y of holding closely to the so-called Mosaic
account of creation. As late as the middle of the eighteenth century,
when Buffon attempted to state simple geological truths, the theological
faculty of the Sorbonne forced him to make and to publish a most
ignominious recantation which ended with these words: "I abandon
everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and
generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses."

Theologians, having thus settled the manner of the creation, the matter
used in it, and the time required for it, now exerted themselves to fix
its DATE.

The long series of efforts by the greatest minds in the Church, from
Eusebius to Archbishop Usher, to settle this point are presented in
another chapter. Suffice it here that the general conclusion arrived
at by an overwhelming majority of the most competent students of the
biblical accounts was that the date of creation was, in round numbers,
four thousand years before our era; and in the seventeenth century, in
his great work, Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University
of Cambridge, and one of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his time,
declared, as the result of his most profound and exhaustive study of
the Scriptures, that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were
created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water,"
and that "this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on
October 23, 4004 B. C., at nine o'clock in the morning."

Here was, indeed, a triumph of Lactantius's method, the result of
hundreds of years of biblical study and theological thought since Bede
in the eighth century, and Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth, had
declared that creation must have taken place in the spring. Yet, alas!
within two centuries after Lightfoot's great biblical demonstration as
to the exact hour of creation, it was discovered that at that hour
an exceedingly cultivated people, enjoying all the fruits of a highly
developed civilization, had long been swarming in the great cities of
Egypt, and that other nations hardly less advanced had at that time
reached a high development in Asia.(6)

(6) For Luther, see his Commentary on Genesis, 1545, introduction,
and his comments on chap. i, verse 12; the quotations from Luther's
commentary are taken mainly from the translation by Henry Cole, D.D.,
Edinburgh, 1858; for Melanchthon, see Loci Theologici, in Melanchthon,
Opera, ed. Bre