126 FAMOUS SCOTS 



any more than it would be possible to assert, with 

 Dugald Stewart, that the words in Sanskrit akin to 

 Greek were dropped by the troops of Alexander the 

 Great. It is now as impossible to maintain, with the 

 mythologists of legend, that the Ross-shire hills were 

 formed by the Cailliach-more^ or great woman, who 

 dropped stones through the bottom of the panniers on 

 her back, as it would be for any reactionary Chauteau- 

 briand to assert that God made the world, at the 

 beginning, precisely as we see it with all its complete- 

 ness and antiquity, since he believed an infancy of the 

 world would be a world without romance ! denying 

 creation in periods, and asserting it in instantaneous 

 processes, by which the fossils were even created just as 

 we see them. Such a conception is not to exalt the 

 Divine Power ; or, if it appears to do so, it yet effec- 

 tively annihilates a belief in the Divine Wisdom that 

 could create pretty toys and useless fossils a creation of 

 mummies and skeletons that were never from the very 

 beginning intended to be anything but skeletons, 

 without any relation to living beings. 



Miller accordingly makes it perfectly plain in what 

 spirit he approaches the sacred record. The Bible, he 

 says repeatedly, is neither a scientific text-book nor 

 even a primer. Why, he asks, should it be regarded as 

 necessary to promulgate the truths of geology when 

 those of astronomy have been withheld ? ' Man has 

 everywhere believed in a book which should be inspired 

 and should teach him what God is and what God 



