On the
Continent the two great champions of the Church in this field
were De Maistre and De Bonald; but the two attempts which may be
especially recalled as the most influential among
English-speaking peoples were those of Whately, Archbishop of
Dublin, and the Duke of Argyll.
First in the combat against these new deductions of science was
Whately. He was a strong man, whose breadth of thought and
liberality in practice deserve all honour; but these very
qualities drew upon him the distrust of his orthodox brethren;
and, while his writings were powerful in the first half of the
present century to break down many bulwarks of unreason, he
seems to have been constantly in fear of losing touch with the
Church, and therefore to have promptly attacked some scientific
reasonings, which, had he been a layman, not holding a brief for
the Church, he would probably have studied with more care and
less prejudice. He was not slow to see the deeper significance
of archaeology and ethnology in their relations to the
theological conception of "the Fall," and he set the battle in
array against them.
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