compelled, like the Ptolemaic astronomy before it, to interpolate some very singular epicycles in its hypothesis. And while all these miraculous interpositions were taking place in order to keep the organic kingdom in a going condition, the Creator was not for a moment allowed by the orthodox geologists to interfere in a similar manner in their own particular domain of the inorganic processes. Their attitude was like that of the French authorities who, a century earlier, suppressed the "miraculous cures" of the Jansenist abbé at the church of St. Médard in Paris, and, in a famous lampoon, were represented as posting the following proclamation on the church doors:
De par le roi, défense a Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu.[1]
So, in the ruling science of 1830-60, the only officially licensed place (outside of Palestine) in which miracles might be performed by the Creator was the domain of organic phenomena. Here, as a measure of compensation, the number of miracles scientifically sanctioned had been materially increased.[2]
It was a further consequence of these changes in the scientific situation that the men who, in the name of orthodoxy but under the mantle of science, attacked the pioneers of evolutionism, themselves taught doctrines no less completely at variance with the usual—and with any natural—interpretation of Scripture. Accommodations and forced interpretations had, indeed, been devised in abundance, to "harmonize" the new science with theology; but if these could be invented to justify geology, others could as well be, as they since have been, invented to justify evolutionary biology. Any consistent scriptural believer could make out as good a case of heresy against Cuvier, Owen, Sedgwick, Agassiz, or Hugh Miller, as against the author of the "Vestiges" or Herbert Spencer. These writers, therefore, occupied a position of a strange and rather damaging incongruity, as Chambers did not fail to point out:
