nimals, pain and death
countless ages before the appearance of man. The half-digested fragments
of weaker animals within the fossilized bodies of the stronger have
destroyed all Wesley's arguments in behalf of his great theory.(144)

(144) See Wesley's sermon on God's Approbation of His Works, parts xi
and xii.

Dr. Adam Clarke held similar views. He insisted that thorns and thistles
were given as a curse to human labour, on account of Adam's sin, and
appeared upon the earth for the first time after Adam's fall. So, too,
Richard Watson, the most prolific writer of the great evangelical reform
period, and the author of the Institutes, the standard theological
treatise on the evangelical side, says, in a chapter treating of the
Fall, and especially of the serpent which tempted Eve: "We have no
reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in any
mode or degree until his transformation. That he was then degraded to
a reptile, to go upon his belly, imports, on the contrary, an entire
alteration and loss of the original form." All that admirable adjustment
of the serpent to its environment which delights naturalists was to the
Wesleyan divine simply an evil result of the sin of Adam and Eve. Yet
here again geology was obliged to confront theology in revealing the
PYTHON in the Eocene, ages before man appeared.(145)

(145) See Westminster Review, October, 1870, article on John Wesley's
Cosmogony, with citations from Wesley's Sermons, Watson's Institutes of
Theology, Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, etc.

The immediate results of such teaching by such men was to throw many who
would otherwise have resorted to observation and investigation back upon
scholastic methods. Again reappears the old system of solving the riddle
by phrases. In 1733, Dr. Theodore Arnold urged the theory of "models,"
and insisted that fossils result from "infinitesimal particles brought
together in the creation to form the outline of all the creatures
and objects upon and within the earth"; and Arnold's work gained wide
acceptance.(146)

(146) See citation in Mr. Ward's article, as above, p. 390.

Such was the influence of this succession of great men that toward the
close of the last century the English opponents of geology on biblical
grounds seemed likely to sweep all before them. Cramping our whole
inheritance of sacred literature within the rules of a historical
compend, they showed t