I now ask you to look at another part of the great warfare, and I
select it because it shows more clearly than any other how Protestant
nations, and in our own time, have suffered themselves to be led into
the same errors that have wrought injury to religion and science in
other times. We will look very briefly at the battle-fields of Geology.
From the first lispings of this science there was war. The prevailing
doctrine of the Church was, that "in the beginning God made the heavens
and the earth;" that "all things were made at the beginning of the
world;" and that to say that stones and fossils have been made since
"the beginning," is contrary to Scripture. The theological substitutes
for scientific explanations ripened into such as these: that the
fossils are "sports of Nature," or "creations of plastic force," or
"results of a seminal air acting upon rocks," or "models" made by the
Creator before he had fully decided upon the best manner of creating
various beings. But, while some latitude was allowed among these
theologico-scientific explanations, it was held essential to believe
that they were placed in all the strata, on one of the creation-days,
by the hand of the Almighty; and that this was done for some mysterious
purpose of his own, probably for the trial of human faith.
In the sixteenth century Fracastoro and Palissy broached the true idea,
but produced little effect. Near the beginning of the seventeenth
century De Clave, Bitaud, and De Villon revived it; straight-way
the theologic faculty of Paris protested against the doctrine as
unscriptural, destroyed the offending treatises, banished the authors
from Paris, and forbade them to live in towns or enter places of public
resort.[120] At the middle of the eighteenth century, Buffon made
another attempt to state simple and fundamental geological truths. The
theological faculty of the Sorbonne immediately dragged him from his
high position, forced him to recant ignominiously, and to print his
recantation. It required a hundred and fifty years for science to carry
the day fairly against this single preposterous theory. The champion
who dealt it the deadly blow was Scilla, and his weapons were facts
revealed by the fossils of Calabria.
But the advocates of tampering with scientific reasoning now retired
to a new position. It was strong, for it was apparently based on
Scripture, though, as the whole world now knows, an utterly false
interpretation of Scripture. The new position was, that the fossils
were produced by the Deluge of Noah.
In vain had it been shown, by such devoted Christians as Bernard
Palissy, that this theory was utterly untenable; in vain did good men
protest against the injury sure to result to religion by tying it to a
scientific theory sure to be exploded: the doctrine that fossils were
the remains of animals drowned at the flood continued to be upheld
by the great majority as "sound doctrine," and as a blessed means of
reconciling science with Scripture.[121]
To sustain this "Scriptural view," so called, efforts were put forth
absolutely herculean, both by Catholics and Protestants. Mazurier
declared certain fossil remains of a mammoth, discovered in France, to
be bones of giants mentioned in Scripture. Father Torrubia did the same
thing in Spain. Increase Mather sent similar remains, discovered in
America, to England, with a similar statement. Scheuchzer made parade
of the bones of a great lizard discovered in Germany, as the _homo
diluvii testis_, the fossil man, proving the reality of the Deluge.[122]
In the midst of this appears an episode very comical but very
instructive; for it shows that the attempt to shape the deductions of
science to meet the exigencies of theology 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. He feared that these new discoveries might be
used to support the Mosaic accounts of the Deluge. All his wisdom and
wit, therefore, were compacted into arguments to prove that the fossil
fishes were remains of fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown
away by travelers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped
by Crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land; and that
sundry fossil bones found between Paris and Étampes 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, fights desperately the growing results of the geologic
investigations of his time.[123]
But far more widespread and disastrous was the effort on the other side
to show that the fossils were caused by the Deluge of Noah.
No supposition was too violent to support a theory which was considered
vital to the Bible. Sometimes it was claimed that the tail of a comet
had produced the Deluge. Sometimes, by a prosaic rendering of the
expression regarding the breaking up of "the fountains of the great
deep," a theory was started that the earth contained a great cistern,
from which the waters came and to which they retired. By taking sacred
poetry as prose, and by giving a literal interpretation of it, Thomas
Burnet, in his "Sacred Theory of the Earth," Whiston, in his "Theory
of the Deluge," and others like them, 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, zoölogical, astronomical proofs that no universal deluge,
or deluge covering any great extent of the earth, had taken place
within the last six thousand or sixty thousand years; in vain did
Bishop Clayton declare, that the Deluge could not have taken place
save in that district where Noah lived before the flood; 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 denunciations of infidelity. In England, France, and
Germany, belief that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah
was insisted upon as part of that faith essential to salvation.[124]
It took a hundred and twenty years for the searchers of God's truth
as revealed in Nature--such men as Buffon, Linnæus, Whitehurst, and
Daubenton--to push their works under these mighty fabrics of error,
and, by statements which could not be resisted, to explode them.
Strange as it may at first seem, the war on geology was waged more
fiercely in Protestant countries than in Catholic; the older Church had
learned, by her earlier wretched mistakes, what dangers to her claim of
infallibility lay in meddling with a growing science; in Italy, then
entirely under papal control, little open opposition was made; and, of
all countries, England furnished the most bitter opponents to geology
at first, and the most active negotiators in patching up a truce on a
basis of sham science afterward.[125]
You have noted already that there are, generally, two sorts of attack
on a new science. First, there is the attack by pitting against science
some great doctrine in theology. You saw this in astronomy, when
Bellarmin and others insisted that the doctrine of the earth revolving
about the sun is contrary to the doctrine of the incarnation. So now,
against geology, it was urged that the scientific doctrine that the
fossils represented animals which died before Adam, was contrary to the
doctrine of Adam's fall, and that "death entered the world by sin."
Then, there is the attack by literal interpretation of texts, based
upon the idea that the Bible is a compendium of history or a text-book
of natural science, which serves a better purpose, generally, in
rousing prejudices.
Toward the close of the last century, in England, the opponents of
geology on Biblical grounds seemed likely to sweep all before them.
Cramping our sacred volume within the rules of an 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 panic 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!"
And difficult as it is to realize it now, within the memory of many of
us 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 thirty years ago, the Rev. J. Mellor Brown, the Rev. Henry Cole,
and others, were hurling at all geologists alike, and especially at
such Christian divines as Dr. Buckland and Dean Conybeare, and Pye
Smith, and such religious scholars as Prof. Sedgwick, the epithets
of "infidel," "impugner of the sacred record," and "assailant of the
volume of God."[126]
Their favorite weapon was the charge that these men were "attacking
the truth of God," forgetting that they were simply opposing the
mistaken interpretations of Messrs. Brown, Cole, and others, like them,
inadequately informed.
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."[127]
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 honor to religion and to himself by standing up for the
claims of science, despite all these clamors. That man was Nicholas
Wiseman, better known afterward as Cardinal Wiseman. The conduct of
this pillar of the Roman Catholic Church contrasts nobly with that
of timid Protestants, who were filling England with shrieks and
denunciations.[128]
And here let me note, that one of the prettiest skirmishes in this war
was made in New England. Prof. Stuart, of Andover, justly honored as a
Hebrew scholar, virtually declared that geology was becoming dangerous;
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 an evening and a 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 got over 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 our own honored
Yale.[129]
But perhaps the most singular attempt against geology was made by a
fine specimen of the English Don--Dean Cockburn, of York--to _scold_
its champions out of the field. Without, apparently, the simplest
elementary knowledge of geology, he opened a battery of abuse. He gave
it to the world at large, by pulpit and press; he even inflicted it
upon leading statesmen by private letters.[130] From his pulpit in York
minster, Mary Somerville was denounced coarsely, by name, for those
studies in physical geography which have made her honored throughout
the world.[131]
But these weapons did not succeed. They were like Chinese gongs and
dragon-lanterns against rifled cannon. Buckland, Pye Smith, Lyell,
Silliman, Hitchcock, Murchison, Agassiz, Dana, and a host of noble
champions besides, press on, and the battle for truth is won.
And was it won merely for men of science? The whole civilized world
declares that it was won for religion--that thereby was infinitely
increased the knowledge of the power and goodness of God.