Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/23

 our globe would have to collect the scattered particles of the bodies of its former inhabitants, or to assemble those bodies in one congregated mass, to meet their final doom. But the advocates of these doctrines connect them inseparably together as parts of the same system, and permit them to rest on the same sort of evidence. If, therefore, we are enabled to show that neither reason nor the word of the Lord affords any evidence that the natural world will ever be destroyed, we are justly entitled to infer that it will never be the theatre of a last, or general judgment. That judgment must take place in the world where spirits dwell.

But before presenting our reasons for believing in the permanent durability of our earth, it may be well to invite the readers attention for a moment, to that great change of opinion which has recently taken place in regard to the time when this earth was created. A few years since, it would have been regarded as a very great heresy to have intimated that our globe was created more than six thousand years since. And yet the time has already arrived when this has almost ceased to be a debatable question. It would be a poor compliment to any man's intelligence to suppose him to entertain a doubt of our earth having been in existence several hundred thousands of years. The man who would attempt to revive the old doctrine that the earth, with the material universe around it, was made about six thousand years since, and in six literal and consecutive days, would find it difficult, by any ingenuity, to obtain a reconsideration of a question so thoroughly and fully settled. That doctrine has slowly and reluctantly retired before the accumulating and finally overwhelming force of astronomical and geological science. It held on to life with long and desperate struggles, but its days are at length numbered. The following passage from the Ninth Bridgwater Treatise, by Charles Babbage, Esq., expresses what may now very justly be regarded as the common belief of intelligent minds:

"The mass of evidence which combines to prove the