THE RENASCENCE OF SCIENCE. IO 5 



mountains and valleys of the land; the waters of the 

 heavens, reducing all to a level, will at last deliver 

 the whole land over to the sea, and the sea succes- 

 sively prevailing over the land, will leave dry new 

 continents like those which we inhabit." So the old 

 man repeated the submission of Galileo, and pub- 

 lished his recantation: " I declare that I had no in- 

 tention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I 

 believe most firmly all therein related about the 

 creation, both as to order of time and matter of 

 fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting 

 the formation of the earth, and generally all which 

 may be contrary to the narrative of Moses." That 

 was in the year 1751. 



If the. English theologians could not deliver 

 heretics of the type of Buffon to the secular arm, 

 they used all the means that denunciation supplied 

 for delivering them over to Satan. Epithets were 

 hurled at them; arguments drawn from a world 

 accursed of God levelled at them. Saint Jerome, 

 living in the fourth century, had pointed to the 

 cracked and crumpled rocks as proof of divine anger: 

 now Wesley and others saw in " sin the moral cause 

 of earthquakes, whatever their natural cause might 

 be," since before Adam's transgression, no convul- 

 sions or eruptions ruffled the calm of Paradise. 

 Meanwhile, the probing of the earth's crust went on; 

 revealing, amidst all the seeming confusion of dis- 

 torted and metamorphosed rocks, an unvarying se- 

 quence of strata, and of the fossils imbedded in them. 



