Hugh Miller was an Evangelical Christian and self-taught geologist. He had first become interested in geology while working as a stonemason; eventually he became one of the most popular geological writers. The Testimony of the Rocks had sold forty-two thousand copies by the end of the century. He was famous for his lyrical descriptions of natural phenomena and for his fervent blending of science and religion. As one biographer puts it, ‘Not as a mere collector of facts, or word-painter of geological landscape, would he work, but in full view and constant recollection of every momentous question relating to the nature and destiny of man on which science might touch’ (Peter Bayne, Life and Letters of Hugh Miller (1871), vol. 2, p. 137), and in Miller's case those ‘momentous questions’ had Christian answers.

The Testimony of the Rocks claims to relate geology to both ‘Natural and Revealed’ theology. The second of these aims, Miller's ‘reconciliation’ of Genesis with geological evidence, is described in C. W. Goodwin's account in Essays and Reviews. The lecture reproduced here, first given in 1852, concentrates on the bearing of geological evidence on natural theology: in the geological record, Miller finds proof of the existence of God the Creator. At the same time, he expects natural theology to provide analogies with revealed theology: so here he sees the successive Creations of geology prefiguring the final Creation of ‘a new Heaven and a new earth’ promised in Revelation.