484 Rough Notes on the controversy against Geologists. 



geology infers to have past while the deposits containing 

 them were made. It is certain, even if the thing were not 

 otherwise absolutely impossible, that, owing to the infinite 

 individual number of these fossils, there is no feasible mode 

 of accounting for the strata containing them coming into 

 existence, nor for the repeated emersions from, and immer- 

 sions into both salt and fresh waters which these strata have 

 been proved to have undergone, during the 6000 years 

 since man's creation, without the most uncompromising and 

 flagrant departure from the pretty strict and limited chrono- 

 logy of the Bible, an offence surely as grievous as going in 

 the teeth of the statements of the Bible in any other way. 

 There remains, therefore, only the supposition, and it comes 

 backed by the most overwhelming and crushing mass of 

 evidence, which may be found in detail in any good elemen- 

 tary work on the subject, that the world, both in its form, 

 and in a great measure in its present structure, existed long, 

 even ages almost countless by the finite understandings of 

 men, before man himself had any existence upon it. Neither 

 does this supposition either contradict the Bible account or 

 assert any thing at variance with it ; for the Bible pretends 

 not to give a history of the revolutions on the surface of the 

 globe, it merely relates the moral history of man. 



There is, however, one supposition, and one supposition 

 only, but it is such that it requires the mind to be peculiarly 

 constituted to adopt it, by which every difficulty is at once 

 removed, the knot is cut, and every possible geological ap- 

 pearance is brought within the limits of the time which, in 

 popular opinion, is assigned by the Scriptures for the duration 

 of the very materials which compose the earth. It has the 

 merit of being the only tenable ground on which they who 

 hold this popular opinion can stand ; and from it they can 

 never be dislodged. It is this, that as God tried the faith 

 of Abraham, David, and others, in his promises, by apparent 

 impossibilities to the execution of these; so he created the 



