Thomas Burnet's Battleground of Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 46

earth, as it is now complete, distinguished into the several orders of bodies of
which it consists, every one perfect and admirable in its kind; this is truly
delightful, and a very good entertainment of the mind; but to see all these in
their first seeds, as I may so say; to take in pieces this frame of nature, and
melt it down into its first principles; and then to observe how the divine
wisdom wrought all these things out of confusion into order, and out of
simplicity into that beautiful composition we now see them in; this, methinks,
is another kind of joy, which pierceth the mind more deep, and is more
satisfactory. (54)
Burnet's Portrayal and Defense of Time's Cycle
The Sacred Theory is much more than pure narrative. It tells a story within a
prescribed framework. Time cannot simply move forward toward ever more
different and progressive states. God, and nature's order, forbids a mere
aimless wandering through time's multifarious corridors. Our modern earth
separates two grand cycles of repetition—our past and future. Destruction
(deluge) followed perfection (paradise) in our past. Our future shall cycle
through these same stages in reverse order, and with uncanny precision of
detail—destruction (conflagration) before renewed perfection.
If reason implies an order of exquisite design (as Burnet had argued in
describing the earth's original perfection), then the fabric of time as a whole
must display rational order as well—for God superintends both space and
time. Such rational order demands an immanent timelessness of invariant, or
cyclically repeating, pattern. Thus, time's cycle pervades the Sacred Theory
as surely as time's arrow. The arrow moves forward within a framework of
repetition that forms the signature of inherent order and good sense in the
cosmos.
At the very end of Book IV, Burnet argues that cycles are the way of God
and nature: "Revolution to the same state again, in a great circle of time,
seems to be according to the methods of Providence; which loves to recover
what was lost or decayed, after