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These statements are not irrrelevant at all, they are truth.

Race, Buddy, are you even trying to follow the conversation? I didn't say they were globally irrelevant. I said they were irrelevant to the issue I happened to be discussing when you replied, which was the prevailing views among Christians about the age of the earth and "flood geology" since the advent of modern geological science. Geology began to take shape as a scientific discipline early in the 19th Century. Your quotes were from the early part of the millennium!

BTW, was it also "truth" when Theophilus, who you cited, claimed that the heavens were a solid dome covering the (by implication flat) earth?

In fact, the abandonement of these doctrines about 100 years ago WAS A NEW THING and very short lived until RA TORREY'S "THE FUNDMENTALS" came out.

Guess what, Race, I've actually read The Fundamentals (at least the articles therein that address scientific issues) but it seems that you haven't. If you did you'd know that not one of the articles takes a young earth position, nor adopts "flood geology," but instead affirm or accept the findings of geological science that the earth is ancient. What's more, none of articles that discuss it unreservedly rejects evolution, instead adopting views ranging from acceptance, to neutrality to mild skepticism.

Are you finally done pontificating on matters you don't know a damn thing about? (Never mind. I know the answer to that from experience.)

Partial retraction. There apparently were a couple anti-evolution articles in The Fundamentals, according to a secondary source I just found. I don't remember them, so I'm guessing for the moment they weren't articles that were primarily addressing scientific issues. Or maybe the edition I have doesn't include all the later articles? (It's only 5 volumes, I think, but possibly it doesn't follow the breakdown of the original. It's packed away right now.) Or maybe I just forgot.

By the way, while I remembered Orr and Wright, I'd forgotten that your hero Torrey was one of those who contributed an article that was open to evolution! Anyway, here's what I found:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/2/part12.html

Many evangelical Christians today suppose that Bible believers have always been in favor of a "young-universe" and "creationism." However, as any student of the history of geology (and religion) knows, by the 1850s all competent evangelical Christian geologists agreed that the earth must be extremely old, and that geological investigations did not support that the Flood "in the days of Noah" literally "covered the whole earth." Rev. William Buckland (head of geology at Oxford), Rev. Adam Sedgwick (head of geology at Cambridge), Rev. Edward Hitchcock (who taught natural theology and geology at Amherst College, Massachusetts), John Pye Smith (head of Homerton Divinity College), Hugh Miller (self taught geologist, and editor of the Free Church of Scotland's newspaper), and Sir John William Dawson (geologist and paleontologist, a Presbyterian brought up in a fundamentalist atmosphere, who also became the only person ever to serve as president of three of the most prestigious geological organizations of Britain and America), all rejected the "Genesis Flood" as an explanation of the geologic record (or any part of that record), and argued that it must have taken a very long time to form the various geologic layers. Neither were their conclusions based on a subconscious desire to support "evolution," since none of the above evangelical Christians were evolutionists, and the earliest works of each of them were composed before Darwin's Origin of Species was published. The plain facts of geology led them to acknowledge the vast antiquity of the earth. And this was before the advent of radiometric dating.
By the very early 1900s, even conservative theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary were prepared in varying degrees to concede to science a long earth history, the transmutation of species by evolution, and even an evolutionary past for the human physical form. Such theologians included B. B. Plarfield, the famous inerrantist Presbyterian, who at that time oversaw the publication of the Princeton Theological Review.
Even when the twelve-volume paperback series, The Fundamentals, was published between 1910 and 1915 (an interdenominational work that launched this century's "fundamentalist" movement), it contained cautiously pro-evolution stances of conservative Christian theologians like George Frederick Wright, James Orr, and R. A. Torrey. It was only in the eighth collection of Fundamentals papers that this cautious advocacy of evolution was matched by two decisively and aggressively anti-Darwin statements, one by someone who remained anonymous and another by the relatively unknown Henry Beach, both of whom lacked the theological and scientific standing of the senior evangelicals already mentioned.

I still think I'm correct in saying that NONE of the articles take a young earth view.