Geological, Philological, and Scriptural Studies on the Cosmogony of Moses

Written against the systems that turn the six days of Genesis into geological ages, by the provincial of the French Capuchins, himself a member of the Geological Society of France. Father Laurent takes the question in four parts. The first weighs the systems geologically: their exposition, the reasons alleged for them, his reply, their want of foundation, and the eight facts he holds to contradict them. The second argues philologically that Moses writes as a historian and not as a poet, that the literal reading of the days answers the rules of sacred hermeneutics, and meets the objections raised. The third, which he counts the heart of the matter, is scriptural: that the question is more scriptural than geological, that the creatures were made with reference to man as the compendium of the world of bodies, and that the world was created in time, on the first day of time. There follow two long musters of authority — the ecclesiastical writers wrongly invoked for the long-day systems, with the Jewish authors, and then the writers who defended the literal days, among the Doctors and Fathers, the theologians, and the modern commentators on Scripture. The fourth part asks what, if not ages, shaped the globe, and answers from the creation itself, the universal flood, the flood of Ogyges or Deucalion, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the slow work of alluvia and accretions. An appendix, added while the book was in the press, reports the debate at the Paris academies in April 1863 over the fossil jaw of Moulin-Quignon and the first claimed human fossil. Approved by the Minister General of the Capuchins at Rome in April 1863 and printed at Paris that year; the library's own Mazzella cites it among the defenders of the literal interpretation. In English for the first time.