British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871Various
History
British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871
Various
English periodicals
It is obviously the principle or method of this scheme of
reconciliation between Genesis and geology to look for points in the
Mosaic narrative which correspond with the facts revealed by geology.
The words in the Scriptural account are few; are they so express,
vivid, and characteristic that they epitomise, as in a Divine
telegram, the geological history of millions of years? A consummate
artist looks upon a face and throws a few strokes, quick as
lightning, upon his canvas. The countenance seems to live. Revealings
of character, which we might have required years to trace, flash on us
from the eye, and chronicles of passion are written in a speck of
crimson on the lip. The portrait is only a sketch; weeks or months
might be spent in elaborating its colour, and perfecting its gradation
of light and shade; but not less on this account, does it accurately
correspond with the original, and show the man to those who knew him.
The advocates of the Age theory of Mosaic geology maintain that, few
as are the touches in the pictured history of the world in the first
chapter of Genesis, the geologist can recognise them as unmistakeably
true to the facts of the past. The correspondence alleged to exist has
been illustrated in yet another fashion. Look upon a mountainous
horizon, in the far distance, on a clear day, and you perceive a
delicate film of blue or pearly grey, relieved against the sky. The
outline of that film, faint though it be, is, for every kind of
mountain range, more or less characteristic. The horizon line of the
primaries will be serrated, peaked, and jagged. The horizon line of
the metamorphic hills, though fantastic, will have more of curve and
undulation. The horizon of the tertiaries will be in long sweeps, and
tenderly modulated, far-stretching lines. Those minute jags and points
of the primaries are dizzy precipices and towering peaks. The glacier
is creeping on under that filmy blue; the avalanche is thundering in
that intense silence. Rivers that will channel continents and separate
nation from nation, bound along in foaming cataracts, where you
perceive only that the tender amethyst of the sky has taken a deeper
tinge. That undulating line of the crystalline hills tells of broad,
dreary moors, dark, sullen streams, sparse fields of stunted corn.
That sweeping, melting, waving line of the tertiaries tells of stately
forest and gardened plain, of lordly mansions and bustling villages.
The Mosaic record, as interpreted by the advocates of the Age theory,
gives the _horizon lines_ of successive geological eras. Its
descriptions, they maintain, are correct, viewed as horizon lines.
They convey the largest amount of knowledge concerning the several
periods which could possibly be conveyed under the given conditions.
Such is the method or logic of the Age theory of Mosaic geology; and
it is manifest that, whatever may be its scientific value, it is no
more to be refuted by the mention of geological facts which the Mosaic
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