NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 607 



" in the work of the six days God caused the devil to feel his power 

 in all earnest, and made Satan's enterprise appear miserable and 

 vain." * 



Such is the last important assault upon the strongholds of geo- 

 logical science in Germany ; and, in view of this and others of the 

 same kind, it is little to be wondered at that, when, in 1870, Johann 

 Silberschlag made an attempt to again base geology upon the Deluge 

 of Noah, he found such diificulties that, in a touching passage, he ex- 

 pressed a desire to get back to the theory that fossils were " sports of 

 Nature." f 



But the most noted among efforts to keep geology well within the 

 letter of Scripture is of still more recent date. In the year 1885 Mr. 

 Gladstone found time, amid all his labors and cares as the greatest 

 parliamentary leader in England, to take the field in the struggle for 

 the letter of Genesis against geology. 



On the face of it his effort seemed Quixotic, for he confessed at 

 the outset that in science he was " utterly destitute of that kind of 

 knowledge which carries authority," and his argument soon showed 

 that this confession was entirely true. 



But he had some other qualities of which much might be expected 

 — great skill in marshaling words, great shrewdness in adapting the 

 meanings of single words to conflicting necessities in discussion, won- 

 derful power in erecting showy structures of argument upon the small- 

 est basis of fact, and a facility almost preternatural in " explaining 

 away " troublesome realities. So striking was his power in this last 

 respect that a humorous London chronicler once stated that a bigamist 

 had been advised, as his only hope, to induce Mr. Gladstone to " explain 

 away " one of his wives. 



At the basis of this theologico-geological structure, Mr. Gladstone 

 placed what he found in the text of Genesis : " A grand four-fold di- 

 vision" of animated Nature "set forth in an orderly succession of 

 times," and he arranged this order and succession of creation as fol- 

 lows : " First, the water population ; secondly, the air population ; 

 thirdly, the land population of animals ; fourthly, the land population 

 consummated in man." 



His next step was to slide in upon this basis the apparently harm- 

 less proposition that this division and sequence " is understood to have 

 been so affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken 

 as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact." 



Finally, upon these foundations he proceeded to build an argument 

 out of the coincidences thus secured between the record in the Hebrew 

 sacred books and the truths revealed by science as regards this order 

 and sequence, and he easily arrived at the desired conclusion with 



* See Shields's " Final Philosophy," pp. 340 ct scq., and Reuseb's "Nature and the Bi- 

 ble" (English translation, 1886), vol. i, pp. 318-320. 

 f * See Reusch, vol. i, p. 264. 



