on
had made peace with the Church, and to disturb that peace was akin to
treason. By large but vague concessions Cuvier kept the theologians
satisfied, while he undermined their strongest fortress. The danger was
instinctively felt by some of the champions of the Church, and typical
among these was Chateaubriand, who in his best-known work, once so
great, now so little--the Genius of Christianity--grappled with the
questions of creation by insisting upon a sort of general deception "in
the beginning," under which everything was created by a sudden fiat,
but with appearances of pre-existence. His words are as follows: "It
was part of the perfection and harmony of the nature which was displayed
before men's eyes that the deserted nests of last year's birds should be
seen on the trees, and that the seashore should be covered with shells
which had been the abode of fish, and yet the world was quite new, and
nests and shells had never been inhabited."(161) But the real victory
was with Brongniart, who, about 1820, gave forth his work on fossil
plants, and thus built a barrier against which the enemies of science
raged in vain.(162)

(161) Genie du Christianisme, chap.v, pp. 1-14, cited by Reusch, vol. i,
p. 250.

(162) For admirable sketches of Brongniart and other paleobotanists, see
Ward, as above.

Still the struggle was not ended, and, a few years later, a forlorn hope
was led in England by Granville Penn.

His fundamental thesis was that "our globe has undergone only two
revolutions, the Creation and the Deluge, and both by the immediate fiat
of the Almighty"; he insisted that the Creation took place in exactly
six days of ordinary time, each made up of "the evening and the
morning"; and he ended with a piece of that peculiar presumption so
familiar to the world, by calling on Cuvier and all other geologists to
"ask for the old paths and walk therein until they shall simplify their
system and reduce their numerous revolutions to the two events or epochs
only--the six days of Creation and the Deluge."(163) The geologists
showed no disposition to yield to this peremptory summons; on the
contrary, the President of the British Geological Society, and even so
eminent a churchman and geologist as Dean Buckland, soon acknowledged
that facts obliged them to give up the theory that the fossils of the
coal measures were deposited at the Deluge of Noah, and to deny that the
Deluge was universal.

(163