in THE RENASCENCE OF SCIENCE 97 



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 convulsions or 

 eruptions ruffled the calm of Paradise. Meanwhile, 

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

 amidst all the seeming confusion of distorted and 

 metamorphosed rocks, an unvarying sequence of 

 strata, and of the fossils embedded in them. Differ- 

 ent causes were assigned for the vast changes ranging 

 over vast periods ; one school believing in the action 

 of volcanic and such like catastrophic agents ; another 

 in the action of aqueous agents, seeing, more consist- 

 ently, in present operations the explanation of the 

 causes of past changes. But there was no diversity 

 of opinion concerning the extension of the earth's 

 time-history and life-history to millions on millions 

 of years. 



So, when this was to be no longer resisted, theo- 

 logians sought some basis of compromise on such 

 non-fundamental points as the six days of creation. 

 It was suggested that perhaps these did not mean the 

 seventh part of a week, but periods,or eons,or something 



H 



