Petersburg with lumps of
flesh bearing the marks of wolves' teeth--all these, with all
gaps and imperfections, he urged mankind to believe came into
being in an instant. The preface of the work is especially
touching, and it ends with the prayer that science and
Scripture may be reconciled by his theory, and "that the God of
truth will deign so to use it, and if he do, to him be all the
glory."[242] At the close of the whole book Gosse declared: "The
field is left clear and undisputed for the one witness on the
opposite side, whose testimony is as follows: `In six days
Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them
is.'" This quotation he placed in capital letters, as the final
refutation of all that the science of geology had built.
In other parts of Europe desperate attempts were made even later
to save the letter of our sacred books by the revival of a
theory in some respects more striking. To shape this theory to
recent needs, vague reminiscences of a text in Job regarding
fire beneath the earth, and vague conceptions of speculations
made by Humboldt and Laplace, were mingled with Jewish
tradition.
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