"We know in part," exclaimed, with burning zeal, the honest man of God in Holy Scripture, "We know in part, and we prophesy in part." How true the first member of this sentence is even in the case of that knowledge of God which alone deserves the name of knowledge, or repays the trouble of its acquisition, the previous Lecture must in many ways have served to convince us. The second member, which will chiefly occupy our attention in the present discussion, is in an eminent degree applicable to physical science. For what, in fact, is all our knowledge of nature, considered as a whole and in its inmost essence, but a mere speculation, conjecture, and guess upon guess? What is it but an endless series of tentative experiments, by which we are continually hoping to succeed in unveiling the secret of life, to seize the wonderful Proteus, and to hold him fast in the chains of science? Or is it not, perhaps, one ever-renewed attempt to decipher more completely than hitherto the sybilline inscriptions on the piled-up rows and layers of tombs, which as nature grows older convert its great body into one vast catacomb, and so perchance to find therein the key to unlock and bring to light the far greater--nay, the greatest of all riddles--the riddle of death? Now there are undoubtedly, even in nature itself, occasional indications of, scattered hints and remote allusions to, a final crisis, when even in nature and in this sensible and elementary world, life shall be entirely separated from death, and when death itself shall be no more. Gravely to be pondered and in nowise to be neglected are these hints, although without the aid of a higher illumination they must forever remain unintelligible to man. Thus considered, however, the universe itself appears replete with dumb echoes and terrestrial resounds of divine revelation. It is not, therefore, without reason and significance, if in this beautiful hymn the ancient prophetess of nature lends her concurrent testimony to the promises of the holy seer of a last day of creation, which nature shall celebrate as the great day of her renovation and toward which she yearns with an indescribable longing which is nowhere so inimitably depicted, so strongly and so vividly expressed, as in Holy Writ itself. Holy Scripture could not and can not contain a system of science, whether as a philosophy of reason or a science of nature. Nay, in this form of a manual and methodical compendium of divine knowledge, it could not inspire us with confidence either as revelation or as science. Condescending altogether to the wants of man, both in form and language, it consists of a collection of occasional and wholly practical compositions derived immediately from, and expressly designed for, life--in a certain sense it consists of nothing but the registers and social statutes either of the prophetic people or of the apostolical community. Accordingly, its contents are of a mixed nature: historical, legal, instructive, hortatory, consolatory, and prophetical, together with a rich abundance of minute and special allusions, while it enters every where into, and with watchful love adapts itself to, individual wants and local peculiarities. And the form of these writings, at once so singular in its kind--and in such marvelous wise, but yet so eminently human--is so far from being inconsistent with the divine character, that the very condescension of the Deity constitutes a new and additional but most characteristic proof of genuine revelation. Only the first foundation-stone and the key and corner-stone form an exception. Embracing within their spacious limits the beginning of nature and the end of the world, they form, as it were, the corner-rings and the bearing-staves of the ark of the covenant of revelation. And while on the one side as well as on the other, in the opening no less than in the closing book, which contain almost as many mysteries as words, the seven-branched candlestick of secret signification is set up, still all else that is inclosed within the holy ark receives therefrom sufficient light for its perfect elucidation. In all other respects the style is that of a plain narrative couched in very appropriate and simple words; and if the masters of criticism in classical antiquity have quoted a few passages from the beginning of Genesis as the most exalted instances of the sublime, still it was in the very simplicity and extreme plainness of the language that they recognized this character of sublimity.