Bible-manipulating dispensationalists then (as now) were openly supportive. And also Bible-rejecting naturalists were secretly delighted.
As even the modern premillennialists Whitcomb and Morris wrote in their influential 1961 book The Genesis Flood:5 "The Flood theory of geology had to overcome serious opposition in the seventeenth century…. However, a new enthusiasm for the Flood theory of geology swept England…, through the influence of…Thomas Burnet [The Theory of the Earth…concerning the Deluge (1681)]…and William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth (1696)."
