" The motion was
carried unanimously and with applause, and the audience dispersed,
feeling that a great service had been rendered to orthodoxy.
_Sancta simplicitas!_
What this incident exhibited on a small scale has been seen
elsewhere with more distinguished actors and on a broader stage.
Scores of theologians, chief among whom of late, in zeal if not in
knowledge, has been Mr. Gladstone, have endeavoured to "reconcile"
the two accounts in Genesis with each other and with the truths
regarding the origin of the universe gained by astronomy, geology,
geography, physics, and chemistry. The result has been recently
stated by an eminent theologian, the Hulsean Professor of Divinity
at the University of Cambridge. He declares, "No attempt at
reconciling genesis with the exacting requirements of modern
sciences has ever been known to succeed without entailing a degree
of special pleading or forced interpretation to which, in such a
question, we should be wise to have no recourse."[19]
The revelations of another group of sciences, though sometimes
bitterly opposed and sometimes "reconciled" by theologians, have
finally set the whole question at rest.
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