We are approaching the end of these studies.
To demolish a fabulous antiquity of the world, from which ignorance and bad faith can deduce heterodox consequences, by giving to its origin its true date, which God himself revealed to us;1 to impart, in the feeble measure of our
powers, a new impetus to the progress of geogeny, by discovering the fundamental error fatally accepted by science, and which has until now been its point of departure: such is the aim that we set ourselves in undertaking them.
Have we attained this twofold aim, religious and scientific? We are not without hope, notably as regards Christian scholars. On the one hand, from the human point of view, good sense and logic confer the right, and even impose the duty, to reject every fact that is not marked with the fourfold seal of history, traditions, testimonies, and monuments; and we have established that all these authorities reject this hypothetical world, these successive revolutions, these unlimited periods that science has created gratuitously in order to make up for its humiliating impotence. On the other hand, from the religious point of view, the proofs that we have accumulated against these systems have attained the proportions and the authority of a rigorous and unassailable demonstration.
Theologically speaking, the question is therefore judged, it is finished: Causa finita est [The case is finished]. But if these systems are condemned by theology, one may affirm with certainty that they are false, considered in themselves and as scientific facts. For there is a dogmatic axiom that concerns the sciences to a very high degree, and upon which one cannot meditate too much; it is this: No system can be true in philosophy, in
physics, in astronomy, in any science whatsoever, if it is false in theology.
Without doubt, in admitting the cosmogony of Moses as we have presented it, we shall still encounter obscure aspects, inaccessible heights, unfathomable depths, insoluble difficulties; but, having arrived before these impenetrable mysteries, nothing remains for us but to humble our brow before creative omnipotence, following the example of the venerable historian of these primitive revelations.
END OF THE COSMOGONY OF MOSES.
Footnotes
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A letter communicated to us at this moment justifies this assessment. This letter, handed to one of our Fathers after his sermon, contains several objections against religion, among others this one: “It is said that the world is of a date so ancient that that of 5863 would be of only imperceptible importance. What would prove it are the fossils that are found at unheard-of depths, which the flood could not have made, and which must be only the effect of a cataclysm. And if that is so, how can one believe that Adam is the first man and Eve the first woman?” ↩