"explaining away"
troublesome realities. So striking was his power in this last respect,
that a humorous London chronicler once advised a bigamist, as his only
hope, to induce Mr. Gladstone to explain away one of his wives.

At the basis of this theologico-geological structure Mr. Gladstone
placed what he found in the text of Genesis: "A grand fourfold division"
of animated Nature "set forth in an orderly succession of times." And he
arranged this order and succession of creation as follows: "First,
the water population; secondly, the air population; thirdly, the land
population of animals; fourthly, the land population consummated in
man."

His next step was to slide in upon this basis the apparently harmless
proposition that this division and sequence "is understood to have been
so affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a
demonstrated conclusion and established fact."

Finally, upon these foundations he proceeded to build an argument out
of the coincidences thus secured between the record in the Hebrew sacred
books and the truths revealed by science as regards this order and
sequence, and he easily arrived at the desired conclusion with which he
crowned the whole structure, namely, as regards the writer of Genesis,
that "his knowledge was divine."(180)

(180) See Mr. Gladstone's Dawn of Creation and Worship, a reply to Dr.
Reville, in the Nineteenth Century for November, 1885.

Such was the skeleton of the structure; it was abundantly decorated with
the rhetoric in which Mr. Gladstone is so skilful an artificer, and
it towered above "the average man" as a structure beautiful and
invincible--like some Chinese fortress in the nineteenth century, faced
with porcelain and defended with crossbows.

Its strength was soon seen to be unreal. In an essay admirable in its
temper, overwhelming in its facts, and absolutely convincing in its
argument, Prof. Huxley, late President of the Royal Society, and
doubtless the most eminent contemporary authority on the scientific
questions concerned, took up the matter.

Mr. Gladstone's first proposition, that the sacred writings give us a
great "fourfold division" created "in an orderly succession of times,"
Prof. Huxley did not presume to gainsay.

As to Mr. Gladstone's second proposition, that "this great fourfold
division... created in an orderly succession of times... has been so
affirmed in our own time by natural science that it may be ta