The heavens declare the glory of God, and the better the telescope ...

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the better the telescope the greater the glory.

The geologists, attacking one of the prime documents of the faith, the Mosaic cosmogony, were more difficult to assimilate or evade. One of the earliest of them had taken the precaution of inviting his theological colleague to sit through his lectures, as censor and chaperone in one; and, on the whole, the religious world seems, in the forties, to have been divided into those who did not know what the geologists were saying and those who did not mind.

A far more serious onslaught was preparing from two quarters, abroad and at home. English divinity was not equipped to meet-for its comfort, it was hardly capable of understanding-the new critical methods of the Germans: it is a singular fact that England could not, before Lightfoot, show one scholar in the field of Biblical learning able and willing to match the scholars of Germany.

Thirlwall, who good judges declared to be

the ablest living Englishman, was

silent, and what was passing in that marmoreal intellect remained a secret.

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