Gladstone placed what he found in the text of Genesis: "A grand
fourfold division" of animated Nature "set forth in an orderly
succession of times." And he arranged this order and succession
of creation as follows: "First, the water population;
secondly, the air population; thirdly, the land population of
animals; fourthly, the land population consummated in man."
His next step was to slide in upon this basis the apparently
harmless proposition that this division and sequence "is
understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural
science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and
established fact."
Finally, upon these foundations he proceeded to build an
argument out of the coincidences thus secured between the record
in the Hebrew sacred books and the truths revealed by science as
regards this order and sequence, and he easily arrived at the
desired conclusion with which he crowned the whole structure,
namely, as regards the writer of Genesis, that "his knowledge
was divine.
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