The wiser theologians waited; the unwise indulged in exhortations to "root out the wicked heart of unbelief," in denunciation of "science falsely so called," and in frantic declarations that "the Bible is true"-- by which they meant that the limited understanding of it which they had happened to inherit is true.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole theological theory of creation--though still preached everywhere as a matter of form--was clearly seen by all thinking men to be hopelessly lost: such strong men as Cardinal Wiseman in the Roman Church, Dean Buckland in the Anglican, and Hugh Miller in the Scottish Church, made heroic efforts to save something from it, but all to no purpose.

That sturdy Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon honesty, which is the best legacy of the Middle Ages to Christendom, asserted itself in the old strongholds of theological thought, the universities.

Neither the powerful logic of Bishop Butler nor the nimble reasoning of Archdeacon Paley availed.

Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the centre, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man.

They had developed a system of a very different sort, and this we shall next consider.( 18) (18) For Acosta, see his Historia Natural y moral de las Indias, Seville, 1590--the quaint English translation is of London, 1604; for Abraham Milius, see his De Origine Animalium et Migratione Popularum, Geneva, 1667; also Kosmos, 1877, H.I, S.36; for Linnaeus's declaration regarding species, see the Philosophia Botanica, 99, 157; for Calmet and Linnaeus, see Zoeckler, vol.ii, p.237.As to the enormously increasing numbers of species in zoology and botany, see President D.S.