Thus, from the Assyrian researches as well as from other sources,
it has come to be acknowledged by the most eminent scholars at the
leading seats of Christian learning that the accounts of creation
with which for nearly two thousand years all scientific discoveries
have had to be "reconciled"--the accounts which blocked the way of
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and Laplace--were simply
transcribed or evolved from a mass of myths and legends largely
derived by the Hebrews from their ancient relations with Chaldea,
rewrought in a monotheistic sense, imperfectly welded together, and then
thrown into poetic forms in the sacred books which we have inherited.
On one hand, then, we have the various groups of men devoted to the
physical sciences all converging toward the proofs that the
universe, as we at present know it, is the result of an
evolutionary process--that is, of the gradual working of physical
laws upon an early condition of matter; on the other hand, we have
other great groups of men devoted to historical, philological, and
archaeological science whose researches all converge toward the
conclusion that our sacred accounts of creation were the result of
an evolution from an early chaos of rude opinion.
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