What retarded it was the circumstance that God has thought fit to express many texts of Scripture in words which have every appearance of denying the earth's motion.

But it is God who did this, not the Church; and, moreover, since he saw fit so to act as to retard the progress of scientific truth, it would be little to her discredit, even if it were true, that she had followed his example." This argument, like Mr.Gosse's famous attempt to reconcile geology to Genesis--by supposing that for some inscrutable purpose God deliberately deceived the thinking world by giving to the earth all the appearances of development through long periods of time, while really creating it in six days, each of an evening and a morning--seems only to have awakened the amazed pity of thinking men.

This, like the argument of Newman, was a last desperate effort of Anglican and Roman divines to save something from the wreckage of dogmatic theology.( 85) (85) For the quotation from Newman, see his Sermons on the Theory of Religious Belief, sermon xiv, cited by Bishop Goodwin in Contemporary Review for January, 1892.

For the attempt to take the blame off the shoulders of both Pope and cardinals and place it upon the Almighty, see the article above cited, in the Dublin Review, September 1865, p.
419 and July, 1871, pp.

157 et seq.