202 BEYIEWS — THE TESTIMONY OE THE BOCKS. 



any Established Church to take up, at the beginning of the present century, a' posi- 

 tion so deter aiined on. the geologic side, — was at the time an obscure young man, 

 characterized, in the small circle in which he moved, by the ardor of his temper- 

 ament and the breadth and originality of his views ; but not yet distinguished in 

 the science or literature of his country, and of comparatively little weight in the 

 theological field. He was marked, too, by what his soberer acquaintance deemed 

 eccentricities of thought and conduct. When the opposite view was all but univer- 

 sal, ae held and taught that free trade would be not only a general benefit to the 

 people of this country, but would inflict permanent injury on no one class or por- 

 tion of them; and further, at a time when the streets and lanes of all the great 

 cities of the empire were lighted with oil burnt in lamps, he held that the time 

 was not distant when a carburreted hydrogen gas would be substituted instead ; 

 and, on getting his snug parsonage-honse repaired, he actually introduced into the i 

 walls a system of tubes and pipes for the passage into its various rooms of the 

 gaseous fluid yet to be employed as the illuminating agent, fime and experience 

 have since impressed their stamp on these supposed eccentricities, and shown 

 them to be the sagacious foreeastiugs of a man who saw further and more clearly 

 than his contemporaries ; and fame has since blown his name very widely, as one 

 of the most comprehensive and enlightened, and, withal, one of the most thoroughly 

 earnest and sincere, of modern theologians. The bold lecturer of St. Andrews was 

 Dr. Thomas Chalmers, — a divine whose writings are now known wherever the 

 English language is spokeu, and whose wonderful eloquence lives in memory as a 

 vanished power, which even his extraordinary writings fail adequately to repre- 

 sent. And in the position which he took up at this early period with respect to 

 geology and the Divine lleeord, we have yet another instance of the great sagacity 

 of the man, and of his ability of correctly estimating the prevailing weight of the 

 evidence with which, though but partially collected at the time, the geologist was 

 preparing to establish the leading propositions of his science, Even in this late 

 age, when the scientific standing of geology is all but universally recognized, and 

 the vast periods of time which it demands fully conceded, neither geologist nor 

 theologian could, in any new scheme of reconciliation., shape his first proposition 

 more skillfully than it was shaped by Chalmers a full half ceutury ago. It iias 

 formed since that time th.e preliminary proposition of those ornaments of at once 

 Science" and the English Church, the present venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, 

 Dr. Bird Sumner, with Doctors Buckland, Gonybeare, and Professor Sedgwick ; of 

 eminent evangelistic Dissenters too, such as the late Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. John Har- 

 ris, Dr. Robert Vaughan, Dr. James Hamilton, and the Rev, Mr. Binuey, — en- 

 lightened and distinguished men, who all came early to the conclusion, with the 

 lecturer of St. Andrews, that " the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of 

 the globe." 



With a view to carry out systematically the object of the work, its. 

 two preliminary chapters, or lectures, are devoted to a popular review 

 of the Palaeontology of Plants and Animals ; in which, amongst other 

 facts, the relative perfectibility of the great typical groups 

 with the geological advent of these, in clearly and iorcibly 

 shown. Upon a track so often traversed, little of actual novelty 

 can, of course, be expected ; but the singularly felicitous and graphic 



