section, Roderick Murchison used his lecture to clear up the confusion between competing views, and say that "every piece of geological evidence sustained the belief that that each species was perfect in its kind when first called into being by the Creator". Sedgwick set aside his differences with Murchison to summarise his forthcoming Edinburgh review and agree in opposing the evolutionary ideas and the "desolating pantheism" of the book. Sedgwick's long, rambling and scathing article was published in the July 1845 edition of the Edinburgh Review. Articles were anonymous, but he ensured that his authorship was well known. He had disregarded William Whewell's caution about attempting a point by point refutation, and the body of his review followed the structure of Vestiges, packed with current evidence to undermine the supposition of continuous transitions underlying the progressive development hypothesis which he scorned as mere speculation, and pointing out errors showing the inadequate expertise of the author. Vestiges crucially undermined the separation between man and beast, and endangered hopes for the afterlife. Sedgwick expressed concern for "our glorious maidens and matrons .... listening to the seductions of this author; who comes before them with a bright, polished, and many-coloured surface, and the serpent coils of a false philosophy, and asks them again to stretch out their hands and pluck forbidden fruit", who tells them "that their Bible is a fable when it teaches them that they were made in the image of God—that they are the children of apes and breeders of monsters—that he has annulled all distinction between physical and moral", which in Sedgwick's view would lead to "a rank, unbending and degrading materialism" lacking the proper reading of nature as analogy to draw moral lessons from physical truths. That needed the use of reason by great men who believed that "moral truth is the ennobled form of material truth" and that "all nature, both material and moral, has been framed and supported by one creative mind" so that one truth could never be in conflict with another. In presenting natural law as explaining the soul, Vestiges threatened the fine balance between faith and science. Journals that had already opposed the book welcomed Sedgwick's article, with the Literary Gazette calling it a "scourging and irrefragable review", as did sections of the church which were suspicious of science and geology. However, its crude vehemence was ill-suited to fashionable society, and Whewell wrote