ut an age previous to the times of Turrettine, the danger of
"corrupting philosophy through an intermixed divinity" was admirably
shown by Bacon in his "Novum Organum;" and the line indicated was
exactly what we now find was laid down of old with such precision in
Scripture. "To deify error and to adore vain things," said the great
philosopher, "may be well accounted the plague of the understanding.
Some modern men, guilty of much levity, have so indulged this vanity,
that they have essayed to find natural philosophy in the first chapter
of Genesis, the Book of Job, and other places of holy writ, seeking the
living among the dead. Now this vanity is so much the more to be checked
and restrained, because, by unadvised mixture of Divine and human
things, not only a phantastical philosophy is produced, but also an
heretical religion. Therefore it is safe to give unto Faith, with a
sober mind, the things that are Faith's." The passage, partially quoted,
has been not unfrequently misapplied, as if it bore, not against
theologians such as Turrettine and the Franciscans, but against
theologians such as Chalmers, Dr. Bird Sumner, and Dr. Pye Smith,--not
against the men who derive a false science from Scripture, into which
God never introduced natural science of any kind, but against the men
who, having sought and acquired their science where it is alone to be
found, have striven to bring Scripture, in the misinterpreted passages,
into harmony with its findings. Taken, however, as a whole, its true
meaning is obvious. It is the men who have "essayed to find natural
philosophy" positively revealed in Genesis and the other sacred
books,--not the men who have merely shown that there is nothing in
Scripture which conflicts with the natural philosophy legitimately found
elsewhere,--that are obnoxious to the censure conveyed in the remark. It
is they only, and not the others, that are "_phantastical_" in their
philosophy and "_heretical_" in their religion. I say heretical in their
religion. The Ptolemaic doctrine which ascribed to the earth a central
place in the universe was only scientifically false, whereas the same
doctrine in Turrettine and the Franciscans, from the circumstance that
they pledged the Scripture to its falsity, and professed to derive it
direct from revelation, was not only scientifically false, but a heresy
to boot. And, in like manner, it is the class who term themselves the
"Mosaic geologists,"--men such as the G