The first measurement, so to speak, which is given us of God’s greatness, is in respect of Time.  He inhabiteth Eternity.  There are some subjects on which it would be good to dwell, if it were only for the sake of that enlargement of mind which is produced by their contemplation.  And eternity is one of these, so that you cannot steadily fix the thoughts upon it without being sensible of a peculiar kind of elevation, at the same time that you are humbled by a personal feeling of utter insignificance.  You have come in contact with something so immeasurable—­beyond the narrow range of our common speculations—­that you are exalted by the very conception of it.  Now the only way we have of forming any idea of eternity is by going, step by step, up to the largest measures of time we know of, and so ascending, on and on, till we are lost in wonder.  We cannot grasp eternity, but we can learn something of it by perceiving, that, rise to what portion of time we will, eternity is vaster than the vastest.

We take up for instance, the history of our own country, and then, when we have spent months in mastering the mere outline of those great events which, in the slow course of revolving centuries, have made England what she is, her earlier ages seem so far removed from our own times that they appear to belong to a hoary and most remote antiquity.  But then, when you compare those times with even the existing works of man, and when you remember that, when England was yet young in civilization, the pyramids of Egypt were already grey with 1500 years, you have got another step which impresses you with a doubled amount of vastness.  Double that period, and you come to the far distant moment when the present aspect of this world was called, by creation, out of the formless void in which it was before.

Modern science has raised us to a pinnacle of thought beyond even this.  It has commanded us to think of countless ages in which that formless void existed before it put on the aspect of its present creation.  Millions of years before God called the light day, and the darkness night, there was, if science speaks true, creation after creation called into existence, and buried in its own ruins upon the surface of this earth.  And then, there was a time beyond even this—­there was a moment when this earth itself, with all its countless creations and innumerable ages, did not exist.  And, again, in that far back distance it is more than conceivable, it seems by the analogy of God’s dealings next to certain, that ten thousand worlds may have been called into existence, and lasted their unnumbered ages, and then perished in succession.  Compared with these stupendous figures, 6,000 years of our planet sink into nothingness.  The mind is lost in dwelling on such thoughts as these.  When you have penetrated far, far back, by successive approximations, and still see the illimitable distance receding before