The sciences of geology and palmontology can not be said to have been in existence for more than eighty years. But they had scarcely begun to assume the form and lineaments of sciences, when that jealousy, which has never since the days of Galileo ceased to exist to some extent between the religionist and the natural philosopher, began to evince itself. The religionist was alarmed by rumours that the rocks, under the searching eye of the geologist, disclosed a state of facts which was wholly at variance with the Mosaic detail of the manner and order of the creation ; and the studies of the geologist were, without much inquiry, con demned and denounced, in no very measured terms, as destructive of the doctrine of the divine inspira tion of the Scriptures, and as infidel in their incep tion and tendency. On the other hand, the man of science was not slow in retorting, that if the record of Moses was of divine origin, it had nothing to apprehend from the development of facts ; and that if it could not bear the test of physical truth, it must give way, even though it stood on the threshold of the treasury of inspiration ; for that, in such a crisis, the testimony of the senses with which man has been endowed for his guidance must prevail against mere matters of faith. In argument the man of science had the advantage, but in practice he erred, by too frequently assuming geological facts and Scripture interpretation without sufficient inquiry ; and so contributed, by hastily •formed conclusions, to put asunder the word and the works of God, which, by the decrees of Omni science, must ever be joined together.
The contest in its early stages was carried on by those religionists who construed the Mosaic days of the creation to have been six successive natural days of twenty-four hours each, measured by the revolution of our globe on its axis ; and the objection of the geologist was founded on the ob vious impossibility or absurdity that the world could have been stocked with the various animal and vegetable organisms, whose remains have been found in the crust of the earth, in the brief period of the six natural days that preceded the birth of Adam. The evidence was incontrovertible, that for untold ages before that event generation upon generation of extinct animals had lived and died upon the earth.
To meet this difficulty, which threatened to blot out the first page of the Scriptures as an inspired revelation, and which was obviously subversive of the authenticity and inspiration of all Scripture, a host of champions arose, who, instead of examining with patience, and testing with care, the alleged facts of geology, recklessly denied their existence, or sought to explain and account for them as wholly inadequate, and in many instances, on false and absurd principles and grounds. Some ascribed the existence of fossil remains to the flood in the days of Noah ; others, to what was termed a plastic power that existed as one of the natural laws of matter ; and others again insisted that the various systems of rocks were created by the fiat of the Almighty with the fossil remains of animals that had never lived, and of plants that had never grown, imbedded in them. These were the rea
sonings of Granville Penn, Fairholm, Kirby, Sharon Turner, Gisborne, Taylor, Dean Cock burne, etc. ; and of them it is unnecessary to say more, than that the progress of scientific discovery has extinguished their arguments, not only without injury to the cause of Scripture truth, but with the effect of establishing it on a surer basis.
Another class of inquirers sought to solve the difficulty by conceding the well-established facts of geology and the geological explanations of those facts, but suggesting that the imperfection of our knowledge of the original Hebrew, at the present day, was such as to preclude all certainty of a right interpretation of its meaning. This was the posi tion of Babbage ; while Baden Powell insisted that the narrative of the creation is couched in the lan guage of mythic poetry, and was not intended to be a historical detail of natural occurrences. It is satisfactory to know that the necessity for argu ments so injurious in their tendencies to the cause of the truth and integrity of the Bible no longer exists ; for the precision of the Mosaic phraseology will be found confirmed by every step that has been taken in the development of the truths of geology.
At an early period of this controversy, Dr. Chal mers, whose sagacious mind and prudent foresight comprehended the importance of this issue be tween the facts of geology and the language of the Scriptures, propounded the proposition, that the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe,'—that after the creation of the heavens and the earth, which may have comprehended any in terval of time and any extent of animal and vege table life, a chaotic period ensued, when death and darkness reigned upon our globe, and the earth be came, in Scripture language, without form and void,' and all that had previously existed was, by some catastrophe, blotted out, and a new world of light and life produced, by fiats of the Deity, in a period of six natural days, closing with the birth of Adam ; and thus the world which now exists was cut off from that which preceded it by a period of black chaotic disorder. The geologist had thus ample room for the existence of all the organisnis whose remains are found in the rocks that compose the crust of the earth ; and he might labour in his investigation of the nature and order of geological events, without endangering the truth of the Mosaic record of the creation.