8o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and geology, even with Buffon behind it, had so little to say for itself 

 that a hint from the Sorbonne was sufficient to quench what feeble 

 light it had. The genesis of the world, therefore, was left to Moses, 

 and the most mechanical theoiy of creation — a purely anthropomor- 

 phic thing and not really in the sacred page at all — Avas everywhere 

 accepted. 



Presently, as the sciences gathered volume and focused their rays 

 on the.past, a new version of creation was spelled out from earth and 

 sea and stars. Accepted at first tentatively, even by men of science, 

 it is not to be wondered at that theologians were for a time unwilling 

 to give up the reading which had held the ground so long. They 

 therefore adopted the policy which is always followed in similar cir- 

 cumstances — compromise and adjustment. Thus intervened the inter- 

 regnum of the reconcilers, De Luc, Kurtz, Pye-Smith, Hugh Miller, 

 Chalmers, and a hundred others whom we need not name. The man 

 who speaks of the labors of these workers without respect has no 

 acquaintance with the methods by which truth, or error, is ascertained. 

 It was necessary that that mine should be worked, and worked out. 

 Whatever fundamental error underlay it, it was done with reverence, 

 with courage, often with leai*ning and with eloquence. A whole litera- 

 ture sprang up around the reconstruction, and one good end was at least 

 secured — science was ardently studied by the Church. But the failure 

 of the new method was a foregone conclusion, and those who sailed on 

 this shallow sea one by one ran aground. This was a moment of peril 

 — one of those moments which always come when truth is in the 

 making, and which, honestly accepted, lead to new departures in the 

 direction where the true light is ultimately found. The wise among 

 the harmonists accepted the situation, though some of them did not 

 know where next to turn. But deliverance swiftly came, and from an 

 unlooked-for quarter. * 



For meantime in Germany and England, in a wholly different 

 department of theology, another science was at work. Apart from 

 any questions of doctrinal detail, the young science of Biblical Criti- 

 cism was beginning to inquire into the composition, meaning, method, 

 and aims of the sacred books. It dealt with these books, in the first 

 instance, simply as literature. Questions of age, authorship, and lit- 

 erary form were for the first time investigated by qualified cxj^erts. 

 And the result of these labors — labors in the truest sense scientific — is 

 that these sacred writings are now regarded by theology from a wholly 

 changed stand-point. Now from this stand-point the problem of the 

 reconciliation of Genesis with geology simply disappears. The proba- 

 ble scientific solution, the possibility or impossibility of a harmony — 

 the very statement becomes an absurdity. The question, in fact, is 

 as iiTclevant as that of the senior wrangler who asked what Milton's 

 " Paradise Lost " was meant to prove. This is of course the true meth- 

 od of dealing with old theories. Beaten in argument, they will surely 



