recent, not more than four or five thousand years before Christ; 2. That
the act of Creation occupied the space of six ordinary days; 3. That
the Deluge was universal, and that the animals which survived it were
preserved in an ark; 4. That Adam was created perfect in morality and
intelligence, that he fell, and that his descendants have shared in his
sin and his fall.

Of these points and others that might be mentioned there were two on
which ecclesiastical authority felt that it must insist. These were:
1. The recent date of Creation; for, the remoter that event, the more
urgent the necessity of vindicating the justice of God, who apparently
had left the majority of our race to its fate, and had reserved
salvation for the few who were living in the closing ages of the
world; 2. The perfect condition of Adam at his creation, since this was
necessary to the theory of the fall, and the plan of salvation.

Theological authorities were therefore constrained to look with disfavor
on any attempt to carry back the origin of the earth, to an epoch
indefinitely remote, and on the Mohammedan theory of the evolution
of man from lower forms, or his gradual development to his present
condition in the long lapse of time.

From the puerilities, absurdities, and contradictions of the foregoing
statement, we may gather how very unsatisfactory this so-called sacred
science was. And perhaps we may be brought to the conclusion to
which Dr. Shuckford, above quoted, was constrained to come, after his
wearisome and unavailing attempt to coordinate its various parts: "As to
the Fathers of the first ages of the Church, they were good men, but not
men of universal learning."

Sacred cosmogony regards the formation and modeling of the earth as the
direct act of God; it rejects the intervention of secondary causes in
those events.

Scientific cosmogony dates from the telescopic discovery made by
Cassini--an Italian astronomer, under whose care Louis XIV. placed the
Observatory of Paris--that the planet Jupiter is not a sphere, but
an oblate spheroid, flattened at the poles. Mechanical philosophy
demonstrated that such a figure is the necessary result of the rotation
of a yielding mass, and that the more rapid the rotation the greater the
flattening, or, what comes to the same thing, the greater the equatorial
bulging must be.

From considerations--purely of a mechanical kind--Newton had foreseen
that such likewise, though to a less stri