# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S147
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Volcanism. 147

were not thoroughly versed in chemistry, into no small embarrassment; and after an attempt to refute Fuchs on his own ground had completely failed, they resorted to ignoring the inconvenient opponent, or to opposing him with baseless pretexts. But the opposition would no longer be silenced. Schafhäutl, in a shorter treatise, and afterward G. Bischof, in his great textbook of chemical and physical geology, not only confirmed Fuchs's arguments but carried them still further. Then, two years ago, one of our most celebrated chemists, Heinrich Rose, issued the same declaration as Fuchs, that from the chemical standpoint the assumption of a fiery origin for quartz and granite could not be accepted; and soon afterward a respected French chemist, Delesse, announced the same result. In this way the chemists — who, after all, ought to have the first word on the question of the origin of rocks — have now pulled the foundation out from under the whole proud edifice of Volcanism, and that not by hypotheses but by pointing to chemical facts, so that the geologists now stand bewildered before the heap of ruins. We will let them stand there, but will take this occasion to point out how matters stand with the evidence for geological theories, seeing that not even the much-vaunted "general agreement of researchers" could guard against the grossest errors. Let theologians well take note of this case, so as not to be led astray, in their adherence to biblical authority, by the hypotheses of natural scientists.

At the close of the whole essay Wagner writes:

As the final result of our examination of the attempts, from the standpoint of natural science, to dispute the authority of Holy Scripture and in particular of the Mosaic account of creation, it has once again become clear that all the opponents' efforts are themselves rejected as erroneous and untenable by rightly understood natural science. The claim, made by them with great confidence, that natural science cannot take a single step without departing from the content of the Mosaic record, is entirely untrue, and has arisen only from a mistaken or deficient knowledge of the natural realm — in part even from a fanatical hatred of revelation — and has been joyfully embraced, in a blind charcoal-burner's faith, by a temper of the age hostile to revelation, even where it has no competence of its own in that field. In such a state of affairs, therefore, the Christian world-view has nothing to fear from natural science. On the contrary, where the latter, free of preconceived opinion, out of pure love of truth and acquainted with the whole state of the facts, approaches the biblical account of creation, it finds that account everywhere in well-grounded agreement with its own findings; indeed, the advances which natural science has made in recent times,