EDITOR'S TABLE. 



113 



DEAK STANLEY'S SERMOK 



In another part of the Monthly will 

 be found a report, derived from the 

 London Times, of a late discourse of 

 the Dean of Westminster, which has 

 made a profound sensation in England. 

 It was delivered in Westminster Abbey, 

 on a very impressive occasion, the funer- 

 al of a philosopher who had done more 

 than any of his contemporaries to vindi- 

 cate the sharply-contested doctrine of 

 the government of the world by unva- 

 rying law rather than by providential 

 interventions ; and who, through evil 

 report and much denunciation, had suc- 

 cessfully asserted the vast antiquity of 

 the earth and of the human race. To 

 add to the solemnity of the occasion, if 

 it were possible, the queen, the "De- 

 fender of the Faith," and the head of 

 the English Church, caused to be laid 

 on the coffin a memorial-wreath, as a 

 mark of her esteem. 



The guiding principle of Lyell's geo- 

 logical opinions was, that there never 

 has been any variation in the laws and 

 operations of Nature. This principle 

 had long previously been established as 

 the corner-stone of scientific astrono- 

 my, both in the prediction of future 

 celestial events and in the verification 

 of old observations. If an eclipse of 

 the sun or moon be recorded by Greek, 

 or Chaldean, or Chinese historians, the 

 astronomer, without hesitation, resorts 

 to retrospective calculations, and deter- 

 mines its exact date. Epochs in chro- 

 nology have been settled in that way. 

 Or, looking forward with prophetic 

 eye, he declares that, at a specified mo- 

 ment, there shail be such and such a 

 conjunction of the satellites of Jupiter, 

 or, a century hence, a transit of Venus. 

 Implicitly relying on forecasts of the 

 kind, the position of the moon among 

 the stars, and other phenomena of the 

 celestial bodies, the mariner trustfully 

 finds the place of his ship at sea, and 

 determines his proper track. Nautical 

 almanacs teach us what prophecy real- 

 ly ought to be. 



VOL. vn. 8 



Lyell transferred the principle from 

 the heavens to the earth. He discov- 

 ered that the modeling of her surface 

 had been accomplished by forces that 

 are now, and ever have been, in opera- 

 tion ; that the summer sun and wintry 

 frosts, that rains, and winds, and riv- 

 ers, and glaciers, and the ocean, worked 

 always as they work now. But this 

 implied the lapse of enormous periods 

 of time. The six days of the orthodox 

 creation, and the 6,000 years of ortho- 

 dox chronology, were absolutely inade- 

 quate. 



Unwilling needlessly to give offense 

 to those who were not emancipated 

 from the legends of their childhood, 

 who still linger among jjopular theo- 

 logical conceptions, and find difficulty 

 in enlarging their field of view, he nev- 

 er offensively, but always modestly, put 

 forth the consequences of his new facts, 

 very often suggesting rather than pro- 

 claiming them. When the first dis- 

 covery of the vast antiquity of the hu- 

 man race was made a discovery in 

 which he took a leading part he scru- 

 pulously observed the same course, and 

 in this set an example to those obstrep- 

 erous theologians whose insolent de- 

 nunciations of science are founded often 

 on ignorance, and not infrequently on 

 less excusable grounds. " We now 

 know," says Dean Stanley, "perfectly 

 well, from our increased insight into 

 the nature and origin of the early bibli- 

 cal records, that they were not, and 

 could not be, literal descriptions of the 

 beginning of the world. It is now 

 clear to all the students of the Bible 

 that the first and second chapters of 

 Genesis contain two narrations of the 

 Creation side by side, differing from 

 each other in almost every particular 

 of time, and place, and order. It is 

 now known that the vast epochs de- 

 manded by scientific observation are 

 incompatible with the 6,000 years of 

 the Mosaic chronology and the six days 

 of the Mosaic creation." 



We ask attention, in the interests 

 of truth, to the grave import of these 



