I 



COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HENRY DRUMMOND. 805 



unusual treatraont. Any visionary is taken, and that notoriously by 

 men of science, as the representative of the s^-stem. And it is time 

 for theology to be relieved of the irresponsible favors of a hundred 

 sciolists, whose guerrilla warfare has so long alienated thinking men in 

 all departments of knowledge. That there is a " science of theology " 

 Mr. Huxley himself admits. It has exponents in Britain and Germany 

 as well-equipj)ed in learning, in sobriety, in balance of mind, and in 

 the possession of the scientific spirit, as the best of the interpreters of 

 Nature. "When these men speak of science, it is with respectful reli- 

 ance upon the best and most recent authorities. They complain that 

 when science speaks of them it accepts positions and statements from 

 any quarter, from books which have been for years or centuries out- 

 grown ; or from popular teachers whom scientific theology unweariedly 

 repudiates. To theological science the whole underlying theory of 

 the reconcilers is as exploded as Bathybius. And Mr. Huxley's inter- 

 ference, however much they welcome it in the interest of popular 

 theology, is to them the amusing performance of a layman, the value 

 of which to scientific theology is about the same as would be a refuta- 

 tion of the Ptolemaic astronomy to modern physics.* 



This, however, to some minds may have to be made plain, and we 

 may briefly devote ourselves to a statement of the case. 



The progress of opinion on this whole subject is marked by three 

 phases : First, until the present century the first chapter of Genesis 

 was accepted as a veritable cosmogony. This, in the circumstances, 

 was inevitable. The hypothesis of Laplace was not yet in the field ; 

 paleontology, Fracastoro notwithstanding, had produced nothing ex- 

 cept what every one knew was the remains of the Noachian Deluge ; 



* Of course, in commentaries written by experts for popular uses, the condemnatory 

 evidence from natural science is sometimes formally cited in stating the case against the 

 reconcilers generally. From one of the most recent, as well as most able, of these we 

 quote the following passage, in which Mr. Huxley is anticipated in so many words. It is 

 here seen, not only that theology " knew all this before," but how completely it has 

 abandoned the position against which Mr. Huxley's counter-statements are directed: 

 " This narrative is not careful to follow the actual order in which life appeared on the 

 globe : it affirms, e. g., that fruit-trees existed before the sun was made ; science can tell 

 us of no such vegetation. It tells us that the birds were created in the fifth day, the 

 reptiles in the sixth ; Nature herself tells a different tale, and assures us that creeping 

 things appeared before the flying fowl. But the most convincing proof of the regard- 

 lessness of scientific accuracy shown by this writer is found in the fact that in the second 

 chapter he gives a different account from that which he has given in the first, and an 

 account irreconcilable with physical facts. ... He represents the creation of man as 

 preceding the creation of the lower animals — an order which both the first chapter and 

 physical science assure us was not the actual order observed. ... It seems to me, there- 

 fore, a mistaken and dangerous attempt which is often made to reconcile the account of 

 physical facts given here with that given in Nature herself. These accounts disagree in 

 the date or distance from the present time to which the work of creation is assigned, in 

 the length of time which the preparation of the world for man is said to have occupied, 

 and in the order in which life is introduced into the world." — " Genesis," by Marcus 

 Dods, D. D. Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1882. 



