xhibited the wrath of God against sin. Tertullian asserted that fossils
resulted from the flood of Noah. A scientific explanation of fossil
remains was attempted by De Clave, Bitaud, and De Villon in the
seventeenth century. The theological faculty of Paris protested against
the scientific doctrine as unscriptural, destroyed their treatises, and
banished their authors from Paris.

In the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon, in France, produced a
thesis attempting to state simple geological truths. The theological
faculty of the Sorbonne dismissed him from his high position and forced
him to print a recantation stating, "I declare that I had no intention
to contradict the text of the Scripture; that I believe most firmly all
therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter
of fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the
earth and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of
Moses!"

The doctrine which Buffon abandoned is now as firmly established as that
of the earth's rotation upon its axis. Yet, in his day, it was heatedly
asserted by ecclesiastics that the scientific doctrine that fossils
represent animals which died before Adam contradicts the theological
doctrine of Adam's fall, and the statement that death entered the world
by sin--and this objection was further strengthened when the
ecclesiastics became cognizant that geology had proved that the earth
was vastly older than the 6000 years determined by Archbishop Ussher's
interpretation of the Old Testament.

About 1580, there was published by authority of Pope Gregory XIII, the
Roman Martyrology, revised in 1640 under Pope Urban VIII, which declared
that the creation of man took place 5199 years before Christ. In 1650,
Archbishop Ussher announced after careful study that man was created
4004 years before the Christian era. But, this proving too vague, Dr.
John Lightfoot, vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, assured
the world that, "Heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were
created together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water ... and
this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on the 23d of
October, 4004 B.C. at nine o'clock in the morning."

When the Egyptologists, Assyriologists, archeologists, and
anthropologists showed that man had reached a far advanced stage of
civilization long before the 6000 years given as the age of the earth,
their efforts were rid