Unity of the Bible to Its Inspiration 63 to become signs for seasons and years. Both then represent the waters bringing forth moving and creeping creatures, and fowl flying in the expanse, followed next by the race of quad- ruped mammals, and, last of all, by man himself. There is the same agreement as to the order of animal creation. Geology and comparative anatomy combine to teach that the order was from lower to higher types. First, the fish, in which the proportion of brain to spinal cord is as 2 to 1; then reptiles, in which it is as 2j£ to 1; birds, 3 to 1; mammals, 4 to 1; man, 33 to 1. Now, this is exactly the order of Moses. Who told him what modern science has discovered, that fish and reptiles belong below birds? As Mr. Tullidge says: “With the advance of discovery, the opposition sup- posed to exist between Revelation and Geology has disap- peared j and of the eighty theories which the French Institute counted in. 1806 as hostile to the Bible, not one now stands.” Take an example of this scientific accuracy from astron- omy. Says Jeremiah in 30:22, “The host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured.’ Hip- parchus about a century and a half before Christ, gave the number of stars as 1,022, and Ptolemy, in the beginning of the second century of the Christian era, could find but 1,026. We may, on a clear night, with the unaided eye, see only 1,160 or in the whole celestial sphere, about 3,000. But when the telescope began to be pointed to the heavens, less than three centuries ago, by Galileo, then men began to know that the stars are as countless as the sand on the seashore. When Lord Rosse turned his great mirror to the sky, lo ! the num- ber of visible stars increased to nearly 400,000,000! John Herschel resolves the nebulae into suns, and finds in the cloudy scarf about Orion, “a gorgeous bed of stars,” and the Milky Way itself proves to be simply a grand procession of stars absolutely without number. And so, the exclamation of the prophet, 600 years before Christ, 2,200 years before Gali- leo “the host of heaven cannot be numbered,” proves to be not
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker