DEAN STANLEY'S SERMON.
In another part of the Monthly will be found a report, derived from the London Times, of a late discourse of the Dean of Westminster, which has made a profound sensation in England. It was delivered in Westminster Abbey, on a very impressive occasion, the funeral of a philosopher who had done more than any of his contemporaries to vindicate the sharply-contested doctrine of the government of the world by unvarying law rather than by providential interventions; and who, through evil report and much denunciation, had successfully asserted the vast antiquity of the earth and of the human race. To add to the solemnity of the occasion, if it were possible, the queen, the "Defender of the Faith," and the head of the English Church, caused to be laid on the coffin a memorial-wreath, as a mark of her esteem.
The guiding principle of Lyell's geological opinions was, that there never has been any variation in the laws and operations of Nature. This principle had long previously been established as the corner-stone of scientific astronomy, both in the prediction of future celestial events and in the verification of old observations. If an eclipse of the sun or moon be recorded by Greek, or Chaldean, or Chinese historians, the astronomer, without hesitation, resorts to retrospective calculations, and determines its exact date. Epochs in chronology have been settled in that way. Or, looking forward with prophetic eye, he declares that, at a specified moment, there shall be such and such a conjunction of the satellites of Jupiter, or, a century hence, a transit of Venus. Implicitly relying on forecasts of the kind, the position of the moon among the stars, and other phenomena of the celestial bodies, the mariner trustfully finds the place of his ship at sea, and determines his proper track. Nautical almanacs teach us what prophecy really ought to be.
Lyell transferred the principle from the heavens to the earth. He discovered that the modeling of her surface had been accomplished by forces that are now, and ever have been, in operation; that the summer sun and wintry frosts, that rains, and winds, and rivers, and glaciers, and the ocean, worked always as they work now. But this implied the lapse of enormous periods of time. The six days of the orthodox creation, and the 6,000 years of orthodox chronology, were absolutely inadequate.
Unwilling needlessly to give offense to those who were not emancipated from the legends of their childhood, who still linger among popular theological conceptions, and find difficulty in enlarging their field of view, he never offensively, but always modestly, put forth the consequences of his new facts, very often suggesting rather than proclaiming them. When the first discovery of the vast antiquity of the human race was made—a discovery in which he took a leading part—he scrupulously observed the same course, and in this set an example to those obstreperous theologians whose insolent denunciations of science are founded often on ignorance, and not infrequently on less excusable grounds. "We now know," says Dean Stanley, "perfectly well, from our increased insight into the nature and origin of the early biblical records, that they were not, and could not be, literal descriptions of the beginning of the world. It is now clear to all the students of the Bible that the first and second chapters of Genesis contain two narrations of the Creation side by side, differing from each other in almost every particular of time, and place, and order. It is now known that the vast epochs demanded by scientific observation are incompatible with the 6,000 years of the Mosaic chronology and the six days of the Mosaic creation."
We ask attention, in the interests of truth, to the grave import of these
