Such was the influence of this succession of great men that toward the
close of the last century the English opponents of geology on biblical
grounds seemed likely to sweep all before them. Cramping our whole
inheritance of sacred literature within the rules of a historical
compend, they showed the 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 testimony of revelation."(148)
(148) See Pye Smith, D. D., Geology and Scripture, pp. 156, 157, 168,
169.
This attempt to scare men from the science having failed, various other means were taken. To say nothing about England, it is humiliating to human nature to remember the annoyances, and even trials, to which the pettiest and narrowest of men subjected such Christian scholars in our own country as Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitchcock and Louis Agassiz.
But it is a duty and a pleasure to state here that one great Christian scholar did honour to religion and to himself by quietly accepting the claims of science and making the best of them, despite all these clamours. This man was Nicholas Wiseman, better known afterward as Cardinal Wiseman. The conduct of this pillar of the Roman Catholic Church contrasts admirably with that of timid Protestants, who were filling England with shrieks and denunciations.(149)