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 contradicted 

 His other messages. "When a few more years are 

 past, Buckland and Sedgwick, Murchison and Lyell, 

 Delab^che and Phillips, Forbes and Jamieson, and the 

 group of brave men who accompanied 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 between 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 ; 

 who laboured on with a noble recklessness, deter- 



