Geological, Philological, and Scriptural Studies on the Cosmogony of Moses — Paris, 1863, by Father Laurent, O.F.M. Cap. — is now on the site, complete, in English for the first time.
Its author gives his name as his age gave it: Father Laurent, Provincial of the Capuchin Friars Minor, Member of the Geological Society of France. He wrote as a naturalist among naturalists, upon the question that divided Catholic writers of his century. Geology had made its case for a world of vast age; and many, to make room for it, had begun to read the six days of Genesis as six indefinite periods. Father Laurent held that the days are days, and that it is the reading of the rocks, not the reading of Moses, that wants correcting.
He argues it in four parts. The first is geological: what the systems are, what is alleged for them, what may be answered, and the eight facts he holds to contradict them. The second is philological: that Moses writes as a historian and not as a poet, and that the literal sense of the days answers the rules of sacred hermeneutics. The third he counts the heart of the matter, and it is scriptural — that the question belongs more to Scripture than to geology, that the creatures were made with reference to man, that the world was created in time, on the first day of time. There he musters the authorities on both sides: first the ecclesiastical writers wrongly claimed for the long days, with the Jewish authors; then, at length, the Doctors and Fathers, the theologians, and the modern commentators who read the days as days. The fourth part asks what shaped the globe, if not ages, and answers from the creation itself, the universal flood, the flood of Ogyges, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the slow work of alluvia.
The book closes with an appendix he added while it was in the press: the report of the Paris academies, in April 1863, upon the fossil jaw of Moulin-Quignon — the first human fossil, as it was then announced. He prints the record and the discussion as they stood, with the question still open.
Readers of this library have met him already without knowing it. Cardinal Mazzella, in his treatise on God the Creator, cites “P. Laurentius Prov. Capuc.” and this very book among the defenders of the literal interpretation.
The whole work is here to read, with the author’s own notes and his table of chapters, and to download as a PDF or an EPUB.