18 



Church has adopted the less. Do these discordances undermine the 

 authority of Scripture ? Do they shake — has any one imagined them 

 to shake — the substantial credit of its history of mankind? Yet it is 

 plain that, in its present condition, Scripture does not teach with cer- 

 tainty and exactness the computation of time. The book of Genesis is 

 not then a book of chronology : it is a book which, by a series of ge- 

 nealogies, traces back the various races of men to one common source. 

 Now, in this point, all the versions, and both the volumes of Scripture, 

 concur — to this point all the lines of scientific inquiry converge — the 

 analysis of language, the most legitimate conclusions of physiology and 

 natural history, coincide in the fact that the nations of the earth are of 

 one blood. There is nothing vague or doubtful in this. Reason and 

 religion are here in perfect accord. 



Let us proceed from the history of mankind to the general philosophy 

 of nature. No one, I think, can doubt that those who condemned the 

 Copei'nican system were justified in conceiving that the Scriptures 

 speak of the earth as fixed, and the sun as the moving body. Every 

 one will allow also that this language is ill adapted to the scientific 

 truths of astronomy. We see the folly of any attempt, on this point, 

 to interpret the laws of nature by the expressions of Scripture : and 

 what is the ground of our judgement ? We are not all competent to 

 judge between the theory of Copernicus and those which preceded it ; 

 but we determine against the seeming evidence of our senses, and 

 against the letter of Scripture, because we know that competent persons 

 have examined and decided the physical question. Now, Gentlemen, 

 in Geology xoe are arrived at the selfsame point ; that is to say, a vast 

 body of the best-informed naturalists have examined, by all the various 

 lights of science, and by undeniable methods of investigation, the struc- 

 ture of the earth ; and however they may differ on less certain points, 

 they all agree in this — that the earth exhibits a succession of stratifi- 

 cation, and a series, of imbedded fossils, which cannot be supposed to 

 have been so stratified, and so imbedded, in six days, in a year, or in 

 two thousand years, without supposing also such numerous, such con- 

 fused, and promiscuous violations of the laws and analogies of the uni- 

 verse, as would confound, not the science of geology alone, but all the 

 principles of natural theology. Here, then, is another point of discord- 

 ance : and in both these cases the discordance lies between the language 

 of Scripture and the truths of science. 



To understand how this may be explained, let us compare the ac- 

 count of creation given in Genesis with that contained in a composition 

 as old, or older, than this oldest of books, — a composition which, car- 



