Beside the Still Waters

Beside the Still Waters is a theological work written by Charles Austin Beard, an American historian, writing primarily during the first half of the 20th century. 

Excerpts:

There has been a period of geological speculation, at which all the changes which have taken place upon the earth's surface, and have left their unmistakable marks in countless relics of animal and vegetable life, were attributed to the action of sudden and violent forces, of which, to-day, earthquake and tempest and volcano are only the feeble and transitory types. Those changes have manifestly been so great and so universal, as to stand out in vivid contrast to the imperceptibly slow, the gently gradual processes, which are all that we are now able to watch and to record: surely we can attribute them only to causes as exceptional as themselves. We see Niagara cutting its backward way through the ravine, so many feet in a thousand years; the lava stream descends the mountain-side like a black and burning glacier, and destruction too plainly marks its path; a storm bursts upon the hills, and for long miles the valleys are choked with barren mud, the bridges scattered in ruin through the stream, the cheerful husbandry of men laid hopelessly waste.