Rough Notes on the controversy against Geologists, 499 



might continue the species in existence through another 

 period. 



Those geologists, if such there be, who, overlooking all 

 the traces of sudden and violent action, rest their system 

 solely upon the evidences of gradual change, a source of the 

 observed appearances in stratification which their opponents 

 also admit, but only conjointly with the other ; who maintain 

 that all things have proceeded in the same train, and in the 

 same manner, as a consequence or effect of the same causes, 

 in the same intensity, as are now daily in operation, and 

 through no other ; who hold that species, genera, orders of 

 being become extinct in the lapse of time and are replaced 

 imperceptibly, no one knows when or how; who suppose 

 that the primary rocks, instead of being really primary, are 

 metamorphic, secondary and tertiary altered and having 

 their organic remains obliterated by fire, through their sink- 

 ing deep enough to come within the range of the central 

 heat, must answer for themselves. Their sin is not the sin 

 of the science of geology, nor ought it to be laid to the 

 charge of all geologists indiscriminately. It belongs to them 

 to defend themselves, and to rebut, if they can, the accusa- 

 tion which may be brought against them on perhaps as fair 

 inductive reasoning as their own, of asserting what directly 

 leads to materialism ; to the old dogma of fate or chance ; to 

 the eternity of matter, of the world, which is thus raised to 

 the level of Deity in one of its leading attributes ; finally, of 

 being teachers of what tends directly to atheism. 



It is generally admitted that many of the works of God, 

 both of the material and spiritual parts of the creation, were 

 produced at first not in a state of ultimate perfection, but in 

 a state changing and continually tending towards that per- 

 fection : and that, not because God could not have made 

 them perfect at the outset at once, but to accommodate them 

 to the limited faculties of His intellectual creatures ; that, as 

 all things were created to shew forth the glory of His attri- 



