400 ON THEORIES OF THE EARTH. 



what would philosophers, more than despots do, 

 without their courts and their adulators ? Yet were 

 such the schools in which we were educated, as in 

 such things were we commanded to helieve, under 

 the penalty of philosophical excommunication. And 

 as were the teachers, so, with little exception, have 

 been the scholars. 



But all these " aqueous theories" claim exlusively to 

 coincide with Scripture ; while, not content with this 

 assumption of exclusive orthodoxy, they have waged a 

 spiritual warfare against their antagonists; like the 

 Scaligers, and the Saumaises, speaking the daggers they 

 could not wield, and thus throwing the " odium theolo- 

 gicum" on those of other systems: while the charge of 

 impiety is especially urged by those whose own are most 

 at variance with it, and the term Religion is adopted, as 

 usual, to secure the votes of the ignorant. Every one 

 of them demands as much time, and circumstances 

 even more irreconcilable than the opposed ones ; while, 

 in the steps of Creation, they are utterly contradictory 

 to the record which they wrest. It is little to have 

 forgotten that there is such a term as Charity, and 

 that the adjective Christian gives it some claim over 

 those who will one day be compelled to ask for what 

 they forgot to give: while if, with some, it is the blind 

 zeal of hypothesis, others have considered it a profit- 

 able account for this world. From even Burnet down- 

 wards, all, all differing, claim the same; and all declare 

 that things mutually irreconcilable, are identical with 

 a common term of comparison : though the same 

 charity, in another day, pronounced even Burners 

 theory atheistical. But, if Kirwan is among the loudest, 

 so is he the most daring: interpreting scripture in his 

 own way, and finally concluding, that the chances are 

 " ten millions to one" that his own account and that 



