s volumes pleading
for a period somewhat longer than that generally allowed, and
insisting that the received Hebrew text was grossly vitiated as
regards chronology, even this poor favour was refused them; the mass of
believers found it more comfortable to hold fast the faith committed to
them by Usher, and it remained settled that man was created about four
thousand years before our era.

To those who wished even greater precision, Dr. John Lightfoot,
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical
scholar of his time, gave his famous demonstration from our sacred books
that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created together,
in the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that "this work took
place and man was created by the Trinity on the twenty-third of October,
4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning."

This tide of theological reasoning rolled on through the eighteenth
century, swollen by the biblical researches of leading commentators,
Catholic and Protestant, until it came in much majesty and force into
our own nineteenth century. At the very beginning of the century it
gained new strength from various great men in the Church, among whom may
be especially named Dr. Adam Clarke, who declared that, "to preclude the
possibility of a mistake, the unerring Spirit of God directed Moses in
the selection of his facts and the ascertaining of his dates."

All opposition to the received view seemed broken down, and as late as
1835--indeed, as late as 1850--came an announcement in the work of one
of the most eminent Egyptologists, Sir J. G. Wilkinson, to the
effect that he had modified the results he had obtained from Egyptian
monuments, in order that his chronology might not interfere with the
received date of the Deluge of Noah.(183)

(183) For Lightfoot, see his Prolegomena relating to the age of the
world at the birth of Christ; see also in the edition of his works,
London, 1822, vol. 4, pp. 64, 112. For Scaliger, see in the De
Emendatione Temporum, 1583; also Mark Pattison, Essays, Oxford, 1889,
vol. i, pp. 162 et seq. For Raleigh's misgivings, see his History of the
World, London, 1614, p. 227, book ii of part i, section 7 of chapter
i; also Clinton's Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 293. For Usher, see
his Annales Vet. et Nov. Test., London, 1650. For Pearson, see his
Exposition of the Creed, sixth edition, London, 1692, pp. 59 et seq.
For Marsham, see his Chronicus Ca