We now turn to the speaking. In the first place, it is neither courteous nor wise to be too long. We are sometimes so much pleased with our own voices, that we forget to stop at the right time, and there may be other speakers to follow too. A very young man once came into a committee room where many persons were assembled previous to a meeting. "I want two hours for my speech," he said; "I have so much to say, I can't well do with less." "My good fellow," said a straightforward friend," there are seven of us to speak, including the chairman, and if we take two hours each, the meeting will not be over for fourteen hours!" The young man saw the force of the rebuke, and spoke nicely for fifteen minutes, instead of two hours, as he had intended. There must be a wise and sound discretion as to the length of a speech-a great deal will depend upon the number of speakers, and the real wishes of local friends; but a deputation ought to be able to feel the pulse of both chairman and meeting; he should never give occasion to the former to hold up his watch before him; or to pull him gently by the coat; or to give him a little bit of paper with the words, ""Tis time to close the meeting," pencilled upon it;—all of which hints to stop, we have seen given to speakers on several occasions. Again, in order that a speech should not be too long, extended prefaces, and sermons at the end, should be avoided. A sensible and well-put-together exordium, just enough to catch the attention of the audience, is desirable, but nothing more, and after that, the sooner the deputation gets in medias res the better.

There are some speakers who cannot get to their own subject without first speaking for some twenty minutes on three or four other subjects. Some always allude to the season-it is "seedtime," or "harvest,"-and they work out an illustration; others allude to "the sacred building close by"-There is an old Norman castle in the county of ; and we have heard several speakers remind the townspeople at the meetings, of "the time when Norman William landed on our shores;" and speaking well-very well, upon that particular epoch of English history; an interesting subject in itself, but it took up time and was not connected with the matter in hand: far better for the society, for which the meeting was held, to have had its claims advocated, and its operations seriously detailed.

Once more, let the tone of the speech be solemn. We do not at all object to a fair missionary anecdote, descriptive of manners, such as the amazement of the South Sea Islander at the first message in writing which he saw responded to,-a message written with a pencil on a chip of wood-and his declaring that" the English could make even their chips to talk ;" or such as the Irish convert boy thinking for a moment, when asked the meaning of the word "plenty," and then replying

"a houseful of praties," or, a fact of interest told in some quaint provincial-peasant dialect, which may perhaps provoke a smile; but we think it is trifling with the time at disposal, and perhaps trifling with the subject too, to tell stories about "Neddy and me," a boy and his donkey, or about the farmer making a cow's horn into a missionary box, and writing poetry on it, which the speaker quotes, and gravely says "it is not from Chaucer."

"This horn once grew

on the head of an ox,
but now, tis turned

into a missionary box."

Some may think us too fastidious; but when we consider our object, the advancement of Christ's kingdom, and when we consider the subject, souls perishing for lack of knowledge, and the best means of instructing them, a holy solemnity should surely overshadow our speeches; and this we are persuaded of, that while an audience will sometimes laugh, and laugh heartily, at absurd and ridiculous stories told on platforms-and will applaud them too-it is nevertheless not the style of speaking which is calculated to attract an audience to a meeting again; and as to collection, the money part of the business, people will give much more when a speech has the effect of bringing a tear from the eye, than when a trifling manner, or ridiculous stories, cause them to laugh.

Far better, then, for deputations to seek that "unction from the Holy One," to speak of the wants of the ignorant, and the happiness of those brought through grace to the knowledge of "the truth as it is in Jesus." Let them tell of hundreds of thousands of professing Christians, through the means of religious societies in India, in Burmah, in Africa, in America, and in the islands of the Pacific, and Austral oceans; let them tell of the sunny plains of Italy, and the valleys of the Apennines just opening to the Gospel; and let them give glory to God for all that has been done, and that shall yet be done, till "the kingdoms of this world" shall "become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ." For, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts," shall the work be done.

THE EARTH AND ITS HISTORY.

THERE are few subjects more interesting or more important, to one of the human family, than the inquiry, How the race to which he belongs first came into existence, and what is the real history of this earth, their abode? And we accordingly find,

as we might have anticipated, that in every nation which possesses any ancient writings or traditions, a prominent place is given in those traditions to some account of the origin of man.

But, amidst all these various attempts to satisfy man's natural curiosity, we shall find, at last, only two sources of information which are of any reliable value. It has been truly said that "Scripture and Observation are the only sources from which we can derive any real knowledge of these matters."* We have, indeed, traditions of the Creation from every quarter of the globe,-from the Chaldeans, the Goths, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Etrurians, the Hindoos, the Greeks, the Chinese, and many others; but although we have amongst us believers and unbelievers of almost every possible kind and degree, we have none who profess to give credit to any of these traditions. Hence, when we have searched through all antiquity, we are forced to return at last to this one conclusion,that to Scripture and observation we must have recourse, if we desire to gain any solid information on these subjects.

And these two sources of knowledge are clearly distinct and apart from each other. The word of God and the works of God should each be studied; but the kind of knowledge derivable from the one is quite different from that which may be obtained from the other. The word of God deals with the history of man, and with the interests of the human race; and leaves all other subjects to be investigated by the human intellect. Man can measure the distances of the stars, can explore the bowels of the earth, or the depths of the ocean, but he cannot "by searching find out God;" nor can he penetrate into the mysteries of the human soul, its origin, its history, or its destinies. Hence, with the material world around him, man is left to acquaint himself by observation; but he is helped to the knowledge of his Creator, and of himself, by a Divine revelation, penned, preserved, and disseminated among mankind, by the special care and interposition of a Divine providence.

In the matter now before us,-the past history of this earth and its inhabitants, we shall find that both these sources of information are required, and are available, to form one complete history. Scripture, limiting itself to man and his interests, furnishes us with the past history of the human race, and of the earth so far as the human race is concerned. But if we require to know the number of the planets, or the size of the moon, or the nature of the laws of the solar system, Scripture declines to furnish us with any information. Or if we ask whether this globe began to exist when the human race was produced, or whether it had a yet earlier history, Scripture is equally silent. The divine record stoops not to gratify curiosity, or to give instruction concerning merely material things. Its grand subject Lardner's Cyclo.

is, the creation, the fall, and the restoration, of man; and to this it is firmly restricted. Man has been furnished with the means of observation and investigation, and he is left at liberty to prosecute inquiries on the questions which geology and astronomy propound; only remembering that the word and the works of God have the same wise and gracious Author, and that they can never really contradict each other.

Putting aside, then, all the traditions of the heathen as fables, or perversions of the truth, we take up, first, Holy Scripture, the earliest portions of which, and those which deal with the earliest part of man's history, were written by Moses. And, over and above the testimony of St. Paul, that "all Scripture is given by inspiration of God" (2 Tim. iii. 16), we must admit that this great prophet has a peculiar claim to be heard and believed in this matter, both from his own averments, and from our Lord's testimony to his character. He himself assures us that, on one occasion, he was called up into the cloud, and dwelt in the Divine presence for forty days and forty nights (Exodus xxiv.); and in another place he adds, that "the Lord spake unto him as a man speaketh with his friend." (Exodus xxxiii.) Thus he was qualified beyond all other men, to tell us how the world was made, by having had free and lengthened communications with Him who made it. And that he was a true man, and no deceiver, we may assuredly gather from the fact, that "on the holy mount" he was presented to the wondering gaze of the disciples as the friend of the glorified Saviour; as well as from our Lord's own language, "They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them" (Luke xvi. 29), and from His reference to "Moses and all the prophets" (Luke xxiv. 27), in proof of His own mission.

Moses, then, writing unquestionably under the Divine command,* and purposing to record for man's instruction the history of the creation, commences his narrative in this majestic and befitting style :

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep:

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

It was plainly necessary that, at the outset, in the most simple, plain, and emphatic language, the great fact should be stated, that "by the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth;"+ that "by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water." But is there any further meaning in these brief sentences?

When read in a cursory manner, men are apt to consider

* 2 Tim. iii. 16; 2 Pet. i. 21; Exod. xxiv. 4; Numb. xxxiii. 2; Deut. xxxi. 9. Ps. xxxiii. 6. 2 Pet. iii. 5.

that they are here perusing the history of one period; and that "the beginning" of the first verse was immediately followed by the "chaos" of the second; and by the moving of the Spirit of God, of the third. But careful students of Scripture have seen, in all ages, that this is nowhere stated in the text. Nearly fifteen hundred years ago, Augustine and Theodoret remarked, that the words of Moses allowed room for a wide interval between the first creation of the earth and the beginning of the six days' work recorded by Moses. And, among ourselves, nearly two centuries ago, bishop Patrick, in commenting on the opening verses of Genesis, had said, "How long all things continued in mere confusion, we are not told. It might be a great while." Bishop Horsley also, writing at the end of the last century, observed that, "the interval between the production of the matter of the chaos, and the formation of light, is undescribed and unknown."

It is important to take notice of this distinction, inasmuch as certain geologists, brought up, probably, in the popular belief that the substance of this earth was not quite six thousand years old, have concluded, when they found traces of a much greater antiquity,-that science and investigation had now disproved the statements of Moses. But there was no such disproof. All that geological research had done, was to overthrow certain of their own suppositions. The first chapter of Genesis had never told them that the world was less than six thousand years old, or less than sixty thousand; this belief was merely an erroneous conclusion of their own, hastily drawn from the words of Moses.

The Hebrew prophet, keeping steadily in view the one purpose of the narrative which he was here beginning to write, presses forward, with the greatest rapidity and succinctness, to the opening of the story of the six days' work, by which the earth of the human race was formed and set in order. Hence, he stops not for one instant to dwell upon the interval, be it small or great, which occurred between the first creation of the globe and the time when "the Spirit of God, moving upon the face of the deep," began to prepare the carth for man's habitation. Yet the second verse seems to give some indication of that which geology asserts to have been the state of this globe just before the six days' work described by Moses. The most eminent writers tell us, that "it pleased the Most High to doom the past worlds to sudden destruction, by the secondary agency of geological convulsions."* In this way, those former periods of the earth's history, which Moses passes over in silence, were terminated, and all that remained was, to use Dr. Buckland's words, "the wreck and ruins of a former world."

Lardner's Museum, Vol. xii. p. 157.