Did time permit, we might go over other battle-fields no less
instructive than those we have seen. We might go over the battle-fields
of Agricultural Progress, and note how, by a most curious perversion
of a text of Scripture, many of the peasantry of Russia were prevented
from raising and eating potatoes, and how in Scotland at the beginning
of this century the use of fanning-mills for winnowing grain was
denounced as contrary to the text "the wind bloweth where it listeth,"
etc., as leaguing with Satan, who is "prince of the powers of the air,"
and as sufficient cause for excommunication from the Scotch Church.[147]
We might go over the battle-fields of Civil Engineering, and note
how the introduction of railways into France was declared, by an
Archbishop, to be an evidence of the divine displeasure against country
innkeepers who set meat before their guests on fast-days, and now
were punished by seeing travelers carried by their doors; and how
railroad and telegraph were denounced from noted pulpits as "heralds
of Anti-christ." And then we might pass to Protestant England and
recall the sermon of the Curate of Rotherhithe at the breaking in of
the Thames Tunnel, so destructive to life and property, declaring that
"it was but a just judgment upon the presumptuous aspirations of mortal
man."[148]