he terrible dangers arising from the revelations
of geology, which make the earth older than the six thousand years
required by Archbishop Usher's interpretation of the Old Testament.
Nor was this feeling confined to ecclesiastics. Williams, a thoughtful
layman, declared that such researches led to infidelity and atheism, and
are "nothing less than to depose the Almighty Creator of the universe
from his office." The poet Cowper, one of the mildest of men, was also
roused by these dangers, and in his most elaborate poem wrote:

"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!"

John Howard summoned England to oppose "those scientific systems which
are calculated to tear up in the public mind every remaining attachment
to Christianity."

With this special attack upon geological science by means of the dogma
of Adam's fall, the more general attack by the literal interpretation
of the text was continued. The legendary husks and rinds of our sacred
books were insisted upon as equally precious and nutritious with the
great moral and religious truths which they envelop. Especially precious
were the six days--each "the evening and the morning"--and the exact
statements as to the time when each part of creation came into being. To
save these, the struggle became more and more desperate.

Difficult as it is to realize it now, within the memory of many now
living the battle was still raging most fiercely in England, and both
kinds of artillery usually brought against a new science were in full
play, and filling the civilized world with their roar.

About half a century since, the Rev. J. Mellor Brown, the Rev. Henry
Cole, and others were hurling at all geologists alike, and especially at
such Christian scholars as Dr. Buckland and Dean Conybeare and Pye Smith
and Prof. Sedgwick, the epithets of "infidel," "impugner of the sacred
record," and "assailant of the volume of God."(147)

(147) For these citations, see Lyell, Principles of Geology,
introduction.

The favourite weapon of the orthodox party was the charge that the
geologists were "attacking the truth of God." They declared geology
"not a subject of lawful inquiry," denouncing it as "a dark art," as
"dangerous and disreputable," as "a forbidden province," as
"infernal artillery," and as "an awful evasion of the