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7,000. A whole library has been written concerning the 
longer and shorter Hebrew chronologies, and now probably 
the balance of opinion will be on the side of Canon Rawlinson, 
when, in Aids to Faith , he argues in favour of the Septuagint 
version, in preference to the Hebrew text, and thus adds six 
centuries to the generally received period which elapsed be- 
tween the creation of Adam and the Deluge. The corruptions 
which have crept into the text must have taken place since 
the time of Josephus, when the Septuagint translation and 
the Hebrew were in accord. The present discrepancies affect, 
however, not the facts of the narrative, but the number of 
years ; and, with an ample margin for all these discrepancies, 
it will not be possible, by any arrangement of Bible dates, to 
consider the creation of our first father as an event more 
remote from us than 7,000 or 8,000 years. This reply, however, 
which Scripture constructively renders, is far different from 
that which many men of science have proposed, and especially 
those who have been among the foremost defenders of the 
common origin of man ; and in their divergence concerning 
the date of man’s origin we have, it has been said, one of the 
questions which stand in the way of an entente cordiale between 
science and religion. When, however, we ask these men of 
science for their answer, we find scarcely two alike. Bunsen, 
with his study of Egyptian history, pleads for 20,000 years 
before Christ. Wallace, in his book on Natural Selection , 
says : a We can with tolerable certainty affirm that man must 
have inhabited the earth a thousand centuries ago.” Sir 
Charles Lyell asks for ‘ c a vast series of antecedent ages " — 
“ periods of incalculable length, which figures cannot enable 
us to appreciate ” ; whilst Waitz, in his learned work on the 
Anthropology of Nations, allows us the choice between thirty- 
five thousand million and nine million years as the period of 
man's existence upon the earth. When we seek to test these 
varied dates, we shall have the more reason to affirm that 
no weapon framed against the Word of Truth can ever 
prosper. The speculations of Bunsen need not detain 
us. Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, and Archdeacon Pratt, in 
his valuable treatise, Scripture and Science not at Variance, 
have shown their foundations to be upon the shifting sands 
of unreliable scraps of Greek chronology and the deceptive 
deposits of Nile mud. To arguments in favour of the vast 
ages which some have required for the development of physical 
differences, and the creation of languages in the races of men, 
the following reply from a paper by Professor Dawson may 
be new, and will not fail to interest. Referring to such facts 
as that the negro is as much a negro now as in the days when 
