LECTURES.

CHAPTER VI.

LECTURE I. THE BIBLE VS. COPERNICUS.

WITH firm convictions of the right, fortified by God's Holy Word and his revealed Book of Nature, yet feeling keenly my own inability to battle with the learned of earth backed by the lore of centuries, with whom I have taken issue, I find myself shrinking from the weighty task which I have set me. And that I must know my testimony may be rejected, and myself contemned, weighs my courage down, as with a leaden pall.

But moved by a sense of duty, and a hope that the thoughts expressed may find a responsive chord in some heart, and prove a germ of truth, which may become a power in the coming years for winning men back to their primal faith in God, with awe and

humility I enter

dissentingly, the temples hallowed by the illustrious dead, and cherished by the profound living. But with God's Word for my guide, and his wondrous works for my justification, why then should I falter, though men may frown?

While mankind have been moving down through the ages, and human wisdom has been advancing, methinks our Heavenly Father, with displeasure, sees the growing tendency of men, as they delve deeper and deeper in the mines of human knowledge, to misconstrue, combat, or even to reject the teachings of his sacred volume. But while skepticism assails and science ignores, the soul redeemed, with eye of faith can pierce the mazes men have wrought, and trace in each inspired page the authorship divine.

Where the Christian who, in the first raptures of his new-born existence, that has not felt all doubts and seeming inconsistencies vanish, and a deep conviction pervading his inmost being, that the Bible is true? Who the dying saint, just launching out from the shores of time, and gazing through

death's portals toward the New Jerusalem, that has ever renounced his faith in it?

Thanks be to God, the Bible is true! All nature breathes it! Angel voices hymn it! The dying witness to it!--and we will trust our all upon it. O, we love to believe the Old Book true; it is the anchor of our faith, the day-star of our earthly existence; on its precious promises hang all our hopes of Heaven. Without it we would be indeed, like a lost ship on an unknown sea, without chart or compass, drifting, it knows not whither; or like a shipwrecked mariner on a desert isle, with vision bounded and obscured by the black clouds of chaotic night hanging o'er his head, and the black waters of despair breaking at his feet.

Accepting it then as true, and from God, lest we err in its perusal, let us keep in constant recollection its last solemn warning, and the possible breadth of its application: "And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part, out of the Book of Life." Revelation, 22 : 19.

Reverently, prayerfully, let us then open at the beginning, and accept what we may find. As the first chapter of Genesis is familiar to all, we will refrain from a general reading, inviting your attention more particularly to the 16th and 17th verses, which read as follows:

"And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth."

To give light upon the earth! Can this be true? Why, the proud science of Astronomy teaches us that this greater light, the sun, is the centre of a system, around which the earth, with other planets, revolves; the earth being simply a planetary attendant of the sun, and more than a million times its inferior in size. But this first chapter of Genesis appears plainly to imply that the earth is the centre, and that sun, moon and stars, were created especially to serve the earth, and set in a firmament enveloping it.

True to my convictions, and my faith in God's Word, I shall assume that the Bible is correct, and shall undertake to show, by this series of lectures, that Science may be wrong.

The 7th verse of the chapter reads, "And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament, from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so."

What do we find in support of this revelation? The divine psalmist, exhorting men to praise God, says in the 148th psalm, "Praise Him ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens!" Again he says, in the 24th psalm,-"The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein: for he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods." And again in the 29th psalm, "The Lord sitteth upon the flood, etc."

These few passages, and others which could be cited, tend to show that whatever men in modern times may think of "The