There is a principle which dominates the whole question and which applies to it by full right; it is this: in order to offer serious minds sufficient motives of credibility, a fact must rest upon solid bases, it must be supported by positive, real, incontestable testimonies, and not merely by gratuitous suppositions. Now, the system of periods, or of the pre-Genesis world, has for its foundation only a litany of subsidiary, purely imaginary hypotheses, namely: that the time fixed by Moses is insufficient to explain the structure of the globe; that, in the creation of beings, the animals and plants came, died, and were fossilized in the very places where they are found; that, in the productions of nature, God proceeded successively
from the simple to the compound (neither more nor less than a workman who had to learn his trade!); that the races originally created were destroyed by a succession of indefinite and indefinable cataclysms; that other races replaced them; etc., etc. All these fine things, and a multitude of others which one does not hesitate to present, with an assurance that astonishes, as certain facts, are in no way confirmed either by tradition, by Scripture, by profane history, or by monuments; they are true phantasmagorias, most often hatched from the brains of their authors in the leisure of the study.
History, tradition, and monuments sanction only two great epochs, two great revolutions of which the globe has been the object. The first is that in which the Bible shows us the earth emerging from nothingness, in the most complete confusion of its elements, then influenced, modified, and ordered according to the plan traced by divine wisdom. The second is that in which the tradition of all peoples represents to us the earth convulsed by the universal flood, and in which Genesis depicts for us the basins of the seas destroyed and the waters of the Ocean covering the earth for five months, then abandoning it in order to invade it anew by an alternating movement of retreat and invasion which in turn left it bare and covered it during seven other months.1
As for the geological periods and the cataclysms which they suppose, mention is made of them nowhere; they are pure hypotheses, more or less singular, invented from the need to accommodate geological phenomena to the works of one’s imagination, all indemonstrable, most of them demonstrated false or absurd; and moreover, it must not be forgotten, hypotheses are not proofs. However much one may posit them dogmatically, as though they ought to be admitted without discussion, they cannot take the place of demonstration; and nothing proves their inanity, their fragility, their falsity better than their great number and the ease with which the latest demolishes those which preceded it.
These systems have been brought forth by the dozen; we believe it useful to our thesis to point out their authors and their diversity.
Burnet makes his oily terrestrial envelope collapse into the great abyss.
Woodward makes the waters of the great abyss rise upon this envelope, and he blindly accepts all the suppositions of his predecessors.
Leibnitz wishes the earth and the planets to have been suns.
Whiston contents himself with making the earth an ancient comet.
Deluc admits unlimited periods of time between the various creations, and consequently successive creations.
Cuvier borrowed from Buffon and Deluc their successive creations and their long periods of time, adding to them a regular succession of marine irruptions.
Ampère found in the text Terra autem erat inanis et vacua [But the earth was void and empty] that a nebula was the first germ of the earth and of all the other sidereal bodies.
Messrs. Buckland and Chalmers found, as we have already said, that Deluc’s indefinite periods did not suffice for the requirements of geological phenomena; they had recourse to the existence of an anterior world, whose relations changed when our present world was organized.
Finally, Mr. de Beaumont, the great defender of the system of mountain upheavals, accepts all the hypotheses which have had currency: the primitive incandescence of the globe, the central fire, the contraction of the terrestrial envelope through cooling, the primitive surface of the globe without mountains, indeterminate epochs, successive creations and destructions, regular cataclysms, etc.; in such a manner that Mr. de Beaumont’s system is less a system peculiar to him than the synthesis of all the systems.2
Singular destiny, that of the mind of man
which refuses to abdicate its independence and its pretensions in order to take its inspiration from the thoughts of the divine Word, creator of all things! The threat of Scripture is accomplished in its regard: Scrutator majestatis opprimetur a gloria [He who searches into majesty shall be overwhelmed by glory];3 through his pride, he is delivered over to all doubts and to all aberrations.
We are therefore fully authorized to affirm that all these theories, without any generative principle, full of conflicts and contradictions, deprived of all connection and all logic, are only gratuitous hypotheses, without foundation, and consequently powerless to contradict the cosmogony of Moses.
However much one may accumulate ideas upon ideas, inductions upon inductions, principles will always be the first and most indispensable of the elements of solution; and without a principle, without a base, one will never be able to establish a line of reasoning or arrive at a positive and certain conclusion. Now, there is nothing in the Mosaic account that could cause or permit one to suspect the existence of these alleged creations. The first two verses of the Bible are joined in such a manner that one forms a body with the other, and they leave no gap. The whole indicates a single creation, and the first verse, in which all the works of God are summarized, evidently relates to the tableau of the work of the days which immediately follows it.