THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 13 
Maker of the coal seam and the diluvial cave could 
not be a “Deus quidam deceptor,’ and that the 
facts which the rock and the silt revealed were 
sacred, not to be warped or trifled with for the sake 
of any cowardly and hasty notion that they con- 
tradicted His other messages. When a few more 
years are past, Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison 
and Lyell, Delabéche and Phillips, Forbes and 
Jamieson, and the group of brave men who accom- 
panied and followed them, will be looked back 
to as moral benefactors of their race; and almost 
as martyrs, also, when it is remembered how much 
misunderstanding, obloquy, and plausible folly they 
had to endure from well-meaning fanatics like 
Fairholme or Granville Penn, and the respectable 
mob at their heels who tried (as is the fashion 
in such cases) to make a hollow compromise be- 
tween fact and the Bible, by twisting facts just 
enough to make them fit the fancied meaning 
of the Bible, and the Bible just enough to make 
it fit the fancied meaning of the facts. But 
there were a few who would have no compromise ; 
