Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/825

Rh unusual treatment. Any visionary is taken, and that notoriously by men of science, as the representative of the system. And it is time for theology to be relieved of the irresponsible favors of a hundred sciolists, whose guerrilla warfare has so long alienated thinking men in all departments of knowledge. That there is a "science of theology" Mr. Huxley himself admits. It has exponents in Britain and Germany as well-equipped in learning, in sobriety, in balance of mind, and in the possession of the scientific spirit, as the best of the interpreters of Nature. When these men speak of science, it is with respectful reliance upon the best and most recent authorities. They complain that when science speaks of them it accepts positions and statements from any quarter, from books which have been for years or centuries outgrown; or from popular teachers whom scientific theology unweariedly repudiates. To theological science the whole underlying theory of the reconcilers is as exploded as Bathybius. And Mr. Huxley's interference, however much they welcome it in the interest of popular theology, is to them the amusing performance of a layman, the value of which to scientific theology is about the same as would be a refutation of the Ptolemaic astronomy to modern physics. Of course, in commentaries written by experts for popular uses, the condemnatory evidence from natural science is sometimes formally cited in stating the case against the reconcilers generally. From one of the most recent, as well as most able, of these we quote the following passage, in which Mr. Huxley is anticipated in so many words. It is here seen, not only that theology "knew all this before," but how completely it has abandoned the position against which Mr. Huxley's counter-statements are directed: "This narrative is not careful to follow the actual order in which life appeared on the globe: it affirms, e. g., that fruit-trees existed before the sun was made; science can tell us of no such vegetation. It tells us that the birds were created in the fifth day, the reptiles in the sixth; Nature herself tells a different tale, and assures us that creeping things appeared before the flying fowl. But the most convincing proof of the regardlessness of scientific accuracy shown by this writer is found in the fact that in the second chapter he gives a different account from that which he has given in the first, and an account irreconcilable with physical facts. . . . He represents the creation of man as preceding the creation of the lower animals—an order which both the first chapter and physical science assure us was not the actual order observed. . . . It seems to me, therefore, a mistaken and dangerous attempt which is often made to reconcile the account of physical facts given here with that given in Nature herself. These accounts disagree in the date or distance from the present time to which the work of creation is assigned, in the length of time which the preparation of the world for man is said to have occupied, and in the order in which life is introduced into the world."—"Genesis," by Marcus Dods, D. D. Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1882.

This, however, to some minds may have to be made plain, and we may briefly devote ourselves to a statement of the case.

The progress of opinion on this whole subject is marked by three phases: First, until the present century the first chapter of Genesis was accepted as a veritable cosmogony. This, in the circumstances, was inevitable. The hypothesis of Laplace was not yet in the field; paleontology, Fracastoro notwithstanding, had produced nothing except what every one knew was the remains of the Noachian Deluge;