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therefore be admitted into the fabric of our fixed and ascer- 
tained knowledge, till its consistency or inconsistency with 
other parts has been ascertained. Other witnesses must be 
examined besides itself. It cannot be accepted on its own 
testimonial of character. Its final adoption must, therefore, 
depend on the presence or absence of conflicting principles 
gathered from other domains of inquiry. It must be reconciled 
with other parts of our knowledge before it can take its 
recognized place in the fabric of science. 
Now it is by no means an easy process to ascertain this 
consistency or inconsistency. It demands not only a wide survey 
of truth, but very accurate habits of reasoning. How readily 
a mistake may be made here may be seen from the pro- 
position to which I have already alluded more than once 
as a good typical instance of all this class of questions, — the 
alleged antiquity of man upon the earth. At first sight, the 
instinct of ninety-nine persons perhaps out of a hundred would 
conclude that such a fact is wholly irreconcilable with the 
truth of the Christian Scriptures. But more careful thought 
modifies such a conclusion, — there is, I believe, not the 
slightest contradiction between the statements of Scripture 
and the remote antiquity of man, should it ever be scien- 
tifically proved, so long as it is not shown that there is 
lineal descent between the men of past epochs and the men 
of the present epoch. The Bible simply contains the history 
of one particular race, lineally descended from one man 
and woman, and nothing else. Whether there may have 
been, or may not have been, other races of similar structure 
and constitution, is a further question of which the Bible 
says nothing one way or another. The matter will not be 
thought so improbable, if there be truth in the belief of some 
men that angelic beings have bodies in some sort similar 
to our own, only incomparably more ethereal. At all events, 
the antiquity of man would involve nothing on the face of 
it contradictory to the literal truth of the word of God. 
No doubt it would modify many popular notions, but this 
is a very different thing. To modify groundless interpre- 
tations of the word, is an office to which science may very 
properly aspire. It has done so already in some very familiar 
instances, and may do so again in many more, perhaps more 
than we have at present any idea of. 
But suppose this process completed, and the matter deter- 
mined, that this particular conclusion of science is irre- 
concilable with the conclusions formed on other branches of 
inquiry. For instance, suppose the antiquity of man upon 
the earth to disprove the credibility of the Christian Bible, 
