Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/826

806 and geology, even with Buffon behind it, had so little to say for itself that a hint from the Sorbonne was sufficient to quench what feeble light it had. The genesis of the world, therefore, was left to Moses, and the most mechanical theory of creation—a purely anthropomorphic thing and not really in the sacred page at all—was everywhere accepted.

Presently, as the sciences gathered volume and focused their rays on the past, a new version of creation was spelled out from earth and sea and stars. Accepted at first tentatively, even by men of science, it is not to be wondered at that theologians were for a time unwilling to give up the reading which had held the ground so long. They therefore adopted the policy which is always followed in similar circumstances—compromise and adjustment. Thus intervened the interregnum of the reconcilers, De Luc, Kurtz, Pye-Smith, Hugh Miller, Chalmers, and a hundred others whom we need not name. The man who speaks of the labors of these workers without respect has no acquaintance with the methods by which truth, or error, is ascertained. It was necessary that that mine should be worked, and worked out. Whatever fundamental error underlay it, it was done with reverence, with courage, often with learning and with eloquence, A whole literature sprang up around the reconstruction, and one good end was at least secured—science was ardently studied by the Church. But the failure of the new method was a foregone conclusion, and those who sailed on this shallow sea one by one ran aground. This was a moment of peril—one of those moments which always come when truth is in the making, and which, honestly accepted, lead to new departures in the direction where the true light is ultimately found. The wise among the harmonists accepted the situation, though some of them did not know where next to turn. But deliverance swiftly came, and from an unlooked-for quarter.

For meantime in Germany and England, in a wholly different department of theology, another science was at work. Apart from any questions of doctrinal detail, the young science of Biblical Criticism was beginning to inquire into the composition, meaning, method, and aims of the sacred books. It dealt with these books, in the first instance, simply as literature. Questions of age, authorship, and literary form were for the first time investigated by qualified experts. And the result of these labors—labors in the truest sense scientific—is that these sacred writings are now regarded by theology from a wholly changed stand-point. Now from this stand-point the problem of the reconciliation of Genesis with geology simply disappears. The probable scientific solution, the possibility or impossibility of a harmony—the very statement becomes an absurdity. The question, in fact, is as irrelevant as that of the senior wrangler who asked what Milton's "Paradise Lost" was meant to prove. This is of course the true method of dealing with old theories. Beaten in argument, they will surely