和訳お願い致します。
We may fairly ask,' he argues, of those persons who consider physical science a fit subject for revelation, what point they can imagine short of a communication of Omniscience at which such a revelation might have stopped without imperfections of omission, less in degree, but similar in kind, to that which they impute to the existing narrative of Moses? A revelation of so much only of astronomy as was known to Copernicus would have seemed imperfect after the discoveries of Newton; and a revelation of the science of Newton would have appeared defective to La Place: a revelation of all the chemical knowledge of the eighteenth century would have been as deficient in comparison with the information of the present day, as what is now known in this science will probably appear before the termination of another age; in the whole circle of sciences there is not one to which this argument may not be extended, until we should require from revelation a full development of all the mysterious agencies that uphold the mechanism of the material world.' Buckland's question is quite inapplicable to the real difficulty, which is, not that circumstantial details are omitted -- that might reasonably be expected -- but that what is told, is told so as to convey to ordinary apprehensions an impression at variance with facts. We are indeed told that certain writers of antiquity had already anticipated the hypothesis of the geologist, and two of the Christian fathers, Augustine and Episcopius, are referred to as having actually held that a wide interval elapsed between the first act of creation, mentioned in the Mosaic account, and the commencement of the six days' work. If, however, they arrived at such a conclusion, it was simply because, like the modern geologist, they had theories of their own to support, which led them to make somewhat similar hypotheses.
お礼
ご回答どうもありがとうございます。 uniqueを[あなた特有の→(文法的に)間違っている]と解釈していたので、それがlessだと真逆の意味になってしまうと、悩んでいました・・・。 質問して良かったです。 >正直、この人の説明ちょっと違うんじゃないかなと思います。 もう一人の回答者は「おかしい」と言っておられるので、敢えて(無理やり)解釈すると(might)ぐらいの感じなんでしょうか・・・。 この度はどうもありがとうございました。大変助かりました。