DISCOURSE ON THE DEATH OF LYELL. 91 



speak the language of science ; and the other attempts to falsify sci- 

 ence to meet the supposed requirements of the Bible. The " seventy," 

 finding that the hare was described as chewing the cud, inserted the 

 word " not ; " and on the other hand, the Jesuits, in editing Newton's 

 " Principia," announced in the preface that they were constrained to 

 treat the theory of gravitation as a fictitious hypothesis, else it would 

 conflict with the decrees of the popes against the motion of the earth. 



But there is another reconciliation of a higher kind, or rather not 

 a reconciliation, but an acknowledgment of the affinity and identity 

 which exist between the spirit of science and the spirit of the Bible. 

 First, there is a likeness of the general spirit of the Bible truths ; and, 

 secondly, there is a likeness in the methods. For instance, the geo- 

 loo-ical truth which our illustrious student was the chief instrument in 

 clearly setting forth and establishing was the doctrine, wrought out 

 by careful, cautious inquiry in all parts of the world, that the frame 

 of this earth was gradually brought into its present condition not by 

 sudden and violent convulsions, but by the slow and silent action of 

 the same causes which we see now, but operating through a long suc- 

 cession of ages beyond the memory and imagination of man. There 

 need be no question whether this doctrine agrees or not with the letter 

 of the Bible. We do not expect it should. For, had there been no such 

 scientific conclusions, we now know perfectly well, from our increased 

 insight into the nature and origin of the early biblical records, that 

 they were not and could not be literal, prosaic, matter-of-fact descrip- 

 tions of the beginning of the world, of Avhich, as of its end, no man 

 knoweth or can conceive except by figures or parables. It is now clear 

 to all students of the Bible that the first and second chapters of 

 Genesis contain two narratives of the creation side by side, diifering 

 from each other in almost every particular of time and place and or- 

 der. It is now known that the vast epochs demanded by scientific 

 observation are incompatible both with the 6,000 years of the Mosaic 

 chronology and the six days of the Mosaic Creation. No one now 

 infers from the Bible that the earth is fixed, tliat it cannot be moved, 

 that the sun does literally go forth as a bridegroom from his chamber, 

 or that the stars sung with an audible voice in the dawn of the creation. 

 But when we rise to the spirit, the ideal, the general drift and purpose 

 of the biblical accounts, we find ourselves in an atmosphere of moral 

 elevation which meets the highest requirements- philosophy can make. 



The discoveries of geology are found to fill up the old religious 

 truths with a new life, and to derive from them in turn a hallowing 

 glory. When the historian of our planet points out that the succes- 

 sive layers of the earth's surface were formed by such agencies as we 

 know of now, by the constant action of wind and wave, of floating 

 ice and rolling stones that there were not separate centres of crea- 

 tion, but one primeval law which formed and governed all created 

 things what is this but the echo of those voices which of old de- 



