The sum of the matter is this:--God, by a Hebrew prophet, is sublimely
described as _the Revealer_; and, in variation of his own expression,
the same prophet describes him as the Being 'that knoweth the
darkness.' Under no idea can the relations of God to man be more
grandly expressed. But of what is he the revealer? Not surely of those
things which he has enabled man to reveal for himself, and which he has
commanded him so to reveal, but of those things which, were it not
through special light from heaven, must eternally remain sealed up in
the inaccessible darkness. On this principle we should all laugh at a
revealed cookery. But essentially the same ridicule applies to a
revealed astronomy, or a revealed geology. As a fact, there _is_
no such astronomy or geology: as a possibility, by the _a priori_
argument which I have used, (viz., that a revelation on such fields,
would contradict _other_ machineries of providence,) there _can_ be no
such astronomy or geology. Consequently there _can_ be none such in the
Bible. Consequently there _is_ none. Consequently there can be no
schism or feud upon _these_ subjects between the Bible and the
philosophies outside. Geology is a field left open, with the amplest
permission from above, to the widest and wildest speculations of man.
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