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MODERN PHILOSOPHERS ON THE PROBABLE AGE OF THE WORLD.*

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amassed for forming an opinion on the subject. Before the end of the last century geology hardly existed as a science; an inquiry as to the age of the world. would have been unhesitatingly answered by the assertion, that the earth was created in six days, 4004 years before the birth of Christ. Though further research has shown that the sacred text bears no such interpretation, those copies of the Authorised Version of the Bible, which are enriched with notes and marginal references, still keep up the formal assertion.

A story is told in Brydone's 'Tour in Sicily' which will serve to recall the state of public opinion on the subject of chronology at the end of the last century. The Canonico Recupero, a Sicilian priest, was Brydone's guide when he explored Mount Etna. Recupero (who afterwards wrote a history of his native mountain) told the traveller that he had

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been vastly embarrassed by the discovery that many strata of lava, each covered deeply with earth, overlaid each other on the mountain-side. 'Moses,' said he, 'hangs like a dead weight upon me, for I have not the conscience to make the mountain so young as that prophet makes the world.' The Bishop,' adds Brydone, who is strenuously orthodox -for it is an excellent see— -has warned him to be on his guard, and not to pretend to be a better historian than Moses.' The worthy Bishop of Catania was not alone in his views. Nearer home it was the generally received opinion that to doubt the literal accuracy of the chronology supposed to be involved in the Mosaic account was a grave impiety. The poet Cowper, mildest of men, became fiercely satirical under the provocation of geology. Though few people read The Task' nowadays, the lines will no doubt be remembered,

'Some drill and bore

The solid earth, and from the strata there
Extract a register by which we learn
That He who made it, and revealed its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age.'

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scope to their imagination. In proportion as the six thousand years formerly assigned as the age of created matter was too small, the reaction of opinion claimed for it an antiquity which workers in other branches of physics feel it impossible to concede; and at the present moment there is among scientific men a revolt against the extreme views of the geologists. The latter affirmed with truth, that creation in six solar days was demonstrably untrue, not because God could not create the world at a stroke, but because the world bears ample evidence that He did not so exercise His power. It was inconsistent alike with reasoning from probability or the investigation of facts. In all the operations of Nature as they unfolded themselves before our eyes God worked by law-by the process of slow development-by means beautifully simple, and involving no violence and no haste, yet irresistible. There was abundant evidence that these causes had been at work for thousands-perhaps millionsof years before the date of the supposed miracle. Beginning from the present age, the time was calculated that each development would require, till the united ages of all amounted to the enormous sum of three hundred millions of years.

Fortunately, it is no longer considered impious to try and extract a register' from the earth. Those who were inclined to be afraid that the Mosaic record would be discredited have long Modern English geology holds that since laid aside their fears. It has been all geological changes have been effected found that, far from being upset by by agents now in operation, and that scientific inquiry, the Bible account of those agents have been working silently the Creation accords in a very remarkable at the same rate in all past time; that manner with modern discoveries; and the great changes of the earth's crust long before Max Müller put the feeling were produced, not by great convulsions into words, it was felt that only by and cataclysms of Nature, but by the treating our own sacred books with ordinary agencies of rain, snow, frost, neither more nor less mercy than the ice, and chemical action. It teaches sacred books of other nations, they that the rocky face of our globe has could retain their position and influence.' been carved into hill and dale, and ultiWhen once the plunge was made, it mately worn down to the sea-level, not was soon found, as might have been ex- only once or twice, but many times over pected, that the fault was not in the during past ages: that the principal oracle, but in the interpretation; and it strata of the rocks-hundreds, and even is very remarkable in how many and thousands, of feet thick-have been unexpected directions the testimony of formed on ocean-floor-beds by the slow Moses has been strengthened by the decay of marine creatures and matter criticism, not always friendly, which it held in solution by the waves: that has received. Of course, when the every part of the earth has been many anciently-accepted date of the Creation times submerged, and has again been was proved to be incorrect, and chronol- lifted into the air. This slow rising ogy was, as it were, thrown open to the and sinking of the ground is an axipublic, there was nothing to prevent om of the geological creed. We are philosophers from allowing the freest told that it is now going on, and that

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