WHETHER THE SENTENCE OF DEATH PRONOUNCED AT THE FALL OF MAN INCLUDED THE WHOLE ANIMAL CREATION, OR WAS RESTRICTED TO THE HUMAN RACE. A SERMON, PREACHED IN THE CATHEDRAL OF CHRIST-CHURCH, Before the University of Oxford, BY THE REV. W. BUCKLAND D. D., F. R. S. CANON OF CHRIST-CHURCH; AND READER IN GEOLOGY AND MINERALOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. MDCCCXXXIX. PREFACE. I AM induced to publish the following Discourse by the same motive that led me to compose it; namely, the hope of shewing the unfounded nature of an opinion entertained by many persons, that death was inflicted on the entire animal creation, as a penal dispensation consequent upon the sin of the parents of the human race. It has not unfrequently been proposed to me, as a theological objection to the credibility of the great amount of death, which Geology shows to have prevailed among extinct races that formerly inhabited our earth, that such phenomena are irreconcileable with the idea, supposed to be derived from Scripture, that no animals would ever have died, had it not been for the Fall of Man. It is not my purpose here to enter upon the question which I have discussed in Chap. XIII. of my Bridgewater Treatise, how far the aggregate of animal enjoyment is increased, and that of pain diminished by the institution of death, throughout the brute creation. Still less does it become us to enquire why it has pleased the Creator to make mortality the condition on which He has given life to every creature upon earth, or why he has established that mysterious gradation in the scale of being, which seems to result from laws he has chosen to impose on Himself for regulating the mechanism of the material world. My present object is, briefly to shew that the authority of Scripture affords no foundation for supposing the inferior animals to be included in the sentence of death pronounced upon the Fall of Man; but that this sentence was exclusively restricted to our first progenitors and their posterity. |