Very characteristic is his dealing with the myth of Lot's wife.
Though more than once at Usdum,--though giving valuable information
regarding the sea, shore, and mountains there, he carefully avoids
all mention of the salt pillar and of the legend which arose from
it. In this he set an example followed by most of the more
thoughtful religious travellers since his time. Very significant is
it to see the New Testament injunction, "Remember Lot's wife," so
utterly forgotten. These later investigators seem never to have
heard of it; and this constant forgetfulness shows the change which
had taken place in the enlightened thinking of the world.

But in the year 1848 came an episode very striking in its character
and effect.

At that time, the war between the United States and Mexico having
closed, Lieutenant Lynch, of the United States Navy, found himself
in the port of Vera Cruz, commanding an old hulk, the _Supply_.
Looking about for somnething to do, it occurred to him to write to
the Secretary of the Navy asking permission to explore the Dead
Sea. Under ordinary circumstances the proposal would doubtless have
been strangled with red tape; but, fortunately, the Secretary at
that time was Mr. John Y. Mason, of Virginia. Mr. Mason was famous
for his good nature. Both at Washington and at Paris, where he was
afterward minister, this predominant trait has left a multitude of
amusing traditions; it was of him that Senator Benton said, "To be
supremely happy he must have his paunch full of oysters and his
hands full of cards."

The Secretary granted permission, but evidently gave the matter not
another thought. As a result, came an expedition the most comical
and one of the most rich in results to be found in American annals.
Never was anything so happy-go-lucky. Lieutenant Lynch started with
his hulk, with hardly an instrument save those ordinarily found on
shipboard, and with a body of men probably the most unfit for
anything like scientific investigation ever sent on such an errand;
fortunately, he picked up a young instructor in mathematics, Mr.
Anderson, and added to his apparatus two strong iron boats.

Arriving, after a tedious voyage, on the coast of Asia Minor, he
set to work. He had no adequate preparation in general history,
archaeology, or the physical sciences; but he had his American
patriotism, energy, pluck, pride, and devotion to duty, and these
qualities stood him in good stead. With great labour he got the
iron boats across the country. Then the tug of war began. First of
all investigators, he forced his way through the whole length of
the river Jordan and from end to end of the Dead Sea. There were
constant difficulties--geographical, climatic, and personal; but
Lynch cut through them all. He was brave or shrewd, as there was
need. Anderson proved an admirable helper, and together they made
surveys of distances, altitudes, depths, and sundry simple
investigations in a geological, mineralogical, and chemical way.
Much was poorly done, much was left undone, but the general result
was most honourable both to Lynch and Anderson; and Secretary Mason
found that his easy-going patronage of the enterprise was the best
act of his official life.

The results of this expedition on public opinion were most curious.
Lynch was no scholar in any sense; he had travelled little, and
thought less on the real questions underlying the whole
investigation; as to the difference in depth of the two parts of
the lake, he jumped--with a sailor's disregard of logic--to the
conclusion that it somehow proved the mythical account of the
overwhelming of the cities, and he indulged in reflections of a
sort probably suggested by his recollections of American
Sunday-schools.

Especially noteworthy is his treatment of the legend of Lot's wife.
He found the pillar of salt. It happened to be at that period a
circular column of friable salt rock, about forty feet high; yet,
while he accepts every other old myth, he treats the belief that
this was once the wife of Lot as "a superstition."

One little circumstance added enormously to the influence of this
book, for, as a frontispiece, he inserted a picture of the salt
column. It was delineated in rather a poetic manner: light streamed
upon it, heavy clouds hung above it, and, as a background, were
ranged buttresses of salt rock furrowed and channelled out by the
winter rains: this salt statue picture was spread far and wide, and
in thousands of country pulpits and Sunday-schools it was shown as
a tribute of science to Scripture.

Nor was this influence confined to American Sunday-school children:
Lynch had innocently set a trap into which several European
theologians stumbled. One of these was Dr. Lorenz Gratz,
Vicar-General of Augsburg, a theological professor. In the second
edition of his _Theatre of the Holy Scriptures_, published in 1858,
he hails Lynch's discovery of the salt pillar with joy, forgets his
allusion to the old theory regarding it as a superstition, and does
not stop to learn that this was one of a succession of statues
washed out yearly by the rains, but accepts it as the originaL
Lot's wife.

The French churchmen suffered most. About two years after Lynch, De
Saulcy visited the Dead Sea to explore it thoroughly, evidently in
the interest of sacred science--and of his own promotion. Of the
modest thoroughness of Robinson there is no trace in his writings.
He promptly discovered the overwhelmed cities, which no one before
or since has ever found, poured contempt on other investigators,
and threw over his whole work an air of piety. But, unfortunately,
having a Frenchman's dread of ridicule, he attempted to give a
rationalistic explanation of what he calls "the enormous needles
of salt washed out by the winter rain," and their connection with
the Lot's wife myth, and declared his firm belief that she, "being
delayed by curiosity or terror, was crushed by a rock which rolled
down from the mountain, and when Lot and his children turned about
they saw at the place where she had been only the rock of salt
which covered her body."

But this would not do at all, and an eminent ecclesiastic privately
and publicly expostulated with De Saulcy--very naturally declaring
that "it was not Lot who wrote the book of Genesis."

The result was that another edition of De Saulcy's work was
published by a Church Book Society, with the offending passage
omitted; but a passage was retained really far more suggestive of
heterodoxy, and this was an Arab legend accounting for the origin
of certain rocks near the Dead Sea curiously resembling salt
formations. This in effect ran as follows:

"Abraham, the friend of God, having come here one day with his mule
to buy salt, the salt-workers impudently told him that they had no
salt to sell, whereupon the patriarch said: `Your words are, true.
you have no salt to sell,' and instantly the salt of this whole
region was transformed into stone, or rather into a salt which has
lost its savour."

Nothing could be more sure than this story to throw light into the
mental and moral process by which the salt pillar myth was
originally created.

In the years 1864 and 1865 came an expedition on a much more
imposing scale: that of the Duc de Luynes. His knowledge of
archaeology and his wealth were freely devoted to working the mine
which Lynch had opened, and, taking with him an iron vessel and
several _savants_, he devoted himself especially to finding the
cities of the Dead Sea, and to giving less vague accounts of them
than those of De Saulcy. But he was disappointed, and honest enough
to confess his disappointment. So vanished one of the most
cherished parts of the legend.

But worse remained behind. In the orthodox duke's company was an
acute geologist, Monsieur Lartet, who in due time made an elaborate
report, which let a flood of light into the whole region.

The Abbe Richard had been rejoicing the orthodox heart of France by
exhibiting some prehistoric flint implements as the knives which
Joshua had made for circumcision. By a truthful statement Monsieur
Lartet set all France laughing at the Abbe, and then turned to the
geology of the Dead Sea basin. While he conceded that man may have
seen some volcanic crisis there, and may have preserved a vivid
remembrance of the vapour then rising, his whole argument showed
irresistibly that all the phenomena of the region are due to
natural causes, and that, so far from a sudden rising of the lake
above the valley within historic times, it has been for ages
steadily subsiding.

Since Balaam was called by Balak to curse his enemies, and "blessed them
altogether," there has never been a more unexpected tribute to truth.

Even the salt pillar at Usdum, as depicted in Lynch's book, aided
to undermine the myth among thinking men; for the background of the
picture showed other pillars of salt in process of formation; and
the ultimate result of all these expeditions was to spread an
atmosphere in which myth and legend became more and more attenuated.

To sum up the main points in this work of the nineteenth century:
Seetzen, Robinson, and others had found that a human being could
traverse the lake without being killed by hellish smoke; that the
waters gave forth no odours; that the fruits of the region were not
created full of cinders to match the desolation of the Dead Sea,
but were growths not uncommon in Asia Minor and elsewhere; in fact,
that all the phenomena were due to natural causes.

Ritter and others had shown that all noted features of the Dead Sea
and the surrounding country were to be found in various other lakes
and regions, to which no supernatural cause was ascribed among
enlightened men. Lynch, Van de Velde, Osborne, and others had
revealed the fact that the "pillar of salt" was frequently formed
anew by the rains; and Lartet and other geologists had given a
final blow to the myths by making it clear from the markings on the
neighbouring rocks that, instead of a sudden upheaval of the sea
above the valley of Siddim, there had been a gradual subsidence for
ages.[[254]]

Even before all this evidence was in, a judicial decision had been
pronounced upon the whole question by an authority both Christian
and scientific, from whom there could be no appeal. During the
second quarter of the century Prof. Carl Ritter, of the University
of Berlin, began giving to the world those researches which have
placed him at the head of all geographers ancient or modern, and
finally he brought together those relating to the geography of the
Holy Land, publishing them as part of his great work on the
physical geography of the earth. He was a Christian, and nothing
could be more reverent than his treatment of the whole subject; but
his German honesty did not permit him to conceal the truth, and he
simply classed together all the stories of the Dead Sea--old and
new--no matter where found, whether in the sacred books of Jews,
Christians, or Mohammedans, whether in lives of saints or accounts
of travellers, as "myths" and "sagas."

From this decision there has never been among intelligent men any appeal.

The recent adjustment of orthodox thought to the scientific view of
the Dead Sea legends presents some curious features. As typical we
may take the travels of two German theologians between 1860 and
1870--John Kranzel, pastor in Munich, and Peter Schegg, lately
professor in the university of that city.

The archdiocese of Munich-Freising is one of those in which the
attempt to suppress modern scientific thought has been most
steadily carried on. Its archbishops have constantly shown
themselves assiduous in securing cardinals' hats by thwarting
science and by stupefying education. The twin towers of the old
cathedral of Munich have seemed to throw a killing shadow over
intellectual development in that region. Naturally, then, these two
clerical travellers from that diocese did not commit themselves to
clearing away any of the Dead Sea myths; but it is significant that
neither of them follows the example of so many of their clerical
predecessors in defending the salt-pillar legend: they steadily
avoid it altogether.

The more recent history of the salt pillar, since Lynch, deserves
mention. It appears that the travellers immediately after him found
it shaped by the storms into a spire; that a year or two later it
had utterly disappeared; and about the year 1870 Prof. Palmer, on
visiting the place, found at some distance from the main salt bed,
as he says, "a tall, isolated needle of rock, which does really bear
a curious resemblance to an Arab woman with a child upon her shoulders."

And, finally, Smith's _Dictionary of the Bible_, the standard work of
reference for English-speaking scholars, makes its concession to
the old belief regarding Sodom and Gomorrah as slight as possible,
and the myth of Lot's wife entirely disappears.


            IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.--
                 TRIUMPH OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW.

The theological effort to compromise with science now came in more
strongly than ever. This effort had been made long before: as we
have seen, it had begun to show itself decidedly as soon as the
influence of the Baconian philosophy was felt. Le Clerc suggested
that the shock caused by the sight of fire from heaven killed Lot's
wife instantly and made her body rigid as a statue. Eichhorn
suggested that she fell into a stream of melted bitumen. Michaelis
suggested that her relatives raised a monument of salt rock to her
memory. Friedrichs suggested that she fell into the sea and that
the salt stiffened around her clothing, thus making a statue of
her. Some claimed that a shower of sulphur came down upon her, and
that the word which has been translated "salt" could possibly be
translated "sulphur." Others hinted that the salt by its antiseptic
qualities preserved her body as a mummy. De Saulcy, as we have
seen, thought that a piece of salt rock fell upon her, and very
recently Principal Dawson has ventured the explanation that a flood
of salt mud coming from a volcano incrusted her.

But theologians themselves were the first to show the inadequacy of
these explanations. The more rationalistic pointed out the fact
that they were contrary to the sacred text: Von Bohlen, an eminent
professor at Konigsberg, in his sturdy German honesty, declared
that the salt pillar gave rise to the story, and compared the pillar
of salt causing this transformation legend to the rock in Greek
mythology which gave rise to the transformation legend of Niobe.

On the other hand, the more severely orthodox protested against
such attempts to explain away the clear statements of Holy Writ.
Dom Calmet, while presenting many of these explanations made as
early as his time, gives us to understand that nearly all
theologians adhered to the idea that Lot's wife was instantly and
really changed into salt; and in our own time, as we shall
presently see, have come some very vigorous protests.

Similar attempts were made to explain the other ancient legends
regarding the Dead Sea. One of the most recent of these is that the
cities of the plain, having been built with blocks of bituminous
rock, were set on fire by lightning, a contemporary earthquake
helping on the work. Still another is that accumulations of
petroleum and inflammable gas escaped through a fissure, took fire,
and so produced the catastrophe.[[257]]

The revolt against such efforts to _reconcile_ scientific fact with
myth and legend had become very evident about the middle of the
nineteenth century. In 1851 and 1852 Van de Velde made his journey.
He was a most devout man, but he confessed that the volcanic action
at the Dead Sea must have been far earlier than the catastrophe
mentioned in our sacred books, and that "the overthrow of Sodom and
Gomorrah had nothing to do with this." A few years later an eminent
dignitary of the English Church, Canon Tristram, doctor of divinity
and fellow of the Royal Society, who had explored the Holy Land
thoroughly, after some generalities about miracles, gave up the
whole attempt to make science agree with the myths, and used these
words: "It has been frequently assumed that the district of Usdum
and its sister cities was the result of some tremendous geological
catastrophe.... Now, careful examination by competent geologists,
such as Monsieur Lartet and others, has shown that the whole
district has assumed its present shape slowly and gradually through
a succession of ages, and that its peculiar phenomena are similar
to those of other lakes." So sank from view the whole mass of Dead
Sea myths and legends, and science gained a victory both for
geology and comparative mythology.

As a protest against this sort of rationalism appeared in 1876 an
edition of Monseigneur Mislin's work on _The Holy Places_. In order
to give weight to the book, it was prefaced by letters from Pope
Pius IX and sundry high ecclesiastics--and from Alexandre Dumas!
His hatred of Protestant missionaries in the East is phenomenal: he
calls them "bagmen," ascribes all mischief and infamy to them, and
his hatred is only exceeded by his credulity. He cites all the
arguments in favour of the salt statue at Usdum as the identical
one into which Lot's wife was changed, adds some of his own, and
presents her as "a type of doubt and heresy." With the proverbial
facility of dogmatists in translating any word of a dead language
into anything that suits their purpose, he says that the word in
the nineteenth chapter of Genesis which is translated "statue" or
"pillar," may be translated "eternal monument"; he is especially
severe on poor Monsieur De Saulcy for thinking that Lot's wife was
killed by the falling of a piece of salt rock; and he actually
boasts that it was he who caused De Saulcy, a member of the French
Institute, to suppress the obnoxious passage in a later edition.

Between 1870 and 1880 came two killing blows at the older theories,
and they were dealt by two American scholars of the highest
character. First of these may be mentioned Dr. Philip Schaff, a
professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at New York, who
published his travels in 1877. In a high degree he united the
scientific with the religious spirit, but the trait which made him
especially fit for dealing with this subject was his
straightforward German honesty. He tells the simple truth regarding
the pillar of salt, so far as its physical origin and
characteristics are concerned, and leaves his reader to draw the
natural inference as to its relation to the myth. With the fate of Dr.
Robertson Smith in Scotland and Dr. Woodrow in South Carolina before
him--both recently driven from their professorships for truth-telling--
Dr. Schaff deserves honour for telling as much as he does.

Similar in effect, and even more bold in statement, were the
travels of the Rev. Henry Osborn, published in 1878. In a truly
scientific spirit he calls attention to the similarity of the Dead
Sea, with the river Jordan, to sundry other lake and river systems;
points out the endless variations between writers describing the
salt formations at Usdum; accounts rationally for these variations,
and quotes from Dr. Anderson's report, saying, "From the soluble
nature of the salt and the crumbling looseness of the marl, it may
well be imagined that, while some of these needles are in the
process of formation, others are being washed away."

Thus came out, little by little, the truth regarding the Dead Sea
myths, and especially the salt pillar at Usdum; but the final truth
remained to be told in the Church, and now one of the purest men
and truest divines of this century told it. Arthur Stanley, Dean of
Westminster, visiting the country and thoroughly exploring it,
allowed that the physical features of the Dead Sea and its shores
suggested the myths and legends, and he sums up the whole as follows:
"A great mass of legends and exaggerations, partly the cause and
partly the result of the old belief that the cities were buried
under the Dead Sea, has been gradually removed in recent years."

So, too, about the same time, Dr. Conrad Furrer, pastor of the
great church of St. Peter at Zurich, gave to the world a book of
travels, reverent and thoughtful, and in this honestly acknowledged
that the needles of salt at the southern end of the Dead Sea "in
primitive times gave rise to the tradition that Lot's wife was
transformed into a statue of salt." Thus was the mythical character
of this story at last openly confessed by Leading churchmen on both
continents.

Plain statements like these from such sources left the high
theological position more difficult than ever, and now a new
compromise was attempted. As the Siberian mother tried to save her
best-beloved child from the pursuing wolves by throwing over to
them her less favoured children, so an effort was now made in a
leading commentary to save the legends of the valley of Siddim and
the miraculous destruction of the cities by throwing overboard the
legend of Lot's wife.[[260]]

An amusing result has followed this development of opinion. As we
have already seen, traveller after traveller, Catholic and
Protestant, now visits the Dead Sea, and hardly one of them follows
the New Testament injunction to "remember Lot's wife." Nearly every
one of them seems to think it best to forget her. Of the great mass
of pious legends they are shy enough, but that of Lot's wife, as a
rule, they seem never to have heard of, and if they do allude to it
they simply cover the whole subject with a haze of pious rhetoric.[[260b]]

Naturally, under this state of things, there has followed the
usual attempt to throw off from Christendom the responsibility of
the old belief, and in 1887 came a curious effort of this sort. In
that year appeared the Rev. Dr. Cunningham Geikie's valuable work
on _The Holy Land and the Bible_. In it he makes the following
statement as to the salt formation at Usdum: "Here and there,
hardened portions of salt withstanding the water, while all around
them melts and wears off, rise up isolated pillars, one of which
bears among the Arabs the name of `Lot's wife.'"

In the light of the previous history, there is something at once
pathetic and comical in this attempt to throw the myth upon the
shoulders of the poor Arabs. The myth was not originated by
Mohammedans; it appears, as we have seen, first among the Jews,
and, I need hardly remind the reader, comes out in the Book of
Wisdom and in Josephus, and has been steadily maintained by
fathers, martyrs, and doctors of the Church, by at least one pope,
and by innumerable bishops, priests, monks, commentators, and
travellers, Catholic and Protestant, ever since. In thus throwing
the responsibility of the myth upon the Arabs Dr. Geikie appears to
show both the "perfervid genius" of his countrymen and their
incapacity to recognise a joke.

Nor is he more happy in his rationalistic explanations of the whole
mass of myths. He supposes a terrific storm, in which the lightning
kindled the combustible materials of the cities, aided perhaps by
an earthquake; but this shows a disposition to break away from the
exact statements of the sacred books which would have been most
severely condemned by the universal Church during at least eighteen
hundred years of its history. Nor would the explanations of Sir
William Dawson have fared any better: it is very doubtful whether
either of them could escape unscathed today from a synod of the
Free Church of Scotland, or of any of the leading orthodox bodies
in the Southern States of the American Union.[[261]]

How unsatisfactory all such rationalism must be to a truly
theological mind is seen not only in the dealings with Prof.
Robertson Smith in Scotland and Prof. Woodrow in South Carolina,
but most clearly in a book published in 1886 by Monseigneur
Haussmann de Wandelburg. Among other things, the author was Prelate
of the Pope's House-hold, a Mitred Abbot, Canon of the Holy
Sepulchre, and a Doctor of Theology of the Pontifical University at
Rome, and his work is introduced by approving letters from Pope
Leo XIII and the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Monseigneur de Wandelburg
scorns the idea that the salt column at Usdum is not the statue of
Lot's wife; he points out not only the danger of yielding this
evidence of miracle to rationalism, but the fact that the divinely.
inspired authority of the Book of Wisdom, written, at the latest,
two hundred and fifty years before Christ, distinctly refers to it.
He summons Josephus as a witness. He dwells on the fact that St.
Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Hegesippus, and St. Cyril, "who as
Bishop of Jerusalem must have known better than any other person
what existed in Palestine," with St. Jerome, St. Chrysostom, and a
multitude of others, attest, as a matter of their own knowledge or
of popular notoriety, that the remains of Lot's wife really existed
in their time in the form of a column of salt; and he points
triumphantly to the fact that Lieutenant Lynch found this very column.

In the presence of such a continuous line of witnesses, some of
them considered as divinely inspired, and all of them greatly
revered--a line extending through thirty-seven hundred years--he
condemns most vigorously all those who do not believe that the
pillar of salt now at Usdum is identical with the wife of Lot, and
stigmatizes them as people who "do not wish to believe the truth
of the Word of God." His ignorance of many of the simplest facts
bearing upon the legend is very striking, yet he does not hesitate
to speak of men who know far more and have thought far more upon
the subject as "grossly ignorant." The most curious feature in his
ignorance is the fact that he is utterly unaware of the annual
changes in the salt statue. He is entirely ignorant of such facts
as that the priest Gabriel Giraudet in the sixteenth century found
the statue lying down; that the monk Zwinner found it in the
seventeenth century standing, and accompanied by a dog also
transformed into salt; that Prince Radziwill found no statue at
all; that the pious Vincent Briemle in the eighteenth century found
the monument renewing itself; that about the middle of the
nineteenth century Lynch found it in the shape of a tower or column
forty feet high; that within two years afterward De Saulcy found it
washed into the form of a spire; that a year later Van de Velde
found it utterly washed away; and that a few years later Palmer
found it "a statue bearing a striking resemblance to an Arab woman
with a child in her arms." So ended the last great demonstration,
thus far, on the side of sacred science--the last retreating shot
from the theological rear guard.

It is but just to say that a very great share in the honour of the
victory of science in this field is due to men trained as
theologians. It would naturally be so, since few others have
devoted themselves to direct labour in it; yet great honour is none
the less due to such men as Reland, Mariti, Smith, Robinson,
Stanley, Tristram, and Schat.

They have rendered even a greater service to religion than to
science, for they have made a beginning, at least, of doing away
with that enforced belief in myths as history which has become a
most serious danger to Christianity.

For the worst enemy of Christianity could wish nothing more than
that its main Leaders should prove that it can not be adopted save
by those who accept, as historical, statements which unbiased men
throughout the world know to be mythical. The result of such a
demonstration would only be more and more to make thinking people
inside the Church dissemblers, and thinking people outside, scoffers.

Far better is it to welcome the aid of science, in the conviction
that all truth is one, and, in the light of this truth, to allow
theology and science to work together in the steady evolution of
religion and morality.

The revelations made by the sciences which most directly deal with
the history of man all converge in the truth that during the
earlier stages of this evolution moral and spiritual teachings must
be inclosed in myth, legend, and parable. "The Master" felt this
when he gave to the poor peasants about him, and so to the world,
his simple and beautiful illustrations. In making this truth clear,
science will give to religion far more than it will take away, for
it will throw new life and light into all sacred literature.


                          CHAPTER XIX.
               FROM LEVITICUS TO POLITICAL ECONOMY

    I. ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF HOSTILITY TO LOANS AT INTEREST.

AMONG questions on which the supporters of right reason in
political and social science have only conquered theological
opposition after centuries of war, is the taking of interest on
loans. In hardly any struggle has rigid adherence to the letter of
our sacred books been more prolonged and injurious.

Certainly, if the criterion of truth, as regards any doctrine, be
that of St. Vincent of Lerins--that it has been held in the Church
"always, everywhere, and by all"--then on no point may a Christian
of these days be more sure than that every savings institution,
every loan and trust company, every bank, every loan of capital by
an individual, every means by which accumulated capital has been
lawfully lent even at the most moderate interest, to make men
workers rather than paupers, is based on deadly sin.

The early evolution of the belief that taking interest for money is
sinful presents a curious working together of metaphysical,
theological, and humanitarian ideas.

In the main centre of ancient Greek civilization, the loaning of
money at interest came to be accepted at an early period as a
condition of productive industry, and no legal restriction was
imposed. In Rome there was a long process of development: the greed
of creditors in early times led to laws against the taking of
interest; but, though these lasted long, that strong practical
sense which gave Rome the empire of the world substituted finally,
for this absolute prohibition, the establishment of rates by law.
Yet many of the leading Greek and Roman thinkers opposed this
practical settlement of the question, and, foremost of all,
Aristotle. In a metaphysical way he declared that money is by
nature "barren"; that the birth of money from money is therefore
"unnatural"; and hence that the taking of interest is to be
censured and hated. Plato, Plutarch, both the Catos, Cicero,
Seneca, and various other leaders of ancient thought, arrived at
much the same conclusion--sometimes from sympathy with oppressed
debtors; sometimes from dislike of usurers; sometimes from simple
contempt of trade.

From these sources there came into the early Church the germ of a
theological theory upon the subject.

But far greater was the stream of influence from the Jewish and
Christian sacred books. In the Old Testament stood various texts
condemning usury--the term usury meaning any taking of interest:
the law of Moses, while it allowed usury in dealing with strangers,
forbade it in dealing with Jews. In the New Testament, in the
Sermon on the Mount, as given by St. Luke, stood the text "Lend,
hoping for nothing again." These texts seemed to harmonize with the
most beautiful characteristic of primnitive Christianity; its
tender care for the poor and oppressed: hence we find, from the
earliest period, the whole weight of the Church brought to bear
against the taking of interest for money.[[265]]

The great fathers of the Eastern Church, and among them St. Basil,
St. Chrysostom, and St. Gregory of Nyssa,--the fathers of the
Western Church, and among them Tertullian, St. Ambrose, St.
Augustine, and St. Jerome, joined most earnestly in this
condemnation. St. Basil denounces money at interest as a "fecund
monster," and says, "The divine law declares expressly, `Thou shalt
not lend on usury to thy brother or thy neighbour.'" St. Gregory of
Nyssa calls down on him who lends money at interest the vengeance
of the Almighty. St. Chrysostom says: "What can be more
unreasonable than to sow without land, without rain, without
ploughs? All those who give themselves up to this damnable culture
shall reap only tares. Let us cut off these monstrous births of
gold and silver; let us stop this execrable fecundity." Lactantius
called the taking of interest "robbery." St. Ambrose declared it as
bad as murder, St. Jerome threw the argument into the form of a
dilemma, which was used as a weapon against money-lenders for
centuries. Pope Leo the Great solemnly adjudged it a sin worthy of
severe punishment.[[266]]

This unanimity of the fathers of the Church brought about a
crystallization of hostility to interest-bearing loans into
numberless decrees of popes and councils and kings and legislatures
throughout Christendom during more than fifteen hundred years,
and the canon law was shaped in accordance with these. At first
these were more especially directed against the clergy, but we soon
find them extending to the laity. These prohibitions were enforced
by the Council of Arles in 314, and a modern Church apologist
insists that every great assembly of the Church, from the Council
of Elvira in 306 to that of Vienne in 1311, inclusive, solemnly
condemned lending money at interest. The greatest rulers under the
sway of the Church--Justinian, in the Empire of the East;
Charlemagne, in the Empire of the West; Alfred, in England; St.
Louis, in France--yielded fully to this dogma. In the ninth century
Alfred went so far as to confiscate the estates of money-lenders,
denying them burial in Consecrated ground; and similar decrees were
made in other parts of Europe. In the twelfth century the Greek
Church seems to have relaxed its strictness somewhat, but the Roman
Church grew more severe. St. Anselm proved from the Scriptures that
the taking of interest is a breach of the Ten Commandments. Peter
Lombard, in his _Sentences_, made the taking of interest purely and
simply theft. St. Bernard, reviving religious earnestness in the
Church, took the same view. In 1179 the Third Council of the
Lateran decreed that impenitent money-lenders should be excluded
from the altar, from absolution in the hour of death, and from
Christian burial. Pope Urban III reiterated the declaration that
the passage in St. Luke forbade the taking of any interest
whatever. Pope Alexander III declared that the prohibition in this
matter could never be suspended by dispensation.

In the thirteenth century Pope Gregory IX dealt an especially
severe blow at commerce by his declaration that even to advance on
interest the money necessary in maritime trade was damnable usury;
and this was fitly followed by Gregory X, who forbade Christian
burial to those guilty of this practice; the Council of Lyons meted
out the same penalty. This idea was still more firmly fastened upon
the world by the two greatest thinkers of the time: first, by St.
Thomas Aquinas, who knit it into the mind of the Church by the use
of the Scriptures and of Aristotle; and next by Dante, who pictured
money-lenders in one of the worst regions of hell.

About the beginning of the fourteenth century the "Subtile Doctor"
of the Middle Ages, Duns Scotus, gave to the world an exquisite
piece of reasoning in evasion of the accepted doctrine; but all to
no purpose: the Council of Vienne, presided over by Pope Clement V,
declared that if any one "shall pertinaciously presume to affirm
that the taking of interest for money is not a sin, we decree him
to be a heretic, fit for punishment." This infallible utterance
bound the dogma with additional force on the conscience of the
universal Church.

Nor was this a doctrine enforced by rulers only; the people were
no less strenuous. In 1390 the city authorities of London enacted
that, "if any person shall lend or put into the hands of any person
gold or silver to receive gain thereby, such person shall have the
punishment for usurers." And in the same year the Commons prayed
the king that the laws of London against usury might have the force
of statutes throughout the realm.

In the fifteenth century the Council of the Church at Salzburg
excluded from communion and burial any who took interest for money,
and this was a very general rule throughout Germany.

An exception was, indeed, sometimes made: some canonists held that
Jews might be allowed to take interest, since they were to be
damned in any case, and their monopoly of money-lending might
prevent Christians from losing their souls by going into the
business. Yet even the Jews were from time to time punished for the
crime of usury; and, as regards Christians, punishment was bestowed
on the dead as well as the living--the bodies of dead money-lenders
being here and there dug up and cast out of consecrated ground.

The popular preachers constantly declaimed against all who took
interest. The medieval anecdote books for pulpit use are especially
full on this point. Jacques de Vitry tells us that demons on one
occasion filled a dead money-lender's mouth with red-hot coins;
Cesarius of Heisterbach declared that a toad was found thrusting a
piece of money into a dead usurer's heart; in another case, a devil
was seen pouring molten gold down a dead money-lender's throat.[[268]]

This theological hostility to the taking of interest was imbedded
firmly in the canon law. Again and again it defined usury to be the
taking of anything of value beyond the exact original amount of a
loan; and under sanction of the universal Church it denounced this
as a crime and declared all persons defending it to be guilty of
heresy. What this meant the world knows but too well.

The whole evolution of European civilization was greatly hindered
by this conscientious policy. Money could only be loaned in most
countries at the risk of incurring odium in this world and
damnation in the next; hence there was but little capital and few
lenders. The rates of interest became at times enormous; as high as
forty per cent in England, and ten per cent a month in Italy and
Spain. Commerce, manufactures, and general enterprise were dwarfed,
while pauperism flourished.

Yet worse than these were the moral results. Doing what one holds
to be evil is only second in bad consequences to doing what is
really evil; hence, all lending and borrowing, even for the most
legitimate purposes and at the most reasonable rates, tended to
debase both borrower and lender. The prohibition of lending at
interest in continental Europe promoted luxury and discouraged
economy; the rich, who were not engaged in business, finding no
easy way of employing their incomes productively, spent them
largely in ostentation and riotous living.

One evil effect is felt in all parts of the world to this hour. The
Jews, so acute in intellect and strong in will, were virtually
drawn or driven out of all other industries or professions by the
theory that their race, being accursed, was only fitted for the
abhorred profession of money-lending.[[270]]

These evils were so manifest, when trade began to revive throughout
Europe in the fifteenth century, that most earnest exertions were
put forth to induce the Church to change its position.

The first important effort of this kind was made by John Gerson.
His general learning made him Chancellor of the University of
Paris; his sacred learning made him the leading orator at the
Council of Constance; his piety led men to attribute to him _The
Imitation of Christ_. Shaking off theological shackles, he
declared, "Better is it to lend money at reasonable interest, and
thus to give aid to the poor, than to see them reduced by poverty
to steal, waste their goods, and sell at a low price their personal
and real property."

But this idea was at once buried beneath citations from the
Scriptures, the fathers, councils, popes, and the canon law. Even
in the most active countries there seemed to be no hope. In
England, under Henry VII, Cardinal Morton, the lord chancellor,
addressed Parliament, asking it to take into consideration loans of
money at interest. The result was a law which imposed on lenders at
interest a fine of a hundred pounds besides the annulment of the
loan; and, to show that there was an offence against religion
involved, there was added a clause "reserving to the Church,
notwithstanding this punishment, the correction of their souls
according to the laws of the same."

Similar enactments were made by civil authority in various parts of
Europe; and just when the trade, commerce, and manufactures of the
modern epoch had received an immense impulse from the great series
of voyages of discovery by such men as Columbus, Vasco da Gama,
Magellan, and the Cabots, this barrier against enterprise was
strengthened by a decree from no less enlightened a pontiff than Leo X.

The popular feeling warranted such decrees. As late as the end of
the Middle Ages we find the people of Piacenza dragging the body of
a money-lender out of his grave in consecrated ground and throwing
it into the river Po, in order to stop a prolonged rainstorm; and
outbreaks of the same spirit were frequent in other countries.[[271]]

Another mode of obtaining relief was tried. Subtle theologians
devised evasions of various sorts. Two among these inventions of
the schoolmen obtained much notoriety.

The first was the doctrine of " _damnum emergens_": if a lender
suffered loss by the failure of the borrower to return a loan at a
date named, compensation might be made. Thus it was that, if the
nominal date of payment was made to follow quickly after the real
date of the loan, the compensation for the anticipated delay in
payment had a very strong resemblance to interest. Equally cogent
was the doctrine of "_lucrum cessans_": if a man, in order to lend
money, was obliged to diminish his income from productive
enterprises, it was claimed that he might receive in return, in
addition to his money, an amount exactly equal to this diminution
in his income.

But such evasions were looked upon with little favour by the great
body of theologians, and the name of St. Thomas Aquinas was
triumphantly cited against them.

Opposition on scriptural grounds to the taking of interest was not
confined to the older Church. Protestantism was led by Luther and
several of his associates into the same line of thought and
practice. Said Luther. "To exchange anything with any one and gain
by the exchange is not to do a charity; but to steal. Every usurer
is a thief worthy of the gibbet. I call those usurers who lend
money at five or six per cent." But it is only just to say that at
a later period Luther took a much more moderate view. Melanchthon,
defining usury as any interest whatever, condemned it again and
again; and the Goldberg _Catechism_ of 1558, for which he wrote a
preface and recommendation, declares every person taking interest
for money a thief. From generation to generation this doctrine was
upheld by the more eminent divines of the Lutheran Church in all
parts of Germany.

The English reformers showed the same hostility to interest-bearing
loans. Under Henry VIII the law of Henry VII against taking
interest had been modified for the better; but the revival of
religious feeling under Edward VI caused in 1552 the passage of the
"Bill of Usury." In this it is said, "Forasmuch as usury is by the
word of God utterly prohibited, as a vice most odious and
detestable, as in divers places of the Holy Scriptures it is
evident to be seen, which thing by no godly teachings and
persuasions can sink into the hearts of divers greedy,
uncharitable, and covetous persons of this realm, nor yet, by any
terrible threatenings of God's wrath and vengeance," etc., it is
enacted that whosoever shall thereafter lend money "for any manner
of usury, increase, lucre, gain, or interest, to be had, received,
or hoped for," shall forfeit principal and interest, and suffer
imprisonment and fine at the king's pleasure.[[273]]

But, most fortunately, it happened that Calvin, though at times
stumbling over the usual texts against the taking of interest for
money, turned finally in the right direction. He cut through the
metaphysical arguments of Aristotle, and characterized the
subtleties devised to evade the Scriptures as "a childish game with
God." In place of these subtleties there was developed among
Protestants a serviceable fiction--the statement that usury means
_illegal or oppressive interest_. Under the action of this fiction,
commerce and trade revived rapidly in Protestant countries, though
with occasional checks from exact interpreters of Scripture. At the
same period in France, the great Protestant jurist Dumoulin brought
all his legal learning and skill in casuistry to bear on the same
side. A certain ferretlike acuteness and litheness seem to have
enabled him to hunt down the opponents of interest-taking through
the most tortuous arguments of scholasticism.

In England the struggle went on with varying fortune; statesmen on
one side, and theologians on the other. We have seen how, under
Henry VIII, interest was allowed at a fixed rate, and how, the
development of English Protestantism having at first strengthened
the old theological view, there was, under Edward VI, a temporarily
successful attempt to forbid the taking of interest by law.

The Puritans, dwelling on Old Testament texts, continued for a
considerable time especially hostile to the taking of any interest.
Henry Smith, a noted preacher, thundered from the pulpit of St.
Clement Danes in London against "the evasions of Scripture" which
permitted men to lend money on interest at all. In answer to the
contention that only "biting" usury was oppressive, Wilson, a noted
upholder of the strict theological view in political economy,
declared: "There is difference in deed between the bite of a dogge
and the bite of a flea, and yet, though the flea doth lesse harm,
yet the flea doth bite after hir kinde, yea, and draweth blood,
too. But what a world this is, that men will make sin to be but a
fleabite, when they see God's word directly against them!"

The same view found strong upholders among contemporary English
Catholics. One of the most eminent of these, Nicholas Sanders,
revived very vigorously the use of an old scholastic argument. He
insisted that "man can not sell time," that time is not a human
possession, but something which is given by God alone: he declared,
"Time was not of your gift to your neighbour, but of God's gift to
you both."

In the Parliament of the period, we find strong assertions of the
old idea, with constant reference to Scripture and the fathers. In
one debate, Wilson cited from Ezekiel and other prophets and
attributed to St. Augustine the doctrine that "to take but a cup of
wine is usury and damnable." Fleetwood recalled the law of King
Edward the Confessor, which submitted usurers to the ordeal.

But arguments of this sort had little influence upon Elizabeth and
her statesmen. Threats of damnation in the next world troubled them
little if they could have their way in this. They re-established
the practice of taking interest under restrictions, and this, in
various forms, has remained in England ever since. Most notable in
this phase of the evolution of scientific doctrine in political
economy at that period is the emergence of a recognised difference
between _usury_ and _interest_. Between these two words, which had so
long been synonymous, a distinction now appears: the former being
construed to indicate _oppressive interest_, and the latter _just
rates_ for the use of money. This idea gradually sank into the
popular mind of Protestant countries, and the scriptural texts no
longer presented any difficulty to the people at large, since there
grew up a general belief that the word "usury," as employed in
Scripture, had _always_ meant exorbitant interest; and this in
spite of the parable of the Talents. Still, that the old
Aristotelian quibble had not been entirely forgotten, is clearly
seen by various passages in Shakespeare's _Merchant of Venice_. But
this line of reasoning seems to have received its quietus from Lord
Bacon. He did not, indeed, develop a strong and connected argument
on the subject; but he burst the bonds of Aristotle, and based
interest for money upon natural laws. How powerful the new current
of thought was, is seen from the fact that James I, of all monarchs
the most fettered by scholasticism and theology, sanctioned a
statute dealing with interest for money as absolutely necessary.
Yet, even after this, the old idea asserted itself; for the bishops
utterly refused to agree to the law allowing interest until a
proviso was inserted that "nothing in this law contained shall be
construed or expounded to allow the practice of usury in point of
religion or conscience." The old view cropped out from time to time
in various public declarations. Famous among these were the
_Treatise of Usury_, published in 1612 by Dr. Fenton, who restated
the old arguments with much force, and the _Usury Condemned_ of John
Blaxton, published in 1634. Blaxton, who also was a clergyman,
defined usury as the taking of any interest whatever for money,
citing in support of this view six archbishops and bishops and over
thirty doctors of divinity in the Anglican Church, some of their
utterances being very violent and all of them running their roots
down into texts of Scripture. Typical among these is a sermon of
Bishop Sands, in which he declares, regarding the taking of
interest: "This canker hath corrupted all England; we shall doe God
and our country true service by taking away this evill; represse it
by law, else the heavy hand of God hangeth over us and will strike us."


       II. RETREAT OF THE CHURCH, PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC.

But about the middle of the seventeenth century Sir Robert Filmer
gave this doctrine the heaviest blow it ever received in England.
Taking up Dr. Fenton's treatise, he answered it, and all works like
it, in a way which, however unsuitable to this century, was
admirably adapted to that. He cites Scripture and chops logic after
a masterly manner. Characteristic is this declaration: "St. Paul
doth, with one breath, reckon up seventeen sins, and yet usury is
none of them; but many preachers can not reckon up seven deadly
sins, except they make usury one of them." Filmer followed Fenton
not only through his theology, but through his political economy,
with such relentless keenness that the old doctrine seems to have
been then and there practically worried out of existence, so far as
England was concerned.

Departures from the strict scriptural doctrines regarding interest
soon became frequent in Protestant countries, and they were
followed up with especial vigour in Holland. Various theologians in
the Dutch Church attempted to assert the scriptural view by
excluding bankers from the holy communion; but the commercial
vigour of the republic was too strong: Salmasius led on the forces
of right reason brilliantly, and by the middle of the seventeenth
century the question was settled rightly in that country. This work
was aided, indeed, by a far greater man, Hugo Grotius; but here was
shown the power of an established dogma. Great as Grotius was--and
it may well be held that his book on _War and Peace_ has wrought
more benefit to humanity than any other attributed to human
authorship--he was, in the matter of interest for money, too much
entangled in theological reasoning to do justice to his cause or to
himself. He declared the prohibition of it to be scriptural, but
resisted the doctrine of Aristotle, and allowed interest on certain
natural and practical grounds.

In Germany the struggle lasted longer. Of some little significance,
perhaps, is the demand of Adam Contzen, in 1629, that lenders at
interest should be punished as thieves; but by the end of the
seventeenth century Puffendorf and Leibnitz had gained the victory.

Protestantism, open as it was to the currents of modern thought,
could not long continue under the dominion of ideas unfavourable to
economic development, and perhaps the most remarkable proof of this
was presented early in the eighteenth century in America, by no
less strict a theologian than Cotton Mather. In his _Magnalia_ he
argues against the whole theological view with a boldness,
acuteness, and good sense which cause us to wonder that this can be
the same man who was so infatuated regarding witchcraft. After an
argument so conclusive as his, there could have been little left of
the old anti-economic doctrine in New England.[[277]]

But while the retreat of the Protestant Church from the old
doctrine regarding the taking of interest was henceforth easy, in
the Catholic Church it was far more difficult. Infallible popes and
councils, with saints, fathers, and doctors, had so constantly
declared the taking of any interest at all to be contrary to
Scripture, that the more exact though less fortunate interpretation
of the sacred text relating to interest continued in Catholic
countries. When it was attempted in France in the seventeenth
century to argue that usury "means oppressive interest," the
Theological Faculty of the Sorbonne declared that usury is the
taking of any interest at all, no matter how little; and the
eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel was cited to clinch this argument.

Another attempt to ease the burden of industry and commerce was
made by declaring that "usury means interest demanded not as a
matter of favour but as a matter of right." This, too, was solemnly
condemned by Pope innocent XI.

Again an attempt was made to find a way out of the difficulty by
declaring that "usury is interest greater than the law allows."
This, too, was condemned, and so also was the declaration that
"usury is interest on loans not for a fixed time."

Still the forces of right reason pressed on, and among them, in the
seventeenth century, in France, was Richard Simon. He attempted to
gloss over the declarations of Scripture against lending at
interest, in an elaborate treatise, but was immediately confronted
by Bossuet. Just as Bossuet had mingled Scripture with astronomy
and opposed the Copernican theory, so now he mingled Scripture
with political economy and denounced the lending of money at
interest. He called attention to the fact that the Scriptures, the
councils of the Church from the beginning, the popes, the fathers,
had all interpreted the prohibition of "usury" to be a prohibition
of any lending at interest; and he demonstrated this interpretation
to be the true one. Simon was put to confusion and his book condemned.

There was but too much reason for Bossuet's interpretation. There
stood the fact that the prohibition of one of the most simple and
beneficial principles in political and economical science was
affirmed, not only by the fathers, but by twenty-eight councils of
the Church, six of them general councils, and by seventeen popes,
to say nothing of innumerable doctors in theology and canon law.
And these prohibitions by the Church had been accepted as of divine
origin by all obedient sons of the Church in the government of
France. Such rulers as Charles the Bald in the ninth century, and
St. Louis in the thirteenth, had riveted this idea into the civil
law so firmly that it seemed impossible ever to detach it.[[279]]

As might well be expected, Italy was one of the countries in which
the theological theory regarding usury--lending at interest--was
most generally asserted and assented to. Among the great number of
Italian canonists who supported the theory, two deserve especial
mention, as affording a contrast to the practical manner in which
the commercial Italians met the question.

In the sixteenth century, very famous among canonists was the
learned Benedictine, Vilagut. In 1589 he published at Venice his
great work on usury, supporting with much learning and vigour the
most extreme theological consequences of the old doctrine. He
defines usury as the taking of anything beyond the original loan,
and declares it mortal sin; he advocates the denial to usurers of
Christian burial, confession, the sacraments, absolution, and
connection with the universities; he declares that priests
receiving offerings from usurers should refrain from exercising
their ministry until the matter is passed upon by the bishop.

About the middle of the seventeenth century another ponderous folio
was published in Venice upon the same subject and with the same
title, by Onorato Leotardi. So far from showing any signs of
yielding, he is even more extreme than Vilagut had been, and quotes
with approval the old declaration that lenders of money at interest
are not only robbers but murderers.

So far as we can learn, no real opposition was made in either
century to this theory, as a theory; as to _practice_, it was
different. The Italian traders did not answer theological argument;
they simply overrode it. In spite of theology, great banks were
established, and especially that of Venice at the end of the
twelfth century, and those of Barcelona and Genoa at the beginning
of the fifteenth. Nowhere was commerce carried on in more complete
defiance of this and other theological theories hampering trade
than in the very city where these great treatises were published.
The sin of usury, like the sin of commerce with the Mohammedans,
seems to have been settled for by the Venetian merchants on their
deathbeds; and greatly to the advantage of the magnificent churches
and ecclesiastical adornments of the city.

By the seventeenth century the clearest thinkers in the Roman
Church saw that her theology must be readjusted to political
economy: so began a series of amazing attempts to reconcile a view
permitting usury with the long series of decrees of popes and
councils forbidding it.

In Spain, the great Jesuit casuist Escobar led the way, and rarely
had been seen such exquisite hair-splitting. But his efforts were
not received with the gratitude they perhaps deserved. Pascal,
revolting at their moral effect, attacked them unsparingly in his
_Provincial Letters_, citing especially such passages as the
following: "It is usury to receive profit from those to whom one
lends, if it be exacted as justly due; but, if it be exacted as a
debt of gratitude, it is not usury." This and a multitude of
similar passages Pascal covered with the keen ridicule and
indignant denunciation of which he was so great a master.

But even the genius of Pascal could not stop such efforts. In the
eighteenth century they were renewed by a far greater theologian
than Escobar--by him who was afterward made a saint and proclaimed
a doctor of the Church--Alphonso Liguori.

Starting with bitter denunciations of usury, Liguori soon developed
a multitude of subtle devices for escaping the guilt of it.
Presenting a long and elaborate theory of "mental, usury" he
arrives at the conclusion that, if the borrower pay interest of
his own free will, the lender may keep it. In answer to the
question whether the lender may keep what the borrower paid, not
out of gratitude but out of fear--fear that otherwise loans might
be refused him in future--Liguori says, "To be usury it must be
paid by reason of a contract, or as justly due; payment by reason
of such a fear does not cause interest to be paid as an actual
price." Again Liguori tells us, "It is not usury to exact
something in return for the danger and expense of regaining the
principal." The old subterfuges of "_Damnum emergens_" and "_Lucrum
cessans_" are made to do full duty. A remarkable quibble is found in
the answer to the question whether he sins who furnishes money to
a man whom he knows to intend employing it in usury. After citing
affirmative opinions from many writers, Liguori says,
"Notwithstanding these opinions, the better opinion seems to me to
be that the man thus putting out his money is not bound to make
restitution, for his action is not injurious to the borrower, but
rather favourable to him," and this reasoning the saint develops at
great length.

In the Latin countries this sort of casuistry eased the relations
of the Church with the bankers, and it was full time; for now there
came arguments of a different kind. The eighteenth century
philosophy had come upon the stage, and the first effective onset
of political scientists against the theological opposition in
southern Europe was made in Italy--the most noted leaders in the
attack being Galiani and Maffei. Here and there feeble efforts were
made to meet them, but it was felt more and more by thinking
churchmen that entirely different tactics must be adopted.

About the same time came an attack in France, and though its
results were less immediate at home, they were much more effective
abroad. In 1748 appeared Montesquieu's _Spirit of the Laws_. In this
famous book were concentrated twenty years of study and thought by
a great thinker on the interests of the world about him. In
eighteen months it went through twenty-two editions; it was
translated into every civilized language; and among the things on
which Montesquieu brought his wit and wisdom to bear with especial
force was the doctrine of the Church regarding interest on loans.
In doing this he was obliged to use a caution in forms which seems
strangely at variance with the boldness of his ideas. In view of
the strictness of ecclesiastical control in France, he felt it
safest to make his whole attack upon those theological and economic
follies of Mohammedan countries which were similar to those which
the theological spirit had fastened on France.[[282]]

By the middle of the eighteenth century the Church authorities at
Rome clearly saw the necessity of a concession: the world would
endure theological restriction no longer; a way of escape _must_ be
found. It was seen, even by the most devoted theologians, that mere
denunciations and use of theological arguments or scriptural texts
against the scientific idea were futile.

To this feeling it was due that, even in the first years of the
century, the Jesuit casuists had come to the rescue. With exquisite
subtlety some of their acutest intellects devoted themselves to
explaining away the utterances on this subject of saints, fathers,
doctors, popes, and councils. These explanations were wonderfully
ingenious, but many of the older churchmen continued to insist upon
the orthodox view, and at last the Pope himself intervened.
Fortunately for the world, the seat of St. Peter was then occupied
by Benedict XIV, certainly one of the most gifted, morally and
intellectually, in the whole line of Roman pontiffs. Tolerant and
sympathetic for the oppressed, he saw the necessity of taking up
the question, and he grappled with it effectually: he rendered to
Catholicism a service like that which Calvin had rendered to
Protestantism, by shrewdly cutting a way through the theological
barrier. In 1745 he issued his encyclical _Vix pervenit_, which
declared that the doctrine of the Church remained consistent with
itself; that usury is indeed a sin, and that it consists in
_demanding any amount beyond the exact amount lent_, but that there
are occasions when on special grounds the lender may obtain such
additional sum.

What these "occasions" and "special grounds" might be, was left
very vague; but this action was sufficient.

At the same time no new restrictions upon books advocating the
taking of interest for money were imposed, and, in the year
following his encyclical, Benedict openly accepted the dedication of
one of them--the work of Maffei, and perhaps the most cogent of all.

Like the casuistry of Boscovich in using the Copernican theory for
"convenience in argument," while acquiescing in its condemnation by
the Church authorities, this encyclical of Pope Benedict broke the
spell. Turgot, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Hume, Bentham, and their
disciples pressed on, and science won for mankind another great
victory.[[283]]

Yet in this case, as in others, insurrections against the sway of
scientific truth appeared among some overzealous religionists. When
the Sorbonne, having retreated from its old position, armed itself
with new casuistries against those who held to its earlier
decisions, sundry provincial doctors in theology protested
indignantly, making the old citations from the Scriptures, fathers,
saints, doctors, popes, councils, and canonists. Again the Roman
court intervened. In 1830 the Inquisition at Rome, with the
approval of Pius VIII, though still declining to commit itself on
the _doctrine_ involved, decreed that, as to _practice_, confessors
should no longer disturb lenders of money at legal interest.

But even this did not quiet the more conscientious theologians. The
old weapons were again furbished and hurled by the Abbe Laborde,
Vicar of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Auch, and by the Abbe
Dennavit, Professor of Theology at Lyons. Good Abbe Dennavit declared
that he refused absolution to those who took interest and to
priests who pretend that the sanction of the civil law is sufficient.

But the "wisdom of the serpent" was again brought into requisition,
and early in the decade between 1830 and 1840 the Abbate Mastrofini
issued a work on usury, which, he declared on its title-page,
demonstrated that "moderate usury is not contrary to Holy
Scripture, or natural law, or the decisions of the Church." Nothing
can be more comical than the suppressions of truth, evasions of
facts, jugglery with phrases, and perversions of history, to which
the abbate is forced to resort throughout his book in order to
prove that the Church has made no mistake. In the face of scores of
explicit deliverances and decrees of fathers, doctors, popes, and
councils against the taking of any interest whatever for money, he
coolly pretended that what they had declared against was
_exorbitant_ interest. He made a merit of the action of the Church,
and showed that its course had been a blessing to humanity. But his
masterpiece is in dealing with the edicts of Clement V and Benedict
XIV. As to the first, it will be remembered that Clement, in accord
with the Council of Vienne, had declared that "any one who shall
pertinaciously presume to affirm that the taking of interest for
money is not a sin, we decree him to be a heiretic fit for
punishment," and we have seen that Benedict XIV did not at all
deviate from the doctrines of his predecessors. Yet Mastrofini is
equal to his task, and brings out, as the conclusion of his book,
the statement put upon his title-page, that what the Church
condemns is only _exorbitant_ interest.

This work was sanctioned by various high ecclesiastical dignitaries,
and served its purpose; for it covered the retreat of the Church.

In 1872 the Holy Office, answering a question solemnly put by the
Bishop of Ariano, as solemnly declared that those who take eight
per cent interest per annum are "not to be disquieted"; and in 1873
appeared a book published under authority from the Holy See,
allowing the faithful to take moderate interest under condition
that any future decisions of the Pope should be implicitly obeyed.
Social science as applied to political economy had gained a victory
final and complete. The Torlonia family at Rome to-day, with its
palaces, chapels, intermarriages, affiliations, and papal favour
--all won by lending money at interest, and by liberal gifts, from
the profits of usury, to the Holy See--is but one out of many
growths of its kind on ramparts long since surrendered and
deserted.[[285]]

The dealings of theology with public economy were by no means
confined to the taking of interest for money. It would be
interesting to note the restrictions placed upon commerce by the
Church prohibition of commercial intercourse with infidels, against
which the Republic of Venice fought a good fight; to note how, by
a most curious perversion of Scripture in the Greek Church, many of
the peasantry of Russia were prevented from raising and eating
potatoes; how, in Scotland, at the beginning of this century, the
use of fanning mills for winnowing grain was widely denounced as
contrary to the text, "The wind bloweth where it listeth," etc., as
leaguing with Satan, who is "Prince of the powers of the air," and
therefore as sufficient cause for excommunication from the Scotch
Church. Instructive it would be also to note how the introduction
of railways was declared by an archbishop of the French Church to
be an evidence of the divine displeasure against country innkeepers
who set meat before their guests on fast days, and who were now
punished by seeing travellers carried by their doors; how railways
and telegraphs were denounced from a few noted pulpits as heralds
of Antichrist; and how in Protestant England the curate of
Rotherhithe, at the breaking in of the Thames Tunnel, so
destructive to life and property, declared it from his pulpit a
just judgment upon the presumptuous aspirations of mortal man.

The same tendency is seen in the opposition of conscientious men to
the taking of the census in Sweden and the United States, on
account of the terms in which the numbering of Israel is spoken of
in the Old Testament. Religious scruples on similar grounds have
also been avowed against so beneficial a thing as life insurance.

Apparently unimportant as these manifestations are, they indicate
a widespread tendency; in the application of scriptural
declarations to matters of social economy, which has not yet
ceased, though it is fast fading away.[[286]]

Worthy of especial study, too, would be the evolution of the modern
methods of raising and bettering the condition of the poor,--the
evolution, especially, of the idea that men are to be helped to
help themselves, in opposition to the old theories of
indiscriminate giving, which, taking root in some of the most
beautiful utterances of our sacred books, grew in the warm
atmosphere of medieval devotion into great systems for the
pauperizing of the labouring classes. Here, too, scientific modes
of thought in social science have given a new and nobler fruitage
to the whole growth of Christian benevolence.[[287]]


                           CHAPTER XX.
        FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM.

                  I. THE OLDER INTERPRETATION.

THE great sacred books of the world are the most precious of human
possessions. They embody the deepest searchings into the most vital
problems of humanity in all its stages: the naive guesses of the
world's childhood, the opening conceptions of its youth, the more
fully rounded beliefs of its maturity.

These books, no matter how unhistorical in parts and at times, are
profoundly true. They mirror the evolution of man's loftiest
aspirations, hopes, loves, consolations, and enthusiasms; his hates
and fears; his views of his origin and destiny; his theories of his
rights and duties; and these not merely in their lights but in
their shadows. Therefore it is that they contain the germs of
truths most necessary in the evolution of humanity, and give to
these germs the environment and sustenance which best insure their
growth and strength.

With wide differences in origin and character, this sacred
literature has been developed and has exercised its influence in
obedience to certain general laws. First of these in time, if not
in importance, is that which governs its origin: in all
civilizations we find that the Divine Spirit working in the mind of
man shapes his sacred books first of all out of the chaos of myth
and legend; and of these books, when life is thus breathed into
them, the fittest survive.

So broad and dense is this atmosphere of myth and legend enveloping
them that it lingers about them after they have been brought forth
full-orbed; and, sometimes, from it are even produced secondary
mythical and legendary concretions--satellites about these greater
orbs of early thought. Of these secondary growths one may be
mentioned as showing how rich in myth-making material was the
atmosphere which enveloped our own earlier sacred literature.

In the third century before Christ there began to be elaborated
among the Jewish scholars of Alexandria, then the great centre of
human thought, a Greek translation of the main books constituting
the Old Testament. Nothing could be more natural at that place and
time than such a translation; yet the growth of explanatory myth
and legend around it was none the less luxuriant. There was indeed
a twofold growth. Among the Jews favourable to the new version a
legend rose which justified it. This legend in its first stage was
to the effect that the Ptolemy then on the Egyptian throne had, at
the request of his chief librarian, sent to Jerusalem for
translators; that the Jewish high priest Eleazar had sent to the
king a most precious copy of the Scriptures from the temple at
Jerusalem, and six most venerable, devout, and learned scholars
from each of the twelve tribes of Israel; that the number of
translators thus corresponded with the mysterious seventy-two
appellations of God; and that the combined efforts of these
seventy-two men produced a marvellously perfect translation.

But in that atmosphere of myth and marvel the legend continued to
grow, and soon we have it blooming forth yet more gorgeously in the
statement that King Ptolemy ordered each of the seventy-two to make
by himself a full translation of the entire Old Testament, and shut
up each translator in a separate cell on the island of Pharos,
secluding him there until the work was done; that the work of each
was completed in exactly seventy-two days; and that when, at the
end of the seventy-two days, the seventy-two translations were
compared, each was found exactly like all the others. This showed
clearly Jehovah's _approval_.

But out of all this myth and legend there was also evolved an
account of a very different sort. The Jews who remained faithful to
the traditions of their race regarded this Greek version as a
profanation, and therefore there grew up the legend that on the
completion of the work there was darkness over the whole earth
during three days. This showed clearly Jehovah's _disapproval_.

These well-known legends, which arose within what--as compared with
any previous time--was an exceedingly enlightened period, and which
were steadfastly believed by a vast multitude of Jews and
Christians for ages, are but single examples among scores which
show how inevitably such traditions regarding sacred books are
developed in the earlier stages of civilization, when men explain
everything by miracle and nothing by law.[[290]]

As the second of these laws governing the evolution of sacred
literature may be mentioned that which we have constantly seen so
effective in the growth of theological ideas--that to which Comte
gave the name of the _Law of Wills and Causes_. Obedient to this,
man attributes to the Supreme Being a physical, intellectual, and
moral structure like his own; hence it is that the votary of each
of the great world religions ascribes to its sacred books what he
considers absolute perfection: he imagines them to be what he
himself would give the world, were he himself infinitely good,
wise, and powerful.

A very simple analogy might indeed show him that even a literature
emanating from an all-wise, beneficent, and powerful author might
not seem perfect when judged by a human standard; for he has only
to look about him in the world to find that the work which he
attributes to an all-wise, all-beneficent, and all-powerful Creator
is by no means free from evil and wrong.

But this analogy long escapes him, and the exponent of each great
religion proves to his own satisfaction, and to the edification of
his fellows, that their own sacred literature is absolutely
accurate in statement, infinitely profound in meaning, and
miraculously perfect in form. From these premises also he arrives
at the conclusion that his own sacred literature is unique; that no
other sacred book can have emanated from a divine source; and that
all others claiming to be sacred are impostures.

Still another law governing the evolution of sacred literature in
every great world religion is, that when the books which compose it
are once selected and grouped they come to be regarded as a final
creation from which nothing can be taken away, and of which even
error in form, if sanctioned by tradition, may not be changed.

The working of this law has recently been seen on a large scale.

A few years since, a body of chosen scholars, universally
acknowledged to be the most fit for the work, undertook, at the
call of English-speaking Christendom, to revise the authorized
English version of the Bible.

Beautiful as was that old version, there was abundant reason for a
revision. The progress of biblical scholarship had revealed
multitudes of imperfections and not a few gross errors in the work
of the early translators, and these, if uncorrected, were sure to
bring the sacred volume into discredit.

Nothing could be more reverent than the spirit of the revisers, and
the nineteenth century has known few historical events of more
significant and touching beauty than the participation in the holy
communion by all these scholars--prelates, presbyters, ministers,
and laymen of churches most widely differing in belief and
observance--kneeling side by side at the little altar in
Westminster Abbey.

Nor could any work have been more conservative and cautious than
theirs; as far as possible they preserved the old matter and form
with scrupulous care.

Yet their work was no sooner done than it was bitterly attacked and
widely condemned; to this day it is largely regarded with dislike.
In Great Britain, in America, in Australia, the old version, with
its glaring misconceptions, mistranslations, and interpolations, is
still read in preference to the new; the great body of
English-speaking Christians clearly preferring the accustomed form
of words given by the seventeenth-century translators, rather than
a nearer approach to the exact teaching of the Holy Ghost.

Still another law is, that when once a group of sacred books has
been evolved--even though the group really be a great library of
most dissimilar works, ranging in matter from the hundredth Psalm
to the Song of Songs, and in manner from the sublimity of Isaiah to
the offhand story-telling of Jonah--all come to be thought one
inseparable mass of interpenetrating parts; every statement in each
fitting exactly and miraculously into each statement in every
other; and each and every one, and all together, literally true to
fact, and at the same time full of hidden meanings.

The working of these and other laws governing the evolution of
sacred literature is very clearly seen in the great rabbinical
schools which flourished at Jerusalem, Tiberias, and elsewhere,
after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and
especially as we approach the time of Christ. These schools
developed a subtlety in the study of the Old Testament which seems
almost preternatural. The resultant system was mainly a jugglery
with words, phrases, and numbers, which finally became a "sacred
science," with various recognised departments, in which
interpretation was carried on sometimes by attaching a numerical
value to letters; sometimes by interchange of letters from
differently arranged alphabets; sometimes by the making of new
texts out of the initial letters of the old; and with
ever-increasing subtlety.

Such efforts as these culminated fitly in the rabbinical declaration
that each passage in the law has seventy distinct meanings, and that
God himself gives three hours every day to their study.

After this the Jewish world was prepared for anything, and it does
not surprise us to find such discoveries in the domain of ethical
culture as the doctrine that, for inflicting the forty stripes save
one upon those who broke the law, the lash should be braided of
ox-hide and ass-hide; and, as warrant for this construction of the
lash, the text, "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's
crib, but Israel doth not know"; and, as the logic connecting text
and lash, the statement that Jehovah evidently intended to command
that "the men who know not shall be beaten by those animals whose
knowledge shames them."

By such methods also were revealed such historical treasures as that
Og, King of Bashan, escaped the deluge by wading after Noah's ark.

There were, indeed, noble exceptions to this kind of teaching. It
can not be forgotten that Rabbi Hillel formulated the golden rule,
which had before him been given to the extreme Orient by Confucius,
and which afterward received a yet more beautiful and positive
emphasis from Jesus of Nazareth; but the seven rules of
interpretation laid down by Hillel were multiplied and refined by
men like Rabbi Ismael and Rabbi Eleazar until they justified every
absurd subtlety.[[293]]

An eminent scholar has said that while the letter of Scripture
became ossified in Palestine, it became volatilized at Alexandria;
and the truth of this remark was proved by the Alexandrian Jewish
theologians just before the beginning of our era.

This, too, was in obedience to a law of development, which is, that
when literal interpretation clashes with increasing knowledge or
with progress in moral feeling, theologians take refuge in mystic
meanings--a law which we see working in all great religions, from
the Brahmans finding hidden senses in the Vedas, to Plato and the
Stoics finding them in the Greek myths; and from the Sofi reading
new meanings into the Koran, to eminent Christian divines of the
nineteenth century giving a non-natural sense to some of the
plainest statements in the Bible.

Nothing is more natural than all this. When naive statements of
sacred writers, in accord with the ethics of early ages, make
Brahma perform atrocities which would disgrace a pirate; and
Jupiter take part in adventures worthy of Don Juan; and Jahveh
practise trickery, cruelty, and high-handed injustice which would
bring any civilized mortal into the criminal courts, the invention
of allegory is the one means of saving the divine authority as soon
as men reach higher planes of civilization.

The great early master in this evolution of allegory, for the
satisfaction of Jews and Christians, was Philo: by him its use
came in as never before. The four streams of the garden of Eden
thus become the four virtues; Abraham's country and kindred, from
which he was commanded to depart, the human body and its members;
the five cities of Sodom, the five senses; the Euphrates,
correction of manners. By Philo and his compeers even the most
insignificant words and phrases, and those especially, were held to
conceal the most precious meanings.

A perfectly natural and logical result of this view was reached
when Philo, saturated as he was with Greek culture and nourished on
pious traditions of the utterances at Delphi and Dodona, spoke
reverently of the Jewish Scriptures as "_oracles_". Oracles they became:
as oracles they appeared in the early history of the Christian Church;
and oracles they remained for centuries: eternal life or death,
infinite happiness or agony, as well as ordinary justice in this world,
being made to depend on shifting interpretations of a long series
of dark and doubtful utterances--interpretations frequently given
by men who might have been prophets and apostles, but who had
become simply oracle-mongers.

Pressing these oracles into the service of science, Philo became
the forerunner of that long series of theologians who, from
Augustine and Cosmas to Mr. Gladstone, have attempted to extract
from scriptural myth and legend profound contributions to natural
science. Thus he taught that the golden candlesticks in the
tabernacle symbolized the planets, the high priest's robe the
universe, and the bells upon it the harmony of earth and
water--whatever that may mean. So Cosmas taught, a thousand years
later, that the table of shewbread in the tabernacle showed forth
the form and construction of the world; and Mr. Gladstone hinted,
more than a thousand years later still, that Neptune's trident had a
mysterious connection with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.[[294]]

These methods, as applied to the Old Testament, had appeared at
times in the New; in spite of the resistance of Tertullian and
Irenaeus, they were transmitted to the Church; and in the works of
the early fathers they bloomed forth luxuriantly.

Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria vigorously extended them.
Typical of Justin's method is his finding, in a very simple
reference by Isaiah to Damascus, Samaria, and Assyria, a clear
prophecy of the three wise men of the East who brought gifts to the
infant Saviour; and in the bells on the priest's robe a
prefiguration of the twelve apostles. Any difficulty arising from
the fact that the number of bells is not specified in Scripture,
Justin overcame by insisting that David referred to this
prefiguration in the nineteenth Psalm: "Their sound is gone out
through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world."

Working in this vein, Clement of Alexandria found in the form,
dimensions, and colour of the Jewish tabernacle a whole wealth of
interpretation--the altar of incense representing the earth placed
at the centre of the universe; the high priest's robe the visible
world; the jewels on the priest's robe the zodiac; and Abraham's
three days' journey to Mount Moriah the three stages of the soul in
its progress toward the knowledge of God. Interpreting the New
Testament, he lessened any difficulties involved in the miracle of
the barley loaves and fishes by suggesting that what it really
means is that Jesus gave mankind a preparatory training for the
gospel by means of the law and philosophy; because, as he says,
barley, like the law, ripens sooner than wheat, which represents
the gospel; and because, just as fishes grow in the waves of the
ocean, so philosophy grew in the waves of the Gentile world.

Out of reasonings like these, those who followed, especially
Cosmas, developed, as we have seen, a complete theological science
of geography and astronomy.[[296]]

But the instrument in exegesis which was used with most cogent
force was the occult significance of certain numbers. The Chaldean
and Egyptian researches of our own time have revealed the main
source of this line of thought; the speculations of Plato upon it
are well known; but among the Jews and in the early Church it grew
into something far beyond the wildest imaginings of the priests of
Memphis and Babylon.

Philo had found for the elucidation of Scripture especially deep
meanings in the numbers four, six, and seven; but other
interpreters soon surpassed him. At the very outset this occult
power was used in ascertaining the canonical books of Scripture.
Josephus argued that, since there were twenty-two letters in the
Hebrew alphabet, there must be twenty-two sacred books in the Old
Testament; other Jewish authorities thought that there should be
twenty-four books, on account of the twenty-four watches in the
temple. St. Jerome wavered between the argument based upon the
twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet and that suggested by the
twenty-four elders in the Apocalypse. Hilary of Poitiers argued
that there must be twenty-four books, on account of the twenty-four
letters in the Greek alphabet. Origen found an argument for the
existence of exactly four gospels in the existence of just four
elements. Irenaeus insisted that there could be neither more nor
fewer than four gospels, since the earth has four quarters, the
air four winds, and the cherubim four faces; and he denounced those
who declined to accept this reasoning as "vain, ignorant, and
audacious."[[297]]

But during the first half of the third century came one who
exercised a still stronger influence in this direction--a great man
who, while rendering precious services, did more than any other to
fasten upon the Church a system which has been one of its heaviest
burdens for more than sixteen hundred years: this was Origen. Yet
his purpose was noble and his work based on profound thought. He
had to meet the leading philosophers of the pagan world, to reply
to their arguments against the Old Testament, and especially to
break the force of their taunts against its imputation of human
form, limitations, passions, weaknesses, and even immoralities to
the Almighty.

Starting with a mistaken translation of a verse in the book of
Proverbs, Origen presented as a basis for his main structure the
idea of a threefold sense of Scripture: the literal, the moral, and
the mystic--corresponding to the Platonic conception of the
threefold nature of man. As results of this we have such
masterpieces as his proof, from the fifth verse of chapter xxv of
Job, that the stars are living beings, and from the well-known
passage in the nineteenth chapter of St. Matthew his warrant for
self-mutilation. But his great triumphs were in the allegorical
method. By its use the Bible was speedily made an oracle indeed,
or, rather, a book of riddles. A list of kings in the Old Testament
thus becomes an enumeration of sins; the waterpots of stone,
"containing two or three firkins apiece," at the marriage of Cana,
signify the literal, moral, and spiritual sense of Scripture; the
ass upon which the Saviour rode on his triumphal entry into
Jerusalem becomes the Old Testament, the foal the New Testament,
and the two apostles who went to loose them the moral and mystical
senses; blind Bartimeus throwing off his coat while hastening to
Jesus, opens a whole treasury of oracular meanings.

The genius and power of Origen made a great impression on the
strong thinkers who followed him. St. Jerome called him "the
greatest master in the Church since the apostles," and Athanasius
was hardly less emphatic.

The structure thus begun was continued by leading theologians
during the centuries following: St. Hilary of Poitiers--"the
Athanasius of Gaul"--produced some wonderful results of this
method; but St. Jerome, inspired by the example of the man whom he
so greatly admnired, went beyond him. A triumph of his exegesis is
seen in his statement that the Shunamite damsel who was selected to
cherish David in his old age signified heavenly wisdom.

The great mind of St. Augustine was drawn largely into this kind of
creation, and nothing marks more clearly the vast change which had
come over the world than the fact that this greatest of the early
Christian thinkers turned from the broader paths opened by Plato
and Aristotle into that opened by Clement of Alexandria.
In the mystic power of numbers to reveal the sense of Scripture
Augustine found especial delight. He tells us that there is deep
meaning in sundry scriptural uses of the number forty, and
especially as the number of days required for fasting. Forty, he
reminds us, is four times ten. Now, four, he says, is the number
especially representing time, the day and the year being each
divided into four parts; while ten, being made up of three and
seven, represents knowledge of the Creator and creature, three
referring to the three persons in the triune Creator, and seven
referring to the three elements, heart, soul, and mind, taken in
connection with the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water,
which go to make up the creature. Therefore this number ten,
representing knowledge, being multiplied by four, representing
time, admonishes us to live during time according to knowledge--that
is, to fast for forty days.

Referring to such misty methods as these, which lead the reader to
ask himself whether he is sleeping or waking, St. Augustine remarks
that "ignorance of numbers prevents us from understanding such
things in Scripture." But perhaps the most amazing example is to be
seen in his notes on the hundred and fifty and three fishes which,
according to St. John's Gospel, were caught by St. Peter and the
other apostles. Some points in his long development of this subject
may be selected to show what the older theological method could be
made to do for a great mind. He tells us that the hundred and fifty
and three fishes embody a mystery; that the number ten, evidently
as the number of the commandments, indicates the law; but, as the
law without the spirit only kills, we must add the seven gifts of
the spirit, and we thus have the number seventeen, which signifies
the old and new dispensations; then, if we add together every
several number which seventeen contains from one to seventeen
inclusive, the result is a hundred and fifty and three--the number
of the fishes.

With this sort of reasoning he finds profound meanings in the
number of furlongs mentioned in the sixth chapter of St. John.
Referring to the fact that the disciples had rowed about
"twenty-five or thirty furlongs," he declares that "twenty-five
typifies the law, because it is five times five, but the law was
imperfect before the gospel came; now perfection is comprised in
six, since God in six days perfected the world, hence five is
multiplied by six that the law may be perfected by the gospel, and
six times five is thirty."

But Augustine's exploits in exegesis were not all based on
numerals; he is sometimes equally profound in other modes. Thus he
tells us that the condemnation of the serpent to eat dust typifies
the sin of curiosity, since in eating dust he "penetrates the
obscure and shadowy"; and that Noah's ark was "pitched within and
without with pitch" to show the safety of the Church from the
leaking in of heresy.

Still another exploit--one at which the Church might well have
stood aghast--was his statement that the drunkenness of Noah
prefigured the suffering and death of Christ. It is but just to say
that he was not the original author of this interpretation: it had
been presented long before by St. Cyprian. But this was far from
Augustine's worst. Perhaps no interpretation of Scripture has ever
led to more cruel and persistent oppression, torture, and bloodshed
than his reading into one of the most beautiful parables of Jesus
of Nazareth--into the words "Compel them to come in"--a warrant
for religious persecution: of all unintended blasphemies since the
world began, possibly the most appalling.

Another strong man follows to fasten these methods on the Church:
St. Gregory the Great. In his renowned work on the book of Job, the
_Magna Moralia_, given to the world at the end of the sixth century,
he lays great stress on the deep mystical meanings of the statement
that Job had seven sons. He thinks the seven sons typify the twelve
apostles, for "the apostles were selected through the sevenfold
grace of the Spirit; moreover, twelve is produced from seven--that
is, the two parts of seven, four and three, when multiplied
together give twelve." He also finds deep significance in the
number of the apostles; this number being evidently determined by
a multiplication of the number of persons in the Trinity by the
number of quarters of the globe. Still, to do him justice, it must
be said that in some parts of his exegesis the strong sense which
was one of his most striking characteristics crops out in a way
very refreshing. Thus, referring to a passage in the first chapter
of Job, regarding the oxen which were ploughing and the asses which
were feeding beside them, he tells us pithily that these typify two
classes of Christians: the oxen, the energetic Christians who do
the work of the Church; the asses, the lazy Christians who merely
feed.[[300]]

Thus began the vast theological structure of oracular interpretation
applied to the Bible. As we have seen, the men who prepared the
ground for it were the rabbis of Palestine and the Hellenized
Jews of Alexandria; and the four great men who laid its foundation
courses were Origen, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory.

During the ten centuries following the last of these men this
structure continued to rise steadily above the plain meanings
of Scripture. The Christian world rejoiced in it, and the few
great thinkers who dared bring the truth to bear upon it were
rejected. It did indeed seem at one period in the early Church that
a better system might be developed. The School of Antioch,
especially as represented by Chrysostom, appeared likely to lead in
this better way, but the dominant forces were too strong; the
passion for myth and marvel prevailed over the love of real
knowledge, and the reasonings of Chrysostom and his compeers were
neglected.[[301]]

In the ninth century came another effort to present the claims of
right reason. The first man prominent in this was St. Agobard,
Bishop of Lyons, whom an eminent historian has well called the
clearest head of his time. With the same insight which penetrated
the fallacies and follies of image worship, belief in witchcraft
persecution, the ordeal, and the judicial duel, he saw the futility
of this vast fabric of interpretation, protested against the idea
that the Divine Spirit extended its inspiration to the mere words
of Scripture, and asked a question which has resounded through
every generation since: "If you once begin such a system, who can
measure the absurdity which will follow?"

During the same century another opponent of this dominant system
appeared: John Scotus Erigena. He contended that "reason and
authority come alike from the one source of Divine Wisdom"; that
the fathers, great as their authority is, often contradict each
other; and that, in last resort, reason must be called in to decide
between them.

But the evolution of unreason continued: Agobard was unheeded, and
Erigena placed under the ban by two councils--his work being
condemned by a synod as a "_Commentum Diaboli_." Four centuries
later Honorius III ordered it to be burned, as "teeming with the
venom of hereditary depravity"; and finally, after eight centuries,
Pope Gregory XIII placed it on the Index, where, with so many other
works which have done good service to humanity, it remains to this
day. Nor did Abelard, who, three centuries after Agobard and
Erigena, made an attempt in some respects like theirs, have any
better success: his fate at the hands of St. Bernard and the
Council of Sens the world knows by heart. Far more consonant with
the spirit of the universal Church was the teaching in the twelfth
century of the great Hugo of St. Victor, conveyed in these ominous
words, "Learn first what is to be believed" (_Disce primo quod
credendum est_), meaning thereby that one should first accept
doctrines, and then find texts to confirm them.

These principles being dominant, the accretions to the enormous
fabric of interpretation went steadily on. Typical is the fact that
the Venerable Bede contributed to it the doctrine that, in the text
mentioning Elkanah and his two wives, Elkanah means Christ and the
two wives the Synagogue and the Church. Even such men as Alfred the
Great and St. Thomas Aquinas were added to the forces at work in
building above the sacred books this prodigious structure of sophistry.

Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the tenacity of the old system
of interpretation than the sermons of Savonarola. During the last
decade of the fifteenth century, just at the close of the medieval
period, he was engaged in a life-and-death struggle at Florence. No
man ever preached more powerfully the gospel of righteousness; none
ever laid more stress on conduct; even Luther was not more zealous
for reform or more careless of tradition; and yet we find the great
Florentine apostle and martyr absolutely tied fast to the old
system of allegorical interpretation. The autograph notes of his
sermons, still preserved in his cell at San Marco, show this
abundantly. Thus we find him attaching to the creation of grasses
and plants on the third day an allegorical connection with the
"multitude of the elect" and with the "sound doctrines of the
Church," and to the creation of land animals on the sixth day a
similar relation to "the Jewish people" and to "Christians given up
to things earthly."[[303]]

The revival of learning in the fifteenth century seemed likely to
undermine this older structure.

Then it was that Lorenzo Valla brought to bear on biblical
research, for the first time, the spirit of modern criticism. By
truly scientific methods he proved the famous "Letter of Christ to
Abgarus" a forgery; the "Donation of Constantine," one of the great
foundations of the ecclesiastical power in temporal things, a
fraud; and the "Apostles' Creed" a creation which post-dated the
apostles by several centuries. Of even more permanent influence was
his work upon the New Testament, in which he initiated the modern
method of comparing manuscripts to find what the sacred text really
is. At an earlier or later period he would doubtless have paid for
his temerity with his life; fortunately, just at that time the
ruling pontiff and his Contemporaries cared much for literature and
little for orthodoxy, and from their palaces he could bid defiance
to the Inquisition.

While Valla thus initiated biblical criticism south of the Alps, a
much greater man began a more fruitful work in northern Europe.
Erasmus, with his edition of the New Testament, stands at the
source of that great stream of modern research and thought which is
doing so much to undermine and dissolve away the vast fabric of
patristic and scholastic interpretation.

Yet his efforts to purify the scriptural text seemed at first to
encounter insurmountable difficulties, and one of these may
stimulate reflection. He had found, what some others had found
before him, that the famous verse in the fifth chapter of the
First Epistle General of St. John, regarding the "three witnesses,"
was an interpolation. Careful research through all the really
important early manuscripts showed that it appeared in none of
them. Even after the Bible had been corrected, in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by
Nicholas, cardinal and librarian of the Roman Church, "in
accordance with the orthodox faith," the passage was still wanting
in the more authoritative Latin manuscripts. There was not the
slightest tenable ground for believing in the authenticity of the
text; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated that, after a
universal silence of the orthodox fathers of the Church, of the
ancient versions of the Scriptures, and of all really important
manuscripts, the verse first appeared in a Confession of Faith
drawn up by an obscure zealot toward the end of the fifth century.
In a very mild exercise, then, of critical judgment, Erasmus
omitted this text from the first two editions of his Greek Testament
as evidently spurious. A storm arose at once. In England, Lee,
afterward Archbishop of York; in Spain, Stunica, one of the editors
of the Complutensian Polyglot; and in France, Bude, Syndic of the
Sorbonne, together with a vast army of monks in England and on the
Continent, attacked him ferociously. He was condemned by the
University of Paris, and various propositions of his were declared
to be heretical and impious. Fortunately, the worst persecutors

