ve to show his ideas: "By the fructifying brooding of
the Divine Spirit on the waters of the deep, creative forces began to
stir; the devils who inhabited the primeval darkness and considered it
their own abode saw that they were to be driven from their possessions,
or at least that their place of habitation was to be contracted, and
they therefore tried to frustrate God's plan of creation and exert all
that remained to them of might and power to hinder or at least to mar
the new creation." So came into being "the horrible and destructive
monsters, these caricatures and distortions of creation," of which
we have fossil remains. Dr. Westermeyer goes on to insist that "whole
generations called into existence by God succumbed to the corruption of
the devil, and for that reason had to be destroyed"; and that "in the
work of the six days God caused the devil to feel his power in all
earnest, and made Satan's enterprise appear miserable and vain."(178)

(178) See Shields's Final Philosophy, pp. 340 et seq., and Reusch's
Nature and the Bible (English translation, 1886), vol. i, pp. 318-320.

Such was the last important assault upon the strongholds of geological
science in Germany; and, in view of this and others of the same kind, it
is little to be wondered at that when, in 1870, Johann Silberschlag made
an attempt to again base geology upon the Deluge of Noah, he found such
difficulties that, in a touching passage, he expressed a desire to get
back to the theory that fossils were "sports of Nature."(179)

(179) See Reusch, vol. i, p. 264.

But the most noted among efforts to keep geology well within the
letter of Scripture is of still more recent date. In the year 1885 Mr.
Gladstone found time, amid all his labours and cares as the greatest
parliamentary leader in England, to take the field in the struggle for
the letter of Genesis against geology.

On the face of it his effort seemed Quixotic, for he confessed at
the outset that in science he was "utterly destitute of that kind of
knowledge which carries authority," and his argument soon showed that
this confession was entirely true.

But he had some other qualities of which much might be expected: great
skill in phrase-making, great shrewdness in adapting the meanings of
single words to conflicting necessities in discussion, wonderful power
in erecting showy structures of argument upon the smallest basis
of fact, and a facility almost preternatural in