ranville Penns, Moses Stewarts,
Eleazar Lords, Dean Cockburns, and Peter Macfarlanes,--who essay to
"find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis," and that too
a demonstrably false natural philosophy, who are obnoxious to the
Baconian censure now. No true geologist ever professes to deduce his
geology from Scripture. It is from the earth's crust, with its numerous
systems, always invariable in their order, and its successive groups of
fossil remains, always (in accordance with their place and age) of a
certain determinable character,--not in a revelation never intended by
its Divine Author to teach any natural science as such,--that he derives
the materials with which he builds. Had there been no Divine Revelation,
geology would be as certainly what it now is as either geography or
astronomy. That it comes in the present time more in contact with
revealed truth than either of these sciences, is, as I have shown,
merely a consequence of the fact that there is a history given in the
opening passages of Scripture, for far other than geological purposes,
of the authorship of the heavens and earth, and of the successive stages
of creation; and further, from the circumstance that, from various
motives, men are ever and anon inquiring how the geologic agrees with
the Scriptural record. It may be well here to remind the
anti-geologists, in connection with this part of my subject, of what at
the utmost they may hope to accomplish. Judging from all I have yet seen
of their writings, they seem to be as certainly impressed by the belief
that they are settling textually the geologic question of the world's
antiquity, as the doctors of Salamanca held that they were settling
textually the question of the world's form; or Turrettine and the
Franciscans, that they were settling textually the question of the
world's motion, or rather want of motion. But the mistake is quite as
gross in their case as in that of Turrettine and the doctors. Geology
rests on a broad, ever extending basis of evidence, wholly independent
of the revelation on which they profess, very unintelligently, in all
the instances I have yet known, to found their objections. What they
need at most promise themselves is, to defeat those attempts to
reconcile the two records which are made by geologists who respect and
believe the Scripture testimony,--not a very laudable feat, even could
it be accomplished, and certainly worthy of being made rather a subject
of