of his infinite power to the mystery of his infinite love; both are equally wonderful, and the immensity of the wonders of his power which we see may help us to understand and believe the immensity of his love. The more

you see that he is great beyond all that you can even conceive, the more ought you to know and to feel that his mercy and compassion are also infinitely beyond your thoughts; for we are told that "the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works" (Ps. cxlv. 9).

"Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isa. lv. 6-9).

"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things

from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."

The next lesson will be from the 2d to the 5th verse of the first chapter of Genesis, along with the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th verses of the 38th chapter of Job.

CHAPTER IV.

THE WORK OF THE FIRST DAY.

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day." -GEN. i. 2-5. Job xxxviii. 4-7.

WE are told in the first verse of Genesis that God caused the heavens and the earth to spring from nothing, in the beginning. The Holy Spirit of inspiration permits us as it were to take a brief glance at the whole wonderful universe which God created at first, and then immediately brings us back to this earth, the spot which has the deepest interest for us, which in the fulness of time was to be the scene of the great work of redemption,a work even more wonderful than creation, wrought out for us by the Son of God.

In the wonderful story which follows in this chapter, we hear no more of all the far distant worlds of which I spoke to you in the last lesson-of all the suns and planets, clus

ters of stars and nebulæ which are studded over the immensity of the heavens. Why should any more be told us about them? The object of this holy book is not to teach us astronomy, or to make known to us the history of the angels. No; it is written to tell us of the great work of grace-of the redemption of the elect on this small but glorious earth-of the eternal reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, after merely noticing the creation of all the universe by God, we are recalled at once, in the second verse, to the history of our earth alone, and we are told in what a state of darkness and confusion it was plunged before it was formed by the six days' work into a fit habitation for man:

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

It has already been said, when explaining these words in the first verse, "In the beginning," that no human being knows how long ago that time was. We know that it was very long ago,-perhaps hundreds of thousands of millions of years; we cannot tell, for the Bible has not told us.

But you may

ask, Can we not find out how long ago it is since the time that is mentioned in the second verse, when "the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep," and when God began on our earth his great six days' work?

To this question we must still answer as we did before, We cannot tell, no man knows, for the Bible has not told us; but it may very probably be ten millions or ten hundred millions of years ago. We do not know. Two things only we know certainly about this, and these are: First, That it is about six thousand years ago since the sixth day's work of the creation ended, and the first man appeared on the earth. Perhaps, speaking more correctly, we might say that it is about 5,860 years ago. Second, We know that before this time, long before God had created man, he had created the angels, since we find that there were good and bad angels at the time when man fell. We know, therefore, that these angels must before then have had their time of trial;-that some of them had persevered in obedience and kept their first estate; and that others, on the contrary, had