Such was the line of philosophic and literary attack, as developed from

Scaliger to Fontenelle. But beneath and in the midst of all of it, from

first to last, giving firmness, strength, and new sources of vitality to

it, was the steady development of scientific effort; and to the

series of great men who patiently wrought and thought out the truth by

scientific methods through all these centuries belong the honours of the

victory.

For generations men in various parts of the world had been making

careful observations on these strange bodies. As far back as the time

when Luther and Melanchthon and Zwingli were plunged into alarm by

various comets from 1531 to 1539, Peter Apian kept his head sufficiently

cool to make scientific notes of their paths through the heavens. A

little later, when the great comet of 1556 scared popes, emperors, and

reformers alike, such men as Fabricius at Vienna and Heller at Nuremberg

quietly observed its path. In vain did men like Dieterich and Heerbrand

and Celich from various parts of Germany denounce such observations and

investigations as impious; they were steadily continued, and in 1577

came the first which led to the distinct foundation of the modern

doctrine. In that year appeared a comet which again plunged Europe into

alarm. In every European country this alarm was strong, but in Germany

strongest of all. The churches were filled with terror-stricken

multitudes. Celich preaching at Magdeburg was echoed by Heerbrand

preaching at Tubingen, and both these from thousands of other pulpits,

Catholic and Protestant, throughout Europe. In the midst of all this

din and outcry a few men quietly but steadily observed the monster; and

Tycho Brahe announced, as the result, that its path lay farther from

the earth than the orbit of the moon. Another great astronomical genius,

Kepler, confirmed this. This distinct beginning of the new doctrine was

bitterly opposed by theologians; they denounced it as one of the evil

results of that scientific meddling with the designs of Providence

against which they had so long declaimed in pulpits and professors'

chairs; they even brought forward some astronomers ambitious or

wrong-headed enough to testify that Tycho and Kepler were in error.(119)

(119) See Madler, Himmelskunde, vol. i, pp. 181, 197; also Wolf, Gesch.

d. Astronomie, and Janssen, Gesch. d. deutschen Volkes, vol. v, p. 350.

Heerbrand's sermon, cited above, is a good specimen of the theologic

attitude. See Pingre, vol. ii, p. 81.

Nothing could be more natural than such opposition; for this simple

announcement by Tycho Brahe began a new era. It shook the very

foundation of cometary superstition. The Aristotelian view, developed by

the theologians, was that what lies within the moon's orbit appertains

to the earth and is essentially transitory and evil, while what lies

beyond it belongs to the heavens and is permanent, regular, and pure.

Tycho Brahe and Kepler, therefore, having by means of scientific

observation and thought taken comets out of the category of meteors and

appearances in the neighbourhood of the earth, and placed them among the

heavenly bodies, dealt a blow at the very foundations of the theological

argument, and gave a great impulse to the idea that comets are

themselves heavenly bodies moving regularly and in obedience to law.

IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.--THE FINAL VICTORY OF SCIENCE.

Attempts were now made to compromise. It was declared that, while

some comets were doubtless supralunar, some must be sublunar. But this

admission was no less fatal on another account. During many centuries

the theory favoured by the Church had been, as we have seen, that the

earth was surrounded by hollow spheres, concentric and transparent,

forming a number of glassy strata incasing one another "like the

different coatings of an onion," and that each of these in its movement

about the earth carries one or more of the heavenly bodies. Some

maintained that these spheres were crystal; but Lactantius, and with him

various fathers of the Church, spoke of the heavenly vault as made of

ice. Now, the admission that comets could move beyond the moon was fatal

to this theory, for it sent them crashing through these spheres of

ice or crystal, and therefore through the whole sacred fabric of the

Ptolemaic theory.(120)

(120) For these features in cometary theory, see Pingre, vol. i, p. 89;

also Humboldt, Cosmos (English translation, London, 1868), vol. iii, p.

169.

Here we may pause for a moment to note one of the chief differences

between scientific and theological reasoning considered in themselves.

Kepler's main reasoning as to the existence of a law for cometary

movement was right; but his secondary reasoning, that comets move nearly

in straight lines, was wrong. His right reasoning was developed by

Gassendi in France, by Borelli in Italy, by Hevel and Doerfel in

Germany, by Eysat and Bernouilli in Switzerland, by Percy and--most

important of all, as regards mathematical demonstration--by Newton

in England. The general theory, which was true, they accepted and

developed; the secondary theory, which was found untrue, they rejected;

and, as a result, both of what they thus accepted and of what they

rejected, was evolved the basis of the whole modern cometary theory.

Very different was this from the theological method. As a rule, when

there arises a thinker as great in theology as Kepler in science, the

whole mass of his conclusions ripens into a dogma. His disciples labour

not to test it, but to establish it; and while, in the Catholic Church,

it becomes a dogma to be believed or disbelieved under the penalty of

damnation, it becomes in the Protestant Church the basis for one more

sect.

Various astronomers laboured to develop the truth discovered by Tycho

and strengthened by Kepler. Cassini seemed likely to win for Italy the

glory of completing the great structure; but he was sadly fettered by

Church influences, and was obliged to leave most of the work to others.

Early among these was Hevel. He gave reasons for believing that comets

move in parabolic curves toward the sun. Then came a man who developed

this truth further--Samuel Doerfel; and it is a pleasure to note that

he was a clergyman. The comet of 1680, which set Erni in Switzerland,

Mather in New England, and so many others in all parts of the world

at declaiming, set Doerfel at thinking. Undismayed by the authority of

Origen and St. John Chrysostom, the arguments of Luther, Melanchthon,

and Zwingli, the outcries of Celich, Heerbrand, and Dieterich, he

pondered over the problem in his little Saxon parsonage, until in

1681 he set forth his proofs that comets are heavenly bodies moving in

parabolas of which the sun is the focus. Bernouilli arrived at the same

conclusion; and, finally, this great series of men and works was closed

by the greatest of all, when Newton, in 1686, having taken the data

furnished by the comet of 1680, demonstrated that comets are guided in

their movements by the same principle that controls the planets in their

orbits. Thus was completed the evolution of this new truth in science.

Yet we are not to suppose that these two great series of philosophical

and scientific victories cleared the field of all opponents. Declamation

and pretended demonstration of the old theologic view were still heard;

but the day of complete victory dawned when Halley, after most thorough

observation and calculation, recognised the comet of 1682 as one which

had already appeared at stated periods, and foretold its return in about

seventy-five years; and the battle was fully won when Clairaut, seconded

by Lalande and Mme. Lepaute, predicted distinctly the time when

the comet would arrive at its perihelion, and this prediction was

verified.(121) Then it was that a Roman heathen philosopher was proved

more infallible and more directly under Divine inspiration than a Roman

Christian pontiff; for the very comet which the traveller finds to-day

depicted on the Bayeux tapestry as portending destruction to Harold and

the Saxons at the Norman invasion of England, and which was regarded by

Pope Calixtus as portending evil to Christendom, was found six centuries

later to be, as Seneca had prophesied, a heavenly body obeying the great

laws of the universe, and coming at regular periods. Thenceforth the

whole ponderous enginery of this superstition, with its proof-texts

regarding "signs in the heavens," its theological reasoning to show

the moral necessity of cometary warnings, and its ecclesiastical

fulminations against the "atheism, godlessness, and infidelity" of

scientific investigation, was seen by all thinking men to be as weak

against the scientific method as Indian arrows against needle guns.

Copernicus, Galileo, Cassini, Doerfel, Newton, Halley, and Clairaut had

gained the victory.(122)

(121) See Pingre, vol. i, p. 53; Grant, History of Physical Astronomy,

p. 305, etc., etc. For a curious partial anticipation by Hooke, in 1664,

of the great truth announced by Halley in 1682, see Pepy's Diary for

March 1, 1664. For excellent summaries of the whole work of Halley and

Clairaut and their forerunners and associates, see Pingre, Madler, Wolf,

Arago, et al.

(122) In accordance with Halley's prophecy, the comet of 1682 has

returned in 1759 and 1835. See Madler, Guillemin, Watson, Grant,

Delambre, Proctor, article Astronomy in Encycl. Brit., and especially

for details, Wolf, pp. 407-412 and 701-722. For clear statement

regarding Doerfel, see Wolf, p. 411.

It is instructive to note, even after the main battle was lost, a

renewal of the attempt, always seen under like circumstances, to effect

a compromise, to establish a "safe science" on grounds pseudo-scientific

and pseudo-theologic. Luther, with his strong common sense, had

foreshadowed this; Kepler had expressed a willingness to accept it.

It was insisted that comets might be heavenly bodies moving in regular

orbits, and even obedient to law, and yet be sent as "signs in the

heavens." Many good men clung longingly to this phase of the old belief,

and in 1770 Semler, professor at Halle, tried to satisfy both sides. He

insisted that, while from a scientific point of view comets could not

exercise any physical influence upon the world, yet from a religious

point of view they could exercise a moral influence as reminders of the

Just Judge of the Universe.

So hard was it for good men to give up the doctrine of "signs in the

heavens," seemingly based upon Scripture and exercising such a healthful

moral tendency! As is always the case after such a defeat, these

votaries of "sacred science" exerted the greatest ingenuity in devising

statements and arguments to avert the new doctrine. Within our own

century the great Catholic champion, Joseph de Maistre, echoed these in

declaring his belief that comets are special warnings of evil. So, too,

in Protestant England, in 1818, the Gentleman's Magazine stated that

under the malign influence of a recent comet "flies became blind and

died early in the season," and "the wife of a London shoemaker had four

children at a birth." And even as late as 1829 Mr. Forster, an English

physician, published a work to prove that comets produce hot summers,

cold winters, epidemics, earthquakes, clouds of midges and locusts, and

nearly every calamity conceivable. He bore especially upon the fact that

the comet of 1665 was coincident with the plague in London, apparently

forgetting that the other great cities of England and the Continent were

not thus visited; and, in a climax, announces the fact that the comet of

1663 "made all the cats in Westphalia sick."

There still lingered one little cloud-patch of superstition, arising

mainly from the supposed fact that comets had really been followed by

a marked rise in temperature. Even this poor basis for the belief

that they might, after all, affect earthly affairs was swept away, and

science won here another victory; for Arago, by thermometric records

carefully kept at Paris from 1735 to 1781, proved that comets had

produced no effect upon temperature. Among multitudes of similar

examples he showed that, in some years when several comets appeared, the

temperature was lower than in other years when few or none appeared. In

1737 there were two comets, and the weather was cool; in 1785 there was

no comet, and the weather was hot; through the whole fifty years it was

shown that comets were sometimes followed by hot weather, sometimes

by cool, and that no rule was deducible. The victory of science was

complete at every point.(123)

(123) For Forster, see his Illustrations of the Atmospherical Origin of

Epidemic Diseases, Chelmsford, 1829, cited by Arago; also in Quarterly

Review for April, 1835. For the writings of several on both sides, and

especially those who sought to save, as far as possible, the sacred

theory of comets, see Madler, vol. ii, p. 384 et seq., and Wolf, p. 186.

But in this history there was one little exhibition so curious as to be

worthy of notice, though its permanent effect upon thought was small.

Whiston and Burnet, so devoted to what they considered sacred science,

had determined that in some way comets must be instruments of Divine

wrath. One of them maintained that the deluge was caused by the tail of

a comet striking the earth; the other put forth the theory that comets

are places of punishment for the damned--in fact, "flying hells." The

theories of Whiston and Burnet found wide acceptance also in Germany,

mainly through the all-powerful mediation of Gottsched, so long, from

his professor's chair at Leipsic, the dictator of orthodox thought,

who not only wrote a brief tractate of his own upon the subject, but

furnished a voluminous historical introduction to the more elaborate

treatise of Heyn. In this book, which appeared at Leipsic in 1742, the

agency of comets in the creation, the flood, and the final destruction

of the world is fully proved. Both these theories were, however, soon

discredited.

Perhaps the more interesting of them can best be met by another, which,

if not fully established, appears much better based--namely, that in

1868 the earth passed directly through the tail of a comet, with

no deluge, no sound of any wailings of the damned, with but slight

appearances here and there, only to be detected by the keen sight of the

meteorological or astronomical observer.

In our own country superstitious ideas regarding comets continued to

have some little currency; but their life was short. The tendency shown

by Cotton Mather, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, toward

acknowledging the victory of science, was completed by the utterances

of Winthrop, professor at Harvard, who in 1759 published two lectures

on comets, in which he simply and clearly revealed the truth, never

scoffing, but reasoning quietly and reverently. In one passage he says:

"To be thrown into a panic whenever a comet appears, on account of the

ill effects which some few of them might possibly produce, if they were

not under proper direction, betrays a weakness unbecoming a reasonable

being."

A happy influence in this respect was exercised on both continents by

John Wesley. Tenaciously as he had held to the supposed scriptural view

in so many other matters of science, in this he allowed his reason

to prevail, accepted the demonstrations of Halley, and gloried in

them.(124)

(124) For Heyn, see his Versuch einer Betrachtung uber die cometun, die

Sundfluth und das Vorspeil des jungsten Gerichts, Leipsic, 1742. A Latin

version, of the same year, bears the title, Specimen Cometologiae Sacre.

For the theory that the earth encountered the tail of a comet, see

Guillemin and Watson. For survival of the old idea in America, see a

Sermon of Israel Loring, of Sudbury, published in 1722. For Prof.

J. Winthrop, see his Comets. For Wesley, see his Natural Philosophy,

London, 1784, vol. iii, p. 303.

The victory was indeed complete. Happily, none of the fears expressed by

Conrad Dieterich and Increase Mather were realized. No catastrophe has

ensued either to religion or to morals. In the realm of religion the

Psalms of David remain no less beautiful, the great utterances of the

Hebrew prophets no less powerful; the Sermon on the Mount, "the first

commandment, and the second, which is like unto it," the definition

of "pure religion and undefiled" by St. James, appeal no less to

the deepest things in the human heart. In the realm of morals, too,

serviceable as the idea of firebrands thrown by the right hand of

an avenging God to scare a naughty world might seem, any competent

historian must find that the destruction of the old theological cometary

theory was followed by moral improvement rather than by deterioration.

We have but to compare the general moral tone of society to-day,

wretchedly imperfect as it is, with that existing in the time when this

superstition had its strongest hold. We have only to compare the court

of Henry VIII with the court of Victoria, the reign of the later Valois

and earlier Bourbon princes with the present French Republic, the period

of the Medici and Sforzas and Borgias with the period of Leo XIII and

Humbert, the monstrous wickedness of the Thirty Years' War with the

ennobling patriotism of the Franco-Prussian struggle, and the despotism

of the miserable German princelings of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries with the reign of the Emperor William. The gain is not simply

that mankind has arrived at a clearer conception of law in the universe;

not merely that thinking men see more clearly that we are part of a

system not requiring constant patching and arbitrary interference; but

perhaps best of all is the fact that science has cleared away one more

series of those dogmas which tend to debase rather than to develop man's

whole moral and religious nature. In this emancipation from terror and

fanaticism, as in so many other results of scientific thinking, we have

a proof of the inspiration of those great words, "THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE

YOU FREE."

CHAPTER V. FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY.

I. GROWTH OF THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS.

Among the philosophers of Greece we find, even at an early period, germs

of geological truth, and, what is of vast importance, an atmosphere

in which such germs could grow. These germs were transmitted to Roman

thought; an atmosphere of tolerance continued; there was nothing which

forbade unfettered reasoning regarding either the earth's strata or

the remains of former life found in them, and under the Roman Empire a

period of fruitful observation seemed sure to begin.

But, as Christianity took control of the world, there came a great

change. The earliest attitude of the Church toward geology and its

kindred sciences was indifferent, and even contemptuous. According to

the prevailing belief, the earth was a "fallen world," and was soon

to be destroyed. Why, then, should it be studied? Why, indeed, give a

thought to it? The scorn which Lactantius and St. Augustine had cast

upon the study of astronomy was extended largely to other sciences.

(125)

(125) For a compact and admirable statement as to the dawn of geological

conceptions in Greece and Rome, see Mr. Lester Ward's essay on

paleobotany in the Fifth Annual Report of the United States Geological

Survey, for 1883-'84. As to the reasons why Greek philosophers did

comparatively so little for geology, see D'Archiac, Geologie, p. 18. For

the contempt felt by Lactantius and St. Augustine toward astronomical

science, see foregoing chapters on Astronomy and Geography.

But the germs of scientific knowledge and thought developed in the

ancient world could be entirely smothered neither by eloquence nor by

logic; some little scientific observation must be allowed, though all

close reasoning upon it was fettered by theology. Thus it was that St.

Jerome insisted that the broken and twisted crust of the earth exhibits

the wrath of God against sin, and Tertullian asserted that fossils

resulted from the flood of Noah.

To keep all such observation and reasoning within orthodox limits, St.

Augustine, about the beginning of the fifth century, began an effort to

develop from these germs a growth in science which should be sacred and

safe. With this intent he prepared his great commentary on the work of

creation, as depicted in Genesis, besides dwelling upon the subject in

other writings. Once engaged in this work, he gave himself to it more

earnestly than any other of the earlier fathers ever did; but his vast

powers of research and thought were not directed to actual observation

or reasoning upon observation. The keynote of his whole method is seen

in his famous phrase, "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority

of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of

the human mind." All his thought was given to studying the letter of

the sacred text, and to making it explain natural phenomena by methods

purely theological.(126)

(126) For citations and authorities on these points, see the chapter on

Meteorology.

Among the many questions he then raised and discussed may be mentioned

such as these: "What caused the creation of the stars on the fourth

day?" "Were beasts of prey and venomous animals created before, or

after, the fall of Adam? If before, how can their creation be reconciled

with God's goodness; if afterward, how can their creation be reconciled

to the letter of God's Word?" "Why were only beasts and birds brought

before Adam to be named, and not fishes and marine animals?" "Why did

the Creator not say, 'Be fruitful and multiply,' to plants as well as to

animals?"(127)

(127) See Augustine, De Genesi, ii, 13, 15, et seq.; ix, 12 et seq. For

the reference to St. Jerome, see Shields, Final Philosophy, p. 119; also

Leyell, Introduction to Geology, vol. i, chap. ii.

Sundry answers to these and similar questions formed the main

contributions of the greatest of the Latin fathers to the scientific

knowledge of the world, after a most thorough study of the biblical text

and a most profound application of theological reasoning. The results

of these contributions were most important. In this, as in so many

other fields, Augustine gave direction to the main current of thought in

western Europe, Catholic and Protestant, for nearly thirteen centuries.

In the ages that succeeded, the vast majority of prominent scholars

followed him implicitly. Even so strong a man as Pope Gregory the Great

yielded to his influence, and such leaders of thought as St. Isidore,

in the seventh century, and the Venerable Bede, in the eighth, planting

themselves upon Augustine's premises, only ventured timidly to extend

their conclusions upon lines he had laid down.

In his great work on Etymologies, Isidore took up Augustine's attempt to

bring the creation into satisfactory relations with the book of Genesis,

and, as to fossil remains, he, like Tertullian, thought that they

resulted from the Flood of Noah. In the following century Bede developed

the same orthodox traditions.(128)

(128) For Isidore, see the Etymologiae, xi, 4, xiii, 22. For Bede, see

the Hexaemeron, i, ii, in Migne, tome xci.

The best guess, in a geological sense, among the followers of St.

Augustine was made by an Irish monkish scholar, who, in order to

diminish the difficulty arising from the distribution of animals,

especially in view of the fact that the same animals are found in

Ireland as in England, held that various lands now separated were once

connected. But, alas! the exigencies of theology forced him to place

their separation later than the Flood. Happily for him, such facts were

not yet known as that the kangaroo is found only on an island in

the South Pacific, and must therefore, according to his theory, have

migrated thither with all his progeny, and along a causeway so

curiously constructed that none of the beasts of prey, who were his

fellow-voyagers in the ark, could follow him.

These general lines of thought upon geology and its kindred science of

zoology were followed by St. Thomas Aquinas and by the whole body

of medieval theologians, so far as they gave any attention to such

subjects.

The next development of geology, mainly under Church guidance, was by

means of the scholastic theology. Phrase-making was substituted for

investigation. Without the Church and within it wonderful contributions

were thus made. In the eleventh century Avicenna accounted for the

fossils by suggesting a "stone-making force";(129) in the thirteenth,

Albert the Great attributed them to a "formative quality;"(130) in the

following centuries some philosophers ventured the idea that they grew

from seed; and the Aristotelian doctrine of spontaneous generation was

constantly used to prove that these stony fossils possessed powers of

reproduction like plants and animals.(131)

(129) Vis lapidifica.

(130) Virtus formativa.

(131) See authorities given in Mr. Ward's assay, as above.

Still, at various times and places, germs implanted by Greek and Roman

thought were warmed into life. The Arabian schools seem to have been

less fettered by the letter of the Koran than the contemporary Christian

scholars by the letter of the Bible; and to Avicenna belongs the credit

of first announcing substantially the modern geological theory of

changes in the earth's surface.(132)

(132) For Avicenna, see Lyell and D'Archiac.

The direct influence of the Reformation was at first unfavourable to

scientific progress, for nothing could be more at variance with any

scientific theory of the development of the universe than the ideas of

the Protestant leaders. That strict adherence to the text of Scripture

which made Luther and Melanchthon denounce the idea that the planets

revolve about the sun, was naturally extended to every other scientific

statement at variance with the sacred text. There is much reason to

believe that the fetters upon scientific thought were closer under the

strict interpretation of Scripture by the early Protestants than they

had been under the older Church. The dominant spirit among the Reformers

is shown by the declaration of Peter Martyr to the effect that, if

a wrong opinion should obtain regarding the creation as described in

Genesis, "all the promises of Christ fall into nothing, and all the life

of our religion would be lost."(133)

(133) See his Commentary on Genesis, cited by Zoeckler, Geschichte der

Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. i, p. 690.

In the times immediately succeeding the Reformation matters went from

bad to worse. Under Luther and Melanchthon there was some little freedom

of speculation, but under their successors there was none; to question

any interpretation of Luther came to be thought almost as wicked as

to question the literal interpretation of the Scriptures themselves.

Examples of this are seen in the struggles between those who held that

birds were created entirely from water and those who held that they were

created out of water and mud. In the city of Lubeck, the ancient centre

of the Hanseatic League, close at the beginning of the seventeenth

century, Pfeiffer, "General Superintendent" or bishop in those parts,

published his Pansophia Mosaica, calculated, as he believed, to beat

back science forever. In a long series of declamations he insisted that

in the strict text of Genesis alone is safety, that it contains all

wisdom and knowledge, human and divine. This being the case, who could

care to waste time on the study of material things and give thought to

the structure of the world? Above all, who, after such a proclamation

by such a ruler in the Lutheran Israel, would dare to talk of the "days"

mentioned in Genesis as "periods of time"; or of the "firmament" as not

meaning a solid vault over the universe; or of the "waters above the

heavens" as not contained in a vast cistern supported by the heavenly

vault; or of the "windows of heaven" as a figure of speech?(134)

(134) For Pfeiffer, see Zoeckler, vol. i, pp. 688, 689.

In England the same spirit was shown even as late as the time of

Sir Matthew Hale. We find in his book on the Origination of Mankind,

published in 1685, the strictest devotion to a theory of creation based

upon the mere letter of Scripture, and a complete inability to draw

knowledge regarding the earth's origin and structure from any other

source.

While the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Anglican Reformers clung to literal

interpretations of the sacred books, and turned their faces away from

scientific investigation, it was among their contemporaries at the

revival of learning that there began to arise fruitful thought in this

field. Then it was, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, that

Leonardo da Vinci, as great a genius in science as in art, broached

the true idea as to the origin of fossil remains; and his compatriot,

Fracastoro, developed this on the modern lines of thought. Others in

other parts of Europe took up the idea, and, while mixing with it many

crudities, drew from it more and more truth. Toward the end of the

sixteenth century Bernard Palissy, in France, took hold of it with the

same genius which he showed in artistic creation; but, remarkable as

were his assertions of scientific realities, they could gain little

hearing. Theologians, philosophers, and even some scientific men of

value, under the sway of scholastic phrases, continued to insist upon

such explanations as that fossils were the product of "fatty matter set

into a fermentation by heat"; or of a "lapidific juice";(135) or of

a "seminal air";(136) or of a "tumultuous movement of terrestrial

exhalations"; and there was a prevailing belief that fossil remains, in

general, might be brought under the head of "sports of Nature," a pious

turn being given to this phrase by the suggestion that these "sports"

indicated some inscrutable purpose of the Almighty.

(135) Succus lapidificus.

(136) Aura seminalis.

This remained a leading orthodox mode of explanation in the Church,

Catholic and Protestant, for centuries.

II. EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW.

But the scientific method could not be entirely hidden; and, near the

beginning of the seventeenth century, De Clave, Bitaud, and De Villon

revived it in France. Straightway the theological faculty of Paris

protested against the scientific doctrine as unscriptural, destroyed the

offending treatises, banished their authors from Paris, and forbade them

to live in towns or enter places of public resort.(137)

(137) See Morley, Life of Palissy the Potter, vol. ii, p. 315 et seq.

The champions of science, though depressed for a time, quietly laboured

on, especially in Italy. Half a century later, Steno, a Dane, and

Scilla, an Italian, went still further in the right direction; and,

though they and their disciples took great pains to throw a tub to the

whale, in the shape of sundry vague concessions to the Genesis legends,

they developed geological truth more and more.

In France, the old theological spirit remained exceedingly powerful.

About the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon made another attempt

to state simple geological truths; but the theological faculty of the

Sorbonne dragged him at once from his high position, forced him to

recant ignominiously, and to print his recantation. It runs as follows:

"I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture;

that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both

as to order of time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book

respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be

contrary to the narrative of Moses." This humiliating document reminds

us painfully of that forced upon Galileo a hundred years before.

It has been well observed by one of the greatest of modern authorities

that the doctrine which Buffon thus "abandoned" is as firmly established

as that of the earth's rotation upon its axis.(138) Yet one hundred

and fifty years were required to secure for it even a fair hearing; the

prevailing doctrine of the Church continued to be that "all things were

made at the beginning of the world," and that to say that stones

and fossils were made before or since "the beginning" is contrary

to Scripture. Again we find theological substitutes for scientific

explanation ripening into phrases more and more hollow--making fossils

"sports of Nature," or "mineral concretions," or "creations of plastic

force," or "models" made by the Creator before he had fully decided upon

the best manner of creating various beings.

(138) See citation and remark in Lyell's Principles of Geology, chap.

iii, p. 57; also Huxley, Essays on Controverted Questions, p. 62.

Of this period, when theological substitutes for science were carrying

all before them, there still exists a monument commemorating at the

same time a farce and a tragedy. This is the work of Johann Beringer,

professor in the University of Wurzburg and private physician to

the Prince-Bishop--the treatise bearing the title Lithographiae

Wirceburgensis Specimen Primum, "illustrated with the marvellous

likenesses of two hundred figured or rather insectiform stones."

Beringer, for the greater glory of God, had previously committed

himself so completely to the theory that fossils are simply "stones of

a peculiar sort, hidden by the Author of Nature for his own

pleasure,"(139) that some of his students determined to give his faith

in that pious doctrine a thorough trial. They therefore prepared a

collection of sham fossils in baked clay, imitating not only plants,

reptiles, and fishes of every sort that their knowledge or imagination

could suggest, but even Hebrew and Syriac inscriptions, one of them

the name of the Almighty; and these they buried in a place where the

professor was wont to search for specimens. The joy of Beringer on

unearthing these proofs of the immediate agency of the finger of God in

creating fossils knew no bounds. At great cost he prepared this book,

whose twenty-two elaborate plates of facsimiles were forever to settle

the question in favour of theology and against science, and prefixed to

the work an allegorical title page, wherein not only the glory of his

own sovereign, but that of heaven itself, was pictured as based upon a

pyramid of these miraculous fossils. So robust was his faith that not

even a premature exposure of the fraud could dissuade him from the

publication of his book. Dismissing in one contemptuous chapter this

exposure as a slander by his rivals, he appealed to the learned world.

But the shout of laughter that welcomed the work soon convinced even its

author. In vain did he try to suppress it; and, according to tradition,

having wasted his fortune in vain attempts to buy up all the copies of

it, and being taunted by the rivals whom he had thought to overwhelm, he

died of chagrin. Even death did not end his misfortunes. The copies

of the first edition having been sold by a graceless descendant to a

Leipsic bookseller, a second edition was brought out under a new title,

and this, too, is now much sought as a precious memorial of human

credulity.(140)

(139) See Beringer's Lithographiae, etc., p. 91.

(140) See Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie, Munich, 1872, p. 467, note,

and Reusch, Bibel und Natur, p. 197. A list of authorities upon this

episode, with the text of one of the epigrams circulated at poor

Beringer's expense, is given by Dr. Reuss in the Serapeum for 1852, p.

203. The book itself (the original impression) is in the White Library

at Cornell University. For Beringer himself, see especially the

encyclopedia of Ersch and Gruber, and the Allgemeine deutsche

Biographie.

But even this discomfiture did not end the idea which had caused

it, for, although some latitude was allowed among the various

theologico-scientific explanations, it was still held meritorious

to believe that all fossils were placed in the strata on one of the

creative days by the hand of the Almighty, and that this was done for

some mysterious purpose, probably for the trial of human faith.

Strange as it may at first seem, the theological war against a

scientific method in geology was waged more fiercely in Protestant

countries than in Catholic. The older Church had learned by her costly

mistakes, especially in the cases of Copernicus and Galileo, what

dangers to her claim of infallibility lay in meddling with a growing

science. In Italy, therefore, comparatively little opposition was made,

while England furnished the most bitter opponents to geology so long as

the controversy could be maintained, and the most active negotiators in

patching up a truce on the basis of a sham science afterward. The Church

of England did, indeed, produce some noble men, like Bishop Clayton

and John Mitchell, who stood firmly by the scientific method; but these

appear generally to have been overwhelmed by a chorus of churchmen and

dissenters, whose mixtures of theology and science, sometimes tragic in

their results and sometimes comic, are among the most instructive things

in modern history.(141)

(141) For a comparison between the conduct of Italian and English

ecclesiastics as regards geology, see Lyell, Principles of Geology,

tenth English edition, vol. i, p. 33. For a philosophical statement of

reasons why the struggle was more bitter and the attempt at deceptive

compromises more absurd in England than elsewhere, see Maury,

L'Ancienne Academie des Sciences, second edition, p. 152. For very

frank confessions of the reasons why the Catholic Church has become

more careful in her dealings with science, see Roberts, The Pontifical

Decrees against the Earth's Movement, London, 1885, especially pp. 94

and 132, 133, and St. George Mivart's article in the Nineteenth Century

for July 1885. The first of these gentlemen, it must not be forgotten,

is a Roman Catholic clergyman and the second an eminent layman of the

same Church, and both admit that it was the Pope, speaking ex cathedra,

who erred in the Galileo case; but their explanation is that God allowed

the Pope and Church to fall into this grievous error, which has cost so

dear, in order to show once and for all that the Church has no right to

decide questions in Science.

We have already noted that there are generally three periods or phases

in a theological attack upon any science. The first of these is marked

by the general use of scriptural texts and statements against the new

scientific doctrine; the third by attempts at compromise by means of

far-fetched reconciliations of textual statements with ascertained fact;

but the second or intermediate period between these two is frequently

marked by the pitting against science of some great doctrine in

theology. We saw this in astronomy, when Bellarmin and his followers

insisted that the scientific doctrine of the earth revolving about the

sun is contrary to the theological doctrine of the incarnation. So now

against geology it was urged that the scientific doctrine that fossils

represent animals which died before Adam contradicts the theological

doctrine of Adam's fall and the statement that "death entered the world

by sin."

In this second stage of the theological struggle with geology, England

was especially fruitful in champions of orthodoxy, first among whom may

be named Thomas Burnet. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century,

just at the time when Newton's great discovery was given to the

world, Burnet issued his Sacred Theory of the Earth. His position was

commanding; he was a royal chaplain and a cabinet officer. Planting

himself upon the famous text in the second epistle of Peter,(142) he

declares that the flood had destroyed the old and created a new world.

The Newtonian theory he refuses to accept. In his theory of the deluge

he lays less stress upon the "opening of the windows of heaven" than

upon the "breaking up of the fountains of the great deep." On this

latter point he comes forth with great strength. His theory is that

the earth is hollow, and filled with fluid like an egg. Mixing together

sundry texts from Genesis and from the second epistle of Peter, the

theological doctrine of the "Fall," an astronomical theory regarding the

ecliptic, and various notions adapted from Descartes, he insisted that,

before sin brought on the Deluge, the earth was of perfect mathematical

form, smooth and beautiful, "like an egg," with neither seas nor islands

nor valleys nor rocks, "with not a wrinkle, scar, or fracture," and that

all creation was equally perfect.

(142) See II Peter iii, 6.

In the second book of his great work Burnet went still further. As in

his first book he had mixed his texts of Genesis and St. Peter with

Descartes, he now mixed the account of the Garden of Eden in Genesis

with heathen legends of the golden age, and concluded that before the

flood there was over the whole earth perpetual spring, disturbed by no

rain more severe than the falling of the dew.

In addition to his other grounds for denying the earlier existence of

the sea, he assigned the reason that, if there had been a sea before

the Deluge, sinners would have learned to build ships, and so, when the

Deluge set in, could have saved themselves.

The work was written with much power, and attracted universal attention.

It was translated into various languages, and called forth a multitude

of supporters and opponents in all parts of Europe. Strong men rose

against it, especially in England, and among them a few dignitaries of

the Church; but the Church generally hailed the work with joy. Addison

praised it in a Latin ode, and for nearly a century it exercised a

strong influence upon European feeling, and aided to plant more deeply

than ever the theological opinion that the earth as now existing

is merely a ruin; whereas, before sin brought on the Flood, it was

beautiful in its "egg-shaped form," and free from every imperfection.

A few years later came another writer of the highest standing--William

Whiston, professor at Cambridge, who in 1696 published his New Theory

of the Earth. Unlike Burnet, he endeavoured to avail himself of the

Newtonian idea, and brought in, to aid the geological catastrophe caused

by human sin, a comet, which broke open "the fountains of the great

deep."

But, far more important than either of these champions, there arose in

the eighteenth century, to aid in the subjection of science to theology,

three men of extraordinary power--John Wesley, Adam Clarke, and Richard

Watson. All three were men of striking intellectual gifts, lofty

character, and noble purpose, and the first-named one of the greatest

men in English history; yet we find them in geology hopelessly fettered

by the mere letter of Scripture, and by a temporary phase in theology.

As in regard to witchcraft and the doctrine of comets, so in regard to

geology, this theological view drew Wesley into enormous error.(143)

The great doctrine which Wesley, Watson, Clarke, and their compeers,

following St. Augustine, Bede, Peter Lombard, and a long line of the

greatest minds in the universal Church, thought it especially necessary

to uphold against geologists was, that death entered the world by

sin--by the first transgression of Adam and Eve. The extent to which the

supposed necessity of upholding this doctrine carried Wesley seems now

almost beyond belief. Basing his theology on the declaration that the

Almighty after creation found the earth and all created things "very

good," he declares, in his sermon on the Cause and Cure of Earthquakes,

that no one who believes the Scriptures can deny that "sin is the moral

cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural cause may be." Again,

he declares that earthquakes are the "effect of that curse which was

brought upon the earth by the original transgression." Bringing into

connection with Genesis the declaration of St. Paul that "the whole

creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now," he finds

additional scriptural proof that the earthquakes were the result of

Adam's fall. He declares, in his sermon on God's Approbation of His

Works, that "before the sin of Adam there were no agitations within

the bowels of the earth, no violent convulsions, no concussions of the

earth, no earthquakes, but all was unmoved as the pillars of heaven.

There were then no such things as eruptions of fires; no volcanoes or

burning mountains." Of course, a science which showed that earthquakes

had been in operation for ages before the appearance of man on the

planet, and which showed, also, that those very earthquakes which he

considered as curses resultant upon the Fall were really blessings,

producing the fissures in which we find today those mineral veins so

essential to modern civilization, was entirely beyond his comprehension.

He insists that earthquakes are "God's strange works of judgment, the

proper effect and punishment of sin."

(143) For his statement that "the giving up of witchcraft is in effect

the giving up of the Bible," see Welsey's Journal, 1766-'68.

So, too, as to death and pain. In his sermon on the Fall of Man he

took the ground that death and pain entered the world by Adam's

transgression, insisting that the carnage now going on among animals is

the result of Adam's sin. Speaking of the birds, beasts, and insects, he

says that, before sin entered the world by Adam's fall, "none of these

attempted to devour or in any way hurt one another"; that "the spider

was then as harmless as the fly and did not then lie in wait for blood."

Here, again, Wesley arrayed his early followers against geology, which

reveals, in the fossil remains of carnivorous animals, pain and death

countless ages before the appearance of man. The half-digested fragments

of weaker animals within the fossilized bodies of the stronger have

destroyed all Wesley's arguments in behalf of his great theory.(144)

(144) See Wesley's sermon on God's Approbation of His Works, parts xi

and xii.

Dr. Adam Clarke held similar views. He insisted that thorns and thistles

were given as a curse to human labour, on account of Adam's sin, and

appeared upon the earth for the first time after Adam's fall. So, too,

Richard Watson, the most prolific writer of the great evangelical reform

period, and the author of the Institutes, the standard theological

treatise on the evangelical side, says, in a chapter treating of the

Fall, and especially of the serpent which tempted Eve: "We have no

reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in any

mode or degree until his transformation. That he was then degraded to

a reptile, to go upon his belly, imports, on the contrary, an entire

alteration and loss of the original form." All that admirable adjustment

of the serpent to its environment which delights naturalists was to the

Wesleyan divine simply an evil result of the sin of Adam and Eve. Yet

here again geology was obliged to confront theology in revealing the

PYTHON in the Eocene, ages before man appeared.(145)

(145) See Westminster Review, October, 1870, article on John Wesley's

Cosmogony, with citations from Wesley's Sermons, Watson's Institutes of

Theology, Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, etc.

The immediate results of such teaching by such men was to throw many who

would otherwise have resorted to observation and investigation back upon

scholastic methods. Again reappears the old system of solving the riddle

by phrases. In 1733, Dr. Theodore Arnold urged the theory of "models,"

and insisted that fossils result from "infinitesimal particles brought

together in the creation to form the outline of all the creatures

and objects upon and within the earth"; and Arnold's work gained wide

acceptance.(146)

(146) See citation in Mr. Ward's article, as above, p. 390.

Such was the influence of this succession of great men that toward the

close of the last century the English opponents of geology on biblical

grounds seemed likely to sweep all before them. Cramping our whole

inheritance of sacred literature within the rules of a historical

compend, they showed the terrible dangers arising from the revelations

of geology, which make the earth older than the six thousand years

required by Archbishop Usher's interpretation of the Old Testament.

Nor was this feeling confined to ecclesiastics. Williams, a thoughtful

layman, declared that such researches led to infidelity and atheism, and

are "nothing less than to depose the Almighty Creator of the universe

from his office." The poet Cowper, one of the mildest of men, was also

roused by these dangers, and in his most elaborate poem wrote:

"Some drill and bore

The solid earth, and from the strata there Extract a register, by

which we learn That He who made it, and revealed its date To Moses, was

mistaken in its age!"

John Howard summoned England to oppose "those scientific systems which

are calculated to tear up in the public mind every remaining attachment

to Christianity."

With this special attack upon geological science by means of the dogma

of Adam's fall, the more general attack by the literal interpretation

of the text was continued. The legendary husks and rinds of our sacred

books were insisted upon as equally precious and nutritious with the

great moral and religious truths which they envelop. Especially precious

were the six days--each "the evening and the morning"--and the exact

statements as to the time when each part of creation came into being. To

save these, the struggle became more and more desperate.

Difficult as it is to realize it now, within the memory of many now

living the battle was still raging most fiercely in England, and both

kinds of artillery usually brought against a new science were in full

play, and filling the civilized world with their roar.

About half a century since, the Rev. J. Mellor Brown, the Rev. Henry

Cole, and others were hurling at all geologists alike, and especially at

such Christian scholars as Dr. Buckland and Dean Conybeare and Pye Smith

and Prof. Sedgwick, the epithets of "infidel," "impugner of the sacred

record," and "assailant of the volume of God."(147)

(147) For these citations, see Lyell, Principles of Geology,

introduction.

The favourite weapon of the orthodox party was the charge that the

geologists were "attacking the truth of God." They declared geology

"not a subject of lawful inquiry," denouncing it as "a dark art," as

"dangerous and disreputable," as "a forbidden province," as

"infernal artillery," and as "an awful evasion of the testimony of

revelation."(148)

(148) See Pye Smith, D. D., Geology and Scripture, pp. 156, 157, 168,

169.

This attempt to scare men from the science having failed, various other

means were taken. To say nothing about England, it is humiliating to

human nature to remember the annoyances, and even trials, to which the

pettiest and narrowest of men subjected such Christian scholars in our

own country as Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitchcock and Louis Agassiz.

But it is a duty and a pleasure to state here that one great Christian

scholar did honour to religion and to himself by quietly accepting

the claims of science and making the best of them, despite all these

clamours. This man was Nicholas Wiseman, better known afterward as

Cardinal Wiseman. The conduct of this pillar of the Roman Catholic

Church contrasts admirably with that of timid Protestants, who were

filling England with shrieks and denunciations.(149)

(149) Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connection between Science and

Revealed Religion, first American edition, New York, 1837. As to the

comparative severity of the struggle regarding astronomy, geology, etc.,

in the Catholic and Protestant countries, see Lecky's England in the

Eighteenth Century, chap. ix, p. 525.

And here let it be noted that one of the most interesting skirmishes

in this war occurred in New England. Prof. Stuart, of Andover, justly

honoured as a Hebrew scholar, declared that to speak of six periods of

time for the creation was flying in the face of Scripture; that Genesis

expressly speaks of six days, each made up of "the evening and the

morning," and not six periods of time.

To him replied a professor in Yale College, James Kingsley. In an

article admirable for keen wit and kindly temper, he showed that Genesis

speaks just as clearly of a solid firmament as of six ordinary days,

and that, if Prof. Stuart had surmounted one difficulty and accepted

the Copernican theory, he might as well get over another and accept the

revelations of geology. The encounter was quick and decisive, and the

victory was with science and the broader scholarship of Yale.(150)

(150) See Silliman's Journal, vol. xxx, p. 114.

Perhaps the most singular attempt against geology was made by a fine

survival of the eighteenth century Don--Dean Cockburn, of York--to SCOLD

its champions off the field. Having no adequate knowledge of the new

science, he opened a battery of abuse, giving it to the world at large

from the pulpit and through the press, and even through private letters.

From his pulpit in York Minster he denounced Mary Somerville by name for

those studies in physical geography which have made her name honoured

throughout the world.

But the special object of his antipathy was the British Association for

the Advancement of Science. He issued a pamphlet against it which

went through five editions in two years, sent solemn warnings to its

president, and in various ways made life a burden to Sedgwick, Buckland,

and other eminent investigators who ventured to state geological facts

as they found them.

These weapons were soon seen to be ineffective; they were like Chinese

gongs and dragon lanterns against rifled cannon; the work of science

went steadily on.(151)

(151) Prof. Goldwin Smith informs me that the papers of Sir Robert Peel,

yet unpublished, contain very curious specimens of the epistles of Dean

Cockburn. See also Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, Boston,

1874, pp. 139 and 375. Compare with any statement of his religious views

that Dean Cockburn was able to make, the following from Mrs. Somerville:

"Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the Deity as these

purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science which

have been, by slow degrees, vouchsafed to man--and are still granted

in these latter times by the differential calculus, now superseded by

the higher algebra--all of which must have existed in that sublimely

omniscient mind from eternity." See also The Life and Letters of Adam

Sedgwick, Cambridge, 1890, vol. ii, pp. 76 and following.

III. THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE, BASED ON THE FLOOD OF NOAH.

Long before the end of the struggle already described, even at a very

early period, the futility of the usual scholastic weapons had been

seen by the more keen-sighted champions of orthodoxy; and, as the

difficulties of the ordinary attack upon science became more and more

evident, many of these champions endeavoured to patch up a truce. So

began the third stage in the war--the period of attempts at compromise.

The position which the compromise party took was that the fossils were

produced by the Deluge of Noah.

This position was strong, for it was apparently based upon Scripture.

Moreover, it had high ecclesiastical sanction, some of the fathers

having held that fossil remains, even on the highest mountains,

represented animals destroyed at the Deluge. Tertullian was especially

firm on this point, and St. Augustine thought that a fossil tooth

discovered in North Africa must have belonged to one of the giants

mentioned in Scripture.(152)

(152) For Tertullian, see his De Pallio, c. ii (Migne, Patr. Lat.,

vol. ii, p. 1033). For Augustine's view, see Cuvier, Recherches sur les

Ossements fossiles, fourth edition, vol. ii, p. 143.

In the sixteenth century especially, weight began to be attached to

this idea by those who felt the worthlessness of various scholastic

explanations. Strong men in both the Catholic and the Protestant camps

accepted it; but the man who did most to give it an impulse into modern

theology was Martin Luther. He easily saw that scholastic phrase-making

could not meet the difficulties raised by fossils, and he naturally

urged the doctrine of their origin at Noah's Flood.(153)

(153) For Luther's opinion, see his Commentary on Genesis.

With such support, it soon became the dominant theory in Christendom:

nothing seemed able to stand against it; but before the end of the same

sixteenth century it met some serious obstacles. Bernard Palissy, one of

the most keen-sighted of scientific thinkers in France, as well as one

of the most devoted of Christians, showed that it was utterly untenable.

Conscientious investigators in other parts of Europe, and especially

in Italy, showed the same thing; all in vain.(154) In vain did good men

protest against the injury sure to be brought upon religion by tying it

to a scientific theory sure to be exploded; the doctrine that fossils

are the remains of animals drowned at the Flood continued to be upheld

by the great majority of theological leaders for nearly three centuries

as "sound doctrine," and as a blessed means of reconciling science

with Scripture. To sustain this scriptural view, efforts energetic and

persistent were put forth both by Catholics and Protestants.

(154) For a very full statement of the honourable record of Italy in

this respect, and for the enlightened views of some Italian churchmen,

see Stoppani, Il Dogma a le Scienze Positive, Milan, 1886, pp. 203 et

seq.

In France, the learned Benedictine, Calmet, in his great works on the

Bible, accepted it as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century,

believing the mastodon's bones exhibited by Mazurier to be those of King

Teutobocus, and holding them valuable testimony to the existence of the

giants mentioned in Scripture and of the early inhabitants of the earth

overwhelmed by the Flood.(155)

(155) For the steady adherence to this sacred theory, see Audiat, Vie de

Palissy, p. 412, and Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv, p. 492. For

Calmet, see his Dissertation sur les Geants, cited in Berger de Xivery,

Traditions Teratologiques, p. 191.

But the greatest champion appeared in England. We have already seen how,

near the close of the seventeenth century, Thomas Burnet prepared the

way in his Sacred Theory of the Earth by rejecting the discoveries of

Newton, and showing how sin led to the breaking up of the "foundations

of the great deep," and we have also seen how Whiston, in his New Theory

of the Earth, while yielding a little and accepting the discoveries of

Newton, brought in a comet to aid in producing the Deluge; but far more

important than these in permanent influence was John Woodward, professor

at Gresham College, a leader in scientific thought at the University

of Cambridge, and, as a patient collector of fossils and an earnest

investigator of their meaning, deserving of the highest respect. In 1695

he published his Natural History of the Earth, and rendered one great

service to science, for he yielded another point, and thus destroyed the

foundations for the old theory of fossils. He showed that they were not

"sports of Nature," or "models inserted by the Creator in the strata for

some inscrutable purpose," but that they were really remains of living

beings, as Xenophanes had asserted two thousand years before him. So

far, he rendered a great service both to science and religion; but, this

done, the text of the Old Testament narrative and the famous passage in

St. Peter's Epistle were too strong for him, and he, too, insisted that

the fossils were produced by the Deluge. Aided by his great authority,

the assault on the true scientific position was vigorous: Mazurier

exhibited certain fossil remains of a mammoth discovered in France as

bones of the giants mentioned in Scripture; Father Torrubia did the

same thing in Spain; Increase Mather sent to England similar remains

discovered in America, with a like statement.

For the edification of the faithful, such "bones of the giants mentioned

in Scripture" were hung up in public places. Jurieu saw some of

them thus suspended in one of the churches of Valence; and Henrion,

apparently under the stimulus thus given, drew up tables showing the

size of our antediluvian ancestors, giving the height of Adam as 123

feet 9 inches and that of Eve as 118 feet 9 inches and 9 lines.(156)

(156) See Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles, fourth edition,

vol. ii, p. 56; also Geoffrey St.-Hilaire, cited by Berger de Xivery,

Traditions Teratologiques, p. 190.

But the most brilliant service rendered to the theological theory came

from another quarter for, in 1726, Scheuchzer, having discovered a large

fossil lizard, exhibited it to the world as the "human witness of the

Deluge":(157) this great discovery was hailed everywhere with joy,

for it seemed to prove not only that human beings were drowned at the

Deluge, but that "there were giants in those days." Cheered by the

applause thus gained, he determined to make the theological position

impregnable. Mixing together various texts of Scripture with notions

derived from the philosophy of Descartes and the speculations of

Whiston, he developed the theory that "the fountains of the great deep"

were broken up by the direct physical action of the hand of God, which,

being literally applied to the axis of the earth, suddenly stopped the

earth's rotation, broke up "the fountains of the great deep," spilled

the water therein contained, and produced the Deluge. But his service

to sacred science did not end here, for he prepared an edition of the

Bible, in which magnificent engravings in great number illustrated his

view and enforced it upon all readers. Of these engravings no less than

thirty-four were devoted to the Deluge alone.(158)

(157) Homo diluvii testis.

(158) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 172; also Scheuchzer, Physica Sacra,

Augustae Vindel et Ulmae, 1732. For the ancient belief regarding

giants, see Leopoldi, Saggio. For accounts of the views of Mazaurier and

Scheuchzer, see Cuvier; also Buchner, Man in Past, Present, and Future,

English translation, pp. 235, 236. For Increase Mather's views, see

Philosophical Transactions, vol. xxiv, p. 85. As to similar fossils

sent from New York to the Royal Society as remains of giants, see Weld,

History of the Royal Society, vol. i, p. 421. For Father Torrubia and

his Gigantologia Espanola, see D'Archiac, Introduction a l'Etude de

la Paleontologie Stratigraphique, Paris, 1864, p. 201. For admirable

summaries, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, London, 1867; D'Archiac,

Geologie et Paleontologie, Paris, 1866; Pictet, Traite de Paleontologie,

Paris, 1853; Vezian, Prodrome de la Geologie, Paris, 1863; Haeckel,

History of Creation, English translation, New York, 1876, chap. iii;

and for recent progress, Prof. O. S. Marsh's Address on the History and

Methods of Paleontology.

In the midst all this came an episode very comical but very instructive;

for it shows that the attempt to shape the deductions of science to meet

the exigencies of dogma may mislead heterodoxy as absurdly as orthodoxy.

About the year 1760 news of the discovery of marine fossils in various

elevated districts of Europe reached Voltaire. He, too, had a theologic

system to support, though his system was opposed to that of the sacred

books of the Hebrews; and, fearing that these new discoveries might be

used to support the Mosaic accounts of the Deluge, all his wisdom and

wit were compacted into arguments to prove that the fossil fishes were

remains of fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown away

by travellers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped by

crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land; and that the fossil

bones found between Paris and Etampes were parts of a skeleton belonging

to the cabinet of some ancient philosopher. Through chapter after

chapter, Voltaire, obeying the supposed necessities of his theology,

fought desperately the growing results of the geologic investigations of

his time.(159)

(159) See Voltaire, Dissertation sur les Changements arrives dans notre

Globe; also Voltaire, Les Singularities de la Nature, chap. xii; also

Jevons, Principles of Science, vol. ii, p. 328.

But far more prejudicial to Christianity was the continued effort on the

other side to show that the fossils were caused by the Deluge of Noah.

No supposition was too violent to support this theory, which was

considered vital to the Bible. By taking the mere husks and rinds of

biblical truth for truth itself, by taking sacred poetry as prose,

and by giving a literal interpretation of it, the followers of Burnet,

Whiston, and Woodward built up systems which bear to real geology much

the same relation that the Christian Topography of Cosmas bears to real

geography. In vain were exhibited the absolute geological, zoological,

astronomical proofs that no universal deluge, or deluge covering any

large part of the earth, had taken place within the last six thousand or

sixty thousand years; in vain did so enlightened a churchman as Bishop

Clayton declare that the Deluge could not have extended beyond that

district where Noah lived before the Flood; in vain did others, like

Bishop Croft and Bishop Stillingfleet, and the nonconformist Matthew

Poole, show that the Deluge might not have been and probably was not

universal; in vain was it shown that, even if there had been a universal

deluge, the fossils were not produced by it: the only answers were the

citation of the text, "And all the high mountains which were under the

whole heaven were covered," and, to clinch the matter, Worthington and

men like him insisted that any argument to show that fossils were not

remains of animals drowned at the Deluge of Noah was "infidelity." In

England, France, and Germany, belief that the fossils were produced

by the Deluge of Noah was widely insisted upon as part of that faith

essential to salvation.(160)

(160) For a candid summary of the proofs from geology, astronomy,

and zoology, that the Noachian Deluge was not universally or widely

extended, see McClintock and Strong, Cyclopedia of Biblical Theology

and Ecclesiastical Literature, article Deluge. For general history, see

Lyell, D'Archiac, and Vezian. For special cases showing the bitterness

of the conflict, see the Rev. Mr. Davis's Life of Rev. Dr. Pye Smith,

passim. For a late account, see Prof. Huxley on The Lights of the Church

and the Light of Science, in the Nineteenth Century for July, 1890.

But the steady work of science went on: not all the force of the

Church--not even the splendid engravings in Scheuchzer's Bible--could

stop it, and the foundations of this theological theory began to crumble

away. The process was, indeed, slow; it required a hundred and twenty

years for the searchers of God's truth, as revealed in Nature--such men

as Hooke, Linnaeus, Whitehurst, Daubenton, Cuvier, and William Smith--to

push their works under this fabric of error, and, by statements which

could not be resisted, to undermine it. As we arrive at the beginning of

the nineteenth century, science is becoming irresistible in this field.

Blumenbach, Von Buch, and Schlotheim led the way, but most important on

the Continent was the work of Cuvier. In the early years of the present

century his researches among fossils began to throw new light into the

whole subject of geology. He was, indeed, very conservative, and even

more wary and diplomatic; seeming, like Voltaire, to feel that "among

wolves one must howl a little." It was a time of reaction. Napoleon

had made peace with the Church, and to disturb that peace was akin to

treason. By large but vague concessions Cuvier kept the theologians

satisfied, while he undermined their strongest fortress. The danger was

instinctively felt by some of the champions of the Church, and typical

among these was Chateaubriand, who in his best-known work, once so

great, now so little--the Genius of Christianity--grappled with the

questions of creation by insisting upon a sort of general deception "in

the beginning," under which everything was created by a sudden fiat,

but with appearances of pre-existence. His words are as follows: "It

was part of the perfection and harmony of the nature which was displayed

before men's eyes that the deserted nests of last year's birds should be

seen on the trees, and that the seashore should be covered with shells

which had been the abode of fish, and yet the world was quite new, and

nests and shells had never been inhabited."(161) But the real victory

was with Brongniart, who, about 1820, gave forth his work on fossil

plants, and thus built a barrier against which the enemies of science

raged in vain.(162)

(161) Genie du Christianisme, chap.v, pp. 1-14, cited by Reusch, vol. i,

p. 250.

(162) For admirable sketches of Brongniart and other paleobotanists, see

Ward, as above.

Still the struggle was not ended, and, a few years later, a forlorn hope

was led in England by Granville Penn.

His fundamental thesis was that "our globe has undergone only two

revolutions, the Creation and the Deluge, and both by the immediate fiat

of the Almighty"; he insisted that the Creation took place in exactly

six days of ordinary time, each made up of "the evening and the

morning"; and he ended with a piece of that peculiar presumption so

familiar to the world, by calling on Cuvier and all other geologists to

"ask for the old paths and walk therein until they shall simplify their

system and reduce their numerous revolutions to the two events or epochs

only--the six days of Creation and the Deluge."(163) The geologists

showed no disposition to yield to this peremptory summons; on the

contrary, the President of the British Geological Society, and even so

eminent a churchman and geologist as Dean Buckland, soon acknowledged

that facts obliged them to give up the theory that the fossils of the

coal measures were deposited at the Deluge of Noah, and to deny that the

Deluge was universal.

(163) See the Works of Granville Penn, vol. ii, p. 273.

The defection of Buckland was especially felt by the orthodox party. His

ability, honesty, and loyalty to his profession, as well as his position

as Canon of Christ Church and Professor of Geology at Oxford, gave him

great authority, which he exerted to the utmost in soothing his brother

ecclesiastics. In his inaugural lecture he had laboured to show that

geology confirmed the accounts of Creation and the Flood as given

in Genesis, and in 1823, after his cave explorations had revealed

overwhelming evidences of the vast antiquity of the earth, he had still

clung to the Flood theory in his Reliquiae Diluvianae.

This had not, indeed, fully satisfied the anti-scientific party, but as

a rule their attacks upon him took the form not so much of abuse as of

humorous disparagement. An epigram by Shuttleworth, afterward Bishop

of Chichester, in imitation of Pope's famous lines upon Newton, ran as

follows:

"Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood: Buckland arose, and

all was clear as mud."

On his leaving Oxford for a journey to southern Europe, Dean Gaisford

was heard to exclaim: "Well, Buckland is gone to Italy; so, thank God,

we shall have no more of this geology!"

Still there was some comfort as long as Buckland held to the Deluge

theory; but, on his surrender, the combat deepened: instead of epigrams

and caricatures came bitter attacks, and from the pulpit and press came

showers of missiles. The worst of these were hurled at Lyell. As we have

seen, he had published in 1830 his Principles of Geology. Nothing

could have been more cautious. It simply gave an account of the main

discoveries up to that time, drawing the necessary inferences with plain

yet convincing logic, and it remains to this day one of those works

in which the Anglo-Saxon race may most justly take pride,--one of the

land-marks in the advance of human thought.

But its tendency was inevitably at variance with the Chaldean and other

ancient myths and legends regarding the Creation and Deluge which

the Hebrews had received from the older civilizations among their

neighbours, and had incorporated into the sacred books which they

transmitted to the modern world; it was therefore extensively "refuted."

Theologians and men of science influenced by them insisted that his

minimizing of geological changes, and his laying stress on the gradual

action of natural causes still in force, endangered the sacred record of

Creation and left no place for miraculous intervention; and when it

was found that he had entirely cast aside their cherished idea that the

great geological changes of the earth's surface and the multitude of

fossil remains were due to the Deluge of Noah, and had shown that a far

longer time was demanded for Creation than any which could possibly

be deduced from the Old Testament genealogies and chronicles, orthodox

indignation burst forth violently; eminent dignitaries of the Church

attacked him without mercy and for a time he was under social ostracism.

As this availed little, an effort was made on the scientific side to

crush him beneath the weighty authority of Cuvier; but the futility of

this effort was evident when it was found that thinking men would no

longer listen to Cuvier and persisted in listening to Lyell. The great

orthodox text-book, Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, became at once so

discredited in the estimation of men of science that no new edition

of it was called for, while Lyell's work speedily ran through twelve

editions and remained a firm basis of modern thought.(164)

(164) For Buckland and the various forms of attack upon him, see Gordon,

Life of Buckland, especially pp. 10, 26, 136. For the attack on Lyell

and his book, see Huxley, The Lights of the Church and the Light of

Science.

As typical of his more moderate opponents we may take Fairholme, who in

1837 published his Mosaic Deluge, and argued that no early convulsions

of the earth, such as those supposed by geologists, could have taken

place, because there could have been no deluge "before moral guilt could

possibly have been incurred"--that is to say, before the creation of

mankind. In touching terms he bewailed the defection of the President of

the Geological Society and Dean Buckland--protesting against geologists

who "persist in closing their eyes upon the solemn declarations of the

Almighty"

Still the geologists continued to seek truth: the germs planted

especially by William Smith, "the Father of English Geology" were

developed by a noble succession of investigators, and the victory was

sure. Meanwhile those theologians who felt that denunciation of

science as "godless" could accomplish little, laboured upon schemes for

reconciling geology with Genesis. Some of these show amazing ingenuity,

but an eminent religious authority, going over them with great

thoroughness, has well characterized them as "daring and fanciful." Such

attempts have been variously classified, but the fact regarding them

all is that each mixes up more or less of science with more or less of

Scripture, and produces a result more or less absurd. Though a few men

here and there have continued these exercises, the capitulation of the

party which set the literal account of the Deluge of Noah against the

facts revealed by geology was at last clearly made.(165)

(165) For Fairholme, see his Mosaic Deluge, London, 1837, p. 358. For a

very just characterization of various schemes of "reconciliation," see

Shields, The Final Philosophy, p. 340.

One of the first evidences of the completeness of this surrender has

been so well related by the eminent physiologist, Dr. W. B. Carpenter,

that it may best be given in his own words: "You are familiar with a

book of considerable value, Dr. W. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible. I

happened to know the influences under which that dictionary was

framed. The idea of the publisher and of the editor was to give as much

scholarship and such results of modern criticism as should be compatible

with a very judicious conservatism. There was to be no objection

to geology, but the universality of the Deluge was to be strictly

maintained. The editor committed the article Deluge to a man of very

considerable ability, but when the article came to him he found that

it was so excessively heretical that he could not venture to put it in.

There was not time for a second article under that head, and if you look

in that dictionary you will find under the word Deluge a reference to

Flood. Before Flood came, a second article had been commissioned from a

source that was believed safely conservative; but when the article came

in it was found to be worse than the first. A third article was then

commissioned, and care was taken to secure its 'safety.' If you look

for the word Flood in the dictionary, you will find a reference to Noah.

Under that name you will find an article written by a distinguished

professor of Cambridge, of which I remember that Bishop Colenso said

to me at the time, 'In a very guarded way the writer concedes the whole

thing.' You will see by this under what trammels scientific thought has

laboured in this department of inquiry."(166)

(166) See Official Report of the National Conference of Unitarian and

other Christian Churches held at Saratoga, 1882, p. 97.

A similar surrender was seen when from a new edition of Horne's

Introduction to the Scriptures, the standard textbook of orthodoxy, its

accustomed use of fossils to prove the universality of the Deluge was

quietly dropped.(167)

(167) This was about 1856; see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 329.

A like capitulation in the United States was foreshadowed in 1841, when

an eminent Professor of Biblical Literature and interpretation in the

most important theological seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church,

Dr. Samuel Turner, showed his Christian faith and courage by virtually

accepting the new view; and the old contention was utterly cast away

by the thinking men of another great religious body when, at a later

period, two divines among the most eminent for piety and learning in

the Methodist Episcopal Church inserted in the Biblical Cyclopaedia,

published under their supervision, a candid summary of the proofs

from geology, astronomy, and zoology that the Deluge of Noah was not

universal, or even widely extended, and this without protest from any

man of note in any branch of the American Church.(168)

(168) For Dr. Turner, see his Companion to the Book of Genesis, London

and New York, 1841, pp. 216-219. For McClintock and Strong, see their

Cyclopaedia of Biblical Knowledge, etc., article Deluge. For similar

surrenders of the Deluge in various other religious encyclopedias and

commentaries, see Huxley, Essays on controverted questions, chap. xiii.

The time when the struggle was relinquished by enlightened theologians

of the Roman Catholic Church may be fixed at about 1862, when Reusch,

Professor of Theology at Bonn, in his work on The Bible and Nature,

cast off the old diluvial theory and all its supporters, accepting the

conclusions of science.(169)

(169) See Reusch, Bibel und Natur, chap. xxi.

But, though the sacred theory with the Deluge of Noah as a universal

solvent for geological difficulties was evidently dying, there still

remained in various quarters a touching fidelity to it. In Roman

Catholic countries the old theory was widely though quietly cherished,

and taught from the religious press, the pulpit, and the theological

professor's chair. Pope Pius IX was doubtless in sympathy with this

feeling when, about 1850, he forbade the scientific congress of Italy to

meet at Bologna.(170)

(170) See Whiteside, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, vol. iii, chap.

xiv.

In 1856 Father Debreyne congratulated the theologians of France on their

admirable attitude: "Instinctively," he says, "they still insist upon

deriving the fossils from Noah's Flood."(171) In 1875 the Abbe Choyer

published at Paris and Angers a text-book widely approved by Church

authorities, in which he took similar ground; and in 1877 the Jesuit

father Bosizio published at Mayence a treatise on Geology and the

Deluge, endeavouring to hold the world to the old solution of the

problem, allowing, indeed, that the "days" of Creation were long

periods, but making atonement for this concession by sneers at

Darwin.(172)

(171) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 472.

(172) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 478, and Bosizio, Geologie und die

Sundfluth, Mayence, 1877, preface, p. xiv.

In the Russo-Greek Church, in 1869, Archbishop Macarius, of Lithuania,

urged the necessity of believing that Creation in six days of ordinary

time and the Deluge of Noah are the only causes of all that geology

seeks to explain; and, as late as 1876, another eminent theologian of

the same Church went even farther, and refused to allow the faithful to

believe that any change had taken place since "the beginning" mentioned

in Genesis, when the strata of the earth were laid, tilted, and twisted,

and the fossils scattered among them by the hand of the Almighty during

six ordinary days.(173)

(173) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 472, 571, and elsewhere; also citations

in Reusch and Shields.

In the Lutheran branch of the Protestant Church we also find echoes

of the old belief. Keil, eminent in scriptural interpretation at the

University of Dorpat, gave forth in 1860 a treatise insisting that

geology is rendered futile and its explanations vain by two great facts:

the Curse which drove Adam and Eve out of Eden, and the Flood that

destroyed all living things save Noah, his family, and the animals in

the ark. In 1867, Phillippi, and in 1869, Dieterich, both theologians

of eminence, took virtually the same ground in Germany, the latter

attempting to beat back the scientific hosts with a phrase apparently

pithy, but really hollow--the declaration that "modern geology observes

what is, but has no right to judge concerning the beginning of things."

As late as 1876, Zugler took a similar view, and a multitude of lesser

lights, through pulpit and press, brought these antiscientific doctrines

to bear upon the people at large--the only effect being to arouse grave

doubts regarding Christianity among thoughtful men, and especially among

young men, who naturally distrusted a cause using such weapons.

For just at this time the traditional view of the Deluge received its

death-blow, and in a manner entirely unexpected. By the investigations

of George Smith among the Assyrian tablets of the British Museum, in

1872, and by his discoveries just afterward in Assyria, it was put

beyond a reasonable doubt that a great mass of accounts in Genesis

are simply adaptations of earlier and especially of Chaldean myths and

legends. While this proved to be the fact as regards the accounts of

Creation and the fall of man, it was seen to be most strikingly so as

regards the Deluge. The eleventh of the twelve tablets, on which the

most important of these inscriptions was found, was almost wholly

preserved, and it revealed in this legend, dating from a time far

earlier than that of Moses, such features peculiar to the childhood of

the world as the building of the great ship or ark to escape the flood,

the careful caulking of its seams, the saving of a man beloved of

Heaven, his selecting and taking with him into the vessel animals of all

sorts in couples, the impressive final closing of the door, the sending

forth different birds as the flood abated, the offering of sacrifices

when the flood had subsided, the joy of the Divine Being who had caused

the flood as the odour of the sacrifice reached his nostrils; while

throughout all was shown that partiality for the Chaldean sacred number

seven which appears so constantly in the Genesis legends and throughout

the Hebrew sacred books.

Other devoted scholars followed in the paths thus opened--Sayce in

England, Lenormant in France, Schrader in Germany--with the result that

the Hebrew account of the Deluge, to which for ages theologians had

obliged all geological research to conform, was quietly relegated,

even by most eminent Christian scholars, to the realm of myth and

legend.(174)

(174) For George Smith, see his Chaldean Account of Genesis, New York,

1876, especially pp. 36, 263, 286; also his special work on the subject.

See also Lenormant, Les Origins de l'Histoire, Paris, 1880, chap. viii.

For Schrader, see his The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament,

Whitehouse's translation, London, 1885, vol. i, pp. 47-49 and 58-60, and

elsewhere.

Sundry feeble attempts to break the force of this discovery, and an

evidently widespread fear to have it known, have certainly impaired not

a little the legitimate influence of the Christian clergy.

And yet this adoption of Chaldean myths into the Hebrew Scriptures

furnishes one of the strongest arguments for the value of our Bible as

a record of the upward growth of man; for, while the Chaldean legend

primarily ascribes the Deluge to the mere arbitrary caprice of one among

many gods (Bel), the Hebrew development of the legend ascribes it to

the justice, the righteousness, of the Supreme God; thus showing the

evolution of a higher and nobler sentiment which demanded a moral cause

adequate to justify such a catastrophe.

Unfortunately, thus far, save in a few of the broader and nobler minds

among the clergy, the policy of ignoring such new revelations has

prevailed, and the results of this policy, both in Roman Catholic and in

Protestant countries, are not far to seek. What the condition of thought

is among the middle classes of France and Italy needs not to be stated

here. In Germany, as a typical fact, it may be mentioned that there was

in the year 1881 church accommodation in the city of Berlin for but two

per cent of the population, and that even this accommodation was more

than was needed. This fact is not due to the want of a deep religious

spirit among the North Germans: no one who has lived among them can

doubt the existence of such a spirit; but it is due mainly to the fact

that, while the simple results of scientific investigation have filtered

down among the people at large, the dominant party in the Lutheran

Church has steadily refused to recognise this fact, and has persisted in

imposing on Scripture the fetters of literal and dogmatic interpretation

which Germany has largely outgrown. A similar danger threatens every

other country in which the clergy pursue a similar policy. No thinking

man, whatever may be his religious views, can fail to regret this. A

thoughtful, reverent, enlightened clergy is a great blessing to any

country, and anything which undermines their legitimate work of leading

men out of the worship of material things to the consideration of that

which is highest is a vast misfortune.(175)

(175) For the foregoing statements regarding Germany the writer relies

on his personal observation as a student at the University of Berlin in

1856, as a traveller at various periods afterward, and as Minister of

the United States in 1879, 1880, and 1881.

IV. FINAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.--THE VICTORY OF SCIENCE COMPLETE.

Before concluding, it may be instructive to note a few especially

desperate attempts at truces or compromises, such as always appear when

the victory of any science has become absolutely sure. Typical among

the earliest of these may be mentioned the effort of Carl von Raumer in

1819. With much pretension to scientific knowledge, but with aspirations

bounded by the limits of Prussian orthodoxy, he made a laboured attempt

to produce a statement which, by its vagueness, haziness, and "depth,"

should obscure the real questions at issue. This statement appeared in

the shape of an argument, used by Bertrand and others in the previous

century, to prove that fossil remains of plants in the coal measures

had never existed as living plants, but had been simply a "result of the

development of imperfect plant embryos"; and the same misty theory was

suggested to explain the existence of fossil animals without supposing

the epochs and changes required by geological science.

In 1837 Wagner sought to uphold this explanation; but it was so clearly

a mere hollow phrase, unable to bear the weight of the facts to be

accounted for, that it was soon given up.

Similar attempts were made throughout Europe, the most noteworthy

appearing in England. In 1853 was issued an anonymous work having as its

title A Brief and Complete Refutation of the Anti-Scriptural Theory of

Geologists: the author having revived an old idea, and put a spark

of life into it--this idea being that "all the organisms found in the

depths of the earth were made on the first of the six creative days, as

models for the plants and animals to be created on the third, fifth, and

sixth days."(176)

(176) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 475.

But while these attempts to preserve the old theory as to fossil remains

of lower animals were thus pressed, there appeared upon the geological

field a new scientific column far more terrible to the old doctrines

than any which had been seen previously.

For, just at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century,

geologists began to examine the caves and beds of drift in various

parts of the world; and within a few years from that time a series

of discoveries began in France, in Belgium, in England, in Brazil, in

Sicily, in India, in Egypt, and in America, which established the

fact that a period of time much greater than any which had before been

thought of had elapsed since the first human occupation of the earth.

The chronologies of Archbishop Usher, Petavius, Bossuet, and the other

great authorities on which theology had securely leaned, were found

worthless. It was clearly seen that, no matter how well based upon the

Old Testament genealogies and lives of the patriarchs, all these systems

must go for nothing. The most conservative geologists were gradually

obliged to admit that man had been upon the earth not merely six

thousand, or sixty thousand, or one hundred and sixty thousand years.

And when, in 1863, Sir Charles Lyell, in his book on The Antiquity of

Man, retracted solemnly his earlier view--yielding with a reluctance

almost pathetic, but with a thoroughness absolutely convincing--the last

stronghold of orthodoxy in this field fell.(177)

(177) See Prof. Marsh's address as President of the Society for the

Advancement of Science, in 1879; and for a development of the matter,

see the chapters on The Antiquity of Man and Egyptology and the Fall of

Man and Anthropology, in this work.

The supporters of a theory based upon the letter of Scripture, who

had so long taken the offensive, were now obliged to fight upon the

defensive and at fearful odds. Various lines of defence were taken;

but perhaps the most pathetic effort was that made in the year 1857,

in England, by Gosse. As a naturalist he had rendered great services to

zoological science, but he now concentrated his energies upon one last

effort to save the literal interpretation of Genesis and the theological

structure built upon it. In his work entitled Omphalos he developed the

theory previously urged by Granville Penn, and asserted a new principle

called "prochronism." In accordance with this, all things were created

by the Almighty hand literally within the six days, each made up of "the

evening and the morning," and each great branch of creation was brought

into existence in an instant. Accepting a declaration of Dr. Ure, that

"neither reason nor revelation will justify us in extending the origin

of the material system beyond six thousand years from our own days,"

Gosse held that all the evidences of convulsive changes and long epochs

in strata, rocks, minerals, and fossils are simply "APPEARANCES"--only

that and nothing more. Among these mere "appearances," all created

simultaneously, were the glacial furrows and scratches on rocks, the

marks of retreat on rocky masses, as at Niagara, the tilted and twisted

strata, the piles of lava from extinct volcanoes, the fossils of every

sort in every part of the earth, the foot-tracks of birds and reptiles,

the half-digested remains of weaker animals found in the fossilized

bodies of the stronger, the marks of hyenas' teeth on fossilized bones

found in various caves, and even the skeleton of the Siberian mammoth

at St. Petersburg with lumps of flesh bearing the marks of wolves'

teeth--all these, with all gaps and imperfections, he urged mankind

to believe came into being in an instant. The preface of the work

is especially touching, and it ends with the prayer that science and

Scripture may be reconciled by his theory, and "that the God of truth

will deign so to use it, and if he do, to him be all the glory."(177) At

the close of the whole book Gosse declared: "The field is left clear and

undisputed for the one witness on the opposite side, whose testimony is

as follows: 'In six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea, and all

that in them is.'" This quotation he placed in capital letters, as the

final refutation of all that the science of geology had built.

(177) See Gosse, Omphalos, London, 1857, p. 5, and passim; and for a

passage giving the keynote of the whole, with a most farcical note on

coprolites, see pp. 353, 354.

In other parts of Europe desperate attempts were made even later to

save the letter of our sacred books by the revival of a theory in some

respects more striking. To shape this theory to recent needs, vague

reminiscences of a text in Job regarding fire beneath the earth, and

vague conceptions of speculations made by Humboldt and Laplace, were

mingled with Jewish tradition. Out of the mixture thus obtained Schubert

developed the idea that the Satanic "principalities and powers" formerly

inhabiting our universe plunged it into the chaos from which it was

newly created by a process accurately described in Genesis. Rougemont

made the earth one of the "morning stars" of Job, reduced to chaos by

Lucifer and his followers, and thence developed in accordance with the

nebular hypothesis. Kurtz evolved from this theory an opinion that the

geological disturbances were caused by the opposition of the devil to

the rescue of our universe from chaos by the Almighty. Delitzsch put a

similar idea into a more scholastic jargon; but most desperate of all

were the statements of Dr. Anton Westermeyer, of Munich, in The Old

Testament vindicated from Modern Infidel Objections. The following

passage will serve to show his ideas: "By the fructifying brooding of

the Divine Spirit on the waters of the deep, creative forces began to

stir; the devils who inhabited the primeval darkness and considered it

their own abode saw that they were to be driven from their possessions,

or at least that their place of habitation was to be contracted, and

they therefore tried to frustrate God's plan of creation and exert all

that remained to them of might and power to hinder or at least to mar

the new creation." So came into being "the horrible and destructive

monsters, these caricatures and distortions of creation," of which

we have fossil remains. Dr. Westermeyer goes on to insist that "whole

generations called into existence by God succumbed to the corruption of

the devil, and for that reason had to be destroyed"; and that "in the

work of the six days God caused the devil to feel his power in all

earnest, and made Satan's enterprise appear miserable and vain."(178)

(178) See Shields's Final Philosophy, pp. 340 et seq., and Reusch's

Nature and the Bible (English translation, 1886), vol. i, pp. 318-320.

Such was the last important assault upon the strongholds of geological

science in Germany; and, in view of this and others of the same kind, it

is little to be wondered at that when, in 1870, Johann Silberschlag made

an attempt to again base geology upon the Deluge of Noah, he found such

difficulties that, in a touching passage, he expressed a desire to get

back to the theory that fossils were "sports of Nature."(179)

(179) See Reusch, vol. i, p. 264.

But the most noted among efforts to keep geology well within the

letter of Scripture is of still more recent date. In the year 1885 Mr.

Gladstone found time, amid all his labours and cares as the greatest

parliamentary leader in England, to take the field in the struggle for

the letter of Genesis against geology.

On the face of it his effort seemed Quixotic, for he confessed at

the outset that in science he was "utterly destitute of that kind of

knowledge which carries authority," and his argument soon showed that

this confession was entirely true.

But he had some other qualities of which much might be expected: great

skill in phrase-making, great shrewdness in adapting the meanings of

single words to conflicting necessities in discussion, wonderful power

in erecting showy structures of argument upon the smallest basis

of fact, and a facility almost preternatural in "explaining away"

troublesome realities. So striking was his power in this last respect,

that a humorous London chronicler once advised a bigamist, as his only

hope, to induce Mr. Gladstone to explain away one of his wives.

At the basis of this theologico-geological structure Mr. Gladstone

placed what he found in the text of Genesis: "A grand fourfold division"

of animated Nature "set forth in an orderly succession of times." And he

arranged this order and succession of creation as follows: "First,

the water population; secondly, the air population; thirdly, the land

population of animals; fourthly, the land population consummated in

man."

His next step was to slide in upon this basis the apparently harmless

proposition that this division and sequence "is understood to have been

so affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a

demonstrated conclusion and established fact."

Finally, upon these foundations he proceeded to build an argument out

of the coincidences thus secured between the record in the Hebrew sacred

books and the truths revealed by science as regards this order and

sequence, and he easily arrived at the desired conclusion with which he

crowned the whole structure, namely, as regards the writer of Genesis,

that "his knowledge was divine."(180)

(180) See Mr. Gladstone's Dawn of Creation and Worship, a reply to Dr.

Reville, in the Nineteenth Century for November, 1885.

Such was the skeleton of the structure; it was abundantly decorated with

the rhetoric in which Mr. Gladstone is so skilful an artificer, and

it towered above "the average man" as a structure beautiful and

invincible--like some Chinese fortress in the nineteenth century, faced

with porcelain and defended with crossbows.

Its strength was soon seen to be unreal. In an essay admirable in its

temper, overwhelming in its facts, and absolutely convincing in its

argument, Prof. Huxley, late President of the Royal Society, and

doubtless the most eminent contemporary authority on the scientific

questions concerned, took up the matter.

Mr. Gladstone's first proposition, that the sacred writings give us a

great "fourfold division" created "in an orderly succession of times,"

Prof. Huxley did not presume to gainsay.

As to Mr. Gladstone's second proposition, that "this great fourfold

division... created in an orderly succession of times... has been so

affirmed in our own time by natural science that it may be taken as a

demonstrated conclusion and established fact," Prof. Huxley showed

that, as a matter of fact, no such "fourfold division" and "orderly

succession" exist; that, so far from establishing Mr. Gladstone's

assumption that the population of water, air, and land followed each

other in the order given, "all the evidence we possess goes to prove

that they did not"; that the distribution of fossils through the various

strata proves that some land animals originated before sea animals;

that there has been a mixing of sea, land, and air "population" utterly

destructive to the "great fourfold division" and to the creation "in an

orderly succession of times"; that, so far is the view presented in the

sacred text, as stated by Mr. Gladstone, from having been "so

affirmed in our own time by natural science, that it may be taken as

a demonstrated conclusion and established fact" that Mr. Gladstone's

assertion is "directly contradictory to facts known to every one who is

acquainted with the elements of natural science"; that Mr. Gladstone's

only geological authority, Cuvier, had died more than fifty years

before, when geological science was in its infancy (and he might have

added, when it was necessary to make every possible concession to

the Church); and, finally, he challenged Mr. Gladstone to produce any

contemporary authority in geological science who would support his

so-called scriptural view. And when, in a rejoinder, Mr. Gladstone

attempted to support his view on the authority of Prof. Dana, Prof.

Huxley had no difficulty in showing from Prof. Dana's works that Mr.

Gladstone's inference was utterly unfounded. But, while the fabric

reared by Mr. Gladstone had been thus undermined by Huxley on the

scientific side, another opponent began an attack from the biblical

side. The Rev. Canon Driver, professor at Mr. Gladstone's own

University of Oxford, took up the question in the light of scriptural

interpretation. In regard to the comparative table drawn up by Sir J. W.

Dawson, showing the supposed correspondence between the scriptural and

the geological order of creation, Canon Driver said: "The two series

are evidently at variance. The geological record contains no evidence

of clearly defined periods corresponding to the 'days' of Genesis. In

Genesis, vegetation is complete two days before animal life appears.

Geology shows that they appear simultaneously--even if animal life

does not appear first. In Genesis, birds appear together with aquatic

creatures, and precede all land animals; according to the evidence of

geology, birds are unknown till a period much later than that at which

aquatic creatures (including fishes and amphibia) abound, and they are

preceded by numerous species of land animals--in particular, by insects

and other 'creeping things.'" Of the Mosaic account of the existence

of vegetation before the creation of the sun, Canon Driver said, "No

reconciliation of this representation with the data of science has yet

been found"; and again: "From all that has been said, however reluctant

we may be to make the admission, only one conclusion seems possible.

Read without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i, creates an

impression at variance with the facts revealed by science." The

eminent professor ends by saying that the efforts at reconciliation are

"different modes of obliterating the characteristic features of Genesis,

and of reading into it a view which it does not express."

Thus fell Mr. Gladstone's fabric of coincidences between the "great

fourfold division" in Genesis and the facts ascertained by geology.

Prof. Huxley had shattered the scientific parts of the structure, Prof.

Driver had removed its biblical foundations, and the last great fortress

of the opponents of unfettered scientific investigation was in ruins.

In opposition to all such attempts we may put a noble utterance by

a clergyman who has probably done more to save what is essential in

Christianity among English-speaking people than any other ecclesiastic

of his time. The late Dean of Westminster, Dr. Arthur Stanley, was

widely known and beloved on both continents. In his memorial sermon

after the funeral of Sir Charles Lyell he said: "It is now clear to

diligent students of the Bible that the first and second chapters of

Genesis contain two narratives of the creation side by side, differing

from each other in almost every particular of time and place and order.

It is well known that, when the science of geology first arose, it was

involved in endless schemes of attempted reconciliation with the

letter of Scripture. There were, there are perhaps still, two modes of

reconciliation of Scripture and science, which have been each in their

day attempted, AND EACH HAS TOTALLY AND DESERVEDLY FAILED. One is the

endeavour to wrest the words of the Bible from their natural meaning and

FORCE IT TO SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE." And again, speaking of the

earliest known example, which was the interpolation of the word "not"

in Leviticus xi, 6, he continues: "This is the earliest instance of THE

FALSIFICATION OF SCRIPTURE TO MEET THE DEMANDS OF SCIENCE; and it has

been followed in later times by the various efforts which have been

made to twist the earlier chapters of the book of Genesis into APPARENT

agreement with the last results of geology--representing days not to be

days, morning and evening not to be morning and evening, the Deluge not

to be the Deluge, and the ark not to be the ark."

After a statement like this we may fitly ask, Which is the more likely

to strengthen Christianity for its work in the twentieth century which

we are now about to enter--a large, manly, honest, fearless utterance

like this of Arthur Stanley, or hair-splitting sophistries, bearing

in their every line the germs of failure, like those attempted by Mr.

Gladstone?

The world is finding that the scientific revelation of creation is ever

more and more in accordance with worthy conceptions of that great Power

working in and through the universe. More and more it is seen that

inspiration has never ceased, and that its prophets and priests are not

those who work to fit the letter of its older literature to the needs

of dogmas and sects, but those, above all others, who patiently,

fearlessly, and reverently devote themselves to the search for truth as

truth, in the faith that there is a Power in the universe wise enough

to make truth-seeking safe and good enough to make truth-telling

useful.(181)

(181) For the Huxley-Gladstone controversy, see The Nineteenth Century

for 1885-'86. For Canon Driver, see his article, The Cosmogony of

Genesis, in The Expositor for January, 1886.

CHAPTER VI. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN EGYPTOLOGY, AND ASSYRIOLOGY.

I. THE SACRED CHRONOLOGY.

In the great ranges of investigation which bear most directly upon the

origin of man, there are two in which Science within the last few years

has gained final victories. The significance of these in changing, and

ultimately in reversing, one of the greatest currents of theological

thought, can hardly be overestimated; not even the tide set in motion by

Cusa, Copernicus, and Galileo was more powerful to bring in a new epoch

of belief.

The first of these conquests relates to the antiquity of man on the

earth.

The fathers of the early Christian Church, receiving all parts of our

sacred books as equally inspired, laid little, if any, less stress

on the myths, legends, genealogies, and tribal, family, and personal

traditions contained in the Old and the New Testaments, than upon the

most powerful appeals, the most instructive apologues, and the most

lofty poems of prophets, psalmists, and apostles. As to the age of our

planet and the life of man upon it, they found in the Bible a carefully

recorded series of periods, extending from Adam to the building of the

Temple at Jerusalem, the length of each period being explicitly given.

Thus they had a biblical chronology--full, consecutive, and

definite--extending from the first man created to an event of known

date well within ascertained profane history; as a result, the early

Christian commentators arrived at conclusions varying somewhat, but in

the main agreeing. Some, like Origen, Eusebius, Lactantius, Clement

of Alexandria, and the great fathers generally of the first three

centuries, dwelling especially upon the Septuagint version of the

Scriptures, thought that man's creation took place about six thousand

years before the Christian era. Strong confirmation of this view was

found in a simple piece of purely theological reasoning: for, just as

the seven candlesticks of the Apocalypse were long held to prove the

existence of seven heavenly bodies revolving about the earth, so it was

felt that the six days of creation prefigured six thousand years during

which the earth in its first form was to endure; and that, as the first

Adam came on the sixth day, Christ, the second Adam, had come at the

sixth millennial period. Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, in the second

century clinched this argument with the text, "One day is with the Lord

as a thousand years."

On the other hand, Eusebius and St. Jerome, dwelling more especially

upon the Hebrew text, which we are brought up to revere, thought

that man's origin took place at a somewhat shorter period before the

Christian era; and St. Jerome's overwhelming authority made this the

dominant view throughout western Europe during fifteen centuries.

The simplicity of these great fathers as regards chronology is

especially reflected from the tables of Eusebius. In these, Moses,

Joshua, and Bacchus,--Deborah, Orpheus, and the Amazons,--Abimelech,

the Sphinx, and Oedipus, appear together as personages equally real, and

their positions in chronology equally ascertained.

At times great bitterness was aroused between those holding the longer

and those holding the shorter chronology, but after all the difference

between them, as we now see, was trivial; and it may be broadly stated

that in the early Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," it was held

as certain, upon the absolute warrant of Scripture, that man was created

from four to six thousand years before the Christian era.

To doubt this, and even much less than this, was to risk damnation.

St. Augustine insisted that belief in the antipodes and in the longer

duration of the earth than six thousand years were deadly heresies,

equally hostile to Scripture. Philastrius, the friend of St. Ambrose and

St. Augustine, whose fearful catalogue of heresies served as a guide

to intolerance throughout the Middle Ages, condemned with the same holy

horror those who expressed doubt as to the orthodox number of years

since the beginning of the world, and those who doubted an earthquake to

be the literal voice of an angry God, or who questioned the plurality of

the heavens, or who gainsaid the statement that God brings out the stars

from his treasures and hangs them up in the solid firmament above the

earth every night.

About the beginning of the seventh century Isidore of Seville, the great

theologian of his time, took up the subject. He accepted the dominant

view not only of Hebrew but of all other chronologies, without anything

like real criticism. The childlike faith of his system may be imagined

from his summaries which follow. He tells us:

"Joseph lived one hundred and five years. Greece began to cultivate

grain."

"The Jews were in slavery in Egypt one hundred and forty-four years.

Atlas discovered astrology."

"Joshua ruled for twenty-seven years. Ericthonius yoked horses

together."

"Othniel, forty years. Cadmus introduced letters into Greece."

"Deborah, forty years. Apollo discovered the art of medicine and

invented the cithara."

"Gideon, forty years. Mercury invented the lyre and gave it to Orpheus."

Reasoning in this general way, Isidore kept well under the longer date;

and, the great theological authority of southern Europe having thus

spoken, the question was virtually at rest throughout Christendom for

nearly a hundred years.