of his power which should fill us with astonishment."

The controlling minds in the Roman Church steadfastly held this view. In
the seventeenth century Bossuet threw his vast authority in its favour,
and in his Discourse on Universal History, which has remained the
foundation not only of theological but of general historical teaching
in France down to the present republic, we find him calling attention to
what he regards as the culminating act of creation, and asserting that,
literally, for the creation of man earth was used, and "the finger of
God applied to corruptible matter."

The Protestant world held this idea no less persistently. In the
seventeenth century Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical scholar of his time,
attempted to reconcile the two main legends in Genesis by saying that of
the "clean sort of beasts there were seven of every kind created, three
couples for breeding and the odd one for Adam's sacrifice on his fall,
which God foresaw"; and that of unclean beasts only one couple was
created.

So literal was this whole conception of the work of creation that in
these days it can scarcely be imagined. The Almighty was represented
in theological literature, in the pictured Bibles, and in works of art
generally, as a sort of enlarged and venerable Nuremberg toymaker. At
times the accounts in Genesis were illustrated with even more literal
exactness; thus, in connection with a well-known passage in the sacred
text, the Creator was shown as a tailor, seated, needle in hand,
diligently sewing together skins of beasts into coats for Adam and Eve.
Such representations presented no difficulties to the docile minds of
the Middle Ages and the Reformation period; and in the same spirit, when
the discovery of fossils began to provoke thought, these were declared
to be "models of his works approved or rejected by the great Artificer,"
"outlines of future creations," "sports of Nature," or "objects placed
in the strata to bring to naught human curiosity"; and this kind of
explanation lingered on until in our own time an eminent naturalist,
in his anxiety to save the literal account in Genesis, has urged that
Jehovah tilted and twisted the strata, scattered the fossils through
them, scratched the glacial furrows upon them, spread over them
the marks of erosion by water, and set Niagara pouring--all in an
instant--thus mystifying the world "for some inscrutable purpose