While all those writers whose opinions I have cited, feel it more or less incumbent on them to seek a reconciliation between the words of Inspiration and the phenomena of Geology, there are not a few who decline the task altogether. Some eminent in science seem, by their entire avoidance of the question, to allow judgment to go by default. Others more boldly deny that the two can be accommodated. Mr. Babbage appears to think the archaic Hebrew so insuperably obscure a language, that no confidence can be put in our constructions of its statements; an opinion which, if true, would make the revelation of God to us, with all its glorious types, and promises, and prophecies, more dubious than the readings of Egyptian papyri, or the decipherment of Assyrian cuneiforms. On this notion, however, Dr. Pye Smith observes:--"All competent scholars, of whatever opinions and parties they may be in other respects, will agree to reject any imputation of uncertainty with respect to the means of ascertaining the sense of the language." Others find no difficulty in understanding the Hebrew, but in believing it. Professor Baden Powell sees in the plain, unvarnished narrative of the Holy Spirit, only myth and poetry: it "was not intended for an historical narrative" at all; and he thinks (I hope incorrectly), that there is a pretty general agreement with his views. "Most rational persons," he says, "now acknowledge the failure of the various attempts to reconcile the difficulty [between Geology and Scripture] by any kind of verbal interpretation; they have learnt to see that the 'six days of thousands of years' have, after all, no more correspondence with anything in Geology than with any sane interpretation of the text. And that the 'immense period at the beginning,' followed by a recent literal great catastrophe, and final reconstruction in a week, is, if possible, more strangely at variance with science, Scripture, and common sense. Yet while they [viz. the 'rational persons,'] thus view the labours of the Bible-geologists as fruitless attempts, they often do not see--," &c. &c.[23] Of course this gives up the authority of Scripture altogether; and, consistently enough, the author is severe upon the prevalent "indiscriminate and unthinking Bibliolatry." "If in any instance the letter of the narrative or form of expression may be found _irreconcilably at variance with physical truth_,[24] we may allow, to those who prefer it, the alternative of understanding them either as religious truths, represented under sensible images, or as descriptions of events according to the preconceptions of the writers, or the traditions of the age."