Irreconcilable Records Author:William Denton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: J " Nor aught, nor naught, existed : yon bright sky Was not, nor heaven's broad roof outstretched above." Accept a beginning, and you accept an eternity o... more »f idleness preceding it, when nothing was done because there was nothing with which it might be done. A solitary monarch for an eternity, considering the sort of kingdom he should make, and how that kingdom 'rule. We can conceive of a boundary to the solar system, but none to the universe. So we can conceive of a beginning to the solar system, but none to the matter of which it is composed ; and, when we are introduced to a beginning, it is as unnatural as for some one to take us out of the universe, and introduce us to its commencement. As far as we can see, the universe is self-sufficient. It does not need winding up by some outside power, like a clock, neither did it require some one to make it originally; and only ignorance of the operation of natural law ever led any one to talk of a " beginning," or dream of a God who stands outside of nature, and makes all things by days' works. But when was this beginning ? One modern would- be harmonizer of Genesis and geology assures us that " there is here no limitation of time, and, therefore, the expansion of astronomical and geological eons, cycle upon cycle, finds here the most ample scope. There was time enough in that 'beginning' for the evolution of the entire solar system from a single nebulous mass, — supposing that to have been the condition in which matter was first produced." Butthis gentleman finds it convenient to forget that God himself—taking his view of the Bible — has declared, in the plainest possible language, when this beginning' was. The creation of heaven was the work of the second day, — "God called the firmament heaven;" and we read in Exod. xx....« less