Project Gutenberg's Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4, by Various

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4

Author: Various

Release Date: July 13, 2006 [EBook #18820]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTINENTAL MONTHLY ***

Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Janet Blenkinship and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by Cornell University Digital Collections)

THE CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.

VOL. V.--APRIL, 1864.--No. IV.

SIR CHARLES LYELL ON THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.[1]

When Thomas Chalmers, sixty years ago, lecturing at St. Andrews,
ventured to announce his conviction that 'the writings of Moses do not
fix the antiquity of the globe,' he startled and alarmed, to no small
degree, the orthodoxy of the day. It was a statement far in advance of
the religious thinking of the time. That massive breadth and
comprehensiveness of intellect which soon placed him, _facile princeps_,
at the head of the clergy of Scotland, joined with a candor, and
ingenuous honesty, which made him admired and beloved by all, could not
fail to perceive, and would not hesitate to acknowledge, the force of
the evidence then for some time slowly but steadily and surely
accumulating from the investigations and discoveries of geological
science, which has forced back the origin of the earth to a vast and
undated antiquity. But nothing could have been farther from the
imagination of the great majority of evangelical, unscientific clergymen
of his day. They held that the writings of Moses fixed the antiquity of
the globe as surely as they fixed anything else. And it required no
little boldness in the lecturer to announce a doctrine which was likely
to raise about his ears the hue and cry of heresy. But fortunately for
the rising Boanerges of the Scottish pulpit, whatever questions might
arise in philology and criticism as to the meaning of the writings of
Moses, the evidence adduced in behalf of _the fact_ of the earth's
antiquity was of such a nature that it could