geographer of Louis XIII, and an intimate friend of Descartes,
addressed to the young Louis XIV a vehement protest against the
superstition, basing his arguments not on astronomy, but on common
sense. A very effective part of the little treatise was devoted to
answering the authority of the fathers of the early Church. To do
this, he simplv reminded his readers that St. Augustine and St.
John Damascenus had also opposed the doctrine of the antipodes. The
book did good service in France, and was translated in Germany a
few years later.[199]

All these were denounced as infidels and heretics, yet none the
less did they set men at thinking, and prepare the way for a far
greater genius; for toward the end of the same century the
philosophic attack was taken up by Pierre Bayle, and in the whole
series of philosophic champions he is chief. While professor at the
University of Sedan he had observed the alarm caused by the comet
of 1680, and he now brought all his reasoning powers to bear upon
it. Thoughts deep and witty he poured out in volume after volume.
Catholics and Protestants were alike scandalized. Catholic France
spurned him, and Jurieu, the great Reformed divine, called his
cometary views "atheism," and tried hard to have Protestant
Holland condemn him. Though Bayle did not touch immediately the
mass of mankind, he wrought with power upon men who gave themselves
the trouble of thinking. It was indeed unfortunate for the Church
that theologians, instead of taking the initiative in this matter,
left it to Bayle; for, in tearing down the pretended scriptural
doctrine of comets, he tore down much else: of all men in his time,
no one so thoroughly prepared the way for Voltaire.

Bayle's whole argument is rooted in the prophecy of Seneca. He
declares: "Comets are bodies subject to the ordinary law of
Nature, and not prodigies amenable to no law." He shows
historically that there is no reason to regard comets as portents
of earthly evils. As to the fact that such evils occur after the
passage of comets across the sky, he compares the person believing
that comets cause these evils to a woman looking out of a window
into a Paris street and believing that the carriages pass because
she looks out. As to the accomplishment of some predictions, he
cites the shrewd saying of Henry IV, to the effect that "the
public will remember one prediction that comes true better than all
the rest that have proved false." Finally, he sums up by saying:
"The more we study man, the more does it appear that pride is his
ruling passion, and that he affects grandeur even in his misery.
Mean and perishable creature that he is, he has been able to
persuade men that he can not die without disturbing the whole
course of Nature and obliging the heavens to put themselves to
fresh expense. In order to light his funeral pomp. Foolish and
ridiculous vanity! If we had a just idea of the universe, we should
soon comprehend that the death or birth of a prince is too
insignificant a matter to stir the heavens."[200]

This great philosophic champion of right reason was followed by a
literary champion hardly less famous; for Fontenelle now gave to
the French theatre his play of _The Comet_, and a point of capital
importance in France was made by rendering the army of ignorance
ridiculous.[200b]

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[201]

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.[202]

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.[204] 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 Bay eux 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.[204b]

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.[206]

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.[207]

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.[209]

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.[210]

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?"[210b]

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.[211]

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";[212] in the thirteenth, Albert the Great
attributed them to a "formative quality;"[212b] 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.[212c]

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.[212d]

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."[213]

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?[213b]

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";[214] or of a
"seminal air";[214b] 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.

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.[214c]

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.[215] 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.

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,"[216] 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.[217]

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.[217b]

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,[218] 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.

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.[220] 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."

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.[221]

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.[222]

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.[222]

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."[223]

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."[223b]

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.[224]

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.[224b]

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.[225]


      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.[225b]

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.[226]

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.[226b]
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.

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.[226c]

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.[228]

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":[228b] 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.[228c]

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.[229]

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.[230]

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."[231] 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.[231b]

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."[232c] 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.

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.[233]

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.[234]

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."[235]

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.[235b]

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.[235c]

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.[236]

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.[236b]

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."[236c]
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.[236d]

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.[237]

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.[238]

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.[239]


       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."[240]

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.[241]

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."[242] 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.

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."[243]

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."[243b]

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."[244]

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.[248]


                          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.

Early in the eighth century the Venerable Bede took up the
problem. Dwelling especially upon the received Hebrew text of
the Old Testament, he soon entangled himself in very serious
difficulties; but, in spite of the great fathers of the first
three centuries, he reduced the antiquity of man on the earth by
nearly a thousand years, and, in spite of mutterings against him
as coming dangerously near a limit which made the theological
argument from the six days of creation to the six ages of the
world look doubtful, his authority had great weight, and did
much to fix western Europe in its allegiance to the general
system laid down by Eusebius and Jerome.

In the twelfth century this belief was re-enforced by a tide of
thought from a very different quarter. Rabbi Moses Maimonides
and other Jewish scholars, by careful study of the Hebrew text,
arrived at conclusions diminishing the antiquity of man still
further, and thus gave strength throughout the Middle Ages to
the shorter chronology: it was incorporated into the sacred
science of Christianity; and Vincent of Beauvais, in his great
_Speculum Historiale_, forming part of that still more enormous
work intended to sum up all the knowledge possessed by the ages
of faith, placed the creation of man at about four thousand
years before our era.[252]

At the Reformation this view was not disturbed. The same manner
of accepting the sacred text which led Luther, Melanchthon, and
the great Protestant leaders generally, to oppose the Copernican
theory, fixed them firmly in this biblical chronology; the
keynote was sounded for them by Luther when he said, "We know,
on the authority of Moses, that longer ago than six thousand
years the world did not exist." Melanchthon, more exact, fixed
the creation of man at 3963 B. C.

But the great Christian scholars continued the old endeavour to
make the time of man's origin more precise: there seems to have
been a sort of fascination in the subject which developed a long
array of chronologists, all weighing the minutest indications in
our sacred books, until the Protestant divine De Vignolles, who
had given forty years to the study of biblical chronology,
declared in 1738 that he had gathered no less than two hundred
computations based upon Scripture, and no two alike.

As to the Roman Church, about 1580 there was published, by
authority of Pope Gregory XIII, the Roman Martyrology, and this,
both as originally published and as revised in 1640 under Pope
Urban VIII, declared that the creation of man took place 5199
years before Christ.

But of all who gave themselves up to these chronological
studies, the man who exerted the most powerful influence upon
the dominant nations of Christendom was Archbishop Usher. In
1650 he published his _Annals of the Ancient and New Testaments_,
and it at once became the greatest authority for all
English-speaking peoples. Usher was a man of deep and wide
theological learning, powerful in controversy; and his careful
conclusion, after years of the most profound study of the Hebrew
Scriptures, was that man was created 4004 years before the
Christian era. His verdict was widely received as final; his
dates were inserted in the margins of the authorized version of

