Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/208

 of an existence which, to beings whose lives are short as ours, seems like eternity itself.

The mere sight of these great formations raises a question even in the most unscientific mind as to the harmony of the record contained in the rocks with the Mosaic chronology. One thing all must admit, that the world is more than six thousand years old, and that the six periods of creation could not have been six days of twenty-four hours, but six successive epochs, during which the earth underwent great geological changes. No one who looks up at these giant cliffs, which the torrents have cleft asunder, can resist the impression of enormous lapses of time. These wadies have been produced by the action of water. As the Niagara river has worn its way back inch by inch from Lake Ontario,

so here the forces of rain and storm and flood have torn their way through the everlasting hills. But what ages upon ages must have been required for all this! What cycles of time, measured not by years, must have passed, what millions of tempests must have poured from the angry heavens, and what millions of floods must have rushed along the sides of these mountains, to wear a channel miles in length through the solid granite!

But the admission of this does not overturn the cosmogony of Moses. By no means. It merely shows us that the words of the Bible have a grander meaning than we in our ignorance had dreamed. We need only to enlarge our interpretations to the vast proportions of the revelation which we are trying to understand. Now we see through a glass darkly; by-and-by we may see that the universe itself is the grandest temple of the Almighty.

Whether the Mosaic account of the Creation agrees in all points with the discoveries of geology, is a question on