444 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and insects, he says that, before sin entered the world by Adam's 

 fall, "none of these attempted to devour or in any way hurt one 

 another " ; that " the spider was then as harmless as the fly and did 

 not then lie in wait for blood." * Here, again, Wesley arrayed his early 

 followers against geology, which reveals, in the fossil remains of car- 

 nivorous animals, pain and death countless ages before the appearance 

 of man. The half-digested fragments of weaker animals within the 

 fossilized bodies of the stronger have destroyed all Wesley's argu- 

 ments in behalf of his great theory. 



Dr. Adam Clarke held similar views. lie insisted that thorns and 

 thistles were given as a curse to human labor, on account of Adam's sin, 

 and appeared upon the earth for the first time after Adam's fall. So, 

 too, Richard Watson, the most prolific writer of the great evangelical 

 reform period, and the author of the " Institutes," the standard theo- 

 logical treatise in the evangelical array, says, in a chajDter treating of 

 the Fall, and especially of the serpent which temj^ted Eve : " We 

 have no reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form 

 in any mode or degree until his transformation. That he was then 

 degraded to a reptile, to go upon his belly, imports, on the contrary, 

 an entire alteration and loss of the original form," All that admi- 

 rable adjustment of the serpent to its environment which delights 

 naturalists, was to Adam Clarke simply an evil result of the sin of 

 Adam and Eve. Yet here again geology was obliged to confront 

 theology in revealing i\xe python in the Eocene — ages before man ap- 

 peared, f 



The immediate results of such teaching by such men was to throw 

 many who would otherwise have resorted to observation and investi- 

 gation back upon scholastic methods. Again reappears the old sys- 

 tem of solving the riddle by phrases. In 1733, Dr. Theodore Arnold 

 urged the theory of " models," and insisted that fossils result from 

 " infinitesimal particles brought together in the creation to form the 

 outline of all the creatures and objects upon and within the earth " ; 

 and Arnold's work translated into German gained wide acceptance. J 



Such was the influence of this succession of great men that toward 

 the close of the last century the English opponents of geology on biblical 

 grounds seemed likely to sweep all before them. Cramping our whole 

 inheritance of sacred literature within the rules of an historical com- 

 pend, they showed the terrible dangers arising from the revelations of 

 geology, which make the earth older than the six thousand years required 

 by Archbishop Usher's interpretation of the Old Testament. Nor was 

 this feeling confined to ecclesiastics. Williams, a thoughtful layman, 



* See Wesley's sermon on "God's Approbation of His Works," 11th and 12th 

 parts, 



f See "Westminster Keview," October, 1870, article on "John Wesley's Cosmog- 

 ony," with citations from Wesley's " Sermons," Watson's " Institutes of Theology," 

 Adam Clarke's " Commentary on the Holy Scriptures," etc. 



X See citation in Mr, Ward's article, as above, p. 390. 



