The foundations of the structure were laid with old thoughts thrown often into new and striking forms; but, as the superstructure arose more and more into view, while genius marked every part of it, features appeared which gave the rigidly orthodox serious misgivings.
From the old theories of direct personal action on the universe by the Almighty he broke utterly.

He dwelt on the action of law, rejected the continuous exercise of miraculous intervention, pointed out the fact that in the natural world there are "errors" and "bungles," and argued vigorously in favour of the origin and maintenance of the universe as a slow and gradual development of Nature in obedience to an inward principle.

The Balaks of seventeenth-century orthodoxy might well condemn this honest Balaam.
Toward the end of the next century a still more profound genius, Immanuel Kant, presented the nebular theory, giving it, in the light of Newton's great utterances, a consistency which it never before had; and about the same time Laplace gave it yet greater strength by mathematical reasonings of wonderful power and extent, thus implanting firmly in modern thought the idea that our own solar system and others--suns, planets, satellites, and their various movements, distances, and magnitudes--necessarily result from the obedience of nebulous masses to natural laws.
Throughout the theological world there was an outcry at once against "atheism," and war raged fiercely.

Herschel and others pointed out many nebulous patches apparently gaseous.

They showed by physical and mathematical demonstrations that the hypothesis accounted for the great body of facts, and, despite clamour, were gaining ground, when the improved telescopes resolved some of the patches of nebulous matter into multitudes of stars.