I do not hesitate, then, to affirm, that human science, in its different and special objects,--whether astronomy, geology, geography, chronology, physics, historical criticism,--is as foreign to the object as it is to the source of the sacred Volumes. In the sciences we have the domain of the mind of man left to itself, and to itself alone. They are the fruits, assiduously cultivated and slowly acquired by the laborious exertions of the human intellect during a succession of ages. If, then, you meet, in Scriptural texts, not treating of acts declared miraculous, terms and assertions apparently repugnant to facts recognised as truths in these different sciences, feel no disquietude. It is not there that God has set up His divine torch; it is not there that God has spoken. The language is the language of the men of the different epochs, men who speak according to the measure of their knowledge or of their ignorance, the language which they are obliged to speak in order to be understood by their contemporaries. I feel surprised that men should require to be told this, so simple, so clear is it. {124} In matters of religion and of morality there have always existed, and in every place there have existed, spontaneous instincts, aspirations, and ideas common to all men, which lead them to employ a similar language,--a language comprehended and received by all who hear it, whatever in other respects may be their inequality in attainments and civilization; whereas, in matters purely scientific we find nothing at all like this; men in the mass see and speak of these, not as they are to the eye of science, but according to their appearances, and so men comprehend or do not comprehend them, hear them or do not hear them, according to the degree of scientific knowledge or of ignorance prevalent at the time and place at which they live. What would the Hebrews in the Desert, or the Jews about the person of Christ, or the savages of the Pacific have said to his missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which turns round the sun, that its shape is that of a spheroid, that it is habitable and inhabited at opposite points of its circumference? {125} What is more natural, what more inevitable, than that the language of the Scriptures should agree with the scientific imperfection of men upon all these matters, even where that language is full of divine inspiration as to the religious or moral law of humanity?