100 The Fundamentals the creation (Heb. 2:6-9). This is the hope held out to us in Christ (Eph. 1:10). One should reflect also that, while the expanse of the physical universe is a modern thought, there has never been a time in the Christian Church when God—Himself infinite—was not conceived of as adored and served by countless hosts of ministering spirits. Man was never thought of as the only intelligence in creation. The mystery of the divine love to our world was in reality as great before as after the stellar expanses were discovered. The sense of “conflict,” therefore, though not the sense of wonder, awakened by the “exceeding riches” of God’s grace to man in Christ Jesus, vanishes with increasing realization of the depths and heights of God’s love “which passeth knowl edge” (Eph. 3:19). Astronomy’s splendid demonstration of the majesty of God’s wisdom and power is undiminished by any feeling of'disharmony with the Gospel. 2. As it is with astronomy, so it has been with the reve lations of geology of the age and gradual formation of the earth. Here also doubt and suspicion were—naturally enough in the circumstances—at first awakened. The gentle Cowper could write in his “Task” of those “* * * who drill and bore
The solid earth and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn That He who made it, and revealed its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age.”
If the intention of the first chapter of Genesis was really to give us the “date” of the creation of the earth and heavens, the objection would be unanswerable. But things, as in the case of astronomy, are now better understood, and few are disquieted in reading their Bibles because it is made certain that the world is immensely older than the 6,000 years which the older chronology gave it. Geology is felt only to have expanded our ideas of the vastness and marvel of the Creator’s
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