The Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4

Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4, by
Various

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Title: Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4
Author: Various
Release Date: July 13, 2006 [EBook #18820]
Language: English
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THE CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO
LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.
VOL. V.--APRIL, 1864.--No. IV.

SIR CHARLES LYELL ON THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.[1]
When Thomas Chalmers, sixty years ago, lecturing at St. Andrews,
ventured to announce his conviction that 'the writings of Moses do not
fix the antiquity of the globe,' he startled and alarmed, to no small
degree, the orthodoxy of the day. It was a statement far in advance of
the religious thinking of the time. That massive breadth and
comprehensiveness of intellect which soon placed him, facile princeps,
at the head of the clergy of Scotland, joined with a candor, and
ingenuous honesty, which made him admired and beloved by all, could
not fail to perceive, and would not hesitate to acknowledge, the force of
the evidence then for some time slowly but steadily and surely
accumulating from the investigations and discoveries of geological
science, which has forced back the origin of the earth to a vast and
undated antiquity. But nothing could have been farther from the
imagination of the great majority of evangelical, unscientific clergymen
of his day. They held that the writings of Moses fixed the antiquity of
the globe as surely as they fixed anything else. And it required no little
boldness in the lecturer to announce a doctrine which was likely to
raise about his ears the hue and cry of heresy. But fortunately for the
rising Boanerges of the Scottish pulpit, whatever questions might arise
in philology and criticism as to the meaning of the writings of Moses,
the evidence adduced in behalf of the fact of the earth's antiquity was of
such a nature that it could not be resisted, and he not only escaped a
prosecution for heresy, but lived to see the doctrine he had broached
almost universally accepted by the religious world.
If now some divine of acknowledged power and position in any branch
of the Christian Church were to put forth the statement that 'the
writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of man,' he would startle the

ear of orthodoxy quite as much, but no more than did Chalmers in the
early years of the present century. And if he would fare more hardly
than the Scottish divine, and fall under the ban of church censure,
which is not unlikely, it would be because the evidence for the fact is
still inchoate and resistible by the force of established opinion. But it is
quite within the range of possible things that before the close of the
present century two things may happen: first, that the evidence for a
high antiquity of the human race may accumulate to such an extent as
to carry with it involuntarily the consent of mankind; and second, that
the sacred writings may be found to adjust themselves as easily to this
new finding in the sphere of induction, as they have already done, in
the general mind of the Church, to the doctrine of the great age of the
earth. The two statements are indeed very much akin in several respects.
They both traverse the accepted meaning of the sacred writings at the
time of their announcement. Both are considered, when first promulged,
as irreconcilable with the plain teaching and consequent inspiration of
the Scriptures. Both rest solely, as to their evidence, in the sphere of
inductive science, and are determinable wholly by the finding of facts
accumulated and compared by the processes of inductive reasoning.
And both, if thus established, are destined to be accepted by the general
mind of the age, without actual harm to the real interests of civilization
and religion. No fact, which is a fact and not an illusion, can do harm to
any of the vital interests of mankind. No truth can stand in hopeless
antagonism to any other truth. To suppose otherwise would be to
resolve the moral government of God into a hopeless enigma, or
enthrone a perpetual and hostile dualism, resigning the universe to the
rival and contending sway of Ormuzd and Ahriman.
Before proceeding to the merits of