152 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In recalling it at this day there stand out from its later phases 

 two efforts at compromise especially instructive, as showing the 

 embarrassment of militant theology in the nineteenth century. 



The first of these was made by John Henry Newman in the 

 days when he was hovering between the Anglican and Roman 

 Churches. In one of his sermons before the University of Oxford 

 he spoke as follows : 



" Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary, 

 and science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at 

 rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements 

 is the very truth till we know what motion is ? If our idea of 

 motion is but an accidental result of our present senses, neither 

 proposition is true and both are true : neither true philosophi- 

 cally ; both true for certain practical purposes in the system in 

 which they are respectively found." 



In all anti-theological literature there is no utterance more 

 hopelessly skeptical. And for what were the youth of Oxford 

 led into such bottomless depths of disbelief as to any real exist- 

 ence of truth or any real foundation for it ? Simply to save an 

 outworn system of interpretation into which the gifted preacher 

 happened to be born. 



The other utterance was suggested by De Bonald and devel- 

 oped in the Dublin Review, as is understood, by one of Newman's 

 associates. This argument was nothing less than an attempt to 

 retreat under the charge of deception against the Almighty him- 

 self. It is as follows : " But it may well be doubted whether the 

 Church did retard the progress of scientific truth. What re- 

 tarded it was the circumstance that God has thought fit to ex- 

 press many texts of Scripture in words which have every appear- 

 ance of denying the earth's motion. But it is God who did this, 

 not the Church ; and, moreover, since he saw fit so to act as to re- 

 tard the progress of scientific truth, it would be little to her dis- 

 credit, even if it were true, that she had followed his example." 



This argument, like Mr. Gosse's famous attempt to reconcile 

 geology to Genesis by supposing that for some inscrutable pur- 

 pose God deliberately deceived the thinking world by giving to 

 the earth all the appearances of development through long periods 

 of time, while really creating it in six days, each of an evening 

 and a morning seems only to have awakened the amazed pity of 

 thinking men. This, like the argument of Newman, was the last 

 desperate effort of Anglican and Roman divines to save some- 

 thing from the wreckage of theology.* 



* For the quotation from Newman, see his Sermons on the Theory of Religious Belief, 

 sermon xiv, cited by Bishop Goodwin in Contemporary Review for January, 1892. For the 

 attempt to take the blame off the shoulders of both Pope and cardinals, and place it upon 

 the Almighty, see the article above cited, in the Dublin Review, September, 1865, p. 419, 



