Here and there, in bygone days, a sceptical voice had been raised in denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Such was that of La Peyrère who, in 1655, published an instalment of a work in which he anticipated what is nowadays accepted, but what then was akin to blasphemy to utter. For not only does he doubt whether Moses had any hand in the writings attributed to him: he rejects the orthodox view of suffering and death as the penalties of Adam's disobedience; and gives rationalistic interpretation of the appearance of the star of Bethlehem, and of the darkness at the Crucifixion. But La Peyrère became a Roman Catholic, and, of course, recanted his opinions. Then, nearer the time when controversy on the historical character of the Scriptures was becoming active, one Astruc, a French physician, suggested, in a work published in 1753, that Moses may have used older materials in his compilation of the earlier parts of the Pentateuch. But, practically, the five books included under that name, were believed to have been written by Moses under divine authority. The statement in Genesis that God made the universe and its contents, both living and non-living, in six days of twenty-four hours each, was explicit. Thus interpreted, as their plain meaning warranted, Archbishop Usher made his famous calculation as to the time elapsing between the creation and the birth of Christ. Dr. White, in his important Warfare of Science with Theology, gives an amusing example of the application of Usher's method in detail. A seventeenth century divine, Dr. Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, computed that "man was created by the Trinity on 23d October, 4004 B. C., at nine o'clock in the morning." The same theologian, who, by the way, was a very eminent Hebrew scholar, following the interpretation of the great Fathers of the Church, "declared, as the result of profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures, that 'heaven and earth, centre and circumference, and clouds full of water, were created all together, in the same instant.'"