If the English theologians could not deliver heretics of the type of Buffon to the secular arm, they used all the means that denunciation supplied for delivering them over to Satan. Epithets were hurled at them; arguments drawn from a world accursed of God levelled at them. Saint Jerome, living in the fourth century, had pointed to the cracked and crumpled rocks as proof of divine anger: now Wesley and others saw in "sin the moral cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural cause might be," since before Adam's transgression, no convulsions or eruptions ruffled the calm of Paradise. Meanwhile, the probing of the earth's crust went on; revealing, amidst all the seeming confusion of distorted and metamorphosed rocks, an unvarying sequence of strata, and of the fossils imbedded in them. Different causes were assigned for the vast changes ranging over vast periods; one school believing in the action of volcanic and such like catastrophic agents; another in the action of aqueous agents, seeing, more consistently, in present operations the explanation of the causes of past changes. But there was no diversity of opinion concerning the extension of the earth's time-history and life-history to millions on millions of years. So, when this was to be no longer resisted, theologians sought some basis of compromise on such non-fundamental points as the six days of creation. It was suggested that perhaps these did not mean the seventh part of a week, but periods, or eons, or something equally elastic; and that if the Mosaic narrative was regarded as a poetic revelation of the general succession of phenomena, beginning with the development of order out of chaos, and ending with the creation of man, Scripture would be found to have anticipated or revealed what science confirms. It was impossible, so theologians argued, that there could be aught else than harmony between the divine works and the writings which were assumed to be of divine origin. Science could not contradict revelation, and whatever seemed contradictory was due to misapprehension either of the natural fact, or to misreading of the written word. But although the story of the creation might be clothed, as so exalted and moving a theme warranted, in poetic form, that of the fall of Adam and of the drowning of his descendants, eight persons excepted, must be taken in all its appalling literalness. Confirmation of the Deluge story was found in the fossil shells on high mountain tops; while as for the giants of antediluvian times, there were the huge bones in proof. Some of these relics of mastodon and mammoth were actually hung up in churches as evidence that "there were giants in those days"! Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire tells of one Henrion, who published a book in 1718 giving the height of Adam as one hundred and twenty-three feet nine inches, and of Eve as one hundred and eighteen feet nine inches, Noah being of rather less stature. But to parley with science is fatal to theology. Moreover,