After describing the heathen sources of Oriental history, he turns to the Christian writers, and, having used the history of Egypt to show that the great Church authorities were not exact, he ends one important argument with the following words: "Thus the most interesting antiquities of Egypt have been involved in the deepest obscurity by the very interpreters of her chronology, who have jumbled everything up (qui omnia susque deque permiscuerunt), so as to make them match with their own reckonings of Hebrew chronology.

Truly a very bad example, and quite unworthy of religious writers." This sturdy protest of Sir John against the dominant system and against the "jumbling" by which Eusebius had endeavoured to cut down ancient chronology within safe and sound orthodox limits, had little effect.
Though eminent chronologists of the eighteenth century, like Jackson, Hales, and Drummond, gave forth multitudes of ponderous volumes pleading for a period somewhat longer than that generally allowed, and insisting that the received Hebrew text was grossly vitiated as regards chronology, even this poor favour was refused them; the mass of believers found it more comfortable to hold fast the faith committed to them by Usher, and it remained settled that man was created about four thousand years before our era.
To those who wished even greater precision, Dr.John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical scholar of his time, gave his famous demonstration from our sacred books that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that "this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on the twenty-third of October, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning." This tide of theological reasoning rolled on through the eighteenth century, swollen by the biblical researches of leading commentators, Catholic and Protestant, until it came in much majesty and force into our own nineteenth century.

At the very beginning of the century it gained new strength from various great men in the Church, among whom may be especially named Dr.Adam Clarke, who declared that, "to preclude the possibility of a mistake, the unerring Spirit of God directed Moses in the selection of his facts and the ascertaining of his dates." All opposition to the received view seemed broken down, and as late as 1835--indeed, as late as 1850--came an announcement in the work of one of the most eminent Egyptologists, Sir J.G.Wilkinson, to the effect that he had modified the results he had obtained from Egyptian monuments, in order that his chronology might not interfere with the received date of the Deluge of Noah.( 183) (183) For Lightfoot, see his Prolegomena relating to the age of the world at the birth of Christ; see also in the edition of his works, London, 1822, vol.4, pp.

64, 112.

For Scaliger, see in the De Emendatione Temporum, 1583; also Mark Pattison, Essays, Oxford, 1889, vol.i, pp.