is the soul of brutes;" but writers on instinct in even our own times have said less warrantable things. God does seem to do for many of the inferior animals of the lower divisions, that, though devoid of brain and vertebral column, are yet skilful chemists and accomplished architects and mathematicians, what he enables man, through the exercise of the reasoning faculty, to do for himself; and the ancient philosopher meant no more. And in clearing away the giants of the reptile dynasty, when their kingdom had passed away, and then reintroducing the class as much shrunken in their proportions as restricted in their domains, the Creator seems to have been doing for the mammals what man, in the character of a mighty hunter before the Lord," does for himself. There is in nature very little of what can be called war. The cities of this country cannot be said to be in a state of war, though their cattlemarkets are thronged every week with animals for slaughter, and the butcher and fishmonger find their places of business thronged with customers. And such, in the main, is the condition of the animal world. It consists of its two classes, animals of prey, and the animals upon which they prey its wars are simply those of the butcher and fisher, lightened by a dash of the enjoyments of the sportsman. "The creatures see of flood and field, And those that travel on the wind, With them no strife can last: they live In peace and peace of mind." 66 Generally speaking, the carnivorous mammalia respect one another lion does not war with tiger, nor the leopard con tend with the hyena. But the carnivorous reptiles manifest no such respect for the carnivorous mammals. There are fierce contests in their native jungles, on the banks of the Ganges, between the gavial and the tiger; and in the steaming forests of South America, the boa-constrictor casts his terrible coil scarce less readily round the puma than the antelope. A world which, after it had become a home of the higher herbivorous and more powerful carnivorous mammals, continued to retain the gigantic reptiles of its earlier ages, would be a world of horrid, exterminating war, and altogether rather a place of torment than a scene of intermediate character, in which, though it sometimes re-echoes the groans of suffering nature, life is, in the main, enjoyment. And so-save in a few exceptional cases, that, while they establish the rule as a fact, serve also as a key to unlock that principle of the Divine government on which it appears to rest-no sooner was the reptile removed from his place in the forefront of creation, and creatures of a higher order introduced into the consolidating and fast-ripening planet of which he had been so long the monarch, than his bulk shrank and his strength lessened, and he assumed a humility of form and aspect at once in keeping with his reduced circumstances, and compatible with the general welfare. But though the reason of the reduction appears obvious, I know not that it can be referred to any other cause than simply the will of the All-Wise Creator. There hangs a mystery greatly more profound over the fact of the degradation than over that of the reduction and diminution of classes. We can assign what at least seems to be a sufficient reason why, when reptiles formed as a class the highest representatives of the vertebrata, they should be of imposing bulk and strength, and altogether worthy of that post of precedence which they then occupied among the animals. We can also assign a reason for the strange reduction which took place among them in strength and bulk immediately on their removal from the first to the second place. But why not only reduction, but also degradation? Why, as division started up in advance of division-first the reptiles in front of the fishes, then the quadrupedal mammals in front of the reptiles, and, last of all, man in front of the quadrupedal mammals-should the supplanted classes-two of them, at least-fishes and reptiles for there seem to have been no additions made to the mammals since man entered upon the scene-why should they have become the receptacles of orders and families of a degraded character, which had no place among them in their monarchical state? The fishes removed beyond all analogy with the higher vertebrata, by their homocercal tails, -the fishes with their four limbs slung in a belt round their necks, flat fishes that, in addition to this deformity, are so twisted to a side, that while the one eye occupies a single orbit in the middle of the skull, the other is thrust out to its edge, the irregular fishes generally (sunfishes, frog-fishes, hippocampi, &c.) were not introduced into the ichthyic division until after the full development of the reptile dynasty; nor did the Hand that makes no slips in its working "form the crooked serpent," footless, grovelling, venom-bearing, the authorised type of a fallen and degraded creature,-until after the introduction of the mammals. What can this fact of degradation mean? Species and genera seem to be greatly more numerous in the present age of the world than in any of the geologic ages. Is it not possible that the extension of the chain of being which has thus taken place,—not only, as we find, through the addition of the higher divisions of animals to its upper end, but also through the interpolations of lower links into the previously existing divisions,-may have borne reference to some predetermined scheme of well-proportioned gradation, or, according to the poet, "Of general ORDER since the whole began ?" May not, in short, what we term degradation be merely one of the modes resorted to for filling up the voids in creation, and thereby perfecting a scale which must have been originally not merely a scale of narrow compass, but also of innumerable breaks and blanks, hiatuses and chasms? Such certainly would be the reading of the enigma which a Soame Jenyns, or a Bolingbroke, would suggest; but the geologist has learned from his science that the completion of a chain of at least contemporary being, perfect in its gradations, cannot possibly have formed the design of Providence. Almost ever since God united vitality to matter, the links in this chain of animated nature, as if composed of a material too brittle to bear their own weight when stretched across the geologic ages, have been dropping, one after one, from his hand, and sinking, fractured and broken, into the ' rocks below. It is urged by Pope, that were we to press on superior powers," and rise from our own assigned place to the place immediately above it, we would, in consequence of the transposition, "In the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroy'd. But though I can assign neither reason nor cause for the fact, I cannot avoid the conclusion, that it is associated with certain other great facts in the moral government of the universe, by those threads of analogical connection which run through the entire tissue of Creation and Providence, and impart to it that character of unity which speaks of the single producing Mind. The first idea of every religion on earth which has arisen out of what may be termed the spiritual instincts of man's nature, is that of a future state; the second idea is, that in this state men shall exist in two separate classes the one in advance of their present condition, the other far in the rear of it. It is on these two great beliefs that conscience everywhere finds the fulcrum from which it acts upon the conduct; and it is, we find, wholly inoperative as a force without them. And in that one religion among men that, instead of retiring, like the pale ghosts of the others, before the light of civilization, brightens and expands in its beams, and in favour of whose claim as a revelation from God the highest philosophy has declared, we find these two master ideas occupying a still more prominent place than in any of those merely indigenous religions that spring up in the human mind of themselves. The special lesson which the adorable Saviour, during his ministry on earth, oftenest enforced, and to which all the others bore reference, was the lesson of a final separation of mankind into two great divisions-a division of God-like men, of whose high standing and full-orbed happiness, man, in the present scene of things, can form no adequate conception; and a division of men finally lost, and doomed to unutterable misery and hopeless degradation. There is not in all Revelation a single doctrine which we find oftener or more clearly enforced, than that there shall continue to exist, throughout the endless cycles of the future, a race of degraded men and of degraded angels. Now, it is truly wonderful how thoroughly, in its general scope, the revealed pieces on to the geologic record. We know, as geologists, that the dynasty of the fish was succeeded by that of the reptile; that the dynasty of the reptile was succeeded by that of the mammiferous quadruped; and that the dynasty of the mammiferous quadruped was succeeded by that of man as man now exists--a creature of mixed character, and subject, in all conditions, to wide alternations of enjoyment and suffering. We know, further—so far, at least, as we have yet succeeded in deciphering the record that the several dynasties were introduced, not in their lower, but in their higher forms; that, in short, in the imposing programme of creation it was arranged, as a general rule, that in each of the great divisions of the procession, the magnates should walk first. We recognise yet further the fact of degradation specially exemplified in the fish and the reptile. And then, passing on to the revealed record, we learn that the dynasty of man in the mixed state and character is not the final one, but that there is to be yet another creation, or, more properly, re-creation, known theologically as the Resurrection, which shall be connected in its physical components, by bonds of mysterious paternity, with the dynasty which now reigns, and be bound to it mentally by the chain of identity, conscious and actual; but which, in all that constitutes superiority, shall be as vastly its superior as the dynasty of responsible man is superior to even the lowest of the preliminary dynasties. We are further taught, that at the commencement of this last of the dynasties there will be a re-creation of not only elevated, but also of degraded beings a re-creation of the lost. We are taught yet further, that though the present dynasty be that of a lapsed race, which at their first introduction were placed on higher ground than that on which they now stand, and sank by their own act, it was yet part of the original design, from the beginning of all things, that they should occupy the existing platform; and that Redemption is thus no afterthought, rendered necessary by the fall, but, on the contrary, part of a general scheme, for which provision had been made from the beginning; so that the Divine Man, through whom the work of restoration has been effected, was in reality, in reference to the purposes of the Eternal, what he is designated in the remarkable text, "the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world." Slain from the foundations of |