I.  GROWTH OF THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS.





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

period, germs of geological truth, and, what is of vast

importance, an atmosphere in which such germs could grow.  These

germs were transmitted to Roman thought; an atmosphere of

tolerance continued; there was nothing which forbade unfettered

reasoning regarding either the earth's strata or the remains of

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

fruitful observation seemed sure to begin.



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

great change.  The earliest attitude of the Church toward geology

and its kindred sciences was indifferent, and even contemptuous.

According to the prevailing belief, the earth was a "fallen

world," and was soon to be destroyed.  Why, then, should it be

studied? Why, indeed, give a thought to it? The scorn which

Lactantius and St. Augustine had cast upon the study of

astronomy was extended largely to other sciences. [125]



[125] For a compact and admirable statement as to the dawn of

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

essay on paleobotany in the Fifth Annual Report of the United

States Geological Survey, for 1883-'84.  As to the reasons why

Greek philosophers did comparatively so little for geology, see

D'Archiac, Geologie, p. 18.  For the contempt felt by Lactantius

and St. Augustine toward astronomical science, see foregoing

chapters on Astronomy and Geography.





But the germs of scientific knowledge and thought developed in

the ancient world could be entirely smothered neither by

eloquence nor by logic; some little scientific observation must

be allowed, though all close reasoning upon it was fettered by

theology.  Thus it was that St. Jerome insisted that the broken

and twisted crust of the earth exhibits the wrath of God against

sin, and Tertullian asserted that fossils resulted from the flood

of Noah.



To keep all such observation and reasoning within orthodox

limits, St. Augustine, about the beginning of the fifth century,

began an effort to develop from these germs a growth in science

which should be sacred and safe.  With this intent he prepared

his great commentary on the work of creation, as depicted in

Genesis, besides dwelling upon the subject in other writings.

Once engaged in this work, he gave himself to it more earnestly

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

powers of research and thought were not directed to actual

observation or reasoning upon observation.  The keynote of his

whole method is seen in his famous phrase, "Nothing is to be

accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is

that authority than all the powers of the human mind."  All his

thought was given to studying the letter of the sacred text, and

to making it explain natural phenomena by methods purely

theological.[126]



[126] For citations and authorities on these points, see the

chapter on Meteorology.





Among the many questions he then raised and discussed may be

mentioned such as these:  "What caused the creation of the stars

on the fourth day?"  "Were beasts of prey and venomous animals

created before, or after, the fall of Adam? If before, how can

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

how can their creation be reconciled to the letter of God's

Word?"  "Why were only beasts and birds brought before Adam to be

named, and not fishes and marine animals?"  "Why did the Creator

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

animals?"[127]



[127] See Augustine, De Genesi, ii, 13, 15, et seq.; ix, 12 et

seq.  For the reference to St. Jerome, see Shields, Final

Philosophy, p. 119; also Leyell, Introduction to Geology, vol. i,

chap. ii.





Sundry answers to these and similar questions formed the main

contributions of the greatest of the Latin fathers to the

scientific knowledge of the world, after a most thorough study of

the biblical text and a most profound application of theological

reasoning.  The results of these contributions were most

important.  In this, as in so many other fields, Augustine gave

direction to the main current of thought in western Europe,

Catholic and Protestant, for nearly thirteen centuries.



In the ages that succeeded, the vast majority of prominent

scholars followed him implicitly.  Even so strong a man as Pope

Gregory the Great yielded to his influence, and such leaders of

thought as St. Isidore, in the seventh century, and the

Venerable Bede, in the eighth, planting themselves upon

Augustine's premises, only ventured timidly to extend their

conclusions upon lines he had laid down.



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

attempt to bring the creation into satisfactory relations with

the book of Genesis, and, as to fossil remains, he, like

Tertullian, thought that they resulted from the Flood of Noah.

In the following century Bede developed the same orthodox

traditions.[128]



[128]  For Isidore, see the Etymologiae, xi, 4, xiii, 22. For

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





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

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

diminish the difficulty arising from the distribution of animals,

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

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

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

to place their separation later than the Flood.  Happily for him,

such facts were not yet known as that the kangaroo is found only

on an island in the South Pacific, and must therefore, according

to his theory, have migrated thither with all his progeny, and

along a causeway so curiously constructed that none of the beasts

of prey, who were his fellow-voyagers in the ark, could follow

him.



These general lines of thought upon geology and its kindred

science of zoology were followed by St. Thomas Aquinas and by

the whole body of medieval theologians, so far as they gave any

attention to such subjects.



The next development of geology, mainly under Church guidance,

was by means of the scholastic theology.  Phrase-making was

substituted for investigation.  Without the Church and within it

wonderful contributions were thus made.  In the eleventh century

Avicenna accounted for the fossils by suggesting a "stone-making

force";[129] in the thirteenth, Albert the Great attributed them

to a "formative quality;"[130] in the following centuries some

philosophers ventured the idea that they grew from seed; and the

Aristotelian doctrine of spontaneous generation was constantly

used to prove that these stony fossils possessed powers of

reproduction like plants and animals.[131]



[129] Vis lapidifica.



[130] Virtus formativa.



[131] See authorities given in Mr. Ward's assay, as above.





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

Roman thought were warmed into life.  The Arabian schools seem to

have been less fettered by the letter of the Koran than the

contemporary Christian scholars by the letter of the Bible; and

to Avicenna belongs the credit of first announcing substantially

the modern geological theory of changes in the earth's

surface.[132]



[132] For Avicenna, see Lyell and D'Archiac.





The direct influence of the Reformation was at first unfavourable

to scientific progress, for nothing could be more at variance

with any scientific theory of the development of the universe

than the ideas of the Protestant leaders.  That strict adherence

to the text of Scripture which made Luther and Melanchthon

denounce the idea that the planets revolve about the sun, was

naturally extended to every other scientific statement at

variance with the sacred text.  There is much reason to believe

that the fetters upon scientific thought were closer under the

strict interpretation of Scripture by the early Protestants than

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

the Reformers is shown by the declaration of Peter Martyr to the

effect that, if a wrong opinion should obtain regarding the

creation as described in Genesis, "all the promises of Christ

fall into nothing, and all the life of our religion would be

lost."[133]



[133] See his Commentary on Genesis, cited by Zoeckler,

Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und

Naturwissenschaft, vol. i, p. 690.





In the times immediately succeeding the Reformation matters went

from bad to worse.  Under Luther and Melanchthon there was some

little freedom of speculation, but under their successors there

was none; to question any interpretation of Luther came to be

thought almost as wicked as to question the literal

interpretation of the Scriptures themselves.  Examples of this

are seen in the struggles between those who held that birds were

created entirely from water and those who held that they were

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

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

seventeenth century, Pfeiffer, "General Superintendent" or bishop

in those parts, published his Pansophia Mosaica, calculated, as

he believed, to beat back science forever.  In a long series of

declamations he insisted that in the strict text of Genesis alone

is safety, that it contains all wisdom and knowledge, human and

divine.  This being the case, who could care to waste time on the

study of material things and give thought to the structure of the

world?  Above all, who, after such a proclamation by such a ruler

in the Lutheran Israel, would dare to talk of the "days"

mentioned in Genesis as "periods of time"; or of the "firmament"

as not meaning a solid vault over the universe; or of the

"waters above the heavens" as not contained in a vast cistern

supported by the heavenly vault; or of the "windows of heaven" as

a figure of speech?[134]



[134] For Pfeiffer, see Zoeckler, vol. i, pp. 688, 689.





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

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

Mankind, published in 1685, the strictest devotion to a theory

of creation based upon the mere letter of Scripture, and a

complete inability to draw knowledge regarding the earth's origin

and structure from any other source.



While the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Anglican Reformers clung to

literal interpretations of the sacred books, and turned their

faces away from scientific investigation, it was among their

contemporaries at the revival of learning that there began to

arise fruitful thought in this field.  Then it was, about the

beginning of the sixteenth century, that Leonardo da Vinci, as

great a genius in science as in art, broached the true idea as to

the origin of fossil remains; and his compatriot, Fracastoro,

developed this on the modern lines of thought.  Others in other

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

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

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

with the same genius which he showed in artistic creation; but,

remarkable as were his assertions of scientific realities, they

could gain little hearing.  Theologians, philosophers, and even

some scientific men of value, under the sway of scholastic

phrases, continued to insist upon such explanations as that

fossils were the product of "fatty matter set into a fermentation

by heat"; or of a "lapidific juice";[135] or of a "seminal

air";[136] or of a "tumultuous movement of terrestrial

exhalations"; and there was a prevailing belief that fossil

remains, in general, might be brought under the head of "sports

of Nature," a pious turn being given to this phrase by the

suggestion that these "sports" indicated some inscrutable purpose

of the Almighty.



[135] Succus lapidificus.



[136] Aura seminalis.





This remained a leading orthodox mode of explanation in the

Church, Catholic and Protestant, for centuries.







II.  EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW.





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

near the beginning of the seventeenth century, De Clave, Bitaud,

and De Villon revived it in France.  Straightway the theological

faculty of Paris protested against the scientific doctrine as

unscriptural, destroyed the offending treatises, banished their

authors from Paris, and forbade them to live in towns or enter

places of public resort.[137]



[137] See Morley, Life of Palissy the Potter, vol. ii, p. 315 et

seq.





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

laboured on, especially in Italy.  Half a century later, Steno, a

Dane, and Scilla, an Italian, went still further in the right

direction; and, though they and their disciples took great pains

to throw a tub to the whale, in the shape of sundry vague

concessions to the Genesis legends, they developed geological

truth more and more.



In France, the old theological spirit remained exceedingly

powerful.  About the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon made

another attempt to state simple geological truths; but the

theological faculty of the Sorbonne dragged him at once from his

high position, forced him to recant ignominiously, and to print

his recantation.  It runs as follows:  "I declare that I had no

intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe

most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to

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

book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all

which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses."  This

humiliating document reminds us painfully of that forced upon

Galileo a hundred years before.



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

authorities that the doctrine which Buffon thus "abandoned" is as

firmly established as that of the earth's rotation upon its

axis.[138] Yet one hundred and fifty years were required to

secure for it even a fair hearing; the prevailing doctrine of

the Church continued to be that "all things were made at the

beginning of the world," and that to say that stones and fossils

were made before or since "the beginning" is contrary to

Scripture.  Again we find theological substitutes for scientific

explanation ripening into phrases more and more hollow--making

fossils "sports of Nature," or "mineral concretions," or

"creations of plastic force," or "models" made by the Creator

before he had fully decided upon the best manner of creating

various beings.



[138] See citation and remark in Lyell's Principles of Geology,

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

p. 62.





Of this period, when theological substitutes for science were

carrying all before them, there still exists a monument

commemorating at the same time a farce and a tragedy.  This is

the work of Johann Beringer, professor in the University of

Wurzburg and private physician to the Prince-Bishop--the treatise

bearing the title Lithographiae Wirceburgensis Specimen Primum,

"illustrated with the marvellous likenesses of two hundred

figured or rather insectiform stones."  Beringer, for the greater

glory of God, had previously committed himself so completely to

the theory that fossils are simply "stones of a peculiar sort,

hidden by the Author of Nature for his own pleasure,"[139] that

some of his students determined to give his faith in that pious

doctrine a thorough trial.  They therefore prepared a collection

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

reptiles, and fishes of every sort that their knowledge or

imagination could suggest, but even Hebrew and Syriac

inscriptions, one of them the name of the Almighty; and these

they buried in a place where the professor was wont to search for

specimens.  The joy of Beringer on unearthing these proofs of the

immediate agency of the finger of God in creating fossils knew no

bounds.  At great cost he prepared this book, whose twenty-two

elaborate plates of facsimiles were forever to settle the

question in favour of theology and against science, and prefixed

to the work an allegorical title page, wherein not only the glory

of his own sovereign, but that of heaven itself, was pictured as

based upon a pyramid of these miraculous fossils.  So robust was

his faith that not even a premature exposure of the fraud could

dissuade him from the publication of his book.  Dismissing in one

contemptuous chapter this exposure as a slander by his rivals, he

appealed to the learned world.  But the shout of laughter that

welcomed the work soon convinced even its author.  In vain did he

try to suppress it; and, according to tradition, having wasted

his fortune in vain attempts to buy up all the copies of it, and

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

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

copies of the first edition having been sold by a graceless

descendant to a Leipsic bookseller, a second edition was brought

out under a new title, and this, too, is now much sought as a

precious memorial of human credulity.[140]



[139] See Beringer's Lithographiae, etc., p. 91.



[140] See Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie, Munich, 1872, p. 467,

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

upon this episode, with the text of one of the epigrams

circulated at poor Beringer's expense, is given by Dr. Reuss in

the Serapeum for 1852, p. 203.  The book itself (the original

impression) is in the White Library at Cornell University.  For

Beringer himself, see especially the encyclopedia of Ersch and

Gruber, and the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.





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

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

theologico-scientific explanations, it was still held meritorious

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

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

done for some mysterious purpose, probably for the trial of human

faith.



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

scientific method in geology was waged more fiercely in

Protestant countries than in Catholic.  The older Church had

learned by her costly mistakes, especially in the cases of

Copernicus and Galileo, what dangers to her claim of

infallibility lay in meddling with a growing science.  In Italy,

therefore, comparatively little opposition was made, while

England furnished the most bitter opponents to geology so long as

the controversy could be maintained, and the most active

negotiators in patching up a truce on the basis of a sham science

afterward.  The Church of England did, indeed, produce some noble

men, like Bishop Clayton and John Mitchell, who stood firmly by

the scientific method; but these appear generally to have been

overwhelmed by a chorus of churchmen and dissenters, whose

mixtures of theology and science, sometimes tragic in their

results and sometimes comic, are among the most instructive

things in modern history.[141]



[141] For a comparison between the conduct of Italian and English

ecclesiastics as regards geology, see Lyell, Principles of

Geology, tenth English edition, vol. i, p. 33.  For a

philosophical statement of reasons why the struggle was more

bitter and the attempt at deceptive compromises more absurd in

England than elsewhere, see Maury, L'Ancienne Academie des

Sciences, second edition, p. 152.  For very frank confessions of

the reasons why the Catholic Church has become more careful in

her dealings with science, see Roberts, The Pontifical Decrees

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

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

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

be forgotten, is a Roman Catholic clergyman and the second an

eminent layman of the same Church, and both admit that it was the

Pope, speaking ex cathedra, who erred in the Galileo case; but

their explanation is that God allowed the Pope and Church to fall

into this grievous error, which has cost so dear, in order to

show once and for all that the Church has no right to decide

questions in Science.





We have already noted that there are generally three periods or

phases in a theological attack upon any science.  The first of

these is marked by the general use of scriptural texts and

statements against the new scientific doctrine; the third by

attempts at compromise by means of far-fetched reconciliations of

textual statements with ascertained fact; but the second or

intermediate period between these two is frequently marked by the

pitting against science of some great doctrine in theology.  We

saw this in astronomy, when Bellarmin and his followers insisted

that the scientific doctrine of the earth revolving about the sun

is contrary to the theological doctrine of the incarnation.  So

now against geology it was urged that the scientific doctrine

that fossils represent animals which died before Adam contradicts

the theological doctrine of Adam's fall and the statement that

"death entered the world by sin."



In this second stage of the theological struggle with geology,

England was especially fruitful in champions of orthodoxy, first

among whom may be named Thomas Burnet.  In the last quarter of

the seventeenth century, just at the time when Newton's great

discovery was given to the world, Burnet issued his Sacred Theory

of the Earth.  His position was commanding; he was a royal

chaplain and a cabinet officer.  Planting himself upon the famous

text in the second epistle of Peter,[142] he declares that the

flood had destroyed the old and created a new world.  The

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

deluge he lays less stress upon the "opening of the windows of

heaven" than upon the "breaking up of the fountains of the great

deep."  On this latter point he comes forth with great strength.

His theory is that the earth is hollow, and filled with fluid

like an egg.  Mixing together sundry texts from Genesis and from

the second epistle of Peter, the theological doctrine of the

"Fall," an astronomical theory regarding the ecliptic, and

various notions adapted from Descartes, he insisted that, before

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

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

islands nor valleys nor rocks, "with not a wrinkle, scar, or

fracture," and that all creation was equally perfect.



[142] See II Peter iii, 6.





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

As in his first book he had mixed his texts of Genesis and St.

Peter with Descartes, he now mixed the account of the Garden of

Eden in Genesis with heathen legends of the golden age, and

concluded that before the flood there was over the whole earth

perpetual spring, disturbed by no rain more severe than the

falling of the dew.



In addition to his other grounds for denying the earlier

existence of the sea, he assigned the reason that, if there had

been a sea before the Deluge, sinners would have learned to build

ships, and so, when the Deluge set in, could have saved

themselves.



The work was written with much power, and attracted universal

attention.  It was translated into various languages, and called

forth a multitude of supporters and opponents in all parts of

Europe.  Strong men rose against it, especially in England, and

among them a few dignitaries of the Church; but the Church

generally hailed the work with joy.  Addison praised it in a

Latin ode, and for nearly a century it exercised a strong

influence upon European feeling, and aided to plant more deeply

than ever the theological opinion that the earth as now existing

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

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

imperfection.



A few years later came another writer of the highest

standing--William Whiston, professor at Cambridge, who in 1696

published his New Theory of the Earth.  Unlike Burnet, he

endeavoured to avail himself of the Newtonian idea, and brought

in, to aid the geological catastrophe caused by human sin, a

comet, which broke open "the fountains of the great deep."



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

arose in the eighteenth century, to aid in the subjection of

science to theology, three men of extraordinary power--John

Wesley, Adam Clarke, and Richard Watson.  All three were men of

striking intellectual gifts, lofty character, and noble purpose,

and the first-named one of the greatest men in English history;

yet we find them in geology hopelessly fettered by the mere

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

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

geology, this theological view drew Wesley into enormous

error.[143] The great doctrine which Wesley, Watson, Clarke, and

their compeers, following St. Augustine, Bede, Peter Lombard,

and a long line of the greatest minds in the universal Church,

thought it especially necessary to uphold against geologists was,

that death entered the world by sin--by the first transgression

of Adam and Eve.  The extent to which the supposed necessity of

upholding this doctrine carried Wesley seems now almost beyond

belief.  Basing his theology on the declaration that the Almighty

after creation found the earth and all created things "very

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

Earthquakes, that no one who believes the Scriptures can deny

that "sin is the moral cause of earthquakes, whatever their

natural cause may be."  Again, he declares that earthquakes are

the "effect of that curse which was brought upon the earth by the

original transgression."  Bringing into connection with Genesis

the declaration of St. Paul that "the whole creation groaneth

and travaileth together in pain until now," he finds additional

scriptural proof that the earthquakes were the result of Adam's

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

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

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

concussions of the earth, no earthquakes, but all was unmoved as

the pillars of heaven.  There were then no such things as

eruptions of fires; no volcanoes or burning mountains."  Of

course, a science which showed that earthquakes had been in

operation for ages before the appearance of man on the planet,

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

considered as curses resultant upon the Fall were really

blessings, producing the fissures in which we find today those

mineral veins so essential to modern civilization, was entirely

beyond his comprehension.  He insists that earthquakes are "God's

strange works of judgment, the proper effect and punishment of

sin."



[143] For his statement that "the giving up of witchcraft is in

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

'68.





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

he took the ground that death and pain entered the world by

Adam's transgression, insisting that the carnage now going on

among animals is the result of Adam's sin.  Speaking of the

birds, beasts, and insects, he says that, before sin entered the

world by Adam's fall, "none of these attempted to devour or in

any way hurt one another"; that "the spider was then as harmless

as the fly and did not then lie in wait for blood."  Here, again,

Wesley arrayed his early followers against geology, which

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

death countless ages before the appearance of man.  The

half-digested fragments of weaker animals within the fossilized

bodies of the stronger have destroyed all Wesley's arguments in

behalf of his great theory.[144]



[144] See Wesley's sermon on God's Approbation of His Works,

parts xi and xii.





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

thistles were given as a curse to human labour, on account of

Adam's sin, and appeared upon the earth for the first time after

Adam's fall.  So, too, Richard Watson, the most prolific writer

of the great evangelical reform period, and the author of the

Institutes, the standard theological treatise on the evangelical

side, says, in a chapter treating of the Fall, and especially of

the serpent which tempted Eve:  "We have no reason at all to

believe that the animal had a serpentine form in any mode or

degree until his transformation.  That he was then degraded to a

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

entire alteration and loss of the original form."  All that

admirable adjustment of the serpent to its environment which

delights naturalists was to the Wesleyan divine simply an evil

result of the sin of Adam and Eve.  Yet here again geology was

obliged to confront theology in revealing the PYTHON in the

Eocene, ages before man appeared.[145]



[145] See Westminster Review, October, 1870, article on John

Wesley's Cosmogony, with citations from Wesley's Sermons,

Watson's Institutes of Theology, Adam Clarke's Commentary on the

Holy Scriptures, etc.





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

many who would otherwise have resorted to observation and

investigation back upon scholastic methods.  Again reappears the

old system of solving the riddle by phrases.  In 1733, Dr.

Theodore Arnold urged the theory of "models," and insisted that

fossils result from "infinitesimal particles brought together in

the creation to form the outline of all the creatures and objects

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

acceptance.[146]



[146] See citation in Mr. Ward's article, as above, p. 390.





Such was the influence of this succession of great men that

toward the close of the last century the English opponents of

geology on biblical grounds seemed likely to sweep all before

them.  Cramping our whole inheritance of sacred literature within

the rules of a historical compend, they showed the terrible

dangers arising from the revelations of geology, which make the

earth older than the six thousand years required by Archbishop

Usher's interpretation of the Old Testament.  Nor was this

feeling confined to ecclesiastics.  Williams, a thoughtful

layman, declared that such researches led to infidelity and

atheism, and are "nothing less than to depose the Almighty

Creator of the universe from his office."  The poet Cowper, one

of the mildest of men, was also roused by these dangers, and in

his most elaborate poem wrote:



                "Some drill and bore

The solid earth, and from the strata there

Extract a register, by which we learn

That He who made it, and revealed its date

To Moses, was mistaken in its age!"





John Howard summoned England to oppose "those scientific systems

which are calculated to tear up in the public mind every

remaining attachment to Christianity."



With this special attack upon geological science by means of the

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

interpretation of the text was continued.  The legendary husks

and rinds of our sacred books were insisted upon as equally

precious and nutritious with the great moral and religious truths

which they envelop.  Especially precious were the six days--each

"the evening and the morning"--and the exact statements as to the

time when each part of creation came into being.  To save these,

the struggle became more and more desperate.



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

now living the battle was still raging most fiercely in England,

and both kinds of artillery usually brought against a new science

were in full play, and filling the civilized world with their

roar.



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

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

especially at such Christian scholars as Dr. Buckland and Dean

Conybeare and Pye Smith and Prof.  Sedgwick, the epithets of

"infidel," "impugner of the sacred record," and "assailant of the

volume of God."[147]



[147] For these citations, see Lyell, Principles of Geology,

introduction.





The favourite weapon of the orthodox party was the charge that

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

geology "not a subject of lawful inquiry," denouncing it as "a

dark art," as "dangerous and disreputable," as "a forbidden

province," as "infernal artillery," and as "an awful evasion of

the testimony of revelation."[148]



[148] See Pye Smith, D. D., Geology and Scripture, pp. 156, 157,

168, 169.





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

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

humiliating to human nature to remember the annoyances, and even

trials, to which the pettiest and narrowest of men subjected such

Christian scholars in our own country as Benjamin Silliman and

Edward Hitchcock and Louis Agassiz.



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

Christian scholar did honour to religion and to himself by

quietly accepting the claims of science and making the best of

them, despite all these clamours.  This man was Nicholas Wiseman,

better known afterward as Cardinal Wiseman.  The conduct of this

pillar of the Roman Catholic Church contrasts admirably with that

of timid Protestants, who were filling England with shrieks and

denunciations.[149]



[149] Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connection between Science

and Revealed Religion, first American edition, New York, 1837.

As to the comparative severity of the struggle regarding

astronomy, geology, etc., in the Catholic and Protestant

countries, see Lecky's England in the Eighteenth Century, chap.

ix, p. 525.





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

skirmishes in this war occurred in New England.  Prof.  Stuart,

of Andover, justly honoured as a Hebrew scholar, declared that to

speak of six periods of time for the creation was flying in the

face of Scripture; that Genesis expressly speaks of six days,

each made up of "the evening and the morning," and not six

periods of time.



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

an article admirable for keen wit and kindly temper, he showed

that Genesis speaks just as clearly of a solid firmament as of

six ordinary days, and that, if Prof. Stuart had surmounted one

difficulty and accepted the Copernican theory, he might as well

get over another and accept the revelations of geology.  The

encounter was quick and decisive, and the victory was with

science and the broader scholarship of Yale.[150]



[150] See Silliman's Journal, vol. xxx, p. 114.



Perhaps the most singular attempt against geology was made by a

fine survival of the eighteenth century Don--Dean Cockburn, of

York--to SCOLD its champions off the field.  Having no adequate

knowledge of the new science, he opened a battery of abuse,

giving it to the world at large from the pulpit and through the

press, and even through private letters.  From his pulpit in York

Minster he denounced Mary Somerville by name for those studies in

physical geography which have made her name honoured throughout

the world.



But the special object of his antipathy was the British

Association for the Advancement of Science.  He issued a pamphlet

against it which went through five editions in two years, sent

solemn warnings to its president, and in various ways made life a

burden to Sedgwick, Buckland, and other eminent investigators who

ventured to state geological facts as they found them.



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

Chinese gongs and dragon lanterns against rifled cannon; the

work of science went steadily on.[151]



[151] Prof. Goldwin Smith informs me that the papers of Sir

Robert Peel, yet unpublished, contain very curious specimens of

the epistles of Dean Cockburn.  See also Personal Recollections

of Mary Somerville, Boston, 1874, pp. 139 and 375.  Compare with

any statement of his religious views that Dean Cockburn was able

to make, the following from Mrs. Somerville: "Nothing has

afforded me so convincing a proof of the Deity as these purely

mental conceptions of numerical and methematical science which

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

granted in these latter times by the differential calculus, now

supeseded by the higher algebra--all of which must have existed

in that sublimely omniscient mind from eternity.  See also The

Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick, Cambridge, 1890, vol. ii, pp.

76 and following.









III.  THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE, BASED ON

THE FLOOD OF NOAH.





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

very early period, the futility of the usual scholastic weapons

had been seen by the more keen-sighted champions of orthodoxy;

and, as the difficulties of the ordinary attack upon science

became more and more evident, many of these champions endeavoured

to patch up a truce.  So began the third stage in the war--the

period of attempts at compromise.



The position which the compromise party took was that the fossils

were produced by the Deluge of Noah.



This position was strong, for it was apparently based upon

Scripture.  Moreover, it had high ecclesiastical sanction, some

of the fathers having held that fossil remains, even on the

highest mountains, represented animals destroyed at the Deluge.

Tertullian was especially firm on this point, and St. Augustine

thought that a fossil tooth discovered in North Africa must have

belonged to one of the giants mentioned in Scripture.[152]



[152] For Tertullian, see his De Pallio, c. ii (Migne, Patr.

Lat., vol. ii, p. 1033).  For Augustine's view, see Cuvier,

Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles, fourth edition, vol. ii,

p. 143.





In the sixteenth century especially, weight began to be attached

to this idea by those who felt the worthlessness of various

scholastic explanations.  Strong men in both the Catholic and the

Protestant camps accepted it; but the man who did most to give

it an impulse into modern theology was Martin Luther.  He easily

saw that scholastic phrase-making could not meet the difficulties

raised by fossils, and he naturally urged the doctrine of their

origin at Noah's Flood.[153]



[153] For Luther's opinion, see his Commentary on Genesis.





With such support, it soon became the dominant theory in

Christendom:  nothing seemed able to stand against it; but

before the end of the same sixteenth century it met some serious

obstacles.  Bernard Palissy, one of the most keen-sighted of

scientific thinkers in France, as well as one of the most devoted

of Christians, showed that it was utterly untenable.

Conscientious investigators in other parts of Europe, and

especially in Italy, showed the same thing; all in vain.[154]

In vain did good men protest against the injury sure to be

brought upon religion by tying it to a scientific theory sure to

be exploded; the doctrine that fossils are the remains of animals

drowned at the Flood continued to be upheld by the great majority

of theological leaders for nearly three centuries as "sound

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

Scripture.  To sustain this scriptural view, efforts energetic

and persistent were put forth both by Catholics and Protestants.





[154] For a very full statement of the honourable record of Italy

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

churchmen, see Stoppani, Il Dogma a le Scienze Positive, Milan,

1886, pp. 203 et seq.





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

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

century, believing the mastodon's bones exhibited by Mazurier to

be those of King Teutobocus, and holding them valuable testimony

to the existence of the giants mentioned in Scripture and of the

early inhabitants of the earth overwhelmed by the Flood.[155]



[155] For the steady adherance to this sacred theory, see Audiat,

Vie de Palissy, p. 412, and Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv,

p. 492.  For Calmet, see his Dissertation sur les Geants, cited

in Berger de Xivery, Traditions Teratologiques, p. 191.





But the greatest champion appeared in England.  We have already

seen how, near the close of the seventeenth century, Thomas

Burnet prepared the way in his Sacred Theory of the Earth by

rejecting the discoveries of Newton, and showing how sin led to

the breaking up of the "foundations of the great deep," and we

have also seen how Whiston, in his New Theory of the Earth,

while yielding a little and accepting the discoveries of Newton,

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

important than these in permanent influence was John Woodward,

professor at Gresham College, a leader in scientific thought at

the University of Cambridge, and, as a patient collector of

fossils and an earnest investigator of their meaning, deserving

of the highest respect.  In 1695 he published his Natural History

of the Earth, and rendered one great service to science, for he

yielded another point, and thus destroyed the foundations for the

old theory of fossils.  He showed that they were not "sports of

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

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

living beings, as Xenophanes had asserted two thousand years

before him.  So far, he rendered a great service both to science

and religion; but, this done, the text of the Old Testament

narrative and the famous passage in St. Peter's Epistle were too

strong for him, and he, too, insisted that the fossils were

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

assault on the true scientific position was vigorous:  Mazurier

exhibited certain fossil remains of a mammoth discovered in

France as bones of the giants mentioned in Scripture; Father

Torrubia did the same thing in Spain; Increase Mather sent to

England similar remains discovered in America, with a like

statement.



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

mentioned in Scripture" were hung up in public places.  Jurieu

saw some of them thus suspended in one of the churches of

Valence; and Henrion, apparently under the stimulus thus given,

drew up tables showing the size of our antediluvian ancestors,

giving the height of Adam as 123 feet 9 inches and that of Eve as

118 feet 9 inches and 9 lines.[156]



[156] See Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles, fourth

edition, vol. ii, p. 56; also Geoffrey St.-Hilaire, cited by

Berger de Xivery, Traditions Teratologiques, p. 190.





But the most brilliant service rendered to the theological theory

came from another quarter for, in 1726, Scheuchzer, having

discovered a large fossil lizard, exhibited it to the world as

the "human witness of the Deluge":[157] this great discovery was

hailed everywhere with joy, for it seemed to prove not only that

human beings were drowned at the Deluge, but that "there were

giants in those days."  Cheered by the applause thus gained, he

determined to make the theological position impregnable.  Mixing

together various texts of Scripture with notions derived from the

philosophy of Descartes and the speculations of Whiston, he

developed the theory that "the fountains of the great deep" were

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

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

stopped the earth's rotation, broke up "the fountains of the

great deep," spilled the water therein contained, and produced

the Deluge.  But his service to sacred science did not end here,

for he prepared an edition of the Bible, in which magnificent

engravings in great number illustrated his view and enforced it

upon all readers.  Of these engravings no less than thirty-four

were devoted to the Deluge alone.[158]



[157] Homo diluvii testis.



[158] See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 172; also Scheuchzer, Physica

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

regarding giants, see Leopoldi, Saggio.  For accounts of the

views of Mazaurier and Scheuchzer, see Cuvier; also Buchner, Man

in Past, Present, and Future, English translation, pp. 235, 236.

For Increase Mather's views, see Philosophical Transactions, vol.

xxiv, p. 85.  As to similar fossils sent from New York to the

Royal Society as remains of giants, see Weld, History of the

Royal Society, vol. i, p. 421.  For Father Torrubia and his

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

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

admirable summaries, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, London,

1867; D'Archiac, Geologie et Paleontologie, Paris, 1866; Pictet,

Traite de Paleontologie, Paris, 1853; Vezian, Prodrome de la

Geologie, Paris, 1863; Haeckel, History of Creation, English

translation, New York, 1876, chap. iii; and for recent progress,

Prof. O. S. Marsh's Address on the History and Methods of

Paleontology.





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

instructive; for it shows that the attempt to shape the

deductions of science to meet the exigencies of dogma may mislead

heterodoxy as absurdly as orthodoxy.



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

various elevated districts of Europe reached Voltaire.  He, too,

had a theologic system to support, though his system was opposed

to that of the sacred books of the Hebrews; and, fearing that

these new discoveries might be used to support the Mosaic

accounts of the Deluge, all his wisdom and wit were compacted

into arguments to prove that the fossil fishes were remains of

fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown away by

travellers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped by

crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land; and that

the fossil bones found between Paris and Etampes were parts of a

skeleton belonging to the cabinet of some ancient philosopher.

Through chapter after chapter, Voltaire, obeying the supposed

necessities of his theology, fought desperately the growing

results of the geologic investigations of his time.[159]



[159] See Voltaire, Dissertation sur les Changements arrives dans

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

xii; also Jevons, Principles of Science, vol. ii, p. 328.





But far more prejudicial to Christianity was the continued effort

on the other side to show that the fossils were caused by the

Deluge of Noah.



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

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

rinds of biblical truth for truth itself, by taking sacred poetry

as prose, and by giving a literal interpretation of it, the

followers of Burnet, Whiston, and Woodward built up systems which

bear to real geology much the same relation that the Christian

Topography of Cosmas bears to real geography.  In vain were

exhibited the absolute geological, zoological, astronomical

proofs that no universal deluge, or deluge covering any large

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

or sixty thousand years; in vain did so enlightened a churchman

as Bishop Clayton declare that the Deluge could not have extended

beyond that district where Noah lived before the Flood; in vain

did others, like Bishop Croft and Bishop Stillingfleet, and the

nonconformist Matthew Poole, show that the Deluge might not have

been and probably was not universal; in vain was it shown that,

even if there had been a universal deluge, the fossils were not

produced by it:  the only answers were the citation of the text,

"And all the high mountains which were under the whole heaven

were covered," and, to clinch the matter, Worthington and men

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

remains of animals drowned at the Deluge of Noah was

"infidelity."  In England, France, and Germany, belief that the

fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah was widely insisted

upon as part of that faith essential to salvation.[160]



[160] For a candid summary of the proofs from geology, astronomy,

and zoology, that the Noachian Deluge was not universally or

widely extended, see McClintock and Strong, Cyclopedia of

Biblical Theology and Ecclesiastical Literature, article Deluge.

For general history, see Lyell, D'Archiac, and Vezian.  For

special cases showing the bitterness of the conflict, see the

Rev. Mr. Davis's Life of Rev. Dr. Pye Smith, passim.  For a late

account, see Prof. Huxley on The Lights of the Church and the

Light of Science, in the Nineteenth Century for July, 1890.





But the steady work of science went on:  not all the force of the

Church--not even the splendid engravings in Scheuchzer's

Bible--could stop it, and the foundations of this theological

theory began to crumble away.  The process was, indeed, slow; it

required a hundred and twenty years for the searchers of God's

truth, as revealed in Nature--such men as Hooke, Linnaeus,

Whitehurst, Daubenton, Cuvier, and William Smith--to push their

works under this fabric of error, and, by statements which could

not be resisted, to undermine it.  As we arrive at the beginning

of the nineteenth century, science is becoming irresistible in

this field.  Blumenbach, Von Buch, and Schlotheim led the way,

but most important on the Continent was the work of Cuvier.  In

the early years of the present century his researches among

fossils began to throw new light into the whole subject of

geology.  He was, indeed, very conservative, and even more wary

and diplomatic; seeming, like Voltaire, to feel that "among

wolves one must howl a little."  It was a time of reaction.

Napoleon had made peace with the Church, and to disturb that

peace was akin to treason.  By large but vague concessions Cuvier

kept the theologians satisfied, while he undermined their

strongest fortress.  The danger was instinctively felt by some of

the champions of the Church, and typical among these was

Chateaubriand, who in his best-known work, once so great, now so

little--the Genius of Christianity--grappled with the questions

of creation by insisting upon a sort of general deception "in the

beginning," under which everything was created by a sudden fiat,

but with appearances of pre-existence.  His words are as follows:

"It was part of the perfection and harmony of the nature which

was displayed before men's eyes that the deserted nests of last

year's birds should be seen on the trees, and that the seashore

should be covered with shells which had been the abode of fish,

and yet the world was quite new, and nests and shells had never

been inhabited."[161] But the real victory was with Brongniart,

who, about 1820, gave forth his work on fossil plants, and thus

built a barrier against which the enemies of science raged in

vain.[162]



[161] Genie du Christianisme, chap.v, pp. 1-14, cited by Reusch,

vol. i, p. 250.



[162] For admirable sketches of Brongniart and other

paleobotanists, see Ward, as above.





Still the struggle was not ended, and, a few years later, a

forlorn hope was led in England by Granville Penn.



His fundamental thesis was that "our globe has undergone only two

revolutions, the Creation and the Deluge, and both by the

immediate fiat of the Almighty"; he insisted that the Creation

took place in exactly six days of ordinary time, each made up of

"the evening and the morning"; and he ended with a piece of that

peculiar presumption so familiar to the world, by calling on

Cuvier and all other geologists to "ask for the old paths and

walk therein until they shall simplify their system and reduce

their numerous revolutions to the two events or epochs only--the

six days of Creation and the Deluge."[163] The geologists showed

no disposition to yield to this peremptory summons; on the

contrary, the President of the British Geological Society, and

even so eminent a churchman and geologist as Dean Buckland, soon

acknowledged that facts obliged them to give up the theory that

the fossils of the coal measures were deposited at the Deluge of

Noah, and to deny that the Deluge was universal.



[163] See the Works of Granville Penn, vol. ii, p. 273.





The defection of Buckland was especially felt by the orthodox

party.  His ability, honesty, and loyalty to his profession, as

well as his position as Canon of Christ Church and Professor of

Geology at Oxford, gave him great authority, which he exerted to

the utmost in soothing his brother ecclesiastics.  In his

inaugural lecture he had laboured to show that geology confirmed

the accounts of Creation and the Flood as given in Genesis, and

in 1823, after his cave explorations had revealed overwhelming

evidences of the vast antiquity of the earth, he had still clung

to the Flood theory in his Reliquiae Diluvianae.



This had not, indeed, fully satisfied the anti-scientific party,

but as a rule their attacks upon him took the form not so much of

abuse as of humorous disparagement.  An epigram by Shuttleworth,

afterward Bishop of Chichester, in imitation of Pope's famous

lines upon Newton, ran as follows:





"Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood:

Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud."





On his leaving Oxford for a journey to southern Europe, Dean

Gaisford was heard to exclaim:  "Well, Buckland is gone to Italy;

so, thank God, we shall have no more of this geology!"



Still there was some comfort as long as Buckland held to the

Deluge theory; but, on his surrender, the combat deepened:

instead of epigrams and caricatures came bitter attacks, and from

the pulpit and press came showers of missiles.  The worst of

these were hurled at Lyell.  As we have seen, he had published in

1830 his Principles of Geology.  Nothing could have been more

cautious.  It simply gave an account of the main discoveries up

to that time, drawing the necessary inferences with plain yet

convincing logic, and it remains to this day one of those works

in which the Anglo-Saxon race may most justly take pride,--one of

the land-marks in the advance of human thought.



But its tendency was inevitably at variance with the Chaldean and

other ancient myths and legends regarding the Creation and Deluge

which the Hebrews had received from the older civilizations among

their neighbours, and had incorporated into the sacred books

which they transmitted to the modern world; it was therefore

extensively "refuted."



Theologians and men of science influenced by them insisted that

his minimizing of geological changes, and his laying stress on

the gradual action of natural causes still in force, endangered

the sacred record of Creation and left no place for miraculous

intervention; and when it was found that he had entirely cast

aside their cherished idea that the great geological changes of

the earth's surface and the multitude of fossil remains were due

to the Deluge of Noah, and had shown that a far longer time was

demanded for Creation than any which could possibly be deduced

from the Old Testament genealogies and chronicles, orthodox

indignation burst forth violently; eminent dignitaries of the

Church attacked him without mercy and for a time he was under

social ostracism.



As this availed little, an effort was made on the scientific side

to crush him beneath the weighty authority of Cuvier; but the

futility of this effort was evident when it was found that

thinking men would no longer listen to Cuvier and persisted in

listening to Lyell.  The great orthodox text-book, Cuvier's

Theory of the Earth, became at once so discredited in the

estimation of men of science that no new edition of it was called

for, while Lyell's work speedily ran through twelve editions and

remained a firm basis of modern thought.[164]



[164] For Buckland and the various forms of attack upon him, see

Gordon, Life of Buckland, especially pp. 10, 26, 136.  For the

attack on Lyell and his book, see Huxley, The Lights of the

Church and the Light of Science.





As typical of his more moderate opponents we may take Fairholme,

who in 1837 published his Mosaic Deluge, and argued that no

early convulsions of the earth, such as those supposed by

geologists, could have taken place, because there could have been

no deluge "before moral guilt could possibly have been

incurred"--that is to say, before the creation of mankind.  In

touching terms he bewailed the defection of the President of the

Geological Society and Dean Buckland--protesting against

geologists who "persist in closing their eyes upon the solemn

declarations of the Almighty"



Still the geologists continued to seek truth:  the germs planted

especially by William Smith, "the Father of English Geology" were

developed by a noble succession of investigators, and the victory

was sure.  Meanwhile those theologians who felt that denunciation

of science as "godless" could accomplish little, laboured upon

schemes for reconciling geology with Genesis.  Some of these show

amazing ingenuity, but an eminent religious authority, going over

them with great thoroughness, has well characterized them as

"daring and fanciful."  Such attempts have been variously

classified, but the fact regarding them all is that each mixes up

more or less of science with more or less of Scripture, and

produces a result more or less absurd.  Though a few men here and

there have continued these exercises, the capitulation of the

party which set the literal account of the Deluge of Noah against

the facts revealed by geology was at last clearly made.[165]



[165] For Fairholme, see his Mosaic Deluge, London, 1837, p. 358.

For a very just characterization of various schemes of

"reconciliation," see Shields, The Final Philosophy, p. 340.





One of the first evidences of the completeness of this surrender

has been so well related by the eminent physiologist, Dr. W. B.

Carpenter, that it may best be given in his own words:  "You are

familiar with a book of considerable value, Dr. W. Smith's

Dictionary of the Bible.  I happened to know the influences

under which that dictionary was framed.  The idea of the

publisher and of the editor was to give as much scholarship and

such results of modern criticism as should be compatible with a

very judicious conservatism.  There was to be no objection to

geology, but the universality of the Deluge was to be strictly

maintained.  The editor committed the article Deluge to a man of

very considerable ability, but when the article came to him he

found that it was so excessively heretical that he could not

venture to put it in.  There was not time for a second article

under that head, and if you look in that dictionary you will find

under the word Deluge a reference to Flood.  Before Flood came, a

second article had been commissioned from a source that was

believed safely conservative; but when the article came in it was

found to be worse than the first.  A third article was then

commissioned, and care was taken to secure its `safety.' If you

look for the word Flood in the dictionary, you will find a

reference to Noah.  Under that name you will find an article

written by a distinguished professor of Cambridge, of which I

remember that Bishop Colenso said to me at the time, `In a very

guarded way the writer concedes the whole thing.'  You will see

by this under what trammels scientific thought has laboured in

this department of inquiry."[166]



[166] See Official Report of the National Conference of Unitarian

and other Christian Churches held at Saratoga, 1882, p. 97.





A similar surrender was seen when from a new edition of Horne's

Introduction to the Scriptures, the standard textbook of

orthodoxy, its accustomed use of fossils to prove the

universality of the Deluge was quietly dropped.[167]



[167] This was about 1856; see Tylor, Early History of Mankind,

p. 329.





A like capitulation in the United States was foreshadowed in

1841, when an eminent Professor of Biblical Literature and

interpretation in the most important theological seminary of the

Protestant Episcopal Church, Dr. Samuel Turner, showed his

Christian faith and courage by virtually accepting the new view;

and the old contention was utterly cast away by the thinking men

of another great religious body when, at a later period, two

divines among the most eminent for piety and learning in the

Methodist Episcopal Church inserted in the Biblical Cyclopaedia,

published under their supervision, a candid summary of the proofs

from geology, astronomy, and zoology that the Deluge of Noah was

not universal, or even widely extended, and this without protest

from any man of note in any branch of the American Church.[168]



[168] For Dr. Turner, see his Companion to the Book of Genesis,

London and New York, 1841, pp. 216-219. For McClintock and

Strong, see their Cyclopaedia of Biblical Knowledge, etc.,

article Deluge. For similar surrenders of the Deluge in various

other religious encyclopedias and commentaries, see Huxley,

Essays on controverted questions, chap. xiii.





The time when the struggle was relinquished by enlightened

theologians of the Roman Catholic Church may be fixed at about

1862, when Reusch, Professor of Theology at Bonn, in his work on

The Bible and Nature, cast off the old diluvial theory and all

its supporters, accepting the conclusions of science.[169]



[169] See Reusch, Bibel und Natur, chap. xxi.





But, though the sacred theory with the Deluge of Noah as a

universal solvent for geological difficulties was evidently

dying, there still remained in various quarters a touching

fidelity to it.  In Roman Catholic countries the old theory was

widely though quietly cherished, and taught from the religious

press, the pulpit, and the theological professor's chair.  Pope

Pius IX was doubtless in sympathy with this feeling when, about

1850, he forbade the scientific congress of Italy to meet at

Bologna.[170]



[170] See Whiteside, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, vol. iii,

chap. xiv.





In 1856 Father Debreyne congratulated the theologians of France

on their admirable attitude:  "Instinctively," he says, "they

still insist upon deriving the fossils from Noah's Flood."[171]

In 1875 the Abbe Choyer published at Paris and Angers a text-book

widely approved by Church authorities, in which he took similar

ground; and in 1877 the Jesuit father Bosizio published at

Mayence a treatise on Geology and the Deluge, endeavouring to

hold the world to the old solution of the problem, allowing,

indeed, that the "days" of Creation were long periods, but making

atonement for this concession by sneers at Darwin.[172]



[171] See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 472.



[172] See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 478, and Bosizio, Geologie und

die Sundfluth, Mayence, 1877, preface, p. xiv.





In the Russo-Greek Church, in 1869, Archbishop Macarius, of

Lithuania, urged the necessity of believing that Creation in six

days of ordinary time and the Deluge of Noah are the only causes

of all that geology seeks to explain; and, as late as 1876,

another eminent theologian of the same Church went even farther,

and refused to allow the faithful to believe that any change had

taken place since "the beginning" mentioned in Genesis, when the

strata of the earth were laid, tilted, and twisted, and the

fossils scattered among them by the hand of the Almighty during

six ordinary days.[173]



[173] See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 472, 571, and elsewhere; also

citations in Reusch and Shields.





In the Lutheran branch of the Protestant Church we also find

echoes of the old belief.  Keil, eminent in scriptural

interpretation at the University of Dorpat, gave forth in 1860 a

treatise insisting that geology is rendered futile and its

explanations vain by two great facts:  the Curse which drove Adam

and Eve out of Eden, and the Flood that destroyed all living

things save Noah, his family, and the animals in the ark.  In

1867, Phillippi, and in 1869, Dieterich, both theologians of

eminence, took virtually the same ground in Germany, the latter

attempting to beat back the scientific hosts with a phrase

apparently pithy, but really hollow--the declaration that "modern

geology observes what is, but has no right to judge concerning

the beginning of things."  As late as 1876, Zugler took a similar

view, and a multitude of lesser lights, through pulpit and press,

brought these antiscientific doctrines to bear upon the people at

large--the only effect being to arouse grave doubts regarding

Christianity among thoughtful men, and especially among young

men, who naturally distrusted a cause using such weapons.



For just at this time the traditional view of the Deluge received

its death-blow, and in a manner entirely unexpected.  By the

investigations of George Smith among the Assyrian tablets of the

British Museum, in 1872, and by his discoveries just afterward in

Assyria, it was put beyond a reasonable doubt that a great mass

of accounts in Genesis are simply adaptations of earlier and

especially of Chaldean myths and legends.  While this proved to

be the fact as regards the accounts of Creation and the fall of

man, it was seen to be most strikingly so as regards the Deluge.

The eleventh of the twelve tablets, on which the most important

of these inscriptions was found, was almost wholly preserved, and

it revealed in this legend, dating from a time far earlier than

that of Moses, such features peculiar to the childhood of the

world as the building of the great ship or ark to escape the

flood, the careful caulking of its seams, the saving of a man

beloved of Heaven, his selecting and taking with him into the

vessel animals of all sorts in couples, the impressive final

closing of the door, the sending forth different birds as the

flood abated, the offering of sacrifices when the flood had

subsided, the joy of the Divine Being who had caused the flood as

the odour of the sacrifice reached his nostrils; while throughout

all was shown that partiality for the Chaldean sacred number

seven which appears so constantly in the Genesis legends and

throughout the Hebrew sacred books.



Other devoted scholars followed in the paths thus opened--Sayce

in England, Lenormant in France, Schrader in Germany--with the

result that the Hebrew account of the Deluge, to which for ages

theologians had obliged all geological research to conform, was

quietly relegated, even by most eminent Christian scholars, to

the realm of myth and legend.[174]



[174] For George Smith, see his Chaldean Account of Genesis, New

York, 1876, especially pp. 36, 263, 286; also his special work on

the subject.  See also Lenormant, Les Origins de l'Histoire,

Paris, 1880, chap. viii.  For Schrader, see his The Cuneiform

Inscriptions and the Old Testament, Whitehouse's translation,

London, 1885, vol. i, pp. 47-49 and 58-60, and elsewhere.





Sundry feeble attempts to break the force of this discovery, and

an evidently widespread fear to have it known, have certainly

impaired not a little the legitimate influence of the Christian

clergy.



And yet this adoption of Chaldean myths into the Hebrew

Scriptures furnishes one of the strongest arguments for the value

of our Bible as a record of the upward growth of man; for, while

the Chaldean legend primarily ascribes the Deluge to the mere

arbitrary caprice of one among many gods (Bel), the Hebrew

development of the legend ascribes it to the justice, the

righteousness, of the Supreme God; thus showing the evolution of

a higher and nobler sentiment which demanded a moral cause

adequate to justify such a catastrophe.



Unfortunately, thus far, save in a few of the broader and nobler

minds among the clergy, the policy of ignoring such new

revelations has prevailed, and the results of this policy, both

in Roman Catholic and in Protestant countries, are not far to

seek.  What the condition of thought is among the middle classes

of France and Italy needs not to be stated here.  In Germany, as

a typical fact, it may be mentioned that there was in the year

1881 church accommodation in the city of Berlin for but two per

cent of the population, and that even this accommodation was more

than was needed.  This fact is not due to the want of a deep

religious spirit among the North Germans:  no one who has lived

among them can doubt the existence of such a spirit; but it is

due mainly to the fact that, while the simple results of

scientific investigation have filtered down among the people at

large, the dominant party in the Lutheran Church has steadily

refused to recognise this fact, and has persisted in imposing on

Scripture the fetters of literal and dogmatic interpretation

which Germany has largely outgrown.  A similar danger threatens

every other country in which the clergy pursue a similar policy.

No thinking man, whatever may be his religious views, can fail to

regret this.  A thoughtful, reverent, enlightened clergy is a

great blessing to any country, and anything which undermines

their legitimate work of leading men out of the worship of

material things to the consideration of that which is highest is

a vast misfortune.[175]



[175] For the foregoing statements regarding Germany the writer

relies on his personal observation as a student at the University

of Berlin in 1856, as a traveller at various periods afterward,

and as Minister of the United States in 1879, 1880, and 1881.







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

SCIENCE COMPLETE.





Before concluding, it may be instructive to note a few especially

desperate attempts at truces or compromises, such as always

appear when the victory of any science has become absolutely

sure.  Typical among the earliest of these may be mentioned the

effort of Carl von Raumer in 1819.  With much pretension to

scientific knowledge, but with aspirations bounded by the limits

of Prussian orthodoxy, he made a laboured attempt to produce a

statement which, by its vagueness, haziness, and "depth," should

obscure the real questions at issue.  This statement appeared in

the shape of an argument, used by Bertrand and others in the

previous century, to prove that fossil remains of plants in the

coal measures had never existed as living plants, but had been

simply a "result of the development of imperfect plant embryos";

and the same misty theory was suggested to explain the existence

of fossil animals without supposing the epochs and changes

required by geological science.



In 1837 Wagner sought to uphold this explanation; but it was so

clearly a mere hollow phrase, unable to bear the weight of the

facts to be accounted for, that it was soon given up.



Similar attempts were made throughout Europe, the most noteworthy

appearing in England.  In 1853 was issued an anonymous work

having as its title A Brief and Complete Refutation of the

Anti-Scriptural Theory of Geologists:  the author having revived

an old idea, and put a spark of life into it--this idea being

that "all the organisms found in the depths of the earth were

made on the first of the six creative days, as models for the

plants and animals to be created on the third, fifth, and sixth

days."[176]



[176] See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 475.





But while these attempts to preserve the old theory as to fossil

remains of lower animals were thus pressed, there appeared upon

the geological field a new scientific column far more terrible to

the old doctrines than any which had been seen previously.



For, just at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth

century, geologists began to examine the caves and beds of drift

in various parts of the world; and within a few years from that

time a series of discoveries began in France, in Belgium, in

England, in Brazil, in Sicily, in India, in Egypt, and in

America, which established the fact that a period of time much

greater than any which had before been thought of had elapsed

since the first human occupation of the earth.  The chronologies

of Archbishop Usher, Petavius, Bossuet, and the other great

authorities on which theology had securely leaned, were found

worthless.  It was clearly seen that, no matter how well based

upon the Old Testament genealogies and lives of the patriarchs,

all these systems must go for nothing.  The most conservative

geologists were gradually obliged to admit that man had been upon

the earth not merely six thousand, or sixty thousand, or one

hundred and sixty thousand years.  And when, in 1863, Sir Charles

Lyell, in his book on The Antiquity of Man, retracted solemnly

his earlier view--yielding with a reluctance almost pathetic, but

with a thoroughness absolutely convincing--the last stronghold of

orthodoxy in this field fell.[177]



[177] See Prof. Marsh's address as President of the Society for

the Advancement of Science, in 1879; and for a development of the

matter, see the chapters on The Antiquity of Man and Egyptology

and the Fall of Man and Anthropology, in this work.





The supporters of a theory based upon the letter of Scripture,

who had so long taken the offensive, were now obliged to fight

upon the defensive and at fearful odds.  Various lines of defence

were taken; but perhaps the most pathetic effort was that made

in the year 1857, in England, by Gosse.  As a naturalist he had

rendered great services to zoological science, but he now

concentrated his energies upon one last effort to save the

literal interpretation of Genesis and the theological structure

built upon it.  In his work entitled Omphalos he developed the

theory previously urged by Granville Penn, and asserted a new

principle called "prochronism."  In accordance with this, all

things were created by the Almighty hand literally within the six

days, each made up of "the evening and the morning," and each

great branch of creation was brought into existence in an

instant.  Accepting a declaration of Dr. Ure, that "neither

reason nor revelation will justify us in extending the origin of

the material system beyond six thousand years from our own days,"

Gosse held that all the evidences of convulsive changes and long

epochs in strata, rocks, minerals, and fossils are simply

"APPEARANCES"--only that and nothing more.  Among these mere

"appearances," all created simultaneously, were the glacial

furrows and scratches on rocks, the marks of retreat on rocky

masses, as at Niagara, the tilted and twisted strata, the piles

of lava from extinct volcanoes, the fossils of every sort in

every part of the earth, the foot-tracks of birds and reptiles,

the half-digested remains of weaker animals found in the

fossilized bodies of the stronger, the marks of hyenas' teeth on

fossilized bones found in various caves, and even the skeleton of

the Siberian mammoth at St. Petersburg with lumps of flesh

bearing the marks of wolves' teeth--all these, with all gaps and

imperfections, he urged mankind to believe came into being in an

instant.  The preface of the work is especially touching, and it

ends with the prayer that science and Scripture may be reconciled

by his theory, and "that the God of truth will deign so to use

it, and if he do, to him be all the glory."[177]  At the close of

the whole book Gosse declared:  "The field is left clear and

undisputed for the one witness on the opposite side, whose

testimony is as follows:  `In six days Jehovah made heaven and

earth, the sea, and all that in them is.'"  This quotation he

placed in capital letters, as the final refutation of all that

the science of geology had built.



[177] See Gosse, Omphalos, London, 1857, p. 5, and passim; and

for a passage giving the keynote of the whole, with a most

farcical note on coprolites, see pp. 353, 354.





In other parts of Europe desperate attempts were made even later

to save the letter of our sacred books by the revival of a theory

in some respects more striking.  To shape this theory to recent

needs, vague reminiscences of a text in Job regarding fire

beneath the earth, and vague conceptions of speculations made by

Humboldt and Laplace, were mingled with Jewish tradition.  Out of

the mixture thus obtained Schubert developed the idea that the

Satanic "principalities and powers" formerly inhabiting our

universe plunged it into the chaos from which it was newly

created by a process accurately described in Genesis.  Rougemont

made the earth one of the "morning stars" of Job, reduced to

chaos by Lucifer and his followers, and thence developed in

accordance with the nebular hypothesis.  Kurtz evolved from this

theory an opinion that the geological disturbances were caused by

the opposition of the devil to the rescue of our universe from

chaos by the Almighty.  Delitzsch put a similar idea into a more

scholastic jargon; but most desperate of all were the statements

of Dr. Anton Westermeyer, of Munich, in The Old Testament

vindicated from Modern Infidel Objections.  The following

passage will serve to show his ideas:  "By the fructifying

brooding of the Divine Spirit on the waters of the deep, creative

forces began to stir; the devils who inhabited the primeval

darkness and considered it their own abode saw that they were to

be driven from their possessions, or at least that their place of

habitation was to be contracted, and they therefore tried to

frustrate God's plan of creation and exert all that remained to

them of might and power to hinder or at least to mar the new

creation."  So came into being "the horrible and destructive

monsters, these caricatures and distortions of creation," of

which we have fossil remains.  Dr. Westermeyer goes on to insist

that "whole generations called into existence by God succumbed to

the corruption of the devil, and for that reason had to be

destroyed"; and that "in the work of the six days God caused the

devil to feel his power in all earnest, and made Satan's

enterprise appear miserable and vain."[178]



[178] See Shields's Final Philosophy, pp. 340 et seq., and

Reusch's Nature and the Bible (English translation, 1886), vol.

i, pp. 318-320.





Such was the last important assault upon the strongholds of

geological science in Germany; and, in view of this and others

of the same kind, it is little to be wondered at that when, in

1870, Johann Silberschlag made an attempt to again base geology

upon the Deluge of Noah, he found such difficulties that, in a

touching passage, he expressed a desire to get back to the theory

that fossils were "sports of Nature."[179]



[179] See Reusch, vol. i, p. 264.





But the most noted among efforts to keep geology well within the

letter of Scripture is of still more recent date.  In the year

1885 Mr. Gladstone found time, amid all his labours and cares as

the greatest parliamentary leader in England, to take the field

in the struggle for the letter of Genesis against geology.



On the face of it his effort seemed Quixotic, for he confessed at

the outset that in science he was "utterly destitute of that kind

of knowledge which carries authority," and his argument soon

showed that this confession was entirely true.



But he had some other qualities of which much might be expected:

great skill in phrase-making, great shrewdness in adapting the

meanings of single words to conflicting necessities in

discussion, wonderful power in erecting showy structures of

argument upon the smallest basis of fact, and a facility almost

preternatural in "explaining away" troublesome realities.  So

striking was his power in this last respect, that a humorous

London chronicler once advised a bigamist, as his only hope, to

induce Mr. Gladstone to explain away one of his wives.



At the basis of this theologico-geological structure Mr.

Gladstone placed what he found in the text of Genesis:  "A grand

fourfold division" of animated Nature "set forth in an orderly

succession of times."  And he arranged this order and succession

of creation as follows:  "First, the water population; secondly,

the air population; thirdly, the land population of animals;

fourthly, the land population consummated in man."



His next step was to slide in upon this basis the apparently

harmless proposition that this division and sequence "is

understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural

science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and

established fact."



Finally, upon these foundations he proceeded to build an argument

out of the coincidences thus secured between the record in the

Hebrew sacred books and the truths revealed by science as regards

this order and sequence, and he easily arrived at the desired

conclusion with which he crowned the whole structure, namely, as

regards the writer of Genesis, that "his knowledge was

divine."[180]



[180] See Mr. Gladstone's Dawn of Creation and Worship, a reply

to Dr. Reville, in the Nineteenth Century for November, 1885.





Such was the skeleton of the structure; it was abundantly

decorated with the rhetoric in which Mr. Gladstone is so skilful

an artificer, and it towered above "the average man" as a

structure beautiful and invincible--like some Chinese fortress in

the nineteenth century, faced with porcelain and defended with

crossbows.



Its strength was soon seen to be unreal.  In an essay admirable

in its temper, overwhelming in its facts, and absolutely

convincing in its argument, Prof. Huxley, late President of the

Royal Society, and doubtless the most eminent contemporary

authority on the scientific questions concerned, took up the

matter.



Mr. Gladstone's first proposition, that the sacred writings give

us a great "fourfold division" created "in an orderly succession

of times," Prof. Huxley did not presume to gainsay.



As to Mr. Gladstone's second proposition, that "this great

fourfold division... created in an orderly succession of

times...has been so affirmed in our own time by natural science

that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established

fact," Prof. Huxley showed that, as a matter of fact, no such

"fourfold division" and "orderly succession" exist; that, so far

from establishing Mr. Gladstone's assumption that the population

of water, air, and land followed each other in the order given,

"all the evidence we possess goes to prove that they did not";

that the distribution of fossils through the various strata

proves that some land animals originated before sea animals; that

there has been a mixing of sea, land, and air "population"

utterly destructive to the "great fourfold division" and to the

creation "in an orderly succession of times"; that, so far is the

view presented in the sacred text, as stated by Mr. Gladstone,

from having been "so affirmed in our own time by natural science,

that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established

fact" that Mr. Gladstone's assertion is "directly contradictory

to facts known to every one who is acquainted with the elements

of natural science"; that Mr. Gladstone's only geological

authority, Cuvier, had died more than fifty years before, when

geological science was in its infancy [and he might have added,

when it was necessary to make every possible concession to the

Church]; and, finally, he challenged Mr. Gladstone to produce any

contemporary authority in geological science who would support

his so-called scriptural view.  And when, in a rejoinder, Mr.

Gladstone attempted to support his view on the authority of Prof.

Dana, Prof. Huxley had no difficulty in showing from Prof.

Dana's works that Mr. Gladstone's inference was utterly

unfounded.  But, while the fabric reared by Mr. Gladstone had

been thus undermined by Huxley on the scientific side, another

opponent began an attack from the biblical side.  The Rev. Canon

Driver, professor at Mr. Gladstone's own University of Oxford,

took up the question in the light of scriptural interpretation.

In  regard to the comparative table drawn up by Sir J. W. Dawson,

showing the supposed correspondence between the scriptural and

the geological order of creation, Canon Driver said:  "The two

series are evidently at variance.  The geological record contains

no evidence of clearly defined periods corresponding to the

`days' of Genesis.  In Genesis, vegetation is complete two days

before animal life appears.  Geology shows that they appear

simultaneously--even if animal life does not appear first.  In

Genesis, birds appear together with aquatic creatures, and

precede all land animals; according to the evidence of geology,

birds are unknown till a period much later than that at which

aquatic creatures (including fishes and amphibia) abound, and

they are preceded by numerous species of land animals--in

particular, by insects and other `creeping things.'"  Of the

Mosaic account of the existence of vegetation before the creation

of the sun, Canon Driver said, "No reconciliation of this

representation with the data of science has yet been found"; and

again:  "From all that has been said, however reluctant we may be

to make the admission, only one conclusion seems possible.  Read

without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i, creates an

impression at variance with the facts revealed by science."  The

eminent professor ends by saying that the efforts at

reconciliation are "different modes of obliterating the

characteristic features of Genesis, and of reading into it a view

which it does not express."



Thus fell Mr. Gladstone's fabric of coincidences between the

"great fourfold division" in Genesis and the facts ascertained by

geology.  Prof. Huxley had shattered the scientific parts of the

structure, Prof. Driver had removed its biblical foundations,

and the last great fortress of the opponents of unfettered

scientific investigation was in ruins.



In opposition to all such attempts we may put a noble utterance

by a clergyman who has probably done more to save what is

essential in Christianity among English-speaking people than any

other ecclesiastic of his time.  The late Dean of Westminster,

Dr. Arthur Stanley, was widely known and beloved on both

continents. In his memorial sermon after the funeral of Sir

Charles Lyell he said:  "It is now clear to diligent students of

the Bible that the first and second chapters of Genesis contain

two narratives of the creation side by side, differing from each

other in almost every particular of time and place and order.  It

is well known that, when the science of geology first arose, it

was involved in endless schemes of attempted reconciliation with

the letter of Scripture.  There were, there are perhaps still,

two modes of reconciliation of Scripture and science, which have

been each in their day attempted, AND EACH HAS TOTALLY AND

DESERVEDLY FAILED. One is the endeavour to wrest the words of the

Bible from their natural meaning and FORCE IT TO SPEAK THE

LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE."  And again, speaking of the earliest known

example, which was the interpolation of the word "not" in

Leviticus xi, 6, he continues: "This is the earliest instance of

THE FALSIFICATION OF SCRIPTURE TO MEET THE DEMANDS OF SCIENCE;

and it has been followed in later times by the various efforts

which have been made to twist the earlier chapters of the book of

Genesis into APPARENT agreement with the last results of

geology--representing days not to be days, morning and evening

not to be morning and evening, the Deluge not to be the Deluge,

and the ark not to be the ark."



After a statement like this we may fitly ask, Which is the more

likely to strengthen Christianity for its work in the twentieth

century which we are now about to enter--a large, manly, honest,

fearless utterance like this of Arthur Stanley, or hair-splitting

sophistries, bearing in their every line the germs of failure,

like those attempted by Mr. Gladstone?



The world is finding that the scientific revelation of creation

is ever more and more in accordance with worthy conceptions of

that great Power working in and through the universe.  More and

more it is seen that inspiration has never ceased, and that its

prophets and priests are not those who work to fit the letter of

its older literature to the needs of dogmas and sects, but those,

above all others, who patiently, fearlessly, and reverently

devote themselves to the search for truth as truth, in the faith

that there is a Power in the universe wise enough to make

truth-seeking safe and good enough to make truth-telling

useful.[181]





[181] For the Huxley-Gladstone controversy, see The Nineteenth

Century for 1885-'86.  For Canon Driver, see his article, The

Cosmogony of Genesis, in The Expositor for January, 1886.