THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 Gift of 
 F. Murray Scott
 

 
 A HISTORY OF 
 
 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE 
 
 WITH THEOLOGY 
 
 IN CHRISTENDOM 
 
 BY 
 
 ANDREW DICKSON WHITE 
 
 LL. D. (YALE), L. H. D. (COLUMBIA), PH. DR. (JENA) 
 
 LATE PRESIDENT AND PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES 
 VOL. I 
 
 LONDON 
 
 MACMILLAN AND COMPANY 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 1897
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1896, 
 BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
 
 o tlje JlTemorg of 
 EZRA CORNELL 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
 
 Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we 
 Breathe cheaply in the common air. LOWELL. 
 
 Discipulus est prioris posterior dies. PUBLIUS SYRUS. 
 
 Truth is the daughter of Time. BACON. 
 
 The Truth shall make you free. ST. JOHN, viii, 32.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 MY book is ready for the printer, and as I begin this 
 preface my eye lights upon the crowd of Russian peasants 
 at work on the Neva under my windows. With pick and 
 shovel they are letting the rays of the April sun into the 
 great ice barrier which binds together the modern quays 
 and the old granite fortress where lie the bones of the 
 Romanoff Czars. 
 
 This barrier is already weakened ; it is widely decayed, 
 in many places thin, and everywhere treacherous ; but it is, 
 as a whole, so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so 
 imbedded in shallows, so wedged into crannies on either 
 shore, that it is a great danger. The waters from thou- 
 sands of swollen streamlets above are pressing behind it ; 
 wreckage and refuse are piling up against it ; every one 
 knows that it must yield. But there is danger that it may 
 resist the pressure too long and break suddenly, wrenching 
 even the granite quays from their foundations, bringing 
 desolation to a vast population, and leaving, after the sub- 
 sidence of the flood, a widespread residue of slime, a fer- 
 tile breeding-bed for the germs of disease. 
 
 But the patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The 
 barrier, exposed more and more to the warmth of spring 
 by the scores of channels they are making, will break away 
 gradually, and the river will flow on beneficent and beau- 
 tiful. 
 
 My work in this book is like that of the Russian mujik 
 on the Neva. I simply try to aid in letting the light of 
 historical truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought 
 which attaches the modern world to mediaeval conceptions
 
 vi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of Christianity, and which still lingers among us a most 
 serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the 
 whole normal evolution of society. 
 
 For behind this barrier also the flood is rapidly rising 
 the flood of increased knowledge and new thought ; and 
 this barrier also, though honeycombed and in many places 
 thin, creates a danger danger of a sudden breaking away, 
 distressing and calamitous, sweeping before it not only out- 
 worn creeds and noxious dogmas, but cherished principles 
 and ideals, and even wrenching out most precious religious 
 and moral foundations of the whole social and political 
 fabric. 
 
 My hope is to aid even if it be but a little in the 
 gradual and healthful dissolving away of this mass of un- 
 reason, that the stream of " religion pure and undefiled " 
 ma} 7 flow on broad and clear, a blessing to humanity. 
 
 And now a few words regarding the evolution of this 
 book. 
 
 It is something over a quarter of a century since I la- 
 bored with Ezra Cornell in founding the university which 
 bears his honored name. 
 
 Our purpose was to establish in the State of New York 
 an institution for advanced instruction and research, in 
 which science, pure and applied, should have an equal place 
 with literature ; in which the study of literature, ancient 
 and modern, should be emancipated as much as possible 
 from pedantry ; and which should be free from various 
 useless trammels and vicious methods which at that period 
 hampered many, if not most, of the American universities 
 and colleges. 
 
 We had especially determined that the institution should 
 be under the control of no political party and of no single 
 religious sect, and with Mr. Cornell's approval I embodied 
 stringent provisions to this effect in the charter. 
 
 It had certainly never entered into the mind of either 
 of us that in all this we were doing anything irreligious or 
 unchristian. Mr. Cornell was reared a member of the So- 
 ciety of Friends; he had from his fortune liberally aided 
 every form of Christian effort which he found going on about 
 him, and among the permanent trustees of the public library
 
 INTRODUCTION. v ji 
 
 which he had already founded, he had named all the clergy- 
 men of the town Catholic and Protestant. As for myself, 
 I had been bred a churchman, had recently been elected a 
 trustee of one church college, and a professor in another ; 
 those nearest and dearest to me were devoutly religious ; 
 and, if I may be allowed to speak of a matter so personal to 
 myself, my most cherished friendships were among deeply 
 religious men and women, and my greatest sources of enjoy- 
 ment were ecclesiastical architecture, religious music, and 
 the more devout forms of poetry. So far from wishing to 
 injure Christianity, we both hoped to promote it ; but we 
 did not confound religion with sectarianism, and we saw in 
 the sectarian character of American colleges and universities, 
 as a whole, a reason for the poverty of the advanced instruc- 
 tion then given in so many of them. 
 
 It required no great acuteness to see that a system of 
 control which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or 
 Language or Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first 
 and above all to what sect or even to what wing or branch of 
 a sect he belonged, could hardly do much to advance the 
 moral, religious, or intellectual development of mankind. 
 
 The reasons for the new foundation seemed to us, then, 
 so cogent that we expected the co-operation of all good citi- 
 zens, and anticipated no opposition from any source. 
 
 As I look back across the intervening years, I know not 
 whether to be more astonished or amused at our sim- 
 plicity. 
 
 Opposition began at once. In the State Legislature it 
 confronted us at every turn, and it was soon in full blaze 
 throughout the State from the good Protestant bishop 
 who proclaimed that all professors should be in holy orders, 
 since to the Church alone was given the command, " Go, 
 teach all nations," to the zealous priest who published a 
 charge that Goldwin Smith a profoundly Christian scholar tf-w 
 had come to Cornell in order to inculcate the " infidelity _ 
 of the Westminster Review"-, and from the eminent divine 
 who went from city to city denouncing the "atheistic and 
 pantheistic tendencies " of the proposed education, to the 
 perfervid minister who informed a denominational synod 
 that Agassiz, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a de-
 
 yiii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 vout theist, was " preaching Darwinism and atheism " in 
 the new institution. 
 
 As the struggle deepened, as hostile resolutions were in- 
 troduced into various ecclesiastical bodies, as honored cler- 
 gymen solemnly warned their flocks first against the " athe- 
 ism," then against the "infidelity," and finally against the 
 " indifferentism " of the university, as devoted pastors en- 
 deavoured to dissuade young men from matriculation, I 
 took the defensive, and, in answer to various attacks from 
 pulpits and religious newspapers, attempted to allay the 
 fears of the public. " Sweet reasonableness " was fully tried. 
 There was established and endowed in the university per- 
 haps the most effective Christian pulpit, and one of the most 
 vigorous branches of the Christian Association, then in the 
 United States ; but all this did nothing to ward off the at- 
 tack. The clause in the charter of the university forbid- 
 ding it to give predominance to the doctrines of any sect, 
 and above all the fact that much prominence was given to 
 instruction in various branches of science, seemed to prevent 
 all compromise, and it soon became clear that to stand on 
 the defensive only made matters worse. Then it was that 
 there was borne in upon me a sense of the real difficulty 
 the antagonism between the theological and scientific view 
 of the universe and of education in relation to it; there- 
 fore it was that, having been invited to deliver a lecture in 
 the great hall of the Cooper Institute at New York, I took 
 as my subject The Battlefields of Science, maintaining this 
 thesis which follows : 
 
 In all modern history, interference with science in the sup- 
 posed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such in- 
 terference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to 
 religion and to science, and invariably ; and, on the other hand, 
 all untrammelled scientific investigation, no matter how danger- 
 ous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time 
 to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion 
 and of science. 
 
 The lecture was next day published in the New York 
 Tribune at the request of Horace Greeley, its editor, 
 who was also one of the Cornell University trustees. As 
 a result of this widespread publication and of sundry at-
 
 INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 tacks which it elicited, I was asked to maintain my thesis 
 before various university associations and literary clubs; 
 and I shall always remember with gratitude that among 
 those who stood by me and presented me on the lecture 
 platform with words of approval and cheer was my re- 
 vered instructor, the Rev. Dr. Theodore D wight Wool- 
 sey, at that time President of Yale College. 
 
 My lecture grew first into a couple of magazine articles, 
 and then into a little book called The Warfare of Science, 
 for which, when republished in England, Prof. John Tyndall 
 wrote a preface. 
 
 Sundry translations of this little book were published, 
 but the most curious thing in its history is the fact that a 
 very friendly introduction to the Swedish translation was 
 written by a Lutheran bishop. 
 
 Meanwhile Prof. John W. Draper published his book on 
 The Conflict between Science and Religion, a work of great 
 ability, which, as I then thought, ended the matter, so far 
 as my giving it further attention was concerned. 
 
 But two things led me to keep on developing my own 
 work in this field : First, I had become deeply interested 
 in it, and could not refrain from directing my observation 
 and study to it ; secondly, much as I admired Draper's 
 treatment of the questions involved, his point of view and 
 mode of looking at history were different from mine. 
 
 He regarded the struggle as one between Science and 
 Religion. I believed then, and am convinced now, that it 
 was a struggle between Science and Dogmatic Theology. 
 
 More and more I saw that it was the conflict between 
 two epochs in the evolution of human thought the theo- 
 logical and the scientific. 
 
 So I kept on, and from time to time published New 
 Chapters in the Warfare of Science as magazine articles in 
 The Popular Science Monthly. This was done under many 
 difficulties. For twenty years, as President of Cornell Uni- 
 versity and Professor of History in that institution, I was im- 
 mersed in the work of its early development. Besides this, 
 I could not hold myself entirely aloof from public affairs, 
 and was three times sent by the Government of the United 
 States to do public duty abroad : first as a commissioner
 
 X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 to Santo Domingo, in 1870; afterward as minister to Ger- 
 many, in 1879; finally, as minister to Russia, in 1892; and 
 was also called upon by the State of New York to do con- 
 siderable labor in connection with international exhibitions 
 at Philadelphia and at Paris. I was also obliged from time 
 to time to throw off by travel the effects of overwork. 
 
 The variety of residence and occupation arising from 
 these causes may perhaps explain some peculiarities in this 
 book which might otherwise puzzle my reader. 
 
 While these journeyings have enabled me to collect ma- 
 terials over a very wide range in the New World, from 
 Quebec to Santo Domingo and from Boston to Mexico, 
 San Francisco, and Seattle, and in the Old World from 
 Trondhjem to Cairo and from St. Petersburg to Palermo 
 they have often obliged me to write under circumstances 
 not very favorable : sometimes on an Atlantic steamer, 
 sometimes on a Nile boat, and not only in my own library 
 at Cornell, but in those of Berlin, Helsingfors, Munich, Flor- 
 ence, and the British Museum. This fact will explain to the 
 benevolent reader not only the citation of different editions 
 of the same authority in different chapters, but some itera- 
 tions which in the steady quiet of my own library would 
 not have been made. 
 
 It has been my constant endeavour to write for the gen- 
 eral reader, avoiding scholastic and technical terms as much 
 as possible and stating the truth simply as it presents itself 
 to me. 
 
 That errors of omission and commission will be found 
 here and there is probable nay, certain ; but the substance 
 of the book will, I believe, be found fully true. I am en- 
 couraged in this belief by the fact that, of the three bitter 
 attacks which this work in its earlier form has already en- 
 countered, one was purely declamatory, objurgatory, and 
 hortatory, and the others based upon ignorance of facts easily 
 pointed out. 
 
 And here I must express my thanks to those who have 
 aided me. First and above all to my former student and 
 dear friend, Prof. George Lincoln Burr, of Cornell Univer- 
 sity, to whose contributions, suggestions, criticisms, and 
 cautions I am most deeply indebted ; also to my friends U.
 
 INTRODUCTION. x i 
 
 G. Weatherly, formerly Travelling Fellow of Cornell, and 
 now Assistant Professor in the University of Indiana, Prof. 
 and Mrs. Earl Barnes and Prof. William H. Hudson, of Stan- 
 ford University, and Prof. E. P. Evans, formerly of the 
 University of Michigan, but now of Munich, for extensive 
 aid in researches upon the lines I have indicated to them, 
 but which I could never have prosecuted without their 
 co-operation. In libraries at home and abroad they have 
 all worked for me most effectively, and I am deeply grate- 
 ful to them. 
 
 This book is presented as a sort of Festschrift a tribute 
 to Cornell University as it enters the second quarter-cen- 
 tury of its existence, and probably my last tribute. 
 
 The ideas for which so bitter a struggle was made at its 
 foundation have triumphed. Its faculty, numbering over 
 one hundred and fifty ; its students, numbering but little 
 short of two thousand ; its noble buildings and equipment ; 
 the munificent gifts, now amounting to millions of dollars, 
 which it has received from public-spirited men and women ; 
 the evidences of public confidence on all sides ; and, above 
 all, the adoption of its cardinal principles and main features 
 by various institutions of learning in other States, show this 
 abundantly. But there has been a triumph far greater and 
 wider. Everywhere among the leading modern nations the 
 same general tendency is seen. During the quarter-century 
 just past the control of public instruction, not only in Amer- 
 ica but in the leading nations of Europe, has passed more 
 and more from the clergy to the laity. Not only are the 
 presidents of the larger universities in the United States, 
 with but one or two exceptions, laymen, but the same thing 
 is seen in the old European strongholds of metaphysical 
 theology. At my first visit to Oxford and Cambridge, forty 
 years ago, they were entirely under ecclesiastical control. 
 Now, all this is changed. An eminent member of the pres- 
 ent British Government has recently said, "A candidate for 
 high university position is handicapped by holy orders." I 
 refer to this with not the slightest feeling of hostility to- 
 ward the clergy, for I have none ; among them are many of 
 my dearest friends ; no one honours their proper work more 
 than I ; but the above fact is simply noted as proving the
 
 x ii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 continuance of that evolution which I have endeavoured to 
 describe in this series of monographs an evolution, indeed, 
 in which the warfare of Theology against Science has been 
 one of the most active and powerful agents. My belief is 
 that in the field left to them their proper field the clergy 
 will more and more, as they cease to struggle against scien- 
 tific methods and conclusions, do work even nobler and more 
 beautiful than anything they have heretofore done. And 
 this is saying much. My conviction is that Science, though 
 it has evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on 
 biblical texts and ancient modes of thought, will go hand in 
 hand with Religion ; and that, although theological control 
 will continue to diminish, Religion, as seen in the recognition 
 of "a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for 
 righteousness," and in the love of God and of our neighbor, 
 will steadily grow stronger and stronger, not only in the 
 American institutions of learning but in the world at large. 
 Thus may the declaration of Micah as to the requirements 
 of Jehovah, the definition by St. James of " pure religion 
 and undefiled," and, above all, the precepts and ideals of the 
 blessed Founder of Christianity himself, be brought to bear 
 more and more effectively on mankind. 
 
 I close this preface some days after its first lines were 
 written. The sun of spring has done its work on the Neva ; 
 the great river flows tranquilly on, a blessing and a joy ; the 
 mujiks are forgotten. 
 
 A. D. W. 
 
 LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES, ST. PETERSBURG, 
 April 1 
 
 P. S. Owing to a wish to give more thorough revision 
 to some parts of my work, it has been withheld from the 
 press until the present date. 
 
 A. D. W. 
 
 CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y., 
 A ugust fj, 1895.
 
 CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Visible Universe. 
 
 Ancient and mediaeval views regarding the manner of creation . . 1-4 
 
 Regarding the matter of creation 4, 5 
 
 Regarding the time of creation 5-9 
 
 Regarding the date of creation 9 
 
 Regarding the Creator ......... 10 12 
 
 Regarding light and darkness 12, 13 
 
 Rise of the conception of an evolution : among the Chaldeans, the He- 
 brews, the Greeks, the Romans 14 
 
 Its survival through the Middle Ages, despite the disfavour of the 
 
 Church 14, 15 
 
 Its development in modern times. The nebular hypothesis and its strug- 
 gle with theology 15-19 
 
 The idea of evolution at last victorious 19-22 
 
 Our sacred books themselves an illustration of its truth . . . 22-24 
 The true reconciliation of Science and Theology 24 
 
 II. Theological Teachings regarding the Animals and Man. 
 
 Ancient and medieval representations of the creation of man ... 24 
 Literal acceptance of the book of Genesis by the Christian fathers . . 25 
 By the Reformers ........... 26 
 
 By modern theologians, Catholic and Protestant . . . . 27, 28 
 
 Theological reasoning as to the divisions of the animal kingdom . 28-30 
 
 The Physiologus, the Bestiaries, the Exempla 32-36 
 
 Beginnings of sceptical observation 37~4O 
 
 Development of a scientific method in the study of Nature . . 40-44 
 Breaking down of the theological theory of creation . . . 44~49 
 
 III. Theological and Scientific Theories of an Evolution in Animated Nature. 
 
 Ideas of evolution among the ancients 50-52 
 
 In the early Church 52-54 
 
 In the mediaeval Church 55, 56 
 
 Development of these ideas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth cen- 
 turies . " 57, 58
 
 x iv CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The work of De Maillet 58, 59 
 
 Of Linnseus . ........ 59~6i 
 
 Of Buffon ' 61 
 
 Contributions to the theory of evolution at the close of the eighteenth 
 
 century 62 
 
 The work of Treviranus and Lamarck 62, 63 
 
 Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier 63, 64 
 
 Development of the theory up to the middle of the nineteenth century 64-66 
 The contributions of Darwin and Wallace ..... 66-68 
 The opposition of Agassiz 68, 69 
 
 IV. The Final Effort of Theology. 
 
 Attacks on Darwin and his theories in England .... 70, 71 
 
 In America 71, 72 
 
 Formation of sacro-scientific organizations to combat the theory of evolu- 
 tion 72 
 
 The attack in France 73 
 
 In Germany 73 
 
 Conversion of Lyell to the theory of evolution 74 
 
 The attack on Darwin's Descent of Man 74~77 
 
 Difference between this and the former attack . . . . 77, 78 
 
 Hostility to Darwinism in America 78-81 
 
 Change in the tone of the controversy. Attempts at compromise . 81, 82 
 Dying-out of opposition to evolution ....... 83 
 
 Last outbursts of theological hostility 83-85 
 
 Final victory of evolution 86 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 I. The Form of the Earth. 
 
 Primitive conception of the earth as flat 89 
 
 In Chaldea and Egypt 89 
 
 In Persia 90 
 
 Among the Hebrews 90 
 
 Evolution, among the Greeks, of the idea of its sphericity ... 91 
 
 Opposition of the early Church 91, 92 
 
 Evolution of a sacred theory, drawn from the Bible .... 92 
 
 Its completion by Cosmas Indicopleustes ..... 93~95 
 
 Its influence on Christian thought ....... 95~97 
 
 Survival of the idea of the earth's sphericity its acceptance by Isidore 
 
 and Bede 97 
 
 Its struggle and final victory 97, 98 
 
 II. The Delineation of the Earth. 
 
 Belief of every ancient people that its own central place was the centre 
 
 of the earth 98 
 
 Hebrew conviction that the earth's centre was at Jerusalem ... 99
 
 CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. xv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Acceptance of this view by Christianity 99, 100 
 
 Influence of other Hebrew conceptions Gog and Magog, the " four 
 
 winds," the waters " on an heap " 101, 102 
 
 III. The Inhabitants of the Earth. 
 
 The idea of antipodes 102 
 
 Its opposition by the Christian Church Gregory Nazianzen, Lactantius, 
 Basil, Ambrose, Augustine, Procopius of Gaza, Cosmas, Isi- 
 dore 102-104 
 
 Virgil of Salzburg's assertion of it in the eighth century . . . 105, 106 
 Its revival by William of Conches and Albert the Great in the thir- 
 teenth 106 
 
 Surrender of it by Nicolas d'Oresme 106 
 
 Fate of Peter of Abano and Cecco d'Ascoli 106, 107 
 
 Timidity of Pierre d'Ailly and Tostatus 107, 108 
 
 Theological hindrance of Columbus 108 
 
 Pope Alexander VI's demarcation line 108 
 
 Cautious conservatism of Gregory Reysch ...... 109 
 
 Magellan and the victory of science 109,110 
 
 IV. The Size of the Earth. 
 
 Scientific attempts at measuring the earth no 
 
 The sacred solution of the problem . . . . . . .in 
 
 Fortunate influence of the blunder upon Columbus 112 
 
 V. The Character of the Earth's Surface. 
 
 Servetus and the charge of denying the fertility of Judea . . 112, 113 
 Contrast between the theological and the religious spirit in their effects 
 
 on science 113 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 I. The Old Sacred Theory of the Universe. 
 
 The early Church's conviction of the uselessness of astronomy . .114 
 The growth of a sacred theory Origen, the Gnostics, Philastrius, Cos- 
 mas, Isidore 114, 115 
 
 The geocentric, or Ptolemaic, theory : its origin, and its acceptance by the 
 
 Christian world 115 
 
 Development of the new sacred system of astronomy the pseudo-Dio- 
 
 nysius, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas ..... 116, 117 
 
 Its popularization by Dante U7 
 
 Its details 118-120 
 
 Its persistence to modern times 120 
 
 II. The Heliocentric Theory. 
 
 Its rise among the Greeks Pythagoras, Philolaus, Aristarchus . . 120 
 Its suppression by the charge of blasphemy 121
 
 xvi CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Its loss from sight for six hundred years, then for a thousand . . . 121 
 Its revival by Nicholas de Cusa and Nicholas Copernicus . . 121-124 
 Its toleration as a hypothesis . . . . . . . . .124 
 
 Its prohibition as soon as Galileo teaches it as a truth . . . .124 
 
 Consequent timidity of scholars Acosta, Apian .... 125, 126 
 
 Protestantism not less zealous in opposition than Catholicism Luther, 
 
 Melanchthon, Calvin, Turretin 126, 127 
 
 This opposition especially persistent in England Hutchinson, Pike, 
 
 Home, Horsley, Forbes, Owen, Wesley 127, 128 
 
 Resulting interferences with freedom of teaching .... 128, 129 
 
 Giordano Bruno's boldness and his fate 130 
 
 The truth demonstrated by the telescope of Galileo . . . .130 
 
 III. The War upon Galileo. 
 
 Concentration of the war on this new champion 130 
 
 The first attack 131, 132 
 
 Fresh attacks Elci, Busaeus, Caccini, Lorini, Bellarmin . . 132-134 
 
 Use of epithets 135 
 
 Attempts to entrap Galileo 136 
 
 His summons before the Inquisition at Rome 137 
 
 The injunction to silence, and the condemnation of the theory of the 
 
 earth's motion, 1616 137, 138 
 
 The work of Copernicus placed on the Index 138 
 
 Galileo's seclusion 138 
 
 Renewed attacks upon Galileo Inchofer, Fromundus . . .139, 140 
 
 IV. Victory of the Church over Galileo. 
 
 Publication of his Dialogo, 1632 140 
 
 Hostility of Pope Urban VIII 141 
 
 Galileo's second trial by the Inquisition 141, 142 
 
 His abjuration 143 
 
 Later persecution of him .......... 143 
 
 Measures to complete the destruction of the Copernican theory . 143-146 
 
 Persecution of Galileo's memory 146, 147 
 
 Protestant hostility to the new astronomy and its champions . . 147-152 
 
 V. Results of the Victory over Galileo. 
 
 Rejoicings of churchmen over the victory 152 
 
 The silencing of Descartes 152 
 
 Persecution of Campanella and of Kepler 153 
 
 Persistence and victory of science 154 
 
 Dilemma of the theologians 154, 155 
 
 Vain attempts to postpone the surrender I55-I57 
 
 VI. The Retreat of the Church after its Victory over Galileo. 
 
 The easy path for the Protestant theologians 158 
 
 The difficulties of the older Church. The papal infallibility fully com- 
 mitted against the Copernican theory 158 
 
 Attempts at evasion first plea: that Galileo was condemned not for 
 
 affirming the earth's motion, but for supporting it from Scripture . 159
 
 CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. xv ii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Its easy refutation . 159, 160 
 
 Second plea : that he was condemned not for heresy, but for contumacy 160 
 
 Folly of this assertion . . '. 160 
 
 Third plea : that it was all a quarrel between Aristotelian professors and 
 
 those favouring the experimental method 161 
 
 Fourth plea : that the condemnation of Galileo was " provisory " . . 161 
 Fifth plea : that he was no more a victim of Catholics than of Protestants 161 
 
 Efforts to blacken Galileo's character 162 
 
 Efforts to suppress the documents of his trial 162 
 
 Their fruitlessness 163 
 
 Sixth plea: that the popes as popes had never condemned his theory . 163 
 
 Its confutation from their own mouths 163, 164 
 
 Abandonment of the contention by honest Catholics . . . 165, 166 
 Two efforts at compromise Newman, De Bonald .... 166, 167 
 
 Effect of all this on thinking men 167, 168 
 
 The fault not in Catholicism more than in Protestantism not in religion, 
 
 but in theology 168-170 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 FROM " SIGNS AND WONDERS " TO LAW IN THE HEAVENS. 
 
 I. The Theological View. 
 
 Early beliefs as to comets, meteors, and eclipses .... 171-173 
 
 Their inheritance by Jews and Christians 173 
 
 The belief regarding comets especially harmful as a source of supersti- 
 tious terror ........... 174 
 
 Its transmission through the Middle Ages 174-176 
 
 Its culmination under Pope Calixtus III 177 
 
 Beginnings of scepticism Copernicus, Paracelsus, Scaliger . . .178 
 Firmness of theologians, Catholic and Protestant, in its support . 178-183 
 
 II. Theological Efforts to crush the Scientific View. 
 
 The effort through the universities. The effort through the pulpits . 183 
 
 Heerbrand at Tubingen and Dieterich at Marburg 184 
 
 Maestlin at Heidelberg 184 
 
 Buttner, Vossius, Torreblanca, Fromundus 185, 186 
 
 Father Augustin de Angelis at Rome 186-188 
 
 Reinzer at Linz 188, 189 
 
 Celichius at Magdeburg 190 
 
 Conrad Dieterich's sermon at Ulm 191-193 
 
 Erni and others in Switzerland . . . . . . . 193, 194 
 
 Comet doggerel . 193 
 
 Echoes from New England Danforth, Morton, Increase Mather . 194-196 
 
 III. The Invasion of Scepticism. 
 
 Rationalism of Cotton Mather, and its cause 196, 197 
 
 Blaise de Vigenere 197 
 
 Erastus 198 
 
 Bekker, Lubienitzky, Pierre Petit .198
 
 xviii CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Bayle 199 
 
 Fontenelle , zoo 
 
 The scientific movement beneath all this 200, 201 
 
 IV. Theological Efforts at Compromise. The Final Victory of Science. 
 
 The admission that some comets are supralunar ..... 202 
 Difference between scientific and theological reasoning . . . 202, 203 
 Development of the reasoning of Tycho and Kepler Cassini, Hevel, 
 
 Doerfel, Bernouilli, Newton 203 
 
 Completion of the victory by Halley and Clairaut .... 203, 204 
 Survivals of the superstition Joseph de Maistre, Forster . . . 205 
 
 Arago's statistics 205 
 
 The theories of Whistoa and Burnet, and their influence in Germany . 206 
 The superstition ended in America by the lectures of Winthrop . . 207 
 
 Helpful influence of John Wesley 207 
 
 Effects of the victory 207, 208 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 I. Growth of Theological Explanations. 
 
 Germs of geological truth among the Greeks and Romans . . . 209 
 
 Attitude of the Church toward science 209 
 
 Geological theories of the early theologians 210, 211 
 
 Attitude of the schoolmen 212 
 
 Contributions of the Arabian schools 212 
 
 Theories of the earlier Protestants 212,213 
 
 Influence of the revival of learning 214 
 
 II. Efforts to Suppress the Scientific View. 
 
 Revival of scientific methods 214,215 
 
 Buffon and the Sorbonne 215 
 
 Beringer's treatise on fossils 216, 217 
 
 Protestant opposition to the new geology the works of Burnet, Whis- 
 
 ton, Wesley, Clark, Watson, Arnold, Cockburn, and others . 217-225 
 
 III. The First Great Effort at Compromise, based on the Flood of Noah. 
 
 The theory that fossils were produced by the Deluge .... 225 
 Its acceptance by both Catholics and Protestants Luther, Calmet . 226 
 Burnet, Whiston, Woodward, Mazurier, Torrubia, Increase Mather . 227 
 
 Scheuchzer 228 
 
 Voltaire's theory of fossils 229 
 
 Vain efforts of enlightened churchmen in behalf of the scientific view 229, 230 
 Steady progress of science the work of Cuvier and Brongniart . 230,231 
 
 Granville Penn's opposition "~ . .231 
 
 The defection of Buckland and Lyell to the scientific side . . 232, 233 
 Surrender of the theologians . . . . . . ' . . 234-236 
 Remnants of the old belief . . * . . . . 236, 237
 
 CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. x ix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Death-blow given to the traditional theory of the Deluge by the discov- 
 ery of the Chaldean accounts 237,238 
 
 Results of the theological opposition to science .... 238, 239 
 
 IV. Final Efforts at Compromise The Victory of Science complete. 
 
 Efforts of Carl von Raumer, Wagner, and others .... 239, 240 
 The new testimony of the caves and beds of drift as to the antiquity of 
 
 man 240 
 
 Gosse's effort to save the literal interpretation of Genesis . . 241, 242 
 
 Efforts of Continental theologians 242, 243 
 
 Gladstone's attempt at a compromise ...... 243, 244 
 
 Its demolition by Huxley 245 
 
 By Canon Driver 246 
 
 Dean Stanley on the reconciliation of Science and Scripture . . . 247 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN, EGYPTOLOGY, AND ASSYRIOLOGY. 
 
 I. The Sacred Chronology. 
 
 Two fields in which Science has gained a definite victory over Theology 249 
 Opinions of the Church fathers on the antiquity of man . . . 249-251 
 
 The chronology of Isidore 251 
 
 OfBede 251 
 
 Of the mediaeval Jewish scholars 252 
 
 The views of the Reformers on the antiquity of man . . . 252, 253 
 
 Of the Roman Church 253 
 
 Of Archbishop Usher 253 
 
 Influence of Egyptology on the belief in man's antiquity . . . 254 
 
 La Peyrere's theory of the Pre-Adamites 255 
 
 Opposition in England to the new chronology 255,256 
 
 II. The New Chronology. 
 
 Influence of the new science of Egyptology on biblical chronology . . 257 
 Manetho's history of Egypt and the new chronology derived from it 257-259 
 Evidence of the antiquity of man furnished by the monuments of 
 
 Egypt 259,260 
 
 By her art 260, 261 
 
 By her science 261, 262 
 
 By other elements of civilization 262 
 
 By the remains found in the bed of the Nile . .' . . .263 
 Evidence furnished by the study of Assyriology 264 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY. 
 ^i? Thunder-stones. 
 Early beliefs regarding " thunder-stones "...... 266 
 
 Theories of Mercati and Tollius regarding them . . . . .267
 
 XX CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 PACK 
 
 Their identification with the implements of prehistoric man . . 267,268 
 
 Remains of man found in caverns 268, 269 
 
 Unfavourable influence on scientific activity of the political conditions of 
 
 the early part of the nineteenth century 269 
 
 Change effected by the French Revolution of 1830 270 
 
 Rallying of the reactionary clerical influence against science . . 270, 271 
 
 II. The Flint Weapons and Implements. 
 
 Boucher de Perthes's contributions to the knowledge of prehistoric man 271-273 
 
 His conclusions confirmed by Lyell and others 273 
 
 Cave explorations of Lartet and Christy ...... 273, 274 
 
 Evidence of man's existence furnished by rude carvings . . . 274, 275 
 
 Cave explorations in the British Islands 276, 277 
 
 Evidence of man's existence in the Drift period .... 277-280 
 In the early Quaternary and in the Tertiary periods . . . 281-283 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE " FALL OF MAN " AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 The two antagonistic views regarding the life of man on the earth . . 284 
 The theory of " the Fall " among ancient peoples .... 285, 286 
 
 Inheritance of this view by the Christian Church 286 
 
 Appearance among the Greeks and Romans of the theory of a rise of 
 
 man 286, 287 
 
 Its disappearance during the Middle Ages 288 
 
 .Its development since the seventeenth century ..... 288 
 The first blow at the doctrine of " the Fall " comes from geology . . 289 
 Influence of anthropology on the belief in this doctrine .... 289 
 The finding of human skulls in Quaternary deposits .... 250 
 
 Their significance 290, 291 
 
 Results obtained from the comparative study of the remains of human 
 
 handiwork 291 
 
 Discovery of human remains in shell-heaps on the shores of the Baltic Sea 292 
 
 In peat-beds 292, 293 
 
 The lake-dwellers 294, 295 
 
 Indications of the upward direction of man's development . . . 295 
 Mr. Southall's attack on the theory of man's antiquity .... 296 
 
 An answer to it. ........... 297 
 
 Discovery of prehistoric human remains in Egypt .... 297-299 
 
 Hamard's attack on the new scientific conclusions 300 
 
 The survival of prehistoric implements in religious rites . . . 300, 301 
 Strength of the argument against the theory of " the Fall of Man " . . 301 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE " FALL OF MAN " AND ETHNOLOGY. 
 
 The beginnings of the science of Comparative Ethnology . . . 303 
 Its testimony to the upward tendency of man from low beginnings . 303, 304
 
 CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 X xi 
 
 Theological efforts to break its force De Maistre and De Bonald . . 304 
 Whately's attempt .......... 304, 305 
 
 The attempt of the Duke of Argyll ....... 305-307 
 
 Evidence of man's upward tendency derived from Comparative Philology 307 
 From Comparative Literature and Folklore . . , . . . 308 
 From Comparative Ethnography ...... . . 308 
 
 From Biology ............ 308 
 
 THE 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 FALL OF MAN " AND HISTORY. 
 
 Proof of progress given by the history of art ...... 310 
 
 Proofs from general history ......... 310 
 
 Development of civilization even under unfavourable circumstances 310, 311 
 Advancement even through catastrophes and the decay of civil- 
 
 izations ........... 311,312 
 
 Progress not confined to man's material condition ..... 312 
 
 Theological struggle against the new scientific view .... 313 
 
 Persecution of Prof. Winchell . . ...... 313-315 
 
 Of Dr. Woodrow .......... 316-318 
 
 Other interferences with freedom of teaching ...... 319 
 
 The great harm thus done to religion ....... 320 
 
 Rise of a better spirit .......... 320 
 
 The service rendered to religion by Anthropology .... 320-322 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 FROM "THE PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR" TO METEOROLOGY. 
 I. Growth of a Theological Theory. 
 
 ' The beliefs of classical antiquity regarding storms, thunder, and lightning 323 
 Development of a sacred science of meteorology by the fathers of the 
 
 Church ........... 323-325 
 
 Theories of Cosmas Indicopleustes 
 
 Of Isidore of Seville 
 
 OfBede 
 
 Of Rabanus Maurus 
 
 Rational views of Honorius of Autun 
 
 Orthodox theories of John of San Geminiano 
 
 325 
 
 326 
 326-328 
 
 328 
 328, 329 
 
 329 
 
 Attempt of Albert the Great to reconcile the speculations of Aristotle 
 
 with the theological views ......... 329 
 
 The monkish encyclopedists ....... . . 330 
 
 Theories regarding the rainbow and the causes of storms . . 330, 331 
 Meteorological phenomena attributed to the Almighty . . . 331-335 
 
 II. Diabolical Agency in Storms. 
 
 Meteorological phenomena attributed to the devil " the prince of 
 
 the power of the air " ........ 336, 337 
 
 Propagation of this belief by the mediaeval theologians . . . 337, 338 
 Its transmission to both Catholics and Protestants Eck, Luther . . 339
 
 xxii CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The great work of Delrio . . 339 
 
 Guacci's Compendium . . . . . . . . . . 340 
 
 The employment of prayer against " the powers of the air " . . 340 
 
 Of exorcisms . . . . . . . - . . . 340-342 
 
 Of fetiches and processions . . . . . . . . 342-344 
 
 Of consecrated church bells 344-350 
 
 III. The Agency of Witches. 
 
 The fearful results of the witch superstition ...... 350 
 
 Its growth out of the doctrine of evil agency in atmospheric phenomena 351 
 
 Archbishop Agobard's futile attempt to dispel it 351 
 
 Its sanction by the popes 351,352 
 
 Its support by confessions extracted by torture .... 352, 353 
 Part taken in the persecution by Dominicans and Jesuits . . . 353 
 Opponents of the witch theory Pomponatius, Paracelsus, Agrippa of 
 
 Nettesheim 354, 355 
 
 Jean Bodin's defence of the superstition 355 
 
 Fate of Cornelius Loos 356 
 
 Of Dietrich Flade 356,357 
 
 Efforts of Spec to stem the persecution 357 
 
 His posthumous influence 358 
 
 Upholders of the orthodox view Bishop Binsfeld, Remigius . . . 358 
 
 Vain protests of Wier 359 
 
 Persecution of Bekker for opposing the popular belief .... 359 
 Effect of the Reformation in deepening the superstition . . . 359, 360 
 The persecution in Great Britain and America .... 360, 361 
 Development of a scientific view of the heavens ..... 362 
 Final efforts to revive the old belief 362, 363 
 
 IV. Franklin's Lightning-Rod. 
 
 Franklin's experiments with the kite 364 
 
 Their effect on the old belief 364 
 
 Efforts at compromise between the scientific and theological theories . 365 
 
 Successful use of the lightning-rod 365 
 
 Religious scruples against it in America 366 
 
 In England 367 
 
 In Austria 367 
 
 In Italy 367,368 
 
 Victory of the scientific theory 368 
 
 This victory exemplified in the case of the church of the monastery of 
 
 Lerins 369-371 
 
 In the case of Dr. Moorhouse 372 
 
 In the case of the Missouri droughts '. 372 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 I. The Supremacy of Magic. 
 
 Primitive tendency to belief in magic ....... 373 
 
 The Greek conception of natural laws . 374
 
 CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. xxiii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Influence of Plato and Aristotle on the growth of science . . 374, 375 
 Effect of the establishment of Christianity on the development of the 
 
 physical sciences ..... 375~377 
 The revival of thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries . . 377 
 
 Albert the Great ' . . . . 377, 378 
 
 Vincent of Beauvais 378 
 
 Thomas Aquinas .......... 379, 380 
 
 Roger Bacon's beginnings of the experimental method brought to nought 381 
 The belief that science is futile gives place to the belief that it is dan- 
 gerous 381 
 
 The two kinds of magic .......... 381 
 
 Rarity of persecution for magic before the Christian era .... 382 
 
 The Christian theory of devils 382 
 
 Constantine's laws against magic ........ 383 
 
 Increasing terror of magic and witchcraft 383, 384 
 
 Papal enactments against them 384, 385 
 
 Persistence of the belief in magic ........ 385 
 
 Its effect on the development of science 385, 386 
 
 Roger Bacon 386-390 
 
 Opposition of secular rulers to science 391, 392 
 
 John Baptist Porta 392 
 
 The opposition to scientific societies in Italy 393 
 
 In England ............ 394 
 
 The effort to turn all thought from science to religion .... 394 
 
 The development of mystic theology 395 
 
 Its harmful influence on science ....... 395397 
 
 Mixture of theological with scientific speculation .... 397, 398 
 
 This shown in the case of Melanchthon 399 
 
 In that of Francis Bacon 400, 401 
 
 Theological theory of gases 402 
 
 Growth of a scientific theory .... .... 402 
 
 Basil Valentine and his contributions to chemistry 403 
 
 Triumph of the scientific theory 403 
 
 II. The Triumph of Chemistry and Physics, 
 
 New epoch in chemistry begun by Boyle 404 
 
 Attitude of the mob toward science 405 
 
 Effect on science of the reaction following the French Revolution . 405, 406 
 Development of chemistry since the middle of the nineteenth century . 406 
 
 Development of physics 406, 407 
 
 Modern opposition to science in Catholic countries 408 
 
 Attack on scientific education in France 409, 410 
 
 In England 411 
 
 In Prussia 411 
 
 Revolt against the subordination of education to science . . . 411,412 
 Effect of the International Exhibition of 1851 at London . . . 413 
 Of the endowment of State colleges in America by the Morrill Act 
 
 of 1862 413,414 
 
 The results to religion 414,415
 
 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE 
 
 WITH THEOLOGY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 I. THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. 
 
 AMONG those masses of cathedral sculpture which pre- 
 serve so much of mediaeval theology, one frequently recur- 
 ring group is noteworthy for its presentment of a time- 
 honoured doctrine regarding the origin of the universe. 
 
 The Almighty, in human form, sits benignly, making the 
 sun, moon, and stars, and hanging them from the solid firma- 
 ment which supports the " heaven above " and overarches 
 the " earth beneath." 
 
 The furrows of thought on the Creator's brow show that 
 in this work he is obliged to contrive ; the knotted muscles 
 upon his arms show that he is obliged to toil ; naturally, 
 then, the sculptors and painters of the mediaeval and early 
 modern period frequently represented him as the writers 
 whose conceptions they embodied had done as, on the 
 seventh day, weary after thought and toil, enjoying well- 
 earned repose and the plaudits of the hosts of heaven. 
 
 In these thought-fossils of the cathedrals, and in other 
 revelations of the same idea through sculpture, painting, 
 glass-staining, mosaic work, and engraving, during the Mid- 
 dle Ages and the two centuries following, culminated a be- 
 lief which had been developed through thousands of years, 
 and which has determined the world's thought until our 
 own time. 
 
 Its beginnings lie far back in human history; we find
 
 2 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 them among the early records of nearly all the great civiliza- 
 tions, and they hold a most prominent place in the various 
 sacred books of the world. In nearly all of them is revealed 
 the conception of a Creator of whom man is an imperfect 
 image, and who literally and directly created the visible 
 universe with his hands and fingers. 
 
 Among these theories, of especial interest to us are those 
 which controlled theological thought in Chaldea. The As- 
 syrian inscriptions which have been recently recovered and 
 given to the English-speaking peoples by Layard, George 
 Smith, Sayce, and others, show that in the ancient religions 
 of Chaldea and Babylonia there was elaborated a narrative 
 of the creation which, in its most important features, must 
 have been the source of that in our own sacred books. It 
 has now become perfectly clear that from the same sources 
 which inspired the accounts of the creation of the universe 
 among the Chaldeo-Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Phoenician, 
 and other ancient civilizations came the ideas which hold so 
 prominent a place in the sacred books of the Hebrews. In 
 the two accounts imperfectly fused together in Genesis, and 
 also in the account of which we have indications in the book 
 of Job and in the Proverbs, there is presented, often with 
 the greatest sublimity, the same early conception of the 
 Creator and of the creation the conception, so natural in 
 the childhood of civilization, of a Creator who is an enlarged 
 human being working literally with his own hands, and of a 
 creation which is " the work of his fingers." To supplement 
 this view there was developed the belief in this Creator as 
 one who, having 
 
 ..." from his ample palm 
 Launched forth the rolling planets into space," 
 
 sits on high, enthroned " upon the circle of the heavens," 
 perpetually controlling and directing them. 
 
 From this idea of creation was evolved in time a some- 
 what nobler view. Ancient thinkers, and especially, as is 
 now found, in Egypt, suggested that the main agency in 
 creation was not the hands and fingers of the Creator, but 
 his voice. Hence was mingled with the earlier, cruder be- 
 lief regarding the origin of the earth and heavenly bodies 
 by the Almighty the more impressive idea that " he spake
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. 3 
 
 and they were made " that they were brought into exist- 
 ence by his word* 
 
 Among the early fathers of the Church this general view 
 of creation became fundamental; they impressed upon 
 Christendom more and more strongly the belief that the 
 universe was created in a perfectly literal sense by the hands 
 or voice of God. Here and there sundry theologians of 
 larger mind attempted to give a more spiritual view regard- 
 ing some parts of the creative work, and of these were St. 
 Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine. Ready as they were 
 to accept the literal text of Scripture, they revolted against 
 the conception of an actual creation of the universe by the 
 hands and fingers of a Supreme Being, and in this they were 
 followed by Bede and a few others; but the more material 
 conceptions prevailed, and we find these taking shape not 
 only in the sculptures and mosaics and stained glass of cathe- 
 drals, and in the illuminations of missals and psalters, but 
 later, at the close of the Middle Ages, in the pictured Bibles 
 and in general literature. 
 
 Into the Anglo-Saxon mind this ancient material concep- 
 tion of the creation was riveted by two poets whose works 
 
 * Among the many mediaeval representations of the creation of the universe, I 
 especially recall from personal observation those sculptured above the portals of 
 the cathedrals of Freiburg and Upsala, the paintings on the walls of the Campo 
 Santo at Pisa, and, most striking of all, the mosaics of the Cathedral of Monreale 
 and those in the Cappella Palatina at Palermo. Among peculiarities showing the 
 simplicity of the earlier conception the representation of the repose of the Almighty 
 on the seventh day is very striking. He is shown as seated in almost the exact 
 attitude of the " Weary Mercury " of classic sculpture bent, and with a very 
 marked expression of fatigue upon his countenance and in the whole disposition of 
 his body. 
 
 The Monreale mosaics are pictured in the great work of Gravina, and the Pisa 
 frescoes in Didron's Iconographie, Paris, 1843, p. 598. For an exact statement of the 
 resemblances which have settled the question among the most eminent scholars in 
 favour of the derivation of the Hebrew cosmogony from that of Assyria, see Jensen, 
 Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 304, 306 ; also Franz Lukas, 
 Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmographien der a/ten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, pp. 35- 
 46 ; also George Smith's Chaldean Genesis, especially the German translation with 
 additions by Delitzsch, Leipsic, 1876, and Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das 
 Alte Testament, Giessen, 1883, pp. 1-54, etc. See also Renan, Histoire du peuple 
 d" Israel, vol. i, chap, i, L' antique influence babylonienne. For Egyptian views re- 
 garding creation, and especially for the transition from the idea of creation by the 
 hands and fingers of the Creator to creation by his voice and his " word," see 
 Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 145-146.
 
 4 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 appealed especially to the deeper religious feelings. In the 
 seventh century Csedmon paraphrased the account given in 
 Genesis, bringing out this material conception in the most 
 literal form ; and a thousand years later Milton developed 
 out of the various statements in the Old Testament, mingled 
 with a theology regarding " the creative Word " which had 
 been drawn from the New, his description of the creation by 
 the second person in the Trinity, than which nothing could 
 be more literal and material : 
 
 " He took the golden compasses, prepared 
 In God's eternal store, to circumscribe 
 This universe and all created things. 
 One foot he centred, and the other turned 
 Round through the vast profundity obscure, 
 And said, ' Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds : 
 This be thy just circumference, O world ! ' " * 
 
 So much for the orthodox view of the manner of creation. 
 
 The next point developed in this theologic evolution had 
 reference to the matter of which the universe was made, and 
 it was decided by an overwhelming majority that no ma- 
 terial substance existed before the creation of the material 
 universe that " God created everything out of nothing." 
 Some venturesome thinkers, basing their reasoning upon the 
 first verses of Genesis, hinted at a different view namely, 
 that the mass, " without form and void," existed before the 
 universe ; but this doctrine was soon swept out of sight. 
 The vast majority of the fathers were explicit on this point. 
 Tertullian especially was very severe against those who 
 took any other view than that generally accepted as ortho- 
 dox : he declared that, if there had been any pre-existing 
 matter out of which the world was formed, Scripture would 
 have mentioned it ; that by not mentioning it God has given 
 us a clear proof that there was no such thing ; and, after a 
 manner not unknown in other theological controversies, he 
 threatens Hermogenes, who takes the opposite view, with 
 
 * For Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and the general subject of the development 
 of an evolution theory among the Greeks, see the excellent work by Dr. Osborn, 
 From the Greeks to Darwin, pp. 33 and following ; for Csedmon, see any edition 
 I have used Bouterwek's, Glitersloh, 1854; for Milton, see Paradise Lost, book vii, 
 lines 225-231.
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. 
 
 5 
 
 " the woe which impends on all who add to or take away 
 from the written word." 
 
 St. Augustine, who showed signs of a belief in a pre-exist- 
 ence of matter, made his peace with the prevailing belief by 
 the simple reasoning that, " although the world has been 
 made of some material, that very same material must have 
 been made out of nothing." 
 
 In the wake of these great men the universal Church 
 steadily followed. The Fourth Lateran Council declared 
 that God created everything out of nothing ; and at the 
 present hour the vast majority of the faithful whether 
 Catholic or Protestant are taught the same doctrine ; on 
 this point the syllabus of Pius IX and the Westminster 
 Catechism fully agree.* 
 
 Having thus disposed of the manner and matter of crea- 
 tion, the next subject taken up by theologians was the time 
 required for the great work. 
 
 Here came a difficulty. The first of the two accounts 
 given in Genesis extended the creative operation through 
 six days, each of an evening and a morning, with much ex- 
 plicit detail regarding the progress made in each. But the 
 second account spoke of " the day " in which " the Lord God 
 made the earth and the heavens." The explicitness of the 
 first account and its naturalness to the minds of the great 
 mass of early theologians gave it at first a decided advan- 
 tage ; but Jewish thinkers, like Philo, and Christian think- 
 ers, like Origen, forming higher conceptions of the Creator 
 and his work, were not content with this, and by them was 
 launched upon the troubled sea of Christian theology the 
 idea that the creation was instantaneous, this idea being 
 strengthened not only by the second of the Genesis legends, 
 but by the great text, " He spake, and it was done ; he com- 
 manded, and it stood fast" or, as it appears in the Vulgate 
 and in most translations, " He spake, and they were made ; 
 he commanded, and they were created." 
 
 * For Tertullian, see Tertullian against ffermogenes, chaps, xx and xxii ; for St. 
 Augustine regarding " creation from nothing," see the De Genesi contra Manichteos, 
 lib. i, cap. vi ; for St. Ambrose, see the Hexameron, lib. i, cap. iv ; for the decree 
 of the Fourth Lateran Council, and the view received in the Church to-day, see 
 the article Creation in Addis and Arnold's Catholic Dictionary.
 
 6 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 As a result, it began to be held that the safe and proper 
 course was to believe literally both statements ; that in some 
 mysterious manner God created the universe in six days, 
 and yet brought it all into existence in a moment. In spite 
 of the outcries of sundry great theologians, like Ephrem 
 Syrus, that the universe was created in exactly six days of 
 twenty-four hours each, this compromise was promoted by 
 St. Athanasius and St. Basil in the East, and by St. Augus- 
 tine and St. Hilary in the West. 
 
 Serious difficulties were found in reconciling these two 
 views, which to the natural mind seem absolutely contra- 
 dictory ; but by ingenious manipulation of texts, by dexter- 
 ous play upon phrases, and by the abundant use of meta- 
 physics to dissolve away facts, a reconciliation was effected, 
 and men came at least to believe that they believed in a 
 creation of the universe instantaneous and at the same time 
 extended through six days.* 
 
 Some of the efforts to reconcile these two accounts were 
 so fruitful as to deserve especial record. The fathers, East- 
 ern and Western, developed out of the double account in 
 Genesis, and the indications in the Psalms, the Proverbs, 
 and the book of Job, a vast mass of sacred science bearing 
 upon this point. As regards the whole work of creation, 
 stress was laid upon certain occult powers in numerals. 
 Philo Judseus, while believing in an instantaneous creation, 
 had also declared that the world was created in six days 
 because " of all numbers six is the most productive " ; he 
 had explained the creation of the heavenly bodies on the 
 fourth day by " the harmony of the number four " ; of the 
 animals on the fifth day by the five senses ; of man on the 
 sixth day by the same virtues in the number six which had 
 caused it to be set as a limit to the creative work ; and, 
 greatest of all, the rest on the seventh day by the vast mass 
 of mysterious virtues in the number seven. 
 
 St. Jerome held that the reason why God did not pro- 
 nounce the work of the second day " good " is to be found 
 
 * For Origen, see his Contra Celsum, cap. xxxvi, xxxvii ; also his De Principi- 
 l>us, cap. v ; for St. Augustine, see his De Genesi contra Manichtzos and De Gentsi 
 ad Litteram, passim ; for Athanasius, see his Discourses against the Arians, ii, 
 48, 49.
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. 7 
 
 in the fact that there is something essentially evil in the 
 number two, and this was echoed centuries afterward, afar 
 off in Britain, by Bede. 
 
 St. Augustine brought this view to bear upon the Church 
 in the following statement: " There are three classes of num- 
 bers the more than perfect, the perfect, and the less than 
 perfect, according as the sum of them is greater than, equal 
 to, or less than the original number. Six is the first perfect 
 number : wherefore we must not say that six is a perfect 
 number because God finished all his works in six days, but 
 that God finished all his works in six days because six is a 
 perfect number." 
 
 Reasoning of this sort echoed along through the mediae- 
 val Church until a year after the discovery of America, 
 when the Nuremberg Chronicle re-echoed it as follows : " The 
 creation of things is explained by the number six, the 
 parts of which, one, two, and three, assume the form of a 
 triangle." 
 
 This view of the creation of the universe as instantaneous 
 and also as in six days, each made up of an evening and a 
 morning, became virtually universal. Peter Lombard and 
 Hugo of St. Victor, authorities of vast weight, gave it their 
 sanction in the twelfth century, and impressed it for ages 
 upon the mind of the Church. 
 
 Both these lines of speculation as to the creation of 
 everything out of nothing, and the reconciling of the instan- 
 taneous creation of the universe with its creation in six days 
 were still further developed by other great thinkers of the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 St. Hilary of Poictiers reconciled the two conceptions 
 as follows : " For, although according to Moses there is an 
 appearance of regular order in the fixing of the firmament, 
 the laying bare of the dry land, the gathering together of 
 the waters, the formation of the heavenly bodies, and the 
 arising of living things from land and water, yet the creation 
 of the heavens, earth, and other elements is seen to be the 
 work of a single moment." 
 
 St. Thomas Aquinas drew from St. Augustine a subtle 
 distinction which for ages eased the difficulties in the case : 
 he taught in effect that God created the substance of things
 
 8 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 in a moment, but gave to the work of separating, shaping, 
 and adorning this creation, six days.* 
 
 The early reformers accepted and developed the same 
 view, and Luther especially showed himself equal to the 
 occasion. With his usual boldness he declared, first, that 
 Moses " spoke properly and plainly, and neither allegorically 
 nor figuratively," and that therefore "the world with all 
 creatures was created in six days." And he then goes on 
 to show how, by a great miracle, the whole creation was 
 also instantaneous. 
 
 Melanchthon also insisted that the universe was created 
 out of nothing and in a mysterious way, both in an instant 
 and in six days, citing the text : " He spake, and they were 
 made." 
 
 Calvin opposed the idea of an instantaneous creation, and 
 laid especial stress on the creation in six days : having called 
 attention to the fact that the biblical chronology shows the 
 world to be not quite six thousand years old and that it is 
 now near its end, he says that "creation was extended 
 through six days that it might not be tedious for us to 
 occupy the whole of life in the consideration of it." 
 
 Peter Martyr clinched the matter by declaring : " So im- 
 portant is it to comprehend the work of creation that we see 
 the creed of the Church take this as its starting point. 
 Were this article taken away there would be no original sin, 
 the promise of Christ would become void, and all the vital 
 force of our religion would be destroyed." The West- 
 minster divines in drawing up their Confession of Faith 
 
 * For Philo Judaeus, see his Creation of the World, chap, iii ; for St. Augustine 
 on the powers of numbers in creation, see his De Genesi ad Litteram, iv, chap, ii ; 
 for Peter Lombard, see the Sententia, lib. ii, dist. xv, 5 ; and for Hugo of St. Vic- 
 tor, see De Sacramentis, lib. i, pars i ; also, Annotat. Eluddal. in Pentateuchum, 
 cap. v, vi, vii ; for St. Hilary, see De Trinitate, lib. xii ; for St. Thomas Aquinas, 
 see his Sumnia Theologica, quest. Ixxxiv, arts, i and ii ; the passage in the Nurem- 
 berg Chronicle, 1493, is in fol. iii ; for Bossuet, see his Discours sur VHistoirc Uni- 
 verselle ; for the sacredness of the number seven among the Babylonians, see espe- 
 cially Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das A lie Testament, pp. 21, 22 ; also 
 George Smith et al, ; for general ideas on the occult powers of various numbers, 
 especially the number seven, and the influence of these ideas on theology and sci- 
 ence, see my chapter on astronomy. As to mediaeval ideas on the same subject, 
 see Detzel, Christliche Ikonographie, Freiburg, 1894, pp. 44 and following.
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. 9 
 
 specially laid it down as necessary to believe that all things 
 visible and invisible were created not only out of nothing 
 but in exactly six days. 
 
 Nor were the Roman divines less strenuous than the 
 Protestant reformers regarding the necessity of holding 
 closely to the so-called Mosaic account of creation. As late 
 as the middle of the eighteenth century, when Buffon at- 
 tempted to state simple geological truths, the theological 
 faculty of the Sorbonne forced him to make and to publish 
 a most ignominious recantation which ended with these 
 words : " I abandon everything in my book respecting the 
 formation of the earth, and generally all which may be con- 
 trary to the narrative of Moses." 
 
 Theologians, having thus settled the manner of the crea- 
 tion, the matter used in it, and the time required for it, now 
 exerted themselves to fix its date. 
 
 The long series of efforts by the greatest minds in the 
 Church, from Eusebius to Archbishop Usher, to settle this 
 point are presented in another chapter. Suffice it here that 
 the general conclusion arrived at by an overwhelming 
 majority of the most competent students of the biblical ac- 
 counts was that the date of creation was, in round numbers, 
 four thousand years before our era ; and in the seventeenth 
 century, in his great work, Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chan- 
 cellor of the University of Cambridge, and one of the most 
 eminent Hebrew scholars of his time, declared, as the result 
 of his most profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures, 
 that " heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were 
 created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full of 
 water," and that " this work took place and man was created 
 by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B. C., at nine o'clock in 
 the morning." 
 
 Here was, indeed, a triumph of Lactantius's method, the 
 result of hundreds of years of biblical study and theological 
 thought since Bede in the eighth century, and Vincent of 
 Beauvais in the thirteenth, had declared that creation must 
 have taken place in the spring. Yet, alas ! within two cen- 
 turies after Lightfoot's great biblical demonstration as to 
 the exact hour of creation, it was discovered that at that 
 hour an exceedingly cultivated people, enjoying all the
 
 IO FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 fruits of a highly developed civilization, had long been 
 swarming in the great cities of Egypt, and that other na- 
 tions hardly less advanced had at that time reached a high 
 development in Asia.* 
 
 But, strange as it may seem, even after theologians had 
 thus settled the manner of creation, the matter employed in 
 it, the time required for it, and the exact date of it, there 
 remained virtually unsettled the first and greatest question 
 of all ; and this was nothing less than the question, WHO 
 actually created the universe ? 
 
 Various theories more or less nebulous, but all centred 
 in texts of Scripture, had swept through the mind of the 
 Church. By some theologians it was held virtually that the 
 actual creative agent was the third person of the Trinity, 
 who, in the opening words of our sublime creation poem, 
 " moved upon the face of the waters." By others it was 
 held that the actual Creator was the second person of the 
 Trinity, in behalf of whose agency many texts were cited 
 from the New Testament. Others held that the actual 
 Creator was the first person, and this view was embodied in 
 the two great formulas known as the Apostles' and Nicene 
 Creeds, which explicitly assigned the work to " God the Fa- 
 ther Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." Others, finding 
 a deep meaning in the words " Let us make," ascribed in 
 Genesis to the Creator, held that the entire Trinity directly 
 created all things ; and still others, by curious metaphysical 
 processes, seemed to arrive at the idea that peculiar com- 
 binations of two persons of the Trinity achieved the creation. 
 
 In all this there would seem to be considerable courage 
 
 * For Luther, see his Commentary on Genesis, 1545, introduction, and his com- 
 ments on chap, i, verse 12 ; the quotations from Luther's commentary are taken 
 mainly from the translation by Henry Cole, D. D., Edinburgh, 1858 ; for Melanch- 
 thon, see Loci Theologici, in Melanchthon, Opera, ed. Bretschneider, vol. xxi, pp. 
 269, 270, also pp. 637, 638 in quoting the text (Ps. xxiii, 9) I have used, as does 
 Melanchthon himself, the form of the Vulgate ; for the citations from Calvin, see 
 his Commentary on Genesis (Opera omnia, Amsterdam, 1671, torn, i, cap. ii, p. 8) ; 
 also in the Institutes, Allen's translation, London, 1838, vol. i, chap, xv, pp. 126, 
 127 ; for Peter Martyr, see his Commentary on Genesis, cited by Zockler, vol. i, p. 
 690 ; for the articles in the Westminster Confession of Faith, see chap, iv ; for 
 Buffon's recantation, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, chap, iii, p. 57. For Light- 
 foot's declaration, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822.
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. H 
 
 in view of the fearful condemnations launched in the Athana- 
 sian Creed against all who should "confound the persons" 
 or " divide the substance of the Trinity." 
 
 These various stages in the evolution of scholastic the- 
 ology were also embodied in sacred art, and especially in 
 cathedral sculpture, in glass-staining, in mosaic working, 
 and in missal painting. 
 
 The creative Being is thus represented sometimes as the 
 third person of the Trinity, in the form of a dove brooding 
 over chaos ; sometimes as the second person, and therefore 
 a youth ; sometimes as the first person, and therefore fa- 
 therly and venerable ; sometimes as the first and second per- 
 sons, one being venerable and the other youthful; and 
 sometimes as three persons, one venerable and one youthful, 
 both wearing papal crowns, and each holding in his lips a 
 tip of the wing of the dove, which thus seems to proceed 
 from both and to be suspended between them. 
 
 Nor was this the most complete development of the 
 mediaeval idea. The Creator was sometimes represented 
 with a single body, but with three faces, thus showing that 
 Christian belief had in some pious minds gone through sub- 
 stantially the same cycle which an earlier form of belief had 
 made ages before in India, when the Supreme Being was 
 represented with one body but with the three faces of 
 Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. 
 
 But at the beginning of the modern period the older 
 view in its primitive Jewish form was impressed upon Chris- 
 tians by the most mighty genius in art the world has known ; 
 for in 1512, after four years of Titanic labour, Michael 
 Angelo uncovered his frescoes within the vault of the Sistine 
 Chapel. 
 
 They had been executed by the command and under the 
 sanction of the ruling Pope, Julius II, to represent the con- 
 ception of Christian theology then dominant, and they re- 
 main to-day in all their majesty to show the highest point 
 ever attained by the older thought upon the origin of the 
 visible universe. 
 
 In the midst of the expanse of heaven the Almighty Fa- 
 ther the first person of the Trinity in human form, august 
 and venerable, attended by angels and upborne by mighty
 
 12 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 winds, sweeps over the abyss, and, moving through success- 
 ive compartments of the great vault, accomplishes the work 
 of the creative days. With a simple gesture he divides the 
 light from the darkness, rears on high the solid firmament, 
 gathers together beneath it the seas, or summons into exist- 
 ence the sun, moon, and planets, and sets them circling 
 about the earth. 
 
 In this sublime work culminated the thought of thou- 
 sands of years ; the strongest minds accepted it or pretended 
 to accept it, and nearly two centuries later this conception, 
 in accordance with the first of the two accounts given in 
 Genesis, was especially enforced by Bossuet, and received a 
 new lease of life in the Church, both Catholic and Protestant.* 
 
 But to these discussions was added yet another, which, 
 beginning in the early days of the Church, was handed 
 down the ages until it had died out among the theologians 
 of our own time. 
 
 In the first of the biblical accounts light is created and 
 the distinction between day and night thereby made on the 
 first day, while the sun and moon are not created until the 
 fourth day. Masses of profound theological and pseudo- 
 scientific reasoning have been developed to account for this 
 masses so great that for ages they have obscured the sim- 
 ple fact that the original text is a precious revelation to us 
 of one of the most ancient of recorded beliefs the belief 
 that light and darkness are entities independent of the heav- 
 enly bodies, and that the sun, moon, and stars exist not 
 merely to increase light but to "divide the day from the 
 night, to be for signs and for seasons, and for days and 
 for years," and "to rule the day and the night." 
 
 * For strange representations of the Creator and of the creation by one, two, or 
 three persons of the Trinity, see Didron, Iconographie Chr/tienne, pp. 35, 178, 
 224, 483, 567-580, and elsewhere ; also Detzel as already cited. The most naive of 
 all survivals of the mediaeval idea of creation which the present writer has ever 
 seen was exhibited in 1894 on the banner of one of the guilds at the celebration of 
 the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Munich Cathedral. Jesus 
 of Nazareth, as a beautiful boy and with a nimbus encircling his head, was shown 
 turning and shaping the globe on a lathe, which he keeps in motion with his foot. 
 The emblems of the Passion are about him, God the Father looking approvingly 
 upon him from a cloud, an'd the dove hovering between the two. The date upon 
 the banner was 1727.
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. ! 3 
 
 Of this belief we find survivals among the early fathers, 
 and especially in St. Ambrose. In his work on creation he 
 tells us : " We must remember that the light of day is one 
 thing and the light of the sun, moon, and stars another the 
 sun by his rays appearing to add lustre to the daylight. 
 For before sunrise the day dawns, but is not in full reful- 
 gence, for the sun adds still further to its splendour." This 
 idea became one of the "treasures of sacred knowledge 
 committed to the Church," and was faithfully received by 
 the Middle Ages. The mediaeval mysteries and miracle 
 plays give curious evidences of this : In a performance of 
 the creation, when God separates light from darkness, the 
 stage direction is, " Now a painted cloth is to be exhibited, 
 one half black and the other half white." It was also given 
 more permanent form. In the mosaics of San Marco at 
 Venice, in the frescoes of the Baptistery at Florence and of 
 the Church of St. Francis at Assisi, and in the altar carving 
 at Salerno, we find a striking realization of it the Creator 
 placing in the heavens two disks or living figures of equal 
 size, each suitably coloured or inscribed to show that one 
 represents light and the other darkness. This conception 
 was without doubt that of the person or persons who com- 
 piled from the Chaldean and other earlier statements the 
 accounts of the creation in the first of our sacred books.* 
 
 Thus, down to a period almost within living memory, it 
 was held, virtually "always, everywhere, and by all," that 
 the universe, as we now see it, was created literally and 
 
 * For scriptural indications of the independent existence of light and darkness, 
 compare with the first verses of the first chapter of Genesis such passages as Job 
 xxxviii, 19, 24 ; for the general prevalence of this early view, see Lukas, Kosmo- 
 gonie, pp. 31, 33, 41, 74, and passim ; for the view of St. Ambrose regarding the 
 creation of light and of the sun, see his Hexameron, lib. 4, cap. iii ; for an excellent 
 general statement, see Huxley, Mr. Gladstone and Genesis, in the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury, 1886, reprinted in his Essays on Controverted Questions, London, 1892, note, 
 pp. 126 et seq. ; for the acceptance in the miracle plays of the scriptural idea of 
 light and darkness as independent creations, see Wright, Essays on Archtzological 
 Subjects, vol. ii, p. 178 ; for an account, with illustrations, of the mosaics, etc., 
 representing this idea, see Tikkanen, Die Genesis-mosaiken von San Marco, Hel- 
 singfors, 1889, pp. 14 and 16 of text and Plates I and II. Very- naively the Salerno 
 carver, not wishing to colour the ivory which he wrought, has inscribed on one disk 
 the word "LUX" and on the other "NOX." See also Didron, Iconographie, 
 p. 482.
 
 !4 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 directly by the voice or hands of the Almighty, or by both 
 out of nothing in an instant or in six days, or in both 
 about four thousand years before the Christian era and for 
 the convenience of the dwellers upon the earth, which was 
 at the base and foundation of the whole structure. 
 
 But there had been implanted along through the ages 
 germs of another growth in human thinking, some of them 
 even as early as the Babylonian period. In the Assyrian 
 inscriptions we find recorded the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea 
 of an evolution of the universe out of the primeval flood or 
 " great deep," and of the animal creation out of the earth 
 and sea. This idea, recast, partially at least, into mono- 
 theistic form, passed naturally into the sacred books of the 
 neighbours and pupils of the Chaldeans the Hebrews ; but 
 its growth in Christendom afterward was checked, as we 
 shall hereafter find, by the more powerful influence of other 
 inherited statements which appealed more intelligibly to the 
 mind of the Church. 
 
 Striking, also, was the effect of this idea as rewrought 
 by the early Ionian philosophers, to whom it was probably 
 transmitted from the Chaldeans through the Phoenicians. 
 In the minds of lonians like Anaximander and Anaximenes 
 it was most clearly developed : the first of these conceiving 
 of the visible universe as the result of processes of evolution, 
 and the latter pressing further the same mode of reasoning, 
 and dwelling on agencies in cosmic development recognised 
 in modern science. 
 
 This general idea of evolution in Nature thus took strong 
 hold upon Greek thought and was developed in many 
 ways, some ingenious, some perverse. Plato, indeed, with- 
 stood it ; but Aristotle sometimes developed it in a manner 
 which reminds us of modern views. 
 
 Among the Romans Lucretius caught much from it, ex- 
 tending the evolutionary process virtually to all things. 
 
 In the early Church, as we have seen, the idea of a crea- 
 tion direct, material, and by means like those used by man, 
 was all-powerful for the exclusion of conceptions based on 
 evolution. From the more simple and crude of the views 
 of creation given in the Babylonian legends, and thence in- 
 corporated into Genesis, rose the stream of orthodox thought
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. 1 5 
 
 on the subject, which grew into a flood and swept on 
 through the Middle Ages and into modern times. Yet here 
 and there in the midst of this flood were high grounds of 
 thought held by strong men. Scotus Erigena and Duns 
 Scotus, among the schoolmen, bewildered though they were, 
 had caught some rays of this ancient light, and passed on to 
 their successors, in modified form, doctrines of an evolu- 
 tionary process in the universe. 
 
 In the latter half of the sixteenth century these evolu- 
 tionary theories seemed to take more definite form in the 
 mind of Giordano Bruno, who evidently divined the funda- 
 mental idea of what is now known as the " nebular hypothe- 
 sis " ; but with his murder by the Inquisition at Rome this 
 idea seemed utterly to disappear dissipated by the flames 
 which in 1600 consumed his body on the Campo dei Fiori. 
 
 Yet within the two centuries divided by Bruno's death 
 the world was led into a new realm of thought in which an 
 evolution theory of the visible universe was sure to be rap- 
 idly developed. For there came, one after the other, five 
 of the greatest men our race has produced Copernicus, 
 Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton and when their 
 work was done the old theological conception of the uni- 
 verse was gone. " The spacious firmament on high " " the 
 crystalline spheres " the Almighty enthroned upon " the 
 circle of the heavens," and with his own hands, or with 
 angels as his agents, keeping sun, moon, and planets in mo- 
 tion for the benefit of the earth, opening and closing the 
 " windows of heaven," letting down upon the earth the " wa- 
 ters above the firmament," "setting his bow in the cloud," 
 hanging out " signs and wonders," hurling comets, " casting 
 forth lightnings" to scare the wicked, and "shaking the 
 earth " in his wrath : all this had disappeared. 
 
 These five men had given a new divine revelation to the 
 world ; and through the last, Newton, had come a vast new 
 conception, destined to be fatal to the old theory of crea- 
 tion, for he had shown throughout the universe, in place of 
 almighty caprice, all-pervading law. The bitter opposition 
 of theology to the first four of these men is well known ; but 
 the fact is not so widely known that Newton, in spite of his 
 deeply religious spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was
 
 !g FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 vigorously urged against him that by his statement of the 
 law of gravitation he " took from God that direct action on 
 his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and 
 transferred it to material mechanism," and that he " sub- 
 stituted gravitation for Providence." But, more than this, 
 these men gave a new basis for the theory of evolution as 
 distinguished from the theory of creation. 
 
 Especially worthy of note is it that the great work of 
 Descartes, erroneous as many of its deductions were, and, 
 in view of the lack of physical knowledge in his time, must 
 be, had done much to weaken the old conception. His 
 theory of a universe brought out of all-pervading matter, 
 wrought into orderly arrangement by movements in accord- 
 ance with physical laws though it was but a provisional 
 hypothesis had done much to draw men's minds from the 
 old theological view of creation ; it was an example of intel- 
 lectual honesty arriving at errors, but thereby aiding the 
 advent of truths. Crippled though Descartes was by his 
 almost morbid fear of the Church, this part of his work was 
 no small factor in bringing in that attitude of mind which 
 led to a reception of the thoughts of more unfettered 
 thinkers. 
 
 Thirty years later came, in England, an effort of a differ- 
 ent sort, but with a similar result. In 1678 Ralph Cud- 
 worth published his Intellectual System of the Universe. To 
 this day he remains, in breadth of scholarship, in strength 
 of thought, in tolerance, and in honesty, one of the greatest 
 glories of the English Church, and his work was worthy of 
 him. He purposed to build a fortress which should protect 
 Christianity against all dangerous theories of the universe, 
 ancient or modern. The foundations of the structure were 
 laid with old thoughts thrown often into new and striking 
 forms ; but, as the superstructure arose more and more into 
 view, while genius marked every part of it, features ap- 
 peared which gave the rigidly orthodox serious misgivings. 
 From the old theories of direct personal action on the uni- 
 verse by the Almighty he broke utterly. He dwelt on the 
 action of law, rejected the continuous exercise of miraculous 
 intervention, pointed out the fact that in the natural world 
 there are " errors " and " bungles," and argued vigorously
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. 17 
 
 in favour of the origin and maintenance of the universe as a 
 slow and gradual development of Nature in obedience to an 
 inward principle. The Balaks of seventeenth-century ortho- 
 doxy might well condemn this honest Balaam. 
 
 Toward the end of the next century a still more profound 
 genius, Immanuel Kant, presented the nebular theory, giv- 
 ing it, in the light of Newton's great utterances, a consist- 
 ency which it never before had ; and about the same time 
 Laplace gave it yet greater strength by mathematical reason- 
 ings of wonderful power and extent, thus implanting firmly 
 in modern thought the idea that our own solar system and 
 others suns, planets, satellites, and their various move- 
 ments, distances, and magnitudes necessarily result from 
 the obedience of nebulous masses to natural laws. 
 
 Throughout the theological world there was an outcry 
 at once against " atheism," and war raged fiercely. Her- 
 schel and others pointed out many nebulous patches appar- 
 ently gaseous. They showed by physical and mathemat- 
 ical demonstrations that the hypothesis accounted for the 
 great body of facts, and, despite clamour, were gaining 
 ground, when the improved telescopes resolved some of the 
 patches of nebulous matter into multitudes of stars. The 
 opponents of the nebular hypothesis were overjoyed ; they 
 now sang pasans to astronomy,' because, as they said, it had 
 proved the truth of Scripture. They had jumped to the 
 conclusion that all nebulas must be alike ; that, if some are 
 made up of systems of stars, all must be so made up ; that 
 none can be masses of attenuated gaseous matter, because 
 some are not. 
 
 Science halted for a time. The accepted doctrine be- 
 came this : that the only reason why all the nebulae are not 
 resolved into distinct stars is that our telescopes are not 
 sufficiently powerful. But in time came the discovery of 
 the spectroscope and spectrum analysis, and thence Fraun- 
 hofer's discovery that the spectrum of an ignited gaseous 
 body is non-continuous, with interrupting lines; and Dra- 
 per's discovery that the spectrum of an ignited solid is con- 
 tinuous, with no interrupting lines. And now the spectro- 
 scope was turned upon the nebulas, and many of them were 
 found to be gaseous. Here, then, was ground for the infer- 
 3
 
 jg FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 ence that in these nebulous masses at different stages of con- 
 densation some apparently mere patches of mist, some with 
 luminous centres we have the process of development ac- 
 tually going on, and observations like those of Lord Rosse 
 and Arrest gave yet further confirmation to this view. Then 
 came the great contribution of the nineteenth century to 
 physics, aiding to explain important parts of the vast process 
 by the mechanical theory of heat. 
 
 Again the nebular hypothesis came forth stronger than 
 ever, and about 1850 the beautiful experiment of Plateau on 
 the rotation of a fluid globe came in apparently to illustrate 
 if not to confirm it. Even so determined a defender of ortho- 
 doxy as Mr. Gladstone at last acknowledged some form of a 
 nebular hypothesis as probably true. 
 
 Here, too, was exhibited that form of surrendering theo- 
 logical views to science under the claim that science con- 
 curs with theology, which we have seen in so many other 
 fields ; and, as typical, an example may be given, which, how- 
 ever restricted in its scope, throws light on the process by 
 which such surrenders are obtained. A few years since one 
 of the most noted professors of chemistry in the city of New 
 York, under the auspices of one of its most fashionable 
 churches, gave a lecture which, as was claimed in the public 
 prints and in placards posted in the streets, was to show 
 that science supports the theory of creation given in the 
 sacred books ascribed to Moses. A large audience assem- 
 bled, and a brilliant series of elementary experiments with 
 oxygen, hydrogen, and carbonic acid was concluded by the 
 Plateau demonstration. It was beautifully made. As the 
 coloured globule of oil, representing the earth, was revolved 
 in a transparent medium of equal density, as it became flat- 
 tened at the poles, as rings then broke forth from it and 
 revolved about it, and, finally, as some of these rings broke 
 into satellites, which for a moment continued to circle about 
 the central mass, the audience, as well they might, rose and 
 burst into rapturous applause. 
 
 Thereupon a well-to-do citizen arose and moved the 
 thanks of the audience to the eminent professor for " this 
 perfect demonstration of the exact and literal conformity of 
 the statements given in Holy Scripture with the latest re-
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. JQ 
 
 suits of science." The motion was carried unanimously and 
 with applause, and the audience dispersed, feeling that a 
 great service had been rendered to orthodoxy. Sancta sint- 
 plicitas ! 
 
 What this incident exhibited on a small scale has been 
 seen elsewhere with more distinguished actors and on a 
 broader stage. Scores of theologians, chief among whom 
 of late, in zeal if not in knowledge, has been Mr. Gladstone, 
 have endeavoured to " reconcile " the two accounts in Gene- 
 sis with each other and with the truths regarding the origin 
 of the universe gained by astronomy, geology, geography, 
 physics, and chemistry. The result has been recently stated 
 by an eminent theologian, the Hulsean Professor of Divinity 
 at the University of Cambridge. He declares, " No attempt 
 at reconciling Genesis with the exacting requirements of 
 modern sciences has ever been known to succeed without 
 entailing a degree of special pleading or forced interpreta- 
 tion to which, in such a question, we should be wise to have 
 no recourse."* 
 
 The revelations of another group of sciences, though 
 sometimes bitterly opposed and sometimes " reconciled " by 
 
 * For an interesting reference to the outcry against Newton, see McCosh, The 
 Religious Aspect of Evolution, New York, 1890, pp. 103, 104 ; for germs of an 
 evolutionary view among the Babylonians, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of 
 Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 74, 75 ; for a germ of the same thought in Lucretius, 
 see his De Natura Renim, lib. v, pp. 187-194, 447-454 ; for Bruno's conjecture (in 
 1591), see Jevons, Principks of Science, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 299 ; for Kant's 
 statement, see his Naturgeschichte des Himmels ; for his part in the nebular hy- 
 pothesis, see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i. p. 266 ; for value of Pla- 
 teau's beautiful experiment, very cautiously estimated, see Jevons, vol. ii, p. 36 ; 
 also Elisee Reclus, The Earth, translated by Woodward, vol. i, pp. 14-18, for an 
 estimate still more careful ; for a general account of discoveries of the nature of 
 nebulae by spectroscope, see Draper, Conflict between Religion and Science ; for a 
 careful discussion regarding the spectra of solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies, see 
 Schellen, Spectrum Analysis, pp. 100 et seq. ; for a very thorough discussion of the 
 bearings of discoveries made by spectrum analysis upon the nebular hypothesis, 
 ibid., pp. 532-537 ; for a presentation of the difficulties yet unsolved, see an article 
 by Plummer in the London Popular Science Review fcr January, 1875 ; for an ex- 
 cellent short summary of recent observations and thought on this subject, see T. 
 Sterry Hunt, Address at the Priestley Centennial, pp. 7, 8 ; for an interesting 
 modification of this hypothesis, see Proctor's writings ; for a still more recent view, 
 see Lockyer's two articles on The Sun's Place in A'ature, in Nature for February 
 14 and 25, 1895.
 
 2Q FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 theologians, have finally set the whole question at rest. 
 First, there have come the biblical critics earnest Christian 
 scholars, working for the sake of truth and these have 
 revealed beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt the exist- 
 ence of at least two distinct accounts of creation in our book 
 of Genesis, which can sometimes be forced to agree, but 
 which are generally absolutely at variance with each other. 
 These scholars have further shown the two accounts to be 
 not the cunningly devised fables of priestcraft, but evidently 
 fragments of earlier legends, myths, and theologies, accepted 
 in good faith and brought together for the noblest of pur- 
 poses by those who put in order the first of our sacred 
 books. 
 
 Next have come the archaeologists and philologists, the 
 devoted students of ancient monuments and records ; of 
 these are such as Rawlinson, George Smith, Sayce, Oppert, 
 Jensen, Schrader, Delitzsch, and a phalanx of similarly de- 
 voted scholars, who have deciphered a multitude of ancient 
 texts, especially the inscriptions found in the great library 
 of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, and have discovered therein 
 an account of the origin of the world identical in its most 
 important features with the later accounts in our own book 
 of Genesis. 
 
 These men have had the courage to point out these facts 
 and to connect them with the truth that these Chaldean and 
 Babylonian myths, legends, and theories were far earlier 
 than those of the Hebrews, which so strikingly resemble 
 them, and which we have in our sacred books ; and they 
 have also shown us how natural it was that the Jewish 
 accounts of the creation should have been obtained at that 
 remote period when the earliest Hebrews were among the 
 Chaldeans, and how the great Hebrew poetic accounts of 
 creation were drawn either from the sacred traditions of 
 these earlier peoples or from antecedent sources common to 
 various ancient nations. 
 
 In a summary which for profound thought and fearless 
 integrity does honour not only to himself but to the great 
 position which he holds, the Rev. Dr. Driver, Professor of 
 Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church at Oxford, has recently 
 stated the case fully and fairly. Having pointed out the
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. 21 
 
 fact that the Hebrews were one people out of many who 
 thought upon the origin of the universe, he says that they 
 " framed theories to account for the beginnings of the earth 
 and man " ; that " they either did this for themselves or bor- 
 rowed those of their neighbours " ; that " of the theories 
 current in Assyria and Phoenicia fragments have been pre- 
 served, and these exhibit points of resemblance with the 
 biblical narrative sufficient to warrant the inference that 
 both are derived from the same cycle of tradition." 
 
 After giving some extracts from the Chaldean creation 
 tablets he says : " In the light of these facts it is difficult to 
 resist the conclusion that the biblical narrative is drawn 
 from the same source as these other records. The biblical 
 historians, it is plain, derived their materials from the best 
 human sources available. . . . The materials which with 
 other nations were combined into the crudest physical theo- 
 ries or associated with a grotesque polytheism were vivified 
 and transformed by the inspired genius of the Hebrew his- 
 torians, and adapted to become the vehicle of profound 
 religious truth." 
 
 Not less honourable to the sister university and to him- 
 self is the statement recently made by the Rev. Dr. Ryle, 
 Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. He says that 
 to suppose that a Christian " must either renounce his con- 
 fidence in the achievements of scientific research or abandon 
 his faith in Scripture is a monstrous perversion of Christian 
 freedom." He declares : " The old position is no longer 
 tenable ; a new position has to be taken up at once, prayer- 
 fully chosen, and hopefully held." He then goes on to 
 compare the Hebrew story of creation with the earlier 
 stories developed among kindred peoples, and especially 
 with the pre-existing Assyro-Babylonian cosmogony, and 
 shows that they are from the same source. He points out 
 that any attempt to explain particular features of the story 
 into harmony with the modern scientific ideas necessitates 
 " a non-natural " interpretation ; but he says that, if we adopt 
 a natural interpretation, " we shall consider that the Hebrew 
 description of the visible universe is unscientific as judged 
 by modern standards, and that it shares the limitations of 
 the imperfect knowledge of the age at which it was com-
 
 22 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 mitted to writing." Regarding the account in Genesis of 
 man's physical origin, he says that it " is expressed in the 
 simple terms of prehistoric legend, of unscientific pictorial 
 description." 
 
 In these statements and in a multitude of others made by 
 eminent Christian investigators in other countries is indi- 
 cated what the victory is which has now been fully won 
 over the older theology. 
 
 Thus, from the Assyrian researches as well as from other 
 sources, it has come to be acknowledged by the most emi- 
 nent scholars at the leading seats of Christian learning that 
 the accounts of creation with which for nearly two thousand 
 years all scientific discoveries have had to be " reconciled " 
 the accounts which blocked the way of Copernicus, and 
 Galileo, and Newton, and Laplace were simply transcribed 
 or evolved from a mass of myths and legends largely derived 
 by the Hebrews from their ancient relations with Chaldea, 
 rewrought in a monotheistic sense, imperfectly welded to- 
 gether, and then thrown into poetic forms in the sacred 
 books which we have inherited. 
 
 On one hand, then, we have the various groups of men 
 devoted to the physical sciences all converging toward the 
 proofs that the universe, as we at present know it, is the 
 result of an evolutionary process that is, of the gradual 
 working of physical laws upon an early condition of matter ; 
 on the other hand, we have other great groups of men 
 devoted to historical, philological, and archaeological science 
 whose researches all converge toward the conclusion that 
 our sacred accounts of creation were the result of an evolu- 
 tion from an early chaos of rude opinion. 
 
 The great body of theologians who have so long resisted 
 the conclusions of the men of science have claimed to be 
 fighting especially for " the truth of Scripture," and their 
 final answer to the simple conclusions of science regarding 
 the evolution of the material universe has been the cry, 
 " The Bible is true." And they are right though in a sense 
 nobler than they have dreamed. Science, while conquering 
 them, has found in our Scriptures a far nobler truth than 
 that literal historical exactness for which theologians have 
 so long and so vainly contended. More and more as we
 
 THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. 23 
 
 consider the results of the long struggle in this field we are 
 brought to the conclusion that the inestimable value of the 
 great sacred books of the world is found in their revelation 
 of the steady striving of our race after higher conceptions, 
 beliefs, and aspirations, both in morals and religion. Un- 
 folding and exhibiting this long-continued effort, each of the 
 great sacred books of the world is precious, and all, in the 
 highest sense, are true. Not one of them, indeed, conforms 
 to the measure of what mankind has now reached in his- 
 torical and scientific truth ; to make a claim to such con- 
 formity is folly, for it simply exposes those who make it 
 and the books for which it is made to loss of their just in- 
 fluence. 
 
 That to which the great sacred books of the world con- 
 form, and our own most of all, is the evolution of the high- 
 est conceptions, beliefs, and aspirations of our race from its 
 childhood through the great turning-points in its history. 
 Herein lies the truth of all bibles, and especially of our own. 
 Of vast value they indeed often are as a record of historical 
 outward fact ; recent researches in the East are constantly 
 increasing this value ; but it is not for this that we prize 
 them most : they are eminently precious, not as a record of 
 outward fact, but as a mirror of the evolving heart, mind, 
 and soul of man. They are true because they have been 
 developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolu- 
 tion of truth in human history, and because in poem, chroni- 
 cle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect this 
 development of what is best in the onward march of human- 
 ity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say 
 that a flower or a tree or a planet is not true ; to scoff at 
 them is to scoff at the law of the universe. In welding to- 
 gether into noble form, whether in the book of Genesis, 
 or in the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the 
 great conceptions of men acting under earlier inspiration, 
 whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or India, or Persia, the 
 compilers of our sacred books have given to humanity a 
 possession ever becoming more and more precious ; and 
 modern science, in substituting a new heaven and a new 
 earth for the old the reign of law for the reign of ca- 
 price, and the idea of evolution for that of creation has
 
 24 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 added and is steadily adding a new revelation divinely in- 
 spired. 
 
 In the light of these two evolutions, then one of the 
 visible universe, the other of a sacred creation-legend sci- 
 ence and theology, if the master minds in both are wise, 
 may at last be reconciled. A great step in this reconciliation 
 was recently seen at the main centre of theological thought 
 among English-speaking people, when, in the collection of 
 essays entitled Liix Mundi, emanating from the college estab- 
 lished in these latter days as a fortress of orthodoxy at Ox- 
 ford, the legendary character of the creation accounts in our 
 sacred books was acknowledged, and when the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury asked, " May not the Holy Spirit at times 
 have made use of myth and legend ? " * 
 
 II. THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS 
 AND MAN. 
 
 IN one of the windows of the cathedral at Ulm a mediae- 
 val glass-stainer has represented the Almighty as busily en- 
 gaged in creating the animals, and there has just left the 
 divine hands an elephant fully accoutred, with armour, har- 
 ness, and housings, ready for war. Similar representations 
 appear in illuminated manuscripts and even in early printed 
 books, and, as the culmination of the whole, the Almighty 
 is shown as fashioning the first man from a hillock of clay 
 and extracting from his side, with evident effort, the first 
 woman. 
 
 This view of the general process of creation had come 
 from far, appearing under varying forms in various ancient 
 cosmogonies. In the Egyptian temples at Philae and Den- 
 
 * For the first citations above made, see The Cosmogony of Genesis, by the 
 Rev. S. R. Driver, D. D., Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of He- 
 brew at Oxford, in The Expositor for January, 1886 ; for the second series of cita- 
 tions, see The Early Narratives of Genesis, by Herbert Edward Ryle, Hulsean 
 Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, London, 1892. For evidence that even the 
 stiffest of Scotch Presbyterians have now come to discard the old literal biblical 
 narrative of creation and to regard the declaration of the Westminster Confession 
 thereon as a " disproved theory of creation," see Principal John Tulloch, in Con- 
 temporary Review, March, 1877, on Religious Thought in Scotland especially 
 page 550.
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 25 
 
 derah may still be seen representations of the Nile gods 
 modelling lumps of clay into men, and a similar work is 
 ascribed in the Assyrian tablets to the gods of Baby- 
 lonia. Passing into our own sacred books, these ideas be- 
 came the starting point of a vast new development of the- 
 ology.* 
 
 The fathers of the Church generally received each of the 
 two conflicting creation legends in Genesis literally, and 
 then, having done their best to reconcile them with each 
 other and to mould them together, made them the final test 
 of thought upon the universe and all things therein. At the 
 beginning of the fourth century Lactantius struck the key- 
 note of this mode of subordinating all other things in the 
 study of creation to the literal text of Scripture, and he en- 
 forces his view of the creation of man by a bit of philology, 
 saying the final being created " is called man because he is 
 made from the ground homo ex humo" 
 
 In the second half of the same century this view as to 
 the literal acceptance of the sacred text was reasserted by 
 St. Ambrose, who, in his work on the creation, declared that 
 " Moses opened his mouth and poured forth what God had 
 said to him." But a greater than either of them fastened 
 this idea into the Christian theologies. St. Augustine, pre- 
 paring his Commentary on the Book of Genesis, laid down in 
 one famous sentence the law which has lasted in the Church 
 until our own time : " Nothing is to be accepted save on the 
 authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than 
 all the powers of the human mind." The vigour of the sen- 
 tence in its original Latin carried it ringing down the cen- 
 turies: "Major est Scriptures auctoritas quam omnis humani 
 ingenii capacitas" 
 
 Through the mediaeval period, in spite of a revolt led 
 by no other than St. Augustine himself, and followed by a 
 
 * For representations of Egyptian gods creating men out of lumps of clay, see 
 Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of History, p. 156; for the Chaldean legends of 
 the creation of men and animals, see ibid., p. 543 ; also George Smith, Chaldean 
 Account of Genesis, Sayce's edition, pp. 36, 72, and 93 ; also for similar legends in 
 other ancient nations, Lenormant, Origines de FHistoire, pp. ijetsey.; for mediae- 
 val representations of the creation of man and woman, see Didron, Iconographie, 
 PP- 35, 178, 224, 537.
 
 2 6 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 series of influential churchmen, contending, as we shall here- 
 after see, for a modification of the accepted view of creation, 
 this phrase held the minds of men firmly. The great Do- 
 minican encyclopaedist, Vincent of Beauvais, in his Mirror 
 of Nature, while mixing ideas brought from Aristotle with a 
 theory drawn from the Bible, stood firmly by the first of the 
 accounts given in Genesis, and assigned the special virtue of 
 the number six as a reason why all things were created in 
 six days ; and in the later Middle Ages that eminent author- 
 ity, Cardinal d'Ailly, accepted everything regarding crea- 
 tion in the sacred books literally. Only a faint dissent is 
 seen in Gregory Reisch, another authority of this later pe- 
 riod, who, while giving, in his book on the beginning of 
 things, a full-length woodcut showing the Almighty in the 
 act of extracting Eve from Adam's side, with all the rest of 
 new-formed Nature in the background, leans in his writings, 
 like St. Augustine, toward a belief in the pre-existence of 
 matter. 
 
 At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was 
 thrown in favour of the literal acceptance of Scripture as 
 the main source of natural science. The allegorical and mys- 
 tical interpretations of earlier theologians he utterly rejected. 
 " Why," he asks, " should Moses use allegory when he is 
 not speaking of allegorical creatures or of an allegorical 
 world, but of real creatures and of a visible world, which 
 can be seen, felt, and grasped ? Moses calls things by their 
 right names, as we ought to do. ... I hold that the animals 
 took their being at once upon the word of God, as did also 
 the fishes in the sea." 
 
 Not less explicit in his adherence to the literal account 
 of creation given in Genesis was Calvin. He warns those 
 who, by taking another view than his own, " basely insult 
 the Creator, to expect a judge who will annihilate them." 
 He insists that all species of animals were created in six 
 days, each made up of an evening and a morning, and that 
 no new species has ever appeared since. He dwells on the 
 production of birds from the water as resting upon certain 
 warrant of Scripture, but adds, " If the question is to be 
 argued on physical grounds, we know that water is more 
 akin to air than the earth is." As to difficulties in the scrip-
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 27 
 
 tural account of creation, he tells us that God " wished by 
 these to give proofs of his power which should fill us with 
 astonishment." 
 
 The controlling minds in the Roman Church steadfastly 
 held this view. In the seventeenth century Bossuet threw 
 his vast authority in its favour, and in his Discourse on Uni- 
 versal History, which has remained the foundation not only 
 of theological but of general historical teaching in France 
 down to the present republic, we find him calling atten- 
 tion to what he regards as the culminating act of creation, 
 and asserting that, literally, for the creation of man earth 
 was used, and "the finger of God applied to corruptible 
 matter." 
 
 The Protestant world held this idea no less persistently. 
 In the seventeenth century Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chan- 
 cellor of the University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical 
 scholar of his time, attempted to reconcile the two main leg- 
 ends in Genesis by saying that of the " clean sort of beasts 
 there were seven of every kind created, three couples for 
 breeding and the odd one for Adam's sacrifice on his fall, 
 which God foresaw " ; and that of unclean beasts only one 
 couple was created. 
 
 So literal was this whole conception of the work of crea- 
 tion that in these days it can scarcely be imagined. The 
 Almighty was represented in theological literature, in the 
 pictured Bibles, and in works of art generally, as a sort of 
 enlarged and venerable Nuremberg toymaker. At times 
 the accounts in Genesis were illustrated with even more 
 literal exactness ; thus, in connection with a well-known pas- 
 sage in the sacred text, the Creator was shown as a tailor, 
 seated, needle in hand, diligently sewing together skins of 
 beasts into coats for Adam and Eve. Such representations 
 presented no difficulties to the docile minds of the Middle 
 Ages and the Reformation period ; and in the same spirit, 
 when the discovery of fossils began to provoke thought, 
 these were declared to be "models of his works approved 
 or rejected by the great Artificer," " outlines of future cre- 
 ations," " sports of Nature," or " objects placed in the strata 
 to bring to naught human curiosity " ; and this kind of ex- 
 planation lingered on until in our own time an eminent natu-
 
 2 8 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 ralist, in his anxiety to save the literal account in Genesis, 
 has urged that Jehovah tilted and twisted the strata, scat- 
 tered the fossils through them, scratched the glacial furrows 
 upon them, spread over them the marks of erosion by water, 
 and set Niagara pouring all in an instant- thus mystifying 
 the world " for some inscrutable purpose, but for his own 
 glory." * 
 
 The next important development of theological reason- 
 ing had regard to the divisions of the animal kingdom. 
 
 Naturally, one of the first divisions which struck the in- 
 quiring mind was that between useful and noxious creatures, 
 and the question therefore occurred, How could a good 
 God create tigers and serpents, thorns and thistles? The 
 answer was found in theological considerations upon sin. 
 To man's first disobedience all woes were due. Great men 
 for eighteen hundred years developed the theory that before 
 Adam's disobedience there was no death, and therefore nei- 
 ther ferocity nor venom. 
 
 Some typical utterances in the evolution of this doctrine 
 are worthy of a passing glance. St. Augustine expressly 
 confirmed and emphasized the view that the vegetable as 
 well as the animal kingdom was cursed on account of man's 
 sin. Two hundred years later this utterance had been 
 echoed on from father to father of the Church until it was 
 caught by Bede ; he declared that before man's fall animals 
 were harmless, but were made poisonous or hurtful by 
 Adam's sin, and he said, " Thus fierce and poisonous animals 
 were created for terrifying man (because God foresaw that 
 
 * For the citation from Lactantius, see Divin. Instit., lib. ii, cap. xi, in Migne, 
 tome vi, pp. 311, 312 ; for St. Augustine's great phrase, see the De Genes, ad litt., 
 ii, 5 ; for St. Ambrose, see lib. i, cap. ii ; for Vincent of Beauvais, see the Specu- 
 lum Natitrale, lib. i, cap. ii, and lib. ii, cap. xv and xxx ; also Bourgeat, Ettides sur 
 Vincent de Beauvais, Paris, 1856, especially chaps, vii, xii, and xvi ; for Cardinal 
 d'Ailly, see the Imago Mundi, and for Reisch, see the various editions of the Mar- 
 garita Philosophica ; for Luther's statements, see Luther's Schriften, ed. Walch, 
 Halle, 1740, Commentary on Genesis, vol. i ; for Calvin's view of the creation of the 
 animals, including the immutability of species, see the Comm. in Gen., tome i of 
 his Opera omnia, Amst., 1671, cap. i, v, xx, p. 5, also cap. ii, v, ii, p. 8, and else- 
 where ; for Bossuet, see his Discours sur FHistoire universelle (in his (Euvres, tome 
 v, Paris, 1846) ; for Lightfoot, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822 ; for 
 Bede, see the Hexameron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, p. 21 ; for Mr. Gosse's mod- 
 ern defence of the literal view, see his Omphalos, London, 1857, passim.
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 
 
 2 9 
 
 he would sin), in order that he might be made aware of the 
 final punishment of hell." 
 
 In the twelfth century this view was incorporated by 
 Peter Lombard into his great theological work, the Sentences, 
 which became a text-book of theology through the middle 
 ages. He affirmed that " no created things would have been 
 hurtful to man had he not sinned ; they became hurtful for 
 the sake of terrifying and punishing vice or of proving and 
 perfecting virtue ; they were created harmless, and on ac- 
 count of sin became hurtful." 
 
 This theological theory regarding animals was brought 
 out in the eighteenth century with great force by John Wes- 
 ley. He declared that before Adam's sin " none of these 
 attempted to devour or in any wise hurt one another " ; " the 
 spider was as harmless as the fly, and did not lie in wait 
 for blood." Not only Wesley, but the eminent Dr. Adam 
 Clarke and Dr. Richard Watson, whose ideas had the very 
 greatest weight among the English Dissenters, and even 
 among leading thinkers in the Established Church, held 
 firmly to this theory ; so that not until, in our own time, 
 geology revealed the remains of vast multitudes of carnivor- 
 ous creatures, many of them with half-digested remains of 
 other animals in their stomachs, all extinct long ages before 
 the appearance of man upon earth, was a victory won by 
 science over theology in this field. 
 
 A curious development of this doctrine was seen in the 
 belief drawn by sundry old commentators from the con- 
 demnation of the serpent in Genesis a belief, indeed, per- 
 fectly natural, since it was evidently that of the original 
 writers of the account preserved in the first of our sacred 
 books. This belief was that, until the tempting serpent was 
 cursed by the Almighty, all serpents stood erect, walked, 
 and talked. 
 
 This belief was handed down the ages as part of " the 
 sacred deposit of the faith " until Watson, the most prolific 
 writer of the evangelical reform in the eighteenth century 
 and the standard theologian of the evangelical party, de- 
 clared : " We have no reason at all to believe that the animal 
 had a serpentine form in any mode or degree until its trans- 
 formation ; that he was then degraded to a reptile to go
 
 jo FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 upon his belly imports, on the contrary, an entire loss and 
 alteration of the original form." Here, again, was a ripe 
 result of the theologic method diligently pursued by the 
 strongest thinkers in the Church during nearly two thou- 
 sand years ; but this " sacred deposit " also faded away 
 when the geologists found abundant remains of fossil ser- 
 pents dating from periods long before the appearance of man. 
 
 Troublesome questions also arose among theologians re- 
 garding animals classed as " superfluous." St. Augustine 
 was especially exercised thereby. He says : " I confess I 
 am ignorant why mice and frogs were created, or flies and 
 worms. . . . All creatures are either useful, hurtful, or su- 
 perfluous to us. ... As for the hurtful creatures, we are 
 either punished, or disciplined, or terrified by them, so that 
 we may not cherish and love this life." As to the " superflu- 
 ous animals," he says, " Although they are not necessary for 
 our service, yet the whole design of the universe is thereby 
 completed and finished." Luther, who followed St. Augus- 
 tine in so many other matters, declined to follow him fully in 
 this. To him a fly was not merely superfluous, it was nox- 
 ious sent by the devil to vex him when reading. 
 
 Another subject which gave rise to much searching of 
 Scripture and long trains of theological reasoning was the 
 difference between the creation of man and that of other 
 living beings. 
 
 Great stress was laid by theologians, from St. Basil and 
 St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet, and from 
 Luther to Wesley, on the radical distinction indicated in 
 Genesis, God having created man "in his own image." 
 What this statement meant was seen in the light of the later 
 biblical statement that "-Adam begat Seth in his own like- 
 ness, after his image." 
 
 In view of this and of well-known tex.ts incorporated 
 from older creation legends into the Hebrew sacred books 
 it came to be widely held that, while man was directly 
 moulded and fashioned separately by the Creator's hand, the 
 animals generally were evoked in numbers from the earth 
 and sea by the Creator's voice. 
 
 A question now arose naturally as to the distinctions of 
 species among animals. The vast majority of theologians
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 31 
 
 agreed in representing all animals as created " in the begin- 
 ning," and named by Adam, preserved in the ark, and con- 
 tinued ever afterward under exactly the same species. This 
 belief ripened into a dogma. Like so many other dogmas 
 in the Church, Catholic and Protestant, its real origins are 
 to be found rather in pagan philosophy than in the Chris- 
 tian Scriptures ; it came far more from Plato and Aristotle 
 than from Moses and St. Paul. But this was not considered : 
 more and more it became necessary to believe that each and 
 every difference of species was impressed by the Creator 
 " in the beginning," and that no change had taken place or 
 could have taken place since. 
 
 Some difficulties arose here and there as zoology pro- 
 gressed and revealed ever-increasing numbers of species ; 
 but through the Middle Ages, and indeed long after the 
 Reformation, these difficulties were easily surmounted by 
 making the ark of Noah larger and larger, and especially 
 by holding that there had been a human error in regard to 
 its measurement.* 
 
 But naturally there was developed among both ecclesias- 
 tics and laymen a human desire to go beyond these special 
 points in the history of animated beings a desire to know 
 what the creation really is. 
 
 Current legends, stories, and travellers' observations, 
 poor as they were, tended powerfully to stimulate curiosity 
 in this field. 
 
 Three centuries before the Christian era Aristotle had 
 made the first really great attempt to satisfy this curiosity, 
 and had begun a development of studies in natural history 
 which remains one of the leading achievements in the story 
 of our race. 
 
 * For St. Augustine, see De Genesi and De Trinilate, passim ; for Bede, see 
 Hexcemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-38, 42 ; and De Sex Dierum 
 Creatione, in Migne, tome xciii, p. 215 ; for Peter Lombard on "noxious animals," 
 see his Sententia, lib. ii, dist. xv, 3, Migne, tome cxcii, p. 682 ; for Wesley, Clarke, 
 and Watson, see quotations from them and notes thereto in my chapter on Geology \ 
 for St. Augustine on " superfluous animals," see the De Genesi, lib. i, cap. xvi, 26 ; 
 on Luther's view of flies, see the Table Talk and his famous utterance, " Odio 
 muscas quia sunt imagines diaboli et htereticorum " ; for the agency of Aristotle 
 and Plato in fastening the belief in the fixity of species into Christian theology, see 
 Sachs, Geschifhte der Botanik, Miinchen, 1875, p. 107 and note, also p. 113.
 
 32 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 But the feeling which we have already seen so strong in 
 the early Church that all study of Nature was futile in 
 view of the approaching end of the world indicated so 
 clearly in the New Testament and voiced so powerfully by 
 Lactantius and St. Augustine held back this current of 
 thought for many centuries. Still, the better tendency in 
 humanity continued to assert itself. There was, indeed, an 
 influence coming from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves 
 which wrought powerfully to this end ; for, in spite of all 
 that Lactantius or St. Augustine might say as to the futility 
 of any study of Nature, the grand utterances in the Psalms 
 regarding the beauties and wonders of creation, in all the 
 glow of the truest poetry, ennobled the study even among 
 those whom logic drew away from it. 
 
 But, as a matter of course, in the early Church and 
 throughout the Middle Ages all such studies were cast in a 
 theologic mould. Without some purpose of biblical illustra- 
 tion or spiritual edification they were considered futile ; too 
 much prying into the secrets of Nature was very generally 
 held to be dangerous both to body and soul ; only for show- 
 ing forth God's glory and his purposes in the creation were 
 such studies praiseworthy. The great work of Aristotle 
 was under eclipse. The early Christian thinkers gave little 
 attention to it, and that little was devoted to transforming it 
 into something absolutely opposed to his whole spirit and 
 method ; in place of it they developed the Physiologus and 
 the Bestiaries, mingling scriptural statements, legends of the 
 saints, and fanciful inventions with pious intent and childlike 
 simplicity. In place of research came authority the au- 
 thority of the Scriptures as interpreted by the Physiologus 
 and the Bestiaries and these remained the principal source 
 of thought on animated Nature for over a thousand years. 
 
 Occasionally, indeed, fear was shown among the rulers 
 in the Church, even at such poor prying into the creation as 
 this, and in the fifth century a synod under Pope Gelasius 
 administered a rebuke to the Physiologus ; but the interest in 
 Nature was too strong : the great work on Creation by St. 
 Basil had drawn from the Physiologus precious illustrations 
 of Holy Writ, and the strongest of the early popes, Gregory 
 the Great, virtually sanctioned it.
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 
 
 33 
 
 Thus was developed a sacred science of creation and of 
 the divine purpose in Nature, which went on developing 
 from the fourth century to the nineteenth from St. Basil to 
 St. Isidore of Seville, from Isidore to Vincent of Beauvais, 
 and from Vincent to Archdeacon Paley and the Bridgewater 
 Treatises. 
 
 Like all else in the Middle Ages, this sacred science was 
 developed purely by theological methods. Neglecting the 
 wonders which the dissection of the commonest animals 
 would have afforded them, these naturalists attempted to 
 throw light into Nature by ingenious use of scriptural texts, 
 by research among the lives of the saints, and by the plenti- 
 ful application of metaphysics. Hence even such strong 
 men as St. Isidore of Seville treasured up accounts of the 
 unicorn and dragons mentioned in the Scriptures and of the 
 phoenix and basilisk in profane writings. Hence such con- 
 tributions to knowledge as that the basilisk kills serpents by 
 his breath and men by his glance, that the lion when pur- 
 sued effaces his tracks with the end of his tail, that the peli- 
 can nourishes her young with her own blood, that serpents 
 lay aside their venom before drinking, that the salamander 
 quenches fire, that the hyena can talk with shepherds, that 
 certain birds are born of the fruit of a certain tree when it 
 happens to fall into the water, with other masses of science 
 equally valuable. 
 
 As to the method of bringing science to bear on Scrip- 
 ture, the Physiologus gives an example, illustrating the pas- 
 sage in the book of Job which speaks of the old lion perish- 
 ing for lack of prey. Out of the attempt to explain an un- 
 usual Hebrew word in the text there came a curious devel- 
 opment of error, until we find fully evolved an account of 
 the " ant-lion," which, it gives us to understand, was the lion 
 mentioned by Job, and it says : " As to the ant-lion, his father 
 hath the shape of a lion, his mother that of an ant ; the father 
 liveth upon flesh and the mother upon herbs ; these bring 
 forth the ant-lion, a compound of both and in part like to 
 either ; for his fore part is like that of a lion and his hind 
 part like that of an ant. Being thus composed, he is neither 
 able to eat flesh like his father nor herbs like his mother, 
 and so he perisheth." 
 4
 
 34 
 
 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 In the middle of the thirteenth century we have a tri- 
 umph of this theological method in the great work of the 
 English Franciscan Bartholomew on The Properties of Things. 
 The theological method as applied to science consists largely 
 in accepting tradition and in spinning arguments to fit it. 
 In this field Bartholomew was a master. Having begun 
 with the intent mainly to explain the allusions in Scripture 
 to natural objects, he soon rises logically into a survey of 
 all Nature. Discussing the " cockatrice " of Scripture, he 
 tells us : " He drieth and burneth leaves with his touch, and 
 he is of so great venom and perilous that he slayeth and 
 wasteth him that nigheth him without tarrying ; and yet the 
 weasel overcometh him, for the biting of the weasel is death 
 to the cockatrice. Nevertheless the biting of the cockatrice 
 is death to the weasel if the weasel eat not rue before. And 
 though the cockatrice be venomous without remedy while 
 he is alive, yet he looseth all the malice when he is burnt to 
 ashes. His ashes be accounted profitable in working of 
 alchemy, and namely in turning and changing of metals." 
 
 Bartholomew also enlightens us on the animals of Egypt, 
 and says, " If the crocodile findeth a man by the water's 
 brim he slayeth him, and then he weepeth over him and 
 swalloweth him." 
 
 Naturally this good Franciscan naturalist devotes much 
 thought to the " dragons" mentioned in Scripture. He 
 says : " The dragon is most greatest of all serpents, and oft 
 he is drawn out of his den and riseth up into the air, and 
 the air is moved by him, and also the sea swelleth against 
 his venom, and he hath a crest, and reareth his tongue, and 
 hath teeth like a saw, and hath strength, and not only in 
 teeth but in tail, and grieveth with biting and with stinging. 
 Whom he findeth he slayeth. Oft four or five of them 
 fasten their tails together and rear up their heads, and sail 
 over the sea to get good meat. Between elephants and 
 dragons is everlasting fighting ; for the dragon with his tail 
 spanneth the elephant, and the elephant with his nose 
 throweth down the dragon. . . . The cause why the dragon 
 desireth his blood is the coldness thereof, by the which the 
 dragon desireth to cool himself. Jerome saith that the 
 dragon is a full thirsty beast, insomuch that he openeth his
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 
 
 35 
 
 mouth against the wind to quench the burning of his thirst 
 in that wise. Therefore, when he seeth ships in great wind 
 he flieth against the sail to take the cold wind, and over- 
 throweth the ship." 
 
 These ideas of Friar Bartholomew spread far and struck 
 deep into the popular mind. His book was translated into the 
 principal languages of Europe, and was one of those most 
 generally read during the Ages of Faith. It maintained its 
 position nearly three hundred years ; even after the inven- 
 tion of printing it held its own, and in the fifteenth century 
 there were issued no less than ten editions of it in Latin, 
 four in French, and various versions of it in Dutch, Spanish, 
 and English. Preachers found it especially useful in illus- 
 trating the ways of God to man. It was only when the great 
 voyages of discovery substituted ascertained fact for the- 
 ological reasoning in this province that its authority was 
 broken. 
 
 The same sort of science flourished in the Bestiaries, 
 which were used everywhere, and especially in the pulpits, 
 for the edification of the faithful. In all of these, as in that 
 compiled early in the thirteenth century by an ecclesiastic, 
 William of Normandy, we have this lesson, borrowed from 
 the Physiologus: "The lioness giveth birth to cubs which 
 remain three days without life. Then cometh the lion, 
 breatheth upon them, and bringeth them to life. . . . Thus 
 it is that Jesus Christ during three days was deprived of 
 life, but God the Father raised him gloriously." 
 
 Pious use was constantly made of this science, especially 
 by monkish preachers. The phoenix rising from his ashes 
 proves the doctrine of the resurrection ; the structure and 
 mischief of monkeys proves the existence of demons; the 
 fact that certain monkeys have no tails proves that Satan 
 has been shorn of his glory ; the weasel, which " constantly 
 changes its place, is a type of the man estranged from the 
 word of God, who findeth no rest." 
 
 The moral treatises of the time often took the form of 
 works on natural history, in order the more fully to exploit 
 these religious teachings of Nature. Thus from the book 
 On Bees, of the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpr6, we learn 
 that " wasps persecute bees and make war on them out of
 
 36 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 natural hatred " ; and these, he tells us, typify the demons 
 who dwell in the air and with lightning and tempest assail 
 and vex mankind whereupon he fills a long chapter with 
 anecdotes of such demonic warfare on mortals. In like 
 manner his fellow-Dominican, the inquisitor Nider, in his 
 book The Ant Hill, teaches us that the ants in Ethiopia, 
 which are said to have horns and to grow so large as 
 to look like dogs, are emblems of atrocious heretics, like 
 Wyclif and the Hussites, who bark and bite against the 
 truth ; while the ants of India, which dig up gold out of the 
 sand with their feet and hoard it, though they make no use 
 of it, symbolize the fruitless toil with which the heretics dig 
 out the gold of Holy Scripture and hoard it in their books 
 to no purpose. 
 
 This pious spirit not only pervaded science ; it bloomed 
 out in art, and especially in the cathedrals. In the gargoyles 
 overhanging the walls, in the grotesques clambering about 
 the towers or perched upon pinnacles, in the dragons prowl- 
 ing under archways or lurking in bosses of foliage, in the 
 apocalyptic beasts carved upon the stalls of the choir, 
 stained into the windows, wrought into the tapestries, illumi- 
 nated in the letters and borders of psalters and missals, these 
 marvels of creation suggested everywhere morals from the 
 Physiologus, the Bestiaries, and the Exempla.* 
 
 * For the Physiologus, Bestiaries, etc., see Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Te"ra- 
 tologiques ; also Hippeau's edition of the Bestiaire de Guillaume de Normandie, 
 Caen, 1852, and such mediaeval books of Exempla as the Lumen Natures ; also 
 Hoefer, Histoire de la Zoologie ; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation Fran- 
 fatse, Paris, 1885, vol. i, pp. 368, 369 ; also Cardinal Pitra, preface to the Spicile- 
 gium Solismense, Paris, 1885. passim ; also Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie; and, for 
 an admirable summary, the article Physiologus in the Encyclopedia Briiannica. 
 In the illuminated manuscripts in the Library of Cornell University are some very 
 striking examples of grotesques. For admirably illustrated articles on the Besti- 
 aries, see Cahier and Martin, Melanges d'Archeologie, Paris, 1851, 1852, and 1856, 
 vol. ii of the first series, pp. 85-232, and second series, volume on Curiositis Mys- 
 t/rieuses, pp. 106164 ; also J. R. Allen, Early Christian Symbolism in Great Brit- 
 ain and Ireland (London, 1887), lecture vi ; for an exhaustive discussion of the 
 subject, see Das Thierbuch des normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc, heraus- 
 gegeben von Reinisch, Leipsic, 1890; and, for an Italian example, Goldstaub und 
 Wendriner, Ein Tosco- Venezianischer Bestiarius, Halle, 1892, where is given, on 
 pp. 369-371, a very pious but very comical tradition regarding the beaver, hardly 
 mentionable to ears polite. For Friar Bartholomew, see (besides his book itself) 
 Medieval Lore, edited by Robert Steele, London, 1893, pp. 118-138.
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 
 
 37 
 
 Here and there among men who were free from church 
 control we have work of a better sort. In the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries Abd Allatif made observations upon the 
 natural history of Egypt which showed a truly scientific 
 spirit, and the Emperor Frederick II attempted to promote 
 a more fruitful study of Nature ; but one of these men was 
 abhorred as a Mussulman and the other as an infidel. Far 
 more in accordance with the spirit of the time was the ec- 
 clesiastic Giraldus Cambrensis, whose book on the topog- 
 raphy of Ireland bestows much attention upon the animals 
 of the island, and rarely fails to make each contribute an 
 appropriate moral. For example, he says that in Ireland 
 " eagles live for so many ages that they seem to contend 
 with eternity itself; so also the saints, having put off the 
 old man and put on the new, obtain the blessed fruit of ever- 
 lasting life." Again, he tells us : " Eagles often fly so high 
 that their wings are scorched by the sun ; so those who in 
 the Holy Scriptures strive to unravel the deep and hidden 
 secrets of the heavenly mysteries, beyond what is allowed, 
 fall below, as if the wings of the presumptuous imaginations 
 on which they are borne were scorched." 
 
 In one of the great men of the following century ap- 
 peared a gleam of healthful criticism : Albert the Great, in 
 his work on the animals, dissents from the widespread belief 
 that certain birds spring from trees and are nourished by 
 the sap, and also from the theory that some are generated 
 in the sea from decaying wood. 
 
 But it required many generations for such scepticism to 
 produce much effect, and we find among the illustrations in 
 an edition of Mandeville published just before the Reforma- 
 tion not only careful accounts but pictured representations 
 both of birds and of beasts produced in the fruit of trees.* 
 
 This general employment of natural science for pious 
 purposes went on after the Reformation. Luther frequently 
 made this use of it, and his example controlled his followers. 
 
 * For Giraldus Cambrensis, see the edition in the Bohn Library, London, 1863, 
 p. 30 ; for Abd Allatif and Frederick II, see Hoefer, as above ; for Albertus Mag- 
 nus, see the De Animalibus, lib. xxiii ; for the illustrations in Mandeville, see the 
 Strasburg edition, 1484 ; for the history of the myth of the tree which produces 
 birds, see Max M tiller's Lectures on the Science of Language, second series, lect. xii.
 
 38 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 In 1612, Wolfgang Franz, Professor of Theology at Luther's 
 university, gave to the world his sacred history of animals, 
 which went through many editions. It contained a very in- 
 genious classification, describing " natural dragons," which 
 have three rows of teeth to each jaw, and he piously adds, 
 " the principal dragon is the Devil." 
 
 Near the end of the same century, Father Kircher, the 
 great Jesuit professor at Rome, holds back the sceptical 
 current, insists upon the orthodox view, and represents 
 among the animals entering the ark sirens and griffins. 
 
 Yet even among theologians we note here and there a 
 sceptical spirit in natural science. Early in the same seven- 
 teenth century Eugene Roger published his Travels in Pales- 
 tine. As regards the utterances of Scripture he is soundly 
 orthodox : he prefaces his work with a map showing, among 
 other important points referred to in biblical history, the 
 place where Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the 
 jawbone of an ass, the cavern which Adam and Eve inhab- 
 ited after their expulsion from paradise, the spot where 
 Balaam's ass spoke, the place where Jacob wrestled with 
 the angel, the steep place down which the swine possessed 
 of devils plunged into the sea, the position of the salt statue 
 which was once Lot's wife, the place at sea where Jonah 
 was swallowed by the whale, and " the exact spot where St. 
 Peter caught one hundred and fifty-three fishes." 
 
 As to natural history, he describes and discusses with 
 great theological acuteness the basilisk. He tells us that 
 the animal is about a foot and a half long, is shaped like a 
 crocodile, and kills people with a single glance. The one 
 which he saw was dead, fortunately for him, since in the 
 time of Pope Leo IV as he tells us one appeared in Rome 
 and killed many people by merely looking at them ; but the 
 Pope destroyed it with his prayers and the sign of the cross. 
 He informs us that Providence has wisely and mercifully 
 protected man by requiring the monster to cry aloud two or 
 three times whenever it leaves its den, and that the divine 
 wisdom in creation is also shown by the fact that the mon- 
 ster is obliged to look its victim in the eye, and at a certain 
 fixed distance, before its glance can penetrate the victim's 
 brain and so pass to his heart. He also gives a reason for
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 
 
 39 
 
 supposing that the same divine mercy has provided that the 
 crowing of a cock will kill the basilisk. 
 
 Yet even in this good and credulous missionary we see 
 the influence of Bacon and the dawn of experimental sci- 
 ence ; for, having been told many stories regarding the sala- 
 mander, he secured one, placed it alive upon the burning 
 coals, and reports to us that the legends concerning its 
 power to live in the fire are untrue. He also tried experi- 
 ments with the chameleon, and found that the stories told 
 of it were to be received with much allowance : while, then, 
 he locks up his judgment whenever he discusses the letter 
 of Scripture, he uses his mind in other things much after 
 the modern method. 
 
 In the second half of the same century Hottinger, in his 
 Theological Examination of the History of Creation, breaks 
 from the belief in the phoenix ; but his scepticism is care- 
 fully kept within the limits imposed by Scripture. He 
 avows his doubts, first, " because God created the animals 
 in couples, while the phoenix is represented as a single, un- 
 mated creature " ; secondly, " because Noah, when he en- 
 tered the ark, brought the animals in by sevens, while there 
 were never so many individuals of the phoenix species " ; 
 thirdly, because " no man is known who dares assert that 
 he has ever seen this bird " ; fourthly, because "those who 
 assert there is a phcenix differ among themselves." 
 
 In view of these attacks on the salamander and the 
 phoenix, we are no't surprised to find, before the end of the 
 century, scepticism regarding the basilisk: the eminent 
 Prof. Kirchmaier, at the University of Wittenberg, treats 
 phoenix and basilisk alike as old wives' fables. As to the 
 phoenix, he denies its existence, not only because Noah 
 took no such bird into the ark, but also because, as he 
 pithily remarks, " birds come from eggs, not from ashes." 
 But the unicorn he can not resign, nor will he even con- 
 cede that the unicorn is a rhinoceros ; he appeals to Job 
 and to Marco Polo to prove that this animal, as usually 
 conceived, really exists, and says, " Who would not fear to 
 deny the existence of the unicorn, since Holy Scripture 
 names him with distinct praises?" As to the other great 
 animals mentioned in Scripture, he is so rationalistic as
 
 40 
 
 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 to admit that behemoth was an elephant and leviathan a 
 whale. 
 
 But these germs of a fruitful scepticism grew, and we 
 soon find Dannhauer going a step further and declaring his 
 disbelief even in the unicorn, insisting that it was a rhinoce- 
 ros only that and nothing more. Still, the main current 
 continued strongly theological. In 1712 Samuel Bochart 
 published his great work upon the animals of Holy Scrip- 
 ture. As showing its spirit we may take the titles of the 
 chapters on the horse : 
 
 " Chapter VI. Of the Hebrew Name of the Horse." 
 
 "Chapter VII. Of the Colours of the Six Horses in 
 Zechariah." 
 
 " Chapter VIII. Of the Horses in Job." 
 
 "Chapter IX. Of Solomon's Horses, and of the Texts 
 wherein the Writers praise the Excellence of Horses." 
 
 " Chapter X. Of the Consecrated Horses of the Sun." 
 
 Among the other titles of chapters are such as : Of Ba- 
 laam's Ass; Of the Thousand Philistines slain by Samson 
 with the Jawbone of an Ass ; Of the Golden Calves of Aaron 
 and Jeroboam ; Of the Bleating, Milk, Wool, External and 
 Internal Parts of Sheep mentioned in Scripture ; Of Nota- 
 ble Things told regarding Lions in Scripture ; Of Noah's 
 Dove and of the Dove which appeared at Christ's Baptism. 
 Mixed up in the book, with the principal mass drawn from 
 Scripture, were many facts and reasonings taken from inves- 
 tigations by naturalists ; but all were permeated by the theo- 
 logical spirit.* 
 
 The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly 
 two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of 
 the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a differ- 
 ent method the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically 
 the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts. At 
 
 * For Franz and Kircher, see Perrier, La Philosophic Zoologique avant Darwin, 
 Paris, 1884, p. 29 ; for Roger, see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664, pp. 89-0,2, 139, 
 2 1 8, etc. ; for Hottinger, see his Historic Creationis Examen theologico-philologi- 
 cum, Heidelberg, 1659, lib. vi, qusest. Ixxxiii ; for Kirchmaier, see his Disputationes 
 Zoologies (published collectively after his death), Jena, 1736 ; for Dannhauer, see 
 his Disputationes Theologies, Leipsic, 1707, p. 14 ; for Bochart, see his Hierozoikon, 
 nve De Animalibus Sacra Serif turn, Leyden, 1712.
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 41 
 
 that time Edward Wotton led the way in England and Con- 
 rad Gesner on the Continent, by observations widely ex- 
 tended, carefully noted, and thoughtfully classified. 
 
 This better method of interrogating Nature soon led to 
 the formation of societies for the same purpose. In 1560 
 was founded an Academy for the Study of Nature at Naples, 
 but theologians, becoming alarmed, suppressed it, and for 
 nearly one hundred years there was no new combined effort 
 of that sort, until in 1645 began the meetings in London of 
 what was afterward the Royal Society. Then came the 
 Academy of Sciences in France, and the Accademia del Ci- 
 mento in Italy ; others followed in all parts of the world, 
 and a great new movement was begun. 
 
 Theologians soon saw a danger in this movement. In 
 Italy, Prince Leopold de' Medici, a protector of the Floren. 
 tine Academy, was bribed with a cardinal's hat to neglect 
 it, and from the days of Urban VIII to Pius IX a similar 
 spirit was there shown. In France, there were frequent 
 ecclesiastical interferences, of which Buffon's humiliation for 
 stating a simple scientific truth was a noted example. In 
 England, Protestantism was at first hardly more favourable 
 toward the Royal Society, and the great Dr. South de- 
 nounced it in his sermons as irreligious. 
 
 Fortunately, one thing prevented an open breach be- 
 tween theology and science : while new investigators had 
 mainly given up the mediaeval method so dear to the Church, 
 they had very generally retained the conception of direct 
 creation and of design throughout creation a design hav- 
 ing as its main purpose the profit, instruction, enjoyment, 
 and amusement of man. 
 
 On this the naturally opposing tendencies of theology 
 and science were compromised. Science, while somewhat 
 freed from its old limitations, became the handmaid of the- 
 ology in illustrating the doctrine of creative design, and al- 
 ways with apparent deference to the Chaldean and other 
 ancient myths and legends embodied in the Hebrew sacred 
 books. 
 
 About the middle of the seventeenth century came a 
 great victory of the scientific over the theologic method. 
 At that time Francesco Redi published the results of his
 
 42 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 inquiries into the doctrine of spontaneous generation. For 
 ages a widely accepted doctrine had been that water, filth, 
 and carrion had received power from the Creator to gen- 
 erate worms, insects, and a multitude of the smaller animals; 
 and this doctrine had been especially welcomed by St. 
 Augustine and many of the fathers, since it relieved the Al- 
 mighty of making, Adam of naming, and Noah of living in 
 the ark with these innumerable despised species. But to 
 this fallacy Redi put an end. By researches which could 
 not be gainsaid, he showed that ever}' one of these animals 
 came from an egg ; each, therefore, must be the lineal de- 
 scendant of an animal created, named, and preserved from 
 " the beginning." 
 
 Similar work went on in England, but under more dis- 
 tinctly theological limitations. In the same seventeenth 
 century a very famous and popular English book was pub- 
 lished by the naturalist John Ray, a fellow of the Royal 
 Society, who produced a number of works on plants, fishes, 
 and birds ; but the most widely read of all was entitled The 
 Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation. Between 
 the years 1691 and 1827 it passed through nearly twenty 
 editions. 
 
 Ray argued the goodness and wisdom of God from the 
 adaptation of the animals not only to man's uses but to their 
 own lives and surroundings. 
 
 In the first years of the eighteenth century Dr. Nehemiah 
 Grew, of the Royal Society, published his Cosmologia Sacra 
 to refute anti-scriptural opinions by producing evidences of 
 creative design. Discussing " the ends of Providence," he 
 says, " A crane, which is scurvy meat, lays but two eggs in 
 the year, but a pheasant and partridge, both excellent meat, 
 lay and hatch fifteen or twenty." He points to the fact that 
 " those of value which lay few at a time sit the oftener, as 
 the woodcock and the dove." He breaks decidedly from the 
 doctrine that noxious things in Nature are caused by sin, 
 and shows that they, too, are useful ; that, " if nettles sting, 
 it is to secure an excellent medicine for children and cat- 
 tle " ; that, "if the bramble hurts man, it makes all the bet- 
 ter hedge " ; and that, " if it chances to prick the owner, it 
 tears the thief." " Weasels, kites, and other hurtful animals
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 
 
 43 
 
 induce us to watchfulness ; thistles and moles, to good hus- 
 bandry ; lice oblige us to cleanliness in our bodies, spiders 
 in our houses, and the moth in our clothes." This very 
 optimistic view, triumphing over the theological theory of 
 noxious animals and plants as effects of sin, which prevailed 
 with so much force from St. Augustine to Wesley, was 
 developed into nobler form during the century by various 
 thinkers, and especially by Archdeacon Paley, whose Natu- 
 ral Theology exercised a powerful influence down to recent 
 times. The same tendency appeared in other countries, 
 though various philosophers snowed weak points in the 
 argument, and Goethe made sport of it in a noted verse, 
 praising the forethought of the Creator in foreordaining the 
 cork tree to furnish stoppers for wine-bottles. 
 
 Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century the 
 main movement culminated in the Bridge-water Treatises. 
 Pursuant to the will of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the 
 President of the Royal Society selected eight persons, each 
 to receive a thousand pounds sterling for writing and pub- 
 lishing a treatise on the " power, wisdom, and goodness of 
 God, as manifested in the creation." Of these, the leading 
 essays in regard to animated Nature were those of Thomas 
 Chalmers, on The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral 
 and Intellectual Condition of Man ; of Sir Charles Bell, on 
 The Hand as evincing Design ; of Roget, on Animal and Vege- 
 table Physiology with reference to Natural Theology, and of 
 Kirby, on The Habits and Instincts of Animals with reference 
 to Natural Theology. 
 
 Besides these there were treatises by Whewell, Buck- 
 land, Kidd, and Prout. The work was well done. It was a 
 marked advance on all that had appeared before, in matter, 
 method, and spirit. Looking back upon it now we can see 
 that it was provisional, but that it was none the less fruitful 
 in truth, and we may well remember Darwin's remark on 
 the stimulating effect of mistaken theories, as compared with 
 the sterilizing effect of mistaken observations : mistaken ob- 
 servations lead men astray, mistaken theories suggest true 
 theories. 
 
 An effort made in so noble a spirit certainly does not 
 deserve the ridicule that, in our own day, has sometimes
 
 44 
 
 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 been lavished upon it. Curiously, indeed, one of the most 
 contemptuous of these criticisms has been recently made by 
 one of the most strenuous defenders of orthodoxy. No less 
 eminent a standard-bearer of the faith than the Rev. Prof. 
 Zoeckler says of this movement to demonstrate creative 
 purpose and design, and of the men who took part in it, 
 " The earth appeared in their representation of it like a 
 great clothing shop and soup kitchen, and God as a glorified 
 rationalistic professor." Such a statement as this is far from 
 just to the conceptions of such men as Butler, Paley, and 
 Chalmers, no matter how fully the thinking world has now 
 outlived them.* 
 
 But, noble as the work of these men was, the foundation 
 of fact on which they reared it became evidently more and 
 more insecure. 
 
 For as far back as the seventeenth century acute theolo- 
 gians had begun to discern difficulties more serious than any 
 that had before confronted them. More and more it was 
 seen that the number of different species was far greater 
 than the world had hitherto imagined. Greater and greater 
 had become the old difficulty in conceiving that, of these in- 
 numerable species, each had been specially created by the 
 Almighty hand ; that each had been brought before Adam 
 by the Almighty to be named ; and that each, in couples or in 
 sevens, had been gathered by Noah into the ark. But the 
 difficulties thus suggested were as nothing compared to 
 those raised by the distribution of animals. 
 
 Even in the first days of the Church this had aroused 
 serious thought, and above all in the great mind of St. 
 
 * For a very valuable and interesting study on the old idea of the generation of 
 insects from carrion, see Osten-Sacken, On the Oxen-born Bees of t'ne Ancients, 
 Heidelberg, 1894 ; for Ray, see the work cited, London, 1827, p. 153 ; for Grew, 
 see Cosmologia Sacra, or a Discourse on the Universe, as if is the Creature and 
 Kingdom of God ; chiefly written to demonstrate the Truth and Excellency of the 
 Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the College of Physicians and of the 
 Royal Society, London, 1701 ; for Paley and the Bridge water Treatises, see the 
 usual editions ; also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ran as fol- 
 lows: 
 
 " Welche Verehrung verdient der WeltenerschSpfer, der Gnadig, 
 Als er den Korkbaum erschuf, gleich auch die Stopfel erfand." 
 
 For the quotation from Zoeckler, see his work already cited, vol. ii, pp. 74, 440.
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 45 
 
 Augustine. In his City of God he had stated the difficulty 
 as follows : " But there is a question about all these kinds of 
 beasts, which are neither tamed by man, nor spring from 
 the earth like frogs, such as wolves and others of that sort, 
 ... as to how they could find their way to the islands after 
 that flood which destroyed every living thing not preserved 
 in the ark. . . . Some, indeed, might be thought to reach 
 islands by swimming, in case these were very near ; but 
 some islands are so remote from continental lands that it 
 does not seem possible that any creature could reach them 
 by swimming. It is not an incredible thing, either, that 
 some animals may have been captured by men and taken 
 with them to those lands which they intended to inhabit, in 
 order that they might have the pleasure of hunting ; and it 
 can not be denied that the transfer may have been accom- 
 plished through the agency of angels, commanded or allowed 
 to perform this labour by God." 
 
 But this difficulty had now assumed a magnitude of 
 which St. Augustine never dreamed. Most powerful of all 
 agencies to increase it were the voyages of Columbus, Vasco 
 da Gama, Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci, and other navigators 
 of the period of discovery. Still more serious did it become 
 as the great islands of the southern seas were explored. 
 Every navigator brought home tidings of new species of ani- 
 mals and of races of men living in parts of the world where 
 the theologians, relying on the statement of St. Paul that 
 the gospel had gone into all lands, had for ages declared 
 there could be none ; until finally it overtaxed even the the- 
 ological imagination to conceive of angels, in obedience to 
 the divine command, distributing the various animals over 
 the earth, dropping the megatherium in South America, the 
 archeopteryx in Europe, the ornithorhynchus in Australia, 
 and the opossum in North America. 
 
 The first striking evidence of this new difficulty was 
 shown by the eminent Jesuit missionary, Joseph Acosta. 
 In his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, published in 
 1 590, he proved himself honest and lucid. Though entangled 
 in most of the older scriptural views, he broke away from 
 many ; but the distribution of animals gave him great 
 trouble. Having shown the futility of St. Augustine's other
 
 46 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 explanations, he quaintly asks : " Who can imagine that in so 
 long a voyage men woulde take the paines to carrie Foxes 
 to Peru, especially that kinde they call ' Adas,' which is the 
 filthiest I have scene ? Who woulde likewise say that they 
 have carried Tygers and Lyons? Truly it were a thing 
 worthy the laughing at to thinke so. It was sufficient, yea, 
 very much, for men driven against their willes by tempest, 
 in so long and unknowne a voyage, to escape with their 
 owne lives, without busying themselves to carrie Woolves 
 and Foxes, and to nourish them at sea." 
 
 It was under the impression made by this new array of 
 facts that in 1667 Abraham Milius published at Geneva his 
 book on The Origin of Animals and the Migrations of Peo- 
 ples. This book shows, like that of Acosta, the shock and 
 strain to which the discovery of America subjected the re- 
 ceived theological scheme of things. It was issued with 
 the special approbation of the Bishop of Salzburg, and it 
 indicates the possibility that a solution of the whole trouble 
 may be found in the text, " Let the earth bring forth the liv- 
 ing creature after his kind." Milius goes on to show that 
 the ancient philosophers agree with Moses, and that " the 
 earth and the waters, and especially the heat of the sun and 
 of the genial sky, together with that slimy and putrid quality 
 which seems to be inherent in the soil, may furnish the ori- 
 gin for fishes, terrestrial animals, and birds." On the other 
 hand, he is very severe against those who imagine that man 
 can have had the same origin with animals. But the subject 
 with which Milius especially grapples is the distribution of 
 animals. He is greatly exercised by the many species found 
 in America and in remote islands of the ocean species en- 
 tirely unknown in the other continents and of course he is 
 especially troubled by the fact that these species existing in 
 those exceedingly remote parts of the earth do not exist in 
 the neighbourhood of Mount Ararat. He confesses that to 
 explain the distribution of animals is the most difficult part 
 of the problem. If it be urged that birds could reach Amer- 
 ica by flying and fishes by swimming, he asks, " What of the 
 beasts which neither fly nor swim ? " Yet even as to the 
 birds he asks, " Is there not an infinite variety of winged 
 creatures who fly so slowly and heavily, and have such a
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 
 
 47 
 
 horror of the water, that they would not even dare trust 
 themselves to fly over a wide river?" As to fishes, he says, 
 " They are very averse to wandering from their native 
 waters," and he shows that there are now reported many 
 species of American and East Indian fishes entirely unknown 
 on the other continents, whose presence, therefore, can not 
 be explained by any theory of natural dispersion. 
 
 Of those who suggest that land animals may have been 
 dispersed over the earth by the direct agency of man for his 
 use or pleasure he asks : " Who would like to get different 
 sorts of lions, bears, tigers, and other ferocious and noxious 
 creatures on board ship ? who would trust himself with 
 them ? and who would wish to plant colonies of such crea- 
 tures in new, desirable lands?" 
 
 His conclusion is that plants and animals take their ori- 
 gin in the lands wherein they are found ; an opinion which 
 he supports by quoting from the two narrations in Genesis 
 passages which imply generative force in earth and water. 
 
 But in the eighteenth century matters had become even 
 worse for the theological view. To meet the difficulty the 
 eminent Benedictine, Dom Calmet, in his Commentary, ex- 
 pressed the belief that all the species of a genus had origi- 
 nally formed one species, and he dwelt on this view as one 
 which enabled him to explain the possibility of gathering all 
 animals into the ark. This idea, dangerous as it was to the 
 fabric of orthodoxy, and involving a profound separation 
 from the general doctrine of the Church, seems to have been 
 abroad among thinking men, for we find in the latter half of 
 the same century even Linnaeus inclining to consider it. It 
 was time, indeed, that some new theological theory be 
 evolved ; the great- Linnaeus himself, in spite of his famous 
 declaration favouring the fixity of species, had dealt a death- 
 blow to the old theory. In his Systema Natures, published 
 in the middle of the eighteenth century, he had enumerated 
 four thousand species of animals, and the difficulties involved 
 in the naming of each of them by Adam and in bringing them 
 together in the ark appeared to all thinking men more and 
 more insurmountable. 
 
 What was more embarrassing, the number of distinct 
 species went on increasing rapidly, indeed enormously, until,
 
 48 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 as an eminent zoological authority of our own time has 
 declared, " for every one of the species enumerated by Lin- 
 nseus, more than fifty kinds are known to the naturalist of 
 to-day, and the number of species still unknown doubtless 
 far exceeds the list of those recorded." 
 
 Already there were premonitions of the strain made upon 
 Scripture by requiring a hundred and sixty distinct miracu- 
 lous interventions of the Creator to produce the hundred 
 and sixty species of land shells found in the little island of 
 Madeira alone, and fourteen hundred distinct interventions 
 to produce the actual number of distinct species of a single 
 well-known shell. 
 
 Ever more and more difficult, too, became the question 
 of the geographical distribution of animals. As new ex- 
 plorations were made in various parts of the world, this dan- 
 ger to the theological view went on increasing. The sloths 
 in South America suggested painful questions : How could 
 animals so sluggish have got away from the neighbourhood 
 of Mount Ararat so completely and have travelled so far? 
 
 The explorations in Australia and neighbouring islands 
 made matters still worse, for there was found in those re- 
 gions a whole realm of animals differing widely from those 
 of other parts of the earth. 
 
 The problem before the strict theologians became, for 
 example, how to explain the fact that the kangaroo can have 
 been in the ark and be now only found in Australia : his 
 saltatory powers are indeed great, but how could he by any 
 series of leaps have sprung across the intervening mountains, 
 plains, and oceans to that remote continent? and, if the 
 theory were adopted that at some period a causeway ex- 
 tended across the vast chasm separating Australia from the 
 nearest mainland, why did not lions, tigers, camels, and 
 camelopards force or find their way across it ? 
 
 The theological theory, therefore, had by the end of the 
 eighteenth century gone to pieces. The wiser theologians 
 waited ; the unwise indulged in exhortations to " root out 
 the wicked heart of unbelief," in denunciation of " science 
 falsely so called," and in frantic declarations that " the Bible 
 is true " by which they meant that the limited understand- 
 ing of it which they had happened to inherit is true.
 
 THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS. 
 
 49 
 
 By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole theo- 
 logical theory of creation though still preached everywhere 
 as a matter of form was clearly seen by all thinking men to 
 be hopelessly lost: such strong men as Cardinal Wiseman in 
 the Roman Church, Dean Buckland in the Anglican, and 
 Hugh Miller in the Scottish Church, made heroic efforts to 
 save something from it, but all to no purpose. That sturdy 
 Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon honesty, which is the best legacy 
 of the Middle Ages to Christendom, asserted itself in the 
 old strongholds of theological thought, the universities. 
 Neither the powerful logic of Bishop Butler nor the nimble 
 reasoning of Archdeacon Paley availed. Just as the line of 
 astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had de- 
 stroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the cen- 
 tre, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent 
 in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, 
 so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old 
 idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all ani- 
 mals to suit the needs and purposes of man. They had de- 
 veloped a system of a very different sort, and this we shall 
 next consider.* 
 
 III. THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES OF AN 
 EVOLUTION IN ANIMATED NATURE. 
 
 WE have seen, thus far, how there came into the think- 
 ing of mankind upon the visible universe and its inhabitants 
 the idea of a creation virtually instantaneous and complete, 
 and of a Creator in human form with human attributes, who 
 spoke matter into existence literally by the exercise of his 
 throat and lips, or shaped and placed it with his hands and 
 fingers. 
 
 We have seen that this view came from far ; that it ex- 
 
 * For Acosta, see his Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Seville, 1590 the 
 quaint English translation is of London, 1604 ; for Abraham Milius, see his De 
 Origine Animalium et Migratione Populorum, Geneva, 1667 ; also Kosmos, 1877, 
 H. i, S. 36 ; for Linnseus's declaration regarding species, see the Philosophia 
 JBotanica, 99, 157 ; for Calmet and Linnaeus, see Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 237. As to 
 the enormously increasing numbers of species in zoology and botany, see President 
 D. S. Jordan, Science Sketches, pp. 176, 177 ; also, for pithy statement, Laing's 
 Problems of the Future, chap. vi. 
 5
 
 go FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 isted in the Chaldaso-Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, 
 and probably in others of the earliest date known to us ; that 
 its main features passed thence into the sacred books of the 
 Hebrews and then into the early Christian Church, by 
 whose theologians it was developed through the Middle Ages 
 and maintained during the modern period. 
 
 But, while this idea was thus developed by a succession 
 of noble and thoughtful men through thousands of years, 
 another conception, to all appearance equally ancient, was 
 developed, sometimes in antagonism to it, sometimes mingled 
 with it the conception of all living beings as wholly or in 
 part the result of a growth process of an evolution. 
 
 This idea, in various forms, became a powerful factor in 
 nearly all the greater ancient theologies and philosophies. 
 For very widespread among the early peoples who attained 
 to much thinking power was a conception that, in obedience 
 to the divine fiat, a watery chaos produced the earth, and 
 that the sea and land gave birth to their inhabitants. 
 
 This is clearly seen in those records of Chaldseo-Baby- 
 lonian thought deciphered in these latter years, to which 
 reference has already been made. In these we have a 
 watery chaos which, under divine action, brings forth the 
 earth and its inhabitants ; first the sea animals and then the 
 land animals the latter being separated into three kinds, 
 substantially as recorded afterward in the Hebrew accounts. 
 At the various stages in the work the Chaldean Creator 
 pronounces it " beautiful," just as the Hebrew Creator in 
 our own later account pronounces it " good." 
 
 In both accounts there is placed over the whole creation 
 a solid, concave firmament; in both, light is created first, and 
 the heavenly bodies are afterward placed " for signs and for 
 seasons " ; in both, the number seven is especially sacred, 
 giving rise to a sacred division of time and to much else. 
 It may be added that, with many other features in the He- 
 brew legends evidently drawn from the Chaldean, the 
 account of the creation in each is followed by a legend re- 
 garding " the fall of man " and a deluge, many details of 
 which clearly passed in slightly modified form from the 
 Chaldean into the Hebrew accounts. 
 
 It would have been a miracle indeed if these primitive
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 5! 
 
 conceptions, wrought out with so much poetic vigour in that 
 earlier civilization on the Tigris and Euphrates, had failed 
 to influence the Hebrews, who during the most plastic peri- 
 ods of their development were under the tutelage of their 
 Chaldean neighbours. Since the researches of Layard, 
 George Smith, Oppert, Schrader, Jensen, Sayce, and their 
 compeers, there is no longer a reasonable doubt that this 
 ancient view of the world, elaborated if not originated in 
 that earlier civilization, came thence as a legacy to the He- 
 brews, who wrought it in a somewhat disjointed but mainly 
 monotheistic form into the poetic whole which forms one of 
 the most precious treasures of ancient thought preserved in 
 the book of Genesis. 
 
 Thus it was that, while the idea of a simple material crea- 
 tion literally by the hands and fingers or voice of the Crea- 
 tor became, as we have seen, the starting-point of a powerful 
 stream of theological thought, and while this stream was 
 swollen from age to age by contributions from the fathers, 
 doctors, and learned divines of the Church, Catholic and 
 Protestant, there was poured into it this lesser current, 
 always discernible and at times clearly separated from it 
 a current of belief in a process of evolution. 
 
 The Rev. Prof. Sayce, of Oxford, than whom no English- 
 speaking scholar carries more weight in a matter of this 
 kind, has recently declared his belief that the Chaldaso- 
 Babylonian theory was the undoubted source of the similar 
 theory propounded by the Ionic philosopher Anaximander 
 the Greek thinkers deriving this view from the Babylonians 
 through the Phoenicians ; he also allows that from the same 
 source its main features were adopted into both the accounts 
 given in the first of our sacred books, and in this general 
 view the most eminent Christian Assyriologists concur. 
 
 It is true that these sacred accounts of ours contradict 
 each other. In that part of the first or Elohistic account 
 given in the first chapter of Genesis the waters bring forth 
 fishes, marine animals, and birds (Genesis, i, 20) ; but in that 
 part of the second or Jehovistic account given in the second 
 chapter of Genesis both the land animals and birds are de- 
 clared to have been created not out of the water, but " out 
 of the ground" 1 (Genesis, ii, 19).
 
 52 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 The dialectic skill of the fathers was. easily equal to ex- 
 plaining away this contradiction ; but the old current of 
 thought, strengthened by both these legends, arrested their 
 attention, and, passing through the minds of a succession of 
 the greatest men of the Church, influenced theological opin- 
 ion deeply, if not widely, for ages, in favour of an evolution 
 theory. 
 
 But there was still another ancient source of evolution 
 ideas. Thoughtful men of the early civilizations which 
 were developed along the great rivers in the warmer regions 
 of the earth noted how the sun-god as he rose in his fullest 
 might caused the water and the rich soil to teem with the 
 lesser forms of life. In Egypt, especially, men saw how 
 under this divine power the Nile slime brought forth " creep- 
 ing things innumerable." Hence mainly this ancient belief 
 that the animals and man were produced by lifeless matter 
 at the divine command, "in the beginning," was supple- 
 mented by the idea that some of the lesser animals, espe- 
 cially the insects, were produced by a later evolution, being 
 evoked after the original creation from various sources, but 
 chiefly from matter in a state of decay. 
 
 This crude, early view aided doubtless in giving germs 
 of a better evolution theory to the early Greeks. Anaxi- 
 mander, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and, greatest of all, Aris- 
 totle, as we have seen, developed them, making their way at 
 times by guesses toward truths since established by observa- 
 tion. Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observa- 
 tion, arrived at some results which, had Greek freedom of 
 thought continued, might have brought the world long since 
 to its present plane of biological knowledge ; for he reached 
 something like the modern idea of a succession of higher 
 organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion 
 of " a perfecting principle " in Nature. 
 
 With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency 
 toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, 
 but the old crude view remained, and as a typical example 
 of it we may note the opinion of St. Basil the Great in the 
 fourth century. Discussing the work of creation, he de- 
 clares that, at the command of God, " the waters were gifted 
 with productive power " ; " from slime and muddy places
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 
 
 53 
 
 frogs, flies, and gnats came into being " ; and he finally de- 
 clares that the same voice which gave this energy and qual- 
 ity of productiveness to earth and water shall be similarly 
 efficacious until the end of the world. St. Gregory of Nyssa 
 held a similar view. 
 
 This idea of these great fathers of the Eastern Church 
 took even stronger hold on the great father of the Western 
 Church. For St. Augustine, so fettered usually by the let- 
 ter of the sacred text, broke from his own famous doctrine 
 as to the acceptance of Scripture and spurned the generally 
 received belief of a creative process like that by which a 
 toymaker brings into existence a box of playthings. In his 
 great treatise on Genesis he says : " To suppose that God 
 formed man from the dust with bodily hands is very child- 
 ish. . . . God neither formed man with bodily hands nor 
 did he breathe upon him with throat and lips." 
 
 St. Augustine then suggests the adoption of the old ema- 
 nation or evolution theory, shows that " certain very small 
 animals may not have been created on the fifth and sixth 
 days, but may have originated later from putrefying mat- 
 ter," argues that, even if this be so, God is still their creator, 
 dwells upon such a potential creation as involved in the 
 actual creation, and speaks of animals " whose numbers the 
 after-time unfolded." 
 
 In his great treatise on the Trinity the work to which 
 he devoted the best thirty years of his life we find the full 
 growth of this opinion. He develops at length the view 
 that in the creation of living beings there was something 
 like a growth that God is the ultimate author, but works 
 through secondary causes ; and finally argues that certain 
 substances are endowed by God with the power of pro- 
 ducing certain classes of plants and animals.* 
 
 * For the Chaldean view of creation, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of 
 Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 14, 15, and 64-86 ; also Lukas, as above ; also Sayce, 
 Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, Hibbert Lectures for 1887, pp. 371 and else- 
 where ; as to the fall of man, Tower of Babel, sacredness of the number seven, etc., 
 see also Delitzsch, appendix to the German translation of Smith, pp. 305 et seq. ; 
 as to the almost exact adoption of the Chaldean legends into the Hebrew sacred 
 account, see all these, as also Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testa- 
 ment, Giessen, 1883, early chapters ; also article Babylonia in the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica ; as to the similar approval of creation by the Creator in both accounts,
 
 54 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 This idea of a development by secondary causes apart 
 from the original creation was helped in its growth by a 
 theological exigency. More and more, as the organic world 
 was observed, the vast multitude of petty animals, winged 
 creatures, and "creeping things" was felt to be a strain upon 
 the sacred narrative. More and more it became difficult to 
 reconcile the dignity of the Almighty with his work in 
 bringing each of these creatures before Adam to be named ; 
 or to reconcile the human limitations of Adam with his 
 work in naming "every living creature"; or to reconcile 
 the dimensions of Noah's ark with the space required for 
 preserving all of them, and the food of all sorts necessary 
 for their sustenance, whether they were admitted by twos, 
 as stated in one scriptural account, or by sevens, as stated 
 in the other. 
 
 The inadequate size of the ark gave especial trouble. 
 Origen had dealt with it by suggesting that the cubit was 
 .six times greater than had been supposed. Bede explained 
 Noah's ability to complete so large a vessel by supposing 
 that he worked upon it during a hundred years ; and, as to 
 the provision of food taken into it, he declared that there 
 was no need of a supply for more than one day, since God 
 could throw the animals into a deep sleep or otherwise 
 miraculously make one day's supply sufficient ; he also les- 
 see George Smith, p. 73 ; as to the migration of the Babylonian legends to the 
 Hebrews, see Schrader, Whitehouse's translation, pp. 44, 45 ; as to the Chaldaean 
 belief in a solid firmament, while Schrader in 1883 thought it not proved, Jensen 
 in 1890 has found it clearly expressed see his Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp. 9 et 
 seq., also pp. 304-306, and elsewhere. Dr. Lukas in 1893 also fully accepts this 
 view of a Chaldean record of a " firmament " see Kosmologie, pp. 43, etc. ; see 
 also Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization, and for crude early ideas of 
 evolution in Egypt, see ibid., pp. 156 et seq. 
 
 For the seven-day week among Chaldeans and rest on the seventh day, and the 
 proof that even the name " Sabbath " is of Chaldean origin, see Delitzsch, Beiga- 
 ben zu Smith's Chald. Genesis, pp. 300 and 306 ; also Schrader ; for St. Basil, see 
 Hexameron and Homilies vii-ix ; but, for the steadfastness of Basil's view in regard 
 to the immutability of species, see a Catholic writer on Evolution and Faith in 
 the Dublin Review for July, 1871, p. 13 ; for citations of St. Augustine on Genesis, 
 see the De Genesi contra Manichaos, lib. ii, cap. 14, in Migne, xxxiv. 188, lib. v, 
 cap. 5 and cap. 23, and lib. vii, cap. I ; for the citations from his work on the 
 Trinity, see his De Ttinitate, lib. iii, cap. 8 and 9, in Migne, xlii, 877, 878 ; for the 
 general subject very fully and adequately presented, see Osborn, From the Greeks 
 to Darwin, New York, 1894, chaps, ii and iii.
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 55 
 
 sened the strain on faith still more by diminishing the num- 
 ber of animals taken into the ark supporting his view upon 
 Augustine's theory of the later development of insects out 
 of carrion. 
 
 Doubtless this theological necessity was among the main 
 reasons which led St. Isidore of Seville, in the seventh cen- 
 tury, to incorporate this theory, supported by St. Basil and 
 St. Augustine, into his great encyclopedic work which" gave 
 materials for thought on God and Nature to so many gen- 
 erations. He familiarized the theological .world still further 
 with the doctrine of secondary creation, giving such exam- 
 ples of it as that " bees are generated from decomposed veal, 
 beetles from horseflesh, grasshoppers from mules, scorpions 
 from crabs," and, in order to give still stronger force to the 
 idea of such transformations, he dwells on the biblical ac- 
 count of Nebuchadnezzar, which appears to have taken 
 strong hold upon mediaeval thought in science, and he de- 
 clares that other human beings had been changed into ani- 
 mals, especially into swine, wolves, and owls. 
 
 This doctrine of after-creations went on gathering 
 strength until, in the twelfth century, Peter Lombard, in his 
 theological summary, The Sentences, so powerful in moulding 
 the thought of the Church, emphasized the distinction be- 
 tween animals which spring from carrion and those which 
 are created from earth and water ; the former he holds to 
 have been created "potentially," the latter "actually." 
 
 In the century following, this idea was taken up by St. 
 Thomas Aquinas and virtually received from him its final 
 form. In the Summa, which remains the greatest work of 
 mediaeval thought, he accepts the idea that certain animals 
 spring from the decaying bodies of plants and animals, and 
 declares that they are produced by the creative word of 
 God either actually or virtually. He develops this view by 
 saying, " Nothing was made by God, after the six days of 
 creation, absolutely new, but it was in some sense included 
 in the work of the six days " ; and that " even new species, 
 if any appear, have existed before in certain native proper- 
 ties, just as animals are produced from putrefaction." 
 
 The distinction thus developed between creation " caus- 
 ally " or " potentially," and " materially " or " formally," was
 
 56 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 made much of by commentators afterward. Cornelius a 
 Lapide spread it by saying that certain animals were created 
 not " absolutely," but only " derivatively," and this thought 
 was still further developed three centuries later by Augus- 
 tinus Eugubinus, who tells us that, after the first creative 
 energy had called forth land and water, light was made by 
 the Almighty, the instrument of all future creation, and that 
 the light called everything into existence. 
 
 All this " science falsely so called," so sedulously devel- 
 oped by the master minds of the Church, and yet so futile 
 that we might almost suppose that the great apostle, in a 
 glow of prophetic vision, had foreseen it in his famous con- 
 demnation, seems at this distance very harmless indeed ; 
 yet, to many guardians of the " sacred deposit of doctrine " 
 in the Church, even so slight a departure from the main 
 current of thought seemed dangerous. It appeared to them 
 like pressing the doctrine of secondary causes to a perilous 
 extent ; and about the beginning of the seventeenth century 
 we have the eminent Spanish Jesuit and theologian Suarez 
 denouncing it, and declaring St. Augustine a heretic for his 
 share in it. 
 
 But there was little danger to the older idea just then ; 
 the main theological tendency was so strong that the world 
 kept on as of old. Biblical theology continued to spin its 
 own webs out of its own bowels, and all the lesser theo- 
 logical flies continued to be entangled in them ; yet here 
 and there stronger thinkers broke loose from this entangle- 
 ment and helped somewhat to disentangle others.* 
 
 * For Bede's view of the ark and the origin of insects, see his Hexcemeron, i 
 and ii ; for Isidore, see the Etymologic, xi, 4, and xiii, 22 ; for Peter Lombard, see 
 Sent., lib. ii, dist. xv, 4 (in Migne, cxcii, 682) ; for St. Thomas Aquinas as to the 
 laws of Nature, see Summa Theologica, i, Quasi. Ixvii, art. iv ; for his discussion 
 on Avicenna's theory of the origin of animals, see ibid., Quasi. Ixxi, vol. i, pp. 
 1184 and 1185, of Migne's edit. ; for his idea as to the word of God being the active 
 producing principle, see ibid., i, Quasi. Ixxi, art. i ; for his remarks on species, 
 see ibid., i, Quasi. Ixxii, art. i ; for his ideas on the necessity of the procreation of 
 man, see ibid., i, Quasi. Ixxii, art. i ; for the origin of animals from putrefaction, 
 see ibid., i, Quasi. Ixxix, art. i, 3 ; for Cornelius a Lapide on the derivative crea- 
 tion of animals, see his In Genesim Comment., cap. i, cited by Mivart, Genesis of 
 Species, p. 282 ; for a reference to Suarez's denunciation of the view of St. Augus- 
 tine, see Huxley's Essays.
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 57 
 
 At the close of the Middle Ages, in spite of the devotion 
 of the Reformed Church to the letter of Scripture, the re- 
 vival of learning and the great voyages gave an atmosphere 
 in which better thinking on the problems of Nature began 
 to gain strength. On all sides, in every field, men were 
 making discoveries which caused the general theological 
 view to appear more and more inadequate. 
 
 First of those who should be mentioned with reverence 
 as beginning to develop again that current of Greek thought 
 which the system drawn from our sacred books by the fa- 
 thers and doctors of the Church had interrupted for more 
 than a thousand years, was Giordano Bruno. His utterances 
 were indeed vague and enigmatical, but this fault may well 
 be forgiven him, for he saw but too clearly what must be his 
 reward for any more open statements. His reward indeed 
 came even for his faulty utterances when, toward the end 
 of the nineteenth century, thoughtful men from all parts of 
 the world united in erecting his statue on the spot where 
 he had been burned by the Roman Inquisition nearly three 
 hundred years before. 
 
 After Bruno's death, during the first half of the seven- 
 teenth century, Descartes seemed about to take the leader- 
 ship of human thought: his theories, however superseded 
 now, gave a great impulse to investigation then. His genius 
 in promoting an evolution doctrine as regards the mechan- 
 ical formation of the solar system was great, and his mode 
 of thought strengthened the current of evolutionary doc- 
 trine generally ; but his constant dread of persecution, both 
 from Catholics and Protestants, led him steadily to veil his 
 thoughts and even to suppress them. The execution of 
 Bruno had occurred in his childhood, and in the midst of 
 his career he had watched the Galileo struggle in all its 
 stages. He had seen his own works condemned by univer- 
 sity after university under the direction of theologians, and 
 placed upon the Roman Index. Although he gave new and 
 striking arguments to prove the existence of God, and 
 humbled himself before the Jesuits, he was condemned by 
 Catholics and Protestants alike. Since Roger Bacon, per- 
 haps, no great thinker had been so completely abased and 
 thwarted by theological oppression.
 
 58 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 Near the close of the same century another great thinker, 
 Leibnitz, though not propounding any full doctrine on evo- 
 lution, gave it an impulse by suggesting a view contrary to 
 the sacrosanct belief in the immutability of species that is, 
 to the pious doctrine that every species in the animal king- 
 dom now exists as it left the hands of the Creator, the nam- 
 ing process by Adam, and the door of Noah's ark. 
 
 His punishment at the hands of the Church came a few 
 years later, when, in 1712, the Jesuits defeated his attempt 
 to found an Academy of Science at Vienna. The imperial 
 authorities covered him with honours, but the priests ruling 
 in the confessionals and pulpits would not allow him the 
 privilege of aiding his fellow-men to ascertain God's truths 
 revealed in Nature. 
 
 Spinoza, Hume, and Kant may also be mentioned as 
 among those whose thinking, even when mistaken, might 
 have done much to aid in the development of a truer theory 
 had not the theologic atmosphere of their times been so un- 
 propitious ; but a few years after Leibnitz's death came in 
 France a thinker in natural science of much less influence 
 than any of these, who made a decided step forward. 
 
 Early in the eighteenth century Benoist de Maillet, a 
 man of the world, but a wide observer and close thinker 
 upon Nature, began meditating especially upon the origin 
 of animal forms, and was led into the idea of the transforma- 
 tion of species and so into a theory of evolution, which in 
 some important respects anticipated modern ideas. He 
 definitely, though at times absurdly, conceived the produc- 
 tion of existing species by the modification of their prede- 
 cessors, and he plainly accepted one of the fundamental 
 maxims of modern geology that the structure of the globe 
 must be studied in the light of the present course of Nature. 
 
 But he fell between two ranks of adversaries. On one 
 side, the Church authorities denounced him as a freethinker ; 
 on the other, Voltaire ridiculed him as a devotee. Feeling 
 that his greatest danger was from the orthodox theologians, 
 De Maillet endeavoured to protect himself by disguising his 
 name in the title of his book, and by so wording its preface 
 and dedication that, if persecuted, he could declare it a mere 
 sport of fancy ; he therefore announced it as the reverie of a
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 
 
 59 
 
 Hindu sage imparted to a Christian missionary. But this 
 strategy availed nothing : he had allowed his Hindu sage to 
 suggest that the days of creation named in Genesis might 
 be long periods of time ; and this, with other ideas of equally 
 fearful import, was fatal. Though the book was in type in 
 1735, it was not published till 1748 three years after his 
 death. 
 
 On the other hand, the heterodox theology of Voltaire 
 was also aroused ; and, as De Maillet had seen in the pres- 
 ence of fossils on high mountains a proof that these moun- 
 tains were once below the sea, Voltaire, recognising in this 
 an argument for the deluge of Noah, ridiculed the new 
 thinker without mercy. Unfortunately, some of De Mail- 
 let's vagaries lent themselves admirably to Voltaire's sar- 
 casm ; better material for it could hardly be conceived than 
 the theory, seriously proposed, that the first human being 
 was born of a mermaid. 
 
 Hence it was that, between these two extremes of the- 
 ology, De Maillet received no recognition until, very re- 
 cently, the greatest men of science in England and France 
 have united in giving him his due. But his work was not 
 lost, even in his own day ; Robinet and Bonnet pushed for- 
 ward victoriously on helpful lines. 
 
 In the second half of the eighteenth century a great bar- 
 rier was thrown across this current the authority of Lin- 
 naeus. He was the most eminent naturalist of his time, a 
 wide observer, a close thinker ; but the atmosphere in which 
 he lived and moved and had his being was saturated with 
 biblical theology, and this permeated all his thinking. 
 
 He who visits the tomb of Linnaeus to-day, entering the 
 beautiful cathedral of Upsala by its southern porch, sees 
 above it, wrought in stone, the Hebrew legend of creation. 
 In a series of medallions, the Almighty in human form 
 accomplishes the work of each creative day. In due order 
 he puts in place the solid firmament with the waters above 
 it, the sun, moon, and stars within it, the beasts, birds, and 
 plants below it, and finishes his task by taking man out of 
 a little hillock of " the earth beneath," and woman out of 
 man's side. Doubtless Linnseus, as he went to his devotions, 
 often smiled at this childlike portrayal. Yet he was never
 
 6o FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 able to break away from the idea it embodied. At times, in 
 face of the difficulties which beset the orthodox theory, he 
 ventured to favour some slight concessions. Toward the end 
 of his life he timidly advanced the hypothesis that all the 
 species of one genus constituted at the creation one species ; 
 and from the last edition of his Systcma Natura he quietly 
 left out the strongly orthodox statement of the fixity of each 
 species, which he had insisted upon in his earlier works. But 
 he made no adequate declaration. What he might expect if 
 he openly and decidedly sanctioned a newer view he learned 
 to his cost ; warnings came speedily both from the Catholic 
 and Protestant sides. 
 
 At a time when eminent prelates of the older Church 
 were eulogizing debauched princes like Louis XV, and using 
 the unspeakably obscene casuistry of the Jesuit Sanchez in 
 the education of the priesthood as to the relations of men to 
 women, the modesty of the Church authorities was so shocked 
 by Linnaeus's proofs of a sexual system in plants that for 
 many years his writings were prohibited in the Papal States 
 and in various other parts of Europe where clerical author- 
 ity was strong enough to resist the new scientific current. 
 Not until 1773 did one of the more broad-minded cardinals 
 Zelanda succeed in gaining permission that Prof. Minasi 
 should discuss the Linnasan system at Rome. 
 
 And Protestantism was quite as oppressive. In a letter 
 to Eloius, Linnseus tells of the rebuke given to science by 
 one of the great Lutheran prelates of Sweden, Bishop Sved- 
 berg. From various parts of Europe detailed statements 
 had been sent to the Royal Academy of Science that water 
 had been turned into blood, and well-meaning ecclesiastics 
 had seen in this an indication of the wrath of God, certainly 
 against the regions in which these miracles had occurred 
 and possibly against the whole world. A miracle of this 
 sort appearing in Sweden, Linnaeus looked into it carefully 
 and found that the reddening of the water was caused by 
 dense masses of minute insects. News of this explanation 
 having reached the bishop, he took the field against it ; he 
 denounced this scientific discovery as " a Satanic abyss " 
 (abyssum Satance), and declared " The reddening of the water 
 is not natural," and " when God allows such a miracle to
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 6 1 
 
 take place Satan endeavours, and so do his ungodly, self- 
 reliant, self-sufficient, and worldly tools, to make it signify 
 nothing." In face of this onslaught Linnaeus retreated ; he 
 tells his correspondent that " it is difficult to say anything in 
 this matter," and shields himself under the statement " It is 
 certainly a miracle that so many millions of creatures can be 
 so sudd'enly propagated," and "it shows undoubtedly the 
 all-wise power of the Infinite." 
 
 The great naturalist, grown old and worn with labours for 
 science, could no longer resist the contemporary theology; 
 he settled into obedience to it, and while the modification of 
 his early orthodox view was, as we have seen, quietly im- 
 bedded in the final edition of his great work, he made no 
 special effort to impress it upon the world. To all appear- 
 ance he continued to adhere to the doctrine that all existing 
 species had been created by the Almighty " in the begin- 
 ning," and that since " the beginning " no new species had 
 appeared. 
 
 Yet even his great authority could not arrest the swell- 
 ing tide ; more and more vast became the number of species, 
 more and more incomprehensible under the old theory be- 
 came the newly ascertained facts in geographical distribu- 
 tion, more and more it was felt that the universe and ani- 
 mated beings had come into existence by some process other 
 than a special creation " in the beginning," and the question 
 was constantly pressing, " By what process ? " 
 
 Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century one 
 man was at work on natural history who might have con- 
 tributed much toward an answer to this question : this man 
 was Buffon. His powers of research and thought were re- 
 markable, and his gift in presenting results of research and 
 thought showed genius. He had caught the idea of an evo- 
 lution in Nature by the variation of species, and was likely 
 to make a great advance with it; but he, too, was made to 
 feel the power of theology. 
 
 As long as he gave pleasing descriptions of animals the 
 Church petted him, but when he began to deduce truths of 
 philosophical import the batteries of the Sorbonne were 
 opened upon him ; he was made to know that " the sacred 
 deposit of truth committed to the Church " was, that " in
 
 62 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 the beginning God made the heavens and the earth " ; and 
 that "all things were made at the beginning of the world." 
 For his simple statement of truths in natural science which 
 are to-day truisms, he was, as we have seen, dragged forth 
 by the theological faculty, forced to recant publicly, and to 
 print his recantation. In this he announced, " I abandon 
 everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, 
 and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of 
 Moses." * 
 
 But all this triumph of the Chaldeo-Babylonian creation 
 legends which the Church had inherited availed but little. 
 
 For about the end of the eighteenth century fruitful sug- 
 gestions and even clear presentations of this or that part of 
 a large evolutionary doctrine came thick and fast, and from 
 the most divergent quarters. Especially remarkable were 
 those which came from Erasmus Darwin in England, from 
 Maupertuis in France, from Oken in Switzerland, and from 
 Herder, and, most brilliantly of all, from Goethe in Ger- 
 many. 
 
 Two men among these thinkers must be especially men- 
 tioned Treviranus in Germany and Lamarck in France ; 
 each independently of the other drew the world more com- 
 pletely than ever before in this direction. 
 
 From Treviranus came, in 1802, his work on biology, and 
 in this he gave forth the idea that from forms of life origi- 
 nally simple had arisen all higher organizations by gradual 
 development ; that every living creature has a capacity for 
 
 * For Descartes in his relation to the Copernican theory, see Saisset, Descartes 
 et ses Prtcurseurs ; also Fouillee, Descartes, Paris, 1893, chaps, ii and iii ; also 
 other authorities cited in my chapter on Astronomy ; for his relation to the theory 
 of evolution, see the Principes de Philosophic, seme partie, 45. For De Maillet, 
 see Quatrefages, Darwin et ses Precurseurs franfais, chap, i, citing D'Archiac, 
 PaUontologie, Stratigraphie, vol. i ; also, Perrier, La Philosophie zoolugique avant 
 Darwin, chap, vi ; also the admirable article, Evolution, by Huxley, in Encyc. 
 Btit. The title of De Maillet's book is, Telliamed, ou Entretiens d'un Philosophe 
 indien avec un Missionnaire franfais sur la Diminution de la Mer, 1748 and 1756. 
 For Buffon, see the authorities previously given, also the chapter on Geology in 
 this work. For the resistance of both Catholic and Protestant authorities to the 
 Linnsean system and ideas, see Alberg, Life of Linntzus, London, 1888, pp. 143- 
 147, and 237. As to the creation medallions at the Cathedral of Upsala, it is a 
 somewhat curious coincidence that the present writer came upon them while visit- 
 ing that edifice during the preparation of this chapter.
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 63 
 
 receiving modifications of its structure from external influ- 
 ences ; and that no species had become really extinct, but 
 that each had passed into some other species. From La- 
 marck came about the same time his Researches, and a little 
 later his Zoological Philosophy, which introduced a new factor 
 into the process of evolution the action of the animal itself 
 in its efforts toward a development to suit new needs and 
 he gave as his principal conclusions the following : 
 
 1. Life tends to increase the volume of each living body 
 and of all its parts up to a limit determined by its own 
 necessities. 
 
 2. New wants in animals give rise to new organs. 
 
 3. The development of these organs is in proportion to 
 their employment. 
 
 4. New developments may be transmitted to offspring. 
 His well-known examples to illustrate these views, such 
 
 as that of successive generations of giraffes lengthening their 
 necks by stretching them to gather high-growing foliage, 
 and of successive generations of kangaroos lengthening and 
 strengthening their hind legs by the necessity of keeping 
 themselves erect while jumping, provoked laughter, but the 
 very comicality of these illustrations aided to fasten his main 
 conclusion in men's memories. 
 
 In both these statements, imperfect as they were, great 
 truths were embodied truths which were sure to grow. 
 
 Lamarck's declaration, especially, that the development 
 of organs is in ratio to their employment, and his indications 
 of the reproduction in progeny of what is gained or lost in 
 parents by the influence of circumstances, entered as a most 
 effective force into the development of the evolution theory. 
 
 The next great successor in the apostolate of this idea of 
 the universe was Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire. As early as 1795 
 he had begun to form a theory that species are various 
 modifications of the same type, and this theory he devel- 
 oped, testing it at various stages as Nature was more and 
 more displayed to him. It fell to his lot to bear the brunt 
 in a struggle against heavy odds which lasted many years. 
 
 For the man who now took up the warfare, avowedly for 
 science but unconsciously for theology, was the foremost 
 naturalist then living Cuvier. His scientific eminence was
 
 64 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 deserved ; the highest honours of his own and other coun- 
 tries were given him, and he bore them worthily. An Im- 
 perial Councillor under Napoleon ; President of the Council 
 of Public Instruction and Chancellor of the University under 
 the restored Bourbons ; Grand Officer of the Legion of Hon- 
 our, a Peer of France, Minister of the Interior, and President 
 of the Council of State under Louis Philippe; he was emi- 
 nent in all these capacities, and yet the dignity given by such 
 high administrative positions was as nothing compared to his 
 leadership in natural science. Science throughout the world 
 acknowledged in him its chief contemporary ornament, and 
 to this hour his fame rightly continues. But there was in 
 him, as in Linnaeus, a survival of certain theological ways of 
 looking at the universe and certain theological conceptions 
 of a plan of creation ; it must be said, too, that while his 
 temperament made him distrust new hypotheses, of which 
 he had seen so many born and die, his environment as a great 
 functionary of state, honoured, admired, almost adored by 
 the greatest, not only in the state but in the Church, his 
 solicitude lest science should receive some detriment by 
 openly resisting the Church, which had recaptured Europe 
 after the French Revolution, and had made of its enemies its 
 footstool all these considerations led him to oppose the new 
 theory. Amid the plaudits, then, of the foremost church- 
 men he threw across the path of the evolution doctrines the 
 whole mass of his authority in favour of the old theory of 
 catastrophic changes and special creations. 
 
 Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire stoutly withstood him, braving 
 non-recognition, ill-treatment, and ridicule. Treviranus, afar 
 off in his mathematical lecture-room at Bremen, seemed sim- 
 ply forgotten. 
 
 But the current of evolutionary thought could not thus 
 be checked : dammed up for a time, it broke out in new 
 channels and in ways and places least expected ; turned 
 away from France, it appeared especially in England, where 
 great paleontologists and geologists arose whose work cul- 
 minated in that of Lyell. Specialists throughout all the 
 world now became more vigorous than ever, gathering facts 
 and thinking upon them in a way which caused the special 
 creation theory to shrink more and more. Broader and
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 65 
 
 more full became these various rivulets, soon to unite in one 
 great stream of thought. 
 
 In 1813 Dr. Wells developed a theory of evolution by 
 natural selection to account for varieties in the human race. 
 About 1820 Dean Herbert, eminent as an authority in horti- 
 culture, avowed his conviction that species are but fixed 
 varieties. In 1831 Patrick Matthews stumbled upon and 
 stated the main doctrine of natural selection in evolution; 
 and others here and there, in Europe and America, caught 
 an inkling of it. 
 
 But no one outside of a circle apparently uninfluential 
 cared for these things : the Church was serene : on the Con- 
 tinent it had obtained reactionary control of courts, cabi- 
 nets, and universities ; in England, Dean Cockburn was de- 
 nouncing Mary Somerville and the geologists to the delight 
 of churchmen ; and the Rev. Mellor Brown was doing the 
 same thing for the edification of dissenters. 
 
 In America the mild suggestions of Silliman and his com- 
 peers were met by the protestations of the Andover theolo- 
 gians headed by Moses Stuart. Neither of the great English 
 universities, as a rule, took any notice of the innovators save 
 by sneers. 
 
 To this current of thought there was joined a new ele- 
 ment when, in 1844, Robert Chambers published his Vestiges 
 of Creation. The book was attractive and was widely read. 
 In Chambers's view the several series of animated beings, 
 from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most re- 
 cent, were the result of two distinct impulses, each given 
 once and for all time by the Creator. The first of these was 
 an impulse imparted to forms of life, lifting them gradually 
 through higher grades ; the second was an impulse tending 
 to modify organic substances in accordance with external 
 circumstances ; in fact, the doctrine of the book was evolu- 
 tion tempered by miracle a stretching out of the creative 
 act through all time a pious version of Lamarck. 
 
 Two results followed, one mirth-provoking, the other 
 leading to serious thought. The amusing result was that 
 the theologians were greatly alarmed by the book : it was 
 loudly insisted that it promoted atheism. Looking back 
 along the line of thought which has since been developed, 
 6
 
 66 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 one feels that the older theologians ought to have put up 
 thanksgivings for Chambers's theory, and prayers that it 
 might prove true. The more serious result was that it ac- 
 customed men's minds to a belief in evolution as in some 
 form possible or even probable. In this way it was pro- 
 visionally of service. 
 
 Eight years later Herbert Spencer published an essay 
 contrasting the theories of creation and evolution reason- 
 ing with great force in favour of the latter, showing that 
 species had undoubtedly been modified by circumstances ; 
 but still only few and chosen men saw the significance of all 
 these lines of reasoning which had been converging during 
 so many years toward one conclusion. 
 
 On July i, 1858, there were read before the Linnasan 
 Society at London two papers one presented by Charles 
 Darwin, the other by Alfred Russel Wallace and with the 
 reading of these papers the doctrine of evolution by natural 
 selection was born. Then and there a fatal breach was made 
 in the great theological barrier of the continued fixity of 
 species since the creation. 
 
 The story of these papers the scientific world knows by 
 heart: how Charles Darwin, having been sent to the Uni- 
 versity of Cambridge to fit him for the Anglican priesthood, 
 left it in 1831 to go upon the scientific expedition of the 
 Beagle ; how for five years he studied with wonderful vig- 
 our and acuteness the problems of life as revealed on land 
 and at sea among volcanoes and coral reefs, in forests and 
 on the sands, from the tropics to the arctic regions ; how, in 
 the Cape Verde and the Galapagos Islands, and in Brazil, 
 Patagonia, and Australia he interrogated Nature with match- 
 less persistency and skill ; how he returned unheralded, 
 quietly settled down to his work, and soon set the world 
 thinking over its first published results, such as his book 
 on Coral Reefs, and the monograph on the Cirripedia; and, 
 finally, how he presented his paper, and followed it up with 
 treatises which made him one of the great leaders in the 
 history of human thought. 
 
 The scientific world realizes, too, more and more, the 
 power of character shown by Darwin in all this great career ; 
 the faculty of silence, the reserve of strength seen in keep-
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 6/ 
 
 ing his great thought his idea of evolution by natural selec- 
 tion under silent study and meditation for nearly twenty 
 years, giving no hint of it to the world at large, but working 
 in every field to secure proofs or disproofs, and accumulat- 
 ing masses of precious material for the solution of the ques- 
 tions involved. 
 
 To one man only did he reveal his thought to Dr. Joseph 
 Hooker, to whom in 1844, under the seal of secrecy, he 
 gave a summary of his conclusions. Not until fourteen 
 years later occurred the event which showed him that the 
 fulness of time had come the letter from Alfred Russel 
 Wallace, to whom, in brilliant researches during the decade 
 from 1848 to 1858, in Brazil and in the Malay Archipelago, 
 the same truth of evolution by natural selection had been 
 revealed. Among the proofs that scientific study does no 
 injury to the more delicate shades of sentiment is the well- 
 known story of this letter. With it Wallace sent Darwin a 
 memoir, asking him to present it to the Linnasan Society : 
 on examining it, Darwin found that Wallace had independ- 
 ently arrived at conclusions similar to his own possibly 
 had deprived him of fame ; but Darwin was loyal to his 
 friend, and his friend remained ever loyal to him. He pub- 
 licly presented the paper from Wallace, with his own con- 
 clusions; and the date of this presentation July i, 1858 
 separates two epochs in the history, not merely of natural 
 science, but of human thought. 
 
 In the following year, 1859, came the first instalment of 
 his work in its fuller development his book on The Origin 
 of Species. In this book one at least of the main secrets at 
 the heart of the evolutionary process, which had baffled the 
 long line of investigators and philosophers from the days of 
 Aristotle, was more broadly revealed. The effective mech- 
 anism of evolution was shown at work in three ascertained 
 facts : in the struggle for existence among organized beings ; 
 in the survival of the fittest ; and in heredity. These facts 
 were presented with such minute research, wide observa- 
 tion, patient collation, transparent honesty, and judicial fair- 
 ness, that they at once commanded the world's attention. 
 It was the outcome of thirty years' work and thought by a 
 worker and thinker of genius, but it was yet more than that
 
 68 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 it was the outcome, also, of the work and thought of an- 
 other man of genius fifty years before. The book of Mal- 
 thus on the Principle of Population, mainly founded on the 
 fact that animals increase in a geometrical ratio, and there- 
 fore, if unchecked, must encumber the earth, had been gen- 
 erally forgotten, and was only recalled with a sneer. But 
 the genius of Darwin recognised in it a deeper meaning, 
 and now the thought of Malthus was joined to the new 
 current. Meditating upon it in connection with his own 
 observations of the luxuriance of Nature, Darwin had ar- 
 rived at his doctrine of natural selection and survival of 
 the fittest. 
 
 As the great dogmatic barrier between the old and new 
 views of the universe was broken down, the flood of new 
 thought pouring over the world stimulated and nourished 
 strong growths in every field of research and reasoning : 
 edition after edition of the book was called for ; it was -trans- 
 lated even into Japanese and Hindustani ; the stagnation of 
 scientific thought, which Buckle, only a few years before, 
 had so deeply lamented, gave place to a widespread and 
 fruitful activity ; masses of accumulated observations, which 
 had seemed stale and unprofitable, were made alive ; facts 
 formerly without meaning now found their interpretation. 
 Under this new influence an army of young men took up 
 every promising line of scientific investigation in every land. 
 Epoch-making books appeared in all the great nations. 
 Spencer, Wallace, Huxley, Galton, Tyndall, Tylor, Lubbock, 
 Bagehot, Lewes, in England, and a phalanx of strong men 
 in Germany, Italy, France, and America gave forth works 
 which became authoritative in every department of biology. 
 If some of the older men in France held back, overawed 
 perhaps by the authority of Cuvier, the younger and more 
 vigorous pressed on. 
 
 One source of opposition deserves to be especially men- 
 tioned Louis Agassiz. 
 
 A great investigator, an inspired and inspiring teacher, 
 a noble man, he had received and elaborated a theory of 
 animated creation which he could not readily change. In 
 his heart and mind still prevailed the atmosphere of the little 
 Swiss parsonage in which he was born, and his religious
 
 THEOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES. 
 
 6 9 
 
 and moral nature, so beautiful to all who knew him, was 
 especially repelled by sundry evolutionists, who, in their 
 zeal as neophytes, made proclamations seeming to have a 
 decidedly irreligious if not immoral bearing. In addition to 
 this was the direction his thinking had received from Cu- 
 vier. Both these influences combined to prevent his accept- 
 ance of the new view. 
 
 He was the third great man who had thrown his influ- 
 ence as a barrier across the current of evolutionary thought. 
 Linnaeus in the second half of the eighteenth century, Cuvier 
 in the first half, and Agassiz in the second half of the nine- 
 teenth all made the same effort. Each remains great ; but 
 not all of them together could arrest the current. Agassiz's 
 strong efforts throughout the United States, and indeed 
 throughout Europe, to check it, really promoted it. From 
 the great museum he had founded at Cambridge, from his 
 summer school at Penikese, from his lecture rooms at Har- 
 vard and Cornell, his disciples went forth full of love and 
 admiration for him, full of enthusiasm which he had stirred 
 and into fields which he had indicated ; but their powers, 
 which he had aroused and strengthened, were devoted to 
 developing the truth he failed to recognise ; Shaler, Ver- 
 rill, Packard, Hartt, Wilder, Jordan, with a multitude of 
 others, and especially the son who bore his honoured name, 
 did justice to his memory by applying what they had re- 
 ceived from him to research under inspiration of the new 
 revelation. 
 
 Still another man deserves especial gratitude and honour 
 in this progress Edward Livingston Youmans. He was 
 perhaps the first in America to recognise the vast bearings 
 of the truths presented by Darwin, Wallace, and Spencer. 
 He became the apostle of these truths, sacrificing the bril- 
 liant career on which he had entered as a public lecturer, 
 subordinating himself to the three leaders, and giving him- 
 self to editorial drudgery in the stimulation of research and 
 the announcement of results. 
 
 In support of the new doctrine came a world of new 
 proofs; those which Darwin himself added in regard to the 
 cross-fertilization of plants, and which he had adopted from 
 embryology, led the way, and these were followed by the
 
 70 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 discoveries of Wallace, Bates, Huxley, Marsh, Cope, Leidy, 
 Haeckel, Miiller, Gaudry, and a multitude of others in all 
 lands.* 
 
 IV. THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 DARWIN'S Origin of Species had come into the theological 
 world like a plough into an ant-hill. Everywhere those 
 thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose 
 had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons, 
 books light and heavy, came flying at the new thinker from 
 all sides. 
 
 The keynote was struck at once in the Quarterly Review 
 by Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. He declared that Bar- 
 win was guilty of " a tendency to limit God's glory in crea- 
 tion " ; that " the principle of natural selection is absolutely 
 incompatible with the word of God " ; that it " contradicts 
 the revealed relations of creation to its Creator " ; that it is 
 " inconsistent with the fulness of his glory " ; that it is " a 
 dishonouring view of Nature"; and that there is "a sim- 
 pler explanation of the presence of these strange forms 
 among the works of God " : that explanation being " the 
 fall of Adam." Nor did the bishop's efforts end here ; at the 
 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of 
 Science he again disported himself in the tide of popular 
 applause. Referring to the ideas of Darwin, who was ab- 
 sent on account of illness, he congratulated himself in a pub- 
 lic speech that he was not descended from a monkey. The 
 reply came from Huxley, who said in substance : " If I had 
 to choose, I would prefer to be a descendant of a humble 
 monkey rather than of a man who employs his knowledge 
 
 * For Agassiz's opposition to evolution, see the Essay on Classification, vol. i, 
 1857, as regards Lamarck, and vol. iii, 1860, as regards Darwin ; also Silliman's 
 Journal, July, 1860 ; also the Atlantic Monthly, January, 1874 ; also his Life and 
 Correspondence, vol. ii, p. 647 ; also Asa Gray, Scientific Papers, vol ii, p. 484. 
 A reminiscence of my own enables me to appreciate his deep ethical and religious 
 feeling. I was passing the day with him at Nahant in 1868, consulting him re- 
 garding candidates for various scientific chairs at the newly established Cornell 
 University, in which he took a deep interest. As we discussed one after another 
 of the candidates he suddenly said : " Who is to be your Professor of Moral 
 Philosophy? That is a far more important position than all the others."
 
 THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. 71 
 
 and eloquence in misrepresenting those who are wearing 
 out their lives in the search for truth." 
 
 This shot reverberated through England, and indeed 
 through other countries. 
 
 The utterances of this the most brilliant prelate of the 
 Anglican Church received a sort of antiphonal response 
 from the leaders of the English Catholics. In an address be- 
 fore the " Academia," which had been organized to combat 
 " science falsely so called," Cardinal Manning declared his 
 abhorrence of the new view of Nature, and described it as 
 " a brutal philosophy to wit, there is no God, and the ape 
 is our Adam." 
 
 These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical 
 fashion for several years. One distinguished clerical re- 
 viewer, in spite of Darwin's thirty years of quiet labour, and 
 in spite of the powerful summing up of his book, prefaced a 
 diatribe by saying that Darwin " might have been more 
 modest had he given some slight reason for dissenting from 
 the views generally entertained." Another distinguished 
 clergyman, vice-president of a Protestant institute to com- 
 bat " dangerous " science, declared Darwinism " an attempt 
 to dethrone God." Another critic spoke of persons accept- 
 ing the Darwinian views as " under the frenzied inspiration 
 of the inhaler of mephitic gas," and of Darwin's argument 
 as "a jungle of fanciful assumption." Another spoke of 
 Darwin's views as suggesting that " God is dead," and de- 
 clared that Darwin's work " does open violence to every- 
 thing which the Creator himself has told us in the Scriptures 
 of the methods and results of his work." Still another the- 
 ological authority asserted : " If the Darwinian theory is 
 true, Genesis is a lie, the whole framework of the book of 
 life falls to pieces, and the revelation of God to man, as we 
 Christians know it, is a delusion and a snare." Another, 
 who had shown excellent qualities as an observing natural- 
 ist, declared the Darwinian view " a huge imposture from 
 the beginning." 
 
 Echoes came from America. One review, the organ of 
 the most widespread of American religious sects, declared 
 that Darwin was " attempting to befog and to pettifog the 
 whole question " ; another denounced Darwin's views as
 
 72 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 " infidelity " ; another, representing the American branch of 
 the Anglican Church, poured contempt over Darwin as 
 " sophistical and illogical," and then plunged into an exceed- 
 ingly dangerous line of argument in the following words: 
 " If this hypothesis be true, then is the Bible an unbearable 
 fiction ; . . . then have Christians for nearly two thousand 
 years been duped by a monstrous lie. . . . Darwin requires 
 us to disbelieve the authoritative word of the Creator." A 
 leading journal representing the same church took pains to 
 show the evolution theory to be as contrary to the explicit 
 declarations of the New Testament as to those of the Old, 
 and said : " If we have all, men and monkeys, oysters and 
 eagles, developed from an original germ, then is St. Paul's 
 grand deliverance ' All flesh is not the same flesh ; there is 
 one kind of flesh of men, another of beasts, another of fishes, 
 and another of birds ' untrue." 
 
 Another echo came from Australia, where Dr. Perry, 
 Lord Bishop of Melbourne, in a most bitter book on Science 
 and the Bible, declared that the obvious object of Chambers, 
 Darwin, and Huxley is " to produce in their readers a dis- 
 belief of the Bible."' 
 
 Nor was the older branch of the Church to be left be- 
 hind in this chorus. Bayma, in the Catholic World, declared, 
 " Mr. Darwin is, we have reason to believe, the mouth- 
 piece or chief trumpeter of that infidel clique whose well- 
 known object is to do away with all idea of a God." 
 
 Worthy of especial note as showing the determination of 
 the theological side at that period w r as the foundation of 
 sacro-scientific organizations to combat the new ideas. First 
 to be noted is the " Academia," planned by Cardinal Wise- 
 man. In a circular letter the cardinal, usually so moderate 
 and just, sounded an alarm and summed up by saying, " Now 
 it is for the Church, which alone possesses divine certainty 
 and divine discernment, to place itself at once in the front 
 of a movement which threatens even the fragmentary re- 
 mains of Christian belief in England." The necessary per- 
 mission was obtained from Rome, the Academia was founded, 
 and the "divine discernment" of the Church was seen in 
 the utterances which came from it, such as those of Cardinal 
 Manning, which every thoughtful Catholic would now de-
 
 THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. 73 
 
 sire to recall, and in the diatribes of Dr. Laing, which only 
 aroused laughter on all sides. A similar effort was seen 
 in Protestant quarters ; the " Victoria Institute " was cre- 
 ated, and perhaps the most noted utterance which ever 
 came from it was the declaration of its vice-president, the 
 Rev. Walter Mitchell, that " Darwinism endeavours to de- 
 throne God." * 
 
 In France the attack was even more violent. Fabre 
 d'Envieu brought out the heavy artillery of theology, and 
 in a long series of elaborate propositions demonstrated that 
 any other doctrine than that of the fixity and persistence of 
 species is absolutely contrary to Scripture. The Abbe De- 
 sorges, a former Professor of Theology, stigmatized Darwin 
 as a " pedant," and evolution as " gloomy " ; Monseigneur 
 Segur, referring to Darwin and his followers, went into hys- 
 terics and shrieked : " These infamous doctrines have for 
 their only support the most abject passions. Their father is 
 pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions. 
 They come from hell and return thither, taking with them 
 the gross creatures who blush not to proclaim and accept 
 them." 
 
 In Germany the attack, if less declamatory, was no less 
 severe. Catholic theologians vied with Protestants in bitter- 
 ness. Prof. Michelis declared Darwin's theory " a caricature 
 of creation." Dr. Hagermann asserted that it " turned the 
 Creator out of doors." Dr. Schund insisted that " every 
 
 * For Wilberforce's article, see Quarterly Review, July, 1860. For the reply of 
 Huxley to the bishop's speech I have relied on the account given in Quatrefages, 
 who had it from Carpenter ; a somewhat different version is given in the Life and 
 Letters of Darwin. For Cardinal Manning's attack, see Essays on Religion and 
 Literature, London, 1865. For the review articles, see the Quarterly already cited, 
 and that for July, 1874; also the North British Review, May, 1860 ; also, F. O. 
 Morris's letter in the Record, reprinted at Glasgow, 1870; also the Addresses of 
 Rev. Walter Mitchell before the Victoria Institute, London, 1867 ; also Rev. B. G. 
 Johns, Moses not Darwin, a Sermon, March 31, 1871. For the earlier American 
 attacks, see Methodist Quarterly Review, April, 1871 ; The American Church Re- 
 view, July and October, 1865, and January, 1866. For the Australian attack, see 
 Science and the Bible, by the Right Reverend Charles Perry, D. D., Bishop of Mel- 
 bourne, London, 1869. For Bayma, see the Catholic World, vol. xxvi, p. 782. For 
 the Academia, see Essays edited by Cardinal Manning, above cited ; and for the 
 Victoria Institute, see Scientia Scientiarum, by a member of the Victoria Institute, 
 London, 1865.
 
 74 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 idea of the Holy Scriptures, from the first to the last page, 
 stands in diametrical opposition to the Darwinian theory " ; 
 and, "if Darwin be right in his view of the development 
 of man out of a brutal condition, then the Bible teaching 
 in regard to man is utterly annihilated." Rougemont in 
 Switzerland called for a crusade against the obnoxious 
 doctrine. Luthardt, Professor of Theology at Leipsic, de- 
 clared : " The idea of creation belongs to religion and not 
 to natural science ; the whole superstructure of personal re- 
 ligion is built upon the doctrine of creation " ; and he 
 showed the evolution theory to be in direct contradiction 
 to Holy Writ. 
 
 But in 1863 came an event which brought serious confu- 
 sion to the theological camp : Sir Charles Lyell, the most 
 eminent of living geologists, a man of deeply Christian feel- 
 ing and of exceedingly cautious temper, who had opposed 
 the evolution theory of Lamarck and declared his adherence 
 to the idea of successive creations, then published his work 
 on the Antiquity of Man, and in this and other utterances 
 showed himself a complete though unwilling convert to the 
 fundamental ideas of Darwin. The blow was serious in 
 many ways, and especially so in two first, as withdrawing 
 all foundation in fact from the scriptural chronology, and 
 secondly, as discrediting the creation theory. The blow 
 was not unexpected ; in various review articles against the 
 Darwinian theory there had been appeals to Lyell, at times 
 almost piteous, " not to flinch from the truths he had for- 
 merly proclaimed." But Lyell, like the honest man he was, 
 yielded unreservedly to the mass of new proofs arrayed on 
 the side of evolution against that of creation. 
 
 At the same time came Huxley's Mans Place in Nature, 
 giving new and most cogent arguments in favour of evolu- 
 tion by natural selection. 
 
 In 1871 was published Darwin's Descent of Man. Its doc- 
 trine had been anticipated by critics of his previous books, 
 but it made, none the less, a great stir ; again the opposing 
 army trooped forth, though evidently with much less heart 
 than before. A few were very violent. The Dublin Univer- 
 sity Magazine, after the traditional Hibernian fashion, charged 
 Mr. Darwin with seeking "to displace God by the uner-
 
 THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 75 
 
 ring action of vagary," and with being " resolved to hunt 
 God out of the world.'' But most notable from the side of 
 the older Church was the elaborate answer to Darwin's book 
 by the eminent French Catholic physician, Dr. Constantin 
 James. In his work, On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape, pub- 
 lished at Paris in 1877, Dr. James not only refuted Darwin 
 scientifically but poured contempt on his book, calling it "a 
 fairy tale," and insisted that a work "so fantastic and so 
 burlesque " was, doubtless, only a huge joke, like Eras- 
 mus's Praise of Folly, or Montesquieu's Persian Letters. The 
 princes of the Church were delighted. The Cardinal Arch- 
 bishop of Paris assured the author that the book had become 
 his " spiritual reading," and begged him to send a copy to 
 the Pope himself. His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, acknowl- 
 edged the gift in a remarkable letter. He thanked his dear 
 son, the writer, for the book in which he " refutes so well 
 the aberrations of Darwinism." " A system," His Holiness 
 adds, " which is repugnant at once to history, to the tradi- 
 tion of all peoples, to exact science, to observed facts, and 
 even to Reason herself, would seem to need no refutation, 
 did not alienation from God and the leaning toward ma- 
 terialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this 
 tissue of fables. . . . And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the 
 Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, 
 wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own 
 God pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to the 
 level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless mat- 
 ter, thus unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration, 
 When pride cometh, then comet h shame. But the corruption 
 of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the danger 
 of the simple, demand that such fancies, altogether absurd 
 though they are, should since they borrow the mask of 
 science be refuted by true science." Wherefore the Pope 
 thanked Dr. James for his book, " so opportune and so per- 
 fectly appropriate to the exigencies of our time," and be- 
 stowed on him the apostolic benediction. Nor was this brief 
 all. With it there came a second, creating the author an 
 officer of the Papal Order of St. Sylvester. The cardinal 
 archbishop assured the delighted physician that such a 
 double honour of brief and brevet was perhaps unprece-
 
 76 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 dented, and suggested only that in a new edition of his book 
 he should " insist a little more on the relation existing be- 
 tween the narratives of Genesis and the discoveries of mod- 
 ern science, in such fashion as to convince the most incredu- 
 lous of their perfect agreement." The prelate urged also a 
 more dignified title. The proofs of this new edition were 
 accordingly all submitted to His Eminence, and in 1882 it 
 appeared as Moses and Darwin : the Man of Genesis compared 
 with the Man- Ape, or Religious Education opposed to Atheistic. 
 No wonder the cardinal embraced the author, thanking him 
 in the name of science and religion. " We have at last," he 
 declared, "a handbook which we can safely put into the 
 hands of youth." 
 
 Scarcely less vigorous were the champions of English 
 Protestant orthodoxy. In an address at Liverpool, Mr. 
 Gladstone remarked : " Upon the grounds of what is termed 
 evolution God is relieved of the labour of creation ; in the 
 name of unchangeable laws he is discharged from governing 
 the world " ; and, when Herbert Spencer called his attention 
 to the fact that Newton with the doctrine of gravitation and 
 with the science of physical astronomy is open to the same 
 charge, Mr. Gladstone retreated in the Contemporary Review 
 under one of his characteristic clouds of words. The Rev. 
 Dr. Coles, in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, de- 
 clared that the God of evolution is not the Christian's God. 
 Burgon, Dean of Chichester, in a sermon preached before 
 the University of Oxford, pathetically warned the students 
 that " those who refuse to accept the history of the creation 
 of our first parents according to its obvious literal intention, 
 and are for substituting the modern dream of evolution in 
 its place, cause the entire scheme of man's salvation to col- 
 lapse." Dr. Pusey also came into the fray with most earnest 
 appeals against the new doctrine, and the Rev. Gavin Car- 
 lyle was perfervid on the same side. The Society for Pro- 
 moting Christian Knowledge published a book by the Rev. 
 Mr. Birks, in which the evolution doctrine was declared to 
 be "flatly opposed to the fundamental doctrine of creation." 
 Even the London Times admitted a review stigmatizing Dar- 
 win's Descent of Man as an " utterly unsupported hypothe- 
 sis," full of " unsubstantiated premises, cursory investiga-
 
 THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 77 
 
 tions, and disintegrating speculations," and Darwin himself 
 as " reckless and unscientific." * 
 
 But it was noted that this second series of attacks, on the 
 Descent of Man, differed in one remarkable respect so far 
 as England was concerned from those which had been 
 made over ten years before on the Origin of Species. While 
 everything was done to discredit Darwin, to pour contempt 
 upon him, and even, of all things in the world, to make him 
 the gentlest of mankind, only occupied with the scientific 
 side of the problem "a persecutor of Christianity," while 
 his followers were represented more and more as charlatans 
 or dupes, there began to be in the most influential quarters 
 careful avoidance of the old argument that evolution even 
 by natural selection contradicts Scripture. It began to be 
 felt that this was dangerous ground. The defection of Lyell 
 had, perhaps, more than anything else, started the question 
 among theologians who had preserved some equanimity, 
 " What if, after all, the Darwinian theory should prove to be 
 true?" Recollections of the position in which the Roman 
 Church found itself after the establishment of the doctrines 
 
 * For the French theological opposition to the Darwinian theory, see Pozzy 
 La Terre et le Recit Biblique de la Creation, 1874, especially pp 353, 363 ; also, 
 Felix Ducane, fitudes sur le Transform isme, 1876, especially pp. 107 to 119. As 
 to Fabre d'Envieu, see especially his Proposition xliii. For the Abbe De'sorges, 
 " former Professor of Philosophy and Theology," see his Erreurs Modernes, Paris, 
 1878, pp. 677 and 595 to 598. For Monseigneur Se"gur, see his La Foi devant la 
 Science Moderne, sixth ed., Paris, 1874, pp. 23, 34, etc. For Herbert Spencer's 
 reply to Mr. Gladstone, see his Study of Sociology ; for the passage in the Dublin 
 Review, see the issue for July, 1871. For the review in the London Times, see 
 Nature for April 20, 1871. For Gavin Carlyle, see The Battle of Unbelief, 1870, 
 pp. 86 and 171. For the attacks by Michelis and Hagermann, see Natur und 
 Offcnbarung, Minister, 1861 to 1869. For Schund, see his Darwin's Hypothese und 
 ihr Verhaltniss zu Religion und Moral, Stuttgart, 1869. For Luthardt, see Funda- 
 mental Truths of Christianity, translated by Sophia Taylor, second ed., Edinburgh, 
 1869. For Rougemont, see his L'Homme et le Singe, Neuchatel, 1863 (also in 
 German trans.). For Constantin James, see his Mes Entretiens avec I'Empe'reur 
 Don Pe'dro sur le Darwinisme, Paris, 1888, where the papal briefs are printed in 
 full. For the English attacks on Darwin's Descent of Man, see the Edinburgh 
 Review July, 1871, and elsewhere ; the Dublin Review, July, 1871 ; the Biitish 
 and Foreign Evangelical Review, April, i<?86. See also The Scripture Doctrine of 
 Creation, by the Rev. T. R. Birks, London, 1873, published by the S. P. C. K. 
 For Dr. Pusey's attack, see his Unscience, not Science, adverse to Faith, 1878 ; also, 
 Darwin's Life and Letters, vol. ii, pp. 411, 412.
 
 78 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 of Copernicus and Galileo naturally came into the minds of 
 the more thoughtful. In Germany this consideration does 
 not seem to have occurred at quite so early a day. One 
 eminent Lutheran clergyman at Magdeburg called on his 
 hearers to choose between Darwin and religion ; Delitszch, 
 in his new commentary on Genesis, attempted to bring sci- 
 ence back to recognise human sin as an important factor in 
 creation ; Prof. Heinrich Ewald, while carefully avoiding 
 any sharp conflict between the scriptural doctrine and evo- 
 lution, comforted himself by covering Darwin and his fol- 
 lowers with contempt ; Christlieb, in his address before the 
 Evangelical Alliance at New York in 1873, simply took the 
 view that the tendencies of the Darwinian theory were " to- 
 ward infidelity," but declined to make any serious battle on 
 biblical grounds; the Jesuit, Father Pesch, in Holland, drew 
 up in Latin, after the old scholastic manner, a sort of gen- 
 eral indictment of evolution, of which one may say that it 
 was interesting as interesting as the display of a troop in 
 chain armour and with cross-bows on a nineteenth-century 
 battlefield. 
 
 From America there came new echoes. Among the 
 myriad attacks on the Darwinian theory by Protestants and 
 Catholics two should be especially mentioned. The first of 
 these was by Dr. Noah Porter, President of Yale College, 
 an excellent scholar, an interesting writer, a noble man, 
 broadly tolerant, combining in his thinking a curious mix- 
 ture of radicalism and conservatism. While giving great 
 latitude to the evolutionary teaching in the university under 
 his care, he felt it his duty upon one occasion to avow his 
 disbelief in it ; but he was too wise a man to suggest any 
 necessary antagonism between it and the Scriptures. He 
 confined himself mainly to pointing out the tendency of the 
 evolution doctrine in this form toward agnosticism and pan- 
 theism. To those who knew and loved him, and had noted 
 the genial way in which by wise neglect he had allowed sci- 
 entific studies to flourish at Yale, there was an amusing side 
 to all this. Within a stone's throw of his college rooms was 
 the Museum of Paleontology, in which Prof. Marsh had laid 
 side by side, among other evidences of the new truth, that 
 wonderful series of specimens showing the evolution of the
 
 THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. 
 
 79 
 
 horse from the earliest form of the animal, " not larger than 
 a fox, with five toes," through the whole series up to his 
 present form and size that series which Huxley declared 
 an absolute proof of the existence of natural selection as an 
 agent in evolution. In spite of the veneration and love which 
 all Yale men felt for President Porter, it was hardly to be 
 expected that these particular arguments of his would have 
 much permanent effect upon them when there was con- 
 stantly before their eyes so convincing a refutation. 
 
 But a far more determined opponent was the Rev. Dr. 
 Hodge, of Princeton ; his anger toward the evolution doc- 
 trine was bitter : he denounced it as thoroughly " atheistic " ; 
 he insisted that Christians " have a right to protest against 
 the arraying of probabilities against the clear evidence of 
 the Scriptures " ; he even censured so orthodox a writer as 
 the Duke of Argyll, and declared that the Darwinian theory 
 of natural selection is " utterly inconsistent with the Scrip- 
 tures," and that " an absent God, who does nothing, is to us 
 no God " ; that " to ignore design as manifested in God's 
 creation is to dethrone God " ; that " a denial of design in 
 Nature is virtually a denial of God " ; and that " no tele- 
 ologist can be a Darwinian." Even more uncompromising 
 was another of the leading authorities at the same university 
 the Rev. Dr. Duffield. He declared war not only against 
 Darwin but even against men like Asa Gray, Le Conte, and 
 others, who had attempted to reconcile the new theory with 
 the Bible : he insisted that " evolutionism and the scriptural 
 account of the origin of man are irreconcilable " that the 
 Darwinian theory is " in direct conflict with the teaching of 
 the apostle, ' All scripture is given by inspiration of God ' " ; 
 he pointed out, in his opposition to Darwin's Descent of Man 
 and Lyell's Antiquity of Man, that in the Bible " the gene- 
 alogical links which connect the Israelites in Egypt with 
 Adam and Eve in Eden are explicitly given." These utter- 
 ances of Prof. Duffield culminated in a declaration which de- 
 serves to be cited as showing that a Presbyterian minister 
 can " deal damnation round the land " ex cathedra in a fashion 
 quite equal to that of popes and bishops. It is as follows : 
 " If the development theory of the origin of man," wrote Dr. 
 Duffield in the Princeton Review, " shall in a little while take
 
 80 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 its place as doubtless it will with other exploded scientific 
 speculations, then they who accept it with its proper logical 
 consequences will in the life to come have their portion with 
 those who in this life ' know not God and obey not the gos- 
 pel of his Son.' " 
 
 Fortunately, at about the time when Darwin's Descent of 
 Man was published, there had come into Princeton Univer- 
 sity a " deus ex machina " in the person of Dr. James McCosh. 
 Called to the presidency, he at once took his stand against 
 teachings so dangerous to Christianity as those of Drs. 
 Hodge, Duffield, and their associates. In one of his personal 
 confidences he has let us into the secret of this matter. 
 With that hard Scotch sense which Thackeray had ap- 
 plauded in his well-known verses, he saw that the most dan- 
 gerous thing which could be done to Christianity at Prince- 
 ton was to reiterate in the university pulpit, week after 
 week, solemn declarations that if evolution by natural selec- 
 tion, or indeed evolution at all, be true, the Scriptures are 
 false. He tells us that he saw that this was the certain way 
 to make the students unbelievers ; he therefore not only 
 checked this dangerous preaching but preached an opposite 
 doctrine. With him began the inevitable compromise, and, 
 in spite of mutterings against him as a Darwinian, he carried 
 the day. Whatever may be thought of his general system 
 of philosophy, no one can deny his great service in neutral- 
 izing the teachings of his predecessors and colleagues so 
 dangerous to all that is essential in Christianity. 
 
 Other divines of strong sense in other parts of the coun- 
 try began to take similar ground namely, that men could 
 be Christians and at the same time Darwinians. There ap- 
 peared, indeed, here and there, curious discrepancies: thus 
 in 1873 the Monthly Religious Magazine of Boston congratu- 
 lated its readers that the Rev. Mr. Burr had " demolished 
 the evolution theory, knocking the breath of life out of it 
 and throwing it to the dogs." This amazing performance by 
 the Rev. Mr. Burr was repeated in a very striking way by 
 Bishop Keener before the (Ecumenical Council of Metho- 
 dism at Washington in 1891. In what the newspapers de- 
 scribed as an " admirable speech," he refuted evolution doc- 
 trines by saying that evolutionists had " only to make a
 
 THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. 8 1 
 
 journey of twelve hours from the place where he was then 
 standing to find together the bones of the muskrat, the opos- 
 sum, the coprolite, and the ichthyosaurus." He asserted 
 that Agassiz whom the good bishop, like so many others, 
 seemed to think an evolutionist when he visited these beds 
 near Charleston, declared : " These old beds have set me 
 crazy ; they have destroyed the work of a lifetime." And 
 the Methodist prelate ended by saying : " Now, gentlemen, 
 brethren, take these facts home with you ; get down and 
 look at them. This is the watch that was under the steam 
 hammer the doctrine of evolution ; and this steam hammer 
 is the wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds." 
 
 Exhibitions like these availed little. While the good 
 bishop amid vociferous applause thus made comically evi- 
 dent his belief that Agassiz was a Darwinian and a coprolite 
 an animal, scientific men were recording in all parts of the 
 world facts confirming the dreaded theory of an evolution 
 by natural selection. While the Rev. Mr. Burr was so 
 loudly praised for " throwing Darwinism to the dogs," 
 Marsh was completing his series leading from the five-toed 
 ungulates to the horse. While Dr. Tayler Lewis at Union, 
 and Drs. Hodge and Duffield at Princeton, were showing 
 that if evolution be true the biblical accounts must be false, 
 the indefatigable Yale professor was showing his cretaceous 
 birds, and among them Hesperornis and Ichthyornis with teeth. 
 While in Germany Luthardt, Schund, and their compeers 
 were demonstrating that Scripture requires a belief in special 
 and separate creations, the Archceopteryx, showing a most 
 remarkable connection between birds and reptiles, was dis- 
 covered. While in France Monseigneur S6gur and others 
 were indulging in diatribes against " a certain Darwin," 
 Gaudry and Filhol were discovering a striking series of 
 " missing links " among the carnivora. 
 
 In view of the proofs accumulating in favour of the new 
 evolutionary hypothesis, the change in the tone of control- 
 ling theologians was now rapid. From all sides came evi- 
 dences of desire to compromise with the theory. Strict ad- 
 herents of the biblical text pointed significantly to the verses 
 in Genesis in which the earth and sea were made to bring 
 forth birds and fishes, and man was created out of the dust
 
 82 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 of the ground. Men of larger mind like Kingsley and Far- 
 rar, with English and American broad churchmen generally, 
 took ground directly in Darwin's favour. Even Whewell 
 took pains to show that there might be such a thing as a 
 Darwinian argument for design in Nature ; and the Rev. 
 Samuel Houghton, of the Royal Society, gave interesting 
 suggestions of a divine design in evolution. 
 
 Both the great English universities received the new 
 teaching as a leaven : at Oxford, in the very front of the 
 High Church party at Keble College, was elaborated a 
 statement that the evolution doctrine is " an advance in our 
 theological thinking." And Temple, Bishop of London, per- 
 haps the most influential thinker then in the Anglican epis- 
 copate, accepted the new revelation in the following words : 
 " It seems something more majestic, more befitting him to 
 whom a thousand years are as one day, thus to impress his 
 will once for all on his creation, and provide for all the 
 countless varieties by this one original impress, than by spe- 
 cial acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what he 
 had previously made." 
 
 In Scotland the Duke of Argyll, head and front of the 
 orthodox party, dissenting in many respects from Darwin's 
 full conclusions, made concessions which badly shook the 
 old position. 
 
 Curiously enough, from the Roman Catholic Church, 
 bitter as some of its writers had been, now came argument 
 to prove that the Catholic faith does not prevent any one 
 from holding the Darwinian theory, and especially a declara- 
 tion from an authority eminent among American Catholics 
 a declaration which has a very curious sound, but which 
 it would be ungracious to find fault with that " the doctrine 
 of evolution is no more in opposition to the doctrine of the 
 Catholic Church than is the Copernican theory or that of 
 Galileo." 
 
 Here and there, indeed, men of science like Dawson, 
 Mivart, and Wigand, in view of theological considerations, 
 sought to make conditions ; but the current was too strong, 
 and eminent theologians in every country accepted natural 
 selection as at least a very important part in the mechanism 
 of evolution.
 
 THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. 83 
 
 At the death of Darwin it was felt that there was but one 
 place in England where his body should be laid, and that 
 this place was next the grave of Sir Isaac Newton in West- 
 minster Abbey. The noble address of Canon Farrar at his 
 funeral was echoed from many pulpits in Europe and Amer- 
 ica, and theological opposition as such was ended. Occa- 
 sionally appeared, it is true, a survival of the old feeling : 
 the Rev. Dr. Laing referred to the burial of Darwin in 
 Westminster Abbey as " a proof that England is no longer a 
 Christian country," and added that this burial was a desecra- 
 tion that this honour was given him because he had been 
 " the chief promoter of the mock doctrine of evolution of 
 the species and the ape descent of man." 
 
 Still another of these belated prophets was, of all men, 
 Thomas Carlyle. Soured and embittered, in the same spirit 
 which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking 
 or in one of Frederick the Great's generals than in Wash- 
 ington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see 
 in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul 
 chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic 
 eunuch, railed at Darwin as an " apostle of dirt worship." 
 
 The last echoes of these utterances reverberated between 
 Scotland and America. In the former country, in 1885, the 
 Rev. Dr. Lee issued a volume declaring that, if the Darwin- 
 ian view be true, " there is no place for God " ; that " by no 
 method of interpretation can the language of Holy Scrip- 
 ture be made wide enough to re-echo the orang-outang the- 
 ory of man's natural history " ; that " Darwinism reverses 
 the revelation of God " and " implies utter blasphemy against 
 the divine and human character of our Incarnate Lord " ; 
 and he was pleased to call Darwin and his followers " gos- 
 pellers of the gutter." In one of the intellectual centres of 
 America the editor of a periodical called The Christian urged 
 frantically that " the battle be set in array, and that men find 
 out who is on the Lord's side and who is on the side of the 
 devil and the monkeys." 
 
 To the honour of the Church of England it should be 
 recorded that a considerable number of her truest men op- 
 posed such utterances as these, and that one of them Far- 
 rar, Archdeacon of Westminster made a protest worthy to
 
 84 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 be held in perpetual remembrance. While confessing his 
 own inability to accept fully the new scientific belief, he 
 said : " We should consider it disgraceful and humiliating to 
 try to shake it by an ad captandum argument, or by a clap- 
 trap platform appeal to the unfathomable ignorance and 
 unlimited arrogance of a prejudiced assembly. We should 
 blush to meet it with an anathema or a sneer." 
 
 All opposition had availed nothing ; Darwin's work and 
 fame were secure. As men looked back over his beautiful 
 life simple, honest, tolerant, kindly and thought upon his 
 great labours in the search for truth, all the attacks faded 
 into nothingness. 
 
 There were indeed some dark spots, which as time goes 
 on appear darker. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Whe- 
 well, the "omniscient," author of the History of the Inductive 
 Sciences, refused to allow a copy of the Origin of Species to be 
 placed in the library. At multitudes of institutions under 
 theological control Protestant as well as Catholic attempts 
 were made to stamp out or to stifle evolutionary teaching. 
 Especially was this true for a time in America, and the case 
 of the American College at Beyrout, where nearly all the 
 younger professors were dismissed for adhering to Darwin's 
 views, is worthy of remembrance. The treatment of Dr. 
 Winchell at the Vanderbilt University in Tennessee showed 
 the same spirit ; one of the truest of men, devoted to science 
 but of deeply Christian feeling, he was driven forth for views 
 which centred in the Darwinian theory. 
 
 Still more striking was the case of Dr. Woodrow. He 
 had, about 1857, been appointed to a professorship of Natu- 
 ral Science as connected with Revealed Religion, in the 
 Presbyterian Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina. He 
 was a devoted Christian man, and his training had led him 
 to accept the Presbyterian standards of faith. With great 
 gifts for scientific study he visited Europe, made a most 
 conscientious examination of the main questions under dis- 
 cussion, and adopted the chief points in the doctrine of 
 evolution by natural selection. A struggle soon began. A 
 movement hostile to him grew more and more determined, 
 and at last, in spite of the efforts made in his behalf by the 
 directors of the seminary and by a large and broad-minded
 
 THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. g$ 
 
 minority in the representative bodies controlling it, an ortho- 
 dox storm, raised by the delegates from various Presbyterian 
 bodies, drove him from his post. Fortunately, he was re- 
 ceived into a professorship at the University of South Caro- 
 lina, where he has since taught with more power than ever 
 before. 
 
 This testimony to the faith by American provincial Prot- 
 estantism was very properly echoed from Spanish provincial 
 Catholicism. In the year 1878 a Spanish colonial man of sci- 
 ence, Dr. Chil y Marango, published a work on the Canary 
 Islands. But Dr. Chil had the imprudence to sketch, in his 
 introduction, the modern hypothesis of evolution, and to 
 exhibit some proofs, found in the Canary Islands, of the bar- 
 barism of primitive man. The ecclesiastical authorities, un- 
 der the lead of Bishop Urquinaona y Bidot, at once grappled 
 with this new idea. By a solemn act they declared it ''falsa, 
 impia, scandalosa " ; all persons possessing copies of the work 
 were ordered to surrender them at once to the proper 
 ecclesiastics, and the author was placed under the major 
 excommunication. 
 
 But all this opposition may be reckoned among the last 
 expiring convulsions of the old theologic theory. Even from 
 the new Catholic University at Washington has come an 
 utterance in favour of the new doctrine, and in other univer- 
 sities in the Old World and in the New the doctrine of 
 evolution by natural selection has asserted its right to full 
 and honest consideration. More than this, it is clearly evi- 
 dent that the stronger men in the Church have, in these 
 latter days, not only relinquished the struggle against sci- 
 ence in this field, but have determined frankly and manfully 
 to make an alliance with it. In two very remarkable lec- 
 tures given in 1892 at the parish church of Rochdale, Wil- 
 son, Archdeacon of Manchester, not only accepted Dar- 
 winism as true, but wrought it with great argumentative 
 power into a higher view of Christianity ; and what is of 
 great significance, these sermons were published by the same 
 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge which 
 only a few years before had published the most bitter at- 
 tacks against the Darwinian theory. So, too, during the 
 year 1893, Prof. Henry Drummond, whose praise is in all
 
 86 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 the dissenting churches, developed a similar view most bril- 
 liantly in a series of lectures delivered before the American 
 Chautauqua schools, and published in one of the most wide- 
 spread of English orthodox newspapers. 
 
 Whatever additional factors may be added to natural 
 selection and Darwin himself fully admitted that there 
 might be others the theory of an evolution process in the 
 formation of the universe and of animated nature is estab- 
 lished, and the old theory of direct creation is gone forever. 
 In place of it science has given us conceptions far more 
 noble, and opened the way to an argument for design infi- 
 nitely more beautiful than an}' ever developed by theology.* 
 
 * For causes of the bitterness shown regarding the Darwinian hypothesis, see 
 Reusch, Bibel und Natur, vol. ii, pp. 46 et seq. For hostility in the United States 
 toward the Darwinian theory, see, among a multitude of writers, the following : Dr. 
 Charles Hodge, of Princeton, monograph, What is Darwinism? New York, 1874 ; 
 also his Systematic Theology, New York, 1872, vol. ii, part 2, Anthropology ; also 
 The Light by which we see Light, or Nature and the Scriptures, Vedder Lectures, 
 1875, Rutgers College, New York, 1875 ; also Positivism and Evolutionism, in 
 the American Catholic Quarterly, October, 1877, pp. 607, 619 ; and, in the same 
 number, Professor Huxley and Evolution, by Rev. A. M. Kirsch, pp. 662, 664 ; 
 The Logic of Evolution, by Prof. Edward F. X. McSweeney, D. D., July, 1879, p. 
 561 ; Das Hextsmeron und die Geologic, von P. Eirich, Pastor in Albany, N. Y., 
 Lutherischer Concordia-Verlag, St. Louis, Mo., 1878, pp. 81, 82, 84, 92-94 ; Evolu- 
 tionism respecting Man and the Bible, by John T. Duffield, of Princeton, January, 
 1878, Princeton Review, pp. 151, 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 188 ; A Lecture on Evolu- 
 tion, before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York, May 25, 1886, by ex-Presi- 
 dent Noah Porter, pp. 4, 26-29. F r tne laudatory notice of the Rev. E. F. Burr's 
 demolition of evolution in his book Pater Mundi, see Monthly Religious Maga- 
 zine, Boston, May, 1873, p. 492. Concerning the removal of Rev. Dr James Wood- 
 row, Professor of Natural Science in the Columbia Theological Seminary, see 
 Evolution or Not, art. in the New York Weekly Sun, October 24, 1888. For the 
 dealings of Spanish ecclesiastics with Dr. Chil and his Darwinian exposition, see 
 the Revue d'Anthropologie, cited in the Academy for April 6, 1878 ; see also the 
 Catholic World, xix, 433, A Discussion with an Infidel, directed against Dr. Louis 
 Biichner and his Kraft und Stoff; also Mind and Matter, by Rev. James Tait, 
 of Canada, p. 66 (in the third edition the author bemoans the " horrible plaudits " 
 that "have accompanied every effort to establish man's brutal descent)" ; also The 
 Church Journal, New York, May 28, 1874. For the effort in favour of a teleo- 
 logical evolution, see Rev. Samuel Houghton, F. R. S., Principles of Animal Me- 
 chanics, London, 1873, preface and p. 156 and elsewhere. For details of the persecu- 
 tion of Drs. Winchell and Woodrow, and of the Beyrout professors, with authorities 
 cited, see my chapter on The Fall of Man and Anthropology. For more liberal 
 views among religious thinkers regarding the Darwinian theory, and for efforts to 
 mitigate and adapt it to theological views, see, among the great mass of utterances, 
 the following: Charles Kingsley's letters to Darwin, November 18, 1859, in Dar-
 
 THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY. g/ 
 
 win's Life and Letters, vol. ii, p. 82 ; Adam Sedgwick to Charles Darwin, Decem- 
 ber 24, 1859, see ibid., vol. ii, pp. 356-359 ; the same to Miss Gerard, January 2, 
 1860, see Sedgwick' s Life and Letters, vol. ii, pp. 359, 360 ; the same in The Spec- 
 tator, London, March 24, 1860 ; The Rambler, March, 1860, cited by Mivart, Gene- 
 sis of Species, p. 30 ; The Dublin Review, May, 1860 ; The Christian Examiner, 
 May, 1860; Charles Kingsley to F. D. Maurice in 1863, in Kingsley's Life, vol. 
 ii, p. 171 ; Adam Sedgwick to Livingstone (the explorer), March 16, 1865, in Life 
 and Letters of Sedgwick, vol. ii, pp. 410-412 ; the Duke of Argyll, The Reign of 
 Law, New York, pp. 16, 18, 31, 116, 117, 120, 159 ; Joseph P. Thompson, D. D., 
 LL. D., Man in Genesis and Geology, New York, 1870, pp. 48, 49, 82 ; Canon H. P. 
 Liddon, Sermons preached before the University of Oxford, 1871, Sermon III ; St. 
 George Mivart, Evolution and its Consequences, Contemporary Review, January, 1872; 
 British and Foreign Evangelical Review, 1872, article on The Theory of Evolu- 
 tion \ The Lutheran Quarterly, Gettysburg, Pa., April, 1872, article by Rev. Cyrus 
 Thomas, Assistant United States Geological Survey, on The Descent of Man, pp. 
 214, 239, 372-376 ; The Lutheran Quarterly, July, 1873, article on Some Assump- 
 tions against Christianity, by Rev. C. A. Stork, Baltimore, Md., pp. 325, 326 ; 
 also, in the same number, see a review of Dr. Burr's Pater Mundi, pp. 474, 475, 
 and contrast with the review in the Andover Review of that period ; an article in 
 the Religious Magazine and Monthly Review, Boston, on Religion and Evolution, 
 by Rev. S. R. Calthrop, September, 1873, p. 200 ; The Popular Science Monthly, 
 January, 1874, article Genesis, Geology, and Evolution, by Rev. George Henslow 
 this article first appeared in his book Evolution and Religion; article by Asa 
 Gray, Nature, London, June 4, 1874 ; Materialism, by Rev. W. Streissguth, 
 Lutheran Quarterly, July, 1875, originally written in German, and translated by 
 J. G. Morris, D. D., pp. 406, 408 ; Darwinismus und Christenthum, von R. Steck, 
 Ref. Pfarrer in Dresden, Berlin, 1875, pp. 5, 6, and 26, reprinted from the Pro- 
 testantische Kirchenzeitung, and issued as a tract by the Protestantenverein ; Rev. 
 W. E. Adams, article in the Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1879, on Evolution : Shall 
 it be Atheistic? John Wood, Bible Anticipations of Modern Science, 1880, pp. 18, 
 19, 22 ; Lutheran Quarterly, January, 1881, Some Postulates of the New Ethics, 
 by Rev. C. A. Stork, D. D. ; Lutheran Quarterly, January, 1882, The Religion of 
 Evolution as against the Religion of Jesus, by Prof. W. H. Wynn, Iowa State 
 Agricultural College this article was republished as a pamphlet ; Canon Liddon, 
 prefatory note to sermon on The Recovery of St. Thomas, pp. 4, n, 12, 13, and 26, 
 preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, April 23, 1882 ; Lutheran Quarterly, January, 
 1882, Evolution and the Scripture, by Rev. John A. Earnest, pp. 101, 105 ; Glimpses 
 in the Twilight, by Rev. F. G. Lee, D. D., Edinburgh, 1885, especially pp. 18 and 
 19; the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, by Rev. Charles Beard, pp. 392, 393, et seq. ; 
 F. W. Farrar, D. D., Canon of Westminster, The History of Interpretation, being 
 the Bampton Lectures for 1885, pp. 426, 427 ; Bishop Temple, Bampton Lectures, 
 pp. 184186 ; article Evolution, in the Dictionary of Religion, edited by Rev. 
 William Benham, 1887 ; Prof. Huxley, An Episcopal Trilogy, Nineteenth Century, 
 November, 1887 this article discusses three sermons delivered by the Bishops of 
 Carlisle, Bedford, and Manchester, in Manchester Cathedral, during the meeting of 
 the British Association, September, 1887 these sermons were afterward published 
 in pamphlet form under the title The Advance of Science ; John Fiske, Darwinism, 
 and other Essays, Boston, 1888 ; Harriet Mackenzie, Evolution illuminating the 
 Bible, London, 1891, dedicated to Prof. Huxley ; H. E. Ryle, Hulsean Professor of 
 Divinity at Cambridge, The Early Narratives of Genesis, London, 1892, preface,
 
 88 FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. 
 
 pp. vii-ix, pp. 7, 9, ii ; Rev. G. M. Searle, of the Catholic University, Washington, 
 article in the Catholic World, November, 1892, pp. 223, 227, 229, 231. For the 
 statement from Keble College, see Rev. Mr. Illingworth, in Lux Mundi. For 
 Bishop Temple, see citation in Laing. For a complete and admirable acceptance 
 of the evolution theory as lifting Christian doctrine and practice to a higher plane, 
 with suggestions for a new theology, see two Sermons by Archdeacon Wilson, of 
 Manchester, S. P. C. K., London, and Young & Co., New York, 1893 ; and for a 
 characteristically lucid statement of the most recent development of evolution doc- 
 trines, and the relations of Spencer, Weismann, Gallon, and others to them, see 
 Lester F. Ward's Address as President of the Biological Society, Washington, 1891 ; 
 also, recent articles in the leading English reviews. For a brilliant glorification of 
 evolution by natural selection as a doctrine necessary to the highest and truest 
 view of Christianity, see Prof. Drummond's Chautauqua Lectures, published in 
 The British Weekly, London, from April 20 to May n, 1893.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 I. THE FORM OF THE EARTH. 
 
 AMONG various rude tribes we find survivals of a primi- 
 tive idea that the earth is a flat table or disk, ceiled, domed, 
 or canopied by the sky, and that the sky rests upon the 
 mountains as pillars. Such a belief is entirely natural ; it 
 conforms to the appearance of things, and hence at a very 
 early period entered into various theologies. 
 
 In the civilizations of Chaldea and Egypt it was very 
 fully developed. The Assyrian inscriptions deciphered in 
 these latter years represent the god Marduk as in the begin- 
 ning creating the heavens and the earth : the earth rests 
 upon the waters ; within it is the realm of the dead ; above 
 it is spread " the firmament " a solid dome coming down 
 to the horizon on all sides and resting upon foundations laid 
 in the " great waters " which extend around the earth. 
 
 On the east and west sides of this domed firmament are 
 doors, through which the sun enters in the morning and de- 
 parts at night ; above it extends another ocean, which goes 
 down to the ocean surrounding the earth at the horizon on 
 all sides, and which is supported and kept away from the 
 earth by the firmament. Above the firmament and the up- 
 per ocean which it supports is the interior of heaven. 
 
 The Egyptians considered the earth as a table, flat and 
 oblong, the sky being its ceiling a huge "firmament" of 
 metal. At the four corners of the earth were the pillars sup- 
 porting this firmament, and on this solid sky were the " wa- 
 ters above the heavens." They believed that, when chaos 
 was taking form, one of the gods by main force raised the 
 waters on high and spread them out over the firmament ; 
 
 89
 
 9O GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 that on the under side of this solid vault, or ceiling, or firma- 
 ment, the stars were suspended to light the earth, and that 
 the rains were caused by the letting down of the waters 
 through its windows. This idea and others connected with 
 it seem to have taken strong hold of the Egyptian priestly 
 caste, entering into their theology and sacred science : ceil- 
 ings of great temples, with stars, constellations, planets, and 
 signs of the zodiac figured upon them, remain to-day as 
 striking evidences of this. 
 
 In Persia we have theories of geography based upon 
 similar conceptions and embalmed in sacred texts. 
 
 From these and doubtless from earlier sources common 
 to them all came geographical legacies to the Hebrews. 
 Various passages in their sacred books, many of them noble 
 in conception and beautiful in form, regarding "the founda- 
 tion of the earth upon the waters," " the fountains of the 
 great deep," " the compass upon the face of the depth," the 
 " firmament," the " corners of the earth," the " pillars of 
 heaven," the " waters above the firmament," the " windows 
 of heaven," and " doors of heaven," point us back to both 
 these ancient springs of thought.* 
 
 * For survivals of the early idea, among the Eskimos, of the sky as supported by 
 mountains, and, among sundry Pacific islanders, of the sky as a firmament or vault 
 of stone, see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, second edition, London, 1870, 
 chap, xi ; Spencer, Sociology, vol. i, chap, viii ; also Andrew Lang, La Mythologie, 
 Paris, 1886, pp. 68-73. For the Babylonian theories, see George Smith's Chaldean 
 Genesis, and especially the German translation by Delitzsch, Leipsic, 1876 ; also, 
 Jensen, Die Kosmogonie der Babylonier, Strasburg, 1890 ; see especially in the 
 appendices, pp. 9 and 10, a drawing representing the whole Babylonian scheme so 
 closely followed in the Hebrew book Genesis. See also Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe 
 in den Kosmogonien der a/ten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, for a most thorough summing 
 up of the whole subject, with texts showing the development of Hebrew out of 
 Chaldean and Egyptian conceptions, pp. 44, etc. ; also pp. 127 et scq. For the 
 early view in India and Persia, see citations from the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta 
 in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. i. For the Egyptian view, 
 see Champollion ; also, Lenormant, Histoire Ancienne, Maspero, and others. As 
 to the figures of the heavens upon the ceilings of Egyptian temples, see Maspero, 
 Arche"ologie Egyptienne, Paris, 1890 ; and for engravings of them, see Lepsius, 
 Denkmdler, vol. i, Bl. 41, and vol. ix, Abth. iv, Bl. 35 ; also the Description de 
 I'Egypte, published by order of Napoleon, tome ii, PI. 14 ; also Prisse d'Avennes, 
 Art Egyptien, Atlas, tome i, PL 35 ; and especially for a survival at the Temple of 
 Denderah, see Denon, Voyage en Egypte, Planches 129, 130. For the Egyptian 
 idea of "pillars of heaven," as alluded to on the stele of victory of Thotmes III,
 
 THE FORM OF THE EARTH. gi 
 
 But, as civilization was developed, there were evolved, 
 especially among the Greeks, ideas of the earth's sphericity. 
 The Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle especially cherished 
 them. These ideas were vague, they were mixed with ab- 
 surdities, but they were germ ideas, and even amid the luxu- 
 riant growth of theology in the early Christian Church these 
 germs began struggling into life in the minds of a few think- 
 ing men, and these men renewed the suggestion that the 
 earth is a globe.* 
 
 A few of the larger-minded fathers of the Church, influ- 
 enced possibly by Pythagorean traditions, but certainly by 
 Aristotle and Plato, were willing to accept this view, but 
 the majority of them took fright at once. To them it seemed 
 fraught with dangers to Scripture, by which, of course, 
 they meant their interpretation of Scripture. Among the 
 first who took up arms against it was Eusebius. In view of 
 the New Testament texts indicating the immediately ap- 
 proaching end of the world, he endeavoured to turn off this 
 idea by bringing scientific studies into contempt. Speaking 
 of investigators, he said, " It is not through ignorance of the 
 things admired by them, but through contempt of their use- 
 
 in the Cairo Museum, see Ebers, Uarda, vol. ii, p. 175, note, Leipsic, 1877. For a 
 similar Babylonian belief, see Sayce's Herodotus, Appendix, p. 403. For the belief 
 of Hebrew scriptural writers in a solid " firmament," see especially Job, xxxviii, 18 ; 
 also Smith's Bible Dictionary. For engravings showing the earth and heaven above 
 it as conceived by Egyptians and Chaldeans, with " pillars of heaven " and " firma- 
 ment," see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, London, 1894, pp. 17 and 543. 
 * The agency of the Pythagoreans in first spreading the doctrine of the earth's 
 sphericity is generally acknowledged, but the first clear and full utterance of it to 
 the world was by Aristotle. Very fruitful, too, was the statement of the new the- 
 ory given by Plato in the Timaus ; see Jowett's translation, 62, c. Also the Ph<zdo, 
 pp. 449 et seg. See also Grote on Plato's doctrine of the sphericity of the earth ; 
 also Sir G. C. Lewis's Astronomy of the Ancients, London, 1862, chap, iii, section 
 i, and note. Cicero's mention of the antipodes, and his reference to the passage in 
 the Timseus, are even more remarkable than the latter, in that they much more 
 clearly foreshadow the modern doctrine. See his Academic Questions, ii ; also 
 Tusc. Quest., \ and v, 24. For a very full summary of the views of the ancients on 
 the sphericity of the earth, see Kretschmer, Die physische Erdkunde im christlichen 
 Mittelalter, Wien, 1889, pp. 35 et seq. ; also, Eicken, Geschichte der mittelalterlichen 
 Weltanschauung, Stuttgart, 1887, Dritter Theil, chap. vi. For citations and sum- 
 maries, see Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, vol. i, p. 189, and St. Martin, Hist, de 
 la Geog., Paris, 1873, p. 96 ; also, Leopardi, Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli 
 antichi, Firenze, 1851, chap, xii, pp. 184 et sey.
 
 9 2 
 
 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 less labour, that we think little of these matters, turning- our 
 souls to better things." Basil of Cassarea declared it "a 
 matter of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or 
 a cylinder or a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan." 
 Lactantius referred to the ideas of those studying astronomy 
 as "bad and senseless," and opposed the doctrine of the 
 earth's sphericity both from Scripture and reason. St. John 
 Chrysostom also exerted his influence against this scientific 
 belief; and Ephraem Syrus, the greatest man of the old 
 Syrian Church, widely known as the " lute of the Holy 
 Ghost," opposed it no less earnestly. 
 
 But the strictly biblical men of science, such eminent 
 fathers and bishops as Theophilus of Antioch in the second 
 century, and Clement of Alexandria in the third, with others 
 in centuries following, were not content with merely oppos- 
 ing what they stigmatized as an old heathen theory ; they 
 drew from their Bibles a new Christian theory, to which one 
 Church authority added one idea and another another, until 
 it was fully developed. Taking the survival of various early 
 traditions, given in the seventh verse of the first chapter of 
 Genesis, they insisted on the clear declarations of Scripture 
 that the earth was, at creation, arched over with a solid 
 vault, " a firmament," and to this they added the passages 
 from Isaiah and the Psalms, in which it declared that the 
 heavens are stretched out " like a curtain," and again " like 
 a tent to dwell in." The universe, then, is like a house : the 
 earth is its ground floor, the firmament its ceiling, under 
 which the Almighty hangs out the sun to rule the day and 
 the moon and stars to rule the night. This ceiling is also 
 the floor of the apartment above, and in this is a cistern, 
 shaped, as one of the authorities says, " like a bathing-tank," 
 and containing " the waters which are above the firmament." 
 These waters are let down upon the earth by the Almighty 
 and his angels through the " windows of heaven." As to 
 the movement of the sun, there was a citation of various 
 passages in Genesis, mixed with metaphysics in various pro- 
 portions, and this was thought to give ample proofs from 
 the Bible that the earth could not be a sphere.* 
 
 * For Eusebius, see the Prtzp. Ev., xv, 61. For Basil, see the Hexameron,
 
 THE FORM OF THE EARTH. 
 
 93 
 
 In the sixth century this development culminated in what 
 was nothing less than a complete and detailed system of the 
 universe, claiming to be based upon Scripture, its author 
 being the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes. Egypt 
 was a great treasure-house of theologic thought to various 
 religions of antiquity, and Cosmas appears to have urged 
 upon the early Church this Egyptian idea of the construc- 
 tion of the world, just as another Egyptian ecclesiastic, 
 Athanasius, urged upon the Church the Egyptian idea of a 
 triune deity ruling the world. According to Cosmas, the 
 earth is a parallelogram, flat, and surrounded by four seas. 
 It is four hundred days' journey long and two hundred 
 broad. At the outer edges of these four seas arise massive 
 walls closing in the whole structure and supporting the 
 firmament or vault of the heavens, whose edges are cement- 
 ed to the walls. These walls inclose the earth and all the 
 heavenly bodies.- 
 
 The whole of this theologico-scientific structure was built 
 most carefully and, as was then thought, most scripturally. 
 Starting with the expression applied in the ninth chapter of 
 Hebrews to the tabernacle in the desert, Cosmas insists, 
 with other interpreters of his time, that it gives the key to 
 the whole construction of the world. The universe is, there- 
 fore, made on the plan of the Jewish tabernacle boxlike 
 and oblong. Going into details, he quotes the sublime 
 words of Isaiah : " It is He that sitteth upon the circle of 
 the earth ; . . . that stretcheth out the heavens like a cur- 
 tain, and spreadeth them out like a tent to dwell in " ; and 
 the passage in Job which speaks of the " pillars of heaven." 
 He works all this into his system, and reveals, as he thinks, 
 treasures of science. 
 
 This vast box is divided into two compartments, one 
 above the other. In the first of these, men live and stars 
 move ; and it extends up to the first solid vault, or firma- 
 ment, above which live the angels, a main part of whose 
 business it is to push and pull the sun and planets to and 
 
 Horn. ix. For Lactantius, see his Inst. Div., lib. iii, cap. 3 ; also, citations in 
 Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, London, 1857, vol. i, p. 194, and in St. Martin, 
 Histoire de la Gtographie, pp. 216, 217. For the views of St. John Chrysostom, 
 Ephraem Syrus, and other great churchmen, see Kretschmer as above, chap. i.
 
 94 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 fro. Next, he takes the text, " Let there be a firmament in 
 the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from 
 the waters," and other texts from Genesis ; to these he adds 
 the text from the Psalms, " Praise him, ye heaven of heavens, 
 and ye waters that be above the heavens " ; then casts all 
 these growths of thought into his crucible together, and 
 finally brings out the theory that over this first vault is a 
 vast cistern containing " the waters." He then takes the ex- 
 pression in Genesis regarding the " windows of heaven " and 
 establishes a doctrine regarding the regulation of the rain, 
 to the effect that the angels not only push and pull the heav- 
 enly bodies to light the earth, but also open and close the 
 heavenly windows to water it. 
 
 To understand the surface of the earth, Cosmas, follow- 
 ing the methods of interpretation which Origen and other 
 early fathers of the Church had established, studies the table 
 of shew-bread in the Jewish tabernacle. The surface of this 
 table proves to him that the earth is flat, and its dimensions 
 prove that the earth is twice as long as broad ; its four 
 corners symbolize the four seasons ; the twelve loaves of 
 bread, the twelve months ; the hollow about the table proves 
 that the ocean surrounds the earth. To account for the 
 movement of the sun, Cosmas suggests that at the north of 
 the earth is a great mountain, and that at night the sun 
 is carried behind this ; but some of the commentators ven- 
 tured to express a doubt here : they thought that the sun 
 was pushed into a pit at night and pulled out in the morning. 
 
 Nothing can be more touching in its simplicity than Cos- 
 mas's summing up of his great argument. He declares, 
 " We say therefore with Isaiah that the heaven embracing 
 the universe is a vault, with Job that it is joined to the 
 earth, and with Moses that the length of the earth is greater 
 than its breadth." The treatise closes with rapturous asser- 
 tions that not only Moses and the prophets, but also angels 
 and apostles, agree to the truth of his doctrine, and that at 
 the last day God will condemn all who do not accept it. 
 
 Although this theory was drawn from Scripture, it was 
 also, as we have seen, the result of an evolution of theological 
 thought begun long before the scriptural texts on which it 
 rested were written. It was not at all strange that Cosmas,
 
 THE FORM OF THE EARTH. 95 
 
 Egyptian as he was, should have received this old Nile-born 
 doctrine, as we see it indicated to-day in the structure of 
 Egyptian temples, and that he should have developed it by 
 the aid of the Jewish Scriptures ; but the theological world 
 knew nothing of this more remote evolution from pagan 
 germs ; it was received as virtually inspired, and was soon 
 regarded as a fortress of scriptural truth. Some of the fore- 
 most men in the Church devoted themselves to buttressing 
 it with new texts and throwing about it new outworks of 
 theological reasoning ; the great body of the faithful con- 
 sidered it a direct gift from the Almighty. Even in the later 
 centuries of the Middle Ages John of San Geminiano made 
 a desperate attempt to save it. Like Cosmas, he takes the 
 Jewish tabernacle as his starting-point, and shows how all 
 the newer ideas can be reconciled with the biblical accounts 
 of its shape, dimensions, and furniture.* 
 
 * For a notice of the views of Cosmas in connection with those of Lactantius, 
 Augustine, St John Chrysostom, and others, see Schoell, Histoire de la Literature 
 Grecqzte, vol. vii, p. 37. The main scriptural passages referred to are as follows : 
 (i) Isaiah xl, 22 ; (2) Genesis i, 6; (3) Genesis vii, n ; (4.) Exodus xxiv, 10; (5) 
 Job xxvi, ii, and xxxvii, 18 ; (6) Psalm cxlviii, 4, and civ, 9 ; (7) Ezekiel i, 22-26. 
 For Cosmas's theory, see Montfaucon, Colkctio Nova Patrum, Paris, 1706, vol. ii, 
 p. 188 ; also pp. 298, 299. The text is illustrated with engravings showing walls 
 and solid vault (firmament), with the whole apparatus of " fountains of the great 
 deep," " windows of heaven," angels, and the mountain behind which the sun is 
 drawn. For reduction of one of them, see Peschel, Geschichte der Erdkunde, p. 
 98 ; also article Maps, in Knight's Dictionary of Mechanics, New York, 1875. 
 For curious drawings showing Cosmas's scheme in a different way from that given 
 by Montfaucon, see extracts from a Vatican codex of the ninth century in Garucci, 
 Storia de I'Arte Christiana, vol. iii, pp. 70 et seg. For a good discussion of Cos- 
 mas's ideas, see Santarem, Hist, de la Cosmographie, vol. ii, pp. 8 et seq., and for a 
 very thorough discussion of its details, Kretschmer, as above. For still another 
 theory, very droll, and thought out on similar principles, see Mungo Park, cited in 
 De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 309. For Cosmas's joyful summing up, see Montfaucon, 
 Colkctio Nova Patrum, vol. ii, p. 255. For a curious survival in the thirteenth 
 century of the old idea of the " waters above the heavens," see the story in Gervase 
 of Tilbury, how in his time some people coming out of church in England found 
 an anchor let down by a rope out of the heavens, how there came voices from sail- 
 ors above trying to loose the anchor, and, finally, how a sailor came down the rope, 
 who, on reaching the earth, died as if drowned in water. See Gervase of Tilbury, 
 Otia Imperialia, edit. Liebrecht, Hanover, 1856, Prima Decisio, cap. xiii. The 
 work was written about 1211. For John of San Geminiano, see his Summa de 
 Exemplis, lib. ix, cap. 43. For the Egyptian Trinitarian views, see Sharpe, His- 
 tory of Egypt, vol. i, pp. 94, 102.
 
 96 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 From this old conception of the universe as a sort of 
 house, with heaven as its upper story and the earth as its 
 ground floor, flowed important theological ideas into heath- 
 en, Jewish, and Christian mythologies. Common to them 
 all are legends regarding attempts of mortals to invade the 
 upper apartment from the lower. Of such are the Greek 
 legends of the Aloidae, who sought to reach heaven by pil- 
 ing up mountains, and were cast down ; the Chaldean and 
 Hebrew legends of the wicked who at Babel sought to build 
 "a tower whose top may reach heaven," which Jehovah 
 went down from .heaven to see, and which he brought to 
 naught by the " confusion of tongues"; the Hindu legend 
 of the tree which sought to grow into heaven and which 
 Brahma blasted ; and the Mexican legend of the giants who 
 sought to reach heaven by building the Pyramid of Cholula, 
 and who were overthrown by fire from above. 
 
 Myths having this geographical idea as their germ devel- 
 oped in luxuriance through thousands of years. Ascensions 
 to heaven and descents from it, "translations," "assump- 
 tions," " annunciations," mortals " caught up " into it and 
 returning, angels flying between it and the earth, thunder- 
 bolts hurled down from it, mighty winds issuing from its 
 corners, voices speaking from the upper floor to men on the 
 lower, temporary openings of the floor of heaven to reveal 
 the blessedness of the good, " signs and wonders " hung out 
 from it to warn the wicked, interventions of every kind 
 from the heathen gods coming down on every sort of errand, 
 and Jehovah coming down to walk in Eden in the cool of 
 the day, to St. Mark swooping down into the market-place 
 of Venice to break the shackles of a slave all these are but 
 features in a vast evolution of myths arising largely from 
 this geographical germ. 
 
 Nor did this evolution end here. Naturally, in this view 
 of things, if heaven was a loft, hell was a cellar ; and if there 
 were ascensions into one, there were descents into the other. 
 Hell being so near, interferences by its occupants with the 
 dwellers of the earth just above were constant, and form a 
 vast chapter in mediaeval literature. Dante made this con- 
 ception of the location of hell still more vivid, and we find 
 some forms of it serious barriers to geographical investiga-
 
 THE FORM OF THE EARTH. 
 
 97 
 
 tion. Many a bold navigator, who was quite ready to brave 
 pirates and tempests, trembled at the thought of tumbling 
 with his ship into one of the openings into hell which a 
 widespread belief placed in the Atlantic at some unknown 
 distance from Europe. This terror among sailors was one 
 of the main obstacles in the great voyage of Columbus. In 
 a mediseval text-book, giving science the form of a dialogue, 
 occur the following question and answer: " Why is the sun 
 so red in the evening ? " " Because he looketh down upon 
 hell." 
 
 But the ancient germ of scientific truth in geography 
 the idea of the earth's sphericity still lived. Although the 
 great majority of the early fathers of the Church, and espe- 
 cially Lactantius, had sought to crush it beneath the utter- 
 ances attributed to Isaiah, David, and St. Paul, the better 
 opinion of Eudoxus and Aristotle could not be forgotten. 
 Clement of Alexandria and Origen had even supported it. 
 Ambrose and Augustine had tolerated it, and, after Cosmas 
 had held sway a hundred years, it received new life from a 
 great churchman of southern Europe, Isidore of Seville, 
 who, however fettered by the dominant theology in many 
 other things, braved it in this. In the eighth century a simi- 
 lar declaration was made in the north of Europe by another 
 great Church authority, Bede. Against the new life thus 
 given to the old truth, the sacred theory struggled long and 
 vigorously but in vain. Eminent authorities in later ages, 
 like Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Vin- 
 cent of Beauvais, felt obliged to accept the doctrine of the 
 earth's sphericity, and as we approach the modern period 
 we find its truth acknowledged by the vast majority of 
 thinking men. The Reformation did not at first yield fully 
 to this better theory. Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin were 
 very strict in their adherence to the exact letter of Scrip- 
 ture. Even Zwingli, broad as his views generally were, was 
 closely bound down in this matter, and held to the opinion 
 of the fathers that a great firmament, or floor, separated the 
 heavens from the earth ; that above it were the waters and 
 angels, and below it the earth and man. 
 
 The main scope given to independent thought on this 
 general subject among the Reformers was in a few minor
 
 98 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 speculations regarding the universe which encompassed 
 Eden, the exact character of the conversation of the serpent 
 with Eve, and the like. 
 
 In the times immediately following the Reformation mat- 
 ters were even worse. The interpretations of Scripture by 
 Luther and Calvin became as sacred to their followers as 
 the Scripture itself. When Calixt ventured, in interpreting 
 the Psalms, to question the accepted belief that " the waters 
 above the heavens " were contained in a vast receptacle up- 
 held by a solid vault, he was bitterly denounced as he- 
 retical. 
 
 In the latter part of the sixteenth century Musasus inter- 
 preted the accounts in Genesis to mean that first God made 
 the heavens for the roof or vault, and left it there on high 
 swinging until three days later he put the earth under it. 
 But the new scientific thought as to the earth's form had 
 gained the day. The most sturdy believers were obliged to 
 adjust their biblical theories to it as best they could.* 
 
 II. THE DELINEATION OF THE EARTH. 
 
 Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its 
 own central city or most holy place as necessarily the centre 
 of the earth. 
 
 The Chaldeans held that their " holy house of the gods " 
 was the centre. The Egyptians sketched the world under 
 the form of a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, 
 and the centre of it Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was 
 Babylon; for the Hindus, it was Mount Meru; for the 
 Greeks, so far as the civilized world was concerned, Olym- 
 pus or the temple at Delphi ; for the modern Mohammed- 
 ans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone ; the Chinese, to this 
 day, speak of their empire as the " middle kingdom." It 
 was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human 
 
 * For a discussion of the geographical views of Isidore and Bede, see Santarem, 
 Cosmographie, vol. i, pp 22-24. For the gradual acceptance of the idea of the 
 earth's sphericity after the eighth century, see Kretschmer, pp. 51 et seq., where 
 citations from a multitude of authors are given. For the views of the Reformers, 
 see Zockler, vol. i, pp. 679 and 693. For Calixt, Musseus, and others, ibid., pp. 
 673-677 and 761.
 
 THE DELINEATION OF THE EARTH. 
 
 99 
 
 thought that the Jews believed the centre of the world to 
 be Jerusalem. 
 
 The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the mid- 
 dle of the earth, and all other parts of the world as set 
 around the holy city. Throughout the " ages of faith " this 
 was very generally accepted as a direct revelation from the 
 Almighty regarding the earth's form. St. Jerome, the great- 
 est authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, 
 on the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jeru- 
 salem could be nowhere but at the earth's centre; in the 
 ninth century Archbishop Rabanus Maurus reiterated the 
 same argument ; in the eleventh century Hugh of St. Vic- 
 tor gave to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration ; 
 and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging 
 the Franks to the crusade, declared, " Jerusalem is the mid- 
 dle point of the earth"; in the thirteenth century an ecclesi- 
 astical writer much in vogue, the monk Csesarius of Heister- 
 bach, declared, "As the heart in the midst of the body, so is 
 Jerusalem situated in the midst of our inhabited earth," 
 " so it was that Christ was crucified at the centre of the 
 earth." Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a cer- 
 tainty, wedding it to immortal verse ; and in the pious book 
 of travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, so widely read 
 in the Middle Ages, it is declared that Jerusalem is at the 
 centre of the world, and that a spear standing erect at the 
 Holy Sepulchre casts no shadow at the equinox. 
 
 Ezekiel's statement thus became the standard of ortho- 
 doxy to early map-makers. The map of the world at Here- 
 ford Cathedral, the maps of Andrea Bianco, Marino Sanuto, 
 and a multitude of others fixed this view in men's minds, and 
 doubtless discouraged during many generations any scien- 
 tific statements tending to unbalance this geographical cen- 
 tre revealed in Scripture.* 
 
 * For the beliefs of various nations of antiquity that the earth's centre was in 
 their most sacred place, see citations from Maspero, Charton, Sayce, and others in 
 Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. iv. As to the Greeks, we have 
 typical statements in the Eumenides of ^Eschylus, where the stone on the altar at 
 Delphi is repeatedly called "the earth's navel" which is precisely the expression 
 used regarding Jerusalem in the Septuagint translation of Ezekiel (see below). 
 The proof texts on which the mediaeval geographers mainly relied as to the form
 
 100 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 Nor did mediaeval thinkers rest with this conception. 
 In accordance with the dominant view that physical truth 
 must be sought by theological reasoning, the doctrine was 
 evolved that not only the site of the cross on Calvary marked 
 the geographical centre of the world, but that on this very 
 spot had stood the tree which bore the forbidden fruit in 
 Eden. Thus was geography made to reconcile all parts of 
 the great theologic plan. This doctrine was hailed with 
 joy by multitudes ; and we find in the works of mediaeval 
 pilgrims to Palestine, again and again, evidence that this 
 had become precious truth to them, both in theology and 
 geography. Even as late as 1664 the eminent French priest 
 Eugene Roger, in his published travels in Palestine, dwelt 
 upon the thirty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel, coupled with a 
 text from Isaiah, to prove that the exact centre of the earth 
 is a spot marked on the pavement of the Church of the Holy 
 Sepulchre, and that on this spot once stood the tree which 
 bore the forbidden fruit and the cross of Christ.* 
 
 of the earth were Ezekiel v, 5, and xxxviii, 12. The progress of geographical 
 'knowledge evidently caused them to be softened down somewhat in our King 
 James's version ; but the first of them reads, in the Vulgate, " Ista est Hierusalem, 
 in media gentium posui earn et in circuitu ejus terra " ; and the second reads, in 
 the Vulgate, " in media terra" and in the Septuagint, M rbt> o/n<J>oAbv TTJS 7771. 
 That the literal centre of the earth was understood, see proof in St. Jerome, Com- 
 mentar. in Ezekiel, lib. ii ; and for general proof, see Leopardi, Saggio sopra gli 
 errori popolari degli antichi, pp. 207, 208. For Rabanus Maurus, see his De Uni- 
 verso, lib. xii, cap. 4, in Migne, tome cxi, p. 339. For Hugh of St. Victor, see his 
 De Situ Terrarum, cap. ii. For Dante's belief, see Inferno, canto xxxiv, 112-115 : 
 " E se' or sotto 1'emisperio giunto, 
 
 Ch' & opposite a quel che la gran secca 
 Coverchia, e sotto il cui col mo consunto 
 
 Fu I'uom che nacque e visse senza pecca." 
 
 For orthodox geography in the Middle Ages, see Wright's Essays on Archce- 
 ology, vol. ii, chapter on the map of the world in Hereford Cathedral ; also the 
 rude maps in Cardinal d'Ailly's Ymago Mundi ; also copies of maps of Marino 
 Sanuto and others in Peschel, Erdkunde, p. 210; also Miinster, Fac Simile dell* 
 Atlante di Andrea Bianco, Venezia, 1869. And for discussions of the whole sub- 
 ject, see Santarem, vol. ii, p. 295, vol. iii, pp. 71, 183, 184, and elsewhere. For a 
 brief summary with citations, see Eicken, Geschichte, etc., pp. 622, 623. 
 
 * For the site of the cross on Calvary, as the point where stood " the tree of 
 the knowledge of good and evil " in Eden, at the centre of the earth, see various 
 Eastern travellers cited in Tobler ; but especially the travels of Bishop Arculf in 
 the Holy Land, in Wright's Early Travels in Palestine, p. 8 ; also Travels of 
 Saewulf, ibid., p. 38 ; also, Sir John Mandeville, ibid., pp. 166, 167. For Roger,
 
 THE DELINEATION OF THE EARTH. i O I 
 
 Nor was this the only misconception which forced its 
 way from our sacred writings into mediaeval map-making : 
 two others were almost as marked. 
 
 First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog and 
 Magog. Few passages in the Old Testament are more 
 sublime than the denunciation of these great enemies by 
 Ezekiel ; and the well-known statement in the Apocalypse 
 fastened the Hebrew feeling regarding them with a new 
 meaning into the mind of the early Church : hence it was 
 that the mediaeval map-makers took great pains to delineate 
 these monsters and their habitations on the maps. For cen- 
 turies no map was considered orthodox which did not show 
 them. 
 
 The second conception was derived from the mention in 
 our sacred books of the " four winds." Hence came a vivid 
 belief in their real existence, and their delineation on the 
 maps, generally as colossal heads with distended cheeks, 
 blowing vigorously toward Jerusalem. 
 
 After these conceptions had mainly disappeared we find 
 here and there evidences of the difficulty men found in giv- 
 ing up the scriptural idea of direct personal interference by 
 agents of Heaven in the ordinary phenomena of Nature : 
 thus, in a noted map of the sixteenth century representing 
 the earth as a sphere, there is at each pole a crank, with an 
 angel laboriously turning the earth by means of it : and, in 
 another map, the hand of the Almighty, thrust forth from 
 the clouds, holds the earth suspended by a rope and spins 
 it with his thumb and fingers. Even as late as the middle of 
 the seventeenth century Heylin, the most authoritative Eng- 
 lish geographer of the time, shows a like tendency to mix 
 science and theology. He warps each to help the other, as 
 follows: "Water, making but one globe with the earth, is 
 
 see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664, pp. 89-218, etc. ; see also Quaresmio, Terra 
 Sancta Elucidatio, 1639, for similar view ; and, for one narrative in which the idea 
 was developed into an amazing mass of pious myths, see Pilgrimage of the Rus- 
 sian Abbot Daniel, edited by Sir C. W. Wilson, London, 1885, p. 14. (The pas- 
 sage deserves to be quoted as an example of myth-making ; it is as follows: "At 
 the time of our Lord's crucifixion, when he gave up the ghost on the cross, the 
 veil of the temple was rent, and the rock above Adam's skull opened, and the 
 blood and water which flowed from Christ's side ran down through the fissure 
 upon the skull, thus washing away the sins of men.")
 
 IO2 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 yet higher than it. This appears, first, because it is a body 
 not so heavy ; secondly, it is observed by sailors that their 
 ships move faster to the shore than from it, whereof no rea- 
 son can be given but the height of the water above the 
 land ; thirdly, to such as stand on the shore the sea seems to 
 swell into the form of a round hill till it puts a bound upon 
 our sight. Now that the sea, hovering thus over and above 
 the earth, doth not overwhelm it, can be ascribed only to 
 his Providence who ' hath made the waters to stand on an 
 heap that they turn not again to cover the earth.' " * 
 
 III. THE INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH. 
 
 Even while the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth 
 was undecided, another question had been suggested which 
 theologians finally came to consider of far greater impor- 
 tance. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth naturally 
 led to thought regarding its inhabitants, and another ancient 
 germ was warmed into life the idea of antipodes: of human 
 beings on the earth's opposite sides. 
 
 In the Greek and Roman world this idea had found sup- 
 porters and opponents, Cicero and Pliny being among the 
 former, and Epicurus, Lucretius, and Plutarch among the 
 latter. Thus the problem came into the early Church un- 
 solved. 
 
 Among the first churchmen to take it up was, in the 
 East, St. Gregory Nazianzen, who showed that to sail be- 
 
 * For Gog and Magog, see Ezekiel xxxviii and xxxix, and Rev. xx, 8 ; and 
 for the general subject, Toy, Judaism and Christianity, Boston, 1891, pp. 373, 
 374. For maps showing these two great terrors, and for geographical discussion 
 regarding them, see Lelewel, Gtog. du Moyen Age, Bruxelles, 1850, Atlas ; also 
 Ruge, Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, Berlin, 1881, pp. 78, 79 ; also Fes- 
 chel's Abhandlungen, pp. 28-35, an d Gesch. der Erdkunde, p. 2IO. For representa- 
 tions on maps of the " Four Winds," see Charton, Voyageurs, tome ii, p. II ; also 
 Ruge, as above, pp. 324, 325 ; also, for a curious mixture of the scriptural four 
 winds with the classical winds issuing from the bags of ^olus, see a map of the 
 twelfth century in Leon Gautier, La Chevalerie, p. 153 ; and for maps showing ad- 
 ditional winds, see various editions of Ptolemy. For a map with angels turning 
 the earth by means of cranks at the poles, see Grynreus, Novus Orbis, Basileae, 
 1537. For the globe kept spinning by the Almighty, see J. Hondius's map, 1589 ; 
 and for Heylin, his first folio, 1652, p. 27.
 
 THE INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH. 
 
 103 
 
 yond Gibraltar was impossible ; and, in the West, Lactantius, 
 who asked : " Is there any one so senseless as to believe that 
 there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads ? 
 . . . that the crops and trees grow downward ? . . . that 
 the rains and snow and hail fall upward toward the earth ? 
 ... I am at a loss what to say of those who, when they 
 have once erred, steadily persevere in their folly and defend 
 one vain thing by another." 
 
 In all this contention by Gregory and Lactantius there 
 was nothing to be especially regretted, for, whatever their 
 motive, they simply supported their inherited belief on 
 grounds of natural law and probability. 
 
 Unfortunately, the discussion was not long allowed to 
 rest on these scientific and philosophical grounds ; other 
 Christian thinkers followed, who in their ardour adduced 
 texts of Scripture, and soon the question had become theo- 
 logical ; hostility to the belief in antipodes became dog- 
 matic. The universal Church was arrayed against it, and 
 in front of the vast phalanx stood, to a man, the fathers. 
 
 To all of them this idea seemed dangerous ; to most of 
 them it seemed damnable. St. Basil and St. Ambrose were 
 tolerant enough to allow that a man might be saved who 
 thought the earth inhabited on its opposite sides ; but the 
 great majority of the fathers doubted the possibility of sal- 
 vation to such misbelievers. 
 
 The great champion of the orthodox view was St. Augus- 
 tine. Though he seemed inclined to yield a little in regard 
 to the sphericity of the earth, he fought the idea that men 
 exist on the other side of it, saying that " Scripture speaks 
 of no such descendants of Adam." He insists that men 
 could not be allowed by the Almighty to live there, since if 
 they did they could not see Christ at his second coming 
 descending through the air. But his most cogent appeal, 
 one which we find echoed from theologian to theologian 
 during a thousand years afterward, is to the nineteenth 
 Psalm, and to its confirmation in the Epistle to the Romans ; 
 to the words, " Their line is gone out through all the earth, 
 and their words to the end of the world." He dwells with 
 great force on the fact that St. Paul based one of his most 
 powerful arguments upon this declaration regarding the
 
 I04 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 preachers of the gospel, and that he declared even more ex- 
 plicitly that " Verily, their sound went into all the earth, and 
 their words unto the ends of the world." Thenceforth we 
 find it constantly declared that, as those preachers did not 
 go to the antipodes, no antipodes can exist ; and hence that 
 the supporters of this geographical doctrine " give the lie 
 direct to King David and to St. Paul, and therefore to the 
 Holy Ghost." Thus the great Bishop of Hippo taught the 
 whole world for over a thousand years that, as there was no 
 preaching of the gospel on the opposite side of the earth, 
 there could be no human beings there. 
 
 The great authority of Augustine, and the cogency of 
 his scriptural argument, held the Church firmly against the 
 doctrine of the antipodes ; all schools of interpretation were 
 now agreed the followers of the allegorical tendencies of 
 Alexandria, the strictly literal exegetes of Syria, the more 
 eclectic theologians of the West. For over a thousand years 
 it was held in the Church, " always, everywhere, and by all," 
 that there could not be human beings on the opposite sides of 
 the earth, even if the earth had opposite sides ; and, when 
 attacked by gainsayers, the great mass of true believers, 
 from the fourth century to the fifteenth, simply used that 
 opiate which had so soothing an effect on John Henry New- 
 man in the nineteenth century securus judicat orbis tcrrarwn. 
 
 Yet gainsayers still appeared. That the doctrine of the 
 antipodes continued to have life, is shown by the fact that 
 in the sixth century Procopius of Gaza attacks it with a 
 tremendous argument. He declares that, if there be men on 
 the other side of the earth, Christ must have gone there and 
 suffered a second time to save them ; and, therefore, that 
 there must have been there, as necessary preliminaries to his 
 coming, a duplicate Eden, Adam, serpent, and deluge. 
 
 Cosmas Indicopleustes also attacked the doctrine with 
 especial bitterness, citing a passage from St. Luke to prove 
 that antipodes are theologically impossible. 
 
 At the end of the sixth century came a man from whom 
 much might be expected St. Isidore of Seville. He had 
 pondered over ancient thought in science, and, as we have 
 seen, had dared proclaim his belief in the sphericity of the 
 earth ; but with that he stopped. As to the antipodes, the
 
 THE INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH. 105 
 
 authority of the Psalmist, St. Paul, and St. Augustine si- 
 lences him; he shuns the whole question as unlawful, sub- 
 jects reason to faith, and declares that men can not and 
 ought not to exist on opposite sides of the earth.* 
 
 Under such pressure this scientific truth seems to have 
 disappeared for nearly two hundred years ; but by the eighth 
 century the sphericity of the earth had come to be generally 
 accepted among the leaders of thought, and now the doc- 
 trine of the antipodes was again asserted by a bishop, Virgil 
 of Salzburg. 
 
 There then stood in Germany, in those first years of the 
 eighth century, one of the greatest and noblest of men St. 
 Boniface. His learning was of the best then known. In 
 .labours he was a worthy successor of the apostles ; his genius 
 for Christian work made him unwillingly primate of Ger- 
 many ; his devotion to duty led him willingly to martyr- 
 dom. There sat, too, at that time, on the papal throne a 
 great Christian statesman Pope Zachary. Boniface im- 
 mediately declared against the revival of such a heresy as 
 the doctrine of the antipodes ; he stigmatized it as an asser- 
 tion that there are men beyond the reach of the appointed 
 means of salvation ; he attacked Virgil, and called on Pope 
 Zachary for aid. 
 
 * For the opinions of Basil, Ambrose, and others, see Lecky, History of Ra- 
 tionalism in Europe, New York, 1872, vol. i, p. 279, note. Also Letronne, in 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, March, 1834. For Lactantius, see citations already given. 
 For St. Augustine's opinion, see the De Civitate Dei, xvi, 9, where this great 
 father of the Church shows that the existence of the antipodes " nulla ratione cre- 
 dendum est." For the unanimity of the fathers against the antipodes, see Zockler, 
 vol. i, p. 127. For a very nai've summary, see Joseph Acosta, Natural and Moral 
 History of the Indies, Grimston's translation, republished by the Hakluyt Soc., 
 chaps, vii and viii ; also citations in Buckle's Posthumous Works, vol. ii, p. 645. 
 For Procopius of Gaza, see Kretschmer, p. 55. See also, on the general subject, 
 Peschel, Geschichte der Erdkunde, pp. 96, 97. For Isidore, see citations already 
 given. To understand the embarrassment caused by these utterances of the fa- 
 thers to scientific men of a later period, see letter of Agricola to Joachim Vadia- 
 nus in 1514. Agricola asks Vadianus to give his views regarding the antipodes, 
 saying that he himself does not know what to do, between the fathers on the one 
 side and the learned men of modern times on the other. On the other hand, for 
 the embarrassment caused to the Church by this mistaken zeal of the fathers, see 
 Kepler's references and Fromund's replies ; also De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 58. 
 Kepler appears to have taken great delight in throwing the views of Lactantius 
 into the teeth of his adversaries.
 
 I0 6 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 The Pope, as the infallible teacher of Christendom, made 
 a strong response. He cited passages from the book of Job 
 and the Wisdom of Solomon against the doctrine of the 
 antipodes ; he declared it " perverse, iniquitous, and against 
 Virgil's own soul," and indicated a purpose of driving him 
 from his bishopric. Whether this purpose was carried out 
 or not, the old theological view, by virtue of the Pope's 
 divinely ordered and protected " inerrancy," was re-estab- 
 lished, and the doctrine that the earth has inhabitants on but 
 one of its sides became more than ever orthodox, and pre- 
 cious in the mind of the Church.* 
 
 This decision seems to have been regarded as final, and 
 five centuries later the great encyclopedist of the Middle 
 Ages, Vincent of Beauvais, though he accepts the sphericity 
 of the earth, treats the doctrine of the antipodes as dis- 
 proved, because contrary to Scripture. Yet the doctrine 
 still lived. Just as it had been previously revived by Wil- 
 liam of Conches and then laid to rest, so now it is somewhat 
 timidly brought out in the thirteenth century by no less a 
 personage than Albert the Great, the most noted man of 
 science in that time. But his utterances are perhaps pur- 
 posely obscure. Again it disappears beneath the theological 
 wave, and a hundred years later Nicolas d'Oresme, geog- 
 rapher of the King of France, a light of science, is forced 
 to yield to the clear teaching of the Scripture as cited by 
 St. Augustine. 
 
 Nor was this the worst. In Italy, at the beginning of 
 the fourteenth century, the Church thought it necessary to 
 deal with questions of this sort by rack and fagot. In 1316 
 Peter of Abano, famous as a physician, having promulgated 
 
 * For Virgil of Salzburg, see Neander's History of the Christian Church, Tor- 
 rey's translation, vol. iii, p. 63 ; also Herzog, Real-Encyklopadie, etc., recent edi- 
 tion by Prof. Hauck, s. v. Virgilius ; also Kretschmer, pp. 56-58 ; also Whewell, 
 vol. i, p. 197 ; also De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes, pp. 24-26. For very full 
 notes as to pagan and Christian advocates of the doctrine of the sphericity of the 
 earth and of the antipodes, and for extract from Zachary's letter, see Migne, 
 Patrologia, vol. vi, p, 426, and vol. xli, p. 487. For St. Boniface's part, see Boni- 
 facii Epistol<z, ed. Giles, i, 173. Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Tfratologiques, 
 pp. 186-188, makes a curious attempt to show that Pope Zachary denounced the 
 wrong man ; that the real offender was the Roman poet in the sixth book of the 
 the first book of the Georgics.
 
 THE INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH. 107 
 
 this with other obnoxious doctrines in science, only escaped 
 the Inquisition by death ; and in 1327 Cecco d'Ascoli, noted 
 as an astronomer, was for this and other results of thought, 
 which brought him under suspicion of sorcery, driven from 
 his professorship at Bologna and burned alive at Florence. 
 Nor was this all his punishment : Orcagna, whose terrible 
 frescoes still exist on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa, 
 immortalized Cecco by representing him in the flames of 
 hell.* 
 
 Years rolled on, and there came in the fifteenth century 
 one from whom the world had a right to expect much. 
 Pierre d'Ailly, by force of thought and study, had risen to 
 be Provost of the College of St. Die in Lorraine ; his ability 
 had made that little village a centre of scientific thought for 
 all Europe, and finally made him Archbishop of Cambray 
 and a cardinal. Toward the end of the fifteenth century 
 was printed what Cardinal d'Ailly had written long before 
 as a summing up of his best thought and research the col- 
 lection of essays known as the Ymago Mundi. It gives us 
 one of the most striking examples in history of a great man 
 in theological fetters. As he approaches this question he 
 states it with such clearness that we expect to hear him 
 assert the truth ; but there stands the argument of St. Au- 
 gustine ; there, too, stand the biblical texts on which it is 
 founded the text from the Psalms and the explicit declara- 
 tion of St. Paul to the Romans, " Their sound went into 
 all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world." 
 D'Ailly attempts to reason, but he is overawed, and gives 
 to the world virtually nothing. 
 
 * For Vincent of Beauvais and the antipodes, see his Speculum Naturale, Book 
 VII, with citations from St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, cap. xvi. For Albert the 
 Great's doctrine regarding the antipodes, compare Kretschmer, as above, with 
 Eicken, Geschichte, etc., p. 621. Kretschmer finds that Albert supports the doc- 
 trine, and Eicken finds that he denies it a fair proof that Albeit was not inclined 
 to state his views with dangerous clearness. For D'Oresme, see Santarem, ffis- 
 toire de la Cosmographie, vol. i, p. 142. For Peter of Abano, or Apono, as he is 
 often called, see Tiraboschi ; also Ginguene, vol. ii, p. 293 ; also Naude, Histoire 
 des Grands Hommes soup^onne's de Magie. For Cecco d'Ascoli, see Montucla, His- 
 toire des Mathe"matiques, i, 528 ; also Daunou, Etudes Historiques, vol. vi, p. 320 ; 
 also Kretschmer, p. 59. Concerning Orcagna's representation of Cecco in the 
 flames of hell, see Renan, Averroes et I'Averroisme, Paris, 1867, p. 328.
 
 I0 8 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 Still, the doctrine of the antipodes lived and moved: so 
 much so that the eminent Spanish theologian Tostatus, even 
 as late as the age of Columbus, felt called upon to protest 
 against it as " unsafe." He had shaped the old missile of St. 
 Augustine into the following syllogism : " The apostles were 
 commanded to go into all the world and to preach the gos- 
 pel to every creature ; they did not go to any such part of 
 the world as "the antipodes ; they did not preach to any 
 creatures there : ergo, no antipodes exist." 
 
 The warfare of Columbus the world knows well : how 
 the Bishop of Ceuta worsted him in Portugal; how sundry 
 wise men of Spain confronted him with the usual quotations 
 from the Psalms, from St. Paul, and from St. Augustine ; 
 how, even after he was triumphant, and after his voyage had 
 greatly strengthened the theory of the earth's sphericity, 
 with which the theory of the antipodes was so closely con- 
 nected, the Church by its highest authority solemnly stum- 
 bled and persisted in going astray. In 1493 Pope Alexander 
 VI, having been appealed to as an umpire between the 
 claims of Spain and Portugal to the newly discovered parts of 
 the earth, issued a bull laying down upon the earth's surface 
 a line of demarcation between the two powers. This line 
 was drawn from north to south a hundred leagues west of 
 the Azores ; and the Pope in the plenitude of his knowledge 
 declared that all lands discovered east of this line should be- 
 long to the Portuguese, and all west of it should belong to 
 the Spaniards. This was hailed as an exercise of divinely 
 illuminated power by the Church ; but difficulties arose, and 
 in 1506 another attempt was made by Pope Julius II to draw, 
 the line three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape 
 Verde Islands. This, again, was supposed to bring divine 
 wisdom to settle the question ; but, shortly, overwhelming 
 difficulties arose; for the Portuguese claimed Brazil, and, of 
 course, had no difficulty in showing that they could reach it 
 by sailing to the east of the line, provided they sailed long 
 enough. The lines laid down by Popes Alexander and 
 Julius may still be found upon the maps of the period, but 
 their bulls have quietly passed into the catalogue of ludicrous 
 errors. 
 
 Yet the theological barriers to this geographical truth
 
 THE INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH. 109 
 
 yielded but slowly. Plain as it had become to scholars, 
 they hesitated to declare it to the world at large. Eleven 
 hundred years had passed since St. Augustine had proved 
 its antagonism to Scripture, when Gregory Reysch gave 
 forth his famous encyclopaedia, the Margarita Philosophica. 
 Edition after edition was issued, and everywhere appeared 
 in it the orthodox statements ; but they were evidently 
 strained to the breaking point; for while, in treating of the 
 antipodes, Reysch refers respectfully to St. Augustine as 
 objecting to the scientific doctrine, he is careful not to cite 
 Scripture against it, and not less caretul to suggest geo- 
 graphical reasoning in favour of it. 
 
 But in 1 5 19 science gains a crushing victory. Magellan 
 makes his famous voyage. He proves the earth to be round, 
 for his expedition circumnavigates it ; he proves the doc- 
 trine of the antipodes, for his shipmates see the peoples of 
 the antipodes. Yet even this does not end the war. Many 
 conscientious men oppose the doctrine for two hundred 
 years longer. Then the French astronomers make their 
 measurements of degrees in equatorial and polar regions, 
 and add to their proofs that of the lengthened pendulum. 
 When this was done, when the deductions of science were 
 seen to be established by the simple test of measurement, 
 beautifully and perfectly, and when a long line of trust- 
 worthy explorers, including devoted missionaries, had sent 
 home accounts of the antipodes, then, and then only, this 
 war of twelve centuries ended. 
 
 Such was the main result of this long war ; but there 
 were other results not so fortunate. The efforts of Eusebius, 
 Basil, and Lactantius to deaden scientific thought ; the ef- 
 forts of Augustine to combat it ; the efforts of Cosmas to 
 crush it by dogmatism ; the efforts of Boniface and Zachary 
 to crush it by force, conscientious as they all were, had re- 
 sulted simply in impressing upon many leading minds the 
 conviction that science and religion are enemies. 
 
 On the other hand, what was gained by the warriors of 
 science for religion ? Certainly a far more worthy concep- 
 tion of the world, and a far more ennobling conception of 
 that power which pervades and directs it. Which is more 
 consistent with a great religion, the cosmography of Cosmas
 
 1 10 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 or that of Isaac Newton? Which presents a nobler field for 
 religious thought, the diatribes of Lactantius or the calm 
 statements of Humboldt?* 
 
 IV. THE SIZE OF THE EARTH. 
 
 But at an early period another subject in geography had 
 stirred the minds of thinking men the earth's size. Various 
 ancient investigators had by different methods reached meas- 
 urements more or less near the truth ; these methods were 
 continued into the Middle Ages, supplemented by new 
 thought, and among the more striking results were those 
 obtained by Roger Bacon and Gerbert, afterward Pope Syl- 
 vester II. They handed down to after-time the torch of 
 
 * For D'Ailly's acceptance of St. Augustine's argument, see the Ymago Mundi, 
 cap. vii. For Tostatus, see Zockler, vol. i, pp. 467, 468. He based his opposi- 
 tion on Romans x, 18. For Columbus, see Winsor, Fiske, and Adams ; also 
 Humboldt, Histoire de la Ge"ographie du A'ouveau Continent. For the bull of 
 Alexander VI, see Daunou, Etudes Historiques, vol. ii, p. 417 ; also Peschel, Zeit- 
 alter der Entdeckungen, Book II, chap. iv. The text of the bull is given with an 
 English translation in Arber's reprint of The first 7^hree English Books on Amer- 
 ica, etc., Birmingham, 1885, pp. 201-204 ; also especially Peschel, Die Thei- 
 lung der Erde unter Papst Alexander VI und Julius II, Leipsic, 1871, pp. 14 et 
 seq. For remarks on the power under which the line was drawn by Alexander VI, 
 see Mamiani, Del Papato net Tre Ultimi Secoli, p. 170. For maps showing lines 
 of division, see Kohl, Die beiden altesten General-Karten von Amerika, Weimar, 
 1860, where maps of 1527 and 1529 are reproduced ; also Mercator, Atlas, tenth 
 edition, Amsterdam, 1628, pp. 70, 71. For latest discussion on The Demarcation 
 Line of Alexander VI, see E. G. Bourne in Yale Review, May, 1892. For the 
 Margarita Philosophica, see the editions of 1503, 1509, 1517, lib. vii, cap. 48. For 
 the effect of Magellan's voyages, and the reluctance to yield to proof, see Henri 
 Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xiv, p. 395 ; St. Martin's Histoire de la Geographic, 
 p. 369 ; Peschel, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, concluding chapters ; 
 and for an admirable summary, Draper, Hist. Int. Devel. of Europe, pp. 451-453 ; 
 also an interesting passage in Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar and Common Errors, 
 Book I, chap, vi ; also a striking passage in Acosta, chap. ii. For general state- 
 ment as to supplementary proof by measurement of degrees and by pendulum, see 
 Somerville, Phys. Geog., chap, i, par. 6, note ; also Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. ii, p. 
 736, and vol. v, pp. 16, 32 ; also Montucla, iv, 138. As to the effect of travel, see 
 Acosta's history above cited. The good missionary says, in Grimston's quaint 
 translation, " Whatsoever Lactantius saieth, wee that live now at Peru, and in- 
 habite that parte of the worlde which is opposite to Asia and their Antipodes, finde 
 not ourselves to bee hanging in the aire, our heades downward and our feete on 
 high."
 
 THE SIZE OF THE EARTH. Ill 
 
 knowledge, but, as their reward among their contemporaries, 
 they fell under the charge of sorcery. 
 
 Far more consonant with the theological spirit of the 
 Middle Ages was a solution of the problem from Scripture, 
 and this solution deserves to be given as an example of a 
 very curious theological error, chancing to result in the 
 establishment of a great truth. The second book of Esdras, 
 which among Protestants is placed in the Apocrypha, was 
 held by many of the foremost men of the ancient Church as 
 fully inspired : though Jerome looked with suspicion on this 
 book, it was regarded as prophetic by Clement of Alexan- 
 dria, Tertullian, and Ambrose, and the Church acquiesced 
 in that view. In the Eastern Church it held an especially 
 high place, and in the Western Church, before the Reforma- 
 tion, was generally considered by the most eminent authori- 
 ties to be part of the sacred canon. In the sixth chapter of 
 this book there is a summary of the works of creation, and 
 in it occur the following verses : 
 
 " Upon the third day thou didst command that the wa- 
 ters should be gathered in the seventh part of the earth ; six 
 parts hast thou dried up and kept them to the intent that of 
 these some, being planted of God and tilled, might serve 
 thee." 
 
 " Upon the fifth day thou saidst unto the seventh part 
 where the waters were gathered, that it should bring forth 
 living creatures, fowls and fishes, and so it came to pass." 
 
 These statements were reiterated in other verses, and 
 were naturally considered as of controlling authority. 
 
 Among the scholars who pondered on this as on all 
 things likely to increase knowledge was Cardinal Pierre 
 d'Ailly. As we have seen, this great man, while he denied 
 the existence of the antipodes, as St. Augustine had done, 
 believed firmly in the sphericity of the earth, and, interpret- 
 ing these statements of the book of Esdras in connection 
 with this belief, he held that, as only one seventh of the 
 earth's surface was covered by water, the ocean between 
 the west coast of Europe and the east coast of Asia could 
 not be very wide. Knowing, as he thought, the extent of 
 the land upon the globe, he felt that in view of this divinely 
 authorized statement the globe must be much smaller, and
 
 112 GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 the land of " Zipango," reached by Marco Polo, on the ex- 
 treme east coast of Asia, much nearer than had been gen- 
 erally believed. 
 
 On this point he laid stress in his great work, the Ymago 
 Mundi, and an edition of it having been published in the 
 days when Columbus was thinking most closely upon the 
 problem of a westward voyage, it naturally exercised much 
 influence upon his reasonings. Among the treasures of the 
 library at Seville, there is nothing more interesting than a 
 copy of this work annotated by Columbus himself : from 
 this very copy it was that Columbus obtained confirmation 
 of his belief that the passage across the ocean to Marco 
 Polo's land of Zipango in Asia was short. But for this error, 
 based upon a text supposed to be inspired, it is unlikely 
 that Columbus could have secured the necessary support 
 for his voyage. It is a curious fact that this single theo- 
 logical error thus promoted a series of voyages which com- 
 pletely destroyed not only this but every other conception 
 of geography based upon the sacred writings.* 
 
 V. THE CHARACTER OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE. 
 
 It would be hardly just to dismiss the struggle for geo- 
 graphical truth without referring to one passage more in 
 the history of the Protestant Church, for it shows clearly 
 the difficulties in the way of the simplest statement of geo- 
 graphical truth which conflicted with the words of the sacred 
 books. 
 
 In the year 1553 Michael Servetus was on trial for his 
 life at Geneva on the charge of Arianism. Servetus had 
 rendered many services to scientific truth, and one of these 
 
 * For this error, so fruitful in discovery, see D'Ailly, Ymago Mundi ; the 
 passage referred to is fol. 12 verso. For the passage from Esdras, see chap, vi, 
 verses 42, 47, 50, and 52 ; see also Zockler, Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen 
 Theologie und Naturwissensckaft, vol. i, p. 461. For one of the best recent state- 
 ments, see Ruge, Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, Berlin, 1882, pp. 221 et 
 seq. For a letter of Columbus acknowledging his indebtedness to this mistake in 
 Esdras, see Navarrete, Viajes y Descubrimientos, Madrid, 1825, tome i, pp. 242, 
 264 ; also Humboldt, Hist, de la Geographic du Nouveau Continent, vol. i, pp. 
 68, 69.
 
 THE CHARACTER OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE. 113 
 
 was an edition of Ptolemy's Geography, in which Judea was 
 spoken of, not as " a land flowing with milk and honey," but, 
 in strict accordance with the truth, as, in the main, meagre, 
 barren, and inhospitable. In his trial this simple statement 
 of geographical fact was used against him by his arch-enemy 
 John Calvin with fearful power. In vain did Servetus plead 
 that he had simply drawn the words from a previous edition 
 of Ptolemy; in vain did he declare that this statement was a 
 simple geographical truth of which there were ample proofs ; 
 it was answered that such language " necessarily inculpated 
 Moses, and grievously outraged the Holy Ghost." * 
 
 In summing up the action of the Church upon geog- 
 raphy, we must say, then, that the dogmas developed in 
 strict adherence to Scripture and the conceptions held in the 
 Church during many centuries "always, everywhere, and 
 by all," were, on the whole, steadily hostile to truth ; but it 
 is only just to make a distinction here between the religious 
 and the theological spirit. To the religious spirit are largely 
 due several of the noblest among the great voyages of dis- 
 covery. A deep longing to extend the realms of Christian- 
 ity influenced the minds of Prince John of Portugal, in his 
 great series of efforts along the African coast ; of Vasco da 
 Gama, in his circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope ; 
 of Magellan, in his voyage around the world ; and doubtless 
 found a place among the more worldly motives of Columbus.f 
 
 Thus, in this field, from the supremacy accorded to the- 
 ology, we find resulting that tendency to dogmatism which 
 has shown itself in all ages the deadly foe not only of scien- 
 tific inquiry but of the higher religious spirit itself, while 
 from the love of truth for truth's sake, which has been the 
 inspiration of all fruitful work in science, nothing but ad- 
 vantage has ever resulted to religion. 
 
 * For Servetus's geographical offense, see Rilliet, Relation du Proces criminel 
 centre Michel Servet d'aprh les Documents originaux, Geneva, 1844, pp. 42, 43 ; 
 also Willis, Servetus and Calvin, London, 1877, p. 325. The passage condemned 
 is in the Ptolemy of 1535, fol. 41. It was discreetly retrenched in a reprint of the 
 same edition. 
 
 f As to the mixture in the motives of Columbus, it may be well to compare 
 with the earlier biographies the recent ones by Dr. Winsor and President Adams.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 I. THE OLD SACRED THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 THE next great series of battles was fought over the rela- 
 tions of the visible heavens to the earth. 
 
 In the early Church, in view of the doctrine so promi- 
 nent in the New Testament, that the earth was soon to be 
 destroyed, and that there were to be " new heavens and a 
 new earth," astronomy, like other branches of science, was 
 generally looked upon as futile. Why study the old heavens 
 and the old earth, when they were so soon to be replaced 
 with something infinitely better? This feeling appears in 
 St. Augustine's famous utterance, " What concern is it to 
 me whether the heavens as a sphere inclose the earth in the 
 middle of the world or overhang it on either side ? " 
 
 As to the heavenly bodies, theologians looked on them 
 as at best only objects of pious speculation. Regarding 
 their nature the fathers of the Church were divided. Ori- 
 gen, and others with him, thought them living beings pos- 
 sessed of souls, and this belief was mainly based upon the 
 scriptural vision of the morning stars singing together, and 
 upon the beautiful appeal to the " stars and light " in the 
 song of the three children the Benedicite which the Angli- 
 can communion has so wisely retained in its Liturgy. 
 
 Other fathers thought the stars abiding-places of the 
 angels, and that stars were moved by angels. The Gnostics 
 thought the stars spiritual beings governed by angels, and 
 appointed not to cause earthly events but to indicate them. 
 
 As to the heavens in general, the prevailing view in the 
 Church was based upon the scriptural declarations that a 
 solid vault a " firmament " was extended above the earth, 
 
 114
 
 THE OLD SACRED THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE. II5 
 
 and that the heavenly bodies were simply lights hung within 
 it. This was for a time held very tenaciously. St. Philas- 
 trius, in his famous treatise on heresies, pronounced it a 
 heresy to deny that the stars are brought out by God from 
 his treasure-house and hung in the sky every evening ; any 
 other view he declared " false to the Catholic faith." This 
 view also survived in the sacred theory established so firmly 
 by Cosmas in the sixth century. Having established his 
 plan of the universe upon various texts in the Old and 
 New Testaments, and having made it a vast oblong box, 
 covered by the solid " firmament," he brought in additional 
 texts from Scripture to account for the planetary move- 
 ments, and developed at length the theory that the sun and 
 planets are moved and the " windows of heaven " opened 
 and shut by angels appointed for that purpose. 
 
 How intensely real this way of looking at the universe 
 was, we find in the writings of St. Isidore, the greatest 
 leader of orthodox thought in the seventh century. He 
 affirms that since the fall of man, and on account of it, the 
 sun and moon shine with a feebler light ; but he proves from 
 a text in Isaiah that when the world shall be fully redeemed 
 these "great lights " will shine again in all their early splen- 
 dour. But, despite these authorities and their theological 
 finalities, the evolution of scientific thought continued, its 
 main germ being the geocentric doctrine the doctrine that 
 the earth is the centre, and that the sun and planets revolve 
 about it.* 
 
 This doctrine was of the highest respectability: it had 
 been developed at a very early period, and had been elabo- 
 
 * For passage cited from Clement of Alexandria, see English translation, Edin- 
 burgh, 1869, vol. ii, p. 368 ; also the Miscellanies, Book V, cap. vi. For typical 
 statements by St. Augustine, see De Genesi, ii, cap. ix, in Migne, Pair. Lot., tome 
 xxxiv, pp. 270, 271. For Origen's view, see the De Principiis, lib. i, cap. vii ; see 
 also Leopardi's Errori Populari, cap. xi ; also Wilson's Selections from the Pro- 
 phetic Scriptures in Ante-Nicene Library, p. 132. For Philo Judaeus, see On the 
 Creation of the World, chaps, xviii and xix, and On Monarchy, chap. i. For St. 
 Isidore, see the De Ordine Creaturarum, cap. v, in Migne, Pair. Lot., Ixxxiii, pp. 
 923925 ; also, 1000, 1001. For Philastrius, see the DJ Hceresibus, chap, cxxxiii, 
 in Migne, tome xii, p. 1264. For Cosmas's view, see his Topographia Christiana, 
 in Montfau9on, Col. Nov. Patrum, ii, p. 150, and elsewhere as cited in my chapter 
 on Geography.
 
 , !6 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 rated until it accounted well for the apparent movements of 
 the heavenly bodies ; its final name, " Ptolemaic theory," 
 carried weight ; and, having thus come from antiquity into 
 the Christian world, St. Clement of Alexandria demon- 
 strated that the altar in the Jewish tabernacle was " a sym- 
 bol of the earth placed in the middle of the universe": 
 nothing more was needed ; the geocentric theory was fully 
 adopted by the Church and universally held to agree with 
 the letter and spirit of Scripture.* 
 
 Wrought into this foundation, and based upon it, there 
 was developed in the Middle Ages, mainly out of fragments 
 of Chaldean and other early theories preserved in the He- 
 brew Scriptures, a new sacred system of astronomy, which 
 became one of the great treasures of the universal Church 
 the last word of revelation. 
 
 Three great men mainly reared this structure. First was 
 the unknown who gave to the world the treatises ascribed 
 to Dionysius the Areopagite. It was unhesitatingly believed 
 that these were the work of St. Paul's Athenian convert, 
 and therefore virtually of St. Paul himself. Though now 
 known to be spurious, they were then considered a treasure 
 of inspiration, and an emperor of the East sent them to an 
 emperor of the West as the most worthy of gifts. In the 
 ninth century they were widely circulated in western Europe, 
 and became a fruitful source of thought, especially on the 
 whole celestial hierarchy. Thus the old ideas of astronomy 
 were vastly developed, and the heavenly hosts were classed 
 and named in accordance with indications scattered through 
 the sacred Scriptures. 
 
 The next of these three great theologians was Peter 
 Lombard, professor at the University of Paris. About the 
 middle of the twelfth century he gave forth his collection of 
 
 * As to the respectability of the geocentric theory, etc., see Grote's Plato, vol. 
 iii, p. 257 ; also Sir G. C. Lewis's Astronomy of the Ancients, chap, iii, sec. I, for a 
 very thoughtful statement of Plato's view, and differing from ancient statements. 
 For plausible elaboration of it, and for supposed agreement of Scripture with it, 
 see Fromundus, Anti-Aristarchus, Antwerp, 1631 ; also Melanchthon's Initia 
 Doctrina Physics. For an admirable statement of the theological view of the 
 geocentric theory, antipodes, etc., see Eicken, Geschichte und System der mittelalter- 
 lichen Weltanschauung, pp. 618 et seq.
 
 THE OLD SACRED THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 117 
 
 Sentences, or Statements by the Fathers, and this remained 
 until the end of the Middle Ages the universal manual of 
 theology. In it was especially developed the theological 
 view of man's relation to the universe. The author tells the 
 world : " Just as man is made for the sake of God that is, 
 that he may serve Him, so the universe is made for the 
 sake of man that is, that it may serve him ; therefore is man 
 placed at the middle point of the universe, that he may both 
 serve and be served." 
 
 The vast significance of this view, and its power in resist- 
 ing any real astronomical science, we shall see, especially in 
 the time of Galileo. 
 
 The great triad of thinkers culminated in St. Thomas 
 Aquinas the sainted theologian, the glory of the mediaeval 
 Church, the "Angelic Doctor," the most marvellous intellect 
 between Aristotle and Newton; he to whom it was believed 
 that an image of the Crucified had spoken words praising 
 his writings. Large of mind, strong, acute, yet just even 
 more than just to his opponents, he gave forth, in the latter 
 half of the thirteenth century, his Cyclopaedia of Theology, 
 the Summa Theologica. In this he carried the sacred theory 
 of the universe to its full development. With great power 
 and clearness he brought the whole vast system, material 
 and spiritual, into its relations to God and man.* 
 
 Thus was the vast system developed by these three lead- 
 ers of mediaeval thought; and now came the man who 
 wrought it yet more deeply into European belief, the poet 
 divinely inspired who made the system part of the world's 
 life. Pictured by Dante, the empyrean and the concentric 
 heavens, paradise, purgatory, and hell, were seen of all men ; 
 
 * For the beliefs of Chaldean astronomers in revolving spheres carrying sun, 
 moon, and planets, in a solid firmament supporting the celestial waters, and in 
 angels as giving motion to the planets, see Lenormant ; also Lethaby, 13-21 ; also 
 Schroder, Jensen, Lukas, etal. For the contribution of the pseudo-Dionysius to 
 mediaeval cosmology, see Dion. Areopagita, De Ccelesti Hierarchia, vers. Joan. Scoti, 
 in Migne, Pair. Lat., cxxii. For the contribution of Peter Lombard, see Pet. 
 Lomb., Libr. Sent., II, i, 8, IV, i, 6, 7, in Migne, tome 192. For the citations 
 from St. Thomas Aquinas, see the Summa, ed. Migne, especially Pars I, Qu. 70, 
 (tome i, pp. 1174-1184); also Quaestio 47, Art. iii. For good general statement, 
 see Milman, Latin Christianity, iv, 191 et seq. ; and for relation of Cosmas to these 
 theologians of western Europe, see Milman, as above, viii, 228, note.
 
 U8 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 the God Triune, seated on his throne upon the circle of the 
 heavens, as real as the Pope seated in the chair of St. Peter; 
 the seraphim, cherubim, and thrones, surrounding the Al- 
 mighty, as real as the cardinals surrounding the Pope ; the 
 three great orders of angels in heaven, as real as the three 
 great orders, bishops, priests, and deacons, on earth ; and 
 the whole system of spheres, each revolving within the one 
 above it, and all moving about the earth, subject to the 
 primum mobile, as real as the feudal system of western 
 Europe, subject to the Emperor.* 
 
 Let us look into this vast creation the highest achieve- 
 ment of theology somewhat more closely. 
 
 Its first feature shows a development out of earlier theo- 
 logical ideas. The earth is no longer a flat plain inclosed by 
 four walls and solidly vaulted above, as theologians of pre- 
 vious centuries had believed it, under the inspiration of Cos- 
 mas; it is no longer a mere flat disk, with sun, moon, and 
 stars hung up to give it light, as the earlier cathedral sculp- 
 tors had figured it ; it has become a globe at the centre of 
 the universe. Encompassing it are successive transparent 
 spheres, rotated by angels about the earth, and each carry- 
 ing one or more of the heavenly bodies with it: that nearest 
 the earth carrying the moon ; the next, Mercury ; the next, 
 Venus; the next, the sun ; the next three, Mars, Jupiter, and 
 Saturn ; the eighth carrying the fixed stars. The ninth was 
 the primum mobile, and inclosing all was the tenth heaven 
 the Empyrean. This was immovable the boundary be- 
 tween creation and the great outer void ; and here, in a light 
 which no one can enter, the Triune God sat enthroned, the 
 " music of the spheres " rising to Him as they moved. Thus 
 was the old heathen doctrine of the spheres made Christian. 
 
 In attendance upon the Divine Majesty, thus enthroned, 
 
 * For the central sun, hierarchy of angels, and concentric circles, see Dante, 
 Paradiso, canto xxviii. For the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, showing to Virgil 
 and Dante the great theologians of the Middle Ages, see canto x, and in Dean 
 Plumptre's translation, vol. ii, pp. 56 et seq. ; also Botta, Dante, pp. 350, 351. As 
 to Dante's deep religious feeling and belief in his own divine mission, see J. R. 
 Lowell, Among my Books, vol. i, p. 36. For a remarkable series of coloured en- 
 gravings showing Dante's whole cosmology, see La Materia delta Divina Corn- 
 media di Dante dichiarata in vi tavole, da Michelangelo Caetani, published by the 
 monks of Monte Cassino, to whose kindness I am indebted for my copy.
 
 THE OLD SACRED THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE. II9 
 
 are vast hosts of angels, who are divided into three hier- 
 archies, one serving in the empyrean, one in the heavens, 
 between the empyrean and the earth, and one on the earth. 
 
 Each of these hierarchies is divided into three choirs, or 
 orders; the first, into the orders of Seraphim, Cherubim, 
 and Thrones ; and the main occupation of these is to chant 
 incessantly to " continually cry " the divine praises. 
 
 The order of Thrones conveys God's will to the second 
 hierarchy, which serves in the movable heavens. This sec- 
 ond hierarchy is also made up of three orders. The first of 
 these, the order of Dominions, receives the divine com- 
 mands; the second, the order of Powers, moves the heavens, 
 sun, moon, planets, and stars, opens and shuts the " windows 
 of heaven, "and brings to pass all other celestial phenomena; 
 the third, the order of Empire, guards the others. 
 
 The third and lowest hierarchy is also made up of three 
 orders. First of these are the Principalities, the guardian 
 spirits of nations and kingdoms. Next come Archangels ; 
 these protect religion, and bear the prayers of the saints to 
 the foot of God's throne. Finally come Angels; these care 
 for earthly affairs in general, one being appointed to each 
 mortal, and others taking charge of the qualities of plants, 
 metals, stones, and the like. Throughout the whole system, 
 from the great Triune God to the lowest group of angels, 
 we see at work the mystic power attached to the triangle 
 and sacred number three the same which gave the triune 
 idea to ancient Hindu theology, which developed the triune 
 deities in Egypt, and which transmitted this theological gift 
 to the Christian world, especially through the Egyptian 
 Athanasius. 
 
 Below the earth is hell. This is tenanted by the angels 
 who rebelled under the lead of Lucifer, prince of the ser- 
 aphim the former favourite of the Trinity ; but, of these re- 
 bellious angels, some still rove among the planetary spheres, 
 and give trouble to the good angels ; others pervade the 
 atmosphere about the earth, carrying lightning, storm, 
 drought, and hail ; others infest earthly society, tempting 
 men to sin; but Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas 
 take pains to show that the work of these devils is, after all, 
 but to discipline man or to mete out deserved punishment.
 
 I20 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 All this vast scheme had been so riveted into the Ptole- 
 maic view by the use of biblical texts and theological reason- 
 ings that the resultant system of the universe was considered 
 impregnable and final. To attack it was blasphemy. 
 
 It stood for centuries. Great theological men of science, 
 like Vincent of Beauvais and Cardinal d'Ailly, devoted 
 themselves to showing not only that it was supported by 
 Scripture, but that it supported Scripture. Thus was the 
 geocentric theory embedded in the beliefs and aspirations, 
 in the hopes and fears, of Christendom down to the middle 
 of the sixteenth century.* 
 
 II. THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY. 
 
 But, on the other hand, there had been planted, long be- 
 fore, the germs of a heliocentric theory. In the sixth cen- 
 tury before our era, Pythagoras, and after him Philolaus, 
 had suggested the movement of the earth and planets about 
 a central fire ; and, three centuries later, Aristarchus had re- 
 stated the main truth with striking precision. Here comes 
 in a proof that the antagonism between theological and sci- 
 
 * For the earlier sacred cosmology of Cosmas, with citations from Montfau9on, 
 see the chapter on Geography in this work. For the views of the mediaeval theo- 
 logians, see foregoing notes in this chapter. For the passages of Scripture on 
 which the theological part of this structure was developed, see especially Romans 
 viii, 38; Ephesians i, 21 ; Colossians i, 16, and ii, 15 ; and innumerable passages 
 in the Old Testament. As to the music of the spheres, see Dean Plumptre's Dante, 
 vol. ii, p. 4, note. For an admirable summing up of the mediaeval cosmology in its 
 relation to thought in general, see Rydberg, Magic of the Middle Ages, chap, i, 
 whose summary I have followed in the main. For striking woodcuts showing the 
 view taken of the successive heavens with their choirs of angels, the earth being at 
 the centre and the spheres about it, and the Almighty on his throne above all, see 
 the Nuremberg Chronicle, ff. iv and v ; its date is 1493. For charts showing the 
 continuance of this general view down to the beginning of the sixteenth century, 
 see the various editions of the Margarita Philosophica, from that of 1503 onward, 
 astronomical part. For interesting statements regarding the trinities of gods in 
 ancient Egypt, see Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. i, pp. 94 and 101. The present 
 writer once heard a lecture in Cairo, from an eminent Scotch Doctor of Medicine, 
 to account for the ancient Hindu and Egyptian sacred threes and trinities. The 
 lecturer's theory was that, when Jehovah came down into the garden of Eden and 
 walked with Adam in " the cool of the day," he explained his triune character to 
 Adam, and that from Adam it was spread abroad to the various ancient nations. 

 
 THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY. I2 i 
 
 entific methods is not confined to Christianity ; for this state- 
 ment brought upon Aristarchus the charge of blasphemy, 
 and drew after it a cloud of prejudice which hid the truth 
 for six hundred years. Not until the fifth century of our era 
 did it timidly appear in the thoughts of Martianus Capella : 
 then it was again lost to sight for a thousand years, until in 
 the fifteenth century, distorted and imperfect, it appeared in 
 the writings of Cardinal Nicholas de Cusa. 
 
 But in the shade cast by the vast system which had 
 grown from the minds of the great theologians and from the 
 heart of the great poet there had come to this truth neither 
 bloom nor fruitage. 
 
 Quietly, however, the soil was receiving enrichment and 
 the air warmth. The processes of mathematics were con- 
 stantly improved, the heavenly bodies were steadily ob- 
 served, and at length appeared, far from the centres of 
 thought, on the borders of Poland, a plain, simple-minded 
 scholar, who first fairly uttered to the modern world the 
 truth now so commonplace, then so astounding that the 
 sun and planets do not revolve about the earth, but that 
 the earth and planets revolve about the sun : this man was 
 Nicholas Copernicus. 
 
 Copernicus had been a professor at -Rome, and even as 
 early as 1500 had announced his doctrine there, but more in 
 the way of a scientific curiosity or paradox, as it had been 
 previously held by Cardinal de Cusa, than as the statement 
 of a system representing a great fact in Nature. About 
 thirty years later one of his disciples, Widmanstadt, had 
 explained it to Clement VII; but it still remained a mere 
 hypothesis, and soon, like so many others, disappeared from 
 the public view. But to Copernicus, steadily studying the 
 subject, it became more and more a reality, and as this 
 truth grew within him he seemed to feel that at Rome 
 he was no longer safe. To announce his discovery there 
 as a theory or a paradox might amuse the papal court, 
 but to announce it as a truth as the truth was a far differ- 
 ent matter. He therefore returned to his little town in Po- 
 land. 
 
 To publish his thought as it had now developed was evi- 
 dently dangerous even there, and for more than thirty years
 
 122 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 it lay slumbering in the mind of Copernicus and of the 
 friends to whom he had privately intrusted it. 
 
 At last he prepared his great work on the Revolutions of 
 the Heavenly Bodies, and dedicated it to the Pope himself. 
 He next sought a place of publication. He dared not send it 
 to Rome, for there were the rulers of the older Church 
 ready to seize it ; he dared not send it to Wittenberg, for 
 there were the leaders of Protestantism no less hostile ; he 
 therefore intrusted it to Osiander, at Nuremberg.* 
 
 * For germs of heliocentric theory planted long before, see Sir G. C. Lewis ; 
 and for a succinct statement of the claims of Pythagoras, Philolaus, Aristarchus, 
 and Martianus Capella, see Hoefer, Histoire de V Astronomic, 1873, p. 107 et seq. 
 also Heller, Geschichte der Physik, Stuttgart, 1882, vol. i, pp. 12, 13; also pp. 99 
 et seq. For germs among thinkers of India, see Whewell, vol. i, p. 277 ; also 
 Whitney, Oriental and Linguistic Studies, New York, 1874 ; Essay on the Lunar 
 Zodiac, p. 345. For the views of Vincent of Beauvais, see his Speculum Naturale, 
 lib. xvi, cap. 21. For Cardinal d'Ailly's view, see his treatise De Concordia Astro- 
 nomiccz Veritatis cum Theologia (in his Ymago Mundi and separately). For 
 general statement of De Cusa's work, see Draper, Intellectual Development of 
 Europe, p. 512. For skilful use of De Cusa's view in order to mitigate censure 
 upon the Church for its treatment of Copernicus's discovery, see an article in the 
 Catholic World for January, 1869. For a very exact statement, in a spirit of 
 judicial fairness, see Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, p. 275 and pp. 
 379, 380. In the latter, Whewell cites the exact words of De Cusa in the De 
 Docta Ignorantia, and sums up in these words : " This train of thought might be a 
 preparation for the reception of the Copernican system ; but it is very different 
 from the doctrine that the sun is the centre of the planetary system." Whewell 
 says : " De Cusa propounded the doctrine of the motion of the earth more as a 
 paradox than as a reality. We can not consider this as any distinct anticipation of 
 a profound and consistent view of the truth." On De Cusa, see also Heller, vol. i, 
 p. 216. For Aristotle's views, and their elaboration by St. Thomas Aquinas, see 
 the De Casio et Mundo, sec. xx, and elsewhere in the latter. It is curious to see 
 how even such a biographer as Archbishop Vaughan slurs over the Angelic Doctor's 
 errors. See Vaughan's Life and Labours of St. Thomas of Aquin, pp. 459, 460. 
 
 As to Copernicus's danger at Rome, the Catholic World for January, 1869, cites 
 a speech of the Archbishop of Mechlin before the University of Louvain, to the 
 effect that Copernicus defended his theory at Rome, in 1500, before two thousand 
 scholars ; also, that another professor taught the system in 1 528, and was made 
 apostolic notary by Clement VIII. All this, even if the doctrines taught were 
 identical with those of Copernicus as finally developed which is simply not the 
 cose avails nothing against the overwhelming testimony that Copernicus felt him- 
 self in danger testimony which the after-history of the Copernican theory renders 
 invincible. The very title of Fromundus's book, already cited, published within a 
 few miles of the archbishop's own cathedral, and sanctioned expressly by the theo- 
 logical faculty of that same University of Louvain in 1630, utterly refutes the 
 archbishop's idea that the Church was inclined to treat Copernicus kindly. The
 
 THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY. 
 
 123 
 
 But Osiander's courage failed him : he dared not launch 
 the new (nought boldly. He wrote a grovelling preface, en- 
 deavouring to excuse Copernicus for his novel idea, and in 
 this he inserted the apologetic lie that Copernicus had pro- 
 pounded the doctrine of the earth's movement not as a fact, 
 but as a hypothesis. He declared that it was lawful for an 
 astronomer to indulge his imagination, and that this was 
 what Copernicus had done. 
 
 Thus was the greatest and most ennobling, perhaps, of 
 scientific truths a truth not less ennobling to religion than 
 to science forced, in coming before the world, to sneak and 
 crawl.* 
 
 On the 24th of May, 1543, the newly printed book ar- 
 rived at the house of Copernicus. It was put into his hands ; 
 but he was on his deathbed. A few hours later he was be- 
 
 title is as follows : Ant-Aiistarchus sive Orbis-Terra Immobilis, in quo decretum 
 S. Congregationis S. Jf. E. Cardinal, an. M. DC. XVI adversus Pythagorico-Coperni- 
 canos editum defenditur, Antverpise, MDCXXXI. L'Epinois, Galilee, Paris, 1867, 
 lays stress, p. 14, on the broaching of the doctrine by De Cusa in 1435, and by 
 Widmanstadt in 1533, and their kind treatment by Eugenius IV and Clement VII ; 
 but this is absolutely worthless in denying the papal policy afterward. Lange, 
 Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i, pp. 217, 218, while admitting that De Cusa 
 and Widmanstadt sustained this theory and received honours from their respective 
 popes, shows that, when the Church gave it serious consideration, it was con- 
 demned. There is nothing in this view unreasonable. It would be a parallel case 
 to that of Leo X, at first inclined toward Luther and others, in their " squabbles 
 with the envious friars," and afterward forced to oppose them. That Copernicus 
 felt the danger, is evident, among other things, by the expression in the preface ; 
 " Statim me explodendum cum tali opinions clamitant" For dangers at Witten- 
 berg, see Lange, as above, vol. i, p. 217. 
 
 * Osiander, in a letter to Copernicus, dated April 20, 1541, had endeavoured 
 to reconcile him to such a procedure, and ends by saying, " Sic enim placidiores 
 reddideris peripatheticos et theologos quos contradicturos metuis" See Apologia 
 Tychonis in Kepler's Opera Omnia, Frisch's edition, vol. i, p. 246. Kepler holds 
 Osiander entirely responsible for this preface. Bertrand, in his Fondateurs de 
 r Astronomic moderns, gives its text, and thinks it possible that Copernicus may 
 have yielded " in pure condescension toward his disciple." But this idea is utterly 
 at variance with expressions in Copernicus's own dedicatory letter to the Pcpe, 
 which follows the preface. For a good summary of the argument, see Figuier, 
 Savants de la Renaissance, pp. 378, 379 ; see also citation from Gassendi's Life 
 of Copernicus, in Flammarion, Vie de Copernic, p. 124. Mr. John Fiske, accurate 
 as he usually is, in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy appears to have followed 
 I aplace, Delambre, and Petit into the error of supposing that Copernicus, and not 
 Osiander, is responsible for the preface. For the latest proofs, see Menzer's 
 translation of Copernicus's work, Thorn, 1879, notes on pp. 3 and 4 of the appendix.
 
 124 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 yond the reach of the conscientious men who would have 
 blotted his reputation and perhaps have destroyed his life. 
 
 Yet not wholly beyond their reach. Even death could 
 not be trusted to shield him. There seems to have been 
 fear of vengeance upon his corpse, for on his tombstone was 
 placed no record of his lifelong labours, no mention of his 
 great discovery; but there was graven upon it simply a 
 prayer : " I ask not the grace accorded to Paul ; not that 
 given to Peter ; give me only the favour which Thou didst 
 show to the thief on the cross." Not till thirty years after 
 did a friend dare write on his tombstone a memorial of his 
 discovery.* 
 
 The preface of Osiander, pretending that the book of 
 Copernicus suggested a hypothesis instead of announcing a 
 truth, served its purpose well. During nearly seventy years 
 the Church authorities evidently thought it best not to stir 
 the matter, and in some cases professors like Calganini were 
 allowed to present the new view purely as a hypothesis. 
 There were, indeed, mutterings from time to time on the theo- 
 logical side, but there was no great demonstration against 
 the system until 1616. Then, when the Copernican doctrine 
 was upheld by Galileo as a truth, and proved to be a truth 
 by his telescope, the book was taken in hand by the Roman 
 curia. The statements of Copernicus were condemned, 
 " until they should be corrected " ; and the corrections re- 
 quired were simply such as would substitute for his conclu- 
 sions the old Ptolemaic theory. 
 
 That this was their purpose was seen in that year when 
 Galileo was forbidden to teach or discuss the Copernican 
 theory, and when were forbidden "all books which affirm 
 the motion of the earth." Henceforth to read the work of 
 Copernicus was to risk damnation, and the world accepted 
 the decree.f The strongest minds were thus held fast. If 
 
 * See Flammarion, Vie de Copemic, p. 190. 
 
 f The authorities deciding this matter in accordance with the wishes of Pope 
 Paul V and Cardinal Bellarmine were the Congregation of the Index, or cardinals 
 having charge of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Recent desperate attempts 
 to fasten the responsibility on them as individuals seem ridiculous in view of the 
 simple fact that their work was sanctioned by the highest Church authority, and 
 required to be universally accepted by the Church. Eleven different editions of
 
 THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY. ^5 
 
 they could not believe the old system, they must pretend that 
 they believed it; and this, even after the great circumnavi- 
 gation of the globe had done so much to open the eyes of 
 the world ! Very striking is the case of the eminent Jesuit 
 missionary Joseph Acosta, whose great work on the Natural 
 and Moral History of the Indies, published in the last quarter 
 of the sixteenth century, exploded so many astronomical and 
 geographical errors. Though at times curiously credulous, 
 he told the truth as far as he dared ; but as to the movement 
 of the heavenly bodies he remained orthodox declaring, 
 " I have seen the two poles, whereon the heavens turn as 
 upon their axletrees." 
 
 There was, indeed, in Europe one man who might have 
 done much to check this current of unreason which was to 
 sweep away so many thoughtful men on the one hand from 
 scientific knowledge, and so many on the other from Chris- 
 tianity. This was Peter Apian. He was one of the great 
 mathematical and astronomical scholars of the time. His 
 brilliant abilities had made him the astronomical teacher 
 of the Emperor Charles V ; his work on geography had 
 brought him a world-wide reputation ; his work on astron- 
 omy brought him a patent of nobility ; his improvements 
 in mathematical processes and astronomical instruments 
 brought him the praise of Kepler and a place in the history 
 of science : never had a true man better opportunity to do a 
 great deed. When Copernicus's work appeared, Apian 
 
 the Index in my own possession prove this. Nearly all of these declare on their 
 title-pages that they are issued by order of the pontiff of the period, and each is 
 prefaced by a special papal bull or letter. See especially the Index of 1664, issued 
 under order of Alexander VII, and that of 1761, under Benedict XIV. Coperni- 
 cus's statements were prohibited in the Index " donee corrigantttr." Kepler said 
 that it ought to be worded "donee explicetur." See Bertrand, Fondateurs de 
 VAstronomie moderne, p. 57. De Morgan, pp. 57-60, gives the corrections re- 
 quired by the Index of 1620. Their main aim seems to be to reduce Copernicus to 
 the grovelling level of Osiander, making of his discovery a mere hypothesis ; but 
 occasionally they require a virtual giving up of the whole Copernican doctrine 
 e.g., "correction" insisted upon for chap, viii, p. 6. For a scholarly account of 
 the relation of the Prohibitory and Expurgatory Indexes to each other, see Mend- 
 ham, Literary Policy of the Church of Rome ; also Reusch, Index der verbotenen 
 Bile her, Bonn, 1855, vol. ii, chaps, i and ii. For a brief but very careful state- 
 ment, see Gebler, Galileo Galilei, English translation, London, 1879, chap, i; see 
 also Addis and Arnold's Catholic Dictionary, article Galileo, p. 8.
 
 ! 2 6 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 was at the height of his reputation and power : a quiet, 
 earnest plea from him, even if it had been only for ordinary 
 fairness and a suspension of judgment, must have carried 
 much weight. His devoted pupil, Charles V, who sat on 
 the thrones of Germany and Spain, must at least have given 
 a hearing to such a plea. But, unfortunately, Apian was a 
 professor in an institution of learning under the strictest 
 Church control the University of Ingolstadt. His foremost 
 duty was to teach safe science to keep science within the 
 line of scriptural truth as interpreted by theological pro- 
 fessors. His great opportunity was lost. Apian continued 
 to maunder over the Ptolemaic theory and astrology in his 
 lecture-room. The attacks on the Copernican theory he 
 neither supported nor opposed ; he was silent ; and the cause 
 of his silence should never be forgotten so long as any 
 Church asserts its title to control university instruction.* 
 
 Doubtless many will exclaim against the Roman Catholic 
 Church for this ; but the simple truth is that Protestantism 
 was no less zealous against the new scientific doctrine. All 
 branches of the Protestant Church Lutheran, Calvinist, 
 Anglican vied with each other in denouncing the Coperni- 
 can doctrine as contrary to Scripture ; and, at a later period, 
 the Puritans showed the same tendency. 
 
 Said Martin Luther : " People gave ear to an upstart 
 astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not 
 the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. Who- 
 ever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, 
 which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool 
 wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy ; but 
 sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to 
 stand still, and not the earth." Melanchthon, mild as he was, 
 was not behind Luther in condemning Copernicus. In his 
 treatise on the Elements of Physics, published six years after 
 Copernicus's death, he says : " The eyes are witnesses that 
 
 * For Joseph Acosta'& statement, see the translation of his History, published 
 by the Hakluyt Society, chap. ii. For Peter Apian, see Madler, Geschichte der 
 Astronomie, Braunschweig, 1873, vol. i, p. 141. For evidences of the special favour 
 of Charles V, see Delambre, Histoire de V Astronomic au Moyen Age, p. 390 ; also 
 Briihns, in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographic. For an attempted apology for 
 him, see Glinther, Peter and Philipp Apian, Prag, 1882, p. 62.
 
 THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY. 
 
 127 
 
 the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four hours. But 
 certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a 
 display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves ; 
 and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun 
 revolves. . . . Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to 
 assert such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious. 
 It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed 
 by God and to acquiesce in it." Melanchthon then cites the 
 passages in the Psalms and Ecclesiastes, which he declares 
 assert positively and clearly that the earth stands fast and 
 that the sun moves around it, and adds eight other proofs of 
 his proposition that " the earth can be nowhere if not in the 
 centre of the universe." So earnest does this mildest of the 
 Reformers become, that he suggests severe measures to re- 
 strain such impious teachings as those of Copernicus.* 
 
 While Lutheranism was thus condemning the theory of 
 the earth's movement, other branches of the Protestant 
 Church did not remain behind. Calvin took the lead, in his 
 Commentary on Genesis, by condemning all who asserted that 
 the earth is not at the centre of the universe. He clinched 
 the matter by the usual reference to the first verse of the 
 ninety-third Psalm, and asked, " Who will venture to place 
 the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?" 
 Turretin, Calvin's famous successor, even after Kepler and 
 Newton had virtually completed the theory of Copernicus 
 and Galileo, put forth his compendium of theology, in which 
 he proved, from a multitude of scriptural texts, that the 
 heavens, sun, and moon move about the earth, which stands 
 still in the centre. In England we see similar theological 
 efforts, even after they had become evidently futile. Hutch- 
 inson's Moses 's Principia, Dr. Samuel Pike's Sacred Philoso- 
 phy, the writings of Home, Bishop Horsley, and President 
 Forbes contain most earnest attacks upon the ideas of New- 
 
 * See the Tischreden in the Walsch edition of Luther's Works, 1743, vol. xxii, 
 p. 2260 ; also Melanchthon's Initia Doctrina Physics. This treatise is cited under 
 a mistaken title by the Catholic World, September, 1870. The correct title is 
 as given above ; it will be found in the Corpus Reformatorum, vol. xiii ( ed. Bret- 
 schneider, Halle, 1846), pp. 216, 217. See also Madler, vol. i, p. 176 ; also Lange, 
 Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. i, p. 217 ; also Prowe, Ueber die Abhdngigkeit 
 des Copernicus, Thorn, 1865, p. 4 ; also note, pp. 5, 6, where text is given in full.
 
 I2 g ASTRONOMY. 
 
 ton, such attacks being based upon Scripture. Dr. John 
 Owen, so famous in the annals of Puritanism, declared the 
 Copernican system a " delusive and arbitrary hypothesis, 
 contrary to Scripture " ; and even John Wesley declared 
 the new ideas to " tend toward infidelity." * 
 
 And Protestant peoples were not a whit behind Catholic 
 in following out such teachings. The people of Elbing made 
 themselves merry over a farce in which Copernicus was the 
 main object of ridicule. The people of Nuremberg, a Prot- 
 estant stronghold, caused a medal to be struck with inscrip- 
 tions ridiculing the philosopher and his theory. 
 
 Why the people at large took this view is easily under- 
 stood when we note the attitude of the guardians of learn- 
 ing, both Catholic and Protestant, in that age. It throws 
 great light upon sundry claims by modern theologians to 
 take charge of public instruction and of the evolution of 
 science. So important was it thought to have " sound learn- 
 ing " guarded and " safe science " taught, that in many of 
 the universities, as late as the end of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, professors were forced to take an oath not to hold the 
 " Pythagorean " that is, the Copernican idea as to the 
 movement of the heavenly bodies. As the contest went on, 
 professors were forbidden to make known to students the 
 facts revealed by the telescope. Special orders to this effect 
 were issued by the ecclesiastical authorities to the universi- 
 ties and colleges of Pisa, Innspruck, Louvain, Douay, Sala- 
 manca, and others. During generations we find the authori- 
 ties of these universities boasting that these godless doctrines 
 were kept away from their students. It is touching to hear 
 such boasts made then, just as it is touching now to hear 
 sundry excellent university authorities boast that they dis- 
 courage the reading of Mill, Spencer, and Darwin. Nor 
 were such attempts to keep the truth from students confined 
 to the Roman Catholic institutions of learning. Strange as 
 it may seem, nowhere were the facts confirming the Coper- 
 nican theory more carefully kept out of sight than at Wit- 
 
 * On the teachings of Protestantism as regards the Copernican theory, see 
 citations in Canon Farrar's History of Interpretation, preface, xviii ; also Rev. 
 Dr. Shields, of Princeton, The Final Philosophy, pp. 60, 6l.
 
 THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY. 
 
 I2 9 
 
 tenberg the university of Luther and Melanchthon. About 
 the middle of the sixteenth century there were at that centre 
 of Protestant instruction two astronomers of a very high 
 order, Rheticus and Reinhold ; both of these, after thorough 
 study, had convinced themselves that the Copernican sys- 
 tem was true, but neither of them was allowed to tell this 
 truth to his students. Neither in his lecture announcements 
 nor in his published works did Rheticus venture to make 
 the new system known, and he at last gave up his professor- 
 ship and left Wittenberg, that he might have freedom to 
 seek and tell the truth. Reinhold was even more wretch- 
 edly humiliated. Convinced of the truth of the new theory, 
 he was obliged to advocate the old ; if he mentioned the 
 Copernican ideas, he was compelled to overlay them with 
 the Ptolemaic. Even this was not thought safe enough, and 
 in 1571 the subject was intrusted to Peucer. He was emi- 
 nently " sound," and denounced the Copernican theory in 
 his lectures as " absurd, and unfit to be introduced into the 
 schools." 
 
 To clinch anti-scientific ideas more firmly into German 
 Protestant teaching, Rector Hensel wrote a text-book for 
 schools entitled The Restored Mosaic System of the World, 
 which showed the Copernican astronomy to be unscriptural. 
 
 Doubtless this has a far-off sound ; yet its echo comes 
 very near modern Protestantism in the expulsion of Dr. 
 Woodrow by the Presbyterian authorities in South Caro- 
 lina ; the expulsion of Prof. Winchell by the Methodist 
 Episcopal authorities in Tennessee ; the expulsion of Prof. 
 Toy by Baptist authorities in Kentucky ; the expulsion of 
 the professors at Beyrout under authority of American Prot- 
 estant divines all for holding the doctrines of modern sci- 
 ence, and in the last years of the nineteenth century.* 
 
 But the new truth could not be concealed ; it could 
 neither be laughed down nor frowned down. Many minds 
 
 * For treatment of Copernican ideas by the people, see The Catholic World, as 
 above; also Melanchthon, ubi supra \ also Prowe, Copernicus, Berlin, 1883, vol. i, 
 p. 26g, note ; also pp. 279, 280 ; also Madler, i, p. 167. For Rector Hensel, see 
 Rev. Dr. Shield's Final Philosophy, p. 60. For details of recent Protestant efforts 
 against evolution doctrines, see the chapter on The Fall of Man and Anthropology 
 in this work. 
 10
 
 130 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 had received it, but within the hearing of the papacy only 
 one tongue appears to have dared to utter it clearly. This 
 new warrior was that strange mortal, Giordano Bruno. He 
 was hunted from land to land, until at last he turned on 
 his pursuers with fearful invectives. For this he was en- 
 trapped at Venice, imprisoned during six years in the dun- 
 geons of the Inquisition at Rome, then burned alive, and his 
 ashes scattered to the winds. Still, the new truth lived on. 
 Ten years after the martyrdom of Bruno the truth of Coper- 
 nicus's doctrine was established by the telescope of Galileo.* 
 Herein was fulfilled one of the most touching of prophe- 
 cies. Years before, the opponents of Copernicus had said to 
 him, " If your doctrines were true, Venus would show phases 
 like the moon." Copernicus answered : " You are right ; I 
 know not what to say ; but God is good, and will in time 
 find an answer to this objection." The God-given answer 
 came when, in i6ii,the rude telescope of Galileo showed 
 the phases of Venus.f 
 
 III. THE WAR UPON GALILEO. 
 
 On this new champion, Galileo, the whole war was at 
 last concentrated. His discoveries had clearly taken the 
 Copernican theory out of the list of hypotheses, and had 
 placed it before the world" as a truth. Against him, then, 
 the war was long and bitter. The supporters of what was 
 called "sound learning" declared his discoveries deceptions 
 and his announcements blasphemy. Semi-scientific profes- 
 
 * For Bruno, see Bartholmess, Vie de Jordzno Bruno, Paris, 1846, vol. i, p. 121 
 and pp. 212 etseq. ; also Berti, Vita dl Giordano Bruno, Firenze, 1868, chap, xvi ; 
 also Whewell, vol. i, pp. 272, 273. That Whewell is somewhat hasty in attribut- 
 ing Bruno's punishment entirely to the Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante will be 
 evident, in spite of Montucla, to any one who reads the account of the persecution 
 in Bartholmess or Berti ; and, even if Whewell be right, the Spaccio would never 
 have been written but for Bruno's indignation at ecclesiastical oppression. See 
 Tiraboschi, vol. vii, pp. 466 et seq. 
 
 \ For the relation of these discoveries to Copernicus's work, see Delambre, 
 Histoire de I' Astronomic moderns, discours pre'limi naire, p. xiv ; also Laplace, Sys- 
 teme du Monde, vol. i, p. 326 ; and for more careful statements, Kepler's Opera 
 Omnia, edit. Frisch, tome ii, p. 464. For Copernicus's prophecy, see Cantu, His- 
 toire Universelle, vol. xv, p. 473. (Cantu was an eminent Roman Catholic.)
 
 THE WAR UPON GALILEO. jj! 
 
 sors, endeavouring to curry favour with the Church, at- 
 tacked him with sham science ; earnest preachers attacked 
 him with perverted Scripture ; theologians, inquisitors, con- 
 gregations of cardinals, and at last two popes dealt with 
 him, and, as was supposed, silenced his impious doctrine 
 forever.* 
 
 I shall present this warfare at some length because, so far 
 as I can find, no careful summary of it has been given in our 
 language, since the whole history was placed in a new light 
 by the revelations of the trial documents in the Vatican 
 Library, honestly published for the first time by L'fipinois 
 in 1867, and since that by Gebler, Berti, Favaro, and others. 
 
 The first important attack on Galileo began in 1610, when 
 he announced that his telescope had revealed the moons of 
 the planet Jupiter. The enemy saw that this took the 
 Copernican theory out of the realm of hypothesis, and they 
 gave battle immediately. They denounced both his method 
 and its results as absurd and impious. As to his method, 
 professors bred in the " safe science " favoured by the Church 
 argued that the divinely appointed way of arriving at the 
 truth in astronomy was by theological reasoning on texts of 
 Scripture ; and, as to his results, they insisted, first, that 
 Aristotle knew nothing of these new revelations ; and, next, 
 that the Bible showed by all applicable types that there 
 could be only seven planets ; that this was proved by the 
 seven golden candlesticks of the Apocalypse, by the seven- 
 branched candlestick of the tabernacle, and by the seven 
 churches of Asia ; that from Galileo's doctrine consequences 
 must logically result destructive to Christian truth. Bishops 
 and priests therefore warned their flocks, and multitudes of 
 the faithful besought the Inquisition to deal speedily and 
 sharply with the heretic.f 
 
 * A very curious example of this sham science employed by theologians is seen 
 in the argument, frequently used at that time, that, if the earth really moved, a 
 stone falling from a height would fall back of the point immediately below its 
 point of starting. This is used by Fromundus with great effect. It appears never 
 to have occurred to him to test the matter by dropping a stone from the topmast of 
 a ship. Benzenburg has experimentally demonstrated just such an aberration in 
 falling bodies as is mathematically required by the diurnal motion of the earth. 
 See Jevons, Principles of Science, pp. 388, 389, second edition, 1877. 
 
 f See Delambre on the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter as the turning-point
 
 132 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 In vain did Galileo try to prove the existence of satel- 
 lites by showing them to the doubters through his telescope : 
 they either declared it impious to look, or, if they did look, 
 denounced the satellites as illusions from the devil. Good 
 Father Clavius declared that " to see satellites of Jupiter, 
 men had to make an instrument which would create them." 
 In vain did Galileo try to save the great truths he had dis- 
 covered by his letters to the Benedictine Castelli and the 
 Grand-Duchess Christine, in which he argued that literal 
 biblical interpretation should not be applied to science ; it 
 was answered that such an argument only made his heresy 
 more detestable ; that he was " worse than Luther or Calvin." 
 
 The war on the Copernican theory, which up to that 
 time had been carried on quietly, now flamed forth. It was 
 declared that the doctrine was proved false by the standing 
 still of the sun for Joshua, by the declarations that " the 
 foundations of the earth are fixed so firm that they can not 
 be moved," and that the sun " runneth about from one end 
 of the heavens to the other." * 
 
 But the little telescope of Galileo still swept the heavens, 
 and another revelation was announced the mountains and 
 valleys in the moon. This brought on another attack. It 
 was declared that this, and the statement that the moon 
 shines by light reflected from the sun, directly contradict 
 the statement in Genesis that the moon is " a great light." 
 To make the matter worse, a painter, placing the moon in a 
 religious picture in its usual position beneath the feet of the 
 
 with the heliocentric doctrine. As to its effects on Bacon, see Jevons, p. 638, as 
 above. For argument drawn from the candlestick and the seven churches, see De- 
 lambre, p. 20. 
 
 * For principal points as given, see Libri, Histoire des Sciences mathe'matiques 
 en Italic, vol. iv, p. 211 ; De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 26, for account of Father 
 Clavius. It is interesting to know that Clavius, in his last years, acknowledged 
 that " the whole system of the heavens is broken down, and must be mended," 
 Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv, p. 478. See Th. Martin, Galilee, pp. 34, 208, 
 and 266 ; also Heller, Geschichte der Physik, Stuttgart, 1882, vol. i, p. 366. For the 
 original documents, see L'Epinois, pp. 34 and 36 ; or, better, Gebler's careful edi- 
 tion of the trial (Die Aden des Galikischen Processes, Stuttgart, 1877), pp. 47 
 et seq. Martin's translation seems somewhat too free. See also Gebler, Galileo 
 Galilei, English translation, London, 1879, pp. 76-78 ; also Reusch, Der Process 
 Galilei's und die Jesuiten, Bonn, 1879, chaps, ix, x, xi.
 
 THE WAR UPON GALILEO. 
 
 133 
 
 Blessed Virgin, outlined on its surface mountains and val- 
 leys ; this was denounced as a sacrilege logically resulting 
 from the astronomer's heresy. 
 
 Still another struggle was aroused when the hated tele- 
 scope revealed spots upon the sun, and their motion indicat- 
 ing the sun's rotation. Monsignor Elci, head of the Univer- 
 sity of Pisa, forbade the astronomer Castelli to mention these 
 spots to his students. Father Busaeus, at the University of 
 Innspruck, forbade the astronomer Scheiner, who had also 
 discovered the spots and proposed a safe explanation of 
 them, to allow the new discovery to be known there. At 
 the College of Douay and the University of Louvain this 
 discovery was expressly placed under the ban, and this be- 
 came the general rule among the Catholic universities and 
 colleges of Europe. The Spanish universities were espe- 
 cially intolerant of this and similar ideas, and up to a recent 
 period their presentation was strictly forbidden in the most 
 important university of all that of Salamanca.* 
 
 Such are the consequences of placing the instruction of 
 men's minds in the hands of those mainly absorbed in saving 
 men's souls. Nothing could be more in accordance with 
 the idea recently put forth by sundry ecclesiastics, Catholic 
 and Protestant, that the Church alone is empowered to pro- 
 mulgate scientific truth or direct university instruction. 
 But science gained a victory here also. Observations of 
 the solar spots were reported not only from Galileo in Italy, 
 but from Fabricius in Holland. Father Scheiner then en- 
 deavoured to make the usual compromise between theology 
 and science. He promulgated a pseudo-scientific theory, 
 which only provoked derision. 
 
 The war became more and more bitter. The Dominican 
 Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, " Ye men 
 of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven ? " and this 
 wretched pun upon the great astronomer's name ushered in 
 sharper weapons ; for, before Caccini ended, he insisted that 
 " geometry is of the devil," and that" mathematicians should 
 be banished as the authors of all heresies." The Church 
 authorities gave Caccini promotion. 
 
 * See Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, vol. iii.
 
 134 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 Father Lorini proved that Galileo's doctrine was not only 
 heretical but "atheistic," and besought the Inquisition to 
 intervene. The Bishop of Fiesole screamed in rage against 
 the Copernican system, publicly insulted Galileo, and de- 
 nounced him to the Grand-Duke. The Archbishop of Pisa 
 secretly sought to entrap Galileo and deliver him to the In- 
 quisition at Rome. The Archbishop of Florence solemnly 
 condemned the new doctrines as unscriptural ; and Paul V, 
 while petting Galileo, and inviting him as the greatest astron- 
 omer of the world to visit Rome, was secretly moving the 
 Archbishop of Pisa to pick up evidence against the astron- 
 omer. 
 
 But by far the most terrible champion who now ap- 
 peared was Cardinal Bellarmin, one of the greatest theo- 
 logians the world has known. He was earnest, sincere, 
 and learned, but insisted on making science conform to 
 Scripture. The weapons which men of Bellarmin's stamp 
 used were purely theological. They held up before the 
 world the dreadful consequences which must result to 
 Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to 
 revolve about the sun and not about the earth. Their 
 most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that 
 " his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan 
 of salvation." Father Lecazre declared " it casts suspicion 
 on the doctrine of the incarnation." Others declared, " It 
 upsets the whole basis of theology. If the earth is a 
 planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be 
 that any such great things have been done specially for it as 
 the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, 
 since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited ; 
 but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam ? 
 How can they trace back their origin to Noah's ark ? How 
 can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?" Nor was 
 this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman 
 Church ; Melanchthon, Protestant as he was, had already 
 used it in his attacks on Copernicus and his school. 
 
 In addition to this prodigious theological engine of war 
 there was kept up a fire of smaller artillery in the shape of 
 texts and scriptural extracts. 
 
 But the war grew still more bitter, and some weapons
 
 THE WAR UPON GALILEO. 
 
 135 
 
 used in it are worth examining. They are very easily ex- 
 amined, for they are to be found on all the battlefields of 
 science ; but on that field they were used with more effect 
 than on almost any other. These weapons are the epithets 
 " infidel " and " atheist." They have been used against 
 almost every man who has ever done anything new for his 
 fellow-men. The list of those who have been denounced as 
 "infidel" and "atheist" includes almost all great men of 
 science, general scholars, inventors, and philanthropists. 
 The purest Christian life, the noblest Christian character, 
 have not availed to shield combatants. Christians like Isaac 
 Newton, Pascal, Locke, Milton, and even Fenelon and How- 
 ard, have had this weapon hurled against them. Of all 
 proofs of the existence of a God, those of Descartes have 
 been wrought most thoroughly into the minds of modern 
 men ; yet the Protestant theologians of Holland sought to 
 bring him to torture and to death by the charge of atheism, 
 and the Roman Catholic theologians of France thwarted him 
 during his life and prevented any due honours to him after 
 his death.* 
 
 These epithets can hardly be classed with civilized weap- 
 ons. They are burning arrows ; they set fire to masses of 
 popular prejudice, always obscuring the real question, some- 
 times destroying the attacking party. They are poisoned 
 weapons. They pierce the hearts of loving women ; they 
 alienate dear children ; they injure a man after life is ended, 
 for they leave poisoned wounds in the hearts of those who 
 loved him best fears for his eternal salvation, dread of the 
 Divine wrath upon him. Of course, in these days these weap- 
 ons, though often effective in vexing good men and in scar- 
 ing good women, are somewhat blunted ; indeed, they not 
 infrequently injure the assailants more than the assailed. So 
 it was not in the days of Galileo ; they were then in all their 
 sharpness and venom. f 
 
 * For various objectors and objections to Galileo by his contemporaries, see 
 Libri, Histoire des Sciences mathe'matiques en Italie, vol. iv, pp. 233, 234 ; also Mar- 
 tin, Vie de Galilee. For Father Lecazre's argument, see Flammarion, Mondes tma- 
 ginaires et mondes re'els, 6e ed., pp. 315, 316. For Melanchthon's argument, see 
 his Initia, in Opera, vol. iii, Halle, 1846. 
 
 f For curious exemplification of the way in which these weapons have been
 
 I3 6 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 Yet a baser warfare was waged by the Archbishop of 
 Pisa. This man, whose cathedral derives its most enduring 
 fame from Galileo's deduction of a great natural law from 
 the swinging lamp before its altar, was not an archbishop 
 after the noble mould of Borromeo and Fenelon and Cheve- 
 rus. Sadly enough for the Church and humanity, he was 
 simply a zealot and intriguer: he perfected the plan for en- 
 trapping the great astronomer. 
 
 Galileo, after his discoveries had been denounced, had 
 written to his friend Castelli and to the Grand-Duchess 
 Christine two letters to show that his discoveries might be 
 reconciled with Scripture. On a hint from the Inquisition 
 at Rome, the archbishop sought to get hold of these letters 
 and exhibit them as proofs that Galileo had uttered heretical 
 views of theology and of Scripture, and thus to bring him 
 into the clutch of the Inquisition. The archbishop begs 
 Castelli, therefore, to let him see the original letter in the 
 handwriting of Galileo. Castelli declines. The archbishop 
 then, while, as is now revealed, writing constantly and bit- 
 terly to the Inquisition against Galileo, professes to Castelli 
 the greatest admiration of Galileo's genius and a sincere de- 
 sire to know more of his discoveries. This not succeeding, 
 the archbishop at last throws off the mask and resorts to 
 open attack. 
 
 The whole struggle to crush Galileo and to save him 
 would be amusing were it not so fraught with evil. There 
 were intrigues and counter-intrigues, plots and counter-plots, 
 lying and spying; and in the thickest of this seething, 
 squabbling, screaming mass of priests, bishops, archbishops, 
 and cardinals, appear two popes, Paul V and Urban VIII. 
 It is most suggestive to see in this crisis of the Church, at 
 the tomb of the prince of the apostles, on the eve of the 
 greatest errors in Church policy the world has known, in all 
 the intrigues and deliberations of these consecrated leaders 
 
 hurled, see lists of persons charged with "infidelity" and "atheism," in the Dic- 
 tionnaire des Ath/es, Paris, [1800] ; also Lecky, History of Rationalism, vol. ii, p. 
 50. For the case of Descartes, see Saisset, Descartes et ses Pr/curseurs, pp. 103, 
 no. For the facility with which the term "atheist" has been applied from the 
 early Aryans down to believers in evolution, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i, 
 p. 420.
 
 THE WAR UPON GALILEO. 137 
 
 of the Church, no more evidence of the guidance or pres- 
 'ence of the Holy Spirit than in a caucus of New York politi- 
 cians at Tammany Hall. 
 
 But the opposing powers were too strong. In 1615 Gali- 
 leo was summoned before the Inquisition at Rome, and the 
 mine which had been so long preparing was sprung. Sun- 
 dry theologians of the Inquisition having been ordered to 
 examine two propositions which had been extracted from 
 Galileo's letters on the solar spots, solemnly considered 
 these points during about a month and rendered their unani- 
 mous decision as follows : " The first proposition, that the sun 
 is the centre and does not revolve about the earth, is foolish, 
 absurd, false in theology, and heretical, because expressly contrary 
 to Holy Scripture " ; and " the second proposition, that the earth 
 is not the centre but revolves about the sun, is absurd, false in 
 philosophy, and, from a theological point of view at least, opposed 
 to the true faith" 
 
 The Pope himself, Paul V, now intervened again : he 
 ordered that Galileo be brought before the Inquisition. 
 Then the greatest man of science in that age was brought 
 face to face with the greatest theologian Galileo was con- 
 fronted by Bellarmin. Bellarrnin shows Galileo the error 
 of his opinion and orders him to renounce it. De Lauda, 
 fortified by a letter from the Pope, gives orders that the 
 astronomer be placed in the dungeons of the Inquisition 
 should he refuse to yield. Bellarmin now commands Gali- 
 leo, " in the name of His Holiness the Pope and the whole 
 Congregation of the Holy Office, to relinquish altogether 
 the opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and im- 
 movable, and that the earth moves, nor henceforth to hold, 
 teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever, verbally or in 
 writing." This injunction Galileo acquiesces in and prom- 
 ises to obey.* 
 
 This was on the 26th of February, 1616. About a fort- 
 
 * I am aware that the theory proposed by Wohlwill and developed by Gebler 
 denies that this promise was ever made by Galileo, and holds that the passage was 
 a forgery devised later by the Church rulers to justify the proceedings of 1632 and 
 1633. This would make the conduct of the Church worse, but authorities as emi- 
 nent consider the charge not proved. A careful examination of the documents seems 
 to disprove it.
 
 j^g ASTRONOMY. 
 
 night later the Congregation of the Index, moved thereto, 
 as the letters and documents now brought to light show, by' 
 Pope Paul V, solemnly rendered a decree that "the doctrine 
 of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about tlie sun 
 is false, and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture " ; and that 
 this opinion must neither be taught nor advocated. The 
 same decree condemned all writings of Copernicus and " all 
 writings which affirm the motion of the earth." The great 
 work of Copernicus was interdicted until corrected in ac- 
 cordance with the views of the Inquisition ; and the works 
 of Galileo and Kepler, though not mentioned by name at 
 that time, were included among those implicitly condemned 
 as " affirming the motion of the earth." 
 
 The condemnations were inscribed upon the Index; and, 
 finally, the papacy committed itself as an infallible judge 
 and teacher to the world by prefixing to the Index the usual 
 papal bull giving its monitions the most solemn papal sanc- 
 tion. To teach or even read the works denounced or pas- 
 sages condemned was to risk persecution in this world and 
 damnation in the next. Science had apparently lost the 
 decisive battle. 
 
 For a time after this judgment Galileo remained in Rome, 
 apparently hoping to find some way out of this difficulty ; 
 but he soon discovered the hollowness of the protestations 
 made to him by ecclesiastics, and, being recalled to Flor- 
 ence, remained in his hermitage near the city in silence, 
 working steadily, indeed, but not publishing anything save 
 by private letters to friends in various parts of Europe. 
 
 But at last a better vista seemed to open for him. Car- 
 dinal Barberini, who had seemed liberal and friendly, be- 
 came pope under the name of Urban VIII. Galileo at this 
 conceived new hopes, and allowed his continued allegiance 
 to the Copernican system to be known. New troubles en- 
 sued. Galileo was induced to visit Rome again, and Pope 
 Urban tried to cajole him into silence, personally taking the 
 trouble to show him his errors by argument. Other op- 
 ponents were less considerate, for works appeared attacking 
 his ideas works all the more unmanly, since their authors 
 knew that Galileo was restrained by force from defending 
 himself. Then, too, as if to accumulate proofs of the unfit-
 
 THE WAR UPON GALILEO. 
 
 139 
 
 ness of the Church to take charge of advanced instruction, 
 his salary as a professor at the University of Pisa was taken 
 from him, and sapping and mining began. Just as the Arch- 
 bishop of Pisa some years before had tried to betray him 
 with honeyed words to the Inquisition, so now Father 
 Grassi tried it, and, after various attempts to draw him out 
 by flattery, suddenly denounced his scientific ideas as "lead- 
 ing to a denial of the Real Presence in the Eucharist." 
 
 For the final assault upon him a park of heavy artillery 
 was at last wheeled into place. It may be seen on all the 
 scientific battlefields. It consists of general denunciation ; 
 and in 1631 Father Melchior Inchofer, of the Jesuits, brought 
 his artillery to bear upon Galileo with this declaration: 
 " The opinion of the earth's motion is of all heresies the most 
 abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous ; the 
 immovability of the earth is thrice sacred ; argument against 
 the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the 
 incarnation, should be tolerated sooner than an argument to 
 prove that the earth moves." 
 
 From the other end of Europe came a powerful echo. 
 From the shadow of the Cathedral of Antwerp, the noted 
 theologian Fromundus gave forth his famous treatise, the 
 Ant-Aristarchus. Its very title-page was a contemptuous 
 insult to the memory of Copernicus, since it paraded the as- 
 sumption that the new truth was only an exploded theory 
 of a pagan astronomer. Fromundus declares that " sacred 
 Scripture fights against the Copernicans." To prove that 
 the sun revolves about the earth, he cites the passage in the 
 Psalms which speaks of the sun " which cometh forth as a 
 bridegroom out of his chamber." To prove that the earth 
 stands still, he quotes a passage from Ecclesiastes, "The 
 earth standeth fast forever." To show the utter futility of 
 the Copernican theory, he declares that, if it were true, " the 
 wind would constantly blow from the east " ; and that 
 " buildings and the earth itself would fly off with such a 
 rapid motion that men would have to be provided with claws 
 like cats to enable them to hold fast to the earth's surface." 
 Greatest weapon of all, he works up, by the use of Aristotle 
 and St. Thomas Aquinas, a demonstration from theology 
 and science combined, that the earth must stand in the cen-
 
 140 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 tre, and that the sun must revolve about it.* Nor was it 
 merely fanatics who opposed the truth revealed by Coper- 
 nicus ; such strong men as Jean Bodin, in France, and Sir 
 Thomas Browne, in England, declared against it as evidently 
 contrary to Holy Scripture. 
 
 IV. VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO. 
 
 While news of triumphant attacks upon him and upon 
 the truth he had established were coming in from all parts 
 of Europe, Galileo prepared a careful treatise in the form of 
 a dialogue, exhibiting the arguments for and against the 
 Copernican and Ptolemaic systems, and offered to submit to 
 any conditions that the Church tribunals might impose, if 
 they would allow it to be printed. At last, after discussions 
 which extended through eight years, they consented, impos- 
 ing a humiliating condition a preface written in accord- 
 ance with the ideas of Father Ricciardi, Master of the Sacred 
 Palace, and signed by Galileo, in which the Copernican 
 theory was virtually exhibited as a play of the imagination, 
 and not at all as opposed to the Ptolemaic doctrine reassert- 
 ed in 1616 by the Inquisition under the direction of Pope 
 Paul V. 
 
 This new work of Galileo the Dialogo appeared in 1632, 
 and met with prodigious success. It put new weapons into 
 the hands of the supporters of the Copernican theory. The 
 pious preface was laughed at from one end of Europe to the 
 other. This roused the enemy ; the Jesuits, Dominicans, 
 
 * For Father Inchofer's attack, see his Tractatus Syllepticus, cited in Galileo's 
 letter to Deoclati, July 28, 1634. For Fromundus's more famous attack, see his 
 Ant-Aristarckus, already cited, passim, but especially the heading of chapter vi, 
 and the argument in chapters x and xi. A copy of this work may be found in the 
 Astor Library at New York, and another in the White Library at Cornell Univer- 
 sity. For interesting reference to one of Fromundus's arguments, showing, by a 
 mixture of mathematics and theology, that the earth is the centre of the universe, 
 see Quetelet, Histoire des Sciences mathe'matiques et physiques, Bruxelles, 1864, p. 
 170; also Madler, Geschichte der Astronomic, vol. i, p. 274. For Bodin's opposi- 
 tion to the Copernican theory, see Hallam, Literature of Europe ; also Lecky. 
 For Sir Thomas Browne, see his Vulgar and Common Errors, book iv, chap, v ; 
 and as to the real reason for his disbelief in the Copernican view, see Dr. John- 
 son's preface to his Life of Browne, vol. i, p. xix, of his collected works.
 
 VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO. 
 
 141 
 
 and the great majority of the clergy returned to the attack 
 more violent than ever, and in the midst of them stood Pope 
 Urban VIII, most bitter of all. His whole power was now 
 thrown against Galileo. He was touched in two points: 
 first, in his personal vanity, for Galileo had put the Pope's 
 arguments into the mouth of one of the persons in the dia- 
 logue and their refutation into the mouth of another ; but, 
 above all, he was touched in his religious feelings. Again 
 and again His Holiness insisted to all comers on the absolute 
 and specific declarations of Holy Scripture, which prove 
 that the sun and heavenly bodies revolve about the earth, 
 and declared that to gainsay them is simply to dispute rev- 
 elation. Certainly, if one ecclesiastic more than another 
 ever seemed not under the care of the Spirit of Truth, it was 
 Urban VIII in all this matter. 
 
 Herein was one of the greatest pieces of ill fortune that 
 has ever befallen the older Church. Had Pope Urban been 
 broad-minded and tolerant like Benedict XIV, or had he 
 been taught moderation by adversity like Pius VII, or had 
 he possessed the large scholarly qualities of Leo XIII, now 
 reigning, the vast scandal of the Galileo case would never 
 have burdened the Church : instead of devising endless quib- 
 bles and special pleadings to escape responsibility for this 
 colossal blunder, its defenders could have claimed forever 
 for the Church the glory of fearlessly initiating a great 
 epoch in human thought. 
 
 But it was not so to be. Urban was not merely Pope ; 
 he was also a prince of the house of Barberini, and therefore 
 doubly angry that his arguments had been publicly con- 
 troverted. 
 
 The opening strategy of Galileo's enemies was to forbid 
 the sale of his work ; but this was soon seen to be unavail- 
 ing, for the first edition had already been spread throughout 
 Europe. Urban now became more angry than ever, and 
 both Galileo and his works were placed in the hands of 
 the Inquisition. In vain did the good Benedictine Castelli 
 urge that Galileo was entirely respectful to the Church ; in 
 vain did he insist that " nothing that can be done can now 
 hinder the earth from revolving." He was dismissed in dis- 
 grace, and Galileo was forced to appear in the presence of
 
 142 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 the dread tribunal without defender or adviser. There, as 
 was so long concealed, but as is now fully revealed, he was 
 menaced with torture again and again by express order of 
 Pope Urban, and, as is also thoroughly established from the 
 trial documents themselves, forced to abjure under threats, 
 and subjected to imprisonment by command of the Pope ; 
 the Inquisition deferring in this whole matter to the papal 
 authority. All the long series of attempts made in the sup- 
 posed interest of the Church to mystify these transactions 
 have at last failed. The world knows now that Galileo was 
 subjected certainly to indignity, to imprisonment, and to 
 threats equivalent to torture, and was at last forced to pro- 
 nounce publicly and on his knees his recantation, as follows : 
 
 " I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner 
 and on my knees, and before your Eminences, having before 
 my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, 
 abjure, curse, and detest the error and the heresy of the 
 movement of the earth." * 
 
 He was vanquished indeed, for he had been forced, in 
 the face of all coming ages, to perjure himself. To com- 
 plete his dishonour, he was obliged to swear that he would 
 denounce to the Inquisition any other man of science whom 
 he should discover to be supporting the " heresy of the mo- 
 tion of the earth." 
 
 Many have wondered at this abjuration, and on account 
 of it have denied to Galileo the title of martyr. But let such 
 gainsay ers consider the circumstances. Here was an old 
 man one who had reached the allotted threescore years 
 and ten broken with disappointments, worn out with la- 
 bours and cares, dragged from Florence to Rome, with the 
 threat from the Pope himself that if he delayed he should be 
 " brought in chains " ; sick in body and mind, given over 
 
 * For various utterances of Pope Urban against the Copernican theory at this 
 period, see extracts from the original documents given by Gebler. For punish- 
 ment of those who had shown some favour to Galileo, see various citations, and 
 especially those from the Vatican manuscript, Gebler, p. 216. As to the text of 
 the abjuration, see L'F,pinois ; also Polacco, Anticopernicus, etc., Venice, 1644 ; 
 and for a discussion regarding its publication, see Favaro, Miscellanea Galileana, 
 p. 804. It is not probable that torture in the ordinary sense was administered 
 to Galileo, though it was threatened. See Th. Martin, Vie de Galilee, for a fair sum- 
 ming up of the case.
 
 VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO. 
 
 143 
 
 to his oppressors by the Grand-Duke who ought to have pro- 
 tected him, and on his arrival in Rome threatened with tor- 
 ture. What the Inquisition was he knew well. He could 
 remember as but of yesterday the burning of Giordano Bruno 
 in that same city for scientific and philosophic heresy ; he 
 could remember, too, that only eight years before this very 
 time De Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatro, having been 
 seized by the Inquisition for scientific and other heresies, 
 had died in a dungeon, and that his body and his writings 
 had been publicly burned. 
 
 To the end of his life nay, after his life was ended the 
 persecution of Galileo was continued. He was kept in exile 
 from his family, from his friends, from his noble employ- 
 ments, and was held rigidly to his promise not to speak of 
 his theory. When, in the midst of intense bodily sufferings 
 from disease, and mental sufferings from calamities in his 
 family, he besought some little liberty, he was met with 
 threats of committal to a dungeon. When, at last, a special 
 commission had reported to the ecclesiastical authorities that 
 he had become blind and wasted with disease and sorrow, 
 he was allowed a little more liberty, but that little was ham- 
 pered by close surveillance. He was forced to bear con- 
 temptible attacks on himself and on his works in silence ; to 
 see the men who had befriended him severely punished ; 
 Father Castelli banished; Ricciardi, the Master of the 
 Sacred Palace, and Ciampoli, the papal secretary, thrown 
 out of their positions by Pope Urban, and the Inquisitor at 
 Florence reprimanded for having given permission to print 
 Galileo's work. He lived to see the truths he had estab- 
 lished carefully weeded out from all the Church colleges and 
 universities in Europe ; and, when in a scientific work he 
 happened to be spoken of as " renowned," the Inquisition 
 ordered the substitution of the word " notorious." * 
 
 And now measures were taken to complete the destruc- 
 tion of the Copernican theory, with Galileo's proofs of it. 
 On the i6th of June, 1633, the Holy Congregation, with the 
 permission of the reigning Pope, ordered the sentence upon 
 
 * For the substitution of the word " notorious " for " renowned " by order of the 
 Inquisition, see Martin, p. 227.
 
 144 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 Galileo, and his recantation, to be sent to all the papal 
 nuncios throughout Europe, as well as to all archbishops, 
 bishops, and inquisitors in Italy ; and this document gave 
 orders that the sentence and abjuration be made known "to 
 your vicars, that you and all professors of philosophy and 
 mathematics may have knowledge of it, that they may know 
 why we proceeded against the said Galileo, and recognise 
 the gravity of his error, in order that they may avoid it, and 
 thus not incur the penalties which they would have to suffer 
 in case they fell into the same." * 
 
 As a consequence, the professors of mathematics and 
 astronomy in various universities of Europe were assem- 
 bled and these documents were read to them. To the theo- 
 logical authorities this gave great satisfaction. The Rec- 
 tor of the University of Douay, referring to the opinion of 
 Galileo, wrote to the papal nuncio at Brussels : " The profess- 
 ors of our university are so opposed to this fanatical opin- 
 ion that they have always held that it must be banished from 
 the schools. In our English college at Douay this paradox 
 has never been approved and never will be." 
 
 Still another step was taken : the Inquisitors were or- 
 dered, especially in Italy, not to permit the publication of a 
 new edition of any of Galileo's works, or of any similar writ- 
 ings. On the other hand, theologians were urged, now that 
 Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler were silenced, to reply 
 to them with tongue and pen. Europe was flooded with 
 these theological refutations of the Copernican system. 
 
 To make all complete, there was prefixed to the Index 
 of the Church, forbidding "all writings which affirm the 
 motion of the earth," a bull signed by the reigning Pope, 
 which, by virtue of his infallibility as a divinely guided 
 teacher in matters of faith and morals, clinched this con- 
 demnation into the consciences of the whole Christian 
 world. 
 
 From the mass of books which appeared under the 
 auspices of the Church immediately after the condemnation 
 
 * For a copy of this document, see Gebler, p. 269. As to the spread of this 
 and similar documents notifying Europe of Galileo's condemnation, see Favaro, 
 pp. 804, 805.
 
 VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO. 145 
 
 of Galileo, for the purpose of rooting out every vestige of 
 the hated Copernican theory from the mind of the world, 
 two may be taken as typical. The first of these was a work 
 by Scipio Chiaramonti, dedicated to Cardinal Barberini. 
 Among his arguments against the double motion of the 
 earth may be cited the following : 
 
 "Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles ; the 
 earth has no limbs or muscles, therefore it does not move. 
 It is angels who make Saturn, Jupiter, the sun, etc., turn 
 round. If the earth revolves, it must also have an angel in 
 the centre to set it in motion ; but only devils live there ; it 
 would therefore be a devil who would impart motion to the 
 earth. . . . 
 
 " The planets, the sun, the fixed stars, all belong to one 
 species namely, that of stars. It seems, therefore, to be a 
 grievous wrong to place the earth, which is a sink of im- 
 purity, among these heavenly bodies, which are pure and 
 divine things." 
 
 The next, which I select from the mass of similar works, 
 is the Anticopernicus Catholicus of Polacco. It was intended 
 to deal a finishing stroke at Galileo's heresy. In this it is 
 declared : 
 
 " The Scripture always represents the earth as at rest, 
 and the sun and moon as in motion ; or, if these latter bodies 
 are ever represented as at rest, Scripture represents this as 
 the result of a great miracle. . . . 
 
 " These writings must be prohibited, because they teach 
 certain principles about the position and motion of the ter- 
 restrial globe repugnant to Holy Scripture and to the Cath- 
 olic interpretation of it, not as hypotheses but as established 
 facts. . . ." 
 
 Speaking of Galileo's book, Polacco says that it " smacked 
 of Copernicanism," and that, " when this was shown to the 
 Inquisition, Galileo was thrown into prison and was com- 
 pelled to utterly abjure the baseness of this erroneous 
 dogma." 
 
 As to the authority of the cardinals in their decree, Po- 
 lacco asserts that, since they are the " Pope's Council " and 
 his " brothers," their work is one, except that the Pope is 
 favoured with special divine enlightenment.
 
 !46 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 Having shown that the authority of the Scriptures, of 
 popes, and of cardinals is against the new astronomy, he 
 gives a refutation based on physics. He asks : " If we con- 
 cede the motion of the earth, why is it that an arrow shot 
 into the air falls back to the same spot, while the earth and 
 all things on it have in the meantime moved very rapidly 
 toward the east ? Who does not see that great confusion 
 would result from this motion ? " 
 
 Next he argues from metaphysics, as follows : " The Co- 
 pernican theory of the earth's motion is against the nature 
 of the earth itself, because the earth is not only cold but 
 contains in itself the principle of cold ; but cold is opposed 
 to motion, and even destroys it as is evident in animals, 
 which become motionless when they become cold." 
 
 Finally, he clinches all with a piece of theological reason- 
 ing, as follows : " Since it can certainly be gathered from 
 Scripture that the heavens move above the earth, and since 
 a circular motion requires something immovable around 
 which to move, . . . the earth is at the centre of the uni- 
 verse." * 
 
 But any sketch of the warfare between theology and 
 science in this field would be incomplete without some ref- 
 erence to the treatment of Galileo after his death. He had 
 begged to be buried in his family tomb in Santa Croce ; 
 this request was denied. His friends wished to erect a 
 monument over him ; this, too, was refused. Pope Urban 
 said to the ambassador Niccolini that " it would be an evil 
 example for the world if such honours were rendered to a 
 man who had been brought before the Roman Inquisition 
 for an opinion so false and erroneous ; who had communi- 
 cated it to many others, and who had given so great a scan- 
 dal to Christendom." In accordance, therefore, with the 
 wish of the Pope and the orders of the Inquisition, Galileo 
 was buried ignobly, apart from his family, without fitting 
 ceremony, without monument, without epitaph. Not until 
 forty years after did Pierrozzi dare write an inscription 
 
 * For Chiaramonti's book and selections given, see Gebler as above, p. 271. 
 For Polacco, see his work as cited, especially Assertiones i, ii, vii, xi, xiii, Ixxiii, 
 clxxxvii, and others. The work is in the White Library at Cornell University. 
 The date of it is 1644.
 
 VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO. 147 
 
 to be placed above his bones ; not until a hundred years 
 after did Nelli dare transfer his remains to a suitable 
 position in Santa Croce, and erect a monument above 
 them. Even then the old conscientious hostility burst 
 forth : the Inquisition was besought to prevent such hon- 
 ours to " a man condemned for notorious errors " ; and that 
 tribunal refused to allow any epitaph to be placed above 
 him which had not been submitted to its censorship. Nor 
 has that old conscientious consistency in hatred yet fully 
 relented : hardly a generation since has not seen some eccle- 
 siastic, like Marini or De Donald or Rallaye or De Gabriac, 
 suppressing evidence, or torturing expressions, or inventing 
 theories to blacken the memory of Galileo and save the 
 reputation of the Church. Nay, more : there are school his- 
 tories, widely used, which, in the supposed interest of the 
 Church, misrepresent in the grossest manner all these trans- 
 actions in which Galileo was concerned. Sancta simplicitas ! 
 The Church has no worse enemies than those who devise 
 and teach these perversions. They are simply rooting out, 
 in the long run, from the minds of the more thoughtful 
 scholars, respect for the great organization which such writ- 
 ings are supposed to serve.* 
 
 The Protestant Church was hardly less energetic against 
 this new astronomy than the mother Church. The sacred 
 science of the first Lutheran Reformers was transmitted as 
 a precious legacy, and in the next century was made much 
 of by Calovius. His great learning and determined ortho- 
 doxy gave him the Lutheran leadership. Utterly refusing 
 to look at ascertained facts, he cited the turning back of the 
 shadow upon King Hezekiah's dial and the standing still 
 of the sun for Joshua, denied the movement of the earth, 
 and denounced the whole new view as clearly opposed to 
 Scripture. To this day his arguments are repeated by sun- 
 dry orthodox leaders of American Lutheranism. 
 
 * For the persecutions of Galileo's memory after his death, see Gebler and 
 Wohlwill, but especially Th. Martin, p. 243 and chaps, ix and x. For documentary 
 proofs, see L'Epinois. For a collection of the slanderous theories invented against 
 Galileo, see Martin, final chapters and appendix. Both these authors are devoted 
 to the Church, but, unlike Monsignor Marini, are too upright to resort to the pious 
 fraud of suppressing documents or interpolating pretended facts.
 
 I4 g ASTRONOMY. 
 
 As to the other branches of the Reformed Church, we 
 have already seen how Calvinists, Anglicans, and, indeed, 
 Protestant sectarians generally, opposed the new truth.* In 
 England, among the strict churchmen, the great Dr. South 
 denounced the Royal Society as " irreligious," and among 
 the Puritans the eminent John Owen declared that New- 
 ton's discoveries were " built on fallible phenomena and ad- 
 vanced by many arbitrary presumptions against evident 
 testimonies of Scripture." Even Milton seems to have hesi- 
 tated between the two systems. At the beginning of the 
 eighth book of Paradise Lost he makes Adam state the diffi- 
 culties of the Ptolemaic system, and then brings forward an 
 angel to make the usual orthodox answers. Later, Milton 
 seems to lean toward the Copernican theory, for, referring 
 to the earth, he says : 
 
 " Or she from west her silent course advance 
 With inoffensive pace, that spinning sleeps 
 On her soft axle, while she faces even 
 And bears thee soft with the smooth air along." 
 
 English orthodoxy continued to assert itself. In 1724 
 John Hutchinson, professor at Cambridge, published his 
 Moses Principia, a system of philosophy in which he sought 
 to build up a complete physical system of the universe from 
 the Bible. In this he assaulted the Newtonian theory as 
 "atheistic," and led the way for similar attacks by such 
 Church teachers as Home, Duncan Forbes, and Jones of 
 Nayland. But one far greater than these involved himself 
 in this view. That same limitation of his reason by the sim- 
 ple statements of Scripture which led John Wesley to de- 
 clare that, "unless witchcraft is true, nothing in the Bible is 
 true," led him, while giving up the Ptolemaic theory and 
 accepting in a general way the Copernican, to suspect the 
 demonstrations of Newton. Happily, his inborn nobility of 
 character lifted him above any bitterness or persecuting 
 spirit, or any imposition of doctrinal tests which could pre- 
 vent those who came after him from finding their way to 
 the truth. 
 
 * For Calovius, see Zoeckler, Geschickte, vol. i, pp. 684 and 763. For Calvin 
 and Turretin, see Shields, The Final Philosophy, pp. 60, 61.
 
 VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO. 
 
 149 
 
 But in the midst of this vast expanse of theologic error 
 signs of right reason began to appear, both in England and 
 America. Noteworthy is it that Cotton Mather, bitter as 
 was his orthodoxy regarding witchcraft, accepted, in 1721, 
 the modern astronomy fully, with all its consequences. 
 
 In the following year came an even more striking evi- 
 dence that the new scientific ideas were making their way 
 in England. In 1722 Thomas Burnet published the sixth 
 edition of his Sacred Theory of the Earth. In this he argues, 
 as usual, to establish the scriptural doctrine of the earth's 
 stability ; but in his preface he sounds a remarkable warn- 
 ing. He mentions the great mistake into which St. Augus- 
 tine led the Church regarding the doctrine of the antipodes, 
 and says, " If within a few years or in the next generation it 
 should prove as certain and demonstrable that the earth is 
 moved, as it is now that there are antipodes, those that have 
 been zealous against it, and engaged the Scripture in the 
 controversy, would have the same reason to repent of their 
 forwardness that St. Augustine would now, if he were still 
 alive." 
 
 Fortunately, too, Protestantism had no such power to 
 oppose the development of the Copernican ideas as the older 
 Church had enjoyed. Yet there were some things in its 
 warfare against science even more indefensible. In 1772 
 the famous English expedition for scientific discovery sailed 
 from England under Captain Cook. Greatest by far of all 
 the scientific authorities chosen to accompany it was Dr. 
 Priestley. Sir Joseph Banks had especially invited him. 
 But the clergy of Oxford and Cambridge interfered. Priest- 
 ley was considered unsound in his views of the Trinity ; it 
 was evidently suspected that this might vitiate his astro- 
 nomical observations ; he was rejected, and the expedition 
 crippled. 
 
 The orthodox view of astronomy lingered on in other 
 branches of the Protestant Church. In Germany even Leib- 
 nitz attacked the Newtonian theory of gravitation on theo- 
 logical grounds, though he found some little consolation in 
 thinking that it might be used to support the Lutheran doc- 
 trine of consubstantiation. 
 
 In Holland the Calvinistic Church was at first strenuous
 
 150 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 against the whole new system, but we possess a comical 
 proof that Calvinism even in its strongholds was powerless 
 against it; for in 1642 Blaer published at Amsterdam his 
 book on the use of globes, and, in order to be on the safe 
 side, devoted one part of his work to the Ptolemaic and the 
 other to the Copernican scheme, leaving the benevolent 
 reader to take his choice. * 
 
 Nor have efforts to renew the battle in the Protestant 
 Church been wanting in these latter days. The attempt in 
 the Church of England, in 1864, to fetter science, which was 
 brought to ridicule by Herschel, Bowring, and De Morgan ; 
 the assemblage of Lutheran clergy at Berlin, in 1868, to pro- 
 test against " science falsely so called," are examples of these. 
 Fortunately, to the latter came Pastor Knak, and his denun- 
 ciations of the Copernican theory as absolutely incompatible 
 with a belief in the Bible, dissolved the whole assemblage 
 in ridicule. 
 
 In its recent dealings with modern astronomy the wisdom 
 of the Catholic Church in the more civilized countries has 
 prevented its yielding to some astounding errors into which 
 one part of the Protestant Church has fallen heedlessly. 
 
 Though various leaders in the older Church have com- 
 mitted the absurd error of allowing a text-book and sundry 
 review articles to appear which grossly misstate the Galileo 
 episode, with the certainty of ultimately undermining con- 
 fidence in her teachings among her more thoughtful young 
 men, she has kept clear of the folly of continuing to tie her 
 instruction, and the acceptance of our sacred books, to an 
 adoption of the Ptolemaic theory. 
 
 Not so with American Lutheranism. In 1873 was pub- 
 lished in St. Louis, at the publishing house of the Lutheran 
 Synod of Missouri, a work entitled Astronomische Untcrre- 
 
 * For the attitude of Leibnitz, Hutchinson, and the others named toward the 
 Newtonian theory, see Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 
 chap. ix. For John Wesley, see his Compendium of A r atural Philosophy, being a 
 Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation, London, 1784. See also Leslie 
 Stephen, Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 413. For Owen, see his Works, vol. xix, 
 p. 310. For Cotton Mather's view, see The Christian Philosopher, London, 1721, 
 especially pp. 16 and 17. For the case of Priestley, see Weld, History of the Royal 
 Society, vol. ii, p. 56, for the facts and the admirable letter of Priestley upon this 
 rejection. For Blaer, see his L' Usage des Globes, Amsterdam, 1642.
 
 VICTORY OF THE CHURCH OVER GALILEO. 151 
 
 dung, the author being well known as a late president of a 
 Lutheran Teachers' Seminary. 
 
 No attack on the whole modern system of astronomy 
 could be more bitter. On the first page of the introduction 
 the author, after stating the two theories, asks, " Which is 
 right?" and says: " It would be very simple to me which is 
 right, if it were only a question of human import. But the 
 wise and truthful God has expressed himself on this matter 
 in the Bible. The entire Holy Scripture settles the ques- 
 tion that the earth is the principal body (Hauptkorper) of the 
 universe, that it stands fixed, and that sun and moon only 
 serve to light it." 
 
 The author then goes on to show from Scripture the 
 folly, not only of Copernicus and Newton, but of a long line 
 of great astronomers in more recent times. He declares : 
 " Let no one understand me as inquiring first where truth is 
 to be found in the Bible or with the astronomers. No; 
 I know that beforehand that my God never lies, never 
 makes a mistake ; out of his mouth comes only truth, when 
 he speaks of the structure of the universe, of the earth, sun, 
 moon, and stars. . . . 
 
 " Because the truth of the Holy Scripture is involved in 
 this, therefore the above question is of the highest impor- 
 tance to me. . . . Scientists and others lean upon the miser- 
 able reed (Rohrstab) that God teaches only the order of sal- 
 vation, but not the order of the universe." 
 
 Very noteworthy is the fact that this late survival of an 
 ancient belief based upon text-worship is found, not in the 
 teachings of any zealous priest of the mother Church, but 
 in those of an eminent professor in that branch of Protes- 
 tantism which claims special enlightenment.* 
 
 Nor has the warfare against the dead champions of sci- 
 ence been carried on by the older Church alone. 
 
 On the loth of May, 1859, Alexander von Humboldt was 
 
 * For the amusing details of the attempt in the English Church to repress sci- 
 ence, and of the way in which it was met, see De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 42. For 
 Pastor Knak and his associates, see the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1868. Of the 
 recent Lutheran works against the Copernican astronomy, see especially the 
 Astronomische Unterredung zwischen einem Liebhaber der Astronomie und mehr- 
 eren beruhmten Astronomer der Neuzeit, by J. C. W. L., St. Louis, 1873.
 
 l$2 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 buried. His labours had been among the glories of the cen- 
 tury, and his funeral was one of the most imposing that 
 Berlin had ever seen. Among those who honoured them- 
 selves by their presence was the prince regent, afterward 
 the Emperor William I ; but of the clergy it was observed 
 that none were present save the officiating clergyman and a 
 few regarded as unorthodox.* 
 
 V. RESULTS OF THE VICTORY OVER GALILEO. 
 
 We return now to the sequel of the Galileo case. 
 
 Having gained their victory over Galileo, living and 
 dead, having used it to scare into submission the professors 
 of astronomy throughout Europe, conscientious churchmen 
 exulted. Loud was their rejoicing that the " heresy," the 
 " infidelity," the " atheism " involved in believing that the 
 earth revolves about its axis and moves around the sun had 
 been crushed by the great tribunal of the Church, acting in 
 strict obedience to the expressed will of one Pope and the 
 written order of another. As we have seen, all books teach- 
 ing this hated belief were put upon the Index of books for- 
 bidden to Christians, and that Index was prefaced by a bull 
 enforcing this condemnation upon the consciences of the 
 faithful throughout the world, and signed by the reigning 
 Pope. 
 
 The losses to the world during this complete triumph of 
 theology were even more serious than at first appears : one 
 must especially be mentioned. There was then in Europe 
 one of the greatest thinkers ever given to mankind Rene 
 Descartes. Mistaken though many of his reasonings were, 
 they bore a rich fruitage of truth. He had already done a 
 vast work. His theory of vortices assuming a uniform 
 material regulated by physical laws as the beginning of 
 the visible universe, though it was but a provisional hy- 
 pothesis, had ended the whole old theory of the heavens with 
 the vaulted firmament and the direction of the planetary 
 movements by angels, which even Kepler had allowed. The 
 
 * See Bruhns and Lassell, Life of Humboldt, London, 1873, vol. ii, p. 411.
 
 RESULTS OF THE VICTORY OVER GALILEO. 
 
 153 
 
 scientific warriors had stirred new life in him, and he was 
 working over and summing up in his mighty mind all the 
 researches of his time. The result would have made an 
 epoch in history. His aim was to combine all knowledge 
 and thought into a Treatise on the World, and in view of this 
 he gave eleven years to the study of anatomy alone. But 
 the fate of Galileo robbed him of all hope, of all courage ; 
 the battle seemed lost ; he gave up his great plan forever.* 
 
 But ere long it was seen that this triumph of the Church 
 was in reality a prodigious defeat. From all sides came 
 proofs that Copernicus and Galileo were right; and although 
 Pope Urban and the Inquisition held Galileo in strict seclu- 
 sion, forbidding him even to speak regarding the double mo- 
 tion of the earth; and although this condemnation of "all 
 books which affirm the motion of the earth " was kept on 
 the Index; and although the papal bull still bound the Index 
 and the condemnations in it on the consciences of the faith- 
 ful ; and although colleges and universities under Church 
 control were compelled to teach the old doctrine it was 
 seen by clear-sighted men everywhere that this victory of 
 the Church was a disaster to the victors. 
 
 New champions pressed on. Campanella, full of vagaries 
 as he was, wrote his Apology for Galileo, though for that and 
 other heresies, religious and political, he seven times under- 
 went torture. 
 
 And Kepler comes : he leads science on to greater vic- 
 tories. Copernicus, great as he was, could not disentangle 
 scientific reasoning entirely from the theological bias : the 
 doctrines of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as to the neces- 
 sary superiority of the circle had vitiated the minor features 
 of his system, and left breaches in it through which the 
 enemy was not slow to enter ; but Kepler sees these errors, 
 and by wonderful genius and vigour he gives to the world 
 the three laws which bear his name, and this fortress of sci- 
 
 * For Descartes's discouragement, see Humboldt, Cosmos, London, 1851, vol. 
 iii, p. 21 ; also Lange. Geschichte des Materialismus, English translation, vol. i, pp. 
 248, 249, where the letters of Descartes are given, showing his despair, and the 
 relinquishment of his best thoughts and works in order to preserve peace with the 
 Church ; also Saisset, Descartes ft ses Pr&urseurs, pp. loo et seq. ; also Jolly, His- 
 toire du Mouvement intellectuel au XVI' Siecle, vol. i, p. 390.
 
 154 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 ence is complete. He thinks and speaks as one inspired. 
 His battle is severe. He is solemnly warned by the Prot- 
 estant Consistory of Stuttgart " not to throw Christ's king- 
 dom into confusion with his silly fancies," and as solemnly 
 ordered to " bring his theory of the world into harmony 
 with Scripture " : he is sometimes abused, sometimes ridi- 
 culed, sometimes imprisoned. Protestants in Styria and 
 Wiirtemberg, Catholics in Austria and Bohemia, press upon 
 him ; but Newton, Halley, Bradley, and other great astrono- 
 mers follow, and to science remains the victory.* 
 
 Yet this did not end the war. During the seventeenth 
 century, in France, after all the splendid proofs added by 
 Kepler, no one dared openly teach the Copernican theory, 
 and Cassini, the great astronomer, never declared for it. In 
 1672 the Jesuit Father Riccioli declared that there were 
 precisely forty-nine arguments for the Copernican theory 
 and seventy-seven against it. Even after the beginning of 
 the eighteenth century long after the demonstrations of 
 Sir Isaac Newton Bossuet, the great Bishop of Meaux, the 
 foremost theologian that France has ever produced, de- 
 clared it contrary to Scripture. 
 
 Nor did matters seem to improve rapidly during that 
 century. In England, John Hutchinson, as we have seen, 
 published in 1724 his Moses Principia maintaining that the 
 Hebrew Scriptures are a perfect system of natural phi- 
 losophy, and are opposed to the Newtonian system of gravi- 
 tation ; and, as we have also seen, he was followed by a long 
 list of noted men in the Church. In France, two eminent 
 mathematicians published in 1748 an edition of Newton's 
 
 * For Campanella, see Amabile, Fra Tommaso Campanella, Naples, 1882, espe- 
 cially vol. iii ; also Libri, vol. iv, pp. 149 et seq. Fromundus, speaking of Kepler's 
 explanation, says, " Vix teneo ebullientem risum." This is almost equal to the 
 New York Church Journal, speaking of John Stuart Mill as " that small sciolist," 
 and of the preface to Dr. Draper's great work as " chippering." How a journal, 
 generally so fair in its treatment of such subjects, can condescend to such weapons, 
 is one of the wonders of modern journalism. For the persecution of Kepler, see 
 Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, pp. 281 et seq. ; also Reuschle, Kepler und die 
 Astronomie, Frankfurt a. M., 1871, pp. 87 et seq. ; also Prof. Sigwart, Kleine Schrif- 
 ten, pp. 2ii et seq. There is poetic justice in the fact that these two last-named 
 books come from Wurtemberg professors. See also The New-Englander for March, 
 1884, p. 178.
 
 RESULTS OF THE VICTORY OVER GALILEO. 
 
 155 
 
 Principia ; but, in order to avert ecclesiastical censure, they 
 felt obliged to prefix to it a statement absolutely false. 
 Three years later, Boscovich, the great mathematician of 
 the Jesuits, used these words : " As for me, full of respect 
 for the Holy Scriptures and the decree of the Holy Inquisi- 
 tion, I regard the earth as immovable ; nevertheless, for sim- 
 plicity in explanation I will argue as if the earth moves ; for 
 it is proved that of the two hypotheses the appearances 
 favour this idea." 
 
 In Germany, especially in the Protestant part of it, the 
 war was even more bitter, and it lasted through the first half 
 of the eighteenth century. Eminent Lutheran doctors of 
 divinity flooded the country with treatises to prove that the 
 Copernican theory could not be reconciled with Scripture. 
 In the theological seminaries and in many of the universities 
 where clerical influence was strong they seemed to sweep 
 all before them ; and yet at the middle of the century we 
 find some of the clearest-headed of them aware of the fact 
 that their cause was lost.* 
 
 In 1757 the most enlightened perhaps in the whole line 
 of the popes, Benedict XIV, took up the matter, and the 
 Congregation of the Index secretly allowed the ideas of Co- 
 pernicus to be tolerated. Yet in 1765 Lalande, the great 
 French astronomer, tried in vain at Rome to induce the 
 authorities to remove Galileo's works from the Index. Even 
 at a date far within our own nineteenth century the authori- 
 ties of many universities in Catholic Europe, and especially 
 those in Spain, excluded the Newtonian system. In 1771 the 
 greatest of them all, the University of Salamanca, being 
 urged to teach physical science, refused, making answer as 
 follows: " Newton teaches nothing that would make a good 
 
 * For Cassini's position, see Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xiii, p. 175. 
 For Riccioli, see Daunou, Etudes Historiques, vol. ii, p. 439. For Bossuet, see 
 Bertrand, p. 41. For Hutchinson, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, p. 48. For 
 Wesley, see his work, already cited. As to Boscovich, his declaration, mentioned 
 in the text, was in 1746, but in 1785 he seemed to feel his position in view of his- 
 tory, and apologized abjectly : Bertrand, pp. 60, 61. See also Whewell's notice of 
 Le Sueur and Jacquier's introduction to their edition of Newton's Principia. For 
 the struggle in Germany, see Zoeckler, Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Theo- 
 logie und Naturwissenschaft, voL ii, pp. 45 e t seq.
 
 !56 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 logician or metaphysician ; and Gassendi and Descartes do 
 not agree so well with revealed truth as Aristotle does." 
 
 Vengeance upon the dead also has continued far into our 
 own century. On the 5th of May, 1829, a great multitude 
 assembled at Warsaw to honour the memory of Copernicus 
 and to unveil Thorwaldsen's statue of him. 
 
 Copernicus had lived a pious, Christian life ; he had been 
 beloved for unostentatious Christian charity ; with his re- 
 ligious belief no fault had ever been found ; he was a canon 
 of the Church at Frauenberg, and over his grave had been 
 written the most touching of Christian epitaphs. Naturally, 
 then, the people expected a religious service ; all was under- 
 stood to be arranged for it ; the procession marched to the 
 church and waited. The hour passed, and no priest ap- 
 peared ; none could be induced to appear. Copernicus, 
 gentle, charitable, pious, one of the noblest gifts of God to 
 religion as well as to science, was evidently still under the 
 ban. Five years after that, his book was still standing on 
 the Index of books prohibited to Christians. 
 
 The edition of the Index published in 1819 was as inexo- 
 rable toward the works of Copernicus and Galileo as its 
 predecessors had been; but in the year 1820 came a crisis. 
 Canon Settele, Professor of Astronomy at Rome, had written 
 an elementary book in which the Copernican system was 
 taken for granted. The Master of the Sacred Palace, An- 
 fossi, as censor of the press, refused to allow the book to be 
 printed unless Settele revised his work and treated the Co- 
 pernican theory as merely a hypothesis. On this Settele ap- 
 pealed to Pope Pius VII, and the Pope referred the matter 
 to the Congregation of the Holy Office. At last, on the i6th 
 of August, 1820, it was decided that Settele might teach the 
 Copernican system as established, and this decision was ap- 
 proved by the Pope. This aroused considerable discussion, 
 but finally, on the nth of September, 1822, the cardinals of 
 the Holy Inquisition graciously agreed that " the printing 
 and publication of works treating of the motion of the earth 
 and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the general 
 opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted at Rome." 
 This decree was ratified by Pius VII, but it was not until 
 thirteen years later, in 1835, that there was issued an edition
 
 RESULTS OF THE VICTORY OVER GALILEO. 157 
 
 of the Index from which the condemnation of works defend- 
 ing the double motion of the earth was left out. 
 
 This was not a moment too soon, for, as if the previous 
 proofs had not been sufficient, each of the motions of the 
 earth was now absolutely demonstrated anew, so as to be 
 recognised by the ordinary observer. The parallax of fixed 
 stars, shown by Bessel as well as other noted astronomers in 
 1838, clinched forever the doctrine of the revolution of the 
 earth around the sun, and in 1851 the great experiment of 
 Foucault with the pendulum showed to the human eye the 
 earth in motion around its own axis. To make the matter 
 complete, this experiment was publicly made in one of the 
 churches at Rome by the eminent astronomer, Father Sec- 
 chi, of the Jesuits, in 1852 just two hundred and twenty 
 years after the Jesuits had done so much to secure Galileo's 
 condemnation.* 
 
 * For good statements of the final action of the Church in the matter, see 
 Gebler; also Zoeckler, ii, 352. See also Bertrand, Fondateurs de I 'Astronomic 
 moderne, p. 61 ; Flammarion, Vie de Copernic, chap. ix. As to the time when the 
 decree of condemnation was repealed, there have been various pious attempts to 
 make it earlier than the reality. Artaud, p. 307, cited in an apologetic article in 
 the Dublin Review, September, 1865, says that Galileo's famous dialogue was pub- 
 lished in 1714, at Padua, entire, and with the usual approbations. The same article 
 also declares that in 1818 the ecclesiastical decrees were repealed by Pius VII 
 in full Consistory. Whewell accepts this ; but Cantu, an authority favourable to 
 the Church, acknowledges that Copernicus's work remained on the Index as late as 
 1835 (Cantu, Histoire universelle, vol. xv, p. 483) ; and with this Th. Martin, not 
 less favourable to the Church, but exceedingly careful as to the facts, agrees ; and 
 the most eminent authority of all. Prof. Reusch, of Bonn, in his Der Index der 
 verbotenen Biicher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii, p. 396, confirms the above statement in the 
 text. For a clear statement of Bradley's exquisite demonstration of the Coperni- 
 can theory by reasonings upon the rapidity of light, etc., and Foucault's exhibition 
 of the rotation of the earth by the pendulum experiment, see Hoefer, Histoire de 
 I Astronomie, pp. 492 et seq. For more recent proofs of the Copernican theory, by 
 the discoveries of Bunsen, Bischoff, Benzenburg, and others, see Jevons, Principles 
 ef Science.
 
 I5 8 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 VI. THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH AFTER ITS VICTORY 
 OVER GALILEO. 
 
 Any history of the victory of astronomical science over 
 dogmatic theology would be incomplete without some ac- 
 count of the retreat made by the Church from all its former 
 positions in the Galileo case. 
 
 The retreat of the Protestant theologians was not difficult. 
 A little skilful warping of Scripture, a little skilful use of 
 that time-honoured phrase, attributed to Cardinal Baronius, 
 that the Bible is given to teach us, not how the heavens go, 
 but how men go to heaven, and a free use of explosive rhet- 
 oric against the pursuing army of scientists, sufficed. 
 
 But in the older Church it was far less easy. The re- 
 treat of the sacro-scientific army of Church apologists lasted 
 through two centuries. 
 
 In spite of all that has been said by these apologists, 
 there no longer remains the shadow of a doubt that the papal 
 infallibility was committed fully and irrevocably against the 
 double revolution of the earth. As the documents of Gali- 
 leo's trial now published show, Paul V, in 1616, pushed on 
 with all his might the condemnation of Galileo and of the 
 works of Copernicus and of all others teaching the motion of 
 the earth around its own axis and around the sun. So, 
 too, in the condemnation of Galileo in 1633, and in all the 
 proceedings which led up to it and which followed it, Urban 
 VIII was the central figure. Without his sanction no action 
 could have been taken. 
 
 True, the Pope did not formally sign the decree against 
 the Copernican theory then ; but this came later. In 1664 
 Alexander VII prefixed to the Index containing the con- 
 demnations of the works of Copernicus and Galileo and " all 
 books which affirm the motion of the earth " a papal bull 
 signed by himself, binding the contents of the Index upon 
 the consciences of the faithful. This bull confirmed and ap- 
 proved in express terms, finally, decisively, and infallibly, 
 the condemnation of " all books teaching the movement of 
 the earth and the stability of the sun."* 
 
 * See Rev. William W. Roberts, The Pontifical Decrees against the Doctrine
 
 THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 159 
 
 The position of the mother Church had been thus made 
 especially difficult; and the first important move in retreat 
 by the apologists was the statement that Galileo was con- 
 demned, not because he affirmed the motion of the earth, 
 but because he supported it from Scripture. There was a 
 slight appearance of truth in this. Undoubtedly, Galileo's 
 letters to Castelli and the grand duchess, in which he at- 
 tempted to show that his astronomical doctrines were not 
 opposed to Scripture, gave a new stir to religious bigotry. 
 For a considerable time, then, this quibble served its pur- 
 pose ; even a hundred and fifty years after Galileo's con- 
 demnation it was renewed by the Protestant Mallet du Pan, 
 in his wish to gain favour from the older Church. 
 
 But nothing can be more absurd, in the light of the origi- 
 nal documents recently brought out of the Vatican archives, 
 than to make this contention now. The letters of Gali- 
 leo to Castelli and the Grand-Duchess were not published 
 until after the condemnation ; and, although the Archbishop 
 of Pisa had endeavoured to use them against him, they were 
 but casually mentioned in 1616, and entirely left out of view 
 in 1633. What was condemned in 1616 by the Sacred Con- 
 gregation held in the presence of Pope Paul V, as "absurd, 
 false in theology, and heretical, because absolutely contrary to 
 Holy Scripture" was the proposition that " the sun is the cen- 
 tre about which the earth revolves " ; and what was condemned 
 as "absurd, false in philosophy, and from a theologic point of 
 view, at least, opposed to the true faith," was the proposition 
 that " the earth is not the centre of the universe and immovable, 
 but has a diurnal motion" 
 
 And again, what Galileo was made, by express order of 
 Pope Urban, and by the action of the Inquisition under 
 threat of torture, to abjure in 1633, was "the error and heresy 
 of the movement of the earth" 
 
 What the Index condemned under sanction of the bull 
 
 of the Earth's Movement, London, 1885, p. 94 ; and for the text of the papal bull, 
 Speculators domus Israel, pp. 132, 133, see also St. George Mivart's article in 
 the Nineteenth Century for July, 1885. For the authentic publication of the bull, 
 see preface to the Index of 1664, where the bull appears, signed by the Pope. The 
 Rev. Mr. Roberts and Mr. St. George Mivart are Roman Catholics, and both 
 acknowledge that the papal sanction was fully given.
 
 !6o ASTRONOMY. 
 
 issued by Alexander VII in 1664 was, "all books teaching the 
 movement of the earth and the stability of the sun" 
 
 What the Index, prefaced by papal bulls, infallibly bind- 
 ing its contents upon the consciences of the faithful, for 
 nearly two hundred years steadily condemned was, "all 
 books which affirm the motion of the earth." 
 
 Not one of these condemnations was directed against 
 Galileo "for reconciling his ideas with Scripture."* 
 
 Having been dislodged from this point, the Church apol- 
 ogists sought cover under the statement that Galileo was 
 condemned not for heresy, but for contumacy and want of 
 respect toward the Pope. 
 
 There was a slight chance, also, for this quibble: no 
 doubt Urban VIII, one of the haughtiest of pontiffs, was in- 
 duced by Galileo's enemies to think that he had been treated 
 with some lack of proper etiquette : first, by Galileo's adhe- 
 sion to his own doctrines after his condemnation in 1616; 
 and, next, by his supposed reference in the Dialogue of 1632 
 to the arguments which the Pope had used against him. 
 
 But it would seem to be a very poor service rendered to 
 the doctrine of papal infallibility to claim that a decision so 
 immense in its consequences could be influenced by the 
 personal resentment of the reigning pontiff. 
 
 Again, as to the first point, the very language of the 
 various sentences shows the folly of this assertion ; for these 
 sentences speak always of " heresy," and never of " con- 
 tumacy." As to the last point, the display of the original 
 documents settled that forever. They show Galileo from 
 first to last as most submissive toward the Pope, and patient 
 under the papal arguments and exactions. He had, indeed, 
 expressed his anger at times against his traducers ; but to 
 hold this the cause of the judgment against him is to de- 
 grade the whole proceedings, and to convict Paul V, Urban 
 
 * For the original trial documents, copied carefully from the Vatican manu- 
 scripts, see the Roman Catholic authority, L'Epinois, especially p. 35, where the 
 principal document is given in its original Latin ; see also Gebler, Die Aden des 
 Galilei 'schen Processes, for still more complete copies of the same documents. For 
 minute information regarding these documents and their publication, see Favaro, 
 Miscellanea Galileana Inedita, forming vol. xxii, part iii, of the Memoirs of the 
 Venetian Institute for 1887, and especially pp. 891 and following.
 
 THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH. rfi 
 
 VIII, Bellarmin, the other theologians, and the Inquisition, 
 of direct falsehood, since they assigned entirely different rea- 
 sons for their conduct. From this position, therefore, the 
 assailants retreated.* 
 
 The next rally was made about the statement that the 
 persecution of Galileo was the result of a quarrel between 
 Aristotelian professors on one side and professors favouring 
 the experimental method on the other. But this position 
 was attacked and carried by a very simple statement. If 
 the divine guidance of the Church is such that it can be 
 dragged into a professorial squabble, and made the tool of a 
 faction in bringing about a most disastrous condemnation of 
 a proved truth, how did the Church at that time differ from 
 any human organization sunk into decrepitude, managed 
 nominally by simpletons, but really by schemers? If that 
 argument be true, the condition of the Church was even 
 worse than its enemies have declared it ; and amid the jeers 
 of an unfeeling world the apologists sought new shelter. 
 
 The next point at which a stand was made was the asser- 
 tion that the condemnation of Galileo was " provisory " ; but 
 this proved a more treacherous shelter than the others. The 
 wording of the decree of condemnation itself is a sufficient 
 answer to this claim. When doctrines have been solemnly 
 declared, as those of Galileo were solemnly declared under 
 sanction of the highest authority in the Church, " contrary 
 to the sacred Scriptures," " opposed to the true faith," and 
 " false and absurd in theology and philosophy " to say that 
 such declarations are " provisory " is to say that the truth 
 held by the Church is not immutable; from this, then, the 
 apologists retreated.f 
 
 Still another contention was made, in some respects more 
 curious than any other : it was, mainly, that Galileo " was 
 no more a victim of Catholics than of Protestants ; for they 
 
 * The invention of the " contumacy " quibble seems due to Monsignor Marini, 
 who appears also to have manipulated the original documents to prove it. Even 
 Whewell was evidently somewhat misled by him, but Whewell wrote before I/Epi- 
 nois had shown all the documents, and under the supposition that Marini was 
 an honest man. 
 
 f This argument also seems to have been foisted upon the world by the wily 
 Monsignor Marini.
 
 !62 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 more than the Catholic theologians impelled the Pope to the 
 action taken." * 
 
 But if Protestantism could force the papal hand in a 
 matter of this magnitude, involving vast questions of belief 
 and far-reaching questions of policy, what becomes of " in- 
 errancy "-7<>f special protection and guidance of the papal 
 authority in matters of faith ? 
 
 While this retreat from position to position was going on, 
 there was a constant discharge of small-arms, in the shape of 
 innuendoes, hints, and sophistries : every effort was made to 
 blacken Galileo's private character : the irregularities of his 
 early life were dragged forth, and stress was even laid upon 
 breaches of etiquette ; but this succeeded so poorly that 
 even as far back as 1850 it was thought necessary to cover 
 the retreat by some more careful strategy. 
 
 This new strategy is instructive. The original docu- 
 ments of the Galileo trial had been brought during the 
 Napoleonic conquests to Paris; but in 1846 they were re- 
 turned to Rome by the French Government, on the express 
 pledge by the papal authorities that they should be pub- 
 lished. In 1850, after many delays on various pretexts, the 
 long-expected publication appeared. The personage charged 
 with presenting them to the world was Monsignor Marini. 
 This ecclesiastic was of a kind which has too often afflicted 
 both the Church and the world at large. Despite the solemn 
 promise of the papal court, the wily Marini became the in- 
 strument of the Roman authorities in evading the promise. 
 By suppressing a document here, and interpolating a state- 
 ment there, he managed to give plausible standing-ground 
 for nearly every important sophistry ever broached to save 
 the infallibility of the Church and destroy the reputation of 
 Galileo. He it was who supported the idea that Galileo 
 was " condemned not for heresy, but for contumacy." 
 
 The first effect of Monsignor Marini's book seemed use- 
 ful in covering the retreat of the Church apologists. Aided 
 by him, such vigorous writers as Ward were able to throw 
 
 * See the Rev. A. M. Kirsch on Professor Huxley and Evolution, in The Amer- 
 ican Catholic Quarterly, October, 1877. The article is, as a whole, remarkably 
 fair-minded, and in the main just, as to the Protestant attitude, and as to the 
 causes underlying the whole action against Galileo.
 
 THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH. ^ 
 
 up temporary intrenchments between the Roman authori- 
 ties and the indignation of the world. 
 
 But some time later came an investigator very different 
 from Monsignor Marini. This was a Frenchman, M. L'fipi- 
 nois. Like Marini, L'Epinois was devoted to the Church ; 
 but, unlike Marini, he could not lie. Having obtained ac- 
 cess in 1867 to the Galileo documents at the Vatican, he 
 published several of the most important, without suppres- 
 sion or pious-fraudulent manipulation. This made all the 
 intrenchments based upon Marini's statements untenable. 
 Another retreat had to be made. 
 
 And now came the most desperate effort of all. The 
 apologetic army, reviving an idea which the popes and the 
 Church had spurned for centuries, declared that the popes 
 as flofles had never condemned the doctrines of Copernicus 
 and Galileo ; that they had condemned them as men simply ; 
 that therefore the Church had never been committed to 
 them ; that the condemnation was made by the cardinals of 
 the Inquisition and Index ; and that the Pope had evidently 
 been restrained by interposition of Providence from signing 
 their condemnation. Nothing could show the desperation 
 of the retreating party better than jugglery like this. The 
 fact is, that in the official account of the condemnation by 
 Bellarmin, in 1616, he declares distinctly that he makes this 
 condemnation "in the name of His Holiness the Pope."* 
 
 Again, from Pope Urban downward, among the Church 
 authorities of the seventeenth century the decision was al- 
 ways acknowledged to be made by the Pope and the Church. 
 Urban VIII spoke of that of 1616 as made by Pope Paul V 
 and the Church, and of that of 1633 as made by himself and 
 the Church. Pope Alexander VII in 1664, in his bull Specu- 
 latores, solemnly sanctioned the condemnation of all books 
 affirming the earth's movement.f 
 
 When Gassendi attempted to raise the point that the de- 
 
 * See the citation from the Vatican manuscript given in Gebler, p. 78. 
 
 f For references by Urban VIII to the condemnation as made by Pope Paul V 
 see pp. 136, 144, and elsewhere in Martin, who much against his will is forced to 
 allow this. See also Roberts, Pontifical Decrees against the Earth's Movement, 
 and St. George Mivart's article, as above quoted ; also Reusch, Index der verbo- 
 tenen Bilcher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii, pp. 29 et sef.
 
 X 6 4 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 cision against Copernicus and Galileo was not sanctioned by 
 the Church as such, an eminent theological authority, Father 
 Lecazre, rector of the College of Dijon, publicly contra- 
 dicted him, and declared that it " was not certain cardinals, 
 but the supreme authority of the Church," that had con- 
 demned Galileo ; and to this statement the Pope and other 
 Church authorities gave consent either openly or by silence. 
 When Descartes and others attempted to raise the same 
 point, they were treated with contempt. Father Castelli, 
 who had devoted himself to Galileo, and knew to his cost 
 just what the condemnation meant and who made it, takes 
 it for granted, in his letter to the papal authorities, that it 
 was made by the Church. Cardinal Querenghi, in his let- 
 ters ; the ambassador Guicciardini, in his dispatches ; Po- 
 lacco, in his refutation ; the historian Viviani, in his biog- 
 raphy of Galileo all writing under Church inspection and 
 approval at the time, took the view that the Pope and the 
 Church condemned Galileo, and this was never denied at 
 Rome. The Inquisition itself, backed by the greatest the- 
 ologian of the time (Bellarmin), took the same view. Not 
 only does he declare that he makes the condemnation "in 
 the name of His Holiness the Pope," but we have the Roman 
 Index, containing the condemnation for nearly two hundred 
 years, prefaced by a solemn bull of the reigning Pope bind- 
 ing this condemnation on the consciences of the whole 
 Church, and declaring year after year that " all books which 
 affirm the motion of the earth " are damnable. To attempt 
 to face all this, added to the fact that Galileo was required 
 to abjure " the heresy of the movement of the earth " by 
 written order of the Pope, was soon seen to be impossible. 
 Against the assertion that the Pope was not responsible we 
 have all this mass of testimony, and the bull of Alexander 
 VII in 1664.* 
 
 * For Lecazre's answer to Gassendi, see Martin, pp. 146, 147. For the attempt 
 to make the crime of Galileo a breach of etiquette, see Dublin Review, as above. 
 Whewell, vol. i, p. 283. Citation from Marini : " Galileo was punished for trifling 
 with the authorities, to which he refused to submit, and was punished for obstinate 
 contumacy, not heresy." The sufficient answer to all this is that the words of the 
 inflexible sentence designating the condemned books are " Libri omnes qiii affir- 
 mant telluris motum" See Bertrand, p. 59. As to the idea that " Galileo was pun-
 
 THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH. jgtj 
 
 This contention, then, was at last utterly given up by 
 honest Catholics themselves. In 1870 a Roman Catholic 
 clergyman in England, the Rev. Mr. Roberts, evidently 
 thinking that the time had come to tell the truth, published 
 a book entitled The Pontifical Decrees against the Earths Move- 
 ment, and in this exhibited the incontrovertible evidences 
 that the papacy had committed itself and its infallibility 
 fully against the movement of the earth. This Catholic 
 clergyman showed from the original record that Pope Paul V, 
 in 1616, had presided over the tribunal condemning the doc- 
 trine of the earth's movement, and ordering Galileo to give 
 up the opinion. He showed that Pope Urban VIII, in 1633, 
 pressed on, directed, and promulgated the final condemna- 
 tion, making himself in all these ways responsible for it. 
 And, finally, he showed that Pope Alexander VII, in 1664, 
 by his bull Spcculatores domus Israel attached to the Index, 
 condemning " all books which affirm the motion of the 
 earth," had absolutely pledged the papal infallibility against 
 the earth's movement. He also confessed that under the 
 rules laid down by the highest authorities in the Church, 
 and especially by Sixtus V and Pius IX, there was no escape 
 from this conclusion. 
 
 Various theologians attempted to evade the force of the 
 argument. Some, like Dr. Ward and Bouix, took refuge in 
 verbal niceties ; some, like Dr. Jeremiah Murphy, comforted 
 themselves with declamation. The only result was, that in 
 1885 came another edition of the Rev. Mr. Roberts's work, 
 even more cogent than the first ; and, besides this, an essay 
 by that eminent Catholic, St. George Mivart, acknowledging 
 the Rev. Mr. Roberts's position to be impregnable, and 
 
 ished not for his opinion, but for basing it on Scripture," the answer may be found 
 in the Roman Index of 1704, in which are noted for condemnation " Libri omnes 
 docentes mobilitatem terra et immobilitatem so/is." For the way in which, when it 
 was found convenient in argument, Church apologists insisted that it was " the Su- 
 preme Chief of the Church by a pontifical decree, and not certain cardinals," who 
 condemned Galileo and his doctrine, see Father Lecazre's letter to Gassendi, in 
 Flammarion, Pluralite" des Mondes, p. 427, and Urban VIII's own declarations as 
 given by Martin. For the way in which, when necessary, Church apologists as- 
 serted the very contrary of this, declaring that " it was issued in a doctrinal decree 
 of the Congregation of the Index, and not as the Holy Father's teaching," see 
 Dublin Review, September, 1865.
 
 !66 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 declaring virtually that the Almighty allowed Pope and 
 Church to fall into complete error regarding the Copernican 
 theory, in order to teach them that science lies outside their 
 province, and that the true priesthood of scientific truth 
 rests with scientific investigators alone.* 
 
 In spite, then, of all casuistry and special pleading, this 
 sturdy honesty ended the controversy among Catholics 
 themselves, so far as fair-minded men are concerned. 
 
 In recalling it at this day there stand out from its later 
 phases two efforts at compromise especially instructive, as 
 showing the embarrassment of militant theology in the nine- 
 teenth century. 
 
 The first of these was made by John Henry Newman in 
 the days when he was hovering between the Anglican and 
 Roman Churches. In one of his sermons before the Univer- 
 sity of Oxford he spoke as follows : 
 
 " Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is sta- 
 tionary, and science that the earth moves and the sun is 
 comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of 
 these opposite statements is the very truth till we know 
 what motion is ? If our idea of motion is but an accidental 
 result of our present senses, neither proposition is true and 
 both are true : neither true philosophically ; both true for 
 certain practical purposes in the system in which they are 
 respectively found." 
 
 In all anti-theological literature there is no utterance 
 more hopelessly skeptical. And for what were the youth of 
 Oxford led into such bottomless depths of disbelief as to any 
 real existence of truth or any real foundation for it ? Sim- 
 ply to save an outworn system of interpretation into which 
 the gifted preacher happened to be born. 
 
 The other utterance was suggested by De Bonald and 
 developed in the Dublin Review^ as is understood, by one of 
 Newman's associates. This argument was nothing less than 
 an attempt to retreat under the charge of deception against 
 the Almighty himself. It is as follows : " But it may well 
 
 * For this crashing answer by two eminent Roman Catholics to the sophistries 
 cited an answer which does infinitely more credit to the older Church than all 
 the perverted ingenuity used in concealing the truth or breaking the force of it 
 see Roberts and St. George Mivart, as already cited.
 
 THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH. ^7 
 
 be doubted whether the Church did retard the progress of 
 scientific truth. What retarded it was the circumstance 
 that God has thought fit to express many texts of Scripture 
 in words which have every appearance of denying the 
 earth's motion. But it is God who did this, not the Church ; 
 and, moreover, since he saw fit so to act as to retard the 
 progress of scientific truth, it would be little to her dis- 
 credit, even if it were true, that she had followed his ex- 
 ample." 
 
 This argument, like Mr. Gosse's famous attempt to rec- 
 oncile geology to Genesis by supposing that for some in- 
 scrutable purpose God deliberately deceived the thinking 
 world by giving to the earth all the appearances of develop- 
 ment through long periods of time, while really creating it 
 in six days, each of an evening and a morning seems only 
 to have awakened the amazed pity of thinking men. This, 
 like the argument of Newman, was a last desperate effort 
 of Anglican and Roman divines to save something from the 
 wreckage of dogmatic theology.* 
 
 All these well-meaning defenders of the faith but wrought 
 into the hearts of great numbers of thinking men the idea 
 that there is a necessary antagonism between science and 
 religion. Like the landsman who lashes himself to the 
 anchor of the sinking ship, they simply attached Christian- 
 ity by the strongest cords of logic which they could spin 
 
 * For the quotation from Newman, see his Sermons on the Theory of Religious 
 Belief, sermon xiv, cited by Bishop Goodwin in Contemporary Re-view for January, 
 1892. For the attempt to take the blame off the shoulders of both Pope and car- 
 dinals and place it upon the Almighty, see the article above cited, in the Dublin 
 Review, September, 1865, p. 419, and July, 1871, pp. 157 et seq. For a good sum- 
 mary of the various attempts, and for replies to them in a spirit of judicial fairness, 
 see Th. Martin, Vie de Galilee, though there is some special pleading to save the 
 infallibility of Pope and Church. The bibliography at the close is very valuable- 
 For details of Mr. Gosse's theory, as developed in his Omphalos, see the chapter on 
 Geology in this work. As to a still later attempt, see Wegg-Prosser, Galileo and 
 his Judges, London, 1889, the main thing in it being an attempt to establish, 
 against the honest and honourable concessions of Catholics like Roberts and Mivart t 
 sundry far-fetched and wire-drawn distinctions between dogmatic and disciplinary 
 bulls an attempt which will only deepen the distrust of straightforward reasoners. 
 The author's point of view is stated in the words, " I have maintained that the 
 Church has a right to lay her restraining hand on the speculations of natural 
 science " (p. 167).
 
 j.68 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 to these mistaken ideas in science, and, could they have had 
 their way, the advance of knowledge would have ingulfed 
 both together. 
 
 On the other hand, what had science done for religion? 
 Simply this: Copernicus, escaping persecution only by 
 death ; Giordano Bruno, burned alive as a monster of im- 
 piety ; Galileo, imprisoned and humiliated as the worst of 
 misbelievers; Kepler, accused of "throwing Christ's king- 
 dom into confusion with his silly fancies " ; Newton, 
 bitterly attacked for "dethroning Providence," gave to 
 religion stronger foundations and more ennobling concep- 
 tions. 
 
 Under the old system, that princely astronomer, Al- 
 phonso of Castile, seeing the inadequacy of the Ptolemaic 
 theory, yet knowing no other, startled Europe with the blas- 
 phemy that, if he had been present at creation, he could 
 have suggested a better order of the heavenly bodies. 
 Under the new system, Kepler, filled with a religious 
 spirit, exclaimed, " I do think the thoughts of God." The 
 difference in religious spirit between these two men marks 
 the conquest- made in this long struggle by Science for 
 Religion.* 
 
 Nothing is more unjust than to cast especial blame for 
 all this resistance to science upon the Roman Church. The 
 Protestant Church, though rarely able to be so severe, has 
 been more blameworthy. The persecution of Galileo and 
 his compeers by the older Church was mainly at the begin- 
 ning of the seventeenth century ; the persecution of Robert- 
 son Smith, and Winchell, and Woodrow, and Toy, and the 
 young professors at Beyrout, by various Protestant authori- 
 ties, was near the end of the nineteenth century. Those 
 earlier persecutions by Catholicism were strictly in accord- 
 ance with principles held at that time by all religionists, 
 Catholic and Protestant, throughout the world ; these later 
 persecutions by Protestants were in defiance of principles 
 which all Protestants to-day hold or pretend to hold, and 
 none make louder claim to hold them than the very sects 
 
 * As a pendant to this ejaculation of Kepler may be cited the words of Lin- 
 naeus : " Deum omnipotentem a tergo transeuntem vidi et obstupui, "
 
 THE RETREAT OF THE CHURCH. 169 
 
 which persecuted these eminent Christian men of our day, 
 men whose crime was that they were intelligent enough to 
 accept the science of their time, and honest enough to 
 acknowledge it. 
 
 Most unjustly, then, would Protestantism taunt Catholi- 
 cism for excluding knowledge of astronomical truths from 
 European Catholic universities in the seventeenth and eight- 
 eenth centuries, while real knowledge of geological and 
 biological and anthropological truth is denied or pitifully 
 diluted in so many American Protestant colleges and uni- 
 versities in the nineteenth century. 
 
 Nor has Protestantism the right to point with scorn to 
 the Catholic Index, and to lay stress on the tact that nearly 
 every really important book in the last three centuries 
 has been forbidden by it, so long as young men in so many 
 American Protestant universities and colleges are nursed 
 with " ecclesiastical pap " rather than with real thought, 
 and directed to the works of "solemnly constituted im- 
 postors," or to sundry "approved courses of reading," 
 while they are studiously kept aloof from such leaders in 
 modern thought as Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Draper, and 
 Lecky. 
 
 It may indeed be justly claimed by Protestantism that 
 some of the former strongholds of her bigotry have be- 
 come liberalized; but, on the other hand, Catholicism can 
 point to the fact that Pope Leo XIII, now happily reign- 
 ing, has made a noble change as regards open dealing 
 with documents. The days of Monsignor Marini, it may 
 be hoped, are gone. The, Vatican Library, with its masses 
 of historical material, has been thrown open to Protestant 
 and Catholic scholars alike, and this privilege has been 
 freely used by men representing all shades of religious 
 thought. 
 
 As to the older errors, the whole civilized world was at 
 fault, Protestant as well as Catholic. It was not the fault 
 of religion ; it was the fault of that short-sighted linking of 
 theological dogmas to scriptural texts which, in utter de- 
 fiance of the words and works of the Blessed Founder 
 of Christianity, narrow-minded, loud-voiced men are ever 
 prone to substitute for religion. Justly is it said by one of
 
 i ;o 
 
 ASTRONOMY. 
 
 the most eminent among contemporary Anglican divines, 
 that " it is because they have mistaken the dawn for a 
 conflagration that theologians have so often been foes of 
 light."* 
 
 * For an exceedingly striking statement, by a Roman Catholic historian of 
 genius, as to the popular demand for persecution and the pressure of the lower 
 strata in ecclesiastical organizations for cruel measures, see Balmes's Le Protestan- 
 tlsme compart au Catholicisms, etc., fourth edition, Paris, 1855, vol. ii. Archbishop 
 Spaulding has something of the same sort in his Miscellanies. L'Epinois, Galilee, 
 pp. 22 et seq., stretches this as far as possible to save the reputation of the Church 
 in the Galileo matter. As to the various branches of the Protestant Church in 
 England and the United States, it is a matter of notoriety that the smug, well-to- 
 do laymen, whether elders, deacons, or vestrymen, are, as a rule, far more prone to 
 heresy-hunting than are their better educated pastors. As to the cases of Messrs. 
 Winchell, Woodrow, Toy, and the professors at Beyrout, with details, see the 
 chapter in this series on The Fall of Man and Anthropology. Among Protestant 
 historians who have been recently allowed full and free examination of the treas- 
 ures in the Vatican Library, and even those involving questions between Catholi- 
 cism and Protestantism, are Von Sybel, of Berlin, and Philip Schaff, of New York. 
 It should be added that the latter went with commendatory letters from eminent 
 prelates of the Catholic Church in Europe and America. For the closing citation, 
 see Canon Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 432.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW IN THE 
 HE A YENS. 
 
 I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. 
 
 FEW things in the evolution of astronomy are more sug- 
 gestive than the struggle between the theological and the 
 scientific doctrine regarding comets the passage from the 
 conception of them as fire-balls flung by an angry God for 
 the purpose of scaring a wicked world, to a recognition of 
 them as natural in origin and obedient to law in movement. 
 Hardly anything throws a more vivid light upon "the dan- 
 ger of wresting texts of Scripture to preserve ideas which 
 observation and thought have superseded, and upon the 
 folly of arraying ecclesiastical power against scientific dis- 
 covery.* 
 
 Out of the ancient world had come a mass of beliefs re- 
 garding comets, meteors, and eclipses ; all these were held 
 to be signs displayed from heaven for the warning of man- 
 kind. Stars and meteors were generally thought to presage 
 happy events, especially the births of gods, heroes, and 
 great men. So firmly rooted was this idea that we con- 
 stantly find among the ancient nations traditions of lights in 
 the heavens preceding the birth of persons of note. The 
 sacred books of India show that the births of Crishna and of 
 Buddha were announced by such heavenly lights.f The 
 
 * The present study, after its appearance in the Popular Science Monthly as a 
 " new chapter in the Warfare of Science," was revised and enlarged to nearly its 
 present form, and read before the American Historical Association, among whose 
 papers it was published, in 1887, under the title of A History of the Doctrine of 
 Comets. 
 
 t For Crishna, see Cox, Aryan Mythology, vol. ii, p. 133 ; the Vishnu Purana 
 (Wilson's translation), book v, chap. iv. As to lights at the birth, or rather at the
 
 1/2 
 
 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 sacred books of China tell of similar appearances at the 
 births of Yu, the founder of the first dynasty, and of the in- 
 spired sage, Lao-tse. According to the Jewish legends, a 
 star appeared at the birth of Moses, and was seen by the 
 Magi of Egpyt, who informed the king ; and when Abraham 
 was born an unusual star appeared in the east. The Greeks 
 and Romans cherished similar traditions. A heavenly light 
 accompanied the birth of ^Esculapius, and the births of va- 
 rious Caesars were heralded in like manner.* 
 
 The same conception entered into our Christian sacred 
 books. Of all the legends which grew in such luxuriance 
 and beauty about the cradle of Jesus of Nazareth, none ap- 
 peals more directly to the highest poetic feeling than that 
 given by one of the evangelists, in which a star, rising in 
 the east, conducted the wise men to the manger where the 
 Galilean peasantchild the Hope of Mankind, the Light of 
 the World was lying in poverty and helplessness. 
 
 Among the Mohammedans we have a curious example of 
 the same tendency toward a kindly interpretation of stars 
 and meteors, in the belief of certain Mohammedan teachers 
 that meteoric showers are caused by good angels hurling 
 missiles to drive evil angels out of the sky. 
 
 Eclipses were regarded in a very different light, being 
 supposed to express the distress of Nature at earthly calami- 
 ties. The Greeks believed that darkness overshadowed the 
 earth at the deaths of Prometheus, Atreus, Hercules, ^Escu- 
 lapius, and Alexander the Great. The Roman legends held 
 
 conception, of Buddha, see Bunsen, Angel Messiah, pp. 22, 23 ; Alabaster, Wheel 
 of the Law (illustrations of Buddhism), p. 102 ; Edwin Arnold, Light of Asia ; 
 Bp. Bigandet, Life of Gaudama, the Burmese Buddha, p. 30 ; Oldenberg, Buddha 
 (English translation), part i, chap. ii. 
 
 * For Chinese legends regarding stars at the birth of Yu and Lao-tse, see 
 Thornton, History of China, vol. i, p. 137 ; also Pingre, Cometographie, p. 245. 
 Regarding stars at the births of Moses and Abraham, see Calmet, Fragments, 
 part viii ; Baring-Gould, Legends of Old Testament Characters, chap, xxiv ; Farrar, 
 Life of Christ, chap. iii. As to the Magi, see Higgins, Anacalypsis ; Hooykaas, Ort, 
 and Kuenen, Bible for Learners, vol. iii. For Greek and Roman traditions, see 
 Bell, Pantheon, s. v. ^Esculapius and Atreus; Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. i, pp. 
 151, 590 ; Farrar, Life of Christ (Amer. ed.), p. 52 ; Cox, Tales of Ancient Greece, 
 pp. 41, 61, 62 ; Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol. i, p. 322 ; also Suetonius, Caes., Julius, p. 
 88, Claud., p. 463 ; Seneca, Nat. Quaest., vol. i, p. I ; Virgil, Eel,, vol. ix, p. 47 ; as 
 well as Ovid, Pliny, and others.
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. 173 
 
 that at the death of Romulus there was darkness for six 
 hours. In the history of the Caesars occur portents of all 
 three kinds ; for at the death of Julius the earth was shrouded 
 in darkness, the birth of Augustus was heralded by a star, 
 and the downfall of Nero by a comet. So, too, in one of the 
 Christian legends clustering about the crucifixion, darkness 
 overspread the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour. Nei- 
 ther the silence regarding it of the only evangelist who 
 claims to have been present, nor the fact that observers like 
 Seneca and Pliny, who, though they carefully described 
 much less striking occurrences of the same sort and in more 
 remote regions, failed to note any such darkness even in 
 Judea, have availed to shake faith in an account so true to 
 the highest poetic instincts of humanity. 
 
 This view of the relations between Nature and man con- 
 tinued among both Jews and Christians. According to Jew- 
 ish tradition, darkness overspread the earth for three days 
 when the books of the Law were profaned by translation 
 into Greek. Tertullian thought an eclipse an evidence of 
 God's wrath against unbelievers. Nor has this mode of 
 thinking ceased in modern times. A similar claim was made 
 at the execution of Charles I ; and Increase Mather thought 
 an eclipse in Massachusetts an evidence of the grief of Nature 
 at the death of President Chauncey, of Harvard College. 
 Archbishop Sandys expected eclipses to be the final tokens 
 of woe at the destruction of the world, and traces of this 
 feeling have come down to our own time. The quaint story 
 of the Connecticut statesman who, when his associates in the 
 General Assembly were alarmed by an eclipse of the sun, 
 and thought it the beginning of the Day of Judgment, quietly 
 ordered in candles, that he might in any case be found doing 
 his duty, marks probably the last noteworthy appearance of 
 the old belief in any civilized nation.* 
 
 * For Hindu theories, see Alabaster, Wheel of the Law, n. For Greek and 
 Roman legends, see Higgins, Anacalypsis, vol. i, pp. 616,617; a ls Suetonius, 
 Caes , Julius, p. 88, Claud., p. 46 ; Seneca, Quaest. Nat., vol. i, p. i, vol. vii, p. 17 ; 
 Pliny, Hist. Nat., vol. ii, p. 25 ; Tacitus, Ann., vol. xiv, p. 22 ; Josephus, Antiq., vol. 
 xiv, p. 12 ; and the authorities above cited. For the tradition of the Jews regarding 
 the darkness of three days, see citation in Renan, Histoire du Peuple Israel, vol. iv, 
 chap. iv. For Tertullian's belief regarding the significance of an eclipse, see the Ad
 
 174 
 
 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 In these beliefs regarding meteors and eclipses there was 
 little calculated to do harm by arousing that superstitious 
 terror which is the worst breeding-bed of cruelty. Far 
 otherwise was it with the belief regarding comets. During 
 many centuries it gave rise to the direst superstition and 
 fanaticism. The Chaldeans alone among the ancient peoples 
 generally regarded comets without fear, and thought them 
 bodies wandering as harmless as fishes in the sea; the 
 Pythagoreans alone among philosophers seem to have had 
 a vague idea of them as bodies returning at fixed periods of 
 time ; and in all antiquity, so far as is known, one man alone, 
 Seneca, had the scientific instinct and prophetic inspira- 
 tion to give this idea definite shape, and to declare that the 
 time would come when comets would be found to move in 
 accordance with natural law. Here and there a few strong 
 men rose above the prevailing superstition. The Emperor 
 Vespasian tried to laugh it down, and insisted that a certain 
 comet in his time could not betoken his death, because it 
 was hairy, and he bald ; but such scoffing produced little 
 permanent effect, and the prophecy of Seneca was soon for- 
 gotten. These and similar isolated utterances could not stand 
 against the mass of opinion which upheld the doctrine that 
 comets are " signs and wonders." * 
 
 The belief that every comet is a ball of fire flung from 
 the right hand of an angry God to warn the grovelling 
 dwellers of earth was received into the early Church, trans- 
 mitted through the Middle Ages to the Reformation period, 
 and in its transmission was made all the more precious by 
 
 Scapulam, chap, iii, in Migne, Patrolog. Lat., vol. i, p. 701. For the claim regard- 
 ing Charles I, see a sermon preached before Charles II, cited by Lecky, England 
 in the Eighteenth Centuri; vol. i, p. 65. Mather thought, too, that it might have 
 something to do with the death of sundry civil functionaries of the colonies : see 
 his Discourse concerning Comets, 1682. For Archbishop Sandys's belief, see his 
 eighteenth sermon (in Parker Soc. Publications). The story of Abraham Daven- 
 port has been made familiar by the poem of Whittier. 
 
 * For terror caused in Rome by comets, see Pingre, Com/tographie, pp. 165, 166. 
 For the Chaldeans, see Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 10 et seq., and p. 181 et 
 seq. ; also Pingre, chap. ii. For the Pythagorean notions, see citation from Plutarch 
 in Costard, History of Astronomy, p. 283. For Seneca's prediction, see Guillemin, 
 World of Comets (translated byGlaisher), pp. 4, 5 ; also Watson, On Comets, p. 126. 
 For this feeling in antiquity generally, see the preliminary chapters of the two 
 works last cited.
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. 175 
 
 supposed textual proofs from Scripture. The great fathers 
 of the Church committed themselves unreservedly to it. In 
 the third century Origen, perhaps the most influential of the 
 earlier fathers of the universal Church in all questions be- 
 tween science and faith, insisted that comets indicate catas- 
 trophes and the downfall of empires and worlds. Bede, so 
 justly revered by the English Church, declared in the eighth 
 century that " comets portend revolutions of kingdoms, pes- 
 tilence, war, winds, or heat " ; and John of Damascus, his 
 eminent contemporary in the Eastern Church, took the same 
 view. Rabanus Maurus, the great teacher of Europe in 
 the ninth century, an authority throughout the Middle Ages, 
 adopted Bede's opinion fully. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great 
 light of the universal Church in the thirteenth century, whose 
 works the Pope now reigning commends as the centre and 
 source of all university instruction, accepted and handed 
 down the same opinion. The sainted Albert the Great, the 
 most noted genius of the mediaeval Church in natural science, 
 received and developed this theory. These men and those 
 who followed them founded upon scriptural texts and the- 
 ological reasonings a system that for seventeen centuries 
 defied every advance of thought* 
 
 The main evils thence arising were three : the paralysis 
 of self-help, the arousing of fanaticism, and the strengthen- 
 ing of ecclesiastical and political tyranny. The first two of 
 these evils the paralysis of self-help and the arousing of 
 fanaticism are evident throughout all these ages. At the 
 appearance of a comet we constantly see all Christendom, 
 from pope to peasant, instead of striving to avert war by 
 wise statesmanship, instead of striving to avert pestilence by 
 observation and reason, instead of striving to avert famine 
 by skilful economy, whining before fetiches, trying to bribe 
 them to remove these signs of God's wrath, and planning to 
 wreak this supposed wrath of God upon misbelievers. 
 
 As to the third of these evils the strengthening of eccle- 
 
 * For Origen, see his De Princip., vol. i, p. 7 ; also Maury, LSg. Pieuses, p. 203, 
 note. For Bede and others, see De Nat,, vol. xxiv ; Joh. Dam., De Fid. Ot., vol. 
 ii, p. 7; Maury, La Magie et fAstronomie, pp. 181, 182. For Albertus Magnus, 
 see his Opera, vol. i, tr. iii, chaps, x, xi. Among the texts of Scripture on which 
 this belief rested was especially Joel ii, 30, 31.
 
 1 76 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 siastical and civil despotism examples appear on every side. 
 It was natural that hierarchs and monarchs whose births 
 were announced by stars, or whose deaths were announced 
 by comets, should regard themselves as far above the com- 
 mon herd, and should be so regarded by mankind ; passive 
 obedience was thus strengthened, and the most monstrous 
 assumptions of authority were considered simply as mani- 
 festations of the Divine will. Shakespeare makes Calphurnia 
 say to Caesar : 
 
 " When beggars die, there are no comets seen ; 
 The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes." 
 
 Galeazzo, the tyrant of Milan, expressing satisfaction on 
 his deathbed that his approaching end was of such impor- 
 tance as to be heralded by a comet, is but a type of many 
 thus encouraged to prey upon mankind ; and Charles V, one 
 of the most powerful monarchs the world has known, ab- 
 dicating under fear of the comet of 1556, taking refuge in 
 the monastery of San Yuste, and giving up the best of his 
 vast realms to such a scribbling bigot as Philip II, furnishes 
 an example even more striking.* 
 
 But for the retention of this belief there was a moral 
 cause. Myriads of good men in the Christian Church down 
 to a recent period saw in the appearance of comets not 
 merely an exhibition of " signs in the heavens " foretold in 
 Scripture, but also Divine warnings of vast value to human- 
 ity as incentives to repentance and improvement of life 
 warnings, indeed, so precious that they could not be spared 
 without danger to the moral government of the world. And 
 this belief in the portentous character of comets as an essen- 
 tial part of the Divine government, being, as it was thought, 
 in full accord with Scripture, was made for centuries a 
 source of terror to humanity. To say nothing of examples 
 in the earlier periods, comets in the tenth century especially 
 increased the distress of all Europe. In the middle of the 
 eleventh century a comet was thought to accompany the 
 death of Edward the Confessor and to presage the Norman 
 
 * For Caesar, see Shakespeare, Julius Casar, act ii, sc. 2. For Galeazzo, see 
 Guillemin, World of Comets, p. 19. For Charles V, see Prof. Wolfs essay in the 
 Monatschrift des wissenschaftlichen Vereins, Zurich, 1857, p. 228.
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. 177 
 
 conquest ; the traveller in France to-day may see this belief 
 as it was then wrought into the Bayeux tapestry.* 
 
 Nearly every decade of years throughout the Middle 
 Ages saw Europe plunged into alarm by appearances of 
 this sort, but the culmination seems to have been reached in 
 1456. At that time the Turks, after a long effort, had made 
 good their footing in Europe. A large statesmanship or 
 generalship might have kept them out ; but, while different 
 religious factions were disputing over petty shades of dogma, 
 they had advanced, had taken Constantinople, and were evi- 
 dently securing their foothold. Now came the full bloom 
 of this superstition. A comet appeared. The Pope of that 
 period, Calixtus III, though a man of more than ordinary 
 ability, was saturated with the ideas of his time. Alarmed 
 at this monster, if we are to believe the contemporary his- 
 torian, this infallible head of the Church solemnly ' decreed 
 several days of prayer for the averting of the wrath of God, 
 that whatever calamity impended might be turned from the 
 Christians and against the Turks." And, that all might join 
 daily in this petition, there was then established that midday 
 Angelus which has ever since called good Catholics to prayer 
 against the powers of evil. Then, too, was incorporated 
 into a litany the plea, " From the Turk and the comet, good 
 Lord, deliver us." Never was papal intercession less effect- 
 ive ; for the Turk has held Constantinople from that day to 
 this, while the obstinate comet, being that now known un- 
 der the name of Halley, has returned imperturbably at short 
 periods ever since.f 
 
 * For evidences of this widespread terror, see chronicles of Raoul Glaber, Guil- 
 laume de Nangis, William of Malmesbury, Florence of Worcester, Ordericus Vita- 
 lis, et al., passim, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in the Rolls Series}. For very 
 thrilling pictures of this horror in England, see Freeman, Norman Conquest, vol. 
 iii, pp. 640-644, and William Rufus, vol. ii, p. 118. For the Bayeux tapestry, see 
 Bruce, Bayeux Tapestry Elucidated, plate vii and p. 86 ; also Guillemin, World of. 
 Comets, p. 24. There is a large photographic copy, in the South Kensington Mu- 
 seum at London, of the original, wrought, as is generally believed, by the wife of 
 William the Conqueror and her ladies, and still preserved in the town museum at 
 Bayeux. 
 
 f The usual statement is, that Calixtus excommunicated the comet by a bull, 
 and this is accepted by Arago, Grant, Hoefer, Guillemin, Watson, and many his- 
 torians of astronomy. Hence the parallel made on a noted occasion by President 
 Lincoln. No such bull, however, is to be found in the published Bullaria, and 
 13
 
 178 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 But the superstition went still further. It became more 
 and more incorporated into what was considered " scriptural 
 science" and "sound learning." The encyclopedic summa- 
 ries, in which the science of the Middle Ages and the Ref- 
 ormation period took form, furnish abundant proofs of this. 
 
 Yet scientific observation was slowly undermining this 
 structure. The inspired prophecy of Seneca had not been 
 forgotten. Even as far back as the ninth century, in the 
 midst of the sacred learning so abundant at the court of 
 Charlemagne and his successors, we find a scholar protest- 
 ing against the accepted doctrine. In the thirteenth cen- 
 tury we have a mild question by Albert the Great as to the 
 supposed influence of comets upon individuals ; but the pre- 
 vailing theological current was too strong, and he finally 
 yielded to it in this as in so many other things. 
 
 So, too, in the sixteenth century, we have Copernicus 
 refusing to accept the usual theory, Paracelsus writing to 
 Zwingli against it, and Julius Caesar Scaliger denouncing it 
 as " ridiculous folly." * 
 
 At first this scepticism only aroused the horror of theo- 
 logians and increased the vigour of ecclesiastics ; both as- 
 serted the theological theory of comets all the more strenu- 
 ously as based on scriptural truth. During the sixteenth 
 century France felt the influence of one of her greatest 
 men on the side of this superstition. Jean Bodin, so far 
 before his time in political theories, was only thoroughly 
 abreast of it in religious theories : the same reverence for 
 
 that establishing the Angelus (as given by Raynaldus in the Annales Eccl.) 
 contains no mention of the comet. But the authority of Platina (in his Vitce 
 Pontificum, Venice, 1479, sub Calistus III), who was not only in Rome at the time, 
 but, when he wrote his history, archivist of the Vatican, is final as to the Pope's 
 attitude. Platina's authority was never questioned until modern science had 
 changed the ideas of the world. The recent attempt of Pastor (in his Geschichte 
 der Pdpste) tb pooh-pooh down the whole matter is too evident an evasion to carry 
 weight with those who know how even the most careful histories have to be modi- 
 fied to suit the views of the censorship at Rome. 
 
 * As to encyclopedic summaries, see Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Naturals, 
 and the various editions of Reisch's Margarita Philosophica. For Charlemagne's 
 time, see Champion, La Fin du Monde, p. 156 ; Leopardi, Errori Popolari, p. 165. 
 As to Albert the Great's question, see Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, p. 
 188. As to scepticism in the sixteenth century, see Champion, La Fin du Monde, 
 PP- 155. 15 ; and for Scaliger, Dudith's book, cited below.
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. 
 
 179 
 
 the mere letter of Scripture which made him so fatally pow- 
 erful in supporting the witchcraft delusion, led him to sup- 
 port this theological theory of comets but with a difference : 
 he thought them the souls of men, wandering in space, 
 bringing famine, pestilence, and war. 
 
 Not less strong was the same superstition in England. 
 Based upon mediaeval theology, it outlived the revival of 
 learning. From a multitude of examples a few may be se- 
 lected as typical. Early in the sixteenth century Polydore 
 Virgil, an ecclesiastic of the unreformed Church, alludes, in 
 his English History, to the presage of the death of the Em- 
 peror Constantine by a comet as to a simple matter of fact; 
 and in his work on prodigies he pushes this superstition to 
 its most extreme point, exhibiting' comets as preceding al- 
 most every form of calamity. 
 
 In 1532, just at the transition period from the old Church 
 to the new, Cranmer, paving the way to his archbishopric, 
 writes from Germany to Henry VIII, and says of the comet 
 then visible : " What strange things these tokens do signify 
 to come hereafter, God knoweth ; for they do not lightly 
 appear but against some great matter." 
 
 Twenty years later Bishop Latimer, in an Advent ser- 
 mon, speaks of eclipses, rings about the sun, and the like, as 
 signs of the approaching end of the world.* 
 
 In 1580, under Queen Elizabeth, there was set forth an 
 "order of prayer to avert God's wrath from us, threatened 
 by the late terrible earthquake, to be used in all parish 
 churches." In connection with this there was also com- 
 mended to the faithful "a godly admonition for the time 
 present " ; and among the things referred to as evidence of 
 God's wrath are comets, eclipses, and falls of snow. 
 
 This view held sway in the Church of England during 
 Elizabeth's whole reign and far into the Stuart period: 
 Strype, the ecclesiastical annalist, gives ample evidence of 
 this, and among the more curious examples is the surmise 
 
 * For Bodin, see Theatr., lib. ii, cited by Pingre, vol. i, p. 45 ; also a vague 
 citation in Baudrillart, Bodin et son Temps, p. 360. For Polydore Virgil, see Eng- 
 lish History, p. 97 (in Camden Society Publications}. For Cranmer, see Remains, 
 vol. ii, p. 535 (in Parker Society Publications). For Latimer, see Sermons, second 
 Sunday in Advent, 1552.
 
 !8o FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 that the comet of 1572 was a token of Divine wrath pro- 
 voked by the St. Bartholomew massacre. 
 
 As to the Stuart period, Archbishop Spottiswoode seems 
 to have been active in carrying the superstition from the 
 sixteenth century to the seventeenth, and Archbishop Bram- 
 hall cites Scripture in support of it. Rather curiously, while 
 the diary of Archbishop Laud shows so much superstition 
 regarding dreams as portents, it shows little or none regard- 
 ing comets ; but Bishop Jeremy Taylor, strong as he was, 
 evidently favoured the usual view. John Howe, the emi- 
 nent Nonconformist divine in the latter part of the century, 
 seems to have regarded the comet superstition as almost a 
 fundamental article of belief ; he laments the total neglect 
 of comets and portents generally, declaring that this neg- 
 lect betokens want of reverence for the Ruler of the world ; 
 he expresses contempt for scientific inquiry regarding com- 
 ets, insists that they may be natural bodies and yet super- 
 natural portents, and ends by saying, " I conceive it very 
 safe to suppose that some very considerable thing, either 
 in the way of judgment or mercy, may ensue, according as 
 the cry of persevering wickedness or of penitential prayer 
 is more or less loud at that time." * 
 
 The Reformed Church of Scotland supported the super- 
 stition just as strongly. John Knox saw in comets tokens of 
 the wrath of Heaven ; other authorities considered them " a 
 warning to the king to extirpate the Papists" ; and as late as 
 1680, after Halley had won his victory, comets were an- 
 nounced on high authority in the Scottish Church to be 
 " prodigies of great judgment on these lands for our sins, 
 for never was the Lord more provoked by a people." 
 
 While such was the view of the clergy during the six- 
 teenth and seventeenth centuries, the laity generally ac- 
 
 * For Liturgical Services of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, see Parker Society 
 Publications, pp. 569, 570. For Strype, see his Ecclesiastical Memorials, vol. iii, 
 part i, p. 472 ; also his Annals of the Ke formation, vol. ii, part ii, p. 151 ; and his 
 Life of Sir Thomas Smith, pp. 161, 162. For Spottiswoode, see History of the 
 Church of Scotland (Edinburgh reprint, 1851), vol. i, pp. 185, 186. For Bramhall, 
 see his Works, Oxford, 1844, vol. iv, pp. 60, 307, etc. For Jeremy Taylor, see 
 his Sermons on the Life of Christ, For John Howe, see his Works, London, 
 1862, vol. iv, pp. 140, 141.
 
 THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. l8l 
 
 cepted it as a matter of course. Among the great leaders 
 in literature there was at least general acquiescence in it. 
 Both Shakespeare and Milton recognise it, whether they 
 fully accept it or not. Shakespeare makes the Duke of 
 Bedford, lamenting at the bier of Henry V, say : 
 
 " Comets, importing change of time and states, 
 Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky ; 
 And with them scourge the bad revolting stars, 
 That have consented unto Henry's death." 
 
 Milton, speaking of Satan preparing for combat, says : 
 
 " On the other side, 
 
 Incensed with indignation, Satan stood 
 Unterrified, and like a comet burned, 
 That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge 
 In the arctic sky, and from its horrid hair 
 Shakes pestilence and war." 
 
 We do indeed find that in some minds the discoveries of 
 Tycho Brahe and Kepler begin to take effect, for, in 1621, 
 Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy alludes to them as 
 changing public opinion somewhat regarding comets ; and, 
 just before the middle of the century, Sir Thomas Browne 
 expresses a doubt whether comets produce such terrible 
 effects, " since it is found that many of them are above the 
 moon." * Yet even as late as the last years of the seven- 
 teenth century we have English authors of much power 
 battling for this supposed scriptural view ; and among the 
 natural and typical results we find, in 1682, Ralph Thoresby, 
 a Fellow of the Royal Society, terrified at the comet of that 
 year, and writing in h'is diary the following passage : " Lord, 
 fit us for whatever changes it may portend ; for, though I 
 am not ignorant that such meteors proceed from natural 
 causes, yet are they frequently also the presages of immi- 
 nent calamities." Interesting is it to note here that this was 
 Halley's comet, and that Halley was at this very moment 
 making those scientific studies upon it which were to free 
 
 * For John Knox, see his Historie of the Reformation of Religion within the 
 Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1732), lib. iv ; also Chambers, Domestic Annals of 
 Scotland, vol. ii, pp. 410-412. For Burton, see his Anatomy of Melancholy, part 
 ii, sect. 2, For Browne, see the Vulgar and Common Errors, book vi, chap. xiv.
 
 !82 FROM 'SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 the civilized world forever from such terrors as distressed 
 Thoresby. 
 
 The belief in comets as warnings against sin was espe- 
 cially one of those held " always, everywhere, and by all," 
 and by Eastern Christians as well as by Western. One of the 
 most striking scenes in the history of the Eastern Church is 
 that which took place at the condemnation of Nikon, the 
 great Patriarch of Moscow. Turning toward his judges, 
 he pointed to a comet then blazing in the sky, and said, 
 " God's besom shall sweep you all away ! " 
 
 Of all countries in western Europe, it was in Germany 
 and German Switzerland that this superstition took strong- 
 est hold. That same depth of religious feeling which pro- 
 duced in those countries the most terrible growth of witch- 
 craft persecution, brought superstition to its highest devel- 
 opment regarding comets. No country suffered more from 
 it in the Middle Ages. At the Reformation Luther declared 
 strongly in favour of it. In one of his Advent sermons he 
 said, "The heathen write that the comet may arise from 
 natural causes, but God creates not one that does not fore- 
 token a sure calamity." Again he said, ' Whatever moves 
 in the heaven in an unusual way is certainly a sign of God's 
 wrath." And sometimes, yielding to another phase of his 
 belief, he declared them works of the devil, and declaimed 
 against them as " harlot stars." * 
 
 Melanchthon, too, in various letters refers to comets as 
 heralds of Heaven's wrath, classing them, with evil conjunc- 
 tions of the planets and abortive births, among the " signs " 
 referred to in Scripture. Zwingli, boldest of the greater 
 Reformers in shaking off traditional beliefs, could not shake 
 off this, and insisted that the comet of 1531 betokened calam. 
 ity. Arietus, a leading Protestant theologian, declared, " The 
 heavens are given us not merely for our pleasure, but also 
 
 * For Thoresby, see his Diary (London, 1830), vol. i, p. 132. Halley's great serv- 
 ice is described further on in this chapter. For Nikon's speech, see Dean Stan- 
 ley's History of the Eastern Church, p. 485. For very striking examples of this 
 mediaeval terror in Germany, see Von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen, vol. 
 vi. P- 538- For the Reformation period, see Wolf, Gesch. d. Astronomie ; also 
 Praetorius, Ueber d. Cometstern (Erfurt, 1580), in which the above sentences of 
 Luther are printed on the title-page as epigraphs. For " Huren-Sternen," see the 
 sermon of Celichius, described later.
 
 EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. ^3 
 
 as a warning of the wrath of God for the correction of our 
 lives." Lavater insisted that comets are signs of death or 
 calamity, and cited proofs from Scripture. 
 
 Catholic and Protestant strove together for the glory of 
 this doctrine. It was maintained with especial vigour by 
 Fromundus, the eminent professor and Doctor of Theology 
 at the Catholic University of Louvain, who so strongly op- 
 posed the Copernican system ; at the beginning of the 
 seventeenth century, even so gifted an astronomer as Kepler 
 yielded somewhat to the belief ; and near the end of that 
 century Voigt declared that the comet of 1618 clearly pre- 
 saged the downfall of the Turkish Empire, and he stigma- 
 tized as " atheists and Epicureans " all who did not believe 
 comets to be God's warnings.* 
 
 II. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC 
 VIEW. 
 
 Out of this belief was developed a great series of efforts 
 to maintain the theological view of comets, and to put down 
 forever the scientific view. These efforts may be divided 
 into two classes : those directed toward learned men and 
 scholars, through the universities, and those directed to- 
 ward the people at large, through the pulpits. As to the 
 first of these, that learned men and scholars might be kept 
 in the paths of " sacred science " and " sound learning," es- 
 pecial pains was taken to keep all knowledge of the scien- 
 tific view of comets as far as possible from students in the 
 universities. Even to the end of the seventeenth century 
 the oath generally required of professors of astronomy over 
 a large part of Europe prevented their teaching that comets 
 are heavenly bodies obedient to law. Efforts just as earnest 
 were made to fasten into students' minds the theological 
 theory. Two or three examples out of many may serve as 
 
 * For Melanchthon, see Wolf, ubi supra. For Zwingli, see Wolf, p. 235. For 
 Arietus, see Madler, Geschichte der Himmelskunde, vol. ii. For Kepler's supersti- 
 tion, see Wolf, p. 281. For Voigt, see Himmels-Magnaten Reichstage, Hamburg, 
 1676. For both Fromundus and Voigt, see also Madler, vol. ii, p. 399, and Lecky, 
 Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, p. 23.
 
 !84 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 types. First of these may be named the teaching of Jacob 
 Heerbrand, professor at the University of Tubingen, who in 
 1577 illustrated the moral value of comets by comparing the 
 Almighty sending a comet, to the judge laying the execu- 
 tioner's sword on the table between himself and the criminal 
 in a court of justice ; and, again, to the father or schoolmaster 
 displaying the rod before naughty children. A little later 
 we have another churchman of great importance in that 
 region, Schickhart, head pastor and superintendent at Gop- 
 pingen, preaching and publishing a comet sermon, in which 
 he denounces those who stare at such warnings of God with- 
 out heeding them, and compares them to " calves gaping at 
 a new barn door." Still later, at the end of the seventeenth 
 century, we find Conrad Dieterich, director of studies at the 
 University of Marburg, denouncing all scientific investiga- 
 tion of comets as impious, and insisting that they are only 
 to be regarded as "signs and wonders." * 
 
 The results of this ecclesiastical pressure upon science 
 in the universities were painfully shown during generation 
 after generation, as regards both professors and students ; 
 and examples may be given typical of its effects upon each 
 of these two classes. 
 
 The first of these is the case of Michael Maestlin. He 
 was by birth a Swabian Protestant, was educated at Tu- 
 bingen as a pupil of Apian, and, after a period of travel, was 
 settled as deacon in the little parish of Backnang, when the 
 comet of 1577 gave him an occasion to apply his astronom- 
 ical studies. His minute and accurate observation of it is to 
 this day one of the wonders of science. It seems almost im- 
 possible that so much could be accomplished by the naked 
 eye. His observations agreed with those of Tycho Brahe, 
 and won for Maestlin the professorship of astronomy in the 
 University of Heidelberg. No man had so clearly proved 
 the supralunar position of a comet, or shown so conclusively 
 that its motion was not erratic, but regular. The young as- 
 tronomer, though Apian's pupil, was an avowed Copernican 
 
 * For the effect of the anti-Pythagorean oath, see Prowe, Copernicus ; also 
 Madler and Wolf. For Heerbrand, see his Von dent erschrockenlichen Wunderzei- 
 chen, Tubingen, 1577. For Schickhart, see his Predigt vom IVunderzeichen, Stutt- 
 gart, 1621. For Dieterich, see his sermon, described more fally below.
 
 EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. ^5 
 
 and the destined master and friend of Kepler. Yet, in the 
 treatise embodying his observations, he felt it necessary to 
 .save his reputation for orthodoxy by calling the comet a 
 " new and horrible prodigy," and by giving a chapter of 
 " conjectures on the signification of the present comet," in 
 which he proves from history that this variety of comet be- 
 tokens peace, but peace purchased by a bloody victory. 
 That he really believed in this theological theory seems im- 
 possible ; the very fact that his observations had settled 
 the supralunar character and regular motion of comets 
 proves this. It was a humiliation only to be compared to 
 that of Osiander when he wrote his grovelling preface to the 
 great book of Copernicus. Maestlin had his reward : when, 
 a few years later, his old teacher, Apian, was driven from his 
 chair at Tubingen for refusing to sign the Lutheran Concord- 
 Book, Maestlin was elected to his place. 
 
 Not less striking was the effect of this theological pres- 
 sure upon the minds of students. Noteworthy as an ex- 
 ample of this is the book of the Leipsic lawyer, Biittner. 
 From no less than eighty-six biblical texts he proves the Al- 
 mighty's purpose of using the heavenly bodies for the in- 
 struction of men as to future events, and then proceeds to 
 frame exhaustive tables, from which, the time and place of 
 the comet's first appearance being known, its signification 
 can be deduced. This manual he gave forth as a triumph 
 of religious science, under the name of the Comet Hour-Book* 
 
 The same devotion to the portent theory is found in the 
 universities of Protestant Holland. Striking is it to see in 
 the sixteenth century, after Tycho Brahe's discovery, the 
 Dutch theologian, Gerard Vossius, Professor of Theology and 
 Eloquence at Leyden, lending his great weight to the super- 
 stition. " The history of all times," he says, " shows comets 
 to be the messengers of misfortune. It does not follow that 
 they are endowed with intelligence, but that there is a 
 deity who makes use of them to call the human race to 
 repentance." Though familiar with the works of Tycho 
 Brahe, he finds it " hard to believe " that all comets are 
 
 * For Maestlin, see his Observatio et Demonstratio Comete, Tubingen, 1578. 
 For Banner, see his Cometen Stundbuchlein, Leipsic, 1605.
 
 !86 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 ethereal, and adduces several historical examples of sublu- 
 nary ones. 
 
 Nor was this attempt to hold back university teaching to 
 the old view of comets confined to Protestants. The Roman 
 Church was, if possible, more strenuous in the same effort. 
 A few examples will serve as types, representing the ortho- 
 dox teaching at the great centres of Catholic theology. 
 
 One of these is seen in Spain. The eminent jurist Torre- 
 blanca was recognised as a controlling authority in all the 
 universities of Spain, and from these he swayed in the sev- 
 enteenth century the thought of Catholic Europe, especially 
 as to witchcraft and the occult powers in Nature. He lays 
 down the old cometary superstition as one of the founda- 
 tions of orthodox teaching. Begging the question, after the 
 fashion of his time, he argues that comets can not be stars, 
 because new stars always betoken good, while comets be- 
 token evil. 
 
 The same teaching was given in the Catholic universities 
 of the Netherlands. Fromundus, at Louvain, the enemy of 
 Galileo, steadily continued his crusade against all cometary 
 heresy.* 
 
 But a still more striking case is seen in Italy. The rev- 
 erend Father Augustin de Angelis, rector of the Clementine 
 College at Rome, as late as 1673, after the new cometary 
 theory had been placed beyond reasonable doubt, and even 
 while Newton was working out its final demonstration, pub- 
 lished a third edition of his Lectures on Meteorology. It was 
 dedicated to the Cardinal of Hesse, and bore the express 
 sanction of the Master of the Sacred Palace at Rome and of 
 the head of the religious order to which De Angelis be- 
 longed. This work deserves careful analysis, not only as 
 representing the highest and most approved university 
 teaching of the time at the centre of Roman Catholic Chris- 
 tendom, but still more because it represents that attempt to 
 make a compromise between theology and science, or rather 
 the attempt to confiscate science to the uses of theology, 
 
 * For Vossius, see the De Idololatria (in his Opera, vol. v, pp. 283-285). For 
 Torreblanca, see his De Magia, Seville, 1618, and often reprinted. For Fromun- 
 dus, see his Mettorologica.
 
 EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. jg^ 
 
 which we so constantly find whenever the triumph of sci- 
 ence in any field has become inevitable. 
 
 As to the scientific element in this compromise, De Ange- 
 lis holds, in his general introduction regarding meteorology, 
 that the main material cause of comets is " exhalation," and 
 says, " If this exhalation is thick and sticky, it blazes into a 
 comet." And again he returns to the same view, saying 
 that " one form of exhalation is dense, hence easily inflam- 
 mable and long retentive of fire, from which sort are espe- 
 cially generated comets." But it is in his third lecture that 
 he takes up comets specially, and his discussion of them is 
 extended through the fourth, fifth, and sixth lectures. Hav- 
 ing given in detail the opinions of various theologians and 
 philosophers, he declares his own in the form of two conclu- 
 sions. The first of these is that " comets are not heavenly 
 bodies, but originate in the earth's atmosphere below the 
 moon ; for everything heavenly is eternal and incorruptible, 
 but comets have a beginning and ending ergo, comets can 
 not be heavenly bodies." This, we may observe, is levelled 
 at the observations and reasonings of Tycho Brahe and Kep- 
 ler, and is a very good illustration of the scholastic and me- 
 diaeval method the method which blots out an ascertained 
 fact by means of a metaphysical formula. His second con- 
 clusion is that " comets are of elemental and sublunary na- 
 ture ; for they are an exhalation hot and dry, fatty and well 
 condensed, inflammable and kindled in the uppermost regions 
 of the air." He then goes on to answer sundry objections 
 to this mixture of metaphysics and science, and among other 
 things declares that " the fatty, sticky material of a comet 
 may be kindled from sparks falling from fiery heavenly 
 bodies or from a thunderbolt " ; and, again, that the thick, 
 fatty, sticky quality of the comet holds its tail in shape, and 
 that, so far are comets from having their paths beyond the 
 moon's orbit, as Tycho Brahe and Kepler thought, he him- 
 self in 1618 saw " a bearded comet so near the summit of 
 Vesuvius that it almost seemed to touch it." As to sorts 
 and qualities of comets, he accepts Aristotle's view, and 
 divides them into bearded and tailed.* He goes on into 
 
 * Barbata et caudata.
 
 !88 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 long disquisitions upon their colours, forms, and motions. 
 Under this latter head he again plunges deep into a sea of 
 metaphysical considerations, and does not reappear until he 
 brings up his compromise in the opinion that their move- 
 ment is as yet uncertain and not understood, but that, if we 
 must account definitely for it, we must say that it is effect- 
 ed by angels especially assigned to this service by Divine 
 Providence. But, while proposing this compromise be- 
 tween science and theology as to the origin and movement 
 of comets, he will hear to none as regards their mission as 
 " signs and wonders " and presages of evil. He draws up a 
 careful table of these evils, arranging them in the following 
 order: Drought, wind, earthquake, tempest, famine, pesti- 
 lence, war, and, to clinch the matter, declares that the comet 
 observed by him in 1618 brought not only war, famine, pes- 
 tilence, and earthquake, but also a general volcanic eruption, 
 " which would have destroyed Naples, had not the blood of 
 the invincible martyr Januarius withstood it." 
 
 It will be observed, even from this sketch, that, while the 
 learned Father Augustin thus comes infallibly to the mediae- 
 val conclusion, he does so very largely by scientific and es- 
 sentially modern processes, giving unwonted prominence to 
 observation, and at times twisting scientific observation into 
 the strand with his metaphysics. The observations and 
 methods of his science are sometimes shrewd, sometimes 
 comical. Good examples of the latter sort are such as his 
 observing that the comet stood very near the summit of 
 Vesuvius, and his reasoning that its tail was kept in place by 
 its stickiness. But observations and reasonings of this sort 
 are always the first homage paid by theology to science as 
 the end of their struggle approaches.* 
 
 Equally striking is an example seen a little later in an- 
 other part of Europe ; and it is the more noteworthy because 
 Halley and Newton had already fully established the mod- 
 ern scientific theory. Just at the close of the seventeenth 
 century the Jesuit Reinzer, professor at Linz, put forth his 
 Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica, in which all natural phe- 
 nomena received both a physical and a moral interpretation. 
 
 * See De Angelis, Lectiones Meteorologies, Rome, 1669.
 
 EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. 1$$ 
 
 It was profusely and elaborately illustrated, and on account 
 of its instructive contents was in 1712 translated into Ger- 
 man for the unlearned reader. The comet receives, of course, 
 great attention. " It appears," says Reinzer, " only then in 
 the heavens when the latter punish the earth, and through 
 it [the comet] not only predict but bring to pass all sorts of 
 calamity. . . . And, to that end, its tail serves for a rod, its 
 hair for weapons and arrows, its light for a threat, and its 
 heat for a sign of anger and vengeance." Its warnings are 
 threefold: (i) " Comets, generated in the air, betoken natu- 
 rally drought, wind, earthquake, famine, and pestilence." 
 (2) " Comets can indirectly, in view of their material, be- 
 token wars, tumults, and the death of princes ; for, being hot 
 and dry, they bring the moistnesses \Feuchtigkeiten\ in the 
 human body to an extraordinary heat and dryness, increasing 
 the gall ; and, since the emotions depend on the tempera- 
 ment and condition of the body, men are through this change 
 driven to violent deeds, quarrels, disputes, and finally to 
 arms : especially is this the result with princes, who are 
 more delicate and also more arrogant than other men, and 
 whose moistnesses are more liable to inflammation of this 
 sort, inasmuch as they live in luxury and seldom restrain 
 themselves from those things which in such a dry state of 
 the heavens are especially injurious." (3) " All comets, what- 
 ever prophetic significance they may have naturally in and 
 of themselves, are yet principally, according to the Divine 
 pleasure, heralds of the death of great princes, of war, and 
 of other such great calamities ; and this is known and proved, 
 first of all, from the words of Christ himself : ' Nation shall 
 rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom ; and 
 great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and 
 pestilences ; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be 
 from heaven.' " * 
 
 While such pains was taken to keep the more highly 
 educated classes in the "paths of scriptural science and 
 sound learning " at the universities, equal efforts were made 
 to preserve the cometary orthodoxy of the people at large 
 
 * See Reinzer, Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica (edition of Augsburg, 1712), 
 pp. 101-103.
 
 I9 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 by means of the pulpits. Out of the mass of sermons for 
 this purpose which were widely circulated I will select just 
 two as typical, and they are worthy of careful study as show- 
 ing some special dangers of applying theological methods to 
 scientific facts. In the second half of the sixteenth century 
 the recognised capital of orthodox Lutheranism was Magde- 
 burg, and in the region tributary to this metropolis no 
 Church official held a more prominent station than the " Su- 
 perintendent," or Lutheran bishop, of the neighbouring Alt- 
 mark. It was this dignitary, Andreas Celichius by name, 
 who at Magdeburg, in 1578, gave to the press his Theological 
 Reminder of the New Comet. After deprecating as blasphe- 
 mous the attempt of Aristotle to explain the phenomenon 
 otherwise than as a supernatural warning from God to sinful 
 man, he assures his hearers that " whoever would know the 
 comet's real source and nature must not merely gape and 
 stare at the scientific theory that it is an earthy, greasy, 
 tough, and sticky vapour and mist, rising into the upper air 
 and set ablaze by the celestial heat." Far more important 
 for them is it to know what this vapour is. It is really, in 
 the opinion of Celichius, nothing more or less than "the 
 thick smoke of human sins, rising every day, every hour, 
 every moment, full of stench and horror, before the face of 
 God, and becoming gradually so thick as to form a comet, 
 with curled and plaited tresses, which at last is kindled by 
 the hot and fiery anger of the Supreme Heavenly Judge." 
 He adds that it is probably only through the prayers and 
 tears of Christ that this blazing monument of human deprav- 
 ity becomes visible to mortals. In support of this theory, 
 he urges the " coming up before God " of the wickedness of 
 Sodom and Gomorrah and of Nineveh, and especially the 
 words of the prophet regarding Babylon, " Her stench and 
 rottenness is come up before me." That the anger of God 
 can produce the conflagration without any intervention of 
 Nature is proved from the Psalms, " He sendeth out his 
 word and melteth them." From the position of the comet, 
 its course, and the direction of its tail he augurs especially 
 the near approach of the judgment day, though it may also 
 betoken, as usual, famine, pestilence, and war. " Yet even 
 in these days," he mourns, " there are people reckless and
 
 EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. igi 
 
 giddy enough to pay no heed to such celestial warnings, and 
 these even cite in their own defence the injunction of Jere- 
 miah not to fear signs in the heavens." This idea he ex- 
 plodes, and shows that good and orthodox Christians, while 
 not superstitious like the heathen, know well " that God is 
 not bound to his creation and the ordinary course of Nature, 
 but must often, especially in these last dregs of the world, 
 resort to irregular means to display his anger at human 
 guilt."* 
 
 The other typical case occurred in the following century 
 and in another part of Germany. Conrad Dieterich was, 
 during the first half of the seventeenth century, a Lutheran 
 ecclesiastic of the highest authority. His ability as a theo- 
 logian had made him Archdeacon of Marburg, Professor of 
 Philosophy and Director of Studies at the University of 
 Giessen, and " Superintendent," or Lutheran bishop, in south- 
 western Germany. In the year 1620, on the second Sunday 
 in Advent, in the great Cathedral of Ulm, he developed the 
 orthodox doctrine of comets in a sermon, taking up the ques- 
 tions: i. What are comets? 2. What do they indicate ? 3. 
 What have we to do with their significance ? This sermon 
 marks an epoch. Delivered in that stronghold of German 
 Protestantism and by a prelate of the highest standing, it 
 was immediately printed, prefaced by three laudatory poems 
 from different men of note, and sent forth to drive back the 
 scientific, or, as it was called, the " godless," view of comets. 
 The preface shows that Dieterich was sincerely alarmed by 
 the tendency to regard comets as natural appearances. His 
 text was taken from the twenty-fifth verse of the twenty-first 
 chapter of St. Luke : " And there shall be signs in the sun, 
 and in the moon, and in the stars ; and upon the earth dis- 
 tress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves 
 roaring." As to what comets are, he cites a multitude of 
 philosophers, and, finding that they differ among themselves, 
 he uses a form of argument not uncommon from that day to 
 this, declaring that this difference of opinion proves that 
 there is no solution of the problem save in revelation, and 
 insisting that comets are " signs especially sent by the Al- 
 
 * For Celichius, or Celich, see his own treatise, as above.
 
 192 
 
 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 mighty to warn the earth." An additional proof of this he 
 finds in the forms of comets. One, he says, took the form of 
 a trumpet; another, of a spear; another, of a goat; another, 
 of a torch ; another, of a sword ; another, of an arrow ; an- 
 other, of a sabre ; still another, of a bare arm. From these 
 forms of comets he infers that we may divine their purpose. 
 As to their creation, he quotes John of Damascus and other 
 early Church authorities in behalf of the idea that each 
 comet is a star newly created at the Divine command, out of 
 nothing, and that it indicates the wrath of God. As to their 
 purpose, having quoted largely from the Bible and from 
 Luther, he winds up by insisting that, as God can make 
 nothing in vain, comets must have some distinct object ; then, 
 from Isaiah and Joel among the prophets, from Matthew, 
 Mark, and Luke among the evangelists, from Origen and 
 John Chrysostom among the fathers, from Luther and Me- 
 lanchthon among the Reformers, he draws various texts more 
 or less conclusive to prove that comets indicate evil and 
 only evil ; and he cites Luther's Advent sermon to the effect 
 that, though comets may arise in the course of Nature, they 
 are still signs of evil to mankind. In answer to the theory 
 of sundry naturalists that comets are made up of "a certain 
 fiery, warm, sulphurous, saltpetery, sticky fog," he declaims : 
 " Our sins, our sins : they are the fiery heated vapours, the 
 thick, sticky, sulphurous clouds which rise from the earth 
 toward heaven before God." Throughout the sermon Die- 
 terich pours contempt over all men who simply investigate 
 comets as natural objects, calls special attention to a comet 
 then in the heavens resembling a long broom or bundle of 
 rods, and declares that he and his hearers can only con- 
 sider it rightly " when we see standing before us our Lord 
 God in heaven as an angry father with a rod for his chil- 
 dren." In answer to the question what comets signify, 
 he commits himself entirely to the idea that they indicate 
 the wrath of God, and therefore calamities of every sort. 
 Page after page is filled with the records of evils following 
 comets. Beginning with the creation ot the world, he in- 
 sists that the first comet brought on the deluge of Noah, and 
 cites a mass of authorities, ranging from Moses and Isaiah 
 to Albert the Great and Melanchthon, in support of the
 
 EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. 
 
 193 
 
 view that comets precede earthquakes, famines, wars, pesti- 
 lences, and every form of evil. He makes some parade of 
 astronomical knowledge as to the greatness of the sun and 
 moon, but relapses soon into his old line of argument. Im- 
 ploring his audience not to be led away from the well-estab- 
 lished belief of Christendom and the principles of their 
 fathers, he comes back to his old assertion, insists that "our 
 sins are the inflammable material of which comets are made," 
 and winds up with a most earnest appeal to the Almighty to 
 spare his people.* 
 
 Similar efforts from the pulpit were provoked by the 
 great comet of 1680. Typical among these was the effort 
 in Switzerland of Pastor Heinrich Erni, who, from the Cathe- 
 dral of Ziirich, sent a circular letter to the clergy of that 
 region showing the connection of the eleventh and twelfth 
 verses of the first chapter of Jeremiah with the comet, 
 giving notice that at his suggestion the authorities had pro- 
 claimed a solemn fast, and exhorting the clergy to preach 
 earnestly on the subject of this warning. 
 
 Nor were the interpreters of the comet's message con- 
 tent with simple prose. At the appearance of the comet of 
 1618, Grasser and Gross, pastors and doctors of theology at 
 Basle, put forth a collection of doggerel rhymes to fasten 
 the orthodox theory into the minds of school-children and 
 peasants. One of these may be translated : 
 
 " I am a Rod in God's right hand 
 Threatening the German and foreign land." 
 
 Others for a similar purpose taught : 
 
 " Eight things there be a Comet brings, 
 When it on high doth horrid range : 
 Wind, Famine, Plague, and Death to Kings, 
 
 War, Earthquakes, Floods, and Direful Change." 
 
 Great ingenuity was shown in meeting the advance of 
 science, in the universities and schools, with new texts of 
 
 * For Dieterich, see Ulmische Cometen-PreJigt, von dem Cometen, so nechst ab~ 
 gewischen 1618 Jahrs im Wintermonat erstenmahls in Schwaben sehen /assert, . . . 
 gehalten zu Ulm . . . durch Conrad Dieterich, Ulm, 1620. For a life of the author, 
 see article Dieterich in the A llgemeine Deutsche Biographie. See also Wolf. 
 14
 
 I 9 4 
 
 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 Scripture ; and Stephen Spleiss, Rector of the Gymnasium 
 at Schaffhausen, got great credit by teaching that in the 
 vision of Jeremiah the " almond rod " was a tailed comet, 
 and the " seething pot " a bearded one.* 
 
 It can be easily understood that such authoritative utter- 
 ances as that of Dieterich must have produced a great effect 
 throughout Protestant Christendom ; and in due time we 
 see their working in New England. That same tendency to 
 provincialism, which, save at rare intervals, has been the 
 bane of Massachusetts thought from that day to this, ap- 
 peared ; and in 1664 we find Samuel Danforth arguing from 
 the Bible that " comets are portentous signals of great and 
 notable changes," and arguing from history that they " have 
 been many times heralds of wrath to a secure and impenitent 
 world." He cites especially the comet of 1652, which ap- 
 peared just before Mr. Cotton's sickness and disappeared 
 after his death. Morton also, in his Memorial recording the 
 death of John Putnam, alludes to the comet of 1662 as "a 
 very signal testimony that God had then removed a bright 
 star and a shining light out of the heaven of his Church here 
 into celestial glory above." Again he speaks of another 
 comet, insisting that " it was no fiery meteor caused by ex- 
 halation, but it was sent immediately by God to awaken the 
 secure world," and goes on to show how in that year " it 
 pleased God to smite the fruits of the earth namely, the 
 wheat in special with blasting and mildew, whereby much 
 of it was spoiled and became profitable for nothing, and 
 much of it worth little, being light and empty. This was 
 looked upon by the judicious and conscientious of the land 
 as a speaking providence against the unthankfulness of many, 
 ... as also against voluptuousness and abuse of the good 
 creatures of God by licentiousness in drinking and fashions 
 in apparel, for the obtaining whereof a great part of the 
 principal grain was oftentimes unnecessarily expended." 
 
 But in 1680 a stronger than either of these seized upon 
 the doctrine and wielded it with power. Increase Mather, 
 
 * For Erni, see Wolf, Gesc h. d. Astronomic, p. 239. For Crasser and Gross, see 
 their Christenliches Bedencken , . . von dem erschrockenlichen Cometen, etc., Zurich, 
 1664. For Spleiss, see Beilduftiger Bericht von dem jetzigen Cometsternen, etc., 
 Schaffhausen, 1664.
 
 EFFORTS TO CRUSH THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. 
 
 195 
 
 so open always to ideas from Europe, and always so power- 
 ful for good or evil in the colonies, preached his sermon on 
 " Heaven's Alarm to the World, . . . wherein is shown that 
 fearful sights and signs in the heavens are the presages of 
 great calamities at hand." The texts were taken from the 
 book of Revelation: "And the third angel sounded, and 
 there fell a great star from heaven, burning, as it were a 
 lamp," and " Behold, the third woe cometh quickly." In 
 this, as in various other sermons, he supports the theolog- 
 ical cometary theory fully. He insists that " we are fallen 
 into the dregs of time," and that the day of judgment is evi- 
 dently approaching. He explains away the words of Jere- 
 miah " Be not dismayed at signs in the heavens " and 
 shows that comets have been forerunners of nearly every 
 form of evil. Having done full justice to evils thus presaged 
 in scriptural times, he begins a similar display in modern 
 history by citing blazing stars which foretold the invasions 
 of Goths, Huns, Saracens, and Turks, and warns gainsayers 
 by citing the example of Vespasian, who, after ridiculing a 
 comet, soon died. The general shape and appearance of 
 comets, he thinks, betoken their purpose, and he cites Ter- 
 tullian to prove them " God's sharp razors on mankind, 
 whereby he doth poll, and his scythe whereby he doth shear 
 down multitudes of sinful creatures." At last, rising to a 
 fearful height, he declares : " For the Lord hath fired his 
 beacon in the heavens among the stars of God there ; the 
 fearful sight is not yet out of sight. The warning piece of 
 heaven is going off. Now, then, if the Lord discharge his 
 murdering pieces from on high, and men be found in their 
 sins unfit for death, their blood shall be upon them." And 
 again, in an agony of supplication, he cries out : " Do we see 
 the sword blazing over us? Let it put us upon crying to 
 God, that the judgment be diverted and not return upon us 
 again so speedily. . . . Doth God threaten our very heavens? 
 O pray unto him, that he would not take away stars and 
 send comets to succeed them." * 
 
 * For Danforth, see his Astronomical Description of the Late Comet or Blazing 
 Star, Together with a Brief Theological Application Thereof, 1664. For Morton, 
 see his Memorial, pp. 251, 252 ; also 309, 310. Texts cited by Mather were Rev. 
 viii, 10, and xi, 14.
 
 j^6 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 Two years later, in August, 1682, he followed this with 
 another sermon on " The Latter Sign," " wherein is showed 
 that the voice of God in signal providences, especially when 
 repeated and iterated, ought to be hearkened unto." Here, 
 too, of course, the comet comes in for a large share of atten- 
 tion. But his tone is less sure : even in the midst of all his 
 arguments appears an evident misgiving. The thoughts of 
 Newton in science and Bayle in philosophy were evidently 
 tending to accomplish the prophecy of Seneca. Mather's 
 alarm at this is clear. His natural tendency is to uphold the 
 idea that a comet is simply a fire-ball flung from the hand of 
 an avenging God at a guilty world, but he evidently feels 
 obliged to yield something to the scientific spirit; hence, 
 in the Discourse concerning Comets, published in 1683, he de- 
 clares : " There are those who think that, inasmuch as com- 
 ets may be supposed to proceed from natural causes, there 
 is no speaking voice of Heaven in them beyond what is to 
 !be said of all other works of God. But certain it is that 
 many things which may happen according to the course of 
 Nature are portentous signs of Divine anger and prognostics 
 of great evils hastening upon the world." He then notices 
 the eclipse of August, 1672, and adds: "That year the col- 
 lege was eclipsed by the death of the learned president 
 there, worthy Mr. Chauncey ; and two colonies namely, 
 Massachusetts and Plymouth by the death of two gov- 
 ernors, who died within a twelvemonth after. . . . Shall, 
 then, such mighty works of God as comets are be insignifi- 
 cant things?"* 
 
 III. THE INVASION OF SCEPTICISM. 
 
 Vigorous as Mather's argument is, we see scepticism re- 
 garding " signs " continuing to invade the public mind ; and, 
 in spite of his threatenings, about twenty years after we find 
 a remarkable evidence of this progress in the fact that this 
 
 * Increase Mather's Heaven's Alarm to the World was first printed at Boston in 
 1681, but was reprinted in 1682, and was appended, with the sermon on The Latter 
 Sign, to the Discourse on Comets (Boston, 1683).
 
 THE INVASION OF SCEPTICISM. j^ 
 
 scepticism has seized upon no less a personage than that 
 colossus of orthodoxy, his thrice illustrious son, Cotton 
 Mather himself; and him we find, in 1726, despite the argu- 
 ments of his father, declaring in \\isManuductio: "Perhaps 
 there may be some need for me to caution you against 
 being dismayed at the signs of the heavens, or having any 
 superstitious fancies upon eclipses and the like. ... I am 
 willing that you be apprehensive of nothing portentous in 
 blazing stars. For my part, I know not whether all our 
 worlds, and even the sun itself, may not fare the better for 
 them." * 
 
 Curiously enough, for this scientific scepticism in Cotton 
 Mather there was a cause identical with that which had 
 developed superstition in the mind of his father. The same 
 provincial tendency to receive implicitly any new Euro- 
 pean fashion in thinking or speech wrought upon both, 
 plunging one into superstition and drawing the other out 
 of it. 
 
 European thought, which New England followed, had at 
 last broken away in great measure from the theological view 
 of comets as signs and wonders. The germ of this emanci- 
 pating influence was mainly in the great utterance of Seneca ; 
 and we find in nearly every century some evidence that this 
 germ was still alive. This life became more and more evi- 
 dent after the Reformation period, even though theologians 
 in every Church did their best to destroy it. The first series 
 of attacks on the old theological doctrine were mainly 
 founded in philosophic reasoning. As early as the first 
 half of the sixteenth century we hear Julius Caesar Scaliger 
 protesting against the cometary superstition as " ridiculous 
 folly. "f Of more real importance was the treatise of Blaise 
 de Vigenere, published at Paris in 1578. In this little book 
 various statements regarding comets as signs of wrath or 
 causes of evils are given, and then followed by a very gentle 
 and quiet discussion, usually tending to develop that health- 
 ful scepticism which is the parent of investigation. A fair 
 example of his mode of treating the subject is seen in his 
 
 * For Cotton Mather, see the Manuductio, pp. 54, 55. 
 f For Scaliger, see p. 20 of Dudith's book, cited below.
 
 1^8 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 dealing with a bit of " sacred science." This was simply 
 that " comets menace princes and kings with death because 
 they live more delicately than other people ; and, therefore, 
 the air thickened and corrupted by a comet would be natu- 
 rally more injurious to them than to common folk who live 
 on coarser food." To this De Vigenere answers that there 
 are very many persons who live on food as delicate as that 
 enjoyed by princes and kings, and yet receive no harm from 
 comets. He then goes on to show that many of the greatest 
 monarchs in history have met death without any comet to 
 herald it. 
 
 In the same year thoughtful scepticism of a similar sort 
 found an advocate in another part of Europe. Thomas 
 Erastus, the learned and devout professor of medicine at 
 Heidelberg, put forth a letter dealing in the plainest terms 
 with the superstition. He argued especially that there could 
 be no natural connection between the comet and pestilence, 
 since the burning of an exhalation must tend to purify rather 
 than to infect the air. In the following year the eloquent 
 Hungarian divine Dudith published a letter in which the 
 theological theory was handled even more shrewdly ; for he 
 argued that, if comets were caused by the sins of mortals, 
 they would never be absent from the sky. But these utter- 
 ances were for the time brushed aside by the theological 
 leaders of thought as shallow or impious. 
 
 In the seventeenth century able arguments against the 
 superstition, on general grounds, began to be multiplied. In 
 Holland, Balthasar Bekker opposed this, as he opposed the 
 witchcraft delusion, on general philosophic grounds ; and 
 Lubienitzky wrote in a compromising spirit to prove that 
 comets were as often followed by good as by evil events. 
 In France, Pierre Petit, formerly geographer of Louis XIII, 
 and an intimate friend of Descartes, addressed to the young 
 Louis XIV a vehement protest against the superstition, 
 basing his arguments not on astronomy, but on common 
 sense. A very effective part of the little treatise was 
 devoted to answering the authority of the fathers of the 
 early Church. To do this, he simply reminded his readers 
 that St. Augustine and St. John Damascenus had also op- 
 posed the doctrine of the antipodes. The book did good
 
 THE INVASION OF SCEPTICISM. I99 
 
 service in France, and was translated in Germany a few 
 years later.* 
 
 All these were denounced as infidels and heretics, yet 
 none the less did they set men at thinking, and prepare the 
 way for a far greater genius ; for toward the end of the 
 same century the philosophic attack was taken up by Pierre 
 Bayle, and in the whole series of philosophic champions he 
 is chief. While professor at the University of Sedan he had 
 observed the alarm caused by the comet of 1680, and he now 
 brought all his reasoning powers to bear upon it. Thoughts 
 deep and witty he poured out in volume after volume. 
 Catholics and Protestants were alike scandalized. Catholic 
 France spurned him, and Jurieu, the great Reformed divine, 
 called his cometary views " atheism," and tried hard to have 
 Protestant Holland condemn him. Though Bayle did not 
 touch immediately the mass of mankind, he wrought with 
 power upon men who gave themselves the trouble of think- 
 ing. It was indeed unfortunate for the Church that theolo- 
 gians, instead of taking the initiative in this matter, left it 
 to Bayle; for, in tearing down the pretended scriptural doc- 
 trine of comets, he tore down much else : of all men in his 
 time, no one so thoroughly prepared the way for Voltaire. 
 
 Bayle's whole argument is rooted in the prophecy of 
 Seneca. He declares : " Comets are bodies subject to the 
 ordinary law of Nature, and not prodigies amenable to no 
 law." He shows historically that there is no reason to re- 
 gard comets as portents of earthly evils. As to the fact that 
 such evils occur after the passage of comets across the sky, 
 he compares the person believing that comets cause these 
 evils to a woman looking out of a window into a Paris street 
 and believing that the carriages pass because she looks out. 
 As to the accomplishment of some predictions, he cites the 
 shrewd saying of Henry IV, to the effect that " the public 
 
 * For Blaise de Vigenere, see his Traite des Cometes, Paris, 1578. For Dudith, 
 see his De Cometarum Significatione, Basle, 1579, to which the letter of Erastus is 
 appended. Bekker's views may be found in his Onderzoek van de Betekening der 
 Cometen, Leeuwarden, 1683. For Lubienitzky's, see his Theatrum Cometicum, Am- 
 sterdam, 1667, in part ii : Historia Cometarum, preface " to the reader." For Petit, 
 see his Dissertation sur la Nature des Cometes, Paris, 1665 (German translation, 
 Dresden and Zittau, 1681).
 
 2oo FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 will remember one prediction that comes true better than 
 all the rest that have proved false." Finally, he sums up by 
 saying : " The more we study man, the more does it appear 
 that pride is his ruling passion, and that he affects grandeur 
 even in his misery. Mean and perishable creature that he 
 is, he has been able to persuade men that he can not die with- 
 out disturbing the whole course of Nature and obliging the 
 heavens to put themselves to fresh expense in order to light 
 his funeral pomp. Foolish and ridiculous vanity! If we 
 had a just idea of the universe, we should soon comprehend 
 that the death or birth of a prince is too insignificant a mat- 
 ter to stir the heavens." * 
 
 This great philosophic champion of right reason was fol- 
 lowed by a literary champion hardly less famous ; for Fonte- 
 nelle now gave to the French theatre his play of The Comet, 
 and a point of capital importance in France was made by 
 rendering the army of ignorance ridiculous.f 
 
 Such was the line of philosophic and literary attack, as 
 developed from Scaliger to Fontenelle. But beneath and 
 in the midst of all of it, from first to last, giving firmness, 
 strength, and new sources of vitality to it, was the steady 
 development of scientific effort ; and to the series of great 
 men who patiently wrought and thought out the truth by 
 scientific methods through all these centuries belong the 
 honours of the victory. 
 
 For generations men in various parts of the world had 
 been making careful observations on these strange bodies. 
 As far back as the time when Luther and Melanchthon and 
 Zwingli were plunged into alarm by various comets from 
 1531 to 1539, Peter Apian kept his head sufficiently cool to 
 make scientific notes of their paths through the heavens. 
 A little later, when the great comet of 1556 scared popes, 
 emperors, and reformers alike, such men as Fabricius at Vi- 
 enna and Heller at Nuremberg quietly observed its path. 
 
 * Regarding Bayle, see Madler, Himmehkunde, vol. i, p. 327. For special points 
 of interest in Bayle's argument, see his Pensfas Diverses sur les Comttes, Amsterdam, 
 1749, pp. 79, 1 02, 134, 206. For the response to Jurieu, see the Continuation des 
 Penstes, Rotterdam, 1705 ; also Champion, p. 164, Lecky, ttbi j/nz,and Guillemin, 
 pp. 29, 30. 
 
 f See Fontenelle, cited by Champion, p. 167.
 
 THE INVASION OF SCEPTICISM. 2 OI 
 
 In vain did men like Dieterich and Heerbrand and Celich 
 from various parts of Germany denounce such observations 
 and investigations as impious ; they were steadily continued, 
 and in 1577 came the first which led to the distinct founda- 
 tion of the modern doctrine. In that year appeared a comet 
 which again plunged Europe into alarm. In every European 
 country this alarm was strong, but in Germany strongest of 
 all. The churches were filled with terror-stricken multi- 
 tudes. Celich preaching at Magdeburg was echoed by 
 Heerbrand preaching at Tubingen, and both these from 
 thousands of other pulpits, Catholic and Protestant, through- 
 out Europe. In the midst of all this din and outcry a few 
 men quietly but steadily observed the monster ; and Tycho 
 Brahe announced, as the result, that its path lay farther from 
 the earth than the orbit of the moon. Another great astro- 
 nomical genius, Kepler, confirmed this. This distinct be- 
 ginning of the new doctrine was bitterly opposed by theo- 
 logians ; they denounced it as one of the evil results of that 
 scientific meddling with the designs of Providence against 
 which they had so long declaimed in pulpits and professors' 
 chairs ; they even brought forward some astronomers am- 
 bitious or wrong-headed enough to testify that Tycho and 
 Kepler were in error.* 
 
 Nothing could be more natural than such opposition ; 
 for this simple announcement by Tycho Brahe began a new 
 era. It shook the very foundation of cometary superstition. 
 The Aristotelian view, developed by the theologians, was 
 that what lies within the moon's orbit appertains to the earth 
 and is essentially transitory and evil, while what lies beyond 
 it belongs to the heavens and is permanent, regular, and 
 pure. Tycho Brahe and Kepler, therefore, having by means 
 of scientific observation and thought taken comets out of the 
 category of meteors and appearances in the neighbourhood 
 of the earth, and placed them among the heavenly bodies, 
 dealt a blow at the very foundations of the theological argu- 
 ment, and gave a great impulse to the idea that comets are 
 
 * See Madler, Himmelskunde, vol. i, pp. i8r, 197 ; also Wolf, Gesch. d. Astrono- 
 mic, and Janssen, Gesch. d. deutschen Volkes, vol. v, p. 350. Heerbrand's sermon, 
 cited above, is a good specimen of the theologic attitude. See Pingre, vol. ii, 
 p. 81.
 
 2Q2 FROM " SIGNS AND WONDERS " TO LAW. 
 
 themselves heavenly bodies moving regularly and in obedi- 
 ence to law. 
 
 IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. THE FINAL 
 VICTORY OF SCIENCE. 
 
 Attempts were now made to compromise. It was de- 
 clared that, while some comets were doubtless supralunar, 
 some must be sublunar. But this admission was no less 
 fatal on another account. During many centuries the theory 
 favoured by the Church had been, as we have seen, that the 
 earth was surrounded by hollow spheres, concentric and 
 transparent, forming a number of glassy strata incasing one 
 another " like the different coatings of an onion," and that 
 each of these in its movement about the earth carries one or 
 more of the heavenly bodies. Some maintained that these 
 spheres were crystal ; but Lactantius, and with him various 
 fathers of the Church, spoke of the heavenly vault as made 
 of ice. Now, the admission that comets could move be- 
 yond the moon was fatal to this theory, for it sent them 
 crashing through these spheres of ice or crystal, and there- 
 fore through the whole sacred fabric of the Ptolemaic 
 theory.* 
 
 Here we may pause for a moment to note one of the 
 chief differences between scientific and theological reasoning 
 considered in themselves. Kepler's main reasoning as to 
 the existence of a law for cometary movement was right ; 
 but his secondary reasoning, that comets move nearly in 
 straight lines, was wrong. His right reasoning was devel- 
 oped by Gassendi in France, by Borelli in Italy, by Hevel 
 and Doerfel in Germany, by Eysat and Bernouilli in Switz- 
 erland, by Percy and most important of all, as regards 
 mathematical demonstration by Newton in England. The 
 general theory, which was true, they accepted and devel- 
 oped ; the secondary theory, which was found untrue, they 
 rejected ; and, as a result, both of what they thus accepted 
 
 * For these features in cometary theory, see Pingre", vol. i, p. 89 ; also Hum- 
 boldt, Cosmos (English translation, London, 1868), vol. iii p. 169.
 
 THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 203 
 
 and of what they rejected, was evolved the basis of the 
 whole modern cometary theory. 
 
 Very different was this from the theological method. As 
 a rule, when there arises a thinker as great in theology as 
 Kepler in science, the whole mass of his conclusions ripens 
 into a dogma. His disciples labour not to test it, but to es- 
 tablish it; and while, in the Catholic Church, it becomes a 
 dogma to be believed or disbelieved under the penalty of 
 damnation, it becomes in the Protestant Church the basis 
 for one more sect. 
 
 Various astronomers laboured to develop the truth dis- 
 covered by Tycho and strengthened by Kepler. Cassini 
 seemed likely to win for Italy the glory of completing the 
 great structure ; but he was sadly fettered by Church influ- 
 ences, and was obliged to leave most of the work to others. 
 Early among these was Hevel. He gave reasons for be- 
 lieving that comets move in parabolic curves toward the 
 sun. Then came a man who developed this truth further 
 Samuel Doerfel ; and it is a pleasure to note that he was a 
 clergyman. The comet of 1680, which set Erni in Switzer- 
 land, Mather in New England, and so many others in all 
 parts of the world at declaiming, set Doerfel at thinking. 
 Undismayed by the authority of Origeri and St. John Chrys- 
 ostom, the arguments of Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli, 
 the outcries of Celich, Heerbrand, and Dieterich, he pon- 
 dered over the problem in his little Saxon parsonage, until 
 in 1 68 1 he set forth his proofs that comets are heavenly 
 bodies moving in parabolas of which the sun is the focus. 
 Bernouilli arrived at the same conclusion ; and, finally, this 
 great series of men and works was closed by the greatest of 
 all, when Newton, in 1686, having taken the data furnished 
 by the comet of 1680, demonstrated that comets are guided 
 in their movements by the same principle that controls the 
 planets in their orbits. Thus was completed the evolution 
 of this new truth in science. 
 
 Yet we are not to suppose that these two great series of 
 philosophical and scientific victories cleared the field of all 
 opponents. Declamation and pretended demonstration of 
 the old theologic view were still heard ; but the day of com- 
 plete victory dawned when Halley, after most thorough ob-
 
 204 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW/ 
 
 servation and calculation, recognised the comet of 1682 as 
 one which had already appeared at stated periods, and fore- 
 told its return in about seventy-five years ; and the battle 
 was fully won when Clairaut, seconded by Lalande and Mme. 
 Lepaute, predicted distinctly the time when the comet would 
 arrive at its perihelion, and this prediction was verified.* 
 Then it was that a Roman heathen philosopher was proved 
 more infallible and more directly under Divine inspiration 
 than a Roman Christian pontiff ; for the very comet which 
 the traveller finds to-day depicted on the Bayeux tapestry 
 as portending destruction to Harold and the Saxons at the 
 Norman invasion of England, and which was regarded by 
 Pope Calixtus as portending evil to Christendom, was found 
 six centuries later to be, as Seneca had prophesied, a heav- 
 enly body obeying the great laws of the universe, and com- 
 ing at regular periods. Thenceforth the whole ponderous 
 enginery of this superstition, with its proof-texts regarding 
 " signs in the heavens," its theological reasoning to show the 
 moral necessity of cometary warnings, and its ecclesiastical 
 fulminations against the "atheism, godlessness, and infidel- 
 ity " of scientific investigation, was seen by all thinking 
 men to be as weak against the scientific method as Indian 
 arrows against needle guns. Copernicus, Galileo, Cassini, 
 Doerfel, Newton, Halley, and Clairaut had gained the 
 victory.f 
 
 It is instructive to note, even after the main battle was 
 lost, a renewal of the attempt, always seen under like circum- 
 stances, to effect a compromise, to establish a " safe science " 
 on grounds pseudo-scientific and pseudo-theologic. Luther, 
 with his strong common sense, had foreshadowed this ; Kep- 
 ler had expressed a willingness to accept it. It was insisted 
 that comets might be heavenly bodies moving in regular 
 
 * See Pingre, vol. i, p. 53 ; Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, p. 305, etc., 
 etc. For a curious partial anticipation by Hooke, in 1664, of the great truth an- 
 nounced by Halley in 1682, see Pepys's Diary for March i, 1664. For excellent 
 summaries of the whole work of Halley and Clairaut and their forerunners and 
 associates, see Pingre, Madler, Wolf, Arago, et al. 
 
 f In accordance with Halley's prophecy, the comet of 1682 has returned in 
 1759 and 1835. See Madler, Guillemin Watson, Grant, Delambre, Proctor, article 
 Astronomy in Encycl. Brit., and especially, for details, Wolf, pp. 407-412 and 701- 
 722. For clear statement regarding Doerfel, see Wolf, p. 411.
 
 THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. 205 
 
 orbits, and even obedient to law, and yet be sent as " signs in 
 the heavens." Many good men clung longingly to this phase 
 of the old belief, and in 1770 Semler, professor at Halle, tried 
 to satisfy both sides. He insisted that, while from a scien- 
 tific point of view comets could not exercise any physical 
 influence upon the world, yet from a religious point of view 
 they could exercise a moral influence as reminders of the 
 Just Judge of the Universe. 
 
 So hard was it for good men to give up the doctrine of 
 " signs in the heavens," seemingly based upon Scripture and 
 exercising such a healthful moral tendency ! As is always 
 the case after such a defeat, these votaries of " sacred sci- 
 ence " exerted the greatest ingenuity in devising statements 
 and arguments to avert the new doctrine. Within our own 
 century the great Catholic champion, Joseph de Maistre, 
 echoed these in declaring his belief that comets are special 
 warnings of evil. So, too, in Protestant England, in 1818, 
 the Gentleman s Magazine stated that under the malign influ- 
 ence of a recent comet " flies became blind and died early in 
 the season," and " the wife of a London shoemaker had four 
 children at a birth." And even as late as 1829 Mr. Forster, 
 an English physician, published a work to prove that comets 
 produce hot summers, cold winters, epidemics, earthquakes, 
 clouds of midges and locusts, and nearly every calamity 
 conceivable. He bore especially upon the fact that the 
 comet of 1665 was coincident with the plague in London, 
 apparently forgetting that the other great cities of England 
 and the Continent were not thus visited ; and, in a climax, 
 announces the fact that the comet of 1663 " made all the cats 
 in Westphalia sick." 
 
 There still lingered one little cloud-patch of superstition, 
 arising mainly from the supposed fact that comets had really 
 been followed by a marked rise in temperature. Even this 
 poor basis for the belief that they might, after all, affect 
 earthly affairs was swept away, and science won here an- 
 other victory ; for Arago, by thermometric records carefully 
 kept at Paris from 1735 to 1781, proved that comets had pro- 
 duced no effect upon temperature. Among multitudes of 
 similar examples he showed that, in some years when several 
 comets appeared, the temperature was lower than in other
 
 2o6 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 years when few or none appeared. In 1737 there were two 
 comets, and the weather was cool; in 1785 there was no 
 comet, and the weather was hot; through the whole fifty 
 years it was shown that comets were sometimes followed 
 by hot weather, sometimes by cool, and that no rule was 
 deducible. The victory of science was complete at every 
 point.* 
 
 But in this history there was one little exhibition so curi- 
 ous as to be worthy of notice, though its permanent effect 
 upon thought was small. VVhiston and Burnet, so devoted 
 to what they considered sacred science, had determined that 
 in some way comets must be instruments of Divine wrath. 
 One of them maintained that the deluge was caused by the 
 tail of a comet striking the earth ; the other put forth the 
 theory that comets are places of punishment for the damned 
 in fact, " flying hells." The theories of Whiston and Bur- 
 net found wide acceptance also in Germany, mainly through 
 the all-powerful mediation of Gottsched, so long, from his 
 professor's chair at Leipsic, the dictator of orthodox thought, 
 who not only wrote a brief tractate of his own upon the 
 subject, but furnished a voluminous historical introduction 
 to the more elaborate treatise of Heyn. In this book, 
 which appeared at Leipsic in 1742, the agency of comets in 
 the creation, the flood, and the final destruction of the world 
 is fully proved. Both these theories were, however, soon 
 discredited. 
 
 Perhaps the more interesting of them can best be met by 
 another, which, if not fully established, appears much better 
 based namely, that in 1868 the earth passed directly through 
 * the tail of a comet, with no deluge, no sound of any wailings 
 of the damned, with but slight appearances here and there, 
 only to be detected by the keen sight of the meteorological 
 or astronomical observer. 
 
 In our own country superstitious ideas regarding comets 
 continued to have some little currency ; but their life was 
 
 * For Forster, see his Illustrations of the Atmospherical Origin of Epidemic 
 Diseases, Chelmsford, 1829, cited by Arago ; also in Quarterly Review for April, 
 1835. For the writings of several on both sides, and especially of those who sought 
 to save, as far as possible, the sacred theory of comets, see Madler, vol. ii, p. 384 
 et seq., and Wolf, p. 186.
 
 THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. 2O/ 
 
 short. The tendency shown by Cotton Mather, at the be- 
 ginning of the eighteenth century, toward acknowledging 
 the victory of science, was completed by the utterances of 
 Winthrop, professor at Harvard, who in 1759 published two 
 lectures on comets, in which he simply and clearly revealed 
 the truth, never scoffing, but reasoning quietly and rever- 
 ently. In one passage he says : " To be thrown into a panic 
 whenever a comet appears, on account of the ill effects which 
 some few of them might possibly produce, if they were not 
 under proper direction, betrays a weakness unbecoming a 
 reasonable being." 
 
 A happy influence in this respect was exercised on both 
 continents by John Wesley. Tenaciously as he had held to 
 the supposed scriptural view in so many other matters of 
 science, in this he allowed his reason to prevail, accepted 
 the demonstrations of Halley, and gloried in them.* 
 
 The victory was indeed complete. Happily, none of the 
 fears expressed by Conrad Dieterich and Increase Mather 
 were realized. No catastrophe has ensued either to religion 
 or to morals. In the realm of religion the Psalms of David 
 remain no less beautiful, the great utterances of the Hebrew 
 prophets no less powerful ; the Sermon on the Mount, " the 
 first commandment, and the second, which is like unto it," 
 the definition of " pure religion and undefiled " by St. James, 
 appeal no less to the deepest things in the human heart. In 
 the realm of morals, too, serviceable as the idea of firebrands 
 thrown by the right hand of an avenging God to scare a 
 jiaughty world might seem, any competent historian must 
 find that the destruction of the old theological cometary 
 theory was followed by moral improvement rather than by 
 deterioration. We have but to compare the general moral 
 tone of society to-day, wretchedly imperfect as it is, with 
 that existing in the time when this superstition had its 
 
 * For Heyn, see his Versuch einer Betrachtung iiber die Cometen, die Siindfluth 
 und das Vor spiel des jiingsten Gerichts, Leipsic, 1742. A Latin version, of the 
 same year, bears the title, Specimen Cometologia Sacra. For the theory that the 
 earth encountered the tail of a comet, see Guillemin and Watson. For survival of 
 the old idea in America, see a Sermon of Israel Loring, of Sudbury, published in 
 1722. For Prof. J. Winthrop, see his Comets. For Wesley, see his Natural Phi- 
 losophy, London, 1784, vol. iii, p. 303.
 
 208 FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW. 
 
 strongest hold. We have only to compare the court of 
 Henry VIII with the court of Victoria, the reign of the 
 later Valois and earlier Bourbon princes with the present 
 French Republic, the period of the Medici and Sforzas and 
 Borgias with the period of Leo XIII and Humbert, the 
 monstrous wickedness of the Thirty Years' War with the 
 ennobling patriotism of the Franco-Prussian struggle, and 
 the despotism of the miserable German princelings of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the reign of the 
 Emperor William. 
 
 The gain is not simply that mankind has arrived at a 
 clearer conception of law in the universe ; not merely that 
 thinking men see more clearly that we are part of a system 
 not requiring constant patching and arbitrary interference ; 
 but perhaps best of all is the fact that science has cleared 
 away one more series of those dogmas which tend to debase 
 rather than to develop man's whole moral and religious 
 nature. In this emancipation from terror and fanaticism, as 
 in so many other results of scientific thinking, we have a 
 proof of the inspiration of those great words, " THE TRUTH 
 SHALL MAKE YOU FREE."
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 I. GROWTH OF THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS. 
 
 AMONG the philosophers of Greece we find, even at an 
 early period, germs of geological truth, and, what is of vast 
 importance, an atmosphere in which such germs could grow. 
 These germs were transmitted to Roman thought ; an at- 
 mosphere 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.* 
 
 But the germs of scientific knowledge and thought de- 
 veloped in the ancient world could be entirely smothered 
 neither by eloquence nor by logic ; some little scientific ob- 
 
 * For a compact and admirable statement as to the dawn of geological concep- 
 tions in Greece and Rome, see Mr. Lester Ward's essay on paleobotany in the 
 Fifth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, for l883~'84. As to 
 the reasons why Greek philosophers did comparatively so little for geology, see 
 D'Archiac, Geologic, p. 18. For the contempt felt by Lactantius and St. Augustine 
 toward astronomical science, see foregoing chapters on Astronomy and Geography. 
 15 209
 
 210 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 servation 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 ex- 
 hibits 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 ortho- 
 dox 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 rea- 
 soning 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.* 
 
 Among the many questions he then raised and discussed 
 may be mentioned such as these : " What caused the crea- 
 tion 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? "f 
 
 Sundry answers to these and similar questions formed 
 the main contributions of the greatest of the Latin fathers to 
 
 * For citations and authorities on these points, see the chapter on Meteorology. 
 
 f See Augustine, De Genesi, ii, 13 ; iii, 13, 15 et seq. ; ix, 12 et seq. For the ref- 
 erence to St. Jerome, see Shields, Final Philosophy, p. 119 ; also Lyell, Introduc- 
 tion to Geology, vol. i, chap. ii.
 
 GROWTH OF THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS. 2 II 
 
 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 promi- 
 nent scholars followed him implicitly. Even so strong 
 a man as Pope Gregory the Great yielded to his influ- 
 ence, 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 ven- 
 tured timidly to extend their conclusions upon lines he had 
 laid down. 
 
 In his great work on Etymologies, Isidore took up Augus- 
 tine's attempt to bring the creation into satisfactory rela^ 
 tions with the book of Genesis, and, as to fossil remains, he, 
 like Tertuliian, thought that they resulted from the Flood of 
 Noah. In the following century Bede developed the same 
 orthodox traditions.* 
 
 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 dis- 
 tribution 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 kin- 
 dred science of zoology were followed by St. Thomas Aqui- 
 
 * For Isidore, see the Etymologist, xi, 4, xiii, 22. For Bede, see the Hexatmeron, 
 i, ii, in Migne, tome xci.
 
 212 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 nas and by the whole body of mediseval 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 " ; * in the thir- 
 teenth, Albert the Great attributed them to a "formative 
 quality ;"f in the following centuries some philosophers 
 ventured the idea that they grew from seed ; and the Aris- 
 totelian doctrine of spontaneous generation was constantly 
 used to prove that these stony fossils possessed powers of 
 reproduction like plants and animals. ^ 
 
 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. | 
 
 The direct influence of the Reformation was at first un- 
 favourable 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 scien- 
 tific 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 Scrip- 
 ture by the early Protestants than they had been under 
 the older Church. The dominant spirit among the Reform- 
 ers is shown by the declaration of Peter Martyr to the effect 
 that, if a wrong opinion should obtain regarding the crea- 
 tion as described in Genesis, "all the promises of Christ 
 
 * Vis lapidifica. 
 
 f Virtus formative.. 
 
 \ See authorities given in Mr. Ward's essay, as above. 
 
 I For Avicenna, see Lyell and D'Archiac.
 
 GROWTH OF THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS. 213 
 
 fall into nothing, and all the life of our religion would be 
 lost." * 
 
 In the times immediately succeeding the Reformation 
 matters went from bad to worse. Under Luther and Me- 
 lanchthon there was some little freedom of speculation, but 
 under their successors there was none ; to question any in- 
 terpretation 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 be- 
 tween 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 Liibeck, the ancient centre of the 
 Hanseatic League, close at the beginning of the seven- 
 teenth 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 heav- 
 ens " as not contained in a vast cistern supported by the 
 heavenly vault ; or of the " windows of heaven " as a figure 
 of speech? f 
 
 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 devo- 
 tion to a theory of creation based upon the mere letter of 
 Scripture, and a complete inability to draw knowledge re- 
 garding 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 
 
 * See his Commentary on Genesis, cited by Zoeckler, Geschichte der Beziehungen 
 z-wischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. i, p. 690. 
 f For Pfeiffer, see Zoeckler, vol. i, pp. 638, 689.
 
 214 
 
 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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 six- 
 teenth 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 ";* or of a 
 "seminal air" ;f or of a "tumultuous movement of terres- 
 trial exhalations " ; and there was a prevailing belief that fos- 
 sil 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 in- 
 scrutable purpose of the Almighty. 
 
 This remained a leading orthodox mode of explanation 
 in the Church, Catholic and Protestant, for centuries. 
 
 II. EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. 
 
 But the scientific method could not be entirely hidden ; 
 and, near the beginning of the seventeenth century, De 
 Clave, Bitaud, and De Villon revived it in France. Straight- 
 way 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. ^ 
 
 * Succus lapidificus. \ Aura seminalis. 
 
 \ See Morley, Life of Palissy the Potter, vol. ii, p. 315 et seq.
 
 EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. 
 
 215 
 
 The champions of science, though repressed 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 sun- 
 dry vague concessions to the Genesis legends, they developed 
 geological truth more and more. 
 
 In France, the old theological spirit remained exceed- 
 ingly powerful. About the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury 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 fol- 
 lows : " I declare that I had no intention to contradict the 
 text of Scripture ; that I believe most firmly all therein re- 
 lated 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 con- 
 trary to the narrative of Moses." This humiliating docu- 
 ment reminds us painfully of that forced upon Galileo a 
 hundred years before. 
 
 It has been well observed by one of the greatest of mod- 
 ern authorities that the doctrine which Buffon thus "aban- 
 doned " is as firmly established as that of the earth's rota- 
 tion upon its axis.* 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 begin- 
 ning " is contrary to Scripture. Again we find theological 
 substitutes for scientific explanation ripening into phrases 
 more and more hollow making fossils " sports of Nature," 
 or " mineral concretions," or " creations of plastic force," or 
 " models " made by the Creator before he had fully decided 
 upon the best manner of creating various beings. 
 
 Of this period, when theological substitutes for science 
 were carrying all before them, there still exists a monument 
 
 * See citation and remark in Lyell's Principles of Geology^ chap, iii, p. 57 ; also 
 Huxley, Essays on Controverted Qitestions, p. 62.
 
 2l6 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 commemorating at the same time a farce and a tragedy. 
 This is the work of Johann Beringer, professor in the Uni- 
 versity of Wiirzburg and private physician to the Prince- 
 Bishop the treatise bearing the title Lithographies Wirce- 
 burgensis Specimen Primum, " illustrated with the marvellous 
 likenesses of two hundred figured or rather insectiform 
 stones." Beringer, for the greater glory of God, had pre- 
 viously 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," * 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 speci- 
 mens. 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 mirac- 
 ulous fossils. So robust was his faith that not even a pre- 
 mature 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 wel- 
 comed the work soon convinced even its author. In vain 
 did he try to suppress it ; and, according to tradition, hav- 
 ing 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 hav- 
 ing been sold by a graceless descendant to a Leipsic book- 
 seller, a second edition was brought out under a new title, 
 
 * See Beringer's Lithographies, etc , p. 91.
 
 EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. 2I/ 
 
 and this, too, is now much sought as a precious memorial of 
 human credulity.* 
 
 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 pur- 
 pose, 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 ge- 
 ology 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 meth- 
 od ; 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. f 
 
 * See Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie, Munich, 1872, p. 467, note, and Reusch, 
 Bibel und Natur, p. 197. A list of the 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 
 encyclopaedia of Ersch and Gruber, and the Allgemeine deutsche Biographic. 
 
 f 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 Acade'mie des Sciences, second edition, p. 152. For very 
 frank confessions of the reasons why the Roman 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
 
 2i8 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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 rec- 
 onciliations of textual statements with ascertained fact ; but 
 the second or intermediate period between these two is fre- 
 quently marked by the pitting against science of some great 
 doctrine in theology. We saw this in astronomy, when Bel- 
 larmin and his followers insisted that the scientific doctrine 
 of the earth revolving about the sun is contrary to the theo- 
 logical 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 en- 
 tered the world by sin." 
 
 In this second stage of the theological struggle with geol- 
 ogy, England was especially fruitful in champions of ortho- 
 doxy, 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,* 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 
 
 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 clear, in order to show once and for all that the Church has no right to 
 decide questions in science. 
 * See II Peter iii, 6.
 
 EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. 
 
 2I 9 
 
 doctrine of the " Fall," an astronomical theory regarding the 
 ecliptic, and various notions adapted from Descartes, he in- 
 sisted that, before sin brought on the Deluge, the earth was 
 of perfect mathematical form, smooth and beautiful, " like 
 an egg," with neither seas nor islands nor valleys nor rocks, 
 " with not a wrinkle, scar, or fracture," and that all creation 
 was equally perfect. 
 
 In the second book of his great work Burnet went still 
 further. As in his first book he had mixed his texts of Gene- 
 sis 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 buiid 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 lan- 
 guages, and called forth a multitude of supporters and oppo- 
 nents 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 theo- 
 logical 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 Bur- 
 net, he endeavoured to avail himself of the Newtonian idea, 
 and brought in, to aid the geological catastrophe caused by 
 human sin, a cornet, which broke open " the fountains of the 
 great deep." 
 
 But, far more important than either of these champions,
 
 22Q FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 there arose in the eighteenth century, to aid in the subjec- 
 tion 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 hope- 
 lessly fettered by the mere letter of Scripture, and by a tem- 
 porary phase in theology. As in regard to witchcraft and 
 the doctrine of comets, so in regard to geology, this theo- 
 logical view drew Wesley into enormous error.* 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 neces- 
 sity of upholding this doctrine carried Wesley seems now 
 almost beyond belief. Basing his theology on the declara- 
 tion 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 earth- 
 quakes, 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 to- 
 gether in pain until now," he finds additional scriptural proof 
 that the earthquakes were the result of Adam's fall. He de- 
 clares, in his sermon on Gods Approbation of His Works, that 
 " before the sin of Adam there were no agitations within 
 the bowels of the earth, no violent convulsions, no concus- 
 sions 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 
 
 * For his statement that " the giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up 
 of the Bible," see Wesley's Journal, i766-'68.
 
 EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. 221 
 
 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 to- 
 day those mineral veins so essential to modern civilization, 
 was entirely beyond his comprehension. He insists that 
 earthquakes are " God's strange works of judgment, the 
 proper effect and punishment of sin." 
 
 So, too, as to death and pain. In his sermon on the Fall 
 of Man he took the ground that death and pain entered the 
 world by Adam's transgression, insisting that the carnage 
 now going on among animals is the result of Adam's sin. 
 Speaking of the birds, beasts, and insects, he says that, be- 
 fore 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 frag- 
 ments of weaker animals within the fossilized bodies of the 
 stronger have destroyed all Wesley's arguments in behalf of 
 his great theory.* 
 
 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 theo- 
 logical 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 
 
 * See Wesley's sermon on God s Approbation of His Works, parts xi and xii.
 
 222 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 obliged to confront theology in revealing the python in the 
 Eocene, ages before man appeared.* 
 
 The immediate results of such teaching by such men was 
 to throw many who would otherwise have resorted to ob- 
 servation 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 " infinitesi- 
 mal 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, f 
 
 Such was the influence of this succession of great men 
 that toward the close of the last century the English oppo- 
 nents 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 ecclesias- 
 tics. Williams, a thoughtful layman, declared that such re- 
 searches 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 sci- 
 entific 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 lit- 
 
 * 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. 
 
 f See citation in Mr. Ward's article, as above, p. 390.
 
 EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW. 223 
 
 eral 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 be- 
 came 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. Buck- 
 land and Dean Conybeare and Pye Smith and Prof. Sedg- 
 wick, the epithets of "infidel," "impugner of the sacred 
 record," and "assailant of the volume of God."* 
 
 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 in- 
 quiry," denouncing it as " a dark art," as " dangerous and 
 disreputable," as " a forbidden province," as " infernal ar- 
 tillery," and as " an awful evasion of the testimony of reve- 
 lation, "f 
 
 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 nar- 
 rowest 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 him- 
 self by quietly accepting the claims of science and making 
 the best of them, despite all these clamours. This man was 
 
 * For these citations, see Lyell, Principles of Geology, introduction. 
 f See Pye Smith, D. D., Geology and Scripture, pp. 156, 157, 168, 169.
 
 22 4 
 
 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 Nicholas Wiseman, better known afterward as Cardinal 
 Wiseman. The conduct of this pillar of the Roman Cath- 
 olic Church contrasts admirably with that of timid Protes- 
 tants, who were filling England with shrieks and denuncia- 
 tions.* 
 
 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 Kings- 
 ley. In an article admirable for keen wit and kindly temper, 
 he showed that Genesis speaks just as clearly of a solid fir- 
 mament as of six ordinary days, and that, if Prof. Stuart had 
 surmounted one difficulty and accepted the Copernican the- 
 ory, he might as well get over another and accept the reve- 
 lations of geology. The encounter was quick and decisive, 
 and the victory was with science and the broader scholar- 
 ship of Yale.f 
 
 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 de- 
 nounced 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 
 
 * 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 Catholic and Protestant 
 countries, see Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap, ix, p. 525. 
 
 f See Silliman's Journal, vol. xxx, p. 114.
 
 THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 225 
 
 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.* 
 
 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 sanc- 
 tion, 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 men- 
 tioned in Scripture.f 
 
 * Prof. Goldwin Smith informs me that the papers of Sir Robert Peel, yet un- 
 published, 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 con- 
 vincing a proof of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and 
 mathematical science which have been, by slow degrees, vouchsafed to man and 
 are still granted in these latter times by the differential calculus, now superseded 
 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. 
 
 f For Tertullian, see his De Pallia, c. ii (Migne, Pair. Lat., vol. ii, p. 1033). 
 For Augustine's view, see Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles, fourth edi- 
 tion, vol. ii, p. 143. 
 16
 
 226 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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.* 
 
 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.f In vain did good men protest against 
 the injury sure to be brought upon religion by tying it 
 to a scientific theory sure to be exploded ; the doctrine 
 that fossils are the remains of animals drowned at the 
 Flood continued to be upheld by the great majority of 
 theological leaders for nearly three centuries as "sound 
 doctrine," and as a blessed means of reconciling science 
 with Scripture. To sustain this scriptural view, efforts 
 energetic and persistent were put forth both by Catholics 
 and Protestants. 
 
 In France, the learned Benedictine, Calmet, in his great 
 works on the Bible, accepted it as late as the beginning of 
 the eighteenth century, believing the mastodon's bones ex- 
 hibited 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.:}: 
 
 * For Luther's opinion, see his Commentary on Genesis. 
 
 f 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, // Dogma 
 e le Scienze Positive, Milan, 1886, pp. 203 et seq. 
 
 \ For the steady adherence to this sacred theory, see Audiat, Vie de Pa- 
 lissy, p. 412, and Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv, p. 492. For Calmet, see
 
 THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE. 227 
 
 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 " founda- 
 tions of the great deep " ; and we have also seen how Whis- 
 ton, 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, de- 
 serving 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 Xenoph- 
 anes 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 ex- 
 hibited 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 
 
 his Dissertation sur les G/ants, cited in Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Ttrato- 
 logiques, p. 191.
 
 228 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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.* 
 
 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 " : f this great 
 discovery was hailed everywhere with joy, for it seemed to 
 prove not only that human beings were drowned at the Del- 
 uge, 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, sud- 
 denly 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. J 
 
 * See Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossements fossilts, fourth edition, vol. ii, p. 
 56; also Geoffrey St.-Hilaire, cited by Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Teratolo- 
 giques, p. 190. 
 
 \ Homo diluvii testis. 
 
 \ See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 172 ; also Scheuchzer, Physica Sacra, Augustas Vin- 
 del. et Ulmse, 1732. For the ancient belief regarding giants, see Leopardi, Saggio. 
 For accounts of the views of Mazurier and Scheuchzer, see Cuvier ; also Buchner, 
 Man in Past, Present, and Future, English translation, pp. 235, 236. For In- 
 crease 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 I'titude de la PaUontologie 
 Stratigrapkique, Paris, 1864, p. 201. For admirable summaries, see Lyell, Prin- 
 ciples of Geology, London, 1867; D'Archiac, Geolog ie et PaUontologie, Paris, 1866; 
 Pictet, Traite" de Paleontologie, Paris, 1853 ; Vezian, Prodrome de la GSologie, 
 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.
 
 THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 22 9 
 
 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 fos- 
 sils in various elevated districts of Europe reached Voltaire. 
 He, too, had a theologic system to support, though his sys- 
 tem 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 re- 
 turning from the Holy Land ; and that the fossil bones found 
 between Paris and Etampes were parts of a skeleton belong- 
 ing to the cabinet of some ancient philosopher. Through 
 chapter after chapter, Voltaire, obeying the supposed neces- 
 sities of his theology, fought desperately the growing results 
 of the geologic investigations of his time.* 
 
 But far more prejudicial to Christianity was the con- 
 tinued 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 inter- 
 pretation of it, the followers of Burnet, Whiston, and Wood- 
 ward 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 ge- 
 ological, 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 
 
 * See Voltaire, Dissertation sur les Changements arriv/s dans notre Globe ; also 
 Voltaire, Les Singulai tie's de la Nature, chap, xii ; also Jevons, Principles of Sci- 
 ence, vol. ii, p. 328.
 
 230 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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 Del- 
 uge 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.* 
 
 But the steady work of science went on : not all the force 
 of the Church not even the splendid engravings in Scheuch- 
 zer's Bible could stop it, and the foundations of this theo- 
 logical 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 un- 
 dermine it. As we arrive at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century, science is becoming irresistible in this field. Blu- 
 menbach, 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 fos- 
 sils began to throw new light into the whole subject of geol- 
 ogy. 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 
 
 * 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, Cyclopczdia 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.
 
 THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 231 
 
 that peace was akin to treason. By large but vague conces- 
 sions Cuvier kept the theologians satisfied, while he under- 
 mined 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 Cliristianity 
 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 appear- 
 ances 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 sea- 
 shore 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." * 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.f 
 
 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 under- 
 gone 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 famil- 
 iar to the world, by calling on Cuvier and all other geolo- 
 gists to " ask for the old paths and walk therein until they 
 shall simplify their system and reduce their numerous revo- 
 lutions to the two events or epochs only the six days of 
 Creation and the Deluge." ^ The geologists showed no dis- 
 position to yield to this peremptory summons ; on the con- 
 trary, the President of the British Geological Society, and 
 even so eminent a churchman and geologist as Dean Buck- 
 land, soon acknowledged that facts obliged them to give up 
 
 * Ginie du Christianisme, chap, v, pp. 1-14, cited by Reusch, vol. i, p. 250. 
 f For admirable sketches of Brongniart and other paleobotanists, see Ward, as 
 above. 
 
 \ See the works of Granville Penn, vol. ii, p. 273.
 
 232 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 the theory that the fossils of the coal measures were de- 
 posited at the Deluge of Noah, and to deny that the Deluge 
 was universal. 
 
 The defection of Buckland was especially felt by the or- 
 thodox party. His ability, honesty, and loyalty to his pro- 
 fession, as well as his position as Canon of Christ Church 
 and Professor of Geology at Oxford, gave him great author- 
 ity, 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 ex- 
 plorations had revealed overwhelming evidences of the vast 
 antiquity of the earth, he had still clung to the Flood theory 
 in his Reliquicz Dihiviance. 
 
 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 imita- 
 tion 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 deep- 
 ened : instead of epigrams and caricatures came bitter at- 
 tacks, and from the pulpit and press came showers of mis- 
 siles. 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 FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE. 233 
 
 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 in- 
 sisted 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 mul- 
 titude 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 at- 
 tacked 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 per- 
 sisted 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.* 
 
 As typical of his more moderate opponents we may take 
 Fairholme, who in 1837 published his Mosaic Deluge, and ar- 
 gued 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 lie bewailed the 
 defection of the President of the Geological Society and 
 Dean Buckland protesting against geologists who " persist 
 
 * 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.
 
 234 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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 Eng- 
 lish Geology," were developed by a noble succession of in- 
 vestigators, and the victory was sure. Meanwhile those 
 theologians who felt that denunciation of science as " god- 
 less " 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.* 
 
 One of the first evidences of the completeness of this sur- 
 render 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 com- 
 mitted the article Deluge to a man of very considerable abil- 
 ity, 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 sec- 
 
 * 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.
 
 THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 235 
 
 ond 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 con- 
 cedes the whole thing.' You will see by this under what 
 trammels scientific thought has laboured in this department 
 of inquiry." * 
 
 A similar surrender was seen when from a new edition 
 of Home's Introduction to the Scriptures, the standard text- 
 book of orthodoxy, its accustomed use of fossils to prove the 
 universality of the Deluge was quietly dropped, f 
 
 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 semi- 
 nary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Dr. Samuel Turner, 
 showed his Christian faith and courage by virtually accept- 
 ing 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 Cyclopedia, published under their su- 
 pervision, 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 pro- 
 test from any man of note in any branch of the American 
 Church.:}: 
 
 The time when the struggle was relinquished by enlight- 
 
 * See Official Report of the National Conference of Unitarian and other Chris- 
 tian Churches held at Saratoga, 1882, p. 97. 
 
 f This was about 1856 ; see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 329. 
 
 \ 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 Cyclopedia of 
 Biblical Knowledge, etc., article Deluge. For similar surrenders of the Deluge in 
 various other religious encyclopaedias and commentaries, sec Huxley, Essays on 
 Controverted Questions, chap. xiiL
 
 236 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 ened 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 conclu- 
 sions of science.* 
 
 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, f 
 
 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." \ 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 tne 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.* 
 
 In the Russo-Greek Church, in 1869, Archbishop Ma- 
 carius, 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 ex- 
 plain ; 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 scat- 
 
 * See Reusch, Bibel und Natur, chap. xxi. 
 
 t See Whiteside, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, vol. iii, chap. xiv. 
 \ See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 472. 
 
 * See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 478, and Bosizio, Geoiogie und die Sundjluth, May- 
 ence, 1877, preface, p. xiv.
 
 THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 237 
 
 tered among- them by the hand- of the Almighty during six 
 ordinary days.* 
 
 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 de- 
 stroyed all living things save Noah, his family, and the ani- 
 mals 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 anti- 
 scientific doctrines to bear upon the people at large the 
 only effect being to arouse grave doubts regarding Chris- 
 tianity 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 discov- 
 eries just afterward in Assyria, it was put beyond a reason- 
 able 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 
 
 * See Zoeckler, vol. ii, pp. 472, 571, and elsewhere ; also citations in Reusch 
 and Shields.
 
 238 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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 Ger- 
 many with the result that the Hebrew account of the Del- 
 uge, to which for ages theologians had obliged all geological re- 
 search to conform, was quietly relegated, even by most emi- 
 nent Christian scholars, to the realm of myth and legend.* 
 
 Sundry feeble attempts to break the force of this dis- 
 covery, 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 show- 
 ing the evolution of a higher and nobler sentiment which 
 demanded a moral cause adequate to justify such a catas- 
 trophe. 
 
 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 
 
 * 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 Lenor- 
 mant, Les Origincs de VHistoire, 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.
 
 FINAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 239 
 
 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 thought- 
 ful, 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 mis- 
 fortune.* 
 
 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 be- 
 come 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 
 
 * For the foregoing statements regarding Germany the writer relies on his per- 
 sonal 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.
 
 240 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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."* 
 
 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 
 
 * See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 475.
 
 FINAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 241 
 
 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.* 
 
 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 simul- 
 taneously, 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 vol- 
 canoes, the fossils of every sort in every part of the earth, 
 the foot-tracks of birds and reptiles, the half-digested re- 
 mains of weaker animals found in the fossilized bodies of the 
 
 * See Prof. Marsh's address as President of the Society for the Advancement of 
 Science, in 1879; an d fora development of the matter, see the chapters on The 
 Antiquity of Man and Egyptology and The Fall of Man and Anthropology, in this 
 work. 
 
 17
 
 242 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 stronger, the marks of hyenas' teeth on fossilized bones found 
 in various caves, and even the skeleton of the Siberian mam- 
 moth 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." * At the close 
 of the whole book Gosse declared : " The field is left clear 
 and undisputed for the one witness on the opposite side, 
 whose testimony is as follows : ' In six days Jehovah made 
 heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is.' " This 
 quotation he placed in capital letters, as the final refutation 
 of all that the science of geology had built. 
 
 In other parts of Europe desperate attempts were made 
 even later to save the letter of our sacred books by the re- 
 vival 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 min- 
 gled 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 ac- 
 cordance 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 simi- 
 lar 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 
 
 * 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-
 
 FINAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 243 
 
 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 destruc- 
 tive 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 ear- 
 nest, and made Satan's enterprise appear miserable and 
 vain." * 
 
 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 diffi- 
 culties that, in a touching passage, he expressed a desire to 
 get back to the theory that fossils were " sports of Na- 
 ture." f 
 
 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 con- 
 fessed 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. 
 
 * See Shields's Final Philosophy, pp. 340 et seq., and Reusch's Nature and the 
 Bible (English translation, 1886), vol. i, pp. 318-320. 
 f See Reusch, vol. i, p. 264.
 
 244 
 
 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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 " trouble- 
 some 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 popu- 
 lation ; secondly, the air population ; thirdly, the land popu- 
 lation of animals ; fourthly, the land population consummated 
 in man." 
 
 His next step was to slide in upon this basis the appar- 
 ently harmless proposition that this division and sequence 
 "is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by nat- 
 ural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclu- 
 sion 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." * 
 
 Such was the skeleton of the structure; it was abun- 
 dantly 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 Chi- 
 nese fortress in the nineteenth century, faced with porcelain 
 and defended with crossbows. 
 
 Its strength was soon seen to be unreal. In an essay ad- 
 
 * See Mr. Gladstone's Da-em of Creation and Worship, a reply to Dr. Reville, 
 in the Nineteenth Century for November, 1885.
 
 FINAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. 245 
 
 mirable in its temper, overwhelming in its facts, and abso- 
 lutely convincing in its argument, Prof. Huxley, late Presi- 
 dent of the Royal Society, and doubtless the most eminent 
 contemporary authority on the scientific questions con- 
 cerned, 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 nat- 
 ural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated con- 
 clusion 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. Glad- 
 stone'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 distribu- 
 tion 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 de- 
 structive 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 " di- 
 rectly contradictory to facts known to every one who is ac- 
 quainted 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 contem- 
 porary 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 ut- 
 terly unfounded.
 
 246 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 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 Uni- 
 versity of Oxford, took up the question in the light of scrip- 
 tural 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 crea- 
 tures, and precede all land animals ; according to the evi- 
 dence 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 spe- 
 cies 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 ad- 
 mission, only one conclusion seems possible. Read without 
 prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i. creates an im- 
 pression 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 char- 
 acteristic 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 ascer- 
 tained by geology. Prof. Huxley had shattered the scien- 
 tific 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
 
 FINAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. 
 
 247 
 
 utterance by a clergyman who has probably done more to 
 save what is essential in Christianity among English-speak- 
 ing 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 de- 
 mands 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 even- 
 ing, 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. Glad- 
 stone? 
 
 The world is finding that the scientific revelation of crea- 
 tion is ever more and more in accordance with worthy con- 
 ceptions 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
 
 248 FROM GENESIS TO GEOLOGY. 
 
 who work to fit the letter of its older literature to the needs 
 of dogmas and sects, but those, above all others, who pa- 
 tiently, 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.* 
 
 * For the Huxley-Gladstone controversy, see The Nineteenth Century for 1885- 
 '86. For Canon Driver, see his article, Tlie Cosmogony of Genesis, in The Ex- 
 positor for January, 1886.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN, EGYPTOLOGY, AND 
 ASSYRIOLOGY. 
 
 I. THE SACRED CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 IN the great ranges of investigation which bear most 
 directly upon the origin of man, there are two in which 
 Science within the last few years has gained final victories. 
 The significance of these in changing, and ultimately in re- 
 versing, one of the greatest currents of theological thought, 
 can hardly be overestimated ; not even the tide set in motion 
 by Cusa, Copernicus, and Galileo was more powerful to 
 bring in a new epoch of belief. 
 
 The first of these conquests relates to the antiquity of 
 man on the earth. 
 
 The fathers of the early Christian Church, receiving all 
 parts of our sacred books as equally inspired, laid little, if 
 any, less stress on the myths, legends, genealogies, and tribal, 
 family, and personal traditions contained in the Old and the 
 New Testaments, than upon the most powerful appeals, the 
 most instructive apologues, and the most lofty poems of 
 prophets, psalmists, and apostles. As to the age of our 
 planet and the life of man upon it, they found in the Bible a 
 carefully recorded series of periods, extending from Adam 
 to the building of the Temple at Jerusalem, the length of 
 each period being explicitly given. 
 
 Thus they had a biblical chronology full, consecutive, 
 and definite extending from the first man created to an 
 event of known date well within ascertained profane his- 
 tory ; as a result, the early Christian commentators arrived 
 at conclusions varying somewhat, but in the main agree- 
 
 249
 
 250 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 
 
 ing. Some, like Origen, Eusebius, Lactantius, Clement of 
 Alexandria, and the great fathers generally of the first 
 three centuries, dwelling especially upon the Septuagint 
 version of the Scriptures, thought that man's creation took 
 place about six thousand years before the Christian era. 
 Strong confirmation of this view was found in a simple 
 piece of purely theological reasoning : for, just as the seven 
 candlesticks of the Apocalypse were long held to prove the 
 existence of seven heavenly bodies revolving about the earth, 
 so it was felt that the six days of creation prefigured six 
 thousand years during which the earth in its first form was 
 to endure ; and that, as the first Adam came on the sixth 
 day, Christ, the second Adam, had come at the sixth millen- 
 nial period. Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, in the second 
 century clinched this argument with the text, " One day is 
 with the Lord as a thousand years." 
 
 On the other hand, Eusebius and St. Jerome, dwelling 
 more especially upon the Hebrew text, which we are brought 
 up to revere, thought that man's origin took place at a some- 
 what shorter period before the Christian era; and St. Je- 
 rome's overwhelming authority made this the dominant view 
 throughout western Europe during fifteen centuries. 
 
 The simplicity of these great fathers as regards chronol- 
 ogy is especially reflected from the tables of Eusebius. In 
 these, Moses, Joshua, and Bacchus, Deborah, Orpheus, and 
 the Amazons, Abimelech, the Sphinx, and CEdipus, appear 
 together as personages equally real, and their positions in 
 chronology equally ascertained. 
 
 At times great bitterness was aroused between those 
 holding the longer and those holding the shorter chronology, 
 but after all the difference between them, as we now see, 
 was trivial ; and it may be broadly stated that in the early 
 Church, " always, everywhere, and by all," it was held as 
 certain, upon the absolute warrant of Scripture, that man 
 was created from four to six thousand years before the 
 Christian era. 
 
 To doubt this, and even much less than this, was to risk 
 damnation. St. Augustine insisted that belief in the antip- 
 odes and in the longer duration of the earth than six thou- 
 sand years were deadly heresies, equally hostile to Scripture.
 
 THE SACRED CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 251 
 
 Philastrius, the friend of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, 
 whose fearful catalogue of heresies served as a guide to in- 
 tolerance throughout the Middle Ages, condemned with the 
 same holy horror those who expressed doubt as to the ortho- 
 dox number of years since the beginning of the world, and 
 those who doubted an earthquake to be the literal voice of 
 an angry God, or who questioned the plurality of the heav- 
 ens, or who gainsaid the statement that God brings out the 
 stars from his treasures and hangs them up in the solid 
 firmament above the earth every night. 
 
 About the beginning of the seventh century Isidore of 
 Seville, the great theologian of his time, took up the subject. 
 He accepted the dominant view not only of Hebrew but of 
 all other chronologies, without anything like real criticism. 
 The childlike faith of his system may be imagined from his 
 summaries which follow. He tells us: 
 
 " Joseph lived one hundred and five years. Greece be- 
 gan to cultivate grain." 
 
 " The Jews were in slavery in Egypt one hundred and 
 forty-four years. Atlas discovered astrology." 
 
 " Joshua ruled for twenty-seven years. Ericthonius yoked 
 horses together." 
 
 " Othniel, forty years. Cadmus introduced letters into 
 Greece." 
 
 " Deborah, forty years. Apollo discovered the art of 
 medicine and invented the cithara." 
 
 " Gideon, forty years. Mercury invented the lyre and 
 gave it to Orpheus." 
 
 Reasoning in this general way, Isidore kept well under 
 the longer date; and, the great theological authority of 
 southern Europe having thus spoken, the question was vir- 
 tually at rest throughout Christendom for nearly a hundred 
 years. 
 
 Early in the eighth century the Venerable Bede took up 
 the problem. Dwelling especially upon the received He- 
 brew text of the Old Testament, he soon entangled himself 
 in very serious difficulties ; but, in spite of the great fathers 
 of the first three centuries, he reduced the antiquity of man 
 on the earth by nearly a thousand years, and, in spite of 
 mutterings against him as coming dangerously near a limit
 
 252 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 
 
 which made the theological argument from the six days of 
 creation to the six ages of the world look doubtful, his au- 
 thority had great weight, and did much to fix western Europe 
 in its allegiance to the general system laid down by Eusebius 
 and Jerome. 
 
 In the twelfth century this belief was re-enforced by a 
 tide of thought from a very different quarter. Rabbi Moses 
 Maimonides and other Jewish scholars, by careful study of 
 the Hebrew text, arrived at conclusions diminishing the an- 
 tiquity of man still further, and thus gave strength through- 
 out the Middle Ages to the shorter chronology : it was 
 incorporated into the sacred science of Christianity ; and 
 Vincent of Beauvais, in his great Speculum Historiale, forming 
 part of that still more enormous work intended to sum up 
 all the knowledge possessed by the ages of faith, placed the 
 creation of man at about four thousand years before our era.* 
 
 At the Reformation this view was not disturbed. The 
 same manner of accepting the sacred text which led Luther, 
 Melanchthon, and the great Protestant leaders generally, to 
 oppose the Copernican theory, fixed them firmly in this 
 biblical chronology; the keynote was sounded for them by 
 Luther when he said, " We know, on the authority of Moses, 
 that longer ago than six thousand years the world did not 
 exist." Melanchthon, more exact, fixed the creation of man 
 at 3963 B. c. 
 
 * For a table summing up the periods, from Adam to the building of the Tem- 
 ple, explicitly given in the Scriptures, see the admirable paper on The Pope and 
 the Bible, in The Contemporary Review for April, 1893. For the date of man's 
 creation as given by leading chronologists in various branches of the Church, see 
 LArt de VMfier les Dates, Paris, 1819, vol. i, pp. 27 et seq. In this edition there 
 are sundry typographical errors ; compare with Wallace, True Age of the World, 
 London, 1844. As to preference for the longer computation by the fathers of the 
 Church, see Clinton, Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 291. For the sacred significance of 
 the six days of creation in ascertaining the antiquity of man, see especially Eicken, 
 Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschatmng ; also Wallace, True Age of the 
 
 World, pp. 2, 3. For the views of St. Augustine, see Topinard, Anthropologie, 
 citing the De Civ. Dei., lib. xvi, c. viii, lib. xii, c. x. For the views of Philastrius, 
 see the De Haresibus, c. 102, 112, et passim, in Migne, tome xii. For Eusebius's 
 simple credulity, see the tables in Palmer's Egyptian Chronicles, vol. ii, pp. 828, 
 829. For Bede, see Usher's Chronologia Sacra, cited in Wallace, True Age of the 
 
 World, p. 35. For Isidore of Seville, see the Etymologia, lib. v, c. 39 ; also lib. iii, 
 in Migne, tome Ixxxii.
 
 THE SACRED CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 253 
 
 But the great Christian scholars continued the old en- 
 deavour to make the time of man's origin more precise : there 
 seems to have been a sort of fascination in the subject which 
 developed a long array of chronologists, all weighing the 
 minutest indications in our sacred books, until the Protestant 
 divine De Vignolles, who had given forty years to the study 
 of biblical chronology, declared in 1738 that he had gathered 
 no less than two hundred computations based upon Scrip- 
 ture, and no two alike. 
 
 As to the Roman Church, about 1580 there was published, 
 by authority of Pope Gregory XIII, the Roman Martyrol- 
 ogy, and this, both as originally published and as revised in 
 1640 under Pope Urban VIII, declared that the creation of 
 man took place 5199 years before Christ. 
 
 But of all who gave themselves up to these chronological 
 studies, the man who exerted the most powerful influence 
 upon the dominant nations of Christendom was Archbishop 
 Usher. In 1650 he published his Annals of the Ancient and 
 New Testaments, and it at once became the greatest authority 
 for all English-speaking peoples. Usher was a man of deep 
 and wide theological learning, powerful in controversy ; and 
 his careful conclusion, after years of the most profound study 
 of the Hebrew Scriptures, was that man was created 4004 
 years before the Christian era. His verdict was widely re- 
 ceived as final ; his dates were inserted in the margins of the 
 authorized version of the English Bible, and were soon prac- 
 tically regarded as equally inspired with the sacred text 
 itself : to question them seriously was to risk preferment in 
 the Church and reputation in the world at large. . 
 
 The same adhesion to the Hebrew Scriptures which had 
 influenced Usher brought leading men of the older Church 
 to the same view : men who would have burned each other 
 at the stake for their differences on other points, agreed on 
 this : Melanchthon and Tostatus, Lightfoot and Jansen, Sal- 
 meron and Scaliger, Petavius and Kepler, inquisitors and 
 reformers, Jesuits and Jansenists, priests and rabbis, stood 
 together in the belief that the creation of man was proved 
 by Scripture to have taken place between 3900 and 4004 
 years before Christ. 
 
 In spite of the severe pressure of this line of authorities,
 
 254 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 
 
 extending from St. Jerome and Eusebius to Usher and Pe- 
 tavius, in favour of this scriptural chronology, even devoted 
 Christian scholars had sometimes felt obliged to revolt. 
 The first great source of difficulty was increased knowledge 
 regarding the Egyptian monuments. As far back as the last 
 years of the sixteenth century Joseph Scaliger had done 
 what he could to lay the foundations of a more scientific 
 treatment of chronology, insisting especially that the his- 
 torical indications in Persia, in Babylon, and above all in 
 Egypt, should be brought to bear on the question. More 
 than that, he had the boldness to urge that the chronological 
 indications of the Hebrew Scriptures should be fully and 
 critically discussed in the light of Egyptian and other rec- 
 ords, without any undue bias from theological considera- 
 tions. His idea may well be called inspired ; yet it had little 
 effect as regards a true view of the antiquity of man, even 
 upon himself, for the theological bias prevailed above all his 
 reasonings, even in his own mind. Well does a brilliant 
 modern writer declare that, " among the multitude of strong 
 men in modern times abdicating their reason at the com- 
 mand of their prejudices, Joseph Scaliger is perhaps the 
 most striking example." 
 
 Early in the following century Sir Walter Raleigh, in his 
 History of the World (1603-1616), pointed out the danger of 
 adhering to the old system. He, too, foresaw one of the re- 
 sults of modern investigation, stating it in these words, 
 which have the ring of prophetic inspiration : " For in Abra- 
 ham's time all the then known parts of the world were de- 
 veloped. . . . Egypt had many magnificent cities, . . . and 
 these not built with sticks, but of hewn stone, . . . which 
 magnificence needed a parent of more antiquity than these 
 other men have supposed." In view of these considerations 
 Raleigh followed the chronology of the Septuagint version, 
 which enabled him to give to the human race a few more 
 years than were usually allowed. 
 
 About the middle of the seventeenth century Isaac Vos- 
 sius, one of the most eminent scholars of Christendom, at- 
 tempted to bring the prevailing belief into closer accordance 
 with ascertained facts, but, save by a chosen few, his ef- 
 forts were rejected. In some parts of Europe a man holding
 
 THE SACRED CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 255 
 
 new views on chronology was by no means safe from bodily 
 harm. As an example of the extreme pressure exerted by 
 the old theological system at times upon honest scholars, we 
 may take the case of La Peyrere, who about the middle of 
 the seventeenth century put forth his book on the Pre- 
 Adamites an attempt to reconcile sundry well-known diffi- 
 culties in Scripture by claiming that man existed on earth 
 before the time of Adam. He was taken in hand at once ; 
 great theologians rushed forward to attack him from all 
 parts of Europe ; within fifty years thirty-six different refu- 
 tations of his arguments had appeared ; the Parliament of 
 Paris burned the book, and the Grand Vicar of the archdio- 
 cese of Mechlin threw him into prison and kept him there 
 until he was forced, not only to retract his statements, but to 
 abjure his Protestantism. 
 
 In England, opposition to the growing truth was hardly 
 less earnest. Especially strong was Pearson, afterward Mas- 
 ter of Trinity and Bishop of Chester. In his treatise on the 
 Creed, published in 1659, which has remained a theologic 
 classic, he condemned those who held the earth to be more 
 than fifty-six hundred years old, insisted that the first man 
 was created just six days later, declared that the Egyptian 
 records were forged, and called all Christians to turn from 
 them to " the infallible annals of the Spirit of God." 
 
 But, in spite of warnings like these, we see the new idea 
 cropping out in various parts of Europe. In 1672, Sir John 
 Marsham published a work in which he showed himself bold 
 and honest. After describing the heathen sources of Orien- 
 tal history, he turns to the Christian writers, and, having 
 used the history of Egypt to show that the great Church 
 authorities were not exact, he ends one important argument 
 with the following words : " Thus the most interesting an- 
 tiquities of Egypt have been involved in the deepest obscu- 
 rity by the very interpreters of her chronology, who have 
 jumbled everything up (qtii omnia susque deque pcrtniscuerunf}, 
 so as to make them match with their own reckonings of He- 
 brew chronology. Truly a very bad example, and quite un- 
 worthy of religious writers." 
 
 This sturdy protest of Sir John against the dominant sys- 
 tem and against the "jumbling" by which Eusebius had
 
 256 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 
 
 endeavoured to cut down ancient chronology within safe and 
 sound orthodox limits, had little effect. Though eminent 
 chronologists of the eighteenth century, like Jackson, Hales, 
 and Drummond, gave forth multitudes of ponderous vol- 
 umes pleading for a period somewhat longer than that gen- 
 erally allowed, and insisting that the received Hebrew text 
 was grossly vitiated as regards chronology, even this poor 
 favour was refused them ; the mass of believers found it 
 more comfortable to hold fast the faith committed to them 
 by Usher, and it remained settled that man was created 
 about four thousand years before our era. 
 
 To those who wished even greater precision, Dr. John 
 Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, 
 the great rabbinical scholar of his time, gave his famous 
 demonstration from our sacred books that " heaven and 
 earth, centre and circumference, were created together, in 
 the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that " this 
 work took place and man was created by the Trinitv on the 
 twenty-third of October, 4004 B. c., at nine o'clock in the 
 morning." 
 
 This tide of theological reasoning rolled on through the 
 eighteenth century, swollen by the biblical researches of 
 leading commentators, Catholic and Protestant, until it came 
 in much majesty and force into our own nineteenth century. 
 At the very beginning of the century it gained new strength 
 from various great men in the Church, among whom may 
 be especially named Dr. Adam Clarke, who declared that, 
 " to preclude the possibility of a mistake, the unerring Spirit 
 of God directed Moses in the selection of his facts and the 
 ascertaining of his dates." 
 
 All opposition to the received view seemed broken down, 
 and as late as 1835 indeed, as late as 1850 came an announce- 
 ment in the work of one of the most eminent Egyptologists, 
 Sir J. G. Wilkinson, to the effect that he had modified the 
 results he had obtained from Egyptian monuments, in order 
 that his chronology might not interfere with the received 
 date of the Deluge of Noah.* 
 
 * For Lightfoot, see his Prolegomena relating to the age of the world at the birth 
 of Christ ; see also in the edition of his works, London, 1822, vol. iv, pp. 64, 112. 
 For Scaliger, see the De Emendatione Temporum, 1583 ; also Mark Pattison, Es-
 
 THE NEW CHRONOLOGY. 257 
 
 II. THE NEW CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 But all investigators were not so docile as Wilkinson, and 
 there soon came a new train of scientific thought which rap- 
 idly undermined all this theological chronology. Not to 
 speak of other noted men, we have early in the present cen- 
 tury Young, Champollion, and Rosellini, beginning a new 
 epoch in the study of the Egyptian monuments. Nothing 
 could be more cautious than their procedure, but the evi- 
 dence was soon overwhelming in favour of a vastly longer 
 existence of man in the Nile Valley than could be made to 
 agree with even the longest duration then allowed by theo- 
 logians. 
 
 For, in spite of all the suppleness of men like Wilkinson, 
 it became evident that, whatever system of scriptural chro- 
 nology was adopted, Egypt was the seat of a flourishing civ- 
 ilization at a period before the " Flood of Noah," and that no 
 such flood had ever interrupted it. This was bad, but worse 
 remained behind : it was soon clear that the civilization of 
 Egypt began earlier than the time assigned for the creation 
 of man, even according to the most liberal of the sacred 
 chronologists. 
 
 As time went on, this became more and more evident. 
 The long duration assigned to human civilization in the frag- 
 ments of Manetho, the Egyptian scribe at Thebes in the third 
 century B. c., was discovered to be more accordant with truth 
 than the chronologies of the great theologians ; and, as the 
 
 says, Oxford, 1889, vol. i, pp. 162 et seq. For Raleigh's misgivings, see his History 
 of the World, London, 1614, p. 227, book ii of part i, section 7 of chapter i ; also Clin- 
 ton's Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 293. For Usher, see his Annales Vet. et Nov. Test., 
 London, 1650. For Pearson, see his Exposition of the Creed, sixth edition, London, 
 1692, pp. 59 ft seq. For Marsham, see his Chronicus Canon ^Egypticus, Ebraicus, 
 Gracus, et Disquisitiones , London, 1672. For La Peyrere, see especially Quatre- 
 fages, in Revue des Deux Mondes for 1861 ; also other chapters in this work. For 
 Jackson, Hales, and others, see Wallace's True Age of the World. For Wilkin- 
 son, see various editions of his work on Egypt. For Vignolles, see Leblois, vol. iii, 
 p. 617. As to the declarations in favour of the recent origin of man, sanctioned by 
 Popes Gregory XIII and Urban VIII, see Strauchius, cited in Wallace, p. 97. For 
 the general agreement of Church authorities, as stated, see U 'Art de Verifier Its 
 Dates, as above. As to difficulties of scriptural chronology, see Ewald, History of 
 Israel, English translation, London, 1883, pp. 204 et seq. 
 18
 
 258 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 
 
 present century has gone on, scientific results have been 
 reached absolutely fatal to the chronological view based by 
 the universal Church upon Scripture for nearly two thou- 
 sand years. 
 
 As is well known, the first of the Egyptian kings of whom 
 mention is made upon the monuments of the Nile Valley is 
 Mena, or Menes. Manetho had given a statement, accord- 
 ing to which Mena must have lived nearly six thousand 
 years before the Christian era. This was looked upon for a 
 long time as utterly inadmissible, as it was so clearly at vari- 
 ance with the chronology of our own sacred books ; but, as 
 time went on, large fragments of the original work of Mane- 
 tho were more carefully studied and distinguished from cor- 
 rupt transcriptions, the lists of kings at Karnak, Sacquarah, 
 and the two temples at Abydos were brought to light, and 
 the lists of court architects were discovered. Among all 
 these monuments the scholar who visits Egypt is most im- 
 pressed by the sculptured tablets giving the lists of kings. 
 Each shows the monarch of the period doing homage to the 
 long line of his ancestors. Each of these sculptured mon- 
 archs has near him a tablet bearing his name. That great 
 care was always taken to keep these imposing records cor- 
 rect is certain ; the loyalty of subjects, the devotion of 
 priests, and the family pride of kings were all combined in 
 this ; and how effective this care was, is seen in the fact that 
 kings now known to be usurpers are carefully omitted. The 
 lists of court architects, extending over the period from Seti 
 to Darius, throw a flood of light over the other records. 
 
 Comparing, then, all these sources, and applying an av- 
 erage from the lengths of the long series of well-known 
 reigns to the reigns preceding, the most careful and cautious 
 scholars have satisfied themselves that the original fragments 
 of Manetho represent the work of a man honest and well in- 
 formed, and, after making all allowances for discrepancies 
 and the overlapping of reigns, it has become clear that the 
 period known as the reign of Mena must be fixed at more 
 than three thousand years B. c. In this the great Egyptolo- 
 gists of our time concur. Mariette, the eminent French au- 
 thority, puts the date at 5004 B. c. ; Brugsch, the leading 
 German authority, puts it at about 4500 B. c. ; and Meyer,
 
 THE NEW CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 259 
 
 the latest and most cautious of the historians of antiquity, de- 
 clares 3180 B. c. the latest possible date that can be assigned 
 it. With these dates the foremost English authorities, Sayce 
 and Flinders Petrie, substantially agree. This view is also 
 confirmed on astronomical grounds by Mr. Lockyer, the 
 Astronomer Royal. We have it, then, as the result of a 
 century of work by the most acute and trained Egyptolo- 
 gists, and with the inscriptions upon the temples and papyri 
 before them, both of which are now read with as much 
 facility as many mediaeval manuscripts, that the reign of 
 Mena must be placed more than five thousand years ago. 
 
 But the significance of this conclusion can not be fully 
 understood until we bring into connection with it some 
 other facts revealed by the Egyptian monuments. 
 
 The first of these is that which struck Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 that, even in the time of the first dynasties in the Nile Val- 
 ley, a high civilization had already been developed. Take, 
 first, man himself : we find sculptured upon the early monu- 
 ments types of the various races Egyptians, Israelites, ne- 
 groes, and Libyans as clearly distinguishable in these paint- 
 ings and sculptures of from four to six thousand years ago 
 as the same types are at the present day. No one can look 
 at these sculptures upon the Egyptian monuments, or even 
 the drawings of them, as given ' by Lepsius or Prisse 
 d'Avennes, without being convinced that they indicate, even 
 at that remote period, a difference of races so marked that 
 long previous ages must have been required to produce it. 
 
 The social condition of Egypt revealed in these early 
 monuments of art forces us to the same conclusion. Those 
 earliest monuments show that a very complex society had 
 even then been developed. We not only have a separation 
 between the priestly and military orders, but agricultur- 
 ists, manufacturers, and traders, with a whole series of sub- 
 divisions in each of these classes. The early tombs show us 
 sculptured and painted representations of a daily life which 
 even then had been developed into a vast wealth and variety 
 of grades, forms, and usages. 
 
 Take, next, the political and military condition. One fact 
 out of many reveals a policy which must have been the re- 
 sult of long experience. Just as now, at the end of the nine-
 
 2 6o THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 
 
 teenth century, the British Government, having found that 
 they can not rely upon the native Egyptians for the protec- 
 tion of the country, are drilling the negroes from the interior 
 of Africa as soldiers, so the celebrated inscription of Prince 
 Una, as far back as the sixth dynasty, speaks of the Maksi 
 or negroes levied and drilled by tens of thousands for the 
 Egyptian army. 
 
 Take, next, engineering. Here we find very early opera- 
 tions in the way of canals, dikes, and great public edifices, 
 so bold in conception and thorough in execution as to fill 
 our greatest engineers of these days with astonishment. 
 The quarrying, conveyance, cutting, jointing, and polishing 
 of the enormous blocks in the interior of the Great Pyramid 
 alone are the marvel of the foremost stone-workers of our 
 century. 
 
 As regards architecture, we find not only the pyramids, 
 which date from the very earliest period of Egyptian his- 
 tory, and which are to this hour the wonder of the world 
 for size, for boldness, for exactness, and for skilful contriv- 
 ance, but also the temples, with long ranges of colossal col- 
 umns wrought in polished granite, with wonderful beauty 
 of ornamentation, with architraves and roofs vast in size and 
 exquisite in adjustment, which by their proportions tax the 
 imagination, and lead the beholder to ask whether all this 
 can be real. 
 
 As to sculpture, we have not only the great Sphinx of 
 Gizeh, so marvellous in its boldness and dignity, dating from 
 the very first period of Egyptian history, but we have ranges 
 of sphinxes, heroic statues, and bas-reliefs, showing that even 
 in the early ages this branch of art had reached an amazing 
 development. 
 
 As regards the perfection of these, Liibke, the most emi- 
 nent German authority on plastic art, referring to the early 
 works in the tombs about Memphis, declares that, " as monu- 
 ments of the period of the fourth dynasty, they are an evi- 
 dence of the high perfection to which the sculpture of the 
 Egyptians had attained." Brugsch declares that "every 
 artistic production of those early days, whether picture, 
 writing, or sculpture, bears the stamp of the highest perfec- 
 tion in art." Maspero, the most eminent French authority
 
 THE NEW CHRONOLOGY. 2 6l 
 
 in this field, while expressing his belief that the Sphinx was 
 sculptured even before the time of Mena, declares that "the 
 art which conceived and carved this prodigious statue was 
 a finished art an art which had attained self-mastery and 
 was sure of its effects " ; while, among the more eminent 
 English authorities, Sayce tells us that " art is at its best in 
 the age of the pyramid-builders," and Sir James Fergusson 
 declares, " We are startled to find Egyptian art nearly as 
 perfect in the oldest periods as in any of the later." 
 
 The evidence as to the high development of Egyptian 
 sculpture in the earlier dynasties becomes every day more 
 overwhelming. What exquisite genius the early Egyptian 
 sculptors showed in their lesser statues is known to all who 
 have seen those most precious specimens in the museum at 
 Cairo, which were wrought before the conventional type 
 was adopted in obedience to religious considerations. 
 
 In decorative and especially in ceramic art, as early as 
 the fourth and fifth dynasties, we have vases, cups, and other 
 vessels showing exquisite beauty of outline and a general 
 sense of form almost if not quite equal to Etruscan and Gre- 
 cian work of the best periods. 
 
 Take, next, astronomy. Going back to the very earliest 
 period of Egyptian civilization, we find that the four sides 
 of the Great Pyramid are adjusted to the cardinal points 
 with the utmost precision. " The day of the equinox can be 
 taken by observing the sun set across the face of the pyra- 
 mid, and the neighbouring Arabs adjust their' astronomical 
 dates by its shadow." Yet this is but one out of many facts 
 which prove that the Egyptians, at the earliest period of 
 which their monuments exist, had arrived at knowledge and 
 skill only acquired by long ages of observation and thought. 
 Mr. Lockyer, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, has re- 
 cently convinced himself, after careful examination of various 
 ruined temples at Thebes and elsewhere, that they were 
 placed with reference to observations of stars. To state his 
 conclusion in his own words: "There seems a very high 
 probability that three thousand, and possibly four thousand, 
 years before Christ the Egyptians had among them men 
 with some knowledge of astronomy, and that six thousand 
 years ago the course of the sun through the year was prac-
 
 262 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 
 
 tically very well known, and methods had been invented 
 by means of which in time it might be better known ; and 
 that, not very long after that, they not only considered ques- 
 tions relating to the sun, but began to take up other ques- 
 tions relating to the position and movement of the stars." 
 
 The same view of the antiquity of man in the Nile val- 
 ley is confirmed by philologists. To use the words of Max 
 Duncker : " The oldest monuments of Egypt and they are 
 the oldest monuments in the world exhibit the Egyptian in 
 possession of the art of writing." It is found also, by the in- 
 scriptions of the early dynasties, that the Egyptian language 
 had even at that early time been developed in all essential 
 particulars to the highest point it ever attained. What long 
 periods it must have required for such a development every 
 scholar in philology can imagine. 
 
 As regards medical science, we have the Berlin papyrus, 
 which, although of a later period, refers with careful speci- 
 fication to a medical literature of the first dynasty. 
 
 As regards archaeology, the earliest known inscriptions 
 point to still earlier events and buildings, indicating a long 
 sequence in previous history. 
 
 As to all that pertains to the history of civilization, no 
 man of fair and open mind can go into the museums of Cairo 
 or the Louvre or the British Museum and look at the monu- 
 ments of those earlier dynasties without seeing in them the 
 results of a development in art, science, laws, customs, and 
 language, which must have required a vast period before 
 the time of Mena. And this conclusion is forced upon us 
 all the more invincibly when we consider the slow growth 
 of ideas in the earlier stages of civilization as compared with 
 the later a slowness of growth which has kept the natives 
 of many parts of the world in that earliest civilization to this 
 hour. To this we must add the fact that Egyptian civiliza- 
 tion was especially immobile : its development into castes is 
 but one among many evidences that it was the very opposite 
 of a civilization developed rapidly. 
 
 As to the length of the period before the time of Mena, 
 there is, of course, nothing exact. Manetho gives lists of 
 great personages before that first dynasty, and these extend 
 over twenty-four thousand years. Bunsen, one of the most
 
 THE NEW CHRONOLOGY. 263 
 
 learned of Christian scholars, declares that not less than ten 
 thousand years were necessary for the development of civili- 
 zation up to the point where we find it in Mena's time. No 
 one can claim precision for either of these statements, but 
 they are valuable as showing the impression of vast antiquity 
 made upon the most competent judges by the careful study 
 of those remains: no unbiased judge can doubt that an im- 
 mensely long period of years must have been required for 
 the development of civilization up to the state in which we 
 there find it. 
 
 The investigations in the bed of the Nile confirm these 
 views. That some unwarranted conclusions have at times 
 been announced is true ; but the fact remains that again and 
 again rude pottery and other evidences of early stages of 
 civilization have been found in borings at places so distant 
 from each other, and at depths so great, that for such a 
 range of concurring facts, considered in connection with the 
 rate of earthy deposit by the Nile, there is no adequate ex- 
 planation save the existence of man in that valley thousands 
 on thousands of years before the longest time admitted by 
 our sacred chronologists. 
 
 Nor have these investigations been of a careless charac- 
 ter. Between the years 1851 and 1854, Mr. Horner, an ex- 
 tremely cautious English geologist, sank ninety-six shafts in 
 four rows at intervals of eight English miles, at right angles 
 to the Nile, in the neighbourhood of Memphis. In these 
 pottery was brought up from various depths, and beneath 
 the statue of Rameses II at Memphis from a depth of thirty- 
 nine feet. At the rate of the Nile deposit a careful estimate 
 has declared this to indicate a period of over eleven thou- 
 sand years. So eminent a German authority in geography 
 as Peschel characterizes objections to such deductions as 
 groundless. However this may be, the general results of 
 these investigations, taken in connection with the other re- 
 sults of research, are convincing. 
 
 And, finally, as if to make assurance doubly sure, a series 
 of archaeologists of the highest standing, French, German, 
 English, and American, have within the past twenty years 
 discovered relics of a savage period, of vastly earlier date 
 than the time of Mena, prevailing throughout Egypt. These
 
 264 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 
 
 relics have been discovered in various parts of the country, 
 from Cairo to Luxor, in great numbers. They are the same 
 sort of prehistoric implements which prove to us the early 
 existence of man in so many other parts of the world at a 
 geological period so remote that the figures given by our 
 sacred chronologists are but trivial. The last and most con- 
 vincing of these discoveries, that of flint implements in the 
 drift, far down below the tombs of early kings at Thebes, 
 and upon high terraces far above the present bed of the 
 Nile, will be referred to later. 
 
 But it is not in Egypt alone that proofs are found of the 
 utter inadequacy of the entire chronological system derived 
 from our sacred books. These results of research in Egypt 
 are strikingly confirmed by research in Assyria and Baby- 
 lonia. Prof. Sayce exhibits various proofs of this. To use 
 his own words regarding one of these proofs : " On the 
 shelves of the British Museum you may see huge sun-dried 
 bricks, on which are stamped the names and titles of kings 
 who erected or repaired the temples where they have been 
 found. . . . They must . . . have reigned before the time 
 when, according to the margins of our Bibles, the Flood of 
 Noah was covering the earth and reducing such bricks as 
 these to their primeval slime." 
 
 This conclusion was soon placed beyond a doubt. The 
 lists of kings and collateral inscriptions recovered from the 
 temples of the great valley between the Tigris and Euphra- 
 tes, and the records of astronomical observations in that 
 region, showed that there, too, a powerful civilization had 
 grown up at a period far earlier than could be made con- 
 sistent with our sacred chronology. The science of Assyri- 
 ology was thus combined with Egyptology to furnish one 
 more convincing proof that, precious as are the moral and 
 religious truths in our sacred books and the historical indi- 
 cations which they give us, these truths and indications are 
 necessarily inclosed in a setting of myth and legend.* 
 
 * As to Manetho, see, for a very full account of his relations to other chronolo- 
 gists, Palmer, Egyptian Chronicles, vol. i, chap. ii. For a more recent and read- 
 able account, see Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, English edition, London, 
 1879, chap. iv. For lists of kings at Abydos and elsewhere, also the lists of archi- 
 tects, see Brugsch, Palmer, Mariette, and others ; also illustrations in Lepsius. For
 
 THE NEW CHRONOLOGY. 265 
 
 proofs that the dynasties given were consecutive and not contemporaneous, as was 
 once so fondly argued by those who tried to save Archbishop Usher's chronology, 
 see Mariette ; also Sayce's Herodotus, appendix, p. 316. For the various race types 
 given on early monuments, see the coloured engravings in Lepsius, Denkmakr ; 
 also Prisse d'Avennes, and the frontispiece in the English edition of Brugsch ; see 
 also statement regarding the same subject in Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i. For the 
 fulness of development in Egyptian civilization in the earliest dynasties, see Raw- 
 linson's Egypt, London, 1881, chap, xiii ; also Brugsch and other works cited. 
 For the perfection of Egyptian engineering, I rely not merely upon my own ob- 
 servation, but on what is far more important, the testimony of my friend the Hon. 
 J. G. Batterson, probably the largest and most experienced worker in granite in 
 the United States, who acknowledges, from personal observation, that the early 
 Egyptian work is, in boldness and perfection, far beyond anything known since, 
 and a source of perpetual wonder to him. As to the perfection of Egyptian archi- 
 tecture, see very striking statements in Fergusson, History of Architecture, book i, 
 chap. i. As to the pyramids, showing a very high grade of culture already reached 
 under the earliest dynasties, see Lubke, Gesch. der Arch., book i. For Sayce's 
 views, see his Herodotus, appendix, p. 348. As to sculpture, see for representa- 
 tions photographs published by the Boulak Museum, and such works as the De- 
 scription de rfigypte, Lepsius's Denkmaler, and Prisse d'Avennes ; see also a most 
 valuable small jwork, easy of access, Maspero, Archeology, translated by Miss A. B. 
 Edwards, New York and London, 1887, chaps, i and ii. See especially in Prisse, 
 vol. ii, the statue of Chafre the Scribe, and the group of ' ' Tea " and his wife. As 
 to the artistic value of the Sphinx, see Maspero, as above, pp. 202, 203. See also 
 similar ideas in Liibke's History of Sculpture, vol. i, p. 24. As to astronomical 
 knowledge evidenced by the Great Pyramid, see Tylor, as above, p. 21 ; also Lock- 
 yer, On Some Points in the Early History of Astronomy, in Nature for 1891, and 
 especially in the issues of June 4th and July 2d ; also his Dawn of Astronomy, pas- 
 sim. For a recent and conservative statement as to the date of Mena, see Flinders 
 Petrie, History of Egypt, London, 1894, chap. ii. For delineations of vases, etc., 
 showing Grecian proportion and beauty of form under the fourth and fifth dynasties, 
 see Prisse, vol. ii, Art Industrie!. As to the philological question, and the develop- 
 ment of language in Egypt, with the hieroglyphic system of writing, see Rawlin- 
 son's Egypt, London, 1881, chap, xiii ; also Lenormant ; also Max Diincker. Ge- 
 schichte des Alterthums, Abbott's translation, 1877. As to the medical papyrus of 
 Berlin, see Brugsch, vol. i, p. 58, but especially the Papyrus Ebers. As to the cor- 
 ruption of later copies of Manetho and fidelity of originals as attested by the monu- 
 ments, see Brugsch, chap. iv. On the accuracy of the present Egyptian chronol- 
 ogy as regards long periods, see ibid., vol. i, p. 32. As to the pottery found deep 
 in the Nile and the value of Homer's discovery, see Peschel, Races of Man, New 
 York, 1876, pp. 42-44. For succinct statement, see also Laing, Problems of the 
 Future, p. 94. For confirmatory proofs from Assyriology, see Sayce, Lectures on 
 the Religion of the Babylonians (Hibbert Lectures for 1887), London, 1887, intro- 
 ductory chapter, and especially pp. 2125. See also Laing, Human Origins, chap, 
 ii, for an excellent summary. For an account of flint implements recently found 
 in gravel terraces fifteen hundred feet above the present level of the Nile, and show- 
 ing evidences of an age vastly greater even than those dug out of the gravel at 
 Thebes, see article by Flinders Petrie in London Times of April iSth, 1895.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC 
 ARCHAEOLOGY, 
 
 I. THE THUNDER-STONES. 
 
 WHILE the view of chronology based upon the literal ac- 
 ceptance of Scripture texts was thus shaken by researches 
 in Egypt, another line of observation and thought was slowly 
 developed, even more fatal to the theological view. 
 
 From a very early period there had been dug from the 
 earth, in various parts of the world, strangely shaped masses 
 of stone, some rudely chipped, some polished : in ancient 
 times the larger of these were very often considered as 
 thunderbolts, the smaller as arrows, and all of them as 
 weapons which had been hurled by the gods and other 
 supernatural personages. Hence a sort of sacredness at- 
 tached to them. In Chaldea, they were built into the wall 
 of temples; in Egypt, they were strung about the necks of 
 the dead ; in India, fine specimens are to this day seen upon 
 altars, receiving prayers and sacrifices. 
 
 Naturally these beliefs were brought into the Christian 
 mythology and adapted to it. During the Middle Ages 
 many of these well-wrought stones were venerated as weap- 
 ons, which during the " war in heaven " had been used in 
 driving forth Satan and his hosts ; hence in the eleventh cen- 
 tury an Emperor of the East sent to the Emperor of the West 
 a " heaven axe " ; and in the twelfth century a Bishop of 
 Rennes asserted the value of thunder-stones as a divinely- 
 appointed means of securing success in battle, safety on the 
 sea, security against thunder, and immunity from unpleasant 
 dreams. Even as late as the seventeenth century a French 
 
 266
 
 THE THUNDER-STONES. 267 
 
 ambassador brought a stone hatchet, which still exists in the 
 museum at Nancy, as a present to the Prince-Bishop of Ver- 
 dun, and claimed for it health-giving virtues. 
 
 In the last years of the sixteenth century Michael Mer- 
 cati tried to prove that the "thunder-stones" were weap- 
 ons or implements of early races of men; but from some 
 cause his book was not published until the following cen- 
 tury, when other thinkers had begun to take up the same 
 idea, and then it had to contend with a theory far more ac- 
 cordant with theologic modes of reasoning in science. This 
 was the theory of the learned Tollius, who in 1649 told the 
 world that these chipped or smoothed stones were " gener- 
 ated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation conglobed in a 
 cloud by the circumposed humour." 
 
 But about the beginning of the eighteenth century a fact 
 of great importance was quietly established. In the year 
 1715 a large pointed weapon of black flint was found in con- 
 tact with the bones of an elephant, in a gravel bed near 
 Gray's Inn Lane, in London. The world in general paid no 
 heed to this : if the attention of theologians was called to it, 
 they dismissed it summarily with a reference to the Deluge 
 of Noah ; but the specimen was labelled, the circumstances 
 regarding it were recorded, and both specimen and record 
 carefully preserved. 
 
 In 1723 Jussieu addressed the French Academy on The 
 Origin and Uses of Thunder-stones. ' He showed that recent 
 travellers from various parts of the world had brought a 
 number of weapons and other implements of stone to France, 
 and that they were essentially similar to what in Europe had 
 been known as " thunder-stones." A year later this fact was 
 clinched into the scientific mind of France by the Jesuit 
 Lafitau, who published a work showing the similarity be- 
 tween the customs of aborigines then existing in other lands 
 and those of the early inhabitants of Europe. So began, in 
 these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the science of Compara- 
 tive Ethnography. 
 
 But it was at their own risk and peril that thinkers drew 
 from these discoveries any conclusions as to the antiquity of 
 man. Montesquieu, having ventured to hint, in an early edi- 
 tion of his Persian Letters, that the world might be much
 
 2 68 ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHEOLOGY. 
 
 older than had been generally supposed, was soon made to 
 feel danger both to his book and to himself, so that in suc- 
 ceeding editions he suppressed the passage. 
 
 In 1730 Mahudel presented a paper to the French Acad- 
 emy of Inscriptions on the so-called " thunder-stones," and 
 also presented a series of plates which showed that these 
 were stone implements, which must have been used at an 
 early period in human history. 
 
 In 1778 Buffon, in his Epoques de la Nature, intimated his 
 belief that "thunder-stones" were made by early races of 
 men ; but he did not press this view, and the reason for his 
 reserve was obvious enough : he had already one quarrel 
 with the theologians on his hands, which had cost him dear 
 public retraction and humiliation. His declaration, there- 
 fore, attracted little notice. 
 
 In the year 1800 another fact came into the minds of 
 thinking men in England. In that year John Frere pre- 
 sented to the London Society of Antiquaries sundry flint im- 
 plements found in the clay beds near Hoxne : that they were 
 of human make was certain, and, in view of the undisturbed 
 depths in which they were found, the theory was suggested 
 that the men who made them must have lived at a very an- 
 cient geological epoch ; yet even this discovery and theory 
 passed like a troublesome dream, and soon seemed to be for- 
 gotten. 
 
 About twenty years later Dr. Buckland published a dis- 
 cussion of the subject, in the light of various discoveries in 
 the drift and in caves. It received wide attention, but the- 
 ology was soothed by his temporary concession that these 
 striking relics of human handiwork, associated with the re- 
 mains of various extinct animals, were proofs of the Deluge 
 of Noah. 
 
 In 1823 Boue*, of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, 
 showed to Cuvier sundry human bones found deep in the 
 alluvial deposits of the upper Rhine, and suggested that they 
 were of an early geological period ; this Cuvier virtually, if 
 not explicitly, denied. Great as he was in his own field, he 
 was not a great geologist ; he, in fact, led geology astray for 
 many years. Moreover, he lived in a time of reaction ; it 
 was the period of the restored Bourbons, of the Voltairean
 
 THE THUNDER-STONES. 269 
 
 King Louis XVIII, governing to please orthodoxy. Bou6's 
 discovery was, therefore, at first opposed, then enveloped in 
 studied silence. 
 
 Cuvier evidently thought, as Voltaire had felt under simi- 
 lar circumstances, that "among wolves one must howl a 
 little " ; and his leading disciple, filie de Beaumont, who suc- 
 ceeded him in the sway over geological science in France, 
 was even more opposed to the new view than his great mas- 
 ter had been. Boue's discoveries were, therefore, appar- 
 ently laid to rest forever.* 
 
 In 1825 Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, was explored by 
 the Rev. Mr. McEnery, a Roman Catholic clergyman, who 
 seems to have been completely overawed by orthodox opin- 
 ion in England and elsewhere ; for, though he found human 
 bones and implements mingled with remains of extinct ani- 
 mals, he kept his notes in manuscript, and they were only 
 brought to light more than thirty years later by Mr. Vivian. 
 
 The coming of Charles X, the last of the French Bour- 
 bons, to the throne, made the orthodox pressure even greater. 
 It was the culmination of the reactionary period the time 
 in France when a clerical committee, sitting at the Tuileries, 
 took such measures as were necessary to hold in check all 
 science that was not perfectly " safe " ; the time in Austria 
 when Kaiser Franz made his famous declaration to sundry 
 professors, that what he wanted of them was simply to train 
 obedient subjects, and that those who did not make this their 
 purpose would be dismissed ; the time in Germany when 
 Nicholas of Russia and the princelings and ministers under 
 his control, from the King of Prussia downward, put forth 
 all their might in behalf of " scriptural science " ; the time in 
 Italy when a scientific investigator, arriving at any conclu- 
 
 * For the general history of early views regarding stone implements, see the 
 first chapters in Cartailhac, La France Pre"historique ; also Joly, L'Homme avant 
 les Meiaux ; also Lyell, Lubbock, and Evans. For lightning-stones in China and 
 elsewhere, see citation from a Chinese encyclopaedia of 1662, in Tylor, Early His- 
 tory of Mankind, p. 209. On the universality of this belief, on the surviving use 
 of stone implements even into civilized times, and on their manufacture to-day, see 
 ibid., chapter viii. For the treatment of Boue's discovery, see especially Mortillet, 
 Le Pre"historique, Paris, 1885, p. u. For the suppression of the passage in Mon- 
 tesquieu's Persian Letters, see Letter 113, cited in Schlosser's History of the Eight- 
 eenth Century (English translation), vol. i, p. 135.
 
 270 ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY. 
 
 sion distrusted by the Church, was sure of losing his place 
 and in danger of losing his liberty; the time in England 
 when what little science was taught was held in due submis- 
 sion to Archdeacon Paley ; the time in the United States 
 when the first thing essential in science was, that it be ad- 
 justed to the ideas of revival exhorters. 
 
 Yet men devoted to scientific truth laboured on ; and in 
 1828 Tournal, of Narbonne, discovered in the cavern of Bize 
 specimens of human industry, with a fragment of a human 
 skeleton, among bones of extinct animals. In the following 
 year Christol published accounts of his excavations in the 
 caverns of Gard ; he had found in position, and under condi- 
 tions which forbade the idea of after-disturbance, human re- 
 mains mixed with bones of the extinct hyena of the early 
 Quaternary period. Little general notice was taken of this, 
 for the reactionary orthodox atmosphere involved such dis- 
 coveries in darkness. 
 
 But in the French Revolution of 1830 the old politico- 
 theological system collapsed : Charles X and his advisers 
 fled for their lives; the other continental monarchs got 
 glimpses of new light ; the priesthood in charge of educa- 
 tion were put on their good behaviour for a time, and a better 
 era began. 
 
 Under the constitutional monarchy of the house of Or- 
 leans in France and Belgium less attention was therefore 
 paid by Government to the saving of souls ; and we have 
 in rapid succession new discoveries of remains of human in- 
 dustry, and even of human skeletons so mingled with bones 
 of extinct animals as to give additional proofs that the origin 
 of man was at a period vastly earlier than any which theolo- 
 gians had dreamed of. 
 
 A few years later the reactionary clerical influence 
 against science in this field rallied again. Schmerling in 
 1833 had explored a multitude of caverns in Belgium, espe- 
 cially at Engis and Engihoul, and had found human skulls 
 and bones closely associated with bones of extinct animals, 
 such as the cave bear, hyena, elephant, and rhinoceros, while 
 mingled with these were evidences of human workmanship 
 in the shape of chipped flint implements ; discoveries of a 
 similar sort Jiad been made by De Serres in France and by
 
 THE FLfNT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. 2 ;i 
 
 Lund in Brazil ; but, at least as far as continental Europe 
 was concerned, these discoveries were received with much 
 coolness both by Catholic leaders of opinion in France and 
 Belgium and by Protestant leaders in England and Holland. 
 Schmerling himself appears to have been overawed, and 
 gave forth a sort of apologetic theory, half scientific, half 
 theologic, vainly hoping to satisfy the clerical side. 
 
 Nor was it much better in England. Sir Charles Lyell, 
 so devoted a servant of prehistoric research thirty years 
 later, was still holding out against it on the scientific side ; 
 and, as to the theological side, it was the period when that 
 great churchman, Dean Cockburn, was insulting geologists 
 from the pulpit of York Minster, and the Rev. Mellor Brown 
 denouncing geology as " a black art," " a forbidden prov- 
 ince " ; and when, in America, Prof. Moses Stuart and others 
 like him were belittling the work of Benjamin Silliman and 
 Edward Hitchcock. 
 
 In 1840 Godwin Austin presented to the Royal Geo- 
 logical Society an account of his discoveries in Kent's Cav- 
 ern, near Torquay, and especially of human bones and imple- 
 ments mingled with bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, cave 
 bear, hyena, and other extinct animals; yet this memoir, 
 like that of McEnery fifteen years before, found an atmos- 
 phere so unfavourable that it was not published. 
 
 II. THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. 
 
 At the middle of the nineteenth century came the begin- 
 ning of a new epoch in science an epoch when all these 
 earlier discoveries were to be interpreted by means of in- 
 vestigations in a different field: for, in 1847, a man prevL 
 ously unknown to the world at large, Boucher de Perthes, 
 published at Paris the first volume of his work on Celtic and 
 Antediluvian Antiquities, and in this he showed engravings of 
 typical flint implements and weapons, of which he had dis- 
 covered thousands upon thousands in the high drift beds 
 near Abbeville, in northern France. 
 
 The significance of this discovery was great indeed far 
 greater than Boucher himself at first supposed^ The very
 
 272 ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY. 
 
 title of his book showed that he at first regarded these im- 
 plements and weapons as having belonged to men over- 
 whelmed at the Deluge of Noah ; but it was soon seen that 
 they were something very different from proofs of the literal 
 exactness of Genesis: for they were found in terraces at 
 great heights above the river Somme, and, under any pos- 
 sible theory having regard to fact, must have been deposited 
 there at a time when the river system of northern France 
 was vastly different from anything known within the his- 
 toric period. The whole discovery indicated a series of 
 great geological changes since the time when these imple- 
 ments were made, requiring cycles of time compared to 
 which the space allowed by the orthodox chronologists was 
 as nothing. 
 
 His work was the result of over ten years of research 
 and thought. Year after year a force of men under his di- 
 rection had dug into these high-terraced gravel deposits of 
 the river Somme, and in his book he now gave, in the first 
 full form, the results of his labour. So far as France was 
 concerned, he was met at first by what he calls " a conspiracy 
 of silence," and then by a contemptuous opposition among 
 orthodox scientists, at the head of whom stood filie de Beau- 
 mont. 
 
 This heavy, sluggish opposition seemed immovable : noth- 
 ing that Boucher could do or say appeared to lighten the 
 pressure of the orthodox theological opinion behind it ; not 
 even his belief that these fossils were remains of men drowned 
 at the Deluge of Noah, and that they were proofs of the lit- 
 eral exactness of Genesis seemed to help the matter. His 
 opponents felt instinctively that such discoveries boded dan- 
 ger to the accepted view, and they were right: Boucher 
 himself soon saw the folly of trying to account for them by 
 the orthodox theory. 
 
 And it must be confessed that not a little force was added 
 to the opposition by certain characteristics of Boucher de 
 Perthes himself. Gifted, far-sighted, and vigorous as he was, 
 he was his own worst enemy. Carried away by his own dis- 
 coveries, he jumped to the most astounding conclusions. The 
 engravings in the later volume of his great work, showing 
 what he thought to be human features and inscriptions upon
 
 THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. 273 
 
 some of the flint implements, are worthy of a comic almanac ; 
 and at the National Museum of Archaeology at St. Germain, 
 beneath the shelves bearing the remains which he discovered, 
 which mark the beginning of a new epoch in science, are 
 drawers containing specimens hardly worthy of a penny 
 museum, but from which he drew the most unwarranted 
 inferences as to the language, religion, and usages of prehis- 
 toric man. 
 
 Boucher triumphed none the less. Among his bitter op- 
 ponents at first was Dr. Rigollot, who in 1855, searching 
 earnestly for materials to refute the innovator, dug into the 
 deposits of St. Acheul and was converted: for he found 
 implements similar to those of Abbeville, making still more 
 certain the existence of man during the Drift period. So, 
 too, Gaudry a year later made similar discoveries. 
 
 But most important was the evidence of the truth which 
 now came from other parts of France and from other coun- 
 tries. The French leaders in geological science had been 
 held back not only by awe of Cuvier but by recollections 
 ot Scheuchzer. Ridicule has always been a serious weapon in 
 France, and the ridicule which finally overtook the supporters 
 of the attempt of -Scheuchzer, Mazurier, and others, to square 
 geology with Genesis, was still remembered. From the 
 great body of French geologists, therefore, Boucher secured 
 at first no aid. His support came from the other side of the 
 Channel. The most eminent English geologists, such as 
 Falconer, Prestwich, and Lyell, visited the beds at Abbeville 
 and St. Acheul, convinced themselves that the discoveries of 
 Boucher, Rigollot, and their colleagues were real, and then 
 quietly but firmly told England the truth. 
 
 And now there appeared a most effective ally in France. 
 The arguments used against Boucher de Perthes and some 
 of the other early investigators of bone caves had been that 
 the implements found might have been washed about and 
 turned over by great floods, and therefore that they might 
 be of a recent period ; but in 1861 Edward Lartet published 
 an account of his own excavations at the Grotto of Aurignac, 
 and the proof that man had existed in the time of the Quater- 
 nary animals was complete. This grotto had been carefully 
 sealed in prehistoric times by a stone at its entrance; no 
 19
 
 274 ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY. 
 
 interference from disturbing currents of water had been pos- 
 sible ; and Lartet found, in place, bones of eight out of nine 
 of the main species of animals which characterize the Qua- 
 ternary period in Europe ; and upon them marks of cutting 
 implements, and in the midst of them coals and ashes. 
 
 Close upon these came the excavations at Eyzies by Lartet 
 and his English colleague, Christy. In both these men there 
 was a carefulness in making researches and a sobriety in 
 stating results which converted many of those who had been 
 repelled by the enthusiasm of Boucher de Perthes. The 
 two colleagues found in the stony deposits made by the 
 water dropping from the roof of the cave at Eyzies the 
 bones of numerous animals extinct or departed to arctic 
 regions one of these a vertebra of a reindeer with a flint 
 lance-head still fast in it, and with these were found evi- 
 dences of fire. 
 
 Discoveries like these were thoroughly convincing; yet 
 there still remained here and there gainsayers in the sup- 
 posed interest of Scripture, and these, in spite of the con- 
 vincing array of facts, insisted that in some way, by some 
 combination of circumstances, these bones of extinct animals 
 of vastly remote periods might have been brought into con- 
 nection with all these human bones and implements of human 
 make in all these different places, refusing to admit that 
 these ancient relics of men and animals were of the same 
 period. Such gainsayers virtually adopted the reasoning of 
 quaint old Persons, who, having maintained that God created 
 the world " about five thousand sixe hundred and odde yeares 
 agoe," added, " And if they aske what God was doing before 
 this short number of yeares, we answere with St. Augustine 
 replying to such curious questioners, that He was framing 
 Hell for them." But a new class of discoveries came to 
 silence this opposition. At La Madeleine in France, at the 
 Kessler cave in Switzerland, and at various other places, were 
 found rude but striking carvings and engravings on bone 
 and stone representing sundry specimens of those long-van- 
 ished species ; and these specimens, or casts of them, were 
 soon to be seen in all the principal museums. They showed 
 the hairy mammoth, the cave bear, and various other ani- 
 mals of the Quaternary period, carved rudely but vigorously
 
 THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. 275 
 
 by contemporary men ; and, to complete the significance of 
 these discoveries, travellers returning from the icy regions 
 of North America brought similar carvings of animals now 
 existing in those regions, made by the Eskimos during their 
 long arctic winters to-day.* 
 
 As a result of these discoveries and others like them, 
 showing that man was not only contemporary with long- 
 extinct animals of past geological epochs, but that he had 
 already developed into a stage of culture above pure sav- 
 agery, the tide of thought began to turn. Especially was this 
 seen in 1863, when Lyell published the first edition of his 
 Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man, and the fact that 
 he had so long opposed the new ideas gave force to the clear 
 and conclusive argument which led him to renounce his 
 early scientific beliefs. 
 
 Research among the evidences ot man's existence in the 
 early Quaternary, and possibly in the Tertiary period, was 
 now pressed forward along the whole line. In 1864 Gabriel 
 Mortillet founded his review devoted to this subject ; and in 
 1865 the first of a series of scientific congresses devoted to 
 such researches was held in Italy. These investigations 
 went on vigorously in all parts of France and spread rapidly 
 
 * For the explorations in Belgium, see Dupont, Le Temps Prthistorique en Bel- 
 gique. For the discoveries by McEnery and Godwin Austin, see Lubbock, Pre- 
 historic Times, London, 1869, chap, x ; also Cartailhac, Joly, and others above 
 cited. For Boucher de Perthes, see his Antiquity's Celtiques et Ante'diiuviennes, 
 Paris, i847-'64, vol. iii, pp. 526 et seq. For sundry extravagances of Boucher de 
 Perthes, see Reinach, Description raisonnJe du Muse"? de St.-Germain-en-l.aye, 
 Paris, 1889, vol. i, pp. id et seq. For the mixture of sound and absurd results in 
 Boucher's work, see Cartailhac as above, p. 19. Boucher had published in 1838 a 
 work entitled De la Creation, but it seems to have dropped dead from the press, 
 For the attempts of Scheuchzer to reconcile geology and Genesis by means of the 
 Homo diluvii testis, and similar " diluvian fossils," see the chapter on Geology in 
 this series. The original specimens of those prehistoric engravings upon bone and 
 stone may be best seen at the Archaeological Museum of St.-Germain and the British 
 Museum. For engravings of some of the most recent, see especially Dawkins's 
 Early Man in Britain, chap, vii, and the Description du Muse"e de St.-Germain. As 
 to the Kessler etchings and their antiquity, see D. G. Brinton, in Science, August 12, 
 1892. For comparison of this prehistoric work with that produced to-day by the 
 Eskimos and others, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, chapters x and xiv. For 
 very striking exhibitions of this same artistic gift in a higher field to-day by de- 
 scendants of the barbarian tribes of northern America, see the very remarkable 
 illustrations in Rink, Danish Greenland, London, 1877, especially those in chap. xiv.
 
 276 ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY. 
 
 to other countries. The explorations which Dupont began 
 in 1864, in the caves of Belgium, gave to the museum at 
 Brussels eighty thousand flint implements, forty thousand 
 bones of animals of the Quaternary period, and a number 
 of human skulls and bones found mingled with these remains. 
 From Germany, Italy, Spain, America, India, and Egypt 
 similar results were reported. 
 
 Especially noteworthy were the further explorations of 
 the caves and drift throughout the British Islands. The 
 discovery by Colonel Wood, in 1861, of flint tools in the same 
 strata with bones of the earlier forms of the rhinoceros, was 
 but typical of many. A thorough examination of the caverns 
 of Brixham and Torquay, by Pengelly and others, made it 
 still more evident that man had existed in the early Quater- 
 nary period. The existence of a period before the Glacial 
 epoch or between different glacial epochs in England, when 
 the Englishman was a savage, using rude stone tools, was 
 then fully ascertained, and, what was more significant, there 
 were clearly shown a gradation and evolution even in the 
 history of that period. It was found that this ancient Stone 
 epoch showed progress and development. In the upper lay- 
 ers of the caves, with remains of the reindeer, who, although 
 he has migrated from these regions, still exists in more 
 northern climates, were found stone implements revealing 
 some little advance in civilization ; next below these, sealed 
 up in the stalagmite, came, as a rule, another layer, in which 
 the remains of reindeer were rare and those of the mammoth 
 more frequent, -the implements found in this stratum being 
 less skilfully made than those in the upper and more recent 
 layers ; and, finally, in the lowest levels, near the floors of 
 these ancient caverns, with remains of the cave bear and others 
 of the most ancient extinct animals, were found stone imple- 
 ments evidently of a yet ruder and earlier stage of human 
 progress. No fairly unprejudiced man can visit the cave 
 and museum at Torquay without being convinced that there 
 were a gradation and an evolution in these beginnings of 
 human civilization. The evidence is complete ; the masses 
 of breccia taken from the cave, with the various soils, im- 
 plements, and bones carefully kept in place, put this progress 
 beyond a doubt.
 
 THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. 277 
 
 All this indicated a great antiquity for the human race, 
 but in it lay the germs of still another great truth, even more 
 important and more serious in its consequences to the older 
 theologic view, which will be discussed in the following 
 chapter. 
 
 But new evidences came in, showing a yet greater antiqui- 
 ty of man. Remains of animals were found in connection 
 with human remains, which showed not only that man was 
 living in times more remote than the earlier of the new in- 
 vestigators had dared dream, but that some of these early 
 periods of his existence must have been of immense length, 
 embracing climatic changes betokening different geological 
 periods ; for with remains of fire and human implements 
 and human bones were found not only bones of the hairy 
 mammoth and cave bear, woolly rhinoceros, and reindeer, 
 which could only have been deposited there in a time of 
 arctic cold, but bones of the hyena, hippopotamus, sabre- 
 toothed tiger, and the like, which could only have been de- 
 posited when there was in these regions a torrid climate. 
 The conjunction of these remains clearly showed that man 
 had lived in England early enough and long enough to pass 
 through times when there was arctic cold and times when 
 there was torrid heat ; times when great glaciers stretched 
 far down into England and indeed into the continent, and 
 times when England had a land connection with the European 
 continent, and the European continent with Africa, allowing 
 tropical animals to migrate freely from Africa to the middle 
 regions of England. 
 
 The question of the origin of man at a period vastly ear- 
 lier than the sacred chronologists permitted was thus abso- 
 lutely settled, but among the questions regarding the exist- 
 ence of man at a period yet more remote, the Drift period, 
 there was one which for a time seemed to give the cham- 
 pions of science some difficulty. The orthodox leaders in 
 the time of Boucher de Perthes, and for a considerable time 
 afterward, had a weapon of which they made vigorous use: 
 the statement that no human bones had yet been discovered 
 in the drift. The supporters of science naturally answered 
 that few if any other bones as small as those of man had been 
 found, and that this fact was an additional proof of the great
 
 2 ;8 ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHEOLOGY. 
 
 length of the period since man had lived with the extinct 
 animals ; for, since specimens of human workmanship proved 
 man's existence as fully as remains of his bones could do, the 
 absence or even rarity of human and other small bones sim- 
 ply indicated the long periods of time required for dissolv- 
 ing them away. 
 
 Yet Boucher, inspired by the genius he had already 
 shown, and filled with the spirit of prophecy, declared that 
 human bones would yet be found in the midst of the flint 
 implements, and in 1863 he claimed that this prophecy had 
 been fulfilled by the discovery at Moulin Quignon of a por- 
 tion of a human jaw deep in the early Quaternary deposits. 
 But his triumph was short-lived : the opposition ridiculed 
 his discovery ; they showed that he had offered a premium 
 to his workmen for the discovery of human remains, and 
 they naturally drew the inference that some tricky labourer 
 had deceived him. The result of this was that the men of 
 science felt obliged to acknowledge that the Moulin Qui- 
 gnon discovery was not proven. 
 
 But ere long human bones were found in the deposits of 
 the early Quaternary period, or indeed of an earlier period, 
 in various other parts of the world, and the question regard- 
 ing the Moulin Quignon relic was of little importance. 
 
 We have seen that researches regarding the existence of 
 prehistoric man in England and on the Continent were at 
 first mainly made in the caverns ; but the existence of man 
 in the earliest Quaternary period was confirmed on both sides 
 of the English Channel, in a way even more striking, by the 
 close examination of the drift and early gravel deposits. 
 The results arrived at by Boucher de Perthes were amply 
 confirmed in England. Rude stone implements were found 
 in terraces a hundred feet and more above the levels at 
 which various rivers of Great Britain now flow, and under 
 circumstances which show that, at the time when they were 
 deposited, the rivers of Great Britain in many cases were 
 entirely different from those of the present period, and 
 formed parts of the river system of the European continent. 
 Researches in the high terraces above the Thames and the 
 Ouse, as well as at other points in Great Britain, placed 
 beyond a doubt the fact that man existed on the British
 
 THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. 
 
 279 
 
 Islands at a time when they were connected by solid land 
 with the Continent, and made it clear that, within the period 
 of the existence of man in northern Europe, a large portion 
 of the British Islands had been sunk to depths between 
 fifteen hundred and twenty -five hundred feet beneath the 
 Northern Ocean, had risen again from the water, had 
 formed part of the continent of Europe, and had been in 
 unbroken connection with Africa, so that elephants, bears, 
 tigers, lions, the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, of species 
 now mainly extinct, had left their bones in the same deposits 
 with human implements as far north as Yorkshire. More- 
 over, connected with this fact came in the new conviction, 
 forced upon geologists by the more careful examination of 
 the earth and its changes, that such elevations and depres- 
 sions of Great Britain and other parts of the world were not 
 necessarily the results of sudden cataclysms, but generally 
 of slow processes extending through vast cycles of years 
 processes such as are now known to be going on in various 
 parts of the world. Thus it was that the six or seven thou- 
 sand years allowed by the most liberal theologians of former 
 times were seen more and more clearly to be but a mere 
 nothing in the long succession of ages since the appearance 
 of man. 
 
 Confirmation of these results was received from various 
 other parts of the world. In Africa came the discovery of 
 flint implements deep in the hard gravel of the Nile Valley 
 at Luxor and on the high hills behind Esneh. In America 
 the discoveries at Trenton, N. J., and at various places in 
 Delaware, Ohio, Minnesota, and elsewhere, along the south- 
 ern edge of the drift of the Glacial epochs, clinched the new- 
 scientific truth yet more firmly ; and the statement made by 
 an eminent American authority is, that " man was on this 
 continent when the climate and ice of Greenland extended to 
 the mouth of New York harbour." The discoveries of pre- 
 historic remains on the Pacific coast, and especially in Brit- 
 ish Columbia, finished completely the last chance at a rea- 
 sonable contention by the adherents of the older view. As 
 to these investigations on the Pacific slope of the United 
 States, the discoveries of Whitney and others in California 
 had been so made and announced that the judgment of scien-
 
 2gO ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHEOLOGY. 
 
 tific men regarding them was suspended until the visit of 
 perhaps the greatest living authority in his department, Al- 
 fred Russel Wallace, in 1887. He confirmed the view of 
 Prof. Whitney and others with the statement that " both the 
 actual remains and works of man found deep under the lava- 
 flows of Pliocene age show that he existed in the New World 
 at least as early as in the Old." To this may be added the 
 discoveries in British Columbia, which prove that, since man 
 existed in these regions, " valleys have been filled up by drift 
 from the waste of mountains to a depth in some cases of 
 fifteen hundred feet ; this covered by a succession of tuffs, 
 ashes, and lava-streams from volcanoes long since extinct, 
 and finally cut down by the present rivers through beds of 
 solid basalt, and through this accumulation of lavas and 
 gravels." The immense antiquity of the human remains in 
 the gravels of the Pacific coast is summed up by a most emi- 
 nent English authority and declared to be proved, " first, by 
 the present river systems being of subsequent date, some- 
 times cutting through them and their superincumbent lava- 
 cap to a depth of two thousand feet; secondly, by the great 
 denudation that has taken place since they were deposited, 
 for they sometimes lie on the summits of mountains six thou- 
 sand feet high ; thirdly, by the fact that the Sierra Nevada 
 has been partly elevated since their formation." * 
 
 * For the general subject of investigations in British prehistoric remains, see es- 
 pecially Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain and his Place in the Tertiary Pe- 
 riod, London, 1880. For Boucher de Perthes's account of his discovery of the 
 human jaw at Moulin Quignon, see his Antiquity's Celtiques et Ante"diluviennes, vol. 
 iii, p. 542 et seq., Appendix. For an excellent account of special investigations in 
 the high terraces above the Thames, see J. Allen Brown, F. G. S., Paleolithic Man 
 in Northwest Middlesex, London, 1887. For discoveries in America, and the cita- 
 tion regarding them, see Wright, The Ice Age in North America, New York, 1889, 
 chap. xxi. Very remarkable examples of these specimens from the drift at Trenton 
 may be seen in Prof. Abbott's collections at the University of Pennsylvania. For 
 an admirable statement, see Prof. Henry W. Haynes, in Wright, as above. For 
 proofs of the vast antiquity of man upon the Pacific coast, cited in the text, see 
 Skertchley, F. G. S., in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1887, p. 336 ; 
 see also Wallace, Darwinism, London, 1890, chap, xv ; and for a summary, as cited, 
 Laing, Problems of the Future, London, 1889. For a striking summary of the 
 evidence that man lived before the last submergence of Britain, see Brown, Palao- 
 lithic Man in Northwest Middlesex, as above cited. For proofs that man existed 
 in a period when the streams were flowing hundreds of feet above their present 
 level, see ibid., p. 33. As to the evidence of the action of the sea and of glacial ac-
 
 THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. 281 
 
 As an important supplement to these discoveries of an- 
 cient implements came sundry comparisons made by emi- 
 nent physiologists between human skulls and bones found in 
 different places and under circumstances showing vast an- 
 tiquity. 
 
 Human bones had been found under such circumstances 
 as early as 1835 at Cannstadt near Stuttgart, and in 1856 
 in the Neanderthal near Diisseldorf ; but in more recent 
 searches they had been discovered in a multitude of places, 
 especially in Germany, France, Belgium, England, the Cau- 
 casus, Africa, and North and South America. Comparison 
 of these bones showed that even in that remote Quaternary 
 period there were great differences of race, and here again 
 came in an argument for the yet earlier existence of man on 
 the earth ; for long previous periods must have been required 
 
 tion in the Welsh bone caves after the remains of extinct animals and weapons of 
 human workmanship had been deposited, see ibid., p. 198. For a good statement 
 of the slowness of the submergence and emergence of Great Britain, with an illus- 
 tration from the rising of the shore of Finland, see ibid., pp. 47, 48. As to the flint 
 implements of Palaeolithic man in the high terraced gravels throughout the Thames 
 Valley, associated with bones of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, etc., see Brown, p. 
 31. For still more conclusive proofs that man inhabited North Wales before the 
 last submergence of the greater part of the British Islands to a depth of twelve 
 hundred to fourteen hundred feet, see ibid., pp. 199, 200. For maps showing the 
 connection of the British river system with that of the Continent, see Boyd Daw- 
 kins, Early Man in Britain, London, 1880, pp. 18, 41, 73 ; also Lyell, Antiquity 
 of Man, chap. xiv. As to the long continuance of the early Stone period, see 
 James Geikie, The Great Ice Age, New York, 1888, p. 402. As to the impossibil- 
 ity of the animals of arctic and torrid regions living together or visiting the same 
 place at different times in the same year, see Geikie, as above, pp. 4.21 et seq. ; and 
 for a conclusive argument that the animals of the period assigned lived in England 
 not since, but before, the Glacial period, or in the interglacial period, see ibid., p. 
 459. For a very candid statement by perhaps the foremost leader of the theo- 
 logical rear-guard, admitting the insuperable difficulties presented by the Old Tes- 
 tament chronology as regards the Creation and the Deluge, see the Duke of Argyll's 
 Primeval Man, pp. 90-100, and especially pp. 93, 124. For a succinct statement 
 on the general subject, see Laing, Problems of the Future, London, 1889, chapters 
 v and vi. For discoveries of prehistoric implements in India, see notes by Bruce 
 Foote, F. G. S., in the British Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1886 
 and 1887. For similar discoveries in South Africa, see Gooch, in Journal of the 
 Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. xi, pp. 124 et seq. For 
 proofs of the existence of Palaeolithic man in Egypt, see Mook, Haynes, Pitt-Riv- 
 ers, Flinders-Petrie, and others, cited at length in the next chapter. For the cor- 
 roborative and concurrent testimony of ethnology, philology, and history to the vast 
 antiquity of man, see Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i.
 
 282 ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHEOLOGY. 
 
 to develop such racial differences. Considerations of this 
 kind gave a new impulse to the belief that man's existence 
 might even date back into the Tertiary period. The evi- 
 dence for this earlier origin of man was ably summed up, 
 not only by its brilliant advocate, Mortillet, but by a former 
 opponent, one of the most conservative of modern anthro- 
 pologists, Quatrefages; and the conclusion arrived at by 
 both was, that man did really exist in the Tertiary period. 
 The acceptance of this conclusion was also seen in the more 
 recent work of Alfred Russel Wallace, who, though very 
 cautious and conservative, placed the origin of man not only 
 in the Tertiary period, but in an earlier stage of it than most 
 had dared assign even in the Miocene. 
 
 The first thing raising a strong presumption, if not giving 
 proof, that man existed in the Tertiary, was the fact that 
 from all explored parts of the world came in more and more 
 evidence that in the earlier Quaternary man existed in dif- 
 ferent, strongly marked races and in great numbers. From 
 all regions which geologists had explored, even from those 
 the most distant and different from each other, came this 
 same evidence from northern Europe to southern Africa ; 
 from France to China ; from New Jersey to British Colum- 
 bia ; from British Columbia to Peru. The development of 
 man in such numbers and in so many different regions, with 
 such differences of race and at so early a period, must have 
 required a long previous time. 
 
 This argument was strengthened by discoveries of bones 
 bearing marks apparently made by cutting instruments, in 
 the Tertiary formations of France and Italy, and by the dis- 
 coveries of what were claimed to be flint implements by the 
 Abbe Bourgeois in France, and of implements and human 
 bones by Prof. Capellini in Italy. 
 
 On the other hand, some of the more cautious men of 
 science are still content to say that the existence of man in 
 the Tertiary period is not yet proven. As to his existence 
 throughout the Quaternary epoch, no new proofs are needed ; 
 even so determined a supporter of the theological side as 
 the Duke of Argyll has been forced to yield to the evidence. 
 
 Of attempts to make an exact chronological statement 
 throwing light on the length of the various prehistoric peri-
 
 THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS. 283 
 
 ods, the most notable have been those by M. Morlot, on the 
 accumulated strata of the Lake of Geneva; by Gillieron, on 
 the silt of Lake Neufchatel ; by Homer, in the delta deposits 
 of Egypt ; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi. 
 But while these have failed to give anything like an exact 
 result, all these investigations together point to the central 
 truth, so amply established, of the vast antiquity of man, and 
 the utter inadequacy of the chronology given in our sacred 
 books. The period of man's past life upon our planet, which 
 has been fixed by the universal Church, "always, every- 
 where, and by all," is thus perfectly proved to be insignifi- 
 cant compared with those vast geological epochs during 
 which man is now known to have existed.* 
 
 * As to the evidence of man in the Tertiary period, see works already cited, 
 especially Quatrefages, Cartailhac, and Mortillet. For an admirable summary, 
 see Laing, Human Origins, chap. viii. See also, for a summing up of the 
 evidence in favour of man in the Tertiary period, Quatrefages, Histoire Ge'ne'rale 
 des Races Humaines, in the Bibliothbque Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, chap. iv. As 
 to the earlier view, see Vogt, Lectures on Man, London, 1864, lecture xi. For a 
 thorough and convincing refutation of Sir J. W. Dawson's attempt to make the old 
 and new Stone periods coincide, see H. W. Haynes, in chap, vi of the History of 
 America, edited by Justin Winsor. For development of various important points 
 in the relation of anthropology to the human occupancy of our planet, see Topinard, 
 Anthropology, London, 1890, chap. ix.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 IN the previous chapters we have seen how science, es- 
 pecially within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has 
 thoroughly changed the intelligent thought of the world in 
 regard to the antiquity of man upon our planet ; and how 
 the fabric built upon the chronological indications in our 
 sacred books first, by the early fathers of the Church, after- 
 ward by the mediaeval doctors, and finally by the reformers 
 and modern orthodox chronologists has virtually disap- 
 peared before an entirely different view forced upon us, 
 especially by Egyptian and Assyrian studies, as well as by 
 geology and archaeology. 
 
 In this chapter I purpose to present some outlines of the 
 work of Anthropology, especially as assisted by Ethnology, 
 in showing what the evolution of human civilization has 
 been. 
 
 Here, too, the change from the old theological view based 
 upon the letter of our sacred books to the modern scientific 
 view based upon evidence absolutely irrefragable is com- 
 plete. Here, too, we are at the beginning of a vast change 
 in the basis and modes of thought upon man a change even 
 more striking than that accomplished by Copernicus and 
 Galileo, when they substituted for a universe in which sun 
 and planets revolved about the earth a universe in which the 
 earth is but the merest grain or atom revolving with other 
 worlds, larger and smaller, about the sun ; and all these 
 forming but one among innumerable systems. 
 
 Ever since the beginning of man's effective thinking upon 
 the great problems around him, two antagonistic views have 
 existed regarding the life of the human race upon earth. 
 
 284
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 285 
 
 The first of these is the belief that man was created " in the 
 beginning " a perfect being, endowed with the highest moral 
 and intellectual powers, but that there came a " fall," and, as 
 its result, the entrance into the world of evil, toil, sorrow, 
 and death. 
 
 Nothing could be more natural than such an explanation 
 of the existence of evil, in times when men saw everywhere 
 miracle and nowhere law. It is, under such circumstances, 
 by far the most easy of explanations, for it is in accordance 
 with the appearances of things : men adopted it just as nat- 
 urally as they adopted the theory that the Almighty hangs 
 up the stars as lights in the solid firmament above the earth, 
 or hides the sun behind a mountain at night, or wheels the 
 planets around the earth, or flings comets as ''signs and 
 wonders " to scare a wicked world, or allows evil spirits to 
 control thunder, lightning, and storm, and to cause diseases 
 of body and mind, or opens the " windows of heaven " to let 
 down " the waters that be above the heavens," and thus to 
 give rain upon the earth. 
 
 A belief, then, in a primeval period of innocence and 
 perfection moral, intellectual, and physical from which 
 men for some fault fell, is perfectly in accordance with what 
 we should expect. 
 
 Among the earliest known records of our race we find 
 this view taking shape in the Chaldean legends of war be- 
 tween the gods, and of a fall of man ; both of which seemed 
 necessary to explain the existence of evil. 
 
 In Greek mythology perhaps the best-known statement 
 was made by Hesiod : to him it was revealed, regarding the 
 men of the most ancient times, that they were at first " a 
 golden race," that " as gods they were wont to live, with a 
 life void of care, without labour and trouble ; nor was wretch- 
 ed old age at all impending ; but ever did they delight them- 
 selves out of the reach of all ills, and they died as if over- 
 come by sleep ; all blessings were theirs : of its own will the 
 fruitful field would bear them fruit, much and ample, and 
 they gladly used to reap the labours of their hands in quiet- 
 ness along with many good things, being rich in flocks and 
 true to the blessed gods." But there came a " fall," caused 
 by human curiosity. Pandora, the first woman created,
 
 286 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 received a vase which, by divine command, was to remain 
 closed; but she was tempted to open it, and troubles, 
 sorrow, and disease escaped into the world, hope alone re- 
 maining. 
 
 So, too, in Roman mythological poetry the well-known 
 picture by Ovid is but one among the many exhibitions of 
 this same belief in a primeval golden age a Saturnian cycle ; 
 one of the constantly recurring attempts, so universal and so 
 natural in the early history of man, to account for the exist- 
 ence of evil, care, and toil on earth by explanatory myths 
 and legends. 
 
 This view, growing out of the myths, legends, and the- 
 ologies of earlier peoples, we also find embodied in the sacred 
 tradition of the Jews, and especially in one of the documents 
 which form the impressive poem beginning the books attrib- 
 uted to Moses. As to the Christian Church, no word of its 
 Blessed Founder indicates that it was committed by him to 
 this theory, or that he even thought it worthy of his atten- 
 tion. How, like so many other dogmas never dreamed of by 
 Jesus of Nazareth and those who knew him best, it was de- 
 veloped, it does not lie within the province of this chapter to 
 point out ; nor is it worth our while to dwell upon its evolu- 
 tion in the early Church, in the Middle Ages, at the Reforma- 
 tion, and in various branches of the Protestant Church : suf- 
 fice it that, though among English-speaking nations by far 
 the most important influence in its favour has come from Mil- 
 ton's inspiration rather than from that of older sacred books, 
 no doctrine has been more universally accepted, "always, 
 everywhere, and by all," from the earliest fathers of the 
 Church down to the present hour. 
 
 On the other hand appeared at an early period the oppo- 
 site view that mankind, instead of having fallen from a high 
 intellectual, moral, and religious condition, has slowly risen 
 from low and brutal beginnings. In Greece, among the phi- 
 losophers contemporary with Socrates, we find Critias de- 
 picting a rise of man, from a time when he was beastlike and 
 lawless, through a period when laws were developed, to a 
 time when morality received enforcement from religion ; but 
 among all the statements of this theory the most noteworthy 
 is that given by Lucretius in his great poem on T/ie Nature
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 287 
 
 of Things. Despite its errors, it remains among the most re- 
 markable examples of prophetic insight in the history of our 
 race. The inspiration of Lucretius gave him almost mirac- 
 ulous glimpses of truth ; his view of the development of 
 civilization from the rudest beginnings to the height of its 
 achievements is a wonderful growth, rooted in observation 
 and thought, branching forth into a multitude of striking 
 facts and fancies ; and among these is the statement regard- 
 ing the sequence of inventions : 
 
 " Man's earliest arms were fingers, teeth, and nails, 
 And stones and fragments from the branching woods ; 
 Then copper next ; and last, as latest traced, 
 The tyrant, iron." 
 
 Thus did the poet prophesy one of the most fruitful 
 achievements of modern science : the discovery of that series 
 of epochs which has been so carefully studied in our century. 
 
 Very striking, also, is the statement of Horace, though 
 his idea is evidently derived from Lucretius. He dwells 
 upon man's first condition on earth as low and bestial, and 
 pictures him lurking in caves, progressing from the use of 
 his fists and nails, first to clubs, then to arms which he had 
 learned to forge, and, finally, to the invention of the names 
 of things, to literature, and to laws.* 
 
 During the mediaeval ages of faith this view was almost 
 
 * For the passage in Hesiod, as given, see the Works and Days, lines 109-120, 
 in Banks's translation. As to Horace, see the Satires, i, 3, 99. As to the relation 
 of the poetic account of the Fall in Genesis to Chaldean myths, see Smith, Chal- 
 dean Account of Genesis, pp. 13, 17. For a very instructive separation of the 
 Jehovistic and Elohistic parts of Genesis, with the account of the " Fall " as given 
 in the former, see Lenormant, La Ge'ne'se, Paris, 1883, pp. 166-168 ; also Bacon, 
 Genesis of Genesis. Of the lines of Lucretius 
 
 " Arma antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt, 
 Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami, 
 Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta, 
 Sed prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus " 
 
 the translation given is that of Good. For a more exact prose translation, see 
 Munro's Lucretius, fourth edition, which is much more careful, at least in the 
 proof-reading, than the first edition. As regards Lucretius's prophetic insight into 
 some of the greatest conclusions of modern science, see Munro's translation and 
 notes, fourth edition, book v, notes ii, p. 335. On the relation of several pas- 
 sages in Horace to the ideas of Lucretius, see Munro as above. For the passage 
 from Luther, see the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, p. 242.
 
 288 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 entirely obscured, and at the Reformation it seemed likely to 
 remain so. Typical of the simplicity of belief in "the Fall" 
 cherished among the Reformers is Luther's declaration re- 
 garding Adam and Eve. He tells us, " they entered into the 
 garden about noon, and having a desire to eat, she took the 
 apple ; then came the fall according to our account at about 
 two o'clock." But in the revival of learning the old eclipsed 
 truth reappeared, and in the first part of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury we find that, among the crimes for which Vanini was sen- 
 tenced at Toulouse to have his tongue torn out and to be 
 burned alive, was his belief that there is a gradation extending 
 upward from the lowest to the highest form of created beings. 
 
 Yet, in the same century, the writings of Bodin, Bacon, 
 Descartes, and Pascal were evidently undermining the old 
 idea of " the Fall." Bodin especially, brilliant as were his 
 services to orthodoxy, argued lucidly against the doctrine 
 of general human deterioration. 
 
 Early in the eighteenth century Vico presented the phi- 
 losophy of history as an upward movement of man out of 
 animalism and barbarism. This idea took firm hold upon 
 human thought, and in the following centuries such men as 
 Lessing and Turgot gave new force to it. 
 
 The investigations of the last forty years have shown that 
 Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets : what they 
 saw by the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius, has 
 been now thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained 
 and arranged until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern ar- 
 chaeologists, have brought these prophecies to evident fulfil- 
 ment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing the age 
 of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an 
 old stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten 
 copper, a period of bronze, and a period of iron, and array- 
 ing vast masses of facts from all parts of the world, fitting 
 thoroughly into each other, strengthening each other, and 
 showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a fall, there has 
 been a rise of man, from the earliest indications in the Qua- 
 ternary, or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.* 
 
 * For Vanini, see Topinard, Elements d'Anthropologie, p. 52. For a brief and 
 careful summary of the agency of Eccard in Germany, Goguet in France, Hoare in 
 England, and others in various parts of Europe, as regards this development of the
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 289 
 
 The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of " the 
 Fall " came, as we have seen, from geology. According to 
 that doctrine, as held quite generally from its beginnings 
 among the fathers and doctors of the primitive Church 
 down to its culmination in the minds of great Protestants 
 like John Wesley, the statement in our sacred books that 
 "death entered the world by sin " was taken as a historic 
 fact, necessitating the conclusion that, before the serpent 
 persuaded Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, death on our 
 planet was unknown. Naturally, when geology revealed, in 
 the strata of a period long before the coming of man on 
 earth, a vast multitude of carnivorous tribes fitted to destroy 
 their fellow-creatures on land and sea, and within the fossil- 
 ized skeletons of many of these the partially digested remains 
 of animals, this doctrine was too heavy to be carried, and it 
 was quietly dropped. 
 
 But about the middle of the nineteenth century the doc- 
 trine of the rise of man as opposed to the doctrine of his 
 " fall " received a great accession of strength from a source 
 most unexpected. As we saw in the last chapter, the facts 
 proving the great antiquity of man foreshadowed a new and 
 even more remarkable idea regarding him. We saw, it is 
 true, that the opponents of Boucher de Perthes, while they 
 could not deny his discovery of human implements in the 
 drift, were successful in securing a verdict of " Not proven " 
 as regarded his discovery of human bones ; but their triumph 
 was short-lived. Many previous discoveries, little thought 
 of up to that time, began to be studied, and others were 
 added which resulted not merely in confirming the truth 
 regarding the antiquity of man, but in establishing another 
 doctrine which the opponents of science regarded with vastly 
 greater dislike the doctrine that man has not fallen from an 
 
 scientific view during the eighteenth century, see Mortillet, Le Pre"historique, Paris, 
 1885, chap. i. For the agency of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal, see Flint, 
 Philosophy of Histoiy, introduction, pp. 28 et seq. For a shorter summary, see 
 Lubbock, Prehistoric Man. For the statements by the northern archaeologists, see 
 Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works cited in this article. For a generous 
 statement regarding the great services of the Danish archaeologists in this field, see 
 Quatrefages, introduction to Cartailhac, Les Ages Pre"historiques de I'Espagne et du 
 Portugal.
 
 2 9 
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 original high estate in which he was created about six thou- 
 sand years ago, but that, from a period vastly earlier than 
 any warranted by the sacred chronologists, he has been, in 
 spite of lapses and deteriorations, rising. 
 
 A brief review of this new growth of truth may be use- 
 ful. As early as 1835 Prof. Jaeger had brought out from a 
 quantity of Quaternary remains dug up long before at Cann- 
 stadt, near Stuttgart, a portion of a human skull, apparently 
 of very low type. A battle raged about it for a time, but 
 this finally subsided, owing to uncertainties arising from the 
 circumstances of the discovery. 
 
 In 1856, in the Neanderthal, near Diisseldorf, among Qua- 
 ternary remains gathered on the floor of a grotto, another 
 skull was found bearing the same evidence of a low human 
 type. As in the case of the Cannstadt skull, this again was 
 fiercely debated, and finally the questions regarding it were 
 allowed to remain in suspense. But new discoveries were 
 made : at Eguisheim, at Brux, at Spy, and elsewhere, human 
 skulls were found of a similarly low type ; and, while each of 
 the earlier discoveries was open to debate, and either, had no 
 other been discovered, might have been considered an ab- 
 normal specimen, the combination of all these showed con- 
 clusively that not only had a race of men existed at that re- 
 mote period, but that it was of a type as low as the lowest, 
 perhaps below the lowest, now known. 
 
 Research was now redoubled, and, as a result, human 
 skulls and complete skeletons of various types began to be 
 discovered in the ancient deposits of many other parts of 
 the world, and especially in France, Belgium, Germany, the 
 Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America. 
 
 But soon began to emerge from all these discoveries a 
 fact of enormous importance. The skulls and bones found 
 at Cro Magnon, Solutre, Furfooz, Grenelle, and elsewhere, 
 were compared, and it was thus made certain that various 
 races had already appeared and lived in various grades of 
 civilization, even in those exceedingly remote epochs ; that 
 even then there were various strata of humanity ranging 
 from races of a very low to those of a very high type ; and 
 that upon any theory certainly upon the theory of the 
 origin of mankind from a single pair two things were evi-
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 2 9 I 
 
 dent : first, that long, slow processes during vast periods of 
 time must have been required for the differentiation of these 
 races, and for the evolution of man up to the point where 
 the better specimens show him, certainly in the early Qua- 
 ternary and perhaps in the Tertiary period ; and, secondly, 
 that there had been from the first appearance of man, of 
 which we have any traces, an upward tendency.* 
 
 This second conclusion, the upward tendency of man 
 from low beginnings, was made more and more clear by 
 bringing into relations with these remains of human bodies 
 and of extinct animals the remains of human handiwork. As 
 stated in the last chapter, the river drift and bone caves in 
 Great Britain, France, and other parts of the world, revealed 
 a progression, even in the various divisions of the earliest 
 Stone period ; for, beginning at the very lowest strata of 
 these remains, on the floors of the caverns, associated mainly 
 with the bones of extinct animals, such as the cave bear, the 
 hairy elephant, and the like, were the rudest implements ; 
 then, in strata above these, sealed in the stalagmite of the 
 cavern floors, lying with the bones of animals extinct but 
 more recent, stone implements were found, still rude, but, as 
 a rule, of an improved type ; and, finally, in a still higher 
 stratum, associated with bones of animals like the reindeer 
 and bison, which, though not extinct, have departed to other 
 climates, were rude stone implements, on the whole of a still 
 better workmanship. Such was the foreshadowing, even at 
 that early rude Stone period, of the proofs that the tendency 
 
 * For Wesley's statement of the amazing consequences of the entrance of death 
 into the world by sin, see citations from his sermon on The Fall of Man in the 
 chapter on Geology. For Boucher de Perthes, see his Life by Ledieu, especially 
 chapters v and xix ; also letters in the appendix ; also Les Antiquitts Celtiques et 
 AnUdiluviennes, as cited in previous chapters of this work. For an account of the 
 Neanderthal man and other remains mentioned, see Quatrefages, Human Species, 
 chap, xxvi ; also Mortillet, Li Prh istorique, Paris, 1885, pp. 232 et seg. ; also other 
 writers cited in this chapter. For the other discoveries mentioned, see the same 
 sources. For an engraving of the skull and the restored human face of the Nean- 
 derthal man, see Reinach, Antiquitis Nationals, etc., vol. i, p. 138. For the vast 
 regions over which that early race spread, see Quatrefages as above, p. 307. See 
 also the same author, Histoire Ge'ne'rale des Races ffumaines, in the Bibliotheque 
 Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, p. 4. In the vast mass of literature bearing on this sub 
 ject, see Quatrefages, Dupont, Reinach, Joly, Mortillet, Tylor, and Lubbock, in 
 works cited through these chapters.
 
 2 9 2 
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 of man has been from his earliest epoch and in all parts of 
 the world, as a rule, upward. 
 
 But this rule was to be much further exemplified. About 
 1850, while the French and English geologists were working 
 more especially among the relics of the drift and cave pe- 
 riods, noted archaeologists of the North Forchammer, Steen- 
 strup, and Worsaae were devoting themselves to the in- 
 vestigation of certain remains upon the Danish Peninsula. 
 These remains were of two kinds : first, there were vast 
 shell-heaps or accumulations of shells and other refuse cast 
 aside by rude tribes which at some unknown age in the 
 past lived on the shores of the Baltic, principally on shell- 
 fish. That these shell-heaps were very ancient was evident : 
 the shells of oysters and the like found in them were far 
 larger than any now found on those coasts ; their size, so far 
 from being like that of the corresponding varieties which 
 now exist in the brackish waters of the Baltic, was in every 
 case like that of those varieties which only thrive in the 
 waters of the open salt sea. Here was a clear indication that 
 at the time when man formed these shell-heaps those coasts 
 were in far more direct communication with the salt sea 
 than at present, and that sufficient time must have elapsed 
 since that period to have wrought enormous changes in sea 
 and land throughout those regions. 
 
 Scattered through these heaps were found indications of 
 a grade of civilization when man still used implements of 
 stone, but implements and weapons which, though still rude, 
 showed a progress from those of the drift and early cave 
 period, some of them being of polished stone. 
 
 With these were other evidences that civilization had 
 progressed. With implements rude enough to have sur- 
 vived from early periods, other implements never known in 
 the drift and bone caves began to appear, and, though there 
 were few if any bones of other domestic animals, the remains 
 of dogs were found ; everything showed that there had been 
 a progress in civilization between the former Stone epoch 
 and this. 
 
 The second series of discoveries in Scandinavia was made 
 in the peat-beds : these were generally formed in hollows or 
 bowls varying in depth from ten to thirty feet, and a section
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 293 
 
 of them, like a section of the deposits in the bone caverns, 
 showed a gradual evolution of human culture. The lower 
 strata in these great bowls were found to be made up chiefly 
 of mosses and various plants matted together with the trunks 
 of fallen trees, sometimes of very large diameter; and the 
 botanical examination of the lowest layer of these trees and 
 plants in the various bowls revealed a most important fact : 
 for this layer, the first in point of time, was always of the 
 Scotch fir which now grows nowhere in the Danish islands, 
 and can not be made to grow anywhere in them and of 
 plants which are now extinct in these regions, but have re- 
 treated within the arctic circle. Coming up from the bot- 
 tom of these great bowls there was found above the first 
 layer a second, in which were matted together masses of 
 oak trees of different varieties ; these, too, were relics of a 
 bygone epoch, since the oak has almost entirely disappeared 
 from Denmark. Above these came a third stratum made up 
 of fallen beech trees ; and the beech is now, and has been 
 since the beginning of recorded history, the most common 
 tree of the Danish Peninsula. 
 
 Now came a second fact of the utmost importance as con- 
 nected with the first. Scattered, as a rule, through the lower 
 of these deposits, that of the extinct fir trees and plants, were 
 found implements and weapons of smooth stone ; in the 
 layer of oak trees were found implements of bronze ; and 
 among the layer of beeches were found implements and 
 weapons of iron. 
 
 The general result of these investigations in these two 
 sources, the shell mounds and the peat deposits, was the 
 same : the first civilization evidenced in them was marked 
 by the use of stone implements more or less smooth, show- 
 ing a progress from the earlier rude Stone period made 
 known by the bone caves ; then came a later progress to a 
 higher civilization, marked by the use of bronze implements ; 
 and, finally, a still higher development when iron began to 
 be used. 
 
 The labours of the Danish archaeologists have resulted in 
 the formation of a great museum at Copenhagen, and on the 
 specimens they have found, coupled with those of the drift 
 and bone caves, is based the classification between the main
 
 294 
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 periods or divisions in the evolution of the human race above 
 referred to. 
 
 It was not merely in Scandinavian lands that these re- 
 sults were reached ; substantially the same discoveries were 
 made in Ireland and France, in Sardinia and Portugal, in 
 Japan and in Brazil, in Cuba and in the United States ; in 
 fact, as a rule, in nearly every part of the world which was 
 thoroughly examined.* 
 
 But from another quarter came a yet more striking indi- 
 cation of this same evolution. As far back as the year 1829 
 there were discovered, in the Lake of Zurich, piles and 
 other antiquities indicating a former existence of human 
 dwellings, standing in the water at some distance from the 
 shore ; but the usual mixture of thoughtlessness and dread 
 of new ideas seems to have prevailed, and nothing was done 
 until about 1853, when new discoveries of the same kind 
 were followed up vigorously, and Riitimeyer, Keller, Troy- 
 on, and others showed not only in the Lake of Zurich, 
 but in many other lakes in Switzerland, remains of former 
 habitations, and, in the midst of these, great numbers of 
 relics, exhibiting the grade of civilization which those lake- 
 dwellers had attained. 
 
 Here, too, were accumulated proofs of the upward tend- 
 ency of the human race. Implements of polished stone, 
 bone, leather, pottery of various grades, woven cloth, bones 
 
 * For the general subject, see Mortillet, Le Prthistorique, p. 498, et passim. 
 For examples of the rude stone implements, improving as we go from earlier to 
 later layers in the bone caves, see Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, chap, vii, 
 p. 186 ; also Quatrefages, Human Species, New York, 1879, pp. 305 et seq. An in- 
 teresting gleam of light is thrown on the subject in De Baye, Grottes Prthistoriques 
 de la Marne, pp. 31 et seq, ; also Evans, as cited in the previous chapter. For 
 the more recent investigations in the Danish shell-heaps, see Boyd Dawkins, Early 
 Man in Britain, pp. 303, 304. For these evidences of advanced civilization in the 
 shell-heaps, see Mortillet, p. 498. He, like Nilsson, says that only the bones of 
 the dog were found ; but compare Dawkins, p. 305. For the very full list of these 
 discoveries, with their bearing on each other, see Mortillet, p. 499. As to those in 
 Scandinavian countries, see Nilsson, The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia, 
 third edition, with Introduction by Lubbock, London, 1868 ; also the Pre-History 
 of the North, by Worsaae, English translation, London, 1886. For shell-mounds 
 and their contents in the Spanish Peninsula, see Cartailhac's greater work already 
 cited. For summary of such discoveries throughout the world, see Mortillet, Le 
 Prthistorique, pp. 497 et seq.
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 295 
 
 of several kinds of domestic animals, various sorts of grain, 
 bread which had been preserved by charring, and a multi- 
 tude of evidences of progress never found among the earlier, 
 ruder relics of civilization, showed yet more strongly that 
 man had arrived here at a still higher stage than his prede- 
 cessor of the drift, cave, and shell-heap periods, and had 
 gone on from better to better. 
 
 Very striking evidences of this upward tendency were 
 found in each class of implements. As by comparing the 
 chipped flint implements of the lower and earlier strata in 
 the cave period with those of the later and upper strata we 
 saw progress, so, in each of the periods of polished stone, 
 bronze, and iron, we see, by similar comparisons, a steady 
 progress from rude to perfected implements ; and especially 
 is this true in the remains of the various lake-dwellings, for 
 among these can be traced out constant increase in the va- 
 riety of animals domesticated, and gradual improvements in 
 means of subsistence and in ways of living. 
 
 Incidentally, too, a fact, at first sight of small account, 
 but on reflection exceedingly important, was revealed. The 
 earlier bronze implements were frequently found to imitate 
 in various minor respects implements of stone ; in other 
 words, forms were at first given to bronze implements 
 natural in working stone, but not natural in working 
 bronze. This showed the direction of the development 
 that it was upward from stone to bronze, not downward 
 from bronze to stone ; that it was progress rather than 
 decline. 
 
 These investigations were supplemented by similar re- 
 searches elsewhere. In many other parts of the world it 
 was found that lake-dwellers had existed in different grades 
 of civilization, but all within a certain range, intermediate 
 between the cave-dwellers and the historic period. To ex- 
 plain this epoch of the lake-dwellers History came in with 
 the account given by Herodotus of the lake-dwellings on 
 Lake Prasias, which gave protection from the armies of Per- 
 sia. Still more important, Comparative Ethnography showed 
 that to-day, in various parts of the world, especially in New 
 Guinea and West Africa, races of men are living in lake- 
 dwellings built upon piles, and with a range of implements
 
 296 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 and weapons strikingly like many of those discovered in 
 these ancient lake deposits of Switzerland. 
 
 In Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Scot- 
 land, and other countries, remains of a different sort were 
 also found, throwing light on this progress. The cromlechs, 
 cranogs, mounds, and the like, though some of them indicate 
 the work of weaker tribes pressed upon by stronger, show, 
 as a rule, the same upward tendency. 
 
 At a very early period in the history of these discoveries, 
 various attempts were made nominally in the interest of 
 religion, but really in the interest of sundry creeds and 
 catechisms framed when men knew little or nothing of natu- 
 ral laws to break the force of such evidences of the progress 
 and development of the human race from lower to higher. 
 Out of all the earlier efforts two may be taken as fairly typ- 
 ical, for they exhibit the opposition to science as developed 
 under two different schools of theology, each working in its 
 own way. The first of these shows great ingenuity and 
 learning, and is presented by Mr. Southall in his book, pub- 
 lished in 1875, entitled The Recent Origin of the World. In 
 this he grapples first of all with the difficulties presented by 
 the early date of Egyptian civilization, and the keynote of 
 his argument is the statement made by an eminent Egyptol- 
 ogist, at a period before modern archaeological discoveries 
 were well understood, that " Egypt laughs the idea of a rude 
 Stone age, a polished Stone age, a Bronze age, an Iron age, 
 to scorn." 
 
 Mr. Southall's method was substantially that of the late 
 excellent Mr. Gosse in geology. Mr. Gosse, as the readers 
 of this work may remember, felt obliged, in the supposed in- 
 terest of Genesis, to urge that safety to men's souls might be 
 found in believing that, six thousand years ago, the Almighty, 
 for some inscrutable purpose, suddenly set Niagara pouring 
 very near the spot where it is pouring now ; laid the various 
 strata, and sprinkled the fossils through them like plums 
 through a pudding ; scratched the glacial grooves upon the 
 rocks, and did a vast multitude of things, subtle and cunning, 
 little and great, in all parts of the world, required to delude 
 geologists of modern times into the conviction that all these 
 things were the result of a steady progress through long
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 297 
 
 epochs. On a similar plan, Mr. Southall proposed, at the 
 very beginning of his book, as a final solution of the prob- 
 lem, the declaration that Egypt, with its high civilization in 
 the time of Mena, with its races, classes, institutions, arrange- 
 ments, language, monuments all indicating an evolution 
 through a vast previous history was a sudden creation 
 which came fully made from the hands of the Creator. To 
 use his own words, " The Egyptians had no Stone age, and 
 were born civilized." 
 
 There is an old story that once on a time a certain jovial 
 King of France, making a progress through his kingdom, 
 was received at the gates of a provincial town by the may- 
 or's deputy, who began his speech on this wise : " May it 
 please your Majesty, there are just thirteen reasons why His 
 Honour the Mayor can not be present to welcome you this 
 morning. The first of these reasons is that he is dead." On 
 this the king graciously declared that this first reason was 
 sufficient, and that he would not trouble the mayor's deputy 
 for the twelve others. 
 
 So with Mr. Southall's argument : one simple result of 
 scientific research out of many is all that it is needful to 
 state, and this is, that in these later years we have a new and 
 convincing evidence of the existence of prehistoric man in 
 Egypt in his earliest, rudest beginnings ; the very same evi- 
 dence which we find in all other parts of the world which 
 have been carefully examined. This evidence consists of 
 stone implements and weapons which have been found in 
 Egypt in such forms, at such points, and in such positions 
 that when studied in connection with those found in all 
 other parts of the world, from New Jersey to California, 
 from France to India, and from England to the Andaman 
 Islands, they force upon us the conviction that civilization 
 in Egypt, as in all other parts of the world, was developed 
 by the same slow process of evolution from the rudest be- 
 ginnings. 
 
 It is true that men learned in Egyptology had discour- 
 aged the idea of an earlier Stone age in Egypt, and that 
 among these were Lepsius and Brugsch ; but these men 
 were not trained in prehistoric archaeology ; their devotion 
 to the study of the monuments of Egyptian civilization had
 
 298 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 evidently drawn them away from sympathy, and indeed 
 from acquaintance, with the work of men like Boucher de 
 Perthes, Lartet, Nilsson, Troyon, and Dawkins. But a new 
 era was beginning. In 1867 Worsaae called attention to the 
 prehistoric implements found on the borders of Egypt; two 
 years later Arcelin discussed such stone implements found 
 beneath the soil of Sakkara and Gizeh, the very focus of 
 the earliest Egyptian civilization ; in the same year Ha my 
 and Lenormant found such implements washed out from 
 the depths higher up the Nile at Thebes, near the tombs of 
 the kings ; and in the following year they exhibited more 
 flint implements found at various other places. Coupled 
 with these discoveries was the fact that Horner and Linant 
 found a copper knife at twenty-four feet, and pottery at sixty 
 feet, below the surface. In 1872 Dr. Reil, director of the 
 baths at Helouan, near Cairo, discovered implements of 
 chipped flint; and in 1877 Dr. Jukes Brown made similar 
 discoveries in that region. In 1878 Oscar Fraas, summing 
 up the question, showed that the stone implements were 
 mainly such as are found in the prehistoric deposits of other 
 countries, and that, Zittel having found them in the Libyan 
 Desert, far from the oases, there was reason to suppose that 
 these implements were used before the region became a des- 
 ert and before Egypt was civilized. Two years later Dr. 
 Mook, of Wiirzburg, published a work giving the results of 
 his investigations, with careful drawings of the rude stone 
 implements discovered by him in the upper Nile Valley, and 
 it was evident that, while some of these implements differed 
 slightly from those before known, the great mass of them 
 were of the character so common in the prehistoric deposits 
 of other parts of the world. 
 
 A yet more important contribution to this mass of facts 
 was made by Prof. Henry Haynes, of Boston, who in the 
 winter of 1877 and 1878 began a very thorough investigation 
 of the subject, and discovered, a few miles east of Cairo, 
 many flint implements. The significance of Haynes's dis- 
 coveries was twofold : First, there were, among these, stone 
 axes like those found in the French drift beds of St. Acheul, 
 showing that the men who made or taught men how to 
 make these in Egypt were passing through the same phase
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 299 
 
 of savagery as that of Quaternary France ; secondly, he 
 found a workshop for making these implements, proving that 
 these flint implements were not brought into Egypt by in- 
 vaders, but were made to meet the necessities of the country. 
 From this first field Prof. Haynes went to Helouan, north of 
 Cairo, and there found, as Dr. Reil had done, various worked 
 flints, some of them like those discovered by M. Riviere in 
 the caves of southern France ; thence he went up the Nile 
 to Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes, began a thorough 
 search in the Tertiary limestone hills, and found multitudes 
 of chipped stone implements, some of them, indeed, of origi- 
 nal forms, but most of forms common in other parts of the 
 world under similar circumstances, some of the chipped 
 stone axes corresponding closely to those found in the drift 
 beds of northern France. 
 
 All this seemed to show conclusively that, long ages be- 
 fore the earliest period of Egyptian civilization of which the 
 monuments of the first dynasties give us any trace, mankind 
 in the Nile Valley was going through the same slow prog- 
 ress from the period when, standing just above the brutes, 
 he defended himself with implements of rudely chipped 
 stone. 
 
 But in 1 88 1 came discoveries which settled the question 
 entirely. In that year General Pitt-Rivers, a Fellow of the 
 Royal Society and President of the Anthropological Insti- 
 tute, and J. F. Campbell, Fellow of the Royal Geographical 
 Society of England, found implements not only in alluvial 
 deposits, associated with the bones of the zebra, hyena, and 
 other animals which have since retreated farther south, but, 
 at Djebel Assas, near Thebes, they found implements of 
 chipped flint in the hard, stratified gravel, from six and a 
 half to ten feet below the surface; relics evidently, as Mr. 
 Campbell says, "beyond calculation older than the oldest 
 Egyptian temples and tombs." They certainly proved that 
 Egyptian civilization had not issued in its completeness, and 
 all at once, from the hand of the Creator in the time of 
 Mena. Nor was this all. Investigators of the highest char- 
 acter and ability men like Hull and Flinders Petrie re- 
 vealed geological changes in Egypt requiring enormous pe- 
 riods of time, and traces of man's handiwork dating from a
 
 3oo 
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 period when the waters in the Nile Valley extended hun- 
 dreds of feet above the present level. Thus was ended the 
 contention of Mr. Southall. 
 
 Still another attack upon the new scientific conclusions 
 came from France, when in 1883 the Abbe Hamard, Priest 
 of the Oratory, published his Age of Stone and Primitive Man. 
 He had been especially vexed at the arrangement of pre- 
 historic implements by periods at the Paris Exposition of 
 1878; he bitterly complains of this as having an anti-Chris- 
 tian tendency, and rails at science as " the idol of the day." 
 He attacks Mortillet, one of the leaders in French archae- 
 ology, with a great display of contempt; speaks of the 
 " venom " in books on prehistoric man generally ; complains 
 that the Church is too mild and gentle with such monstrous 
 doctrines ; bewails the concessions made to science by some 
 eminent preachers ; and foretells his own martyrdom at the 
 hands of men of science. 
 
 Efforts like this accomplished little, and a more legitimate 
 attempt was made to resist the conclusions of archaeology 
 by showing that knives of stone were used in obedience to 
 a sacred ritual in Egypt for embalming, and in Judea for cir- 
 cumcision, and that these flint knives might have had this 
 later origin. But the argument against the conclusions 
 drawn from this view was triple : First, as we have seen, not 
 only stone knives, but axes and other implements of stone 
 similar to those of a prehistoric period in western Europe 
 were discovered ; secondly, these implements were discov- 
 ered in the hard gravel drift of a period evidently far earlier 
 than that of Mena; and, thirdly, the use of stone imple- 
 ments in Egyptian and Jewish sacred functions within the 
 historic period, so far from weakening the force of the argu- 
 ments for the long and slow development of Egyptian civili- 
 zation from the men who used rude flint implements to the 
 men who built and adorned the great temples of the early 
 dynasties, is really an argument in favour of that long evolu- 
 tion. A study of comparative ethnology has made it clear 
 that the sacred stone knives and implements of the Egyptian 
 and Jewish priestly ritual were natural survivals of that pre- 
 vious period. For sacrificial or ritual purposes, the knife of 
 stone was considered more sacred than the knife of bronze or
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 30! 
 
 iron, simply because it was ancient; just as to-day, in India, 
 Brahman priests kindle the sacred fire not with matches or 
 flint and steel, but by a process found in the earliest, lowest 
 stages of human culture by violently boring a pointed stick 
 into another piece of wood until a spark comes ; and just as 
 to-day, in Europe and America, the architecture of the Mid- 
 dle Ages survives as a special religious form in the erection 
 of our most recent churches, and to such an extent that 
 thousands on thousands of us feel that we can not worship 
 fitly unless in the midst of windows, decorations, vessels, im- 
 plements, vestments, and ornaments, no longer used for other 
 purposes, but which have survived in sundry branches of 
 the Christian Church, and derived a special sanctity from 
 the fact that they are of ancient origin. 
 
 Taking, then, the whole mass of testimony together, even 
 though a plausible or very strong argument against single 
 evidences may be made here and there, the force of its com- 
 bined mass remains, and leaves both the vast antiquity of 
 man and the evolution of civilization from its lowest to its 
 highest forms, as proved by the prehistoric remains of Egypt 
 and so many other countries in all parts of the world, be- 
 yond a reasonable doubt. Most important of all, the recent 
 discoveries in Assyria have thrown a new light upon the 
 evolution of the dogma of "the fall of man." Reverent 
 scholars like George Smith, Sayce, Delitzsch, Jensen, Schra- 
 der, and their compeers have found in the Ninevite records 
 the undoubted source of that form of the fall legend which 
 was adopted by the Hebrews and by them transmitted to 
 Christianity.* 
 
 * For Mr. Southall's views, see his Recent Origin of Man, p. 20, and elsewhere. 
 For Mr. Gosse's views, see his Omphalos as cited in the chapter on Geology in this 
 work. For a summary of the work of Arcelin, Hamy, Lenormant, Richard, Luh- 
 bock, Mook, and Haynes, see Mortillet, Le Prthistorique, passim. As to Zittel's 
 discovery, see Oscar Fraas's Aus dem Orient, Stuttgart, 1878. As to the striking 
 similarities of the stone implements found in Egypt with those found in the drift 
 and bone caves, see Mook's monograph, Wiirzburg, 1880, cited in the next chap- 
 ter, especially Plates IX. XI, XII. For even more striking reproductions of photo- 
 graphs showing this remarkable similarity between Egyptian and European chipped 
 stone remains, see H. W. Haynes, Paleolithic Implements in Upper Egypt, Boston, 
 1881. See also Evans, Ancient Stone Implements, chap, i, pp. 8, 9, 44, 102, 316, 
 329. As to stone implements used by priests of Jehovah, priests of Baal, priests
 
 3 02 
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 
 
 of Moloch, priests of Odin, and Egyptian priests, as religious survivals, see Cartail- 
 hac, as above, 6 and 7 ; also Lartet, in De Luynes, Expedition to the Dead Sea ; 
 also Nilsson, Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia, pp. 96, 97 ; also Sayce, He- 
 rodotus, p. 171, note. For the discoveries by Pitt-Rivers, see the Journal of the 
 Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1882, vol. xi, pp. 382 
 etsej. ; and for Campbell's decision regarding them, see ibid., pp. 396, 397. For 
 facts summed up in the words, " It is most probable that Egypt at a remote period 
 passed like many other countries through its stone period," see Hilton Price, 
 F. S. A., F. G. S., paper in the Journal of the A rchczological Institute of Great Brit- 
 ain and Ireland for 1884, p. 56. Specimens of palaeolithic implements from Egypt 
 knives, arrowheads, spearheads, flakes, and the like, both of peculiar and ordinary 
 forms may be seen in various museums, but especially in that of Prof. Haynes, of 
 Boston. Some interesting light is also thrown into the subject by the specimens 
 obtained by General Wilson and deposited in the Smithsonian Institution at Wash- 
 ington. For the Abb6 Hamard's attack, see his L'Age de la Pierre et I'Homme 
 Primitif, Paris, 1883 especially his preface. For the stone weapon found in the 
 high drift behind Esneh, see Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, chap. i. Of these 
 discoveries by Pitt-Rivers and others Maspero appears to know nothing.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. 
 
 WE have seen that, closely connected with the main lines 
 of investigation in archaeology and anthropology, there 
 were other researches throwing much light on the entire 
 subject. In a previous chapter we saw especially that La- 
 fitau and Jussieu were among the first to collect and com- 
 pare facts bearing on the natural history of man, gathered 
 by travellers in various parts of the earth, thus laying foun- 
 dations for the science of comparative ethnology. It was 
 soon seen that ethnology had most important bearings upon 
 the question of the material, intellectual, moral, and religious 
 evolution of the human race ; in every civilized nation, 
 therefore, appeared scholars who began to study the char- 
 acteristics of various groups of men as ascertained from 
 travellers, and to compare the results thus gained with each 
 other and with those obtained by archaeology. 
 
 Thus, more and more clear became the evidences that 
 the tendency of the race has been upward from low begin- 
 nings. It was found that groups of men still existed possess- 
 ing characteristics of those in the early periods of develop- 
 ment to whom the drift and caves and shell-heaps and pile- 
 dwellings bear witness; groups of men using many of the 
 same implements and weapons, building their houses in the 
 same way, seeking their food by the same means, enjoying 
 the same amusements, and going through the same general 
 stages of culture ; some being in a condition correspond- 
 ing to the earlier, some to the later, of those early periods. 
 
 From all sides thus came evidence that we have still 
 upon the earth examples of all the main stages in the devel- 
 opment of human civilization ; that from the period when 
 
 303
 
 304 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. 
 
 man appears little above the brutes, and with little if any re- 
 ligion in any accepted sense of the word, these examples can 
 be arranged in an ascending series leading to the highest 
 planes which humanity has reached ; that philosophic ob- 
 servers may among these examples study existing beliefs, 
 usages, and institutions back through earlier and earlier 
 forms, until, as a rule, the whole evolution can be easily 
 divined if not fully seen. Moreover, the basis of the whole 
 structure became more and more clear: the fact that " the 
 lines of intelligence have always been what they are, and 
 have always operated as they do now ; that man has pro- 
 gressed from the simple to the complex, from the particular 
 to the general." 
 
 As this evidence from ethnology became more and more 
 strong, its significance to theology aroused attention, and 
 naturally most determined efforts were made to break its 
 force. On the Continent the two great champions of the 
 Church in this field were De Maistre and De Bonald ; but 
 the two attempts which may be especially recalled as the 
 most influential among English-speaking peoples were those 
 of Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, and the Duke of Argyll. 
 
 First in the combat against these new deductions of 
 science was Whately. He was a strong man, whose breadth 
 of thought and liberality in practice deserve all honour; 
 but these very qualities drew upon him the distrust of his 
 orthodox brethren ; and, while his writings were powerful 
 in the first half of the present century to break down 
 many bulwarks of unreason, he seems to have been con- 
 stantly in fear of losing touch with the Church, and 
 therefore to have promptly attacked some scientific rea- 
 sonings, which, had he been a layman, not holding a brief 
 for the Church, he would probably have studied with more 
 care and less prejudice. He was not slow to see the deeper 
 significance of archaeology and ethnology in their relations 
 to the theological conception of " the Fall," and he set the 
 battle in array against them. 
 
 His contention was, to use his own words, that " no com- 
 munity ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external 
 helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can 
 be called civilization " ; and that, in short, all imperfectly
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. 305 
 
 civilized, barbarous, and savage races are but fallen descend- 
 ants of races more fully civilized. This view was urged 
 with his usual ingenuity and vigour, but the facts proved 
 too strong for him : they made it clear, first, that many races 
 were without simple possessions, instruments, and arts which 
 never, probably, could have been lost if once acquired as, 
 for example, pottery, the bow for shooting, various domesti- 
 cated animals, spinning, the simplest principles of agricul- 
 ture, household economy, and the like ; and, secondly, it was 
 shown as a simple matter of fact that various savage and 
 barbarous tribes had raised themselves by a development of 
 means which no one from outside could have taught them ; 
 as in the cultivation and improvement of various indigenous 
 plants, such as the potato and Indian corn among the Indians 
 of North America; in the domestication of various animals 
 peculiar to their own regions, such as the llama among the 
 Indians of South America ; in the making of sundry fabrics 
 out of materials and by processes not found among other na- 
 tions, such as the bark cloth of the Polynesians ; and in the 
 development of weapons peculiar to sundry localities, but 
 known in no others, such as the boomerang in Australia. 
 
 Most effective in bringing out the truth were such works 
 as those of Sir John Lubbock and Tylor ; and so conclusive 
 were they that the arguments of Whately were given up as 
 untenable by the other of the two great champions above 
 referred to, and an attempt was made by him to form the 
 diminishing number of thinking men supporting the old 
 theological view on a new line of defence. 
 
 This second champion, the Duke of Argyll, was a man of 
 wide knowledge and strong powers in debate, whose high 
 moral sense was amply shown in his adhesion to the side of 
 the American Union in the struggle against disunion and 
 slavery, despite the overwhelming majority against him in 
 the high aristocracy to which he belonged. As an honest 
 man and close thinker, the duke was obliged to give up 
 completely the theological view of the antiquity of man. 
 The whole biblical chronology as held by the universal 
 Church, " always, everywhere, and by all," he sacrificed, and 
 gave all his powers in this field to support the theory of 
 "the Fall." Noblesse oblige: the duke and his ancestors had
 
 306 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. 
 
 been for centuries the chief pillars of the Church of Scot- 
 land, and it was too much to expect that he could break 
 away from a tenet which forms really its " chief corner- 
 stone." 
 
 Acknowledging the insufficiency of Archbishop Whate- 
 ly's argument, the duke took the ground that the lower, bar- 
 barous, savage, brutal races were the remains of civilized 
 races which, in the struggle for existence, had been pushed 
 and driven off to remote and inclement parts of the earth, 
 where the conditions necessary to a continuance in their 
 early civilization were absent; that, therefore, the descend- 
 ants of primeval, civilized men degenerated and sank in the 
 scale of culture. To use his own words, the weaker races 
 were " driven by the stronger to the woods and rocks," so 
 that they became " mere outcasts of the human race." 
 
 In answer to this, while it was conceded, first, that there 
 have been examples of weaker tribes sinking in the scale of 
 culture after escaping from the stronger into regions unfa- 
 vourable to civilization, and, secondly, that many powerful 
 nations have declined and decayed, it was shown that the 
 men in the most remote and unfavourable regions have not 
 always been the lowest in the scale ; that men have been fre- 
 quently found "among the woods and rocks" in a higher 
 state of civilization than on the fertile plains, such examples 
 being cited as Mexico, Peru, and even Scotland ; and that, 
 while there were many examples of special and local de- 
 cline, overwhelming masses of facts point to progress as a 
 rule. 
 
 The improbability, not to say impossibility, of many of 
 the conclusions arrived at by the duke appeared more and 
 more strongly as more became known of the lower tribes of 
 mankind. It was necessary on his theory to suppose many 
 things which our knowledge of the human race absolutely 
 forbids us to believe : for example, it was necessary to sup- 
 pose that the Australians or New Zealanders, having once 
 possessed so simple and convenient an art as that of the pot- 
 ter, had lost every trace of it ; and that the same tribes, hav- 
 ing once had so simple a means of saving labour as the 
 spindle or .small stick weighted at one end for spinning, 
 had given it up and gone back to twisting threads with the
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. 307 
 
 hand. In fact, it was necessary to suppose that one of the 
 main occupations of man from " the beginning " had been 
 the forgetting of simple methods, processes, and implements 
 which all experience in the actual world teaches us are never 
 entirely forgotten by peoples who have once acquired them. 
 
 Some leading arguments of the duke were overthrown 
 by simple statements of fact. Thus, his instance of the Eski- 
 mo as pushed to the verge of habitable America, and there- 
 fore living in the lowest depths of savagery, which, even 
 if it were true, by no means proved a general rule, was de- 
 prived of its force by the simple fact that the Eskimos are by 
 no means the lowest race on the American continent, and 
 that various tribes far more centrally and advantageously 
 placed, as, for instance, those in Brazil, are really inferior to 
 them in the scale of culture. Again, his statement that "in 
 Africa there appear to be no traces of any time when the 
 natives were not acquainted with the use of iron," is met by 
 the fact that from the Nile Valley to the Cape of Good Hope 
 we find, wherever examination has been made, the same early 
 stone implements which in all other parts of the world pre- 
 cede the use of iron, some of which would not have been 
 made had their makers possessed iron. The duke also tried 
 to show that there were no distinctive epochs of stone, bronze, 
 and iron, by adducing the fact that some stone implements 
 are found even in some high civilizations. This is indeed a 
 fact. We find some few European peasants to-day using 
 stone mallet-heads ; but this proves simply that the old stone 
 mallet-heads have survived as implements cheap and effective. 
 
 The argument from Comparative Ethnology in support of 
 the view that the tendency of mankind is upward has re- 
 ceived strength from many sources. Comparative Philology 
 shows that in the less civilized, barbarous, and savage races 
 childish forms of speech prevail frequent reduplications 
 and the like, of which we have survivals in the later and 
 even in the most highly developed languages. In various 
 languages, too, we find relics of ancient modes of thought in 
 the simplest words and expressions used for arithmetical cal- 
 culations. Words and phrases for this purpose are frequently 
 found to be derived from the words for hands, feet, fingers, 
 and toes, just as clearly as in our own language some of our
 
 3 08 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. 
 
 simplest measures of length are shown by their names to 
 have been measures of parts of the human body, as the cubit, 
 the foot, and the like, and therefore to date from a time when 
 exactness was not required. To add another out of many 
 examples, it is found to-day that various rude nations go 
 through the simplest arithmetical processes by means of 
 pebbles. Into our own language, through the Latin, has 
 come a word showing that our distant progenitors reckoned 
 in this way : the word calculate gives us an absolute proof 
 of this. According to the theory of the Duke of Argyll, 
 men ages ago used pebbles (calculi] in performing the sim- 
 plest arithmetical calculations because we to-day "calculate" 
 No reduction to absurdity could be more thorough. The 
 simple fact must be that we " calculate " because our remote 
 ancestors used pebbles in their arithmetic. 
 
 Comparative Literature and Folklore also show among 
 peoples of a low culture to-day childish modes of viewing 
 nature, and childish ways of expressing the relations of man 
 to nature, such as clearly survive from a remote ancestry ; 
 noteworthy among these are the beliefs in witches and fairies, 
 and multitudes of popular and poetic expressions in the most 
 civilized nations. 
 
 So, too, Comparative Ethnography, the basis of Ethnology, 
 shows in contemporary barbarians and savages a childish love 
 of playthings and games, of which we have many survivals. 
 
 All these facts, which were at first unobserved or ob- 
 served as matters of no significance, have been brought into 
 connection with a fact in biology acknowledged alike by all 
 important schools ; by Agassiz on one hand and by Darwin 
 on the other namely, as stated by Agassiz, that " the young 
 states of each species and group resemble older forms of the 
 same group," or, as stated by Darwin, that " in two or more 
 groups of animals, however much they may at first differ 
 from each other in structure and habits, if they pass through 
 closely similar embryonic stages, we may feel almost assured 
 that they have descended from the same parent form, and 
 are therefore closely related." * 
 
 * For the stone forms given to early bronze axes, etc., see Nilsson, Primitive 
 Inhabitants of Scandinavia, London, 1868, Lubbock's Introduction, p. 31 ; and
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY. 
 
 309 
 
 for plates, see Lubbock's Prehistoric Man, chap, ii ; also Cartailhac, Les Ages 
 Pre"historiques de I' Espagne et du Portugal, p. 227 ; also Keller, Lake Dwellings ; 
 also Troyon, Habitations Lacustres; also Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Great 
 Britain, p. 292 ; also Lubbock, p. 6 ; also Lyell, Antiquity of Man, chap. ii. For 
 the cranogs, etc., in the north of Europe, see Munro, Ancient Scottish Lake Dwell- 
 ings, Edinburgh, 1882. For mounds and greater stone constructions in the ex- 
 treme south of Europe, see Cartailhac's work on Spain and Portugal above cited, 
 part iii, chap. iii. For the source of Mr. Southall's contention, see Brugsch, Egypt 
 of the Pharaohs. For the two sides of the question whether in the lowest grades 
 of savagery there is really any recognition of a superior power, or anything which 
 can be called, in any accepted sense, religion, compare Quatrefages with Lubbock, 
 in works already cited. For a striking but rather ad captandum effort to show that 
 there is a moral and religious sense in the very lowest Australian tribes, see one of 
 the discourses of Archbishop Vaughan on Science and Religion, Baltimore, 1879. 
 For one out of multitudes of striking and instructive resemblances in ancient stone 
 implements and those now in use among sundry savage tribes, see comparison be- 
 tween old Scandinavian arrowheads and those recently brought from Tierra del 
 Fuego, in Nilsson as above, especially in Plate V. For a brief and admirable 
 statement of the arguments on both sides, see Sir J. Lubbock's Dundee paper, 
 given in the appendix to the American edition of his Origin of Civilization, etc. 
 For the general argument referred to between Whately and the Duke of Argyll on 
 one side and Lubbock on the other, see Lubbock's Dundee paper as above cited ; 
 Tylor, Early History of Mankind, especially p. 193 ; and the Duke of Argyll, 
 Primeval Man, part iv. For difficulties of savages in arithmetic, see Lubbock, as 
 above, pp. 459 et seq. For a very temperate and judicial view of the whole ques- 
 tion, see Tylor as above, chaps, vii and xiii. For a brief summary of the scientific 
 position regarding the stagnation and deterioration of races, resulting in the state- 
 ment that such deterioration " in no way contradicts the theory that civilization 
 itself is developed from low to high stages," see Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i. For 
 striking examples of the testimony of language to upward progress, see Tylor, 
 chap. xii.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 THE history of art, especially as shown by architecture, 
 in the noblest monuments of the most enlightened nations of 
 antiquity, gives abundant proofs of the upward tendency of 
 man from the rudest and simplest beginnings. Many col- 
 umns of early Egyptian temples or tombs are but bundles of 
 Nile reeds slightly conventionalized in stone; the temples 
 of Greece, including not only the earliest forms, but the Par- 
 thenon itself, while in parts showing an evolution out of 
 Egyptian and Assyrian architecture, exhibit frequent remi- 
 niscences and even imitations of earlier constructions in 
 wood ; the mediaeval cathedrals, while evolved out of Roman 
 and Byzantine structures, constantly show unmistakable sur- 
 vivals of prehistoric construction.* 
 
 So, too, general history has come in, illustrating the un- 
 known from the known : the development of man in the 
 prehistoric period from his development within historic 
 times. Nothing is more evident from history than the fact 
 that weaker bodies of men driven out by stronger do not 
 necessarily relapse into barbarism, but frequently rise, even 
 under the most unfavourable circumstances, to a civilization 
 
 * As to evolution in architecture, and especially of Greek forms and ornaments 
 out of Egyptian and Assyrian, with survivals in stone architecture of forms ob- 
 tained in Egypt when reeds were used, and in Greece when wood construction 
 prevailed, see Fergusson's Handbook of Architecture, vol. i, pp. 100, 228, 233, and 
 elsewhere ; also Otfried Miiller, Ancient Art and its Remains, English translation, 
 London, 1852, pp. 219, passim. For a very brief but thorough statement, see A. 
 Mangnard's paper in the Proceedings of the American Oriental Society, October, 
 1889, entitled Reminiscences of Egypt in Doric Architecture. On the general sub- 
 ject, see Hommel, Babylonien, ch. i, and Meyer, Alterthum, i, 199. 
 
 310
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 3 n 
 
 equal or superior to that from which they have been ban- 
 ished. Out of very many examples showing this law of 
 upward development, a few may be taken as typical. The 
 Slavs, who sank so low under the pressure of stronger races 
 that they gave the modern world a new word to express the 
 most hopeless servitude, have developed powerful civiliza- 
 tions peculiar to themselves ; the barbarian tribes who ages 
 ago took refuge amid the sand-banks and morasses of Hol- 
 land, have developed one of the world's leading centres of 
 civilization ; the wretched peasants who about the fifth cen- 
 tury took refuge from invading hordes among the lagoons 
 and mud banks of Venetia, developed a power in art, arms, 
 and politics which is among the wonders of human history ; 
 the Puritans, driven from the civilization of Great Britain to 
 the unfavourable climate, soil, and circumstances of early 
 New England, the Huguenots, driven from France, a coun- 
 try admirably fitted for the highest growth of civilization, to 
 various countries far less fitted for such growth, the Irish 
 peasantry, driven in vast numbers from their own island to 
 other parts of the world on the whole less fitted to them 
 all are proofs that, as a rule, bodies of men once enlightened, 
 when driven to unfavourable climates and brought under the 
 most depressing circumstances, not only retain what en- 
 lightenment they have, but go on increasing it. Besides 
 these, we have such cases as those of criminals banished to 
 various penal colonies, from whose descendants has been 
 developed a better morality ; and of pirates, like those of 
 the Bounty, whose descendants, in a remote Pacific island, 
 became sober, steady citizens. Thousands of examples show 
 the prevalence of this same rule that men in masses do not 
 forget the main gains of their civilization, and that, in spite 
 of deteriorations, their tendency is upward. 
 
 Another class of historic facts also testifies in the most 
 striking manner to this same upward tendency : the decline 
 and destruction of various civilizations brilliant but hope- 
 lessly vitiated. These catastrophes are seen more and more 
 to be but steps in this development. The crumbling away 
 of the great ancient civilizations based upon despotism, 
 whether the despotism of monarch, priest, or mob the de- 
 cline and fall of Roman civilization, for example, which, in
 
 312 
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 his most remarkable generalization, Guizot has shown to 
 have been necessary to the development of the richer civili- 
 zation of modern Europe ; the terrible struggle and loss of 
 the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, 
 but are now seen to have brought in, with the downfall of 
 feudalism, the beginnings of the centralizing, civilizing mo- 
 narchical period ; the French Revolution, once thought a 
 mere outburst of diabolic passion, but now seen to be an 
 unduly delayed transition from the monarchical to the con- 
 stitutional epoch : all show that even widespread deteriora- 
 tion and decline often, indeed, the greatest political and 
 moral catastrophes so far from leading to a fall of mankind, 
 tend in the long run to raise humanity to higher planes. 
 
 Thus, then, Anthropology and its handmaids, Ethnology, 
 Philology, and History, have wrought out, beyond a doubt, 
 proofs of the upward evolution of humanity since the ap- 
 pearance of man upon our planet. 
 
 Nor have these researches been confined to progress in 
 man's material condition. Far more important evidences 
 have been found of upward evolution in his family, social, 
 moral, intellectual, and religious relations. The light thrown 
 on this subject by such men as Lubbock, Tylor, Herbert 
 Spencer, Buckle, Draper, Max Miiller, and a multitude of 
 others, despite mistakes, haltings, stumblings, and occasional 
 following of delusive paths, is among the greatest glories of 
 the century now ending. From all these investigators in 
 their various fields, holding no brief for any system sacred 
 or secular, but seeking truth as truth, comes the same gen- 
 eral testimony of the evolution of higher out of lower. The 
 process has been indeed slow and painful, but this does not 
 prove that it may not become more rapid and less fruitful in 
 sorrow as humanity goes on.* 
 
 While, then, it is not denied that many instances of re- 
 trogression can be found, the consenting voice of unbiased 
 investigators in all lands has declared more and more that 
 the beginnings of our race must have been low and brutal, 
 and that the tendency has been upward. To combat this 
 
 * As to the good effects of migration, see Waitz, Introduction to Anthropology, 
 London, 1863, p. 345.
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 313 
 
 conclusion by examples of decline and deterioration here 
 and there has become impossible : as well try to prove that, 
 because in the Mississippi there are eddies in which the cur- 
 rents flow northward, there is no main stream flowing south- 
 ward ; or that, because trees decay and fall, there is no law 
 of upward growth from germ to trunk, branches, foliage, 
 and fruit. 
 
 A very striking evidence that the theological theory had 
 become untenable was seen when its main supporter in the 
 scientific field, Von Martius, in the full ripeness of his pow- 
 ers, publicly declared his conversion to the scientific view. 
 
 Yet, while the tendency of enlightened human thought 
 in recent times is unmistakable, the struggle against the 
 older view is not yet ended. The bitterness of the Abbe 
 Hamard in France has been carried to similar and even 
 greater extremes among sundry Protestant bodies in Europe 
 and America. The simple truth of history makes it a neces- 
 sity, unpleasant though it be, to chronicle two typical exam- 
 ples in the United States. 
 
 In the year 1875 a leader in American industrial enter- 
 prise endowed at the capital of a Southern State a university 
 which bore his name. It was given into the hands of one of 
 the religious sects most powerful in that region, and a bishop 
 of that sect became its president. To its chair of Geology 
 was called Alexander Winchell, a scholar who had already 
 won eminence as a teacher and writer in that field, a pro- 
 fessor greatly beloved and respected in the two universities 
 with which he had been connected, and a member of the 
 sect which the institution of learning above referred to rep- 
 resented. 
 
 But his relations to this Southern institution were des- 
 tined to be brief. That his lectures at the Vanderbilt Uni- 
 versity were learned, attractive, and stimulating, even his 
 enemies were forced to admit ; but he was soon found to be- 
 lieve that there had been men earlier than the period as- 
 signed to Adam, and even that all the human race are not 
 descended from Adam. His desire was to reconcile science 
 and Scripture, and he was now treated by a Methodist Epis- 
 copal Bishop in Tennessee just as, two centuries before, La 
 Peyrere had been treated, for a similar effort, by a Roman
 
 314 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 Catholic vicar-general in Belgium. The publication of a 
 series of articles on the subject, contributed by the pro- 
 fessor to a Northern religious newspaper at its own request, 
 brought matters to a climax ; for, the articles having fallen 
 under the notice of a leading Southwestern organ of the de- 
 nomination controlling the Vanderbilt University, the result 
 was a most bitter denunciation of Prof. Winchell and of his 
 views. Shortly afterward the professor was told by Bishop 
 McTyeire that "our people are of the opinion that such 
 views are contrary to the plan of redemption," and was re- 
 quested by the bishop to quietly resign his chair. To this 
 the professor made the fitting reply : " If the board of trus- 
 tees have the manliness to dismiss me for cause, and declare 
 the cause, I prefer that they should do it. No power on 
 earth could persuade me to resign." 
 
 " We do not propose," said the bishop, with quite gratui- 
 tous suggestiveness, " to treat you as the Inquisition treated 
 Galileo." 
 
 " But what you propose is the same thing," rejoined Dr. 
 Winchell. " It is ecclesiastical proscription for an opinion 
 which must be settled by scientific evidence." 
 
 Twenty-four hours later Dr. Winchell was informed that 
 his chair had been abolished, and its duties, with its salary, 
 added to those of a colleague ; the public were given to un- 
 derstand that the reasons were purely economic; the ban- 
 ished scholar was heaped with official compliments, evi- 
 dently in hope that he would keep silence. 
 
 Such was not Dr. Winchell's view. In a frank letter to 
 the leading journal of the university town he stated the 
 whole matter. The intolerance-hating press of the country, 
 religious and secular, did not hold its peace. In vain the 
 authorities of the university waited for the storm to blow 
 over. It was evident, at last, that a defence must be made, 
 and a local organ of the sect, which under the editorship of 
 a fellow-professor had always treated Dr. Winchell's views 
 with the luminous inaccuracy which usually characterizes a 
 professor's ideas of a rival's teachings, assumed the task. In 
 the articles which followed, the usual scientific hypotheses 
 as to the creation were declared to be " absurd," " vague and 
 unintelligible," " preposterous and gratuitous." This new
 
 THE " FALL OF MAN " AND HISTORY. 
 
 315 
 
 champion stated that " the objections drawn from the fossil- 
 iferous strata and the like are met by reference to the anal- 
 ogy of Adam and Eve, who presented the phenomena of 
 adults when they were but a day old, and by the Flood of 
 Noah and other cataclysms, which, with the constant change 
 of Nature, are sufficient to account for the phenomena in 
 question " ! 
 
 Under inspiration of this sort the Tennessee Conference 
 of the religious body in control of the university had already, 
 in October, 1878, given utterance to its opinion of unsancti- 
 fied science as follows : "This is an age in which scientific 
 atheism, having divested itself of the habiliments that most 
 adorn and dignify humanity, walks abroad in shameless den- 
 udation. The arrogant and impertinent claims of this ' sci- 
 ence, falsely so called,' have been so boisterous and persist- 
 ent, that the unthinking mass have been sadly deluded ; but 
 our university alone has had the courage to lay its young 
 but vigorous hand upon the mane of untamed Speculation 
 and say, ' We will have no more of this.' " 
 
 It is a consolation to know how the result, thus devoutly 
 sought, has been achieved ; for in the " ode " sung at the lay- 
 ing of the corner-stone of a new theological building of the 
 same university, in May, 1880, we read: 
 
 " Science and Revelation here 
 In perfect harmony appear, 
 Guiding young feet along the road 
 Through grace and Nature up to God." 
 
 It is also pleasing to know that, while an institution call- 
 ing itself a university thus violated the fundamental princi- 
 ples on which any institution worthy of the name must be 
 based, another institution which has the glory of being the 
 first in the entire North to begin something like a university 
 organization the State University of Michigan recalled 
 Dr. Winchell at once to his former professorship, and hon- 
 oured itself by maintaining him in that position, where, un- 
 hampered, he was thereafter able to utter his views in the 
 midst of the largest body of students on the American con- 
 tinent. 
 
 Disgraceful as this history was to the men who drove
 
 316 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 out Dr. Winchell, they but succeeded, as various similar 
 bodies of men making similar efforts have done, in advanc- 
 ing their supposed victim to higher position and more com- 
 manding influence.* 
 
 A few years after this suppression of earnest Christian 
 thought at an institution of learning in the western part of 
 our Southern States, there appeared a similar attempt in 
 sundry seaboard States of the South. 
 
 As far back as the year 1857 tne Presbyterian Synod of 
 Mississippi passed the following resolution : 
 
 " Whereas, We live in an age in which the most insidious 
 attacks are made on revealed religion through the natural 
 sciences, and as it behooves the Church at all times to have 
 men capable of defending the faith once delivered to the 
 saints ; 
 
 "Resolved, That this presbytery recommend the endow- 
 ment of a professorship of Natural Science as connected 
 with revealed religion in one or more of our theological 
 seminaries." 
 
 Pursuant to this resolution such a chair was established 
 in the theological seminary at Columbia, S. C., and James 
 Woodrow was appointed professor. Dr. Woodrow seems 
 to have been admirably fitted for the position a devoted 
 Christian man, accepting the Presbyterian standards of faith 
 in which he had been brought up, and at the same time giv- 
 ing every effort to acquaint himself with the methods and 
 conclusions of science. To great natural endowments he 
 added constant labours to arrive at the truth in this field. 
 Visiting Europe, he made the acquaintance of man)' of the 
 
 * For Dr. Winchell's original statements, see Adamites and Pre-Adamites, Syra- 
 cuse, N. Y., 1878. For the first important denunciation of his views, see the St. 
 Louis Christian Advocate, May 22, 1878. For the conversation with Bishop Mc- 
 Tyeire, see Dr. Winchell's own account in the Nashville American, June 16, 1878. 
 For the curious reply from Dr. Winchell's colleague, see the Nashville Christian 
 Advocate, July 12, 1878 ; and for the further development of the matter, see the 
 Nashville American of July 19, 1878. For the further course of the attack in the 
 denominational organ of Dr. Winchell's oppressors, see the Nashville Christian 
 Advocate, April 26, 1879. For the oratorical declaration of the Tennessee Confer- 
 ence upon the matter, see the Nashville American, October 15, 1878 ; and for the 
 "ode" regarding the "harmony of science and revelation" as supported at the 
 university, see the same journal for May 2, 1880.
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 3^ 
 
 foremost scientific investigators, became a student in univer- 
 sity lecture rooms and laboratories, an interested hearer in 
 scientific conventions, and a correspondent of leading men 
 of science at home and abroad. As a result, he came to the 
 conclusion that the hypothesis of evolution is the only one 
 which explains various leading facts in natural science. This 
 he taught, and he also taught that such a view is not incom- 
 patible with a true view of the sacred Scriptures. 
 
 In 1882 and 1883 the board of directors of the theological 
 seminary, in fear that " scepticism in the world is using 
 alleged discoveries in science to impugn the Word of God," 
 requested Prof. Woodrow to state his views in regard to 
 evolution. The professor complied with this request in a 
 very powerful address, which was published and widely cir- 
 culated, to such effect that the board of directors shortly 
 afterward passed resolutions declaring the theory of evolu- 
 tion as defined by Prof. Woodrow not inconsistent with per- 
 fect soundness in the faith. 
 
 In the year 1884 alarm regarding Dr. Woodrow's teach- 
 ings began to show itself in larger proportions, and a minor- 
 ity report was introduced into the Synod of South Carolina 
 declaring that " the synod is called upon to decide not upon 
 the question whether the said views of Dr. Woodrow con- 
 tradict the Bible in its highest and absolute sense, but upon 
 the question whether they contradict the interpretation of 
 the Bible by the Presbyterian Church in the United States." 
 
 Perhaps a more self-condemnatory statement was never 
 presented, for it clearly recognized, as a basis for intolerance, 
 at least a possible difference between " the interpretation of 
 the Bible by the Presbyterian Church " and the teachings of 
 " the Bible in its highest and absolute sense." 
 
 This hostile movement became so strong that, in spite of 
 the favourable action of the directors of the seminary, and 
 against the efforts of a broad-minded minority in the repre- 
 sentative bodies having ultimate charge of the institution, 
 the delegates from the various synods raised a storm of or- 
 thodoxy and drove Dr. Woodrow from his post Happily, 
 he was at the same time professor in the University of South 
 Carolina in the same city of Columbia, and from his chair in 
 that institution he continued to teach natural science with
 
 3i 8 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 the approval of the great majority of thinking men in that 
 region ; hence, the only effect of the attempt to crush him 
 was, that his position was made higher, respect for him 
 deeper, and his reputation wider. 
 
 In spite of attempts by the more orthodox to prevent stu- 
 dents of the theological seminary from attending his lectures 
 at the university, they persisted in hearing him ; indeed, the 
 reputation of heresy seemed to enhance his influence. 
 
 It should be borne in mind that the professor thus treated 
 had been one of the most respected and beloved university 
 instructors in the South during more than a quarter of a 
 century, and that he was turned out of his position with no 
 opportunity for careful defence, and, indeed, without even 
 the formality of a trial. Well did an eminent but thoughtful 
 divine of the Southern Presbyterian Church declare that " the 
 method of procedure -to destroy evolution by the majority 
 in the Church is vicious and suicidal," and that " logical 
 dynamite has been used to put out a supposed fire in the 
 upper stories of our house, and all the family in the house at 
 that." Wisely, too, did he refer to the majority as " sowing 
 in the fields of the Church the thorns of its errors, and cum- 
 bering its path with the debris and ruin of its own folly." 
 
 To these recent cases may be added the expulsion of 
 Prof. Toy from teaching, under ecclesiastical control at 
 Louisville, and his election to a far more influential chair 
 at Harvard University ; the driving out from the American 
 College at Bey rout of the young professors who accepted 
 evolution as probable, and the rise of one of them, Mr. Nimr, 
 to a far more commanding position than that which he left 
 the control of three leading journals at Cairo ; the driving 
 out of Robertson Smith from his position at Edinburgh, and 
 his reception into the far more important and influential 
 professorship at the English University of Cambridge ; and 
 multitudes of similar cases. From the days when Henry 
 Dunster, the first President of Harvard College, was driven 
 from his presidency, as Cotton Mather said, for " falling into 
 the briers of Antipedobaptism " until now, the same spirit is 
 shown in all such attempts. In each we have generally, on 
 one side, a body of older theologians, who since their youth 
 have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, sundry pro-
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 319 
 
 fessors who do not wish to rewrite their lectures, and a mass 
 of unthinking ecclesiastical persons of little or no importance 
 save in making up a retrograde majority in an ecclesiastical 
 tribunal ; on the other side we have as generally the think- 
 ing, open-minded, devoted men who have listened to the 
 revelation of their own time as well as of times past, and 
 who are evidently thinking the future thought of the world. 
 
 Here we have survivals of that same oppression of thought 
 by theology which has cost the modern world so dear; the 
 system which forced great numbers of professors, under 
 penalty of deprivation, to teach that the sun and planets 
 revolve about the earth ; that comets are fire-balls flung by 
 an angry God at a wicked world ; that insanity is diabolic 
 possession ; that anatomical investigation of the human frame 
 is sin against the Holy Ghost ; that chemistry leads to sor- 
 cery ; that taking interest for money is forbidden by Scrip- 
 ture ; that geology must conform to ancient Hebrew poetry. 
 From the same source came in Austria the rule of the " Im- 
 maculate Oath," under which university professors, long be- 
 fore the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was defined 
 by the Church, were obliged to swear to their belief in that 
 dogma before they were permitted to teach even arithmetic 
 or geometry ; in England, the denunciation of inoculation 
 against smallpox; in Scotland, the protests against using 
 chloroform in childbirth as " vitiating the primal curse 
 against woman " ; in France, the use in clerical schools of a 
 historical text-book from which Napoleon was left out ; and, 
 in America, the use of Catholic manuals in which the In- 
 quisition is declared to have been a purely civil tribunal, or 
 Protestant manuals in which the Puritans are shown to have 
 been all that we could now wish they had been. 
 
 So, too, among multitudes of similar efforts abroad, we 
 have during centuries the fettering of professors at English 
 and Scotch universities by test oaths, subscriptions to ar- 
 ticles, and catechisms without number. In our own country 
 we have had in a vast multitude of denominational colleges, 
 as the first qualification for a professorship, not ability in the 
 subject to be taught, but fidelity to the particular shibboleth 
 of the denomination controlling the college or university. 
 
 Happily, in these days such attempts generally defeat
 
 320 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 themselves. The supposed victim is generally made a man 
 of mark by persecution, and advanced to a higher and wider 
 sphere ot usefulness. In withstanding the march of scientific 
 truth, any Conference, Synod, Board of Commissioners, 
 Board of Trustees, or Faculty, is but as a nest of field-mice 
 in the path of a steam plough. 
 
 The harm done to religion in these attempts is far greater 
 than that done to science ; for thereby suspicions are widely 
 spread, especially among open-minded young men, that the 
 accepted Christian system demands a concealment of truth, 
 with the persecution of honest investigators, and therefore 
 must be false. Well was it said in substance by President 
 McCosh, of Princeton, that no more sure way of making 
 unbelievers in Christianity among young men could be 
 devised than preaching to them that the doctrines arrived 
 at by the great scientific thinkers of this period are opposed 
 to religion. 
 
 Yet it is but justice here to say that more and more there 
 is evolving out of this past history of oppression a better 
 spirit, which is making itself manifest with power in the lead- 
 ing religious bodies of the world. In the Church of Rome 
 we have to-day such utterances as those of St. George Mi- 
 vart, declaring that the Church must not attempt to interfere 
 with science; that the Almighty in the Galileo case gave 
 her a distinct warning that the priesthood of science must 
 remain with the men of science. In the Anglican Church 
 and its American daughter we have the acts and utterances 
 of such men as Archbishop Tait, Bishop Temple, Dean Stan- 
 ley, Dean Farrar, and many others, proving that the deepest 
 religious thought is more and more tending to peace rather 
 than warfare with science ; and in the other churches, espe- 
 cially in America, while there is yet much to be desired, the 
 welcome extended in many of them to Alexander Winchell, 
 and the freedom given to views like his, augur well for a 
 better state of things in the future. 
 
 From the science of Anthropology, when rightly viewed 
 as a whole, has come the greatest aid to those who work to 
 advance religion rather than to promote any particular sys- 
 tem of theology ; for Anthropology and its subsidiary sci- 
 ences show more and more that man, since coming upon the
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 321 
 
 earth, has risen, from the period when he had little, if any, 
 idea of a great power above him, through successive stages 
 of fetichism, shamanism, and idolatry, toward better forms of 
 belief, making him more and more accessible to nobler forms 
 of religion. The same sciences show, too, within the historic 
 period, the same tendency, and especially within the events 
 covered by our sacred books, a progress from fetichism, of 
 which so many evidences crop out in the early Jewish 
 worship as shown in the Old Testament Scriptures, through 
 polytheism, when Jehovah was but "a god above all gods," 
 through the period when he was " a jealous God," capri- 
 cious and cruel, until he is revealed in such inspired utter- 
 ances as those of the nobler Psalms, the great passages in 
 Isaiah, the sublime preaching of Micah, and, above all, 
 through the ideal given to the world by Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 Well indeed has an eminent divine of the Church of Eng- 
 land in our own time called on Christians to rejoice over this 
 evolution, " between the God of Samuel, who ordered infants 
 to be slaughtered, and the God of the Psalmist, whose tender 
 mercies are over all his works; between the God of the 
 Patriarchs, who was always repenting, and the God of the 
 Apostles, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, 
 with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning ; 
 between the God of the Old Testament, who walked in the 
 garden in the cool of the day, and the God of the New Tes- 
 tament, whom no man hath seen nor can see ; between the 
 God of Leviticus, who was so particular about the sacrificial 
 furniture and utensils, and the God of the Acts, who dwelleth 
 not in temples made with hands ; between the God who 
 hardened Pharaoh's heart, and the God who will have all 
 men to be saved ; between the God of Exodus, who is merci- 
 ful only to those who love him, and the God of Christ the 
 heavenly Father who is kind unto the unthankful and the 
 evil." 
 
 However overwhelming, then, the facts may be which 
 Anthropology, History, and their kindred sciences may, in 
 the interest of simple truth, establish against the theolog- 
 ical doctrine of " the Fall " ; however completely they may 
 fossilize various dogmas, catechisms, creeds, confessions, 
 " plans of salvation " and " schemes of redemption," which
 
 322 
 
 THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY. 
 
 have been evolved from the great minds of the theological 
 period : science, so far from making inroads on religion, or 
 even upon our Christian development of it, will strengthen 
 all that is essential in it, giving new and nobler paths to 
 man's highest aspirations. For the one great, legitimate, 
 scientific conclusion of anthropology is, that, more and more, 
 a better civilization of the world, despite all its survivals of 
 savagery and barbarism, is developing men and women on 
 whom the declarations of the nobler Psalms, of Isaiah, of 
 Micah, the Sermon on the Mount, the first great command- 
 ment, and the second, which is like unto it, St. Paul's praise 
 of charity and St. James's definition of " pure religion and 
 undefiled," can take stronger hold for the more effective and 
 more rapid uplifting of our race.* 
 
 * For the resolution of the Presbyterian Synod of Mississippi in 1857, see Prof. 
 Woodrow's speech before the Synod of South Carolina, October 27 and 28, 1884, 
 p. 6. As to the action of the Board of Directors of the Theological Seminary of 
 Columbia, see ibid. As to the minority report in the Synod of South Carolina, 
 see ibid., p. 24. For the pithy sentences regarding the conduct of the majority in 
 the synods toward Dr. Woodrow, see the Rev. Mr. Flinn's article in the Southern 
 Presbyterian Review for April, 1885, p. 272, and elsewhere. For the restrictions 
 regarding the teaching of the Copernican theory and the true doctrine of comets in 
 German universities, see various histories of astronomy, especially Madler. For 
 the immaculate oath {Immaculaten-Rid} as enforced upon the Austrian professors, 
 see Luftkandl, Die Josephinischen Ideen. For the effort of the Church in France, 
 after the restoration of the Bourbons, to teach a history of that country from which 
 the name of Napoleon should be left out, see Father Loriquet's famous Histoire de 
 France & V Usage de la Jeunesse, Lyon, 1820, vol. ii ; see especially table of contents 
 at the end. The book bears on its title-page the well-known initials of the Jesuit 
 motto, A. M. D. G. (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam). For examples in England and 
 Scotland, see various English histories, and especially Buckle's chapters on Scot- 
 land. For a longer collection of examples showing the suppression of anything 
 like unfettered thought upon scientific subjects in American colleges, see Inaugural 
 Address at the Opening of Cornell University, by the author of these chapters. For 
 the citation regarding the evolution of better and nobler ideas of God, see Church 
 and Creed: Sermons preached in the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital, London, 
 by A. W. Momerie, M. A., LL. D., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in King's 
 College, London, London, 1890. For a very vigorous utterance on the other side, 
 see a recent charge of the Bishop of Gloucester.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 FROM " THE PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR " 
 TO METEOROLOGY. 
 
 I. GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY. 
 
 THE popular beliefs of classic antiquity regarding storms, 
 thunder, and lightning, took shape in myths representing 
 Vulcan as forging thunderbolts, Jupiter as flinging them at 
 his enemies, ^Eolus intrusting the winds in a bag to ^Eneas, 
 and the like. An attempt at their further theological devel- 
 opment is seen in the Pythagorean statement that lightnings 
 are intended to terrify the damned in Tartarus. 
 
 But at a very early period we see the beginning of a 
 scientific view. In Greece, the Ionic philosophers held that 
 such phenomena are obedient to law. Plato, Aristotle, and 
 many lesser lights, attempted to account for them on natural 
 grounds ; and their explanations, though crude, were based 
 upon observation and thought. In Rome, Lucretius, Seneca, 
 Pliny, and others, inadequate as their statements were, im- 
 planted at least the germs of a science. But, as the Chris- 
 tian Church rose to power, this evolution was checked ; the 
 new leaders of thought found, in the Scriptures recognized 
 by them as sacred, the basis for a new view, or rather for a 
 modification of the old view. 
 
 This ending of a scientific evolution based upon observa- 
 tion and reason, and this beginning of a sacred science based 
 upon the letter of Scripture and on theology, are seen in 
 the utterances of various fathers in the early Church. As 
 to the general features of this new development, Tertullian 
 held that sundry passages of Scripture prove lightning iden- 
 tical with hell-fire ; and this idea was transmitted from gen- 
 eration to generation of later churchmen, who found an 
 
 323
 
 324 
 
 FROM "THE PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 especial support of Tertullian's view in the sulphurous smell 
 experienced' during thunderstorms. St. Hilary thought the 
 firmament very much lower than the heavens, and that it 
 was created not only for the support of the upper waters, 
 but also for the tempering of our atmosphere.* St. Am- 
 brose held that thunder is caused by the winds breaking 
 through the solid firmament, and cited from the prophet 
 Amos the sublime passage regarding " Him that establisheth 
 the thunders." f He shows, indeed, some conception of the 
 true source of rain ; but his whole reasoning is limited by 
 various scriptural texts. He lays great stress upon the firma- 
 ment as a solid outer shell of the universe : the heavens he 
 holds to be not far outside this outer shell, and argues regard- 
 ing their character from St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians 
 and from the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm. As to 
 " the waters which are above the firmament," he takes up 
 the objection of those who hold that, this outside of the uni- 
 verse being spherical, the waters must slide off it, especially 
 if the firmament revolves ; and he points out that it is by no 
 means certain that the outside of the firmament is spherical, 
 and insists that, if it does revolve, the water is just what is 
 needed to lubricate and cool its axis. 
 
 St. Jerome held that God at the Creation, having spread 
 out the firmament between heaven and earth, and having 
 separated the upper waters from the lower, caused the upper 
 waters to be frozen into ice, in order to keep all in place. 
 A proof of this view Jerome found in the words of Ezekiel 
 regarding "the crystal stretched above the cherubim.":}: 
 
 The germinal principle in accordance with which all 
 these theories were evolved was most clearly proclaimed 
 
 * For Tertullian, see the Apol contra gentes, c. 47 ; also Augustin de Ange- 
 lis, Lectiones Meteorologies, p. 64. For Hilary, see In Psalm. CXXXV (Migne, 
 Pair. Lot., vol. ix, p. 773). 
 
 f " Firmans tonitrua " (Amos iv, 13) ; the phrase does not appear in our ver- 
 sion. 
 
 | For Ambrose, see the Hexameron, lib. ii, cap. 3, 4 ; lib. iii, cap. 5 (Migne, Patr. 
 Lat., vol. xiv, pp. 148-150, 153, 165). The passage as to lubrication of the heavenly 
 axis is as follows : " Deinde cum ipsi dicant volvi orbem cceli stellis ardentibus 
 refulgentem, nonne divina providentia necessario prospexit, ut intra orbem creli, et 
 supra orbem redundaret aqua, quae ilia ferventis axis incendia temperaret ? " For 
 Jerome, see his Epistola, Ixix, cap. 6 (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xxii, p. 659).
 
 GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY. 
 
 325 
 
 to the world by St. Augustine in his famous utterance: 
 " Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scrip- 
 ture, since greater is that authority than all the powers 
 of the human mind." * No treatise was safe thereafter 
 which did not breathe the spirit and conform to the letter of 
 this maxim. Unfortunately, what was generally understood 
 by the " authority of Scripture " was the tyranny of sacred 
 books imperfectly transcribed, viewed through distorting su- 
 perstitions, and frequently interpreted by party spirit. 
 
 Following this precept of St. Augustine there were de- 
 veloped, in every field, theological views of science which 
 have never led to a single truth which, without exception, 
 have forced mankind away from the truth, and have caused 
 Christendom to stumble for centuries into abysses of error 
 and sorrow. In meteorology, as in every other science with 
 which he dealt, Augustine based everything upon the letter 
 of the sacred text ; and it is characteristic of the result that 
 this man, so great when untrammelled, thought it his duty 
 to guard especially the whole theory of the " waters above 
 the heavens." 
 
 In the sixth century this theological reasoning was still 
 further developed, as we have seen, by Cosmas Indicopleus- 
 tes. Finding a sanction for the old Egyptian theory of the 
 universe in the ninth chapter of Hebrews, he insisted that 
 the earth is a flat parallelogram, and that from its outer 
 edges rise immense walls supporting the firmament ; then, 
 throwing together the reference to the firmament in Gene- 
 sis and the outburst of poetry in the Psalms regarding the 
 " waters that be above the heavens," he insisted that over 
 the terrestrial universe are solid arches bearing a vault sup- 
 porting a vast cistern " containing the waters " ; finally, tak- 
 ing from Genesis the expression regarding the " windows of 
 heaven," he insisted that these windows are opened and 
 closed by the angels whenever the Almighty wishes to send 
 rain upon the earth or to withhold it. 
 
 * " Major est quippe Scripturse hujus auctoritas, quam omnis humani ingenii 
 capacitas." Augustine, De Genesi ad Lit., lib. ii, cap. 5 (Migne, Patr. Lot., vol. 
 xxxiv, pp. 266, 267). Or, as he is cited by Vincent of Beauvais (Spec. Nat., lib. iv, 
 98) : " Non est aliquid temere diffiniendum, sed quantum Scriptura dicit accipien- 
 dum, cujus major est auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenii capacitas."
 
 326 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 This was accepted by the universal Church as a vast 
 contribution to thought; for several centuries it was the 
 orthodox doctrine, and various leaders in theology devoted 
 themselves to developing and supplementing it. 
 
 About the beginning of the seventh century, Isidore, 
 Bishop of Seville, was the ablest prelate in Christendom, and 
 was showing those great qualities which led to his enrol- 
 ment among the saints of the Church. His theological view 
 of science marks an epoch. As to the " waters above the 
 firmament," Isidore contends that they must be lower than 
 the uppermost heaven, though higher than the lower heaven, 
 because in the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm they are 
 mentioned after the heavenly bodies and the " heaven of 
 heavens," but before the terrestrial elements. As to their pur- 
 pose, he hesitates between those who held that they were 
 stored up there by the prescience of God for the destruc- 
 tion of the world at the Flood, as the words of Scripture that 
 " the windows of heaven were opened " seemed to indicate, 
 and those who held that they were kept there to moderate 
 the heat of the heavenly bodies. As to the firmament, he is 
 in doubt whether it envelops the earth " like an eggshell," 
 or is merely spread over it " like a curtain " ; for he holds 
 that the passage in the one hundred and fourth Psalm may 
 be used to support either view. 
 
 Having laid these scriptural foundations, Isidore shows 
 considerable power of thought; indeed, at times, when he 
 discusses the rainbow, rain, hail, snow, and frost, his theories 
 are rational, and give evidence that, if he could have broken 
 away from his adhesion to the letter of Scripture, he might 
 have given a strong impulse to the evolution of a true 
 science.* 
 
 About a century later appeared, at the other extremity 
 of Europe, the second in the trio of theological men of sci- 
 ence in the early Middle Ages Bede the Venerable. The 
 nucleus of his theory also is to be found in the accepted view 
 
 * For Cosmas, see his Topographia Christiana (in Montfaucon, Collectio nova 
 patrum, vol. ii), and the more complete account of his theory given in the chapter 
 on Geography in this work. For Isidore, see the Etymologic, lib. xiii, cap. 7-9, De 
 or dine creaturarum, cap. 3, 4, and De natura rerum, cap. 29, 3o(Migne, Pair. Lat* 
 vol. Ixxxii, pp. 476, 477, vol. Ixxxiii, pp. 920-922, 1001-1003).
 
 GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY. 
 
 327 
 
 of the " firmament " and of the " waters above the heavens," 
 derived from Genesis. The firmament he holds to be spher- 
 ical, and of a nature subtile and fiery ; the upper heavens, he 
 says, which contain the angels, God has tempered with ice, 
 lest they inflame the lower elements. As to the waters placed 
 above the firmament, lower than the spiritual heavens, but 
 higher than all corporeal creatures, he says, " Some declare 
 that they were stored there for the Deluge, but others, more 
 correctly, that they are intended to temper the fire of the 
 stars." He goes on with long discussions as to various ele- 
 ments and forces in Nature, and dwells at length upon the 
 air, of which he says that the upper, serene air is over the 
 heavens ; while the lower, which is coarse, with humid exha- 
 lations, is sent off from the earth, and that in this are light- 
 ning, hail, snow, ice, and tempests, finding proof of this in the 
 one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm, where these are com- 
 manded to "praise the Lord from the earth." * 
 
 So great was Bede's authority, that nearly all the anony- 
 mous speculations of the next following centuries upon these 
 subjects were eventually ascribed to him. In one of these 
 spurious treatises an attempt is made to get new light upon 
 the sources of the waters above the heavens, the main reli- 
 ance being the sheet containing the animals let down from 
 heaven, in the vision of St. Peter. Another of these treat- 
 ises is still more curious, for it endeavours to account for 
 earthquakes and tides by means of the leviathan mentioned 
 in Scripture. This characteristic passage runs as follows: 
 " Some say that the earth contains the animal leviathan, 
 and that he holds his tail after a fashion of his own, so that 
 it is sometimes scorched by the sun, whereupon he strives 
 to get hold of the sun, and so the earth is shaken by the mo- 
 tion of his indignation ; he drinks in also, at times, such huge 
 masses of the waves that when he belches them forth all the 
 seas feel their effect." And this theological theory of the 
 tides, as caused by the alternate suction and belching of 
 leviathan, went far and wide.f 
 
 * See Bede, De natura rerum (Migne, Pair. Lat., vol. xc). 
 f See the treatise De mundi constitutione, in Bede's Opera (Migne, Pair. Lat., 
 vol. xc, p. 884).
 
 328 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 In the writings thus covered with the name of Bede 
 there is much showing a scientific spirit, which might have 
 come to something of permanent value had it not been ham- 
 pered by the supposed necessity of conforming to the letter 
 of Scripture. It is as startling as it is refreshing to hear one 
 of these mediseval theorists burst out as follows against those 
 who are content to explain everything by the power of 
 God : " What is more pitiable than to say that a thing is, 
 because God is able to do it, and not to show any reason 
 why it is so, nor any purpose for which it is so ; just as if 
 God did everything that he is able to do ! You talk like 
 one who says that God is able to make a calf out of a log. 
 But did he ever do it? Either, then, show a reason why a 
 thing is so, or a purpose wherefore it is so, or else cease to 
 declare it so." * 
 
 The most permanent contribution of Bede to scientific 
 thought in this field was his revival of the view that the 
 firmament is made of ice ; and he supported this from the 
 words in the twenty-sixth chapter of Job, " He bindeth up 
 the waters in his thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under 
 them." 
 
 About the beginning of the ninth century appeared the 
 third in that triumvirate of churchmen who were the oracles 
 of sacred science throughout the early Middle Ages Raba- 
 nus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mayence. 
 Starting, like all his predecessors, from the first chapter of 
 Genesis, borrowing here and there from the ancient phi- 
 losophers, and excluding everything that could conflict with 
 the letter of Scripture, he follows, in his work upon the uni- 
 verse, his two predecessors, Isidore and Bede, developing 
 especially St. Jerome's theory, drawn from Ezekiel, that the 
 firmament is strong enough to hold up the " waters above 
 the heavens," because it is made of ice. 
 
 For centuries the authority of these three great teachers 
 was unquestioned, and in countless manuals and catechisms 
 
 * For this remonstrance, see the Elementa philosophic, in Bede's Opera (Migne, 
 Pair. Lat., vol. xc, p. 1139). This treatise, which has also been printed, under the 
 title of De philosophia mundi, among the works of Honorius of Autun, is believed 
 by modern scholars (Haure"au, Werner, Poole) to be the production of William of 
 Conches.
 
 GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY. 329 
 
 their doctrine was translated and diluted for the common 
 mind. But about the second quarter of the twelfth centu- 
 ry a priest, Honorius of Autun, produced several treatises 
 which show that thought on this subject had made some 
 little progress. He explained the rain rationally, and mainly 
 in the modern manner; with the thunder he is less success- 
 ful, but insists that the thunderbolt " is not stone, as some 
 assert." His thinking is vigorous and independent. Had 
 theorists such as he been many, a new science could have 
 been rapidly evolved, but the theological current was too 
 strong. * 
 
 The strength of this current which overwhelmed the 
 thought of Honorius is seen again in the work of the Domin- 
 ican monk, John of San Geminiano, who in the thirteenth 
 century gave forth his Summa de Exemplis for the use of 
 preachers in his order. Of its thousand pages, over two 
 hundred are devoted to illustrations drawn from the heavens 
 and the elements. A characteristic specimen is his explana- 
 tion of the Psalmist's phrase, " The arrows of the thunder." 
 These, he tells us, are forged out of a dry vapour rising from 
 the earth and kindled by the heat of the upper air, which 
 then, coming into contact with a cloud just turning into rain, 
 " is conglutinated like flour into dough," but, being too hot 
 to be extinguished, its particles become merely sharpened at 
 the lower end, and so blazing arrows, cleaving and burning 
 everything they touch. f 
 
 But far more important, in the thirteenth century, was the 
 fact that the most eminent scientific authority of that age, 
 Albert the Great, Bishop of Ratisbon, attempted to reconcile 
 the speculations of Aristotle with theological views derived 
 from the fathers. In one very important respect he im- 
 
 * For Rabanus Maurus, see the Comment, in Genesim and De Universo (Migne, 
 Pair. Lot , vol. cvii, cxi. For a charmingly naive example of the primers referred 
 to, see the little Anglo-Saxon manual of astronomy, sometimes attributed to ^Elfric ; 
 it is in the vernacular, but is translated in Wright's Popular Treatises on Science 
 during the Middle Ages. Bede is, of course, its chief source. For Honorius, see 
 the De imagine mundi and f/extemeron (Migne, Pair. Lat., vol. clxxii). The De 
 philosophia mundi, the most rational of all, is, however, believed by modern schol- 
 ars to be unjustly ascribed to him. See note above. 
 
 f See Joannes a S. Geminiano, Summa, c. 75.
 
 330 
 
 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR.' 
 
 proved upon the meteorological views of his great master. 
 The thunderbolt, he says, is no mere fire, but the product of 
 black clouds containing much mud, which, when it is baked 
 by the intense heat, forms a fiery black or red stone that 
 falls from the sky, tearing beams and crushing walls in its 
 course : such he has seen with his own eyes.* 
 
 The monkish encyclopedists of the later Middle Ages 
 added little to these theories. As we glance over the pages 
 of Vincent of Beauvais, the monk Bartholomew, and Wil- 
 liam of Conches, we note only a growing deference to the 
 authority of Aristotle as supplementing that of Isidore and 
 Bede and explaining sacred Scripture. Aristotle is treated 
 like a Church father, but extreme care is taken not to go 
 beyond the great maxim of St. Augustine ; then, little by 
 little, Bede and Isidore fall into the background, Aristotle 
 fills the whole horizon, and his utterances are second in 
 sacredness only to the text of Holy Writ. 
 
 A curious illustration of the difficulties these mediaeval 
 scholars had to meet in reconciling the scientific theories of 
 Aristotle with the letter of the Bible is seen in the case of 
 the rainbow. It is to the honour of Aristotle that his con- 
 clusions regarding the rainbow, though slightly erroneous, 
 were based upon careful observation and evolved by reason- 
 ing alone ; but his Christian commentators, while anxious to 
 follow him, had to bear in mind the scriptural statement that 
 God had created the rainbow as a sign to Noah that there 
 should never again be a Flood on the earth. Even so bold a 
 thinker as Cardinal d'Ailly, whose speculations as to the 
 geography of the earth did so much afterward in stimulating 
 Columbus, faltered before this statement, acknowledging 
 that God alone could explain it ; but suggested that possibly 
 never before the Deluge had a cloud been suffered to take 
 such a position toward the sun as to cause a rainbow. 
 
 The learned cardinal was also constrained to believe that 
 certain stars and constellations have something to do in caus- 
 ing the rain, since these would best explain Noah's fore- 
 
 * See Albertus Magnus, II Sent., Op., vol. xv, p. 137, a. (cited by Heller, Gesch. 
 d. Pkvsik, vol. i, p. 184) and his Liber Methaurorum, III, iv, 18 (of which I have 
 used the edition of Venice, 1488).
 
 GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY. 331 
 
 knowledge of the Deluge. In connection with this scrip- 
 tural doctrine of winds came a scriptural doctrine of earth- 
 quakes : they were believed to be caused by winds issuing 
 from the earth, and this view was based upon the passage in 
 the one hundred and thirty-fifth Psalm, " He bringeth the 
 wind out of his treasuries." * 
 
 Such were the main typical attempts during nearly four- 
 teen centuries to build up under theological guidance and 
 within scriptural limitations a sacred science of meteorology. 
 But these theories were mainly evolved in the effort to es- 
 tablish a basis and general theory of phenomena : it still re- 
 mained to account for special manifestations, and here came 
 a twofold development of theological thought. 
 
 On one hand, these phenomena were attributed to the 
 Almighty, and, on the other, to Satan. As to the first of 
 these theories, we constantly find the Divine wrath mentioned 
 by the earlier fathers as the cause of lightning, hailstorms, 
 hurricanes, and the like. 
 
 In the early days of Christianity we see a curious 
 struggle between pagan and Christian belief upon this point. 
 Near the close of the second century the Emperor Marcus 
 Aurelius, in his effort to save the empire, fought a hotly con- 
 tested battle with the Quadi, in what is now Hungary. 
 While the issue of this great battle was yet doubtful there 
 came suddenly a blinding storm beating into the faces of the 
 Quadi, and this gave the Roman troops the advantage, en- 
 abling Marcus Aurelius to win a decisive victory. Votaries 
 of each of the great religions claimed that this storm was 
 caused by the object of their own adoration. The pagans 
 insisted that Jupiter had sent the storm in obedience to their 
 prayers, and on the Antonine Column at Rome we may still 
 see the figure of Olympian Jove casting his thunderbolts 
 and pouring a storm of rain from the open heavens against 
 the Quadi. On the other hand, the Christians insisted that 
 the storm had been sent by Jehovah in obedience to their 
 
 * For D'Ailly, see his Concordia astronomies veritatis cum theologia (Paris, 1483 
 in the Imago mundi and Venice, 1490) ; also Eck's commentary on Aristotle's 
 Meteorologica (Augsburg, 1519), lib. ii, nota 2 ; also Reisch, Margaf ita philosophica, 
 lib. ix, c. 1 8.
 
 332 
 
 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR.' 
 
 prayers; and Tertullian, Eusebius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, 
 and St. Jerome were among those who insisted upon this 
 meteorological miracle ; the first two, indeed, in the fer- 
 vour of their arguments for its reality, allowing themselves 
 to be carried considerably beyond exact historical truth.* 
 
 As time went on, the fathers developed this view more 
 and more from various texts in the Jewish and Christian 
 sacred books, substituting for Jupiter flinging his thunder- 
 bolts the Almighty wrapped in thunder and sending forth 
 his lightnings. Through the Middle Ages this was fostered 
 until it came to be accepted as a mere truism, entering into 
 all mediaeval thinking, and was still further developed by an 
 attempt to specify the particular sins which were thus pun- 
 ished. Thus even the rational Florentine historian Vil- 
 lani ascribed floods and fires to the " too great pride of the 
 city of Florence and the ingratitude of the citizens toward 
 God," which, "of course," says a recent historian, "meant 
 their insufficient attention to the ceremonies of religion." f 
 
 In the thirteenth century the Cistercian monk, Cassarius 
 of Heisterbach, popularized the doctrine in central Europe. 
 His rich collection of anecdotes for the illustration of re- 
 ligious truths was the favourite recreative reading in the con- 
 vents for three centuries, and exercised great influence over 
 the thought of the later Middle Ages. In this work he re- 
 lates several instances of the Divine use of lightning, both for 
 rescue and for punishment. Thus he tells us how the stew- 
 ard (cellerarius) of his own monastery was saved from the 
 clutch of a robber by a clap of thunder which, in answer to 
 his prayer, burst suddenly from the sky and frightened the 
 bandit from his purpose ; how, in a Saxon theatre, twenty 
 men were struck down, while a priest escaped, not because 
 he was not a greater sinner than the rest, but because the 
 thunderbolt had respect for his profession ! It is Cassarius, 
 too, who tells us the story of the priest of Treves, struck by 
 lightning in his own church, whither he had gone to ring 
 
 * For the authorities, pagan and Christian, see the note of Merivale, in his His- 
 tory of the Romans under the Empire, chap. Ixviii. He refers for still fuller cita- 
 tions to Fynes Clinton's Fasti Rom., p. 24. 
 
 f See Trollope, History of Florence, vol. i, p. 64.
 
 GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY. 
 
 333 
 
 the bell against the storm, and whose sins were revealed by 
 the course of the lightning, for it tore his clothes from him 
 and consumed certain parts of his body, showing that the 
 sins for which he was punished were vanity and unchastity. * 
 
 This mode of explaining the Divine interference more 
 minutely is developed century after century, and we find 
 both Catholics and Protestants assigning as causes of un- 
 pleasant meteorological phenomena whatever appears to them 
 wicked or even unorthodox. Among the English Reform- 
 ers, Tyndale quotes in this kind of argument the thirteenth 
 chapter of I. Samuel, showing that, when God gave Israel a 
 king, it thundered and rained. Archbishop Whitgift, Bishop 
 Bale, and Bishop Pilkington insisted on the same view. In 
 Protestant Germany, about the same period, Plieninger took 
 a dislike to the new Gregorian calendar and published a vol- 
 ume of Brief Reflections, in which he insisted that the ele- 
 ments had given utterance to God's anger against it, calling 
 attention to the fact that violent storms raged over almost 
 all Germany during the very ten days which the Pope had 
 taken out for the correction of the year, and that great 
 floods began with the first days of the corrected year.f 
 
 Early in the seventeenth century, Majoli, Bishop of Vol- 
 toraria, in southern Italy, produced his huge work Dies Ca- 
 nicularii, or Dog Days, which remained a favourite encyclo- 
 paedia in Catholic lands for over a hundred years. Treat- 
 ing of thunder and lightning, he compares them to bombs 
 against the wicked, and says that the thunderbolt is " an 
 exhalation condensed and cooked into stone," and that " it 
 is not to be doubted that, of all instruments of God's venge- 
 ance, the thunderbolt is the chief " ; that by means of it 
 Sennacherib and his army were consumed ; that Luther was 
 struck by lightning in his youth as a caution against depart- 
 ing from the Catholic faith; that blasphemy and Sabbath- 
 breaking are the sins to which this punishment is especially 
 
 * See Csesarius Heisterbacensis, Dialogus miraculorum, lib. x, c. 28-30. 
 
 f For Tyndale, see his Doctrinal Treatises, p. 194, and for Whitgift, see his 
 Works, vol. ii, pp. 477-4^3 ; Bale, Works, pp. 244, 245 ; and Pilkington, Works, 
 pp. 177, 536 (all in Parker Society Publications). Bishop Bale cites especially Job 
 xxxviii, Ecclesiasticus xiii, and Revelation viii, as supporting the theory. For Plie- 
 ninger's words, see Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, voL v, p. 350.
 
 334 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 assigned, and he cites the case of Dathan and Abiram. Fifty 
 years later the Jesuit Stengel developed this line of thought 
 still further in four thick quarto volumes on the judgments 
 of God, adding an elaborate schedule for the use of preachers 
 in the sermons of an entire year. Three chapters were de- 
 voted to thunder, lightning, and storms. That the author 
 teaches the agency in these of diabolical powers goes without 
 saying ; but this can only act, he declares, by Divine permis- 
 sion, and the thunderbolt is always the finger of God, which 
 rarely strikes a man save for his sins, and the nature of the 
 special sin thus punished may be inferred from the bodily or- 
 gans smitten. A few years later, in Protestant Swabia, Pas- 
 tor Georg Nuber issued a volume of " weather-sermons," in 
 which he discusses nearly every sort of elemental disturb- 
 ances storms, floods, droughts, lightning, and hail. These, 
 he says, come direct from God for human sins, yet no doubt 
 with discrimination, for there are five sins which God espe- 
 cially punishes with lightning and hail namely, impenitence, 
 incredulity, neglect of the repair of churches, fraud in the 
 payment of tithes to the clergy, and oppression of subordi- 
 nates, each of which points he supports with a mass of scrip- 
 tural texts.* 
 
 This doctrine having become especially precious both 
 to Catholics and to Protestants, there were issued hand- 
 books of prayers against bad weather : among these was the 
 Spiritual Thunder and Storm Booklet, produced in 1731 by a 
 Protestant scholar, Stoltzlin, whose three or four hundred 
 pages of prayer and song, " sighs for use when it lightens 
 fearfully," and "cries of anguish when the hailstorm is 
 drawing on," show a wonderful adaptability to all pos- 
 sible meteorological emergencies. The preface of this vol- 
 ume is contributed by Prof. Dilherr, pastor of the great 
 church of St. Sebald at Nuremberg, who, in discussing the 
 Divine purposes of storms, adds to the three usually assigned 
 namely, God's wish to manifest his power, to display his 
 anger, and to drive sinners to repentance a fourth, which, 
 
 * For Majoli, see Dies Can., I, i ; for Stengel, see the De jtidiciis divinis, vol. 
 ii, pp. 15-61, and especially the example of the impurus et saltator sacerdos, ful- 
 mine castratus, pp. 26, 27. For Nuber, see his Condones meteoricce, Ulm, 1661.
 
 GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY. 335 
 
 he says, is that God may show us " with what sort of a storm- 
 bell he will one day ring in the last judgment." 
 
 About the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury we find, in Switzerland, even the eminent and rational 
 Professor of Mathematics, Scheuchzer, publishing his Physica 
 Sacra, with the Bible as a basis, and forced to admit that the 
 elements, in the most literal sense, utter the voice of God. 
 The same pressure was felt in New England. Typical are 
 the sermons of Increase Mather on The Voice of God in Stormy 
 Winds. He especially lays stress on the voice of God speak- 
 ing to Job out of the whirlwind, and upon the text, " Stormy 
 wind fulfilling his word." He declares, " When there are 
 great tempests, the angels oftentimes have a hand there- 
 in, ... yea, and sometimes evil angels." He gives several 
 cases of blasphemers struck by lightning, and says, " Noth- 
 ing can be more dangerous for mortals than to contemn 
 dreadful providences, and, in particular, dreadful tempests." 
 
 His distinguished son, Cotton Mather, disentangled him- 
 self somewhat from the old view, as he had done in the 
 interpretation of comets. In his Christian Philosopher, his 
 Thoughts for the Day of Rain, and his Sermon preached at the 
 Time of the Late Storm (in 1723), he is evidently tending to- 
 ward the modern view. Yet, from time to time, the older 
 view has reasserted itself, and in France, as recently as the 
 year 1 870, we find the Bishop of Verdun ascribing the drought 
 afflicting his diocese to the sin of Sabbath-breaking.* 
 
 This theory, which attributed injurious meteorological 
 phenomena mainly to the purposes of God, was a natural de- 
 velopment, and comparatively harmless ; but at a very early 
 period there was evolved another theory, which, having 
 been ripened into a doctrine, cost the earth dear indeed. 
 Never, perhaps, in the modern world has there been a 
 dogma more prolific of physical, mental, and moral agony 
 
 * For Stoltzlin, see his Gdstliches Donner- und Wetter-Buchlein (Zurich, 1731). 
 For Increase Mather, see his The Voice of God, etc. (Boston, 1704). This rare 
 volume is in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society at Worces- 
 ter. For Cotton Mather's view, see the chapter From Signs and Wonders to 
 Law, in this work. For the Bishop of Verdun, see the Semaine relig. de Lor- 
 raine, 1870, p. 445 (cited by " Paul Parfait," in his Dossier des Ptlerinages, pp. 
 141-143).
 
 336 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 throughout whole nations and during whole centuries. This 
 theory, its development by theology, its fearful results to 
 mankind, and its destruction by scientific observation and 
 thought, will next be considered. 
 
 II. DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. 
 
 While the fathers and schoolmen were labouring to de- 
 duce a science of meteorology from our sacred books, there 
 oozed up in European society a mass of traditions and ob- 
 servances which had been lurking since the days of pagan- 
 ism ; and, although here and there appeared a churchman 
 to oppose them, the theologians and ecclesiastics ere long 
 began to adopt them and to clothe them with the authority 
 of religion. 
 
 Both among the pagans of the Roman Empire and among 
 the barbarians of the North the Christian missionaries had 
 found it easier to prove the new God supreme than to prove 
 the old gods powerless. Faith in the miracles of the new 
 religion seemed to increase rather than to diminish faith in 
 the miracles of the old ; and the Church at last began ad- 
 mitting the latter as facts, but ascribing them to the devil. 
 Jupiter and Odin sank into the category of ministers of 
 Satan, and transferred to that master all their former powers. 
 A renewed study of Scripture by theologians elicited over- 
 whelming proofs of the truth of this doctrine. Stress was 
 especially laid on the declaration of Scripture, " The gods 
 of the heathen are devils." * Supported by this and other 
 texts, it soon became a dogma. So strong was the hold it 
 took, under the influence of the Church, that not until late 
 in the seventeenth century did its substantial truth begin to 
 be questioned. 
 
 With no field of action had the sway of the ancient deities 
 been more identified than with that of atmospheric phenom- 
 ena. The Roman heard Jupiter, and the Teuton heard Thor, 
 in the thunder. Could it be doubted that these powerful 
 beings would now take occasion, unless hindered by the 
 command of the Almighty, to vent their spite against those 
 
 * For so the Vulgate and all the early versions rendered Ps. xcvi, 5.
 
 DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. 337 
 
 who had deserted their altars? Might not the Almighty 
 himself be willing to employ the malice of these powers of 
 the air against those who had offended him ? 
 
 It was, indeed, no great step, for those whose simple 
 faith accepted rain or sunshine as an answer to their prayers, 
 to suspect that the untimely storms or droughts, which baf- 
 fled their most earnest petitions, were the work of the arch- 
 enemy, " the prince of the power of the air." 
 
 The great fathers of the Church had easily found war- 
 rant for this doctrine in Scripture. St. Jerome declared 
 the air to be full of devils, basing this belief upon various 
 statements in the prophecies of Isaiah and in the Epistle to 
 the Ephesians. St. Augustine held the same view as be- 
 yond controversy.* 
 
 During the Middle Ages this doctrine of the diabolical 
 origin of storms went on gathering strength. Bede had full 
 faith in it, and narrates various anecdotes in support of it. 
 St. Thomas Aquinas gave it his sanction, saying in his all- 
 authoritative Summa, " Rains and winds, and whatsoever 
 occurs by local impulse alone, can be caused by demons." 
 " It is," he says, " a dogma of faith that the demons can pro- 
 duce wind, storms, and rain of fire from heaven." 
 
 Albert the Great taught the same doctrine, and showed 
 how a certain salve thrown into a spring produced whirl- 
 winds. The great Franciscan the " seraphic doctor " 
 St. Bonaventura, whose services to theology earned him 
 one of the highest places in the Church, and to whom Dante 
 gave special honour in paradise, set upon this belief his high 
 authority. The lives of the saints, and the chronicles of the 
 Middle Ages, were filled with it. Poetry and painting ac- 
 cepted the idea and developed it. Dante wedded it to verse, 
 and at Venice this thought may still be seen embodied in 
 
 * For St. Jerome, see his Com. in Efl. ad Ephesios (lib. iii, cap. 6) ; commenting 
 on the text, " Our battle is not with flesh and blood," he explains this as mean- 
 ing the devils in the air, and adds : " Nam et in alio loco de dsemonibus quod in 
 acre isto vagentur, Apostolus ait : In qtiibus ambulastis aliquando juxta stzculum 
 mundi istius, secundum principem potestatis aeris spiritus, qui nunc operatur in 
 fillos diffidentia (Eph. ii, 2). Haec autem omnium doctorum opinio est, quod aer 
 iste qui ccelum et terram medius dividens, inane appellatur, plenus sit contrariis 
 fortitudinibus." See also his Com. in fsaiam, lib. xiii, cap. 50 (Migne, Pair. 
 Lot., vol. xxiv, p. 477). For Augustine, see the De Civitate Dei, passim. 
 23
 
 338 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR.* 
 
 one of the grand pictures of Bordone : a shipload of demons 
 is seen approaching Venice in a storm, threatening destruc- 
 tion to the city, but St. Mark, St. George, and St. Nicholas 
 attack the vessel, and disperse the hellish crew.* 
 
 The popes again and again sanctioned this doctrine, and 
 it was amalgamated with various local superstitions, pious 
 imaginations, and interesting arguments, to strike the fancy 
 of the people at large. A strong argument in favour of a 
 diabolical origin of the thunderbolt was afforded by the 
 eccentricities of its operation. These attracted especial at- 
 tention in the Middle Ages, and the popular love of marvel 
 generalized isolated phenomena into rules. Thus it was 
 said that the lightning strikes the sword in the sheath, gold 
 in the purse, the foot in the shoe, leaving sheath and purse 
 and shoe unharmed ; that it consumes a human being inter- 
 nally without injuring the skin ; that it destroys nets in the 
 water, but not on the land ; that it kills one man, and leaves 
 untouched another standing beside him ; that it can tear 
 through a house and enter the earth without moving a stone 
 from its place ; that it injures the heart of a tree, but not the 
 bark ; that wine is poisoned by it, while poisons struck by it 
 lose their venom ; that a man's hair may be consumed by it 
 and the man be unhurt, f 
 
 These peculiar phenomena, made much of by the alle- 
 gorizing sermonizers of the day, were used in moral lessons 
 from every pulpit. Thus the Carmelite, Matthias Farinator, 
 of Vienna, who at the Pope's own instance compiled early in 
 the fifteenth century that curious handbook of illustrative 
 examples for preachers, the Lumen Animce, finds a spiritual 
 analogue for each of these anomalies. J 
 
 This doctrine grew, robust and noxious, until, in the 
 
 * For Bede, see the Hist. Eccks., vol. i, p. 17 ; Vita Cuthberti, c. 17 (Migne, 
 tome xliv). For Thomas Aquinas, see the Summa, pars I, qu. Ixxx, art. 2. The 
 second citation I owe to Rydberg, Magic of the Middle Ages, p. 73, where the 
 whole interesting passage is given at length. For Albertus Magnus, see the De 
 Potentia Dcemonum (cited by Maury, Legendes Pieuses). For Bonaventura, see 
 the Comp. Theol. Veritat., ii, 26. For Dante, see Purgatorio, c. 5. On Bordone's 
 picture, see Maury, Ltgendes Pieuses ; p. 18, note. 
 
 f- See, for lists of such admiranda, any of the early writers e. g., Vincent of 
 Beauvais, Reisch's Margarita, or Eck's Aristotle. 
 
 \ See the Lumen Animce, Eichstadt, 1479.
 
 DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. 339 
 
 fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, we find its 
 bloom in a multitude of treatises by the most learned of the 
 Catholic and Protestant divines, and its fruitage in the tor- 
 ture chambers and on the scaffolds throughout Christendom. 
 At the Reformation period, and for nearly two hundred 
 years afterward, Catholics and Protestants vied with each 
 other in promoting this growth. John Eck, the great oppo- 
 nent of Luther, gave to the world an annotated edition of 
 Aristotle's Physics, which was long authoritative in the Ger- 
 man universities ; and, though the text is free from this doc- 
 trine, the woodcut illustrating the earth's atmosphere shows 
 most vividly, among the clouds of mid-air, the devils who 
 there reign supreme.* 
 
 Luther, in the other religious camp, supported the super- 
 stition even more zealously, asserting at times his belief that 
 the winds themselves are only good or evil spirits, and de- 
 claring that a stone thrown into a certain pond in his native 
 region would cause a dreadful storm because of the devils 
 kept prisoners there.f 
 
 Just at the close of the same century, Catholics and Prot- 
 estants welcomed alike the great work of Delrio. In this, 
 the power of devils over the elements is proved first from 
 the Holy Scriptures, since, he declares, " they show that 
 Satan brought fire down from heaven to consume the ser- 
 vants and flocks of Job, and that he stirred up a violent 
 wind, which overwhelmed in ruin the sons and daughters of 
 Job at their feasting." Next, Delrio insists on the agreement 
 of all the orthodox fathers, that it was the devil himself who 
 did this, and attention is called to the fact that the hail with 
 which the Egyptians were punished is expressly declared in 
 Holy Scripture to have been brought by the evil angels. 
 Citing from the Apocalypse, he points to the four angels 
 standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the 
 winds and preventing their doing great damage to mortals ; 
 and he dwells especially upon the fact that the devil is called 
 by the apostle a " prince of the power of the air." He then 
 
 * See Eck, Aristotelis Meteorologica, Augsburg, 1519. 
 
 f For Luther, see the Table Talk; also Michelet, Life of Luther (translated 
 by Hazlitt, p. 321).
 
 340 FROM THE '-PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 goes on to cite the great fathers of the Church Clement, 
 Jerome, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.* 
 
 This doctrine was spread not only in ponderous treatises, 
 but in light literature and by popular illustrations. In the 
 Compendium Maleficarum of the Italian monk Guacci, perhaps 
 the most amusing book in the whole literature of witchcraft, 
 we may see the witch, in propria persona, riding the diabolic 
 goat through the clouds while the storm rages around and 
 beneath her ; and we may read a rich collection of anecdotes, 
 largely contemporary, which establish the required doctrine 
 beyond question. 
 
 The first and most natural means taken against this work 
 of Satan in the air was prayer ; and various petitions are to 
 be found scattered through the Christian liturgies some 
 very beautiful and touching. This means of escape has been 
 relied upon, with greater or less faith, from those days to 
 these. Various mediaeval saints and reformers, and devoted 
 men in all centuries, from St. Giles to John Wesley, have 
 used it with results claimed to be miraculous. Whatever 
 theory any thinking man may hold in the matter, he will cer- 
 tainly not venture a reproachful word : such prayers have been 
 in all ages a natural outcome of the mind of man in trouble, f 
 
 But against the " power of the air " were used other means 
 of a very different character and tendency, and foremost 
 among these was exorcism. In an exorcism widely used 
 and ascribed to Pope Gregory XIII, the formula is given: 
 " I, a priest of Christ, ... do command ye, most foul spirits, 
 who do stir up these clouds, , . . that ye depart from them, 
 and disperse yourselves into wild and untilled places, that 
 
 * For Delrio, see his Disquisitiones Magicce, first printed at Liege in 1599- 
 1600, but reprinted again and again throughout the seventeenth century. His in- 
 terpretation of Psalm Ixxviii, 47-49, was apparently shared by the translators of our 
 own authorized version. For citations by him, see Revelation vii, I ; Ephesians ii, 
 2. Even according to modern commentators (e. g., Alford), the word here trans- 
 lated "power" denotes not might, but government, court, hierarchy ; and in this 
 sense it was always used by the ecclesiastical writers, whose conception is best 
 rendered by our plural " powers." See Delrio, Disquisitiones Magica, lib. ii, 
 c. ii. 
 
 \ For Guacci, see his Compendium Maleficarum (Milan, 1608). For the cases 
 of St. Giles, John Wesley, and others stilling the tempests, see Brewer, Diction- 
 ary of Miracles, s. v. Prayer.
 
 DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. 34! 
 
 ye may be no longer able to harm men or animals or fruits 
 or herbs, or whatsoever is designed for human use." But 
 this is mild, indeed, compared to some later exorcisms, as 
 when the ritual runs : " All the people shall rise, and the 
 priest, turning toward the clouds, shall pronounce these 
 words : ' I exorcise ye, accursed demons, who have dared to 
 use, for the accomplishment of your iniquity, those powers 
 of Nature by which God in divers ways worketh good to 
 mortals; who stir up winds, gather vapours, form clouds, 
 and condense them into hail. ... I exorcise ye, ... that 
 ye relinquish the work ye have begun, dissolve the hail, 
 scatter the clouds, disperse the vapours, and restrain the 
 winds.' " The rubric goes on to order that then there shall 
 be a great fire kindled in an open place, and that over it the 
 sign of the cross shall be made, and the one hundred and 
 fourteenth Psalm chanted, while malodorous substances, 
 among them sulphur and asafcetida, shall be cast into the 
 flames. The purpose seems to have been literally to " smoke 
 out " Satan.* 
 
 Manuals of exorcisms became important some bulky 
 quartos, others handbooks. Noteworthy among the latter 
 is one by the Italian priest Locatelli, entitled Exorcisms most 
 Power f til and Efficacious for the Dispelling of Aerial Tempests, 
 whether raised by Demons at their own Instance or at the Beck 
 of some Servant of the Devil, f 
 
 The Jesuit Gretser, in his famous book on Benedictions 
 and Maledictions, devotes a chapter to this subject, dismiss- 
 ing summarily the scepticism that questions the power of 
 devils over the elements, and adducing the story of Job as 
 conclusive. ^ 
 
 Nor was this theory of exorcism by any means confined 
 to the elder Church. Luther vehemently upheld it, and 
 
 * See Polidorus Valerius, Practica exorcistarum ; also the Thesaurus exorcismo- 
 rum (Cologne, 1626), pp. 158-162. 
 
 f That is, Exoicismi, etc. A "corrected" second edition was printed at Lay- 
 bach, 1680, in 24mo, to which is appended another manual of Preces et conjurationes 
 contra aereas tempestates, omnibus sacerdotibus utiles et necessaria, printed at the 
 monastery of Kempten (in Bavaria) in 1667. The latter bears as epigraph the 
 passage from the gospels describing Christ's stilling of the winds. 
 
 \ See Gretser, De benedictionibus et maledictionibus, lib. ii, c. 48.
 
 342 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 prescribed especially the first chapter of St. John's gospel 
 as of unfailing efficacy against thunder and lightning, de- 
 claring that he had often found the mere sign of the cross, 
 with the text, " The word was made flesh," sufficient to put 
 storms to flight.* 
 
 From the beginning of the Middle Ages until long after 
 the Reformation the chronicles give ample illustration 
 of the successful use of such exorcisms. So strong was 
 the belief in them that it forced itself into minds compara- 
 tively rational, and found utterance in treatises of much im- 
 portance. 
 
 But, since exorcisms were found at times ineffectual, 
 other means were sought, and especially fetiches of various 
 sorts. One of the earliest of these appeared when Pope 
 Alexander I, according to tradition, ordained that holy 
 water should be kept in churches and bedchambers to drive 
 away devils, f Another safeguard was found in relics, and 
 of similar efficacy were the so-called " conception billets " 
 sold by the Carmelite monks. They contained a formula 
 upon consecrated paper, at which the devil might well turn 
 pale. Buried in the corner of a field, one of these was 
 thought to give protection against bad weather and destruc- 
 tive insects.:}: 
 
 But highest in repute during centuries was the Agnus Dei 
 a piece of wax blessed by the Pope's own hand, and 
 stamped with the well-known device representing the " Lamb 
 of God." Its powers were so marvellous that Pope Urban 
 V thought three of these cakes a fitting gift from himself to 
 the Greek Emperor. In the Latin doggerel recounting their 
 virtues, their meteorological efficacy stands first, for especial 
 stress is laid on their power of dispelling the thunder. The 
 stress thus laid by Pope Urban, as the infallible guide of 
 Christendom, on the efficacy of this fetich, gave it great 
 value throughout Europe, and the doggerel verses reciting 
 
 * So, at least, says Gretser (in his De ben. et ma/., as above). 
 
 f " Instituit lit aqua quam sanctam appellamus sale admixta interpositis sacris 
 orationibus et in templis et in cubiculis ad fugandos daemones retineretur." Pla- 
 tina, Vitce Pontif. But the story is from the False Decretals. 
 
 \ See Rydberg, The Magic of the Middle Ages, translated by Edgren, pp. 
 63-66.
 
 DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. 
 
 343 
 
 its virtues sank deep into the popular mind. It was con- 
 sidered a most potent means of dispelling hail, pestilence, 
 storms, conflagrations, and enchantments ; and this feeling 
 was deepened by the rules and rites for its consecration. So 
 solemn was the matter, that the manufacture and sale of this 
 particular fetich was, by a papal bull of 1471, reserved for 
 the Pope himself, and he only performed the required cere- 
 mony in the first and seventh years of his pontificate. Stand- 
 ing unmitred, he prayed: "O God, ... we humbly beseech 
 thee that thou wilt bless these waxen forms, figured with the 
 image of an innocent lamb, . . . that, at the touch and sight 
 of them, the faithful may break forth into praises, and that 
 the crash of hailstorms, the blast of hurricanes, the violence 
 of tempests, the fury of winds, and the malice of thunder- 
 bolts may be tempered, and evil spirits flee and tremble be- 
 fore the standard of thy holy cross, which is graven upon 
 them."* 
 
 Another favourite means with the clergy of the older 
 Church for bringing to naught the " power of the air," was 
 found in great processions bearing statues, relics, and holy 
 
 * These pious charms are still in use in the Church, and may be found described 
 in any ecclesiastical cyclopaedia. The doggerel verses run as follows : 
 
 " Tonitrua magna terret, Inimicos nostros domat, 
 
 Et peccata nostra delet ; Praegnantem cum partu salvat, 
 
 Ab incendio prseservat, Dona dignis multa confert, 
 
 A submersione servat, Utque malis mala defert. 
 
 A morte cita liberal, Portio, quamvis parva sit, 
 
 Et Cacodaemones fugat, Ut magna tamen proficit." 
 
 See these verses cited in full faith, so late as 1743, in Father Vincent of Berg's En- 
 chiridium, pp. 23, 24, where is an ample statement of the virtues of the Agnus Dei, 
 and instructions for its use. A full account of the rites used in consecrating this 
 fetich, with the prayers and benedictions which gave colour to this theory of the 
 powers of the Agnus Dei, may be found in the ritual of the Church. I have used the 
 edition entitled Saerarum ceremoniarum sive rituum Sancta Romance Ecclesice libri 
 ires, Rome, 1560, in folio. The form of the papal prayer is as follows: "Deus, ' 
 . . . te suppliciter deprecamur, ut . . . has cereas formas, innocentissimi agni 
 imagine figuratas, benedicere . . . digneris, ut per ejus tactum et visum fideles in- 
 vitentur ad laudes, fragor grandinum, procella turbinum, impetus tempestatum, ven- 
 torum rabies, infesta tonitrua temperentur, fugiant atque tremiscant maligni spiritus 
 ante Sanctae Crucis vexillum, quod in illis exsculptum est. . . ." (Sacr. Cer, Rom. 
 Eccl., as above). If any are curious as to the extent to which this consecrated wax 
 was a specific for all spiritual and most temporal ills during the sixteenth and sev- 
 enteenth centuries, let them consult the Jesuit Litterce annuce, passim.
 
 344 
 
 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR. 
 
 emblems through the streets. Yet even these were not 
 always immediately effective. One at Liege, in the thir- 
 teenth century, thrice proved unsuccessful in bringing rain, 
 when at last it was found that the image of the Virgin had 
 been forgotten ! A new procession was at once formed, the 
 Salve Regina sung, and the rain came down in such torrents 
 as to drive the devotees to shelter.* 
 
 In Catholic lands this custom remains to this day, and 
 very important features in these processions are the statues 
 and the reliquaries of patron saints. Some of these excel in 
 bringing sunshine, others in bringing rain. The Cathedral 
 of Chartres is so fortunate as to possess sundry relics of 
 St. Taurin, especially potent against dry weather, and 
 some of St. Piat, very nearly as infallible against wet 
 weather. In certain regions a single saint gives protection 
 alternately against wet and dry weather as, for example, 
 St. Godeberte at Noyon. Against storms St. Barbara is 
 very generally considered the most powerful protectress ; 
 but, in the French diocese of Limoges, Notre Dame de Crocq 
 has proved a most powerful rival, for when, a few years 
 since, all the neighbouring parishes were ravaged by storms, 
 not a hailstone fell in the canton which she protected. In 
 the diocese of Tarbes, St. Exupere is especially invoked 
 against hail, peasants flocking from all the surrounding 
 country to his shrine, f 
 
 But the means of baffling the powers of the air which 
 came to be most widely used was the ringing of consecrated 
 church bells. 
 
 This usage had begun in the time of Charlemagne, and 
 there is extant a prohibition of his against the custom of 
 baptizing bells and of hanging certain tags \ on their tongues 
 as a protection against hailstorms ; but even Charlemagne 
 
 * John of Winterthur describes many such processions in Switzerland in the 
 thirteenth century, and all the monkish chronicles speak of them. See also Ryd- 
 berg, Magic of the Middle Ages, p. 74. 
 
 f As to protection by special saints as stated, see the Guide du touriste et du 
 pelerin & Chartres, 1867 (cited by " Paul Parfait," in his Dossier des Pelerinages) ; 
 also pp. 139-145 of the Dossier. 
 
 \ Perticce. See Montanus, Hist. Nachricht von den Glocken (Chemnitz, 1726), 
 p. 121 ; and Meyer, Der Aberglaitbe des Mittelalters t p, 186.
 
 DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. 345 
 
 was powerless against this current of mediaeval superstition. 
 Theological reasons were soon poured into it, and in the 
 year 968 Pope John XIII gave it the highest ecclesiastical 
 sanction by himself baptizing the great bell of his cathedral 
 church, the Lateran, and christening it with his own name.* 
 This idea was rapidly developed, and we soon find it 
 supported in ponderous treatises, spread widely in sermons, 
 and popularized in multitudes of inscriptions cast upon the 
 bells themselves. This branch of theological literature may 
 still be studied in multitudes of church towers throughout 
 Europe. A bell at Basel bears the inscription, " Ad f ugan- 
 dos demones." Another, in Lugano, declares " The sound 
 of this bell vanquishes tempests, repels demons, and sum- 
 mons men." Another, at the Cathedral of Erfurt, declares 
 that it can " ward off lightning and malignant demons." A 
 peal in the Jesuit church at the university town of Pont-a- 
 Mousson bore the words, " They praise God, put to flight 
 the clouds, affright the demons, and call the people." This 
 is dated 1634. Another bell in that part of France declares, 
 " It is I who dissipate the thunders " (Ego sum qui dissipo toni- 
 
 Another, in one of the forest cantons of Switzerland, 
 bears a doggerel couplet, which may be thus translated : 
 
 " On the devil my spite I'll vent, 
 And, God helping, bad weather prevent." J 
 
 Very common were inscriptions embodying this doctrine in 
 sonorous Latin. 
 
 Naturally, then, there grew up a ritual for the consecra- 
 tion of bells. Knollys, in his quaint translation of the old 
 
 * For statements regarding Pope John and bell superstitions, see Higgins's 
 Anacalypsis, vol. ii, p. 70. See also Platina, Vittz Pontif., s. v. John XIII, and 
 Paronius, Annales Ecclesiastici, sub anno 968. The conjecture of Baronius that 
 the bell was named after St. John the Baptist, is even more startling than the ac- 
 cepted tradition of the Pope's sponsorship, 
 
 f For these illustrations, with others equally striking, see Meyer, Der Aber- 
 glaube des Mittelalters* pp. 185, 186. For the later examples, see Germain, An- 
 ciennes cloches lorraines (Nancy, 1885), pp. 23, 27. 
 
 \ " An dem Tiifel will ich mich rachen, 
 
 Mit der hilf gotz alle bosen wetter zerbrechen." 
 
 (See Meyer, as above.)
 
 346 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 chronicler Sleidan, gives us the usage in the simple English 
 of the middle of the sixteenth century : 
 
 " In lyke sorte [as churches] are the belles used. And 
 first, forsouth, they must hange so, as the Byshop may goe 
 round about them. Whiche after he hath sayde certen 
 Psalmes, he consecrateth water and salte, and mingleth them 
 together, wherwith he washeth the belle diligently both 
 within and without, after wypeth it drie, and with holy oyle 
 draweth in it the signe of the crosse, and prayeth God, that 
 whan they shall rynge or sounde that bell, all the disceiptes 
 of the devyll may vanyshe away, hayle, thondryng, lighten- 
 ing, wyndes, and tempestes, and all untemperate weathers 
 may be aswaged. Whan he hath wipte out the crosse of 
 oyle wyth a linen cloth, he maketh seven other crosses in 
 the same, and within one only. After saying certen Psalmes, 
 he taketh a payre of sensours and senseth the bel within, and 
 prayeth God to sende it good lucke. In man)" places they 
 make a great dyner, and kepe a feast as it were at a solemne 
 wedding." * 
 
 These bell baptisms became matters of great importance. 
 Popes, kings, and prelates were proud to stand as sponsors. 
 Four of the bells at the Cathedral of Versailles having been 
 destroyed during the French Revolution, four new ones 
 were baptized, on the 6th of January, 1824, the Voltairean 
 King, Louis XVIII, and the pious Duchess d'Angouleme 
 standing as sponsors. 
 
 In some of these ceremonies zeal appears to have outrun 
 knowledge, and one of Luther's stories, at the expense of the 
 older Church, was that certain authorities thus christened a 
 bell " Hosanna," supposing that to be the name of a woman. 
 
 To add to the efficacy of such baptisms, water was some- 
 times brought from the river Jordan, f 
 
 The prayers used at bell baptisms fully recognise this 
 doctrine. The ritual of Paris embraces the petition that, 
 " whensoever this bell shall sound, it shall drive away the 
 
 * Sleidan's Commentaries, English translation, as above, fol. 334 (lib. xxi, sub 
 anno 1549). 
 
 f See Montanus, as above, who cites Beck, Lutherthum vor Luthero, p. 294, 
 for the statement that many bells were carried to the Jordan by pilgrims for this 
 purpose.
 
 DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. 347 
 
 malign influences of the assailing spirits, the horror of their 
 apparitions, the rush of whirlwinds, the stroke of lightning, 
 the harm of thunder, the disasters of storms, and all the 
 spirits of the tempest." Another prayer begs that " the 
 sound of this bell may put to flight the fiery darts of the 
 enemy of men " ; and others vary the form but not the sub- 
 stance of this petition. The great Jesuit theologian, Bellar- 
 min, did indeed try to deny the reality of this baptism ; but 
 this can only be regarded as a piece of casuistry suited to 
 Protestant hardness of heart, or as strategy in the warfare 
 against heretics. * 
 
 Forms of baptism were laid down in various manuals 
 sanctioned directly by papal authority, and sacramental effi- 
 cacy was every where taken for granted, f The development 
 of this idea in the older Church was too strong to be re- 
 sisted ; ^ but, as a rule, the Protestant theologians of the Ref- 
 ormation, while admitting that storms were caused by Satan 
 and his legions, opposed the baptism of bells, and denied the 
 theory of their influence in dispersing storms. Luther, while 
 never doubting that troublesome meteorological phenomena 
 were caused by devils, regarded with contempt the idea that 
 
 * For prayers at bell baptisms, see Arago, (Euvres, Paris, 1854, vol. iv, p. 322. 
 
 f As has often been pointed out, the ceremony was in all its details even to 
 the sponsors, the wrapping a garment about the baptized, the baptismal fee, the 
 feast precisely the same as when a child was baptized. Magius, who is no scep- 
 tic, relates from his own experience an instance of this sort, where a certain 
 bishop stood sponsor for two bells, giving them both his own name William. (See 
 his De Tintinnabulis, vol. xiv.) 
 
 \ And no wonder, when the oracle of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, expressly 
 pronounced church bells, " provided they have been duly consecrated and bap- 
 tized," the foremost means of " frustrating the atmospheric mischiefs of the devil," 
 and likened steeples in which bells are ringing to a hen brooding her chickens, 
 " for the tones of the consecrated metal repel the demons and avert storm and 
 lightning " ; when pre-Reformation preachers of such universal currency as Jo- 
 annes Herolt declared, "Bells, as all agree, are baptized with the result that they 
 are secure from the power of Satan, terrify the demons, compel the powers " ; when 
 Geiler of Kaisersberg especially commended bell-ringing as a means of beating off 
 the devil in storms ; and when a canonist like Durandus explained the purpose of 
 the rite to be, that " the demons hearing the trumpets of the Eternal King, to wit, 
 the bells, may flee in terror, and may cease from the stirring up of tempests." 
 See Herolt, Sermones Discipuli, vol. xvii, and Durandus, De ritibus ecclesice, vol. 
 ii, p. 12. I owe the first of these citations to Rydberg, and the others to Mon- 
 tanus. For Geiler, see Dacheux, Geiler de Kaisersberg, pp. 280, 281.
 
 348 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 the demons were so childish as to be scared by the clang of 
 bells ; his theory made them altogether too powerful to be 
 affected by means so trivial. The great English Reformers, 
 while also accepting very generally the theory of diabolic 
 interference in storms, reproved strongly the baptizing of 
 bells, as the perversion of a sacrament and involving blas- 
 phemy. Bishop Hooper declared reliance upon bells to 
 drive away tempests, futile. Bishop Pilkington, while argu- 
 ing that tempests are direct instruments of God's wrath, is 
 very severe against using " unlawful means," and among 
 these he names " the hallowed bell " ; and these opinions 
 were very generally shared by the leading English clergy.* 
 Toward the end of the sixteenth century the Elector of 
 Saxony strictly forbade the ringing of bells against storms, 
 urging penance and prayer instead ; but the custom was not 
 so easily driven out of the Protestant Church, and in some 
 quarters was developed a Protestant theory of a rationalistic 
 sort, ascribing the good effects of bell-ringing in storms to 
 the calling together of the devout for prayer or to the sug- 
 gestion of prayers during storms at night. As late as the 
 end of the seventeenth century we find the bells of Protes- 
 tant churches in northern Germany rung for the dispelling 
 of tempests. In Catholic Austria this bell-ringing seems to 
 have become a nuisance in the last century, for the Emperor 
 Joseph II found it necessary to issue an edict against it; 
 but this doctrine had gained too large headway to be ar- 
 rested by argument or edict, and the bells may be heard 
 ringing during storms to this day in various remote dis- 
 tricts in Europe, f For this was no mere superficial view. 
 
 * The baptism of bells was, indeed, one of the express complaints of the Ger- 
 man Protestant princes at the Reformation. See their Gravam. Cent. German. 
 Grav., p. 51. For Hooper, see his Early Writings, p. 197 (in Parker Society 
 Publications). For Pilkington, see his Works, p. 177 (in same). Among others 
 sharing these opinions were Tyndale, Bishop Ridley, Archbishop Sandys, Becon, 
 Calfhill, and Rogers. It is to be noted that all these speak of the rite as " baptism." 
 
 f For Elector of Saxony, see Peuchen, Disp. circa tempestates, Jena, 1697. For 
 the Protestant theory of bells, see, e. g., the Condones Selects of Superintendent 
 Conrad Dieterich (cited by Peuchen, Disp. circa tempestates}. For Protestant 
 ringing of bells to dispel tempests, see Schwimmer, Physicalische Luftfragen, 
 1692 (cited by Peuchen, as above). He pictures the whole population of a Thu- 
 ringian district flocking to the churches on the approach of a storm.
 
 DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS. 
 
 349 
 
 It was really part of a deep theological current steadily de- 
 veloped through the Middle Ages, the fundamental idea of 
 the whole being the direct influence of the bells upon the 
 " Power of the Air " ; and it is perhaps worth our while to go 
 back a little and glance over the coming of this current into 
 the modern world. Having grown steadily through the 
 Middle Ages, it appeared in full strength at the Reformation 
 period ; and in the sixteenth century Olaus Magnus, Arch- 
 bishop of Upsala and Primate of Sweden, in his great work 
 on the northern nations, declares it a well-established fact 
 that cities and harvests may be saved from lightning by the 
 ringing of bells and the burning of consecrated incense, 
 accompanied by prayers ; and he cautions his readers that 
 the workings of the thunderbolt are rather to be marvelled 
 at than inquired into. Even as late as 1673 the Franciscan 
 professor Lealus, in Italy, in a schoolbook which was re- 
 ceived with great applause in his region, taught unhesitat- 
 ingly the agency of demons in storms, and the power of bells 
 over them, as well as the portentousness of comets and the 
 movement of the heavens by angels. He dwells especially, 
 too, upon the perfect protection afforded by the waxen Agnus 
 Dei. How strong this current was, and how difficult even 
 for philosophical minds to oppose, is shown by the fact that 
 both Descartes and Francis Bacon speak of it with respect, 
 admitting the fact, and suggesting very mildly that the 
 bells may accomplish this purpose by the concussion of the 
 air.* 
 
 But no such moderate doctrine sufficed, and the re- 
 nowned Bishop Binsfeld, of Treves, in his noted treatise on 
 the credibility of the confessions of witches, gave an entire 
 chapter to the effect of bells in calming atmospheric dis- 
 turbances. Basing his general doctrine upon the first chap- 
 ter of Job and the second chapter of Ephesians, he insisted 
 on the reality of diabolic agency in storms ; and then, by 
 theological reasoning, corroborated by the statements ex- 
 torted in the torture chamber, he showed the efficacy of bells 
 
 * For Olaus Magnus, see the De gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555), lib. 
 i, c. 12, 13. For Descartes, see his De meteor., c. 7. For Bacon, see his Natural 
 History^ cent. 2, 127. In his Historia Ventorum he again alludes to the belief, 
 and without comment.
 
 350 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 in putting the hellish legions to flight.* This continued, 
 therefore, an accepted tenet, developed in every nation, and 
 coming to its climax near the end of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. At that period the period of Isaac Newton Father 
 Augustine de Angelis, rector of the Clementine College at 
 Rome, published under the highest Church authority his lec- 
 tures upon meteorology. Coming from the centre of Catho- 
 lic Christendom, at so late a period, they are very important 
 as indicating what had been developed under the influence 
 of theology during nearly seventeen hundred years. This 
 learned head of a great college at the heart of Christendom 
 taught that " the surest remedy against thunder is that which 
 our Holy Mother the Church practises, namely, the ringing 
 of bells when a thunderbolt impends : thence follows a 
 twofold effect, physical and moral a physical, because the 
 sound variously disturbs and agitates the air, and by agita- 
 tion disperses the hot exhalations and dispels the thunder ; 
 but the moral effect is the more certain, because by the sound 
 the faithful are stirred to pour forth their prayers, by which 
 they win from God the turning away of the thunderbolt." 
 Here we see in this branch of thought, as in so many others, 
 at the close of the seventeenth century, the dawn of rational- 
 ism. Father De Angelis now keeps demoniacal influence in 
 the background. Little, indeed, is said of the efficiency of 
 bells in putting to flight the legions of Satan : the wise pro- 
 fessor is evidently preparing for that inevitable compromise 
 which we see in the history of every science when it is 
 clear that it can no longer be suppressed by ecclesiastical ful- 
 minations.f 
 
 III. THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. 
 
 But, while this comparatively harmless doctrine of thwart- 
 ing the powers of the air by fetiches and bell-ringing was 
 developed, there were evolved another theory, and a series 
 of practices sanctioned by the Church, which must forever 
 be considered as among the most fearful calamities in human 
 
 * See Binsfeld, De Confessionbus Male/., pp. 308-314, edition of 1623. 
 f For De Angelis, see his Lectiones Meteorol., p. 75.
 
 THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. 351 
 
 history. Indeed, few errors have ever cost so much shed- 
 ding- of innocent blood over such wide territory and during 
 SD many generations. Out of the old doctrine pagan and 
 Christian of evil agency in atmospheric phenomena was 
 evolved the belief that certain men, women, and children 
 may secure infernal aid to produce whirlwinds, hail, frosts, 
 floods, and the like. 
 
 As early as the ninth century one great churchman, Ago- 
 bard, Archbishop of Lyons, struck a heavy blow at this 
 superstition. His work, Against the Absurd Opinion of the 
 Vulgar touching Hail and Thunder, shows him to have been 
 one of the most devoted apostles of right reason whom hu- 
 man history has known. By argument and ridicule, and at 
 times by a lofty eloquence, he attempted to breast this tide. 
 One passage is of historical significance. He declares : " The 
 wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness ; 
 things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no 
 one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." * 
 
 All in vain ; the tide of superstition continued to roll on ; 
 great theologians developed it and ecclesiastics favoured it ; 
 until as we near the end of the mediaeval period the infallible 
 voice of Rome is heard accepting it, and clinching this belief 
 into the mind of Christianity. For, in 1437, Pope Eugene 
 IV, by virtue of the teaching power conferred on him by 
 the Almighty, and under the divine guarantee against any 
 possible error in the exercise of it, issued a bull exhorting 
 the inquisitors of heresy and witchcraft to use greater dili- 
 gence against the human agents of the Prince of Darkness, 
 and especially against those who have the power to produce 
 bad weather. In 1445 Pope Eugene returned again to the 
 charge, and again issued instructions and commands infal- 
 libly committing the Church to the doctrine. But a greater 
 than Eugene followed, and stamped the idea yet more deeply 
 into the mind of the Church. On the ;th of December, 
 1484, Pope Innocent VIII sent forth his bull Summis Deside- 
 rantes. Of all documents ever issued from Rome, imperial 
 
 * For a very interesting statement of Agobard's position and work, with cita- 
 tions from his Liber contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis, see 
 Poole, Illustrations of the History of Mediaval Thought, pp. 40 et seq. The works 
 of Agobard are in vol. civ of Migne's Patrol. Lot.
 
 352 
 
 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR.' 
 
 or papal, this has doubtless, first and last, cost the greatest 
 shedding of innocent blood. Yet no document was ever 
 more clearly dictated by conscience. Inspired by the scrip- 
 tural command, " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," Pope 
 Innocent exhorted the clergy of Germany to leave no means 
 untried to detect sorcerers, and especially those who by evil 
 weather destroy vineyards, gardens, meadows, and growing 
 crops. These precepts were based upon various texts of 
 Scripture, especially upon the famous statement in the book 
 of Job; and, to carry them out, witch-finding inquisitors 
 were authorized by the Pope to scour Europe, especially 
 Germany, and a manual was prepared for their use the 
 Witch-Hammer, Malleus Maleficarum. In this manual, which 
 was revered for centuries, both in Catholic and Protestant 
 countries, as almost divinely inspired, the doctrine of Satanic 
 agency in atmospheric phenomena was further developed, 
 and various means of detecting and punishing it were dwelt 
 upon.* 
 
 With the application of torture to thousands of women, 
 in accordance with the precepts laid down in the Malleus, it 
 was not difficult to extract masses of proof for this sacred 
 theory of meteorology. The poor creatures, writhing on 
 the rack, held in horror by those who had been nearest and 
 dearest to them, anxious only for death to relieve their suf- 
 ferings, confessed to anything and everything that would 
 satisfy the inquisitors and judges. All that was needed was 
 that the inquisitors should ask leading questions f and sug- 
 
 * For the bull of Pope Eugene, see Raynaldus, Annaks Eccl., pp. 1437, 1445. 
 The Latin text of the bull Summis Desiderantes may be found in the Malleus 
 Maleficarum, in Binsfeld's De Confessionibus cited below, or in RoskofFs Geschichte 
 des Teufels (Leipsic, 1869), vol. i, pp. 222-225. There is, so far as I know, no 
 good analysis, in any English book, of the contents of the Witch-Hammer ; but 
 such may be found in RoskofFs Geschichte des Teufels, or in Soldan's Geschichte 
 der Hexenprozesse. Its first dated edition is that of 1489 ; but Prof. Burr has 
 shown that it was printed as early as 1486. It was, happily, never translated into 
 any modern tongue. 
 
 f For still extant lists of such questions, see the Zeitschrift filr deutsche Cultur- 
 geschichte for 1858, pp. 522-528, or Diefenbach, Der Hexenwahn in Deutschland, 
 pp. 15-17. Father Vincent of Berg (in his Enchiridium) gives a similar list for 
 use by priests in the confession of the accused. Manuscript lists of this sort which 
 have actually done service in the courts of Baden and Bavaria may be seen in the 
 library of Cornell University.
 
 THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. 353 
 
 gest satisfactory answers: the prisoners, to shorten the tor- 
 ture, were sure sooner or later to give the answer required, 
 even though they knew that this would send them to the 
 stake or scaffold. Under the doctrine of " excepted cases," 
 there was no limit to torture for persons accused of heresy 
 or witchcraft; even the safeguards which the old pagan 
 world had imposed upon torture were thus thrown down, 
 and the prisoner must confess. 
 
 The theological literature of the Middle Ages was thus 
 enriched with numberless statements regarding modes of 
 Satanic influence on the weather. Pathetic, indeed, are the 
 records ; and none more so than the confessions of these 
 poor creatures, chiefly women and children, during hundreds 
 of years, as to their manner of raising hailstorms and tem- 
 pests. Such confessions, by tens of thousands, are still to be 
 found in the judicial records of Germany, and indeed of all 
 Europe. Typical among these is one on which great stress 
 was laid during ages, and for which the world was first in- 
 debted to one of these poor women. Crazed by the agony 
 of torture, she declared that, returning with a demon through 
 the air from the witches' sabbath, she was dropped upon 
 the earth in the confusion which resulted among the hellish 
 legions when they heard the bells sounding the Ave Maria. 
 It is sad to note that, after a contribution so valuable to 
 sacred science, the poor woman was condemned to the 
 flames. This revelation speedily ripened the belief that, 
 whatever might be going on at the witches' sabbath no 
 matter how triumphant Satan might be at the moment of 
 sounding the consecrated bells the Satanic power was para- 
 lyzed. This theory once started, proofs came in to support 
 it, during a hundred years, from the torture chambers in all 
 parts of Europe. 
 
 Throughout the later Middle Ages the Dominicans had 
 been the main agents in extorting and promulgating these 
 revelations, but in the centuries following the Reformation 
 the Jesuits devoted themselves with even more keenness and 
 vigour to the same task. Some curious questions inciden- 
 tally arose. It was mooted among the orthodox authorities 
 whether the damage done by storms should or should not 
 be assessed upon the property of convicted witches. The 
 
 24
 
 354 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 theologians inclined decidedly to the affirmative ; the jurists, 
 on the whole, to the negative.* 
 
 In spite of these tortures, lightning and tempests con- 
 tinued, and great men arose in the Church throughout Eu- 
 rope in every generation to point out new cruelties for the 
 discovery of " weather-makers," and new methods for bring- 
 ing their machinations to naught. 
 
 But here and there, as early as the sixteenth century, we 
 begin to see thinkers endeavouring to modify or oppose 
 these methods. At that time Paracelsus called attention to 
 the reverberation of cannon as explaining the rolling of thun- 
 der, but he was confronted by one of his greatest contem- 
 poraries. Jean Bodin, as superstitious in natural as he was 
 rational in political science, made sport of the scientific the- 
 ory, and declared thunder to be " a flaming exhalation set in 
 motion by evil spirits, and hurled downward with a great 
 crash and a horrible smell of sulphur." In support of this 
 view, he dwelt upon the confessions of tortured witches, 
 upon the acknowledged agency of demons in the Will-o'-the- 
 wisp, and specially upon the passage in the one hundred and 
 fourth Psalm, " Who maketh his angels spirits, his ministers 
 a flaming fire." 
 
 To resist such powerful arguments by such powerful men 
 was dangerous indeed. In 1513, Pomponatius, professor at 
 Padua, published a volume of Doubts as to the Fourth Book of 
 Aristotle s Meteorologica^ and also dared to question this power 
 of devils; but he soon found it advisable to explain that, 
 while as a philosopher he might doubt, yet as a Christian he 
 of course believed everything taught by Mother Church 
 devils and all and so escaped the fate of several others who 
 dared to question the agency of witches in atmospheric and 
 other disturbances. 
 
 A few years later Agrippa of Nettesheim made a some- 
 what similar effort to breast this theological tide in northern 
 Europe. He had won a great reputation in various fields, 
 but especially in natural science, as science was then under- 
 stood. Seeing the folly and cruelty of the prevailing theory, 
 
 * For proofs of the vigour of the Jesuits in this persecution, see not only the 
 histories of witchcraft, but also the Annua littera of the Jesuits themselves, passim.
 
 THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. 
 
 355 
 
 he attempted to modify it, and in 1518, as Syndic of Metz, 
 endeavoured to save a poor woman on trial for witchcraft. 
 But the chief inquisitor, backed by the sacred Scriptures, 
 the papal bulls, the theological faculties, and the monks, was 
 too strong for him ; he was not only forced to give up his 
 office, but for this and other offences of a similar sort was im- 
 prisoned, driven from city to city and from country to coun- 
 try, and after his death his clerical enemies, especially the 
 Dominicans, pursued his memory with calumny! and placed 
 over his grave probably the most malignant epitaph ever 
 written. 
 
 As to argument, these efforts were met especially by 
 Jean Bodin in his famous book, the De'monomanie dcs Sorciers, 
 published in 1580. It was a work of great power by a man 
 justly considered the leading thinker in France, and perhaps 
 in Europe. All the learning of the time, divine and human, 
 he marshalled in support of the prevailing theory. With in- 
 exorable logic he showed that both the veracity of sacred 
 Scripture and the infallibility of a long line of popes and 
 councils of the Church were pledged to it, and in an elo- 
 quent passage this great publicist warned rulers and judges 
 against any mercy to witches citing the example of King 
 Ahab condemned by the prophet to die for having pardoned 
 a man worthy of death, and pointing significantly to King 
 Charles IX of France, who, having pardoned a sorcerer, died 
 soon afterward.* 
 
 In the last years of the sixteenth century the persecu- 
 tions for witchcraft and magic were therefore especially 
 cruel ; and in the western districts of Germany the main in- 
 strument in them was Binsfeld, Suffragan Bishop of Treves. 
 
 * To the argument cited above, Bodin adds : " Id certissimam dsemonis praesen- 
 tiam significat : nam ubicunque daemones cum hominibus nefaria societatis fide 
 copulantur, foedissimum semper relinquunt sulphuris odorem, quod sortilegi ssepis- 
 sime experiuntur et confitentur." See Bodin's Universes Naturtz Theatrum, Frank- 
 fort, 1597, pp. 208-211. The first edition of the book by Pomponatius, which was 
 the earliest of his writings, is excessively rare, but it was reprinted at Venice just a 
 half-century later. It is in his De incantationibus, however, that he speaks espe- 
 cially of devils. As to Pomponatius, see, besides these, Creighton's History of the 
 Papacy during the Reformation, and an excellent essay in Franck's Moralistes et 
 Philosophes. For Agrippa, see his biography by Prof. Henry Morley, London, 1856. 
 For Bodin, see a statement of his general line of argument in Lecky, Rationalism 
 in Europe, vol. i, chap. i.
 
 356 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 At that time Cornelius Loos was a professor at the uni- 
 versity of that city. He was a devoted churchman, and one 
 of the most brilliant opponents of Protestantism, but he 
 finally saw through the prevailing belief regarding occult 
 powers, and in an evil hour for himself embodied his idea 
 in a book entitled True and False Magic. The book, though 
 earnest, was temperate, but this helped him and his cause 
 not at all. The texts of Scripture clearly sanctioning belief 
 in sorcery and magic stood against him, and these had been 
 confirmed by the infallible teachings of the Church and the 
 popes from time immemorial ; the book was stopped in the 
 press, the manuscript confiscated, and Loos thrown into a 
 dungeon. 
 
 The inquisitors having wrought their will upon him, in 
 the spring of 1593 he was brought out of prison, forced to 
 recant on his knees before the assembled dignitaries of the 
 Church, and thenceforward kept constantly under surveil- 
 lance and at times in prison. Even this was considered too 
 light a punishment, and his arch-enemy, the Jesuit Delrio, 
 declared that, but for his death by the plague, he would have 
 been finally sent to the stake.* 
 
 That this threat was not unmeaning had been seen a few 
 years earlier in a case even more noted, and in the same 
 city. During the last decades of the sixteenth century, Die- 
 trich Flade, an eminent jurist, was rector of the University 
 of Treves, and chief judge of the Electoral Court, and in 
 the latter capacity he had to pass judgment upon persons 
 tried on the capital charge of magic and witchcraft. For 
 a time he yielded to the long line of authorities, ecclesi- 
 astical and judicial, supporting the reality of this crime ; but 
 he at last seems to have realized that it was unreal, and 
 that the confessions in his torture chamber, of compacts 
 with Satan, riding on broomsticks to the witch-sabbath, 
 
 * What remains of the manuscript of Loos, which until recently was supposed 
 to be lost, was found, hidden away on the shelves of the old Jesuit library at Treves, 
 by Mr. George Lincoln Burr, now a professor at Cornell University ; and Prof 
 Burr's copy of the manuscript is now in the library of that institution. For a full 
 account of the discovery and its significance, see the New York Nation for No- 
 vember ii, 1886. The facts regarding the after-life of Loos were discovered by 
 Prof. Burr in manuscript records at Brussels.
 
 THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. 357 
 
 raising tempests, producing diseases, and the like, were 
 either the results of madness or of willingness to confess 
 anything and everything, and even to die, in order to shorten 
 the fearful tortures to which the accused were in all cases 
 subjected until a satisfactory confession was obtained. 
 
 On this conviction of the unreality of many at least of the 
 charges Flade seems to have acted, and he at once received 
 his reward. He was arrested by the authority of the arch- 
 bishop and charged with having sold himself to Satan the 
 fact of his hesitation in the persecution being perhaps what 
 suggested his guilt. He was now, in his turn, brought into 
 the torture chamber over which he had once presided, was 
 racked until he confessed everything which his torturers 
 suggested, and finally, in 1589, was strangled and burnt. 
 
 Of that trial a record exists in the library of Cornell 
 University in the shape of the original minutes of the case, 
 and among them the depositions of Flade when under tor- 
 ture, taken down from his own lips in the torture chamber. 
 In these depositions this revered and venerable scholar and 
 jurist acknowledged the truth of every absurd charge 
 brought against him anything, everything, which would end 
 the fearful torture : compared with that, death was nothing.* 
 
 Nor was even a priest secure who ventured to reveal the 
 unreality of magic. When Friedrich Spec, the Jesuit poet 
 of western Germany, found, in taking the confessions of those 
 about to be executed for magic, that without exception, just 
 when about to enter eternity and utterly beyond hope of 
 pardon, they all retracted their confessions made under tor- 
 ture, his sympathies as a man rose above his loyalty to his 
 order, and he published his Cautio Criminalis as a warning, 
 stating with entire moderation the facts he had observed 
 and the necessity of care. But he did not dare publish it 
 under his own name, nor did he even dare publish it in a 
 Catholic town ; he gave it to the world anonymously, and, 
 in order to prevent any tracing of the work to him through 
 the confessional, he secretly caused it to be published in the 
 Protestant town of Rinteln. 
 
 * For the case of Flade, see the careful study by Prof. Burr, The Fate of Die- 
 ttich Flade, in the Papers of the American Historical Association, 1891.
 
 358 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 Nor was this all. Nothing shows so thoroughly the hold 
 that this belief in magic had obtained as the conduct of 
 Spec's powerful friend and contemporary, John Philip von 
 Schonborn, later the Elector and Prince Archbishop of May- 
 ence. 
 
 As a youth, Schonborn had loved and admired Spec, and 
 had especially noted his persistent melancholy and his hair 
 whitened even in his young manhood. On Schonborn's 
 pressing him for the cause, Spec at last confessed that his 
 sadness, whitened hair, and premature old age were due to 
 his recollections of the scores of men and women and chil- 
 dren whom he had been obliged to see tortured and sent to 
 the scaffold and stake for magic and witchcraft, when he as 
 their father confessor positively knew them to be innocent. 
 The result was that, when Schonborn became Elector and 
 Archbishop of Mayence, he stopped the witch persecutions in 
 that province, and prevented them as long as he lived. But 
 here was shown the strength of theological and ecclesiastical 
 traditions and precedents. Even a man so strong by family 
 connections, and enjoying such great temporal and spiritual 
 power as Schonborn, dared not openly give his reasons for 
 this change of policy. So far as is known, he never uttered 
 a word publicly against the reality of magic, and under his 
 successor in the electorate witch trials were resumed. 
 
 The great upholders of the orthodox view retained full 
 possession of the field. The victorious Bishop Binsfeld, of 
 Treves, wrote a book to prove that everything confessed by 
 the witches under torture, especially the raising of storms 
 and the general controlling of the weather, was worthy of 
 belief ; and this book became throughout Europe a stand- 
 ard authority, both among Catholics and Protestants. Even 
 more inflexible was Remigius, criminal judge in Lorraine. 
 On the title-page of his manual he boasts that within fifteen 
 years he had sent nine hundred persons to death for this 
 imaginary crime.* 
 
 * For Spec and Schonborn, see Soldan and other German authorities. There 
 are copies of the first editions of the Cautio Criminalis in the library of Cornell 
 University. Binsfeld's book bore the title of Tractatus de confessionibus malefi- 
 corum et sagarum. First published at Treves in 1589, it appeared subsequently 
 four times in the original Latin, as well as in two distinct German translations, and
 
 THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. 
 
 359 
 
 Protestantism fell into the superstition as fully as Cathol- 
 icism. In the same century John Wier, a disciple of 
 Agrippa, tried to frame a pious theory which, while satisfy- 
 ing orthodoxy, should do something to check the frightful 
 cruelties around him. In his book De Prcestigiis D&monum, 
 published in 1563, he proclaimed his belief in witchcraft, but 
 suggested that the compacts with Satan, journeys through 
 the air on broomsticks, bearing children to Satan, raising 
 storms and producing diseases to which so many women 
 and children confessed under torture were delusions sug- 
 gested and propagated by Satan himself, and that the per- 
 sons charged with witchcraft were therefore to be consid- 
 ered " as possessed " that is, rather as sinned against than 
 sinning.* 
 
 But neither Catholics nor Protestants would listen for 
 a moment to any such suggestion. Wier was bitterly de- 
 nounced and persecuted. Nor did Bekker, a Protestant 
 divine in Holland, fare any better in the following century. 
 For his World Bewitched, in which he ventured not only to 
 question the devil's power over the weather, but to deny 
 his bodily existence altogether, he was solemnly tried by the 
 synod of his Church and expelled from his pulpit, while his 
 views were condemned as heresy, and overwhelmed with a 
 flood of refutations whose mere catalogue would fill pages ; 
 and these cases were typical of many. 
 
 The Reformation had, indeed, at first deepened the super- 
 stition ; the new Church being anxious to show itself equally 
 orthodox and zealous with the old. During the century 
 following the first great movement, the eminent Lutheran 
 jurist and theologian Benedict Carpzov, whose boast was 
 that he had read the Bible fifty-three times, especially dis- 
 tinguished himself by his skill in demonstrating the reality 
 of witchcraft, and by his cruelty in detecting and punishing 
 it. The torture chambers were set at work more vigorously 
 than ever, and a long line of theological jurists followed to 
 maintain the system and to extend it. 
 
 in a French one. Remigius's manual was entitled D&monolatreia, and was first 
 printed at Lyons in 1595. 
 
 * For Wier, or Weyer, see, beside his own works, the excellent biography by 
 Prof. Binz, of Bonn.
 
 360 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 To argue against it, or even doubt it, was exceedingly 
 dangerous. Even as late as the beginning of the eighteenth 
 century, when Christian Thomasius, the greatest and bravest 
 German between Luther and Lessing, began the efforts 
 which put an end to it in Protestant Germany, he did not 
 dare at first, bold as he was, to attack it in his own name, 
 but presented his views as the university thesis of an irre- 
 sponsible student.* 
 
 The same stubborn resistance to the gradual encroach- 
 ment of the scientific spirit upon the orthodox doctrine of 
 witchcraft was seen in Great Britain. Typical as to the 
 attitude both of Scotch and English Protestants were the 
 theory and practice of King James I, himself the author of a 
 book on Demonology, and nothing if not a theologian. As to 
 theory, his treatise on Demonology supported the worst fea- 
 tures of the superstition ; as to practice, he ordered the 
 learned and acute work of Reginald Scot, The Discwerie of 
 Witchcraft, one of the best treatises ever written on the sub- 
 ject, to be burned by the hangman, and he applied his own 
 knowledge to investigating the causes of the tempests which 
 beset his bride on her voyage from Denmark. Skilful use 
 of unlimited torture soon brought these causes to light. A 
 Dr. Fian, while his legs were crushed in the "boots" and 
 wedges were driven under his finger nails, confessed that 
 several hundred witches had gone to sea in a sieve from the 
 port of Leith, and had raised storms and tempests to drive 
 back the princess. 
 
 With the coming in of the Puritans the persecution was 
 even more largely, systematically, and cruelly developed. 
 The great witch-finder, Matthew Hopkins, having gone 
 through the county of Suffolk and tested multitudes of poor 
 old women by piercing them with pins and needles, declared 
 that county to be infested with witches. Thereupon Par- 
 liament issued a commission, and sent two eminent Presby- 
 terian divines to accompany it, with the result that in 
 
 * For Thomasius, see his various biographies by Luden and others ; also the 
 treatises on witchcraft of Soldan and others. Manuscript notes of his lectures, and 
 copies of his earliest books on witchcraft as well as on other forms of folly, are to 
 be found in the library of Cornell University.
 
 THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. 36! 
 
 that county alone sixty persons were hanged for witchcraft 
 in a single year. In Scotland matters were even worse. 
 The auto da ft of Spain was celebrated in Scotland under 
 another name, and with Presbyterian ministers instead of 
 Roman Catholic priests as the main attendants. At Leith, 
 in 1664, nine women were burned together. Condemnations 
 and punishments of women in batches were not uncommon. 
 Torture was used far more freely than in England, both in 
 detecting witches and in punishing them. The natural argu- 
 ment developed in hundreds of pulpits was this : If the All- 
 wise God punishes his creatures with tortures infinite in 
 cruelty and duration, why should not his ministers, as far as 
 they can, imitate him ? 
 
 The strongest minds in both branches of the Protestant 
 Church in Great Britain devoted themselves to maintaining 
 the superstition. The newer scientific modes of thought, 
 and especially the new ideas regarding the heavens, revealed 
 first by Copernicus and Galileo and later by Newton, Huy- 
 gens, and Halley, were gradually dissipating the whole do- 
 main of the Prince of the Power of the Air ; but from first 
 to last a long line of eminent divines, Anglican and Calvin- 
 istic, strove to resist the new thought. On the Anglican 
 side, in the seventeenth century, Meric Casaubon, Doctor 
 of Divinity and a high dignitary of Canterbury, Henry 
 More, in many respects the most eminent scholar in the 
 Church, Cudworth, by far the most eminent philosopher, 
 and Dr. Joseph Glanvil, the most cogent of all writers in 
 favour of witchcraft, supported the orthodox superstition in 
 treatises of great power ; and Sir Matthew Hale, the great- 
 est jurist of the period, condemning two women to be burned 
 for witchcraft, declared that he based his judgment on the 
 direct testimony of Holy Scripture. On the Calvinistic side 
 were the great names of Richard Baxter, who applauded 
 some of the worst cruelties in England, and of Increase and 
 Cotton Mather, who stimulated the worst in America ; and 
 these marshalled in behalf of this cruel superstition a long 
 line of eminent divines, the most earnest of all, perhaps, be- 
 ing John Wesley. 
 
 Nor was the Lutheran Church in Sweden and the other 
 Scandinavian countries behind its sister churches, either in
 
 362 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 persecuting witchcraft or in repressing doubts regarding the 
 doctrine which supported it. 
 
 But in spite of all these great authorities in every land, 
 in spite of such summary punishments as those of Flade, Loos, 
 and Bekker, and in spite of the virtual exclusion from 
 church preferment of all who doubted the old doctrine, 
 the new scientific view of the heavens was developed more 
 and more ; the physical sciences were more and more culti- 
 vated ; the new scientific atmosphere in general more and 
 more prevailed ; and at the end of the seventeenth century 
 this vast growth of superstition began to wither and droop. 
 Montaigne, Bayle, and Voltaire in France, Thomasius in 
 Germany, Calef in New England, and Beccaria in Italy, did 
 much also to create an intellectual and moral atmosphere 
 fatal to it. 
 
 And here it should be stated, to the honour of the Church 
 of England, that several of her divines showed great cour- 
 age in opposing the dominant doctrine. Such men as Hars- 
 net, Archbishop of York, and Morton, Bishop of Lichfield, 
 who threw all their influence against witch-finding cruelties 
 even early in the seventeenth century, deserve lasting grati- 
 tude. But especially should honour be paid to the younger 
 men in the Church, who wrote at length against the whole 
 system : such men as Wagstaffe and Webster and Hutchin- 
 son, who in the humbler ranks of the clergy stood manfully 
 for truth, with the certainty that by so doing they were mak- 
 ing their own promotion impossible. 
 
 By the beginning of the eighteenth century the doctrine 
 was evidently dying out. Where torture had been abolished, 
 or even made milder, " weather-makers " no longer confessed, 
 and the fundamental proofs in which the system was rooted 
 were evidently slipping away. Even the great theologian 
 Fromundus, at the University of Louvain, the oracle of his 
 age, who had demonstrated the futility of the Copernican 
 theory, had foreseen this and made the inevitable attempt 
 at compromise, declaring that devils, though often, are not 
 always or even for the most part the causes of thunder. The 
 learned Jesuit Caspar Schott, whose Physica Curiosa was 
 one of the most popular books of the seventeenth century, 
 also ventured to make the same mild statement. But even
 
 THE AGENCY OF WITCHES. 363 
 
 such concessions by such great champions of orthodoxy did 
 not prevent frantic efforts in various quarters to bring the 
 world back under the old dogma: as late as 1743 there was 
 published in Catholic Germany a manual by Father Vincent 
 of Berg, in which the superstition was taught to its fullest 
 extent, with the declaration that it was issued for the use of 
 priests under the express sanction of the theological pro- 
 fessors of the University of Cologne ; and twenty-five years 
 later, in 1768, we find in Protestant England John Wesley 
 standing firmly for witchcraft, and uttering his famous dec- 
 laration, " The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving 
 up of the Bible." The latest notable demonstration in Scot- 
 land was made as late as 1773, when "the divines of the 
 Associated Presbytery " passed a resolution declaring their 
 belief in witchcraft, and deploring the general scepticism re- 
 garding it.* 
 
 * For Carpzov and his successors, see authorities already given. The best 
 account of James's share in the extortion of confessions may be found in the collec- 
 tion of Curious Tracts published at Edinburgh in 1820. See also King James's 
 own Demonologie, and Pitcairn's Criminal Trials of Scotland, vol. i, part ii, pp. 213- 
 223. For Casaubon, see his Credulity and Incredulity in Things Natural, pp. 66, 
 67. For Glanvil, More, Casaubon, Baxter, Wesley, and others named, see Lecky, 
 as above. As to Increase Mather, in his sermons, already cited, on The Voice of 
 God in Stormy Winds, Boston, 1 704, he says : " When there are great tempests, 
 the Angels oftentimes have a Hand therein. . . . Yea, and sometimes, by Divine 
 Permission, Evil Angels have a Hand in such Storms and Tempests as are very 
 hurtful to Men on the Earth." Yet "for the most part, such Storms are sent by 
 the Providence of God as a Sign of His Displeasure for the Sins of Men," and 
 sometimes " as Prognosticks and terrible Warnings of Great Judgements not far 
 off." From the height of his erudition Mather thus rebukes the timid voice of 
 scientific scepticism : " There are some who would be esteemed the Wits of the 
 World, that ridicule those as Superstitious and Weak Persons, which look upon 
 Dreadful Tempests as Prodromous of other Judgements. Nevertheless, the most 
 Learned and Judicious Writers, not only of the Gentiles, but amongst Chris- 
 tians, have Embraced such a Persuasion ; their Sentiments therein being Con- 
 firmed by the Experience of many Ages." For another curious turn given to this 
 theory, with reference to sanitary science, see Deodat Lawson's famous sermon at 
 Salem, in 1692, on Christ's Fidelity a Shield against Satan's Malignity, p. 21 of the 
 second edition. For Cotton Mather, see his biography by Barrett Wendell, pp. 
 91, 92 ; also the chapter on Diabolism and Hysteria in this work. For Fromundus, 
 see his Meteor ologica (London, 1656), lib. iii, c. 9, and lib. ii, c. 3. For Schott, 
 see his Physica Curiosa (edition of Wiirzburg, 1667), p. 1249. For Father Vin- 
 cent of Berg, see his Enchiridium quadripartitum (Cologne, 1743). Besides 
 benedictions and exorcisms for all emergencies, it contains full directions for the
 
 364 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 IV. FRANKLIN'S LIGHTNING-ROD. 
 
 But in the midst of these efforts by Catholics like Father 
 Vincent and by Protestants like John Wesley to save the old 
 sacred theory, it received its death-blow. In 1752 Franklin 
 made his experiments with the kite on the banks of the 
 Schuylkill ; and, at the moment when he drew the electric 
 spark from the cloud, the whole tremendous fabric of the- 
 ological meteorology reared by the fathers, the popes, the 
 mediaeval doctors, and the long line of great theologians, 
 Catholic and Protestant, collapsed ; the " Prince of the Pow- 
 er of the Air" tumbled from his seat; the great doctrine 
 which had so long afflicted the earth was prostrated forever. 
 
 The experiment of Franklin was repeated in various parts 
 of Europe, but, at first, the Church seemed careful to take 
 no notice of it. The old church formulas against the Prince 
 of the Power of the Air were still used, but the theological 
 theory, especially in the Protestant Church, began to grow 
 milder. Four years after Franklin's discovery Pastor Karl 
 Koken, member of the Consistory and official preacher to 
 the City Council of Hildesheim, was moved by a great hail- 
 storm to preach and publish a sermon on The Revelation 
 of God in Weather. Of "the Prince of the Power of the 
 Air" he says nothing; the theory of diabolical agency he 
 throws overboard altogether; his whole attempt is to save 
 the older and more harmless theory, that the storm is the 
 voice of God. He insists that, since Christ told Nicodemus 
 that men " know not whence the wind cometh," it can not 
 be of mere natural origin, but is sent directly by God him- 
 self, as David intimates in the Psalm, " out of His secret 
 places." As to the hailstorm, he lays great stress upon the 
 plague of hail sent by the Almighty upon Egypt, and clinches 
 all by insisting that God showed at Mount Sinai his purpose 
 to startle the body before impressing the conscience. 
 
 manufacture of the Agnus Dei, and of another sacred panacea called "Heiligthum? 
 not less effective against evil powers, gives formulae to be worn for protection 
 against the devil, suggests a list of signs by which diabolical possession may be 
 recognised, and prescribes the questions to be asked by priests in the examination 
 of witches. For Wesley, see his Journal for 1768. The whole citation is given in 
 Lecky.
 
 FRANKLIN'S LIGHTNING-ROD. 365 
 
 While the theory of diabolical agency in storms was thus 
 drooping and dying, very shrewd efforts were made at com- 
 promise. The first of these attempts we have already noted, 
 in the effort to explain the efficacy of bells in storms by their 
 simple use in stirring the faithful to prayer, and in the con- 
 cession made by sundry theologians, and even by the great 
 Lord Bacon himself, that church bells might, under the sanc- 
 tion of Providence, disperse storms by agitating the air. 
 This gained ground somewhat, though it was resisted by 
 one eminent Church authority, who answered shrewdly that, 
 in that case, cannon would be even more pious instruments. 
 Still another argument used in trying to save this part of 
 the theological theory was that the bells were consecrated 
 instruments for this purpose, " like the horns at whose blow- 
 ing the walls of Jericho fell." * 
 
 But these compromises were of little avail. In 1766 
 Father Sterzinger attacked the very groundwork of the 
 whole diabolic theory. He was, of course, bitterly assailed, 
 insulted, and hated ; but the Church thought it best not to 
 condemn him. More and more the " Prince of the Power 
 of the Air " retreated before the lightning-rod of Franklin. 
 The older Church, while clinging to the old theory, was 
 finally obliged to confess the supremacy of Franklin's theory 
 practically ; for his lightning-rod did what exorcisms, and 
 holy water, and processions, and the Agnus Dei, and the ring- 
 ing of church bells, and the rack, and the burning of witches, 
 had failed to do. This was clearly seen, even by the poorest 
 peasants in eastern France, when they observed that the 
 grand spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which neither the sacred- 
 ness of the place, nor the bells within it, nor the holy water 
 and relics beneath it, could protect from frequent injuries by 
 lightning, was once and for all protected by Franklin's rod. 
 Then came into the minds of multitudes the answer to the 
 question which had so long exercised the leading theologians 
 of Europe and America, namely, " Why should the Al- 
 mighty strike his own consecrated temples, or suffer Satan 
 to strike them ? " 
 
 * For Koken, see his Offenbarung Gottes in Wetter, Hildesheim, 1756 ; and 
 for the answer to Bacon, see Gretser's De bentdictionibus, lib. ii, cap. 46.
 
 366 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 Yet even this practical solution of the question was not 
 received without opposition. 
 
 In America the earthquake of 1755 was widely ascribed, 
 especially in Massachusetts, to Franklin's rod. The Rev. 
 Thomas Prince, pastor of the Old South Church, published 
 a sermon on the subject, and in the appendix expressed the 
 opinion that the frequency of earthquakes may be due to 
 the erection of "iron points invented by the sagacious Mr. 
 Franklin." He goes on to argue that " in Boston are more 
 erected than anywhere else in New England, and Boston 
 seems to be more dreadfully shaken. Oh ! there is no get- 
 ting out of the mighty hand of God." 
 
 Three years later, John Adams, speaking of a conversa- 
 tion with Arbuthnot, a Boston physician, says : " He began 
 to prate upon the presumption of philosophy in erecting iron 
 rods to draw the lightning from the clouds. He railed and 
 foamed against the points and the presumption that erected 
 them. He talked of presuming upon God, as Peter at- 
 tempted to walk upon the water, and of attempting to con- 
 trol the artillery of heaven." 
 
 As late as 1770 religious scruples regarding lightning- 
 rods were still felt, the theory being that, as thunder and 
 lightning were tokens of the Divine displeasure, it was im- 
 piety to prevent their doing their full work. Fortunately, 
 Prof. John Winthrop, of Harvard, showed himself wise in 
 this, as in so many other things : in a lecture on earthquakes 
 he opposed the dominant theology ; and as to arguments 
 against Franklin's rods, he declared, " It is as much our duty 
 to secure ourselves against the effects of lightning as against 
 those of rain, snow, and wind by the means God has put 
 into our hands." 
 
 Still, for some years theological sentiment had to be re- 
 garded carefully. In Philadelphia, a popular lecturer on sci- 
 ence for some time after Franklin's discovery thought it best 
 in advertising his lectures to explain that " the erection of 
 lightning-rods is not chargeable with presumption nor in- 
 consistent with any of the principles either of natural or 
 revealed religion." * 
 
 * Regarding opposition to Franklin's rods in America, see Prince's Sermon,
 
 FRANKLIN'S LIGHTNING-ROD. 367 
 
 In England, the first lightning conductor upon a church 
 was not put up until 1762, ten years after Franklin's discov- 
 ery. The spire of St. Bride's Church in London was greatly 
 injured by lightning in 1750, and in 1764 a storm so wrecked 
 its masonry that it had to be mainly rebuilt; yet for years 
 after this the authorities refused to attach a lightning-rod. 
 The Protestant Cathedral of St. Paul's, in London, was, not 
 protected until sixteen years after Franklin's discovery, and 
 the tower of the great Protestant church at Hamburg not 
 until a year later still. As late as 1783 it was declared 
 in Germany, on excellent authority, that within a space 
 of thirty-three years nearly four hundred towers had 
 been damaged and one hundred and twenty bell-ringers 
 killed. 
 
 In Roman Catholic countries a similar prejudice was 
 shown, and its cost at times was heavy. In Austria, the 
 church of Rosenberg, in the mountains of Carinthia, was 
 struck so frequently and with such loss of life that the peas- 
 ants feared at last to attend service. Three times was the 
 spire rebuilt, and it was not until 1778 twenty-six years 
 after Franklin's discovery that the authorities permitted a 
 rod to be attached. Then all trouble ceased. 
 
 A typical case in Italy was that of the tower of St. Mark's, 
 at Venice. In spite of the angel at its summit and the bells 
 consecrated to ward off the powers of the air, and the relics 
 in the cathedral hard by, and the processions in the adjacent 
 square, the tower was frequently injured and even ruined by 
 lightning. In 1388 it was badly shattered; in 1417, and 
 again in 1489, the wooden spire surmounting it was utterly 
 consumed; it was again greatly injured in 1548, 1565, 1653, 
 and in 1745 was struck so powerfully that the whole tower, 
 which had been rebuilt of stone and brick, was shattered in 
 thirty-seven places. Although the invention of Franklin 
 had been introduced into Italy by the physicist Beccaria, 
 the tower of St. Mark's still went unprotected, and was again 
 badly struck in 1761 and 1762; and not until 1766 fourteen 
 
 especially p. 23 ; also Quincy, History of Harvard University, vol. ii, p. 219 ; also 
 Works of John Adams, vol. ii, pp. 51, 52 ; also Parton's Life of Franklin, vol. i, 
 p. 294.
 
 368 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 years after Franklin's discovery was a lightning-rod placed 
 upon it ; and it has never been struck since.* 
 
 So, too, though the beautiful tower of the Cathedral of 
 Siena, protected by all possible theological means, had been 
 struck again and again, much opposition was shown to plac- 
 ing upon it what was generally known as "the heretical 
 rod " ; but the tower was at last protected by Franklin's in- 
 vention, and in 1777, though a very heavy bolt passed down 
 the rod, the church received not the slightest injury. This 
 served to reconcile theology and science, so far as that city 
 was concerned ; but the case which did most to convert the 
 Italian theologians to the scientific view was that of the 
 church of San Nazaro, at Brescia. The Republic of Venice 
 had stored in the vaults of this church over two hundred 
 thousand pounds of powder. In 1767, seventeen years after 
 Franklin's discovery, no rod having been placed upon it, 
 it was struck by lightning, the powder in the vaults was 
 exploded, one sixth of the entire city destroyed, and over 
 three thousand lives were lost.f 
 
 Such examples as these, in all parts of Europe, had their 
 effect. The formulas for conjuring off storms, for con- 
 secrating bells to ward off lightning and tempests, and for 
 putting to flight the powers of the air, were still allowed to 
 stand in the liturgies ; but the lightning-rod, the barometer, 
 and the thermometer, carried the day. A vigorous line of 
 investigators succeeding Franklin completed his victory. 
 The traveller in remote districts of Europe still hears the 
 church bells ringing during tempests ; the Polish or Italian 
 peasant is still persuaded to pay fees for sounding bells to 
 keep off hailstorms; but the universal tendency favours 
 more and more the use of the lightning-rod, and of the 
 insurance offices where men can be relieved of the ruinous 
 results of meteorological disturbances in accordance with 
 the scientific laws of average, based upon the ascertained re- 
 currence of storms. So, too, though many a poor seaman 
 trusts to his charm that has been bathed in holy water, or 
 
 * For reluctance in England to protect churches with Franklin's rods, see 
 Priestley, History of Electricity, London, 1775, vol. i, pp. 407, 465 et seq. 
 \ See article on Lightning in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1844.
 
 FRANKLIN'S LIGHTNING-ROD. 369 
 
 that has touched some relic, the tendency among mariners 
 is to value more and more those warnings which are sent 
 far and wide each day over the earth and under the sea by 
 the electric wires in accordance with laws ascertained by 
 observation. 
 
 Yet, even in our own time, attempts to revive the old 
 theological doctrine of meteorology have not been wanting. 
 Two of these, one in a Roman Catholic and another in a 
 Protestant country, will serve as types of many, to show 
 how completely scientific truth has saturated and permeated 
 minds supposed to be entirely surrendered to the theological 
 view. 
 
 The Island of St. Honorat, just off the southern coast 
 of France, is deservedly one of the places most venerated in 
 Christendom. The monastery of L6rins, founded there in 
 the fourth century, became a mother of similar institutions 
 in western Europe, and a centre of religious teaching for 
 the Christian world. In its atmosphere, legends and myths 
 grew in beauty and luxuriance. Here, as the chroniclers 
 tell us, at the touch of St. Honorat, burst forth a stream 
 of living water, which a recent historian of the monastery 
 declares a greater miracle than that of Moses ; here he de- 
 stroyed, with a touch of his staff, the reptiles which infested 
 the island, and then forced the sea to wash away their foul 
 remains. Here, to please his sister, Sainte-Marguerite, a 
 cherry tree burst into full bloom every month; here he 
 threw his cloak upon the waters and it became a raft, which 
 bore him safely to visit the neighbouring island ; here St. 
 Patrick received from St. Just the staff with which he imi- 
 tated St. Honorat by driving all reptiles from Ireland. 
 
 Pillaged by Saracens and pirates, the island was made all 
 the more precious by the blood of Christian martyrs. Popes 
 and kings made pilgrimages to it; saints, confessors, and 
 bishops went forth from it into all Europe ; in one of its cells 
 St. Vincent of L6rins wrote that famous definition of pure 
 religion which, for nearly fifteen hundred years, has virtually 
 superseded that of St. James. Naturally, the monastery 
 became most illustrious, and its seat " the Mediterranean 
 Isle of Saints." 
 
 But toward the close of the last century, its inmates hav- 
 25
 
 370 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 ing- become slothful and corrupt, it was dismantled, all 
 save a small portion torn down, and the island became 
 the property first of impiety, embodied in a French ac- 
 tress, and finally of heresy, embodied in an English clergy- 
 man. 
 
 Bought back for the Church by the Bishop of Fre"jus in 
 1859, there was little revival of life for twelve years. Then 
 came the reaction, religious and political, after the humilia- 
 tion of France and the Vatican by Germany ; and of this 
 reaction the monastery of St. Honorat was made one of 
 the most striking outward and visible signs. Pius IX inter- 
 ested himself directly in it, called into it a body of Cistercian 
 monks, and it became the chief seat of their order in France. 
 To restore its sacredness the strict system of La Trappe was 
 established labour, silence, meditation on death. The word 
 thus given from Rome was seconded in France by cardinals, 
 archbishops, and all churchmen especially anxious for pro- 
 motion in this world or salvation in the next. Worn-out 
 dukes and duchesses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain united 
 in this enterprise of pious reaction with the frivolous young- 
 sters, the petits crevds, who haunt the purlieus of Notre Dame 
 de Lorette. The great church of the monastery was hand- 
 somely rebuilt and a multitude of altars erected ; and beau- 
 tiful frescoes and stained windows came from the leaders 
 of the reaction. The whole effect was, perhaps, somewhat 
 theatrical and thin, but it showed none the less earnestness 
 in making the old " Isle of Saints " a protest against the 
 hated modern world. 
 
 As if to bid defiance still further to modern liberalism, 
 great store of relics was sent in ; among these, pieces of the 
 true cross, of the white and purple robes, of the crown of 
 thorns, sponge, lance, and winding-sheet of Christ, the hair, 
 robe, veil, and girdle of the Blessed Virgin ; relics of St. 
 John the Baptist, St. Joseph, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Paul, 
 St. Barnabas, the four evangelists, and a multitude of other 
 saints: so many that the bare mention of these treasures 
 requires twenty-four distinct heads in the official catalogue 
 recently published at the monastery. Besides all this 
 what was considered even more powerful in warding off 
 harm from the revived monastery the bones of Christian
 
 FRANKLIN'S LIGHTNING-ROD. 37! 
 
 martyrs were brought from the Roman catacombs and laid 
 beneath the altars.* 
 
 All was thus conformed to the mediaeval view ; nothing 
 was to be left which could remind one of the nineteenth 
 century ; the " ages of faith " were to be restored in their 
 simplicity. Pope Leo XIII commended to the brethren the 
 writings of St. Thomas Aquinas as their one great object 
 of study, and works published at the monastery dwelt upon 
 the miracles of St. Honorat as the most precious refuta- 
 tion of modern science. 
 
 High in the cupola, above the altars and relics, were 
 placed the bells. Sent by pious donors, they were solemnly 
 baptized and consecrated in 1871, four bishops officiating, a 
 multitude of the faithful being present from all parts of 
 Europe, and the sponsors of the great tenor bell being the 
 Bourbon claimant to the ducal throne of Parma and his 
 duchess. The good bishop who baptized the bells conse- 
 crated them with a formula announcing their efficacy in 
 driving away the " Prince of the Power of the Air," and the 
 lightning and tempests he provokes. 
 
 And then, above all, at the summit of the central spire, 
 high above relics, altars, and bells, was placed a lightning- 
 rod ! \ 
 
 The account of the monastery, published under the direc- 
 tion of the present worthy abbot, more than hints at the 
 saving, by its bells, of a ship which was wrecked a few years 
 since on that coast ; and yet, to protect the bells and church 
 and monks and relics from the very foe whom, in the mediae- 
 val faith, all these were thought most powerful to drive 
 away, recourse was had to the scientific discovery of that 
 " arch-infidel," Benjamin Franklin ! 
 
 Perhaps the most striking recent example in Protestant 
 lands of this change from the old to the new occurred not 
 
 * See the Guide des Visiteurs d Latins, published at the monastery in 1880, 
 p. 204 ; also the Histoire de Le'rins, mentioned below. 
 
 f See Guide, as above, p. 84. Les Isles de Urins, by the Abbe" Alliez (Paris, 
 1860), and the Histoire de Le'rins, by the same author, are the authorities for the 
 general history of the abbey, and are especially strong in presenting the miracles 
 of St. Honorat, etc. The Cartulaire of the monastery, recently published, is 
 also valuable. But these do not cover the recent revival, for an account of which 
 recourse must be had to the very interesting and naive Guide already cited.
 
 372 FROM THE "PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR." 
 
 long since in one of the great Pacific dependencies of the 
 British crown. At a time of severe drought an appeal was 
 made to the bishop, Dr. Moorhouse, to order public prayers 
 for rain. The bishop refused, advising the petitioners for 
 the future to take better care of their water supply, virtually 
 telling them, " Heaven helps those who help themselves." 
 But most noteworthy in this matter was it that the English 
 Government, not long after, scanning the horizon to find 
 some man to take up the good work laid down by the la- 
 mented Bishop Fraser, of Manchester, chose Dr. Moorhouse ; 
 and his utterance upon meteorology, which a few genera- 
 tions since would have been regarded by the whole Church 
 as blasphemy, was universally alluded to as an example of 
 strong good sense, proving him especially fit for one of the 
 most important bishoprics in England. 
 
 Throughout Christendom, the prevalence of the convic- 
 tion that meteorology is obedient to laws is more and more 
 evident. In cities especially, where men are accustomed 
 each day to see posted in public places charts which show 
 the storms moving over various parts of the country, and to 
 read in the morning papers scientific prophecies as to the 
 weather, the old view can hardly be very influential. 
 
 Significant of this was the feeling of the American people 
 during the fearful droughts a few years since in the States 
 west of the Missouri. No days were appointed for fasting 
 and prayer to bring rain ; there was no attribution of the 
 calamity to the wrath of God or the malice of Satan ; but 
 much was said regarding the folly of our people in allow- 
 ing the upper regions of their vast rivers to be denuded of 
 forests, thus subjecting the States below to alternations of 
 drought and deluge. Partly as a result of this, a beginning 
 has been made of teaching forest culture in many schools, 
 tree-planting societies have been formed, and "Arbor Day" 
 is recognised in several of the States. A true and noble 
 theology can hardly fail to recognise, in the love of Nature 
 and care for our fellow-men thus promoted, something far 
 better, both from a religious and a moral point of view, than 
 any efforts to win the Divine favour by flattery, or to avert 
 Satanic malice by fetichism.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 I. 
 
 IN all the earliest developments of human thought we 
 find a strong tendency to ascribe mysterious powers over 
 Nature to men and women especially gifted or skilled. Sur- 
 vivals of this view are found to this day among savages and 
 barbarians left behind in the evolution of civilization, and 
 especially is this the case among the tribes of Australia, 
 Africa, and the Pacific coast of America. Even in the most 
 enlightened nations still appear popular beliefs, observances, 
 or sayings, drawn from this earlier phase of thought. 
 
 Between the prehistoric savage developing this theory, 
 and therefore endeavouring to deal with the powers of Na- 
 ture by magic, and the modern man who has outgrown it, 
 appears a long line of nations struggling upward through it. 
 As the hieroglyphs, cuneiform inscriptions, and various 
 other records of antiquity are read, the development of this 
 belief can be studied in Egypt, India, Babylonia, Assyria, 
 Persia, and Phoenicia. From these civilizations it came into 
 the early thought of Greece and Rome, but especially into 
 the Jewish and Christian sacred books. Both in the Old 
 Testament and in the New we find magic, witchcraft, and 
 soothsaying constantly referred to as realities.* 
 
 * For magic in prehistoric times and survivals of it since, with abundant cita- 
 tion of authorities, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, chap, iv ; also The Early History 
 of Mankind, by the same author, third edition, pp. 115 et seq., also p. 380 ; also 
 Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. i, chap. iv. For magic in Egypt, 
 see Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, chaps, vi-viii ; also Maspero, Histoire Ancienne 
 des Peuples de I' Orient; also Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 
 282, and for the threat of the magicians to wreck heaven, see ibid., p. 17, note, 
 and especially the citations from Chabas, Le Papyrus Magique Harris, in chap. 
 
 373
 
 374 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 The first distinct impulse toward a higher view of re- 
 search into natural laws was given by the philosophers of 
 Greece. It is true that philosophical opposition to physical 
 research was at times strong, and that even a great thinker 
 like Socrates considered certain physical investigations as 
 an impious intrusion into the work of the gods. It is also 
 true that Plato and Aristotle, while bringing their thoughts 
 to bear upon the world with great beauty and force, did 
 much to draw mankind away from those methods which in 
 modern times have produced the best results. 
 
 Plato developed a world in which the physical sciences 
 had little if any real reason for existing; Aristotle, a world 
 in which the same sciences were developed largely indeed 
 by observation of what is, but still more by speculation on 
 what ought to be. From the former of these two great men 
 came into Christian theology many germs of mediaeval 
 magic, and from the latter sundry modes of reasoning which 
 aided in the evolution of these ; yet the impulse to human 
 thought given by these great masters was of inestimable 
 value to our race, and one legacy from them was especially 
 precious the idea that a science of Nature is possible, and 
 that the highest occupation of man is the discovery of its 
 laws. Still another gift from them was greatest of all, for 
 they gave scientific freedom. They laid no interdict upon 
 new paths; they interposed no barriers to the extension of 
 knowledge ; they threatened no doom in this life or in the 
 
 vii ; also Maury, La Magie et VAstrologie dans V Antiquite" et au Moyen Age. For 
 magic in Chaldea, see Lenormant as above ; also Maspero and Sayce, pp. 780 et seq. 
 For examples of magical powers in India, see Max Miiller's Sacred Books of the 
 East, vol. xvii, pp. 121 et seq. For a legendary view of magic in Media, see the 
 Zend A vesta, part i, p. 14, translated by Darmsteter ; and for a more highly devel- 
 oped view, see the Zend Avesta, part iii, p. 239, translated by Mill. For magic 
 in Greece and Rome, and especially in the Neoplatonic school, as well as in the 
 Middle Ages, see especially Maury, La Magie et I'Astrologie, chaps, iii-v. For 
 various sorts of magic recognised and condemned in our sacred books, see Deuter- 
 onomy xviii, to, II ; and for the burning of magical books at Ephesus under the 
 influence of St. Paul, see Acts xix, 14. See also Ewald, History of Israel, Mar- 
 tineau's translation, fourth edition, vol. ii, pp. 55~63 ', vol. iii, pp. 45~5 r - For a 
 very elaborate summing up of the passages in our sacred books recognizing magic 
 as a fact, see De Haen, De Magia, Leipsic, 1775, chaps, i, ii, and iii, of first part. 
 For the general subject of magic, see Ennemoser, History of Magic, translated by 
 Howitt, which, however, constantly mixes sorcery with magic proper.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 375 
 
 next against investigators on new lines ; they left the world 
 free to seek any new methods and to follow any new paths 
 which thinking men could find. 
 
 This legacy of belief in science, of respect for scien- 
 tific pursuits, and of freedom in scientific research, was 
 especially received by the school of Alexandria, and above 
 all by Archimedes, who began, just before the Christian 
 era, to open new paths through the great field of the 
 inductive sciences by observation, comparison, and experi- 
 ment.* 
 
 The establishment of Christianity, beginning a new evo- 
 lution of theology, arrested the normal development of the 
 physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years. The cause 
 of this arrest was twofold : First, there was created an atmos- 
 phere in which the germs of physical science could hardly 
 grow an atmosphere in which all seeking in Nature for 
 truth as truth was regarded as futile. The general belief de- 
 rived from the New Testament Scriptures was, that the end 
 of the world was at hand ; that the last judgment was ap- 
 proaching ; that all existing physical nature was soon to be 
 destroyed : hence, the greatest thinkers in the Church gen- 
 erally poured contempt upon all investigators into a science 
 of Nature, and insisted that everything except the saving of 
 souls was folly. 
 
 This belief appears frequently through the entire period 
 of the Middle Ages ; but during the first thousand years it is 
 clearly dominant. From Lactantius and Eusebius, in the 
 third century, pouring contempt, as we have seen, over 
 studies in astronomy, to Peter Damian, the noted chancellor 
 of Pope Gregory VII, in the eleventh century, declaring 
 all worldly sciences to be " absurdities " and " fooleries," it 
 
 * As to the beginnings of physical science in Greece, and of the theological 
 opposition to physical science, also Socrates's view regarding certain branches as 
 interdicted to human study, see Crete's History of Greece, vol. i, pp. 495 and 504, 
 505 ; also Jowett's introduction to his translation of the Timtzus, and Whewell's 
 History of the Inductive Sciences. For examples showing the incompatibility of 
 Plato's methods in physical science with that pursued in modern times, see Zeller, 
 Plato and the Older Academy, English translation by Alleyne and Goodwin, pp. 
 375 ft sec]' The supposed opposition to freedom of opinion in the Laws of Plato, 
 toward the end of his life, can hardly make against the whole spirit of Greek 
 thought.
 
 376 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 becomes a very important element in the atmosphere of 
 thought.* 
 
 Then, too, there was established a standard to which all 
 science which did struggle up through this atmosphere must 
 be made to conform a standard which favoured magic 
 rather than science, for it was a standard of rigid dogmatism 
 obtained from literal readings in the Jewish and Christian 
 Scriptures. The most careful inductions from ascertained 
 facts were regarded as wretchedly fallible when compared 
 with any view of nature whatever given or even hinted at 
 in any poem, chronicle, code, apologue, myth, legend, alle- 
 gory, letter, or discourse of any sort which had happened 
 to be preserved in the literature which had come to be held 
 as sacred. 
 
 For twelve centuries, then, the physical sciences were 
 thus discouraged or perverted by the dominant orthodoxy. 
 Whoever studied nature studied it either openly to find 
 illustrations of the sacred text, useful in the " saving of souls," 
 or secretly to gain the aid of occult powers, useful in secur- 
 ing personal advantage. Great men like Bede, Isidore of 
 Seville, and Rabanus Maurus, accepted the scriptural stand- 
 ard of science and used it as a means of Christian edification. 
 The views of Bede and Isidore on kindred subjects have 
 been shown in former chapters ; and typical of the view 
 taken by Rabanus is the fact that in his great work on the 
 Universe there are only two chapters which seem directly or 
 indirectly to recognise even the beginnings of a real phi- 
 losophy of nature. A multitude of less-known men found 
 warrant in Scripture for magic applied to less worthy pur- 
 poses.f 
 
 * For the view of Peter Damian and others through the Middle Ages as to the 
 futility of scientific investigation, see citations in Eicken, Ceschichte und System 
 der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, chap. vi. 
 
 f As typical examples, see the utterances of Eusebius and Lactantius regarding 
 astronomers given in the chapter on Astronomy. For a summary of Rabanus 
 Maurus's doctrine of physics, see Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, pp. 172 et 
 seq. For Bede and Isidore, see the earlier chapters of this work. For an excel- 
 lent statement regarding the application of scriptural standards to scientific re- 
 search in the Middle Ages, see Kretschmer, Die physische Erdkunde im christlichen 
 Afittelalter, pp. 5 et seq. For the distinctions in magic recognised in the mediaeval 
 Church, see the long catalogue of various sorts given in the Abbd Migne's Encyclo- 
 pe"die Thtologique, third series, article Magie.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 377 
 
 But after the thousand years had passed to which vari- 
 ous thinkers in the Church, upon supposed scriptural war- 
 rant, had lengthened out the term of the earth's existence, 
 " the end of all things " seemed further off than ever ; and 
 in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, owing to causes 
 which need not be dwelt upon here, came a great revival of 
 thought, so that the forces of theology and of science seemed 
 arrayed for a contest. On one side came a revival of re- 
 ligious fervour, and to this day the works of the cathedral 
 builders mark its depth and strength ; on the other side 
 came a new spirit of inquiry incarnate in a line of powerful 
 thinkers. 
 
 First among these was Albert of Bollstadt, better known 
 as Albert the Great, the most renowned scholar of his time. 
 Fettered though he was by the methods sanctioned in the 
 Church, dark as was all about him, he had conceived better 
 methods and aims ; his eye pierced the mists of scholasti- 
 cism ; he saw the light, and sought to draw the world toward 
 it. He stands among the great pioneers of physical and 
 natural science ; he aided in giving foundations to botany 
 and chemistry ; he rose above his time, and struck a heavy 
 blow at those who opposed the possibility of human life on 
 opposite sides of the earth ; he noted the influence of moun- 
 tains, seas, and forests upon races and products, so that 
 Humboldt justly finds in his works the germs of physical 
 geography as a comprehensive science. 
 
 But the old system of deducing scientific truth from 
 scriptural texts was renewed in the development of scholas- 
 tic theology ; and ecclesiastical power, acting through thou- 
 sands of subtle channels, was made to aid this development. 
 The old idea of the futility of physical science and of the 
 vast superiority of theology was revived. Though Albert's 
 main effort was to Christianize science, he was dealt with 
 by the authorities of the Dominican order, subjected to sus- 
 picion and indignity, and only escaped persecution for sor- 
 cery by yielding to the ecclesiastical spirit of the time, and 
 working finally in theological channels by scholastic methods. 
 
 It was a vast loss to the earth ; and certainly, of all or- 
 ganizations that have reason to lament the pressure of eccle- 
 siasticism which turned Albert the Great from natural phi-
 
 378 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 losophy to theology, foremost of all in regret should be the 
 Christian Church, and especially the Roman branch of it. 
 Had there been evolved in the Church during the thirteenth 
 century a faith strong enough to accept the truths in natural 
 science which Albert and his compeers could have given, 
 and to have encouraged their growth, this faith and this en- 
 couragement would to this day have formed the greatest 
 argument for proving the Church directly under Divine 
 guidance ; they would have been among the brightest jew- 
 els in her crown. The loss to the Church by this want of 
 faith and courage has proved in the long run even greater 
 than the loss to science.* 
 
 The next great man of that age whom the theological 
 and ecclesiastical forces of the time turned from the right 
 path was Vincent of Beauvais. During the first half of the 
 twelfth century he devoted himself to the study of Nature 
 in several of her most interesting fields. To astronomy, bot- 
 any, and zoology he gave special attention, but in a larger 
 way he made a general study of the universe, and in a series 
 of treatises undertook to reveal the whole field of science. 
 But his work simply became a vast commentary on the ac- 
 count of creation given in the book of Genesis. Beginning 
 with the work of the Trinity at the creation, he goes on to 
 detail the work of angels in all their fields, and makes excur- 
 sions into every part of creation, visible and invisible, but 
 always with the most complete subordination of his thought 
 to the literal statements of Scripture. Could he have taken 
 
 * For a very careful discussion of Albert's strength in investigation and weak- 
 ness in yielding to scholastic authority, see Kopp, Ansichten iiber die Aufgabe der 
 Chemie von Geber bis Stahl, Braunschweig, 1875, pp. 64 et seq. For a very extended 
 and enthusiastic biographical sketch, see Pouchet. For comparison of his work 
 with that of Thomas Aquinas, see Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. vi, 
 p. 461. " II e"tat aussi tres-habile dans les arts mecaniques, ce que le fit soup9onner 
 d'etre sorcier " (Sprengel, Histoire de la MJdecine, vol. ii, p. 389). For Albert's biog- 
 raphy treated strictly in accordance with ecclesiastical methods, see Albert the Great, 
 by Joachim Sighart, translated by the Rev. T. A. Dickson, of the Order of Preach- 
 ers, published under the sanction of the Dominican censor and of the Cardinal 
 Archbishop of Westminster, London, 1876. How an Englishman like Cardinal 
 Manning could tolerate among Englishmen such an unctuous glossing over of his- 
 torical truth is one of the wonders of contemporary history. For choice specimens, 
 see chapters ii and iv. For one of the best and most recent summaries, see Heller, 
 Geschichte der Pkysik, Stuttgart, 1882, vol. i, pp. 179 et seq.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 379 
 
 the path of experimental research, the world would have 
 been enriched with most precious discoveries ; but the force 
 which had given wrong direction to Albert of Bollstadt, 
 backed as it was by the whole ecclesiastical power of his 
 time, was too strong, and in all the life labour of Vincent 
 nothing appears of any permanent value. He reared a struc- 
 ture which the adaptation of facts to literal interpretations of 
 Scripture and the application of theological subtleties to na- 
 ture combine to make one of the most striking monuments 
 of human error.* 
 
 But the theological spirit of the thirteenth century gained 
 its greatest victory in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. In 
 him was the theological spirit of his age incarnate. Al- 
 though he yielded somewhat at one period to love of natu- 
 ral science, it was he who finally made that great treaty or 
 compromise which for ages subjected science entirely to 
 theology. He it was who reared the most enduring bar- 
 rier against those who in that age and in succeeding ages 
 laboured to open for science the path by its own methods 
 toward its own ends. 
 
 He had been the pupil of Albert the Great, and had 
 gained much from him. Through the earlier systems of phi- 
 losophy, as they were then known, and through the earlier 
 theologic thought, he had gone with great labour and vig- 
 our; and all his mighty powers, thus disciplined and cul- 
 tured, he brought to bear in making a truce which was to 
 give theology permanent supremacy over science. 
 
 The experimental method had already been practically 
 initiated : Albert of Bollstadt and Roger Bacon had begun 
 their work in accordance with its methods ; but St. Thomas 
 gave all his thoughts to bringing science again under the 
 sway of theological methods and ecclesiastical control. In 
 his commentary on Aristotle's treatise upon Heaven and 
 Earth he gave to the world a striking example of what his 
 method could produce, illustrating all the evils which arise 
 in combining theological reasoning and literal interpretation 
 of Scripture with scientific facts ; and this work remains to 
 
 * For Vincent de Beauvais, see Etudes sur Vincent de Beauvais, par 1'Abbe* 
 Bourgeat, chaps, xii, xiii, and xiv ; also Pouchet, Histoire des Sciences Naturelks 
 au Moyen Age, Paris, 1853, pp. 470 et seq. ; also other histories cited hereafter.
 
 380 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 this day a monument of scientific genius perverted by the- 
 ology.* 
 
 The ecclesiastical power of the time hailed him as a de- 
 liverer; it was claimed that miracles were vouchsafed, prov- 
 ing that the blessing of Heaven rested upon his labours, and 
 among the legends embodying this claim is that given by 
 the Bollandists and immortalized by a renowned painter. 
 The great philosopher and saint is represented in the habit 
 of his order, with book and pen in hand, kneeling before the 
 image of Christ crucified, and as he kneels the image thus 
 addresses him : " Thomas, thou hast written well concerning 
 me; what price wilt thou receive for thy labour?" The 
 myth-making faculty of the people at large was also brought 
 into play. According to a widespread and circumstantial 
 legend, Albert, by magical means, created an android an 
 artificial man, living, speaking, and answering all questions 
 with such subtlety that St. Thomas, unable to answer its 
 reasoning, broke it to pieces with his staff. 
 
 Historians of the Roman Church like Rohrbacher, and 
 historians of science like Pouchet, have found it convenient 
 to propitiate the Church by dilating upon the glories of St. 
 Thomas Aquinas in thus making an alliance between re- 
 ligious and scientific thought, and laying the foundations for 
 a " sanctified science " ; but the unprejudiced historian can 
 not indulge in this enthusiastic view : the results both for the 
 Church and for science have been most unfortunate. It was 
 a wretched delay in the evolution of fruitful thought, for 
 the first result of this great man's great compromise was to 
 close for ages that path in science which above all others 
 leads to discoveries of value the experimental method 
 and to reopen that old path of mixed theology and science 
 which, as Hallam declares, ' after three or four hundred 
 years had not untied a single knot or added one unequivocal 
 truth to the domain of philosophy " the path which, as all 
 modern history proves, has ever since led only to delusion 
 and evil.f 
 
 * For citations showing this subordination of science to theology, see Eicken, 
 chap. vi. 
 
 t For the work of Aquinas, see his Liber de Cctlo et Mundo, section xx ; also, 
 Life and Labours of St. Thomas, of Aquin, by Archbishop Vaughan, pp. 459 et seq.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 381 
 
 The theological path thus opened by these strong men 
 became the main path for science during ages, and it led 
 the world ever further and further from any fruitful fact or 
 useful method. Roger Bacon's investigations already begun 
 were discredited : worthless mixtures of scriptural legends 
 with imperfectly authenticated physical facts took their 
 place. Thus it was that for twelve hundred years the minds 
 in control of Europe regarded all real science as futile, and 
 diverted the great current of earnest thought into theology. 
 
 The next stage in this evolution was the development of 
 an idea which acted with great force throughout the Mid- 
 dle Ages the idea that science is dangerous. This belief 
 was also of very ancient origin. From the time when the 
 Egyptian magicians made their tremendous threat that 
 unless their demands were granted they would reach out to 
 the four corners of the earth, pull down the pillars of heav- 
 en, wreck the abodes of the gods above and crush those of 
 men below, fear of these representatives of science is evi- 
 dent in the ancient world. 
 
 But differences in the character of magic were recog- 
 nised, some sorts being considered useful and some baleful. 
 Of the former was magic used in curing diseases, in deter- 
 
 For his labours in natural science, see Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, Paris, 1843, 
 vol. i, p. 381. For theological views of science in the Middle Ages, and rejoicing 
 thereat, see Pouchet, Hist, des Set. A'af. au Moyen Age, ubi supra. Pouchet says : 
 " En general au milieu du moyen age les sciences sont essentiellement chretiennes, 
 leur but est tout-a-fait religieux, et elles semblent beaucoup moins s'inquieter de 
 1'avancement intellectuel de l'homme que de son salut eternel." Pouchet calls this 
 " conciliation " into a " harmonieux ensemble " " la plus glorieuse des conquetes in- 
 tellectuelles du moyen age." Pouchet belongs to Rouen, and the shadow of Rouen 
 Cathedral seems thrown over all his history. See, also, 1'Abbe Rohrbacher, Hist, 
 de I'Eglise Catholique, Paris, 1858, vol. xviii, pp. 421 et seq. The abbe dilates upon 
 the fact that " the Church organizes the agreement of all the sciences by the labours 
 of St. Thomas of Aquin and his contemporaries." For the complete subordination 
 of science to theology by St. Thomas, see Eicken, chap. vi. For the theological 
 character of science in the Middle Ages, recognised by a Protestant philosophic his- 
 torian, see the well-known passage in Guizot, History of Civilization in Europe ; 
 and by a noted Protestant ecclesiastic, see Bishop Hampden's Life of Thomas 
 Aquinas, chaps, xxxvi, xxxvii ; see also Hallam, Middle Ages, chap. ix. For deal- 
 ings of Pope John XXII, of the Kings of France and England, and of the Repub- 
 lic of Venice, see Figuier, LAlchimie et les Alchimistes, pp. 140, 141, where, in a 
 note, the text of the bull Spondet pariter is given. For popular legends regarding 
 Albert and St. Thomas, see Eliphas Levi, Hist, de la Magie, liv. iv, chap. iv.
 
 382 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 mining times auspicious for enterprises, and even in contrib- 
 uting to amusement ; of the latter was magic used to bring 
 disease and death on men and animals or tempests upon the 
 growing crops. Hence gradually arose a general distinction 
 between white magic, which dealt openly with the more 
 beneficent means of nature, and black magic, which dealt 
 secretly with occult, malignant powers. 
 
 Down to the Christian era the fear of magic rarely led to 
 any persecution very systematic or very cruel. While in 
 Greece and Rome laws were at times enacted against magi- 
 cians, they were only occasionally enforced with rigour, and 
 finally, toward the end of the pagan empire, the feeling 
 against them seemed dying out altogether. As to its more 
 kindly phases/ men like Marcus Aurelius and Julian did not 
 hesitate to consult those who claimed to foretell the future. 
 As to black magic, it seemed hardly worth while to enact 
 severe laws, when charms, amulets, and even gestures could 
 thwart its worst machinations. 
 
 Moreover, under the old empire a real science was com- 
 ing in, and thought was progressing. Both the theory and 
 practice of magic were more and more held up to ridicule. 
 Even as early a writer as Ennius ridiculed the idea that 
 magicians, who were generally poor and hungry themselves, 
 could bestow wealth on others ; Pliny, in his Natural Philoso- 
 phy, showed at great length their absurdities and cheatery ; 
 others followed in the same line of thought, and the whole 
 theory, except among the very lowest classes, seemed dying 
 out. 
 
 But with the development of Christian theology came 
 a change. The idea of the active interference of Satan in 
 magic, which had come into the Hebrew mind with especial 
 force from Persia during the captivity of Israel, had passed 
 from the Hebrew Scriptures into Christianity, and had been 
 made still stronger by various statements in the New Testa- 
 ment. Theologians laid stress especially upon the famous 
 utterances of the Psalmist that " all the gods of the heathen 
 are devils," and of St. Paul that " the things which the Gen- 
 tiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils " ; and it was widely 
 held that these devils were naturally indignant at their de- 
 thronement and anxious to wreak vengeance upon Chris-
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 383 
 
 tianity. Magicians were held to be active agents of these 
 dethroned gods, and this persuasion was strengthened by 
 sundry old practitioners in the art of magic impostors who 
 pretended to supernatural powers, and who made use of old 
 rites and phrases inherited from paganism. 
 
 Hence it was that as soon as Christianity came into 
 power it more than renewed the old severities against the 
 forbidden art, and one of the first acts of the Emperor Con- 
 stantine after his conversion was to enact a most severe law 
 against magic and magicians, under which the main offender 
 might be burned alive. But here, too, it should be noted that 
 a distinction between the two sorts of magic was recognised, 
 for Constantine shortly afterward found it necessary to 
 issue a proclamation stating that his intention was only to 
 prohibit deadly and malignant magic ; that he had no inten- 
 tion of prohibiting magic used to cure diseases and to pro- 
 tect the crops from hail and tempests. But as new emperors 
 came to the throne who had not in them that old leaven of 
 paganism which to the last influenced Constantine, and as 
 theology obtained a firmer hold, severity against magic in- 
 creased. Toleration of it, even in its milder forms, was 
 more and more denied. Black magic and white were classed 
 together. 
 
 This severity went on increasing and threatened the sim- 
 plest efforts in physics and chemistry ; even the science of 
 mathematics was looked upon with dread. By the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries, the older theology having arrived 
 at the climax of its development in Europe, terror of magic 
 and witchcraft took complete possession of the popular 
 mind. In sculpture, painting, and literature it appeared in 
 forms ever more and more striking. The lives of saints 
 were filled with it. The cathedral sculpture embodied it in 
 every part. The storied windows made it all the more im- 
 pressive. The missal painters wrought it not only into 
 prayer books, but, despite the fact that hardly a trace of the 
 belief appears in the Psalms, they illustrated it in the great 
 illuminated psalters from which the noblest part of the service 
 was sung before the high altar. The service books showed 
 every form of agonizing petition for delivery from this dire 
 influence, and every form of exorcism for thwarting it.
 
 384 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 All the great theologians of the Church entered into this 
 belief and aided to develop it. The fathers of the early 
 Church were full and explicit, and the mediaeval doctors be- 
 came more and more minute in describing the operations of 
 the black art and in denouncing them. It was argued that, 
 as the devil afflicted Job, so he and his minions continue to 
 cause diseases ; that, as Satan is the Prince of the power of 
 the air, he and his minions cause tempests ; that the cases 
 of Nebuchadnezzar and Lot's wife prove that sorcerers can 
 transform human beings into animals or even lifeless mat- 
 ter ; that, as the devils of Gadara were cast into swine, all 
 animals could be afflicted in the same manner ; and that, as 
 Christ himself had been transported through the air by the 
 power of Satan, so any human being might be thus trans- 
 ported to " an exceeding high mountain." 
 
 Thus the horror of magic and witchcraft increased on 
 every hand, and in 1317 Pope John XXII issued his bull Spon- 
 dent pariter, levelled at the alchemists, but really dealing a 
 terrible blow at the beginnings of chemical science. That 
 many alchemists were knavish is no doubt true, but no in- 
 fallibility in separating the evil from the good was shown by 
 the papacy in this matter. In this and in sundry other bulls 
 and briefs we find Pope John, by virtue of his infallibility as 
 the world's instructor in all that pertains to faith and morals, 
 condemning real science and pseudo-science alike. In two 
 of these documents, supposed to be inspired by wisdom 
 from on high, he complains that both he and his flock are in 
 danger of their lives by the arts of the sorcerers; he de- 
 clares that such sorcerers can send devils into mirrors and 
 finger rings, and kill men and women by a magic word ; that 
 they had tried to kill him by piercing a waxen image of him 
 with needles in the name of the devil. He therefore called 
 on all rulers, secular and ecclesiastical, to hunt down the 
 miscreants who thus afflicted the faithful, and he especially 
 increased the powers of inquisitors in various parts of Eu- 
 rope for this purpose. 
 
 The impulse thus given to childish fear and hatred 
 against the investigation of nature was felt for centuries ; 
 more and more chemistry came to be known as one of the 
 " seven devilish arts."
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 385 
 
 Thus began a long series of demonstrations against magic 
 from the centre of Christendom. In 1437, and again in 1445, 
 Pope Eugene IV issued bulls exhorting inquisitors to be 
 more diligent in searching out and delivering over to pun- 
 ishment magicians and witches who produced bad weather, 
 the result being that persecution received a fearful impulse. 
 But the worst came forty years later still, when, in 1484, there 
 came the yet more terrible bull of Pope Innocent VIII, known 
 as Summis Desiderantes, which let inquisitors loose upon Ger- 
 many, with Sprenger at their head, armed with the Witch- 
 Hammer, the fearful manual Malleus Maleficarum, to torture 
 and destroy men and women by tens of thousands for sor- 
 cery and magic. Similar bulls were issued in 1504 by Julius 
 II, and in 1523 by Adrian VI. 
 
 The system of repression thus begun lasted for hundreds 
 of years. The Reformation did little to change it, and in 
 Germany, where Catholics and Protestants vied with each 
 other in proving their orthodoxy, it was at its worst. On 
 German soil more than one hundred thousand victims are 
 believed to have been sacrificed to it between the middle of 
 the fifteenth and the middle of the sixteenth centuries. 
 
 Thus it was that from St. Augustine to St. Thomas 
 Aquinas, from Aquinas to Luther, and from Luther to Wes- 
 ley, theologians of both branches of the Church, with hardly 
 an exception, enforced the belief in magic and witchcraft, 
 and, as far as they had power, carried out the injunction, 
 " Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." 
 
 How this was ended by the progress of scientific modes 
 of thought I shall endeavour to show elsewhere: here we 
 are only concerned with the effect of this widespread terror- 
 ism on the germs and early growth of the physical sciences. 
 
 Of course, the atmosphere created by this persecution 
 of magicians was deadly to any open beginnings of experi- 
 mental science. The conscience of the time, acting in obe- 
 dience to the highest authorities of the Church, and, as was 
 supposed, in defence of religion, now brought out a missile 
 which it hurled against scientific investigators with deadly 
 effect. The mediaeval battlefields of thought were strewn 
 with various forms of it. This missile was the charge of un- 
 lawful compact with Satan, and it was most effective. We 
 
 26
 
 3 86 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 find it used against every great investigator of nature in 
 those times and for ages after. The list of great men in 
 those centuries charged with magic, as given by Naude, is 
 astounding ; it includes every man of real mark, and in the 
 midst of them stands one of the most thoughtful popes, Syl- 
 vester II (Gerbert), and the foremost of mediaeval thinkers 
 on natural science, Albert the Great. It came to be the ac- 
 cepted idea that, as soon as a man conceded a wish to study 
 the works of God, his first step must be a league with the 
 devil. 
 
 It was entirely natural, then, that in 1163 Pope Alexander 
 III, in connection with the Council of Tours, forbade the 
 study of physics to all ecclesiastics, which, of course, in that 
 age meant prohibition of all such scientific studies to the 
 only persons likely to make them. What the Pope then ex- 
 pressly forbade was, in the words of the papal bull, " the 
 study of physics or the laws of the world," and it was added 
 that any person violating this rule " shall be avoided by all 
 and excommunicated."* 
 
 The first great thinker who, in spite of some stumbling 
 into theologic pitfalls, persevered in a truly scientific path, 
 was Roger Bacon. His life and works seem until recently 
 to have been generally misunderstood : he was formerly 
 ranked as a superstitious alchemist who happened upon 
 some inventions, but more recent investigation has shown 
 him to be one of the great masters in the evolution of hu- 
 man thought. The advance of sound historical judgment 
 seems likely to bring the fame of the two who bear the name 
 of Bacon nearly to equality. Bacon of the chancellorship 
 and of the Novnm Organum may not wane, but Bacon of 
 the prison cell and the Opus Majus steadily approaches him 
 in brightness. 
 
 More than three centuries before Francis Bacon advo- 
 cated the experimental method, Roger Bacon practised it, 
 and the results as now revealed are wonderful. He wrought 
 
 * For the charge of magic against scholars and others, see Naude, Apologie pour 
 les Grands Hommes soupfonn/s de Magie, passim ; also Maury, Hist, de la Magie, 
 troisieme edition, pp. 214, 215 ; also Cuvier, Hist, des Sciences Naturelles, vol. i, 
 p. 396. For the prohibition by the Council of Tours and Alexander III, see the 
 Acta Conciliorum (ed. Harduin), torn, vi, pars ii, p. 1598, Canon viii.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 387 
 
 with power in many sciences, and his knowledge was sound 
 and exact. By him, more than by any other man of the 
 Middle Ages, was the world brought into the more fruitful 
 paths of scientific thought the paths which have led to the 
 most precious inventions ; and among these are clocks, 
 lenses, and burning specula, which were given by him to the 
 world, directly or indirectly. In his writings are found 
 formulae for extracting phosphorus, manganese, and bis- 
 muth. It is even claimed, with much appearance of justice, 
 that he investigated the power of steam, and he seems to 
 have very nearly reached some of the principal doctrines of 
 modern chemistry. But it should be borne in mind that his 
 method of investigation was even greater than its results. In 
 an age when theological subtilizing was alone thought to 
 give the title of scholar, he insisted on real reasoning and 
 the aid of natural science by mathematics; in an age when 
 experimenting was sure to cost a man his reputation, and 
 was likely to cost him his life, he insisted on experimenting, 
 and braved all its risks. Few greater men have lived. As 
 we follow Bacon's process of reasoning regarding the refrac- 
 tion of light, we see that he was divinely inspired. 
 
 On this man came the brunt of the battle. The most con- 
 scientious men of his time thought it their duty to fight him, 
 and they fought him steadily and bitterly. His sin was not 
 disbelief in Christianity, not want of fidelity to the Church, 
 not even dissent from the main lines of orthodoxy ; on the 
 contrary, he showed in all his writings a desire to strength- 
 en Christianity, to build up the Church, and to develop 
 orthodoxy. He was attacked and condemned mainly be- 
 cause he did not believe that philosophy had become com- 
 plete, and that nothing more was to be learned ; he was con- 
 demned, as his opponents expressly declared, "on account 
 of certain suspicious novelties " "propter quasdam novitates 
 suspect as." 
 
 Upon his return to Oxford, about 1250, the forces of un- 
 reason beset him on all sides. Greatest of all his enemies was 
 Bonaventura. This enemy was the theologic idol of the pe- 
 riod : the learned world knew him as the "seraphic Doctor " ; 
 Dante gave him an honoured place in the great poem of the 
 Middle Ages ; the Church finally enrolled him among the
 
 388 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 saints. By force of great ability in theology he had become, 
 in the middle of the thirteenth century, general of the Fran- 
 ciscan order : thus, as Bacon's master, his hands were laid 
 heavily on the new teaching, so that in 1257 the troublesome 
 monk was forbidden to lecture ; all men were solemnly 
 warned not to listen to his teaching, and he was ordered to 
 Paris, to be kept under surveillance by the monastic authori- 
 ties. Herein was exhibited another of the myriad examples 
 showing the care exercised over scientific teaching by the 
 Church. The reasons for thus dealing with Bacon were 
 evident : First, he had dared attempt scientific explanations 
 of natural phenomena, which under the mystic theology of 
 the Middle Ages had been referred simply to supernatural 
 causes. Typical was his explanation of the causes and char- 
 acter of the rainbow. It was clear, cogent, a great step in 
 the right direction as regards physical science : but there, in 
 the book of Genesis, stood the legend regarding the origin 
 of the rainbow, supposed to have been dictated immediately 
 by the Holy Spirit ; and, according to that, the " bow in the 
 cloud " was not the result of natural laws, but a " sign " ar- 
 bitrarily placed in the heavens for the simple purpose of 
 assuring mankind that there was not to be another universal 
 deluge. 
 
 But this was not the worst : another theological idea was 
 arrayed against him the idea of Satanic intervention in 
 science; hence he was attacked with that goodly missile 
 which with the epithets "infidel" and "atheist" has decided 
 the fate of so many battles the charge of magic and com- 
 pact with Satan. 
 
 He defended himself with a most unfortunate weapon 
 a weapon which exploded in his hands and injured him 
 more than the enemy ; for he argued against the idea of 
 compacts with Satan, and showed that much which is as- 
 cribed to demons results from natural means. This added 
 fuel to the flame. To limit the power of Satan was deemed 
 hardly less impious than to limit the power of God. 
 
 The most powerful protectors availed him little. His 
 friend Guy of Foulques, having in 1265 been made Pope under 
 the name of Clement IV, shielded him for a time; but the 
 fury of the enemy was too strong, and when he made ready
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 389 
 
 to perform a few experiments before a small audience, we 
 are told that all Oxford was in an uproar. It was believed 
 that Satan was about to be let loose. Everywhere priests, 
 monks, fellows, and students rushed about, their garments 
 streaming in the wind, and everywhere rose the cry, " Down 
 with the magician ! " and this cry, " Down with the magi- 
 cian ! " resounded from cell to cell and from hall to hall. 
 
 Another weapon was also used upon the battlefields of 
 science in that time with much effect. The Arabs had made 
 many noble discoveries in science, and Averroes had, in the 
 opinion of many, divided the honours with St. Thomas 
 Aquinas; these facts gave the new missile it was the 
 epithet " Mohammedan " ; this, too, was flung with effect at 
 Bacon. 
 
 The attack now began to take its final shape. The two 
 great religious orders, Franciscan and Dominican, then in all 
 the vigour of their youth, vied with each other in fighting 
 the new thought in chemistry and physics. St. Dominic 
 solemnly condemned research by experiment and obser- 
 vation ; the general of the Franciscan order took similar 
 ground. In 1243 the Dominicans interdicted every member 
 of their order from the study of medicine and natural philos- 
 ophy, and in 1287 this interdiction was extended to the study 
 of chemistry. 
 
 In 1278 the authorities of the Franciscan order assembled 
 at Paris, solemnly condemned Bacon's teaching, and the gen- 
 eral of the Franciscans, Jerome of Ascoli, afterward Pope, 
 threw him into prison, where he remained for fourteen 
 years. Though Pope Clement IV had protected him, Popes 
 Nicholas III and IV, by virtue of their infallibility, decided 
 that he was too dangerous to be at large, and he was only 
 released at the age of eighty but a year or two before 
 death placed him beyond the reach of his enemies. How 
 deeply the struggle had racked his mind may be gathered 
 from that last affecting declaration of his, " Would that I 
 had not given myself so much trouble for the love of 
 science ! " 
 
 The attempt has been made by sundry champions of the 
 Church to show that some of Bacon's utterances against 
 ecclesiastical and other corruptions in his time were the
 
 390 
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 main cause of the severity which the Church authorities ex- 
 ercised against him. This helps the Church but little, even 
 if it be well based ; but it is not well based. That some of 
 his utterances of this sort made him enemies is doubtless 
 true, but the charges on which St. Bonaventura silenced 
 him, and Jerome of Ascoli imprisoned him, and successive 
 popes kept him in prison for fourteen years, were " danger- 
 ous novelties " and suspected sorcery. 
 
 Sad is it to think of what this great man might have given 
 to the world had ecclesiasticism allowed the gift. He held 
 the key of treasures which would have freed mankind from 
 ages of error and misery. With his discoveries as a basis, 
 with his method as a guide, what might not the world have 
 gained ! Nor was the wrong done to that age alone ; it was 
 done to this age also. The nineteenth century was robbed 
 at the same time with the thirteenth. But for that interfer. 
 ence with science the nineteenth century would be enjoying 
 discoveries which will not be reached before the twentieth 
 century, and even later. Thousands of precious lives shall 
 be lost, tens of thousands shall suffer discomfort, priva- 
 tion, sickness, poverty, ignorance, for lack of discoveries 
 and methods which, but for this mistaken dealing with 
 Roger Bacon and his compeers, would now be blessing the 
 earth. 
 
 In two recent years sixty thousand children died in Eng- 
 land and in Wales of scarlet fever ; probably quite as many 
 died in the United States. Had not Bacon been hindered, 
 we should have had in our hands, by this time, the means to 
 save two thirds of these victims ; and the same is true of 
 typhoid, typhus, cholera, and that great class of diseases of 
 whose physical causes science is just beginning to get an 
 inkling. Put together all the efforts of all the atheists who 
 have ever lived, and they have not done so much harm to 
 Christianity and the world as has been done by the narrow- 
 minded, conscientious men who persecuted Roger Bacon, 
 and closed the path which he gave his life to open. 
 
 But despite the persecution of Bacon and the defection 
 of those who ought to have followed him, champions of the 
 experimental method rose from time to time during the suc- 
 ceeding centuries. We know little of them personally ; our
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 391 
 
 main knowledge of their efforts is derived from the endeav- 
 ours of their persecutors. 
 
 Under such guidance the secular rulers were naturally 
 vigorous. In France Charles V forbade, in 1380, the pos- 
 session of furnaces and apparatus necessary for chemical 
 processes ; under this law the chemist John Barrillon was 
 thrown into prison, and it was only by the greatest effort 
 that his life was saved. In England Henry IV, in 1404, is- 
 sued a similar decree. In Italy the Republic of Venice, in 
 1418, followed these examples. The judicial torture and 
 murder of Antonio de Dominis were not simply for heresy ; 
 his investigations in the phenomena of light were an addi- 
 tional crime. In Spain everything like scientific research 
 was crushed out among Christians. Some earnest efforts 
 were afterward made by Jews and Moors, but these were 
 finally ended by persecution ; and to this hour the Spanish 
 race, in some respects the most gifted in Europe, which be- 
 gan its career with everything in its favour and with every 
 form of noble achievement, remains in intellectual develop- 
 ment behind every other in Christendom. 
 
 To question the theological view of physical science was, 
 even long after the close of the Middle Ages, exceedingly 
 perilous. We have seen how one of Roger Bacon's unpar- 
 donable offences was his argument against the efficacy of 
 magic, and how, centuries afterward, Cornelius Agrippa, 
 Weyer, Flade, Loos, Bekker, and a multitude of other inves- 
 tigators and thinkers, suffered confiscation of property, loss 
 of position, and even torture and death, for similar views.* 
 
 * For an account of Bacon's treatise, De Nullitate Magics, see Hoefer. For 
 the uproar caused by Bacon's teaching at Oxford, see Kopp, Geschichte der Ckemie, 
 Braunschweig, 1869, vol. i, p. 63 ; and for a somewhat reactionary discussion of 
 Bacon's relation to the progress of chemistry, see a recent work by the same author, 
 Ansichten ilber die Aufgabe der Chemie, Braunschweig, 1874, pp. 85 et seq. ; also, 
 for an excellent summary, see Hoefer, Hist, de la Ckimie, vol. i, pp. 368 et seq. For 
 probably the most thorough study of Bacon's general works in science, and for his 
 views of the universe, see Prof. Werner, Die Kosmologie und allgemeine Naturlehre 
 des Roger Baco, Wien, 1879. For summaries of his work in other fields, see Whew- 
 ell, vol. i, pp. 367, 368 ; Draper, p. 438 ; Saisset, Descartes et ses Pr&urseurs, 
 deuxieme edition, pp. 397 et seq. ; Nourrisson, Progres de la Pense"e humaine, pp. 
 271, 272 ; Sprengel, Histoire de la Me"decine, Paris, 1865, vol. ii, p. 397 ; Cuvier, 
 Histoire des Sciences Naturelles, vol. i, p. 417. As to Bacon's orthodoxy, see Sais- 
 set, pp. 53, 55. For special examination of causes of Bacon's condemnation, see
 
 392 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 The theological atmosphere, which in consequence set- 
 tled down about the great universities and colleges, seemed 
 likely to stifle all scientific effort in every part of Europe, 
 and it is one of the great wonders in human history that in 
 spite of this deadly atmosphere a considerable body of think- 
 ing men, under such protection as they could secure, still 
 persisted in devoting themselves to the physical sciences. 
 
 In Italy, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, came 
 a striking example of the difficulties which science still en- 
 countered even after the Renaissance had undermined the 
 old beliefs. At that time John Baptist Porta was conduct- 
 ing his investigations, and, despite a considerable mixture 
 of pseudo-science, they were fruitful. His was not " black 
 magic," claiming the aid of Satan, but " white magic," bring- 
 ing into service the laws of nature the precursor of applied 
 
 Waddington, cited by Saisset, p. 14. For a brief but admirable statement of Roger 
 Bacon's relation to the world in his time, and of what he might have done had he 
 not been thwarted by theology, see Dollinger, Studies in European History, Eng- 
 lish translation, London, 1890, pp. 178, 179. For a good example of the danger of 
 denying the full power of Satan, even in much more recent times and in a Protes- 
 tant country, see account of treatment of Bekker's Monde Enchante" by the theolo- 
 gians of Holland, in Nisard, Histoire des Livres Populaires, vol. i, pp. 172, 173. 
 Kopp, in his Ansichten, pushes criticism even to some scepticism as to Roger 
 Bacon being the discoverer of many of the things generally attributed to him ; but, 
 after all deductions are carefully made, enough remains to make Bacon the greatest 
 benefactor to humanity during the Middle Ages. For Roger Bacon's deep devotion 
 to religion and the Church, see citation and remarks in Schneider, Roger Bacon, 
 Augsburg, 1873, p. 112 ; also, citation from the Opus Majus in Eicken, chap. vi. 
 On Bacon as a " Mohammedan," see Saisset, p. 17. For the interdiction of studies 
 in physical science by the Dominicans and Franciscans, see Henri Martin, Histoire 
 de France, vol. iv, p. 283. For the suppression of chemical teaching by the Parlia- 
 ment of Paris, see ibid., vol. xii, pp. 14, 15. For proofs that the world is steadily 
 working toward great discoveries as to the cause and prevention of zymotic dis- 
 eases and of their propagation, see Beale's Disease Germs, Baldwin Latham's 
 Sanitary Engineering, Michel Levy's Traite" a Hygiene Publique et Priv^e. For 
 a summary of the bull Spondent pariter, and for an example of injury done by it, 
 see Schneider, Geschichte der Alchemic, p. 160 ; and for a studiously moderate 
 statement, Milman, Latin Christianity, book xii, chap. vi. For character and gen- 
 eral efforts of John XXII, see Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 436, also pp. 452 et seq. 
 For the character of the two papal briefs, see Rydberg, p. 177. For the bull Sum- 
 mis Desiderantes, see previous chapters of this work. For Antonio de Dominis, see 
 Montucla, Hist, des Mathtmatiques, vol. i, p. 705 ; Humboldt, Cosmos ; Libri, vol. 
 iv, pp. 145 et seq. For Weyer, Flade, Bekker, Loos, and others, see the chapters 
 of this work on Meteorology, Demoniacal Possession and Insanity, and Diabolism 
 and Hysteria.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 393 
 
 science. His book on meteorology was the first in which 
 sound ideas were broached on this subject ; his researches 
 in optics gave the world the camera obscura, and possibly 
 the telescope ; in chemistry he seems to have been the first 
 to show how to reduce the metallic oxides, and thus to have 
 laid the foundation of several important industries. He did 
 much to change natural philosophy from a black art to a 
 vigorous open science. He encountered the old ecclesias- 
 tical policy. The society founded by him for physical re- 
 search, " I Secreti," was broken up, and he was summoned 
 to Rome by Pope Paul III and forbidden to continue his 
 investigations. 
 
 So, too, in France. In 1624, some young chemists at 
 Paris having taught the experimental method and cut loose 
 from Aristotle, the faculty of theology beset the Parliament 
 of Paris, and the Parliament prohibited these new chemical 
 researches under the severest penalties. 
 
 The same war continued in Italy. Even after the belief 
 in magic had been seriously weakened, the old theological 
 fear and dislike of physical science continued. In 1657 
 occurred the first sitting of the Accademia del Cimento at 
 Florence, under the presidency of Prince Leopold de' Med- 
 ici. This academy promised great things for science; it 
 was open to all talent ; its only fundamental law was " the 
 repudiation of any favourite system or sect of philosophy, 
 and the obligation to investigate Nature by the pure light of 
 experiment " ; it entered into scientific investigations with 
 energy. Borelli in mathematics, Redi in natural history, 
 and many others, enlarged the boundaries of knowledge. 
 Heat, light, magnetism, electricity, projectiles, digestion, 
 and the incompressibility of water were studied by the right 
 method and with results that enriched the world. 
 
 The academy was a fortress of science, and siege was 
 soon laid to it. The votaries of scholastic learning de- 
 nounced it as irreligious, quarrels were fomented, Leopold 
 was bribed with a cardinal's hat and drawn away to Rome, 
 and, after ten years of beleaguering, the fortress fell : Borelli 
 was left a beggar; Oliva killed himself in despair. 
 
 So, too, the noted Academy of the Lincei at times in- 
 curred the ill will of the papacy by the very fact that it
 
 394 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 included thoughtful investigators. It was " patronized " by 
 Pope Urban VIII in such manner as to paralyze it, and it 
 was afterward vexed by Pope Gregory XVI. Even in our 
 own time sessions of scientific associations were discouraged 
 and thwarted by as kindly a pontiff as Pius IX.* 
 
 A hostility similar in kind, though less in degree, was 
 shown in Protestant countries. 
 
 Even after Thomasius in Germany and Voltaire in France 
 and Beccaria in Italy had given final blows to the belief in 
 magic and witchcraft throughout Christendom, the tradi- 
 tional orthodox distrust of the physical sciences continued 
 for a long time. 
 
 In England a marked dislike was shown among various 
 leading ecclesiastics and theologians towards the Royal So- 
 ciety, and later toward the Association for the Advance- 
 ment of Science ; and this dislike, as will hereafter be seen, 
 sometimes took shape in serious opposition. 
 
 As a rule, both in Protestant and Catholic countries in- 
 struction in chemistry and physics was for a long time dis- 
 couraged by Church authorities ; and, when its suppression 
 was no longer possible, great pains were taken to subordi- 
 nate it to instruction supposed to be more fully in accord- 
 ance with the older methods of theological reasoning. 
 
 * For Porta, see the English translation of his main summary, Natural Magick, 
 London, 1658. The first chapters are especially interesting, as showing what the 
 word " magic " had come to mean in the mind of a man in whom mediaeval and 
 modern ideas were curiously mixed ; see also Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, vol. ii, 
 pp. 102-106 ; also Kopp ; also Sprengel, Histoire de la MJdecine, vol. iii, p. 239 ; also 
 Musset-Pathay. For the Accademia del Cimento, see Napier, Florentine History, 
 vol. v, p. 485 ; Tiraboschi, Storia delta Litteratura ; Henri Martin, Histoire de 
 France ; Jevons, Principles of Science, vol. ii, pp. 36-40. For value attached to 
 Borelli's investigations by Newton and Huygens, see Brewster's Life of Sir Isaac 
 Newton, London, 1875, pp. 128, 129. Libri, in his Essai sur Galilee, p. 37, says 
 that Oliva was summoned to Rome and so tortured by the Inquisition that, to 
 escape further cruelty, he ended his life by throwing himself from a window. For 
 interference by Pope Gregory XVI with the Academy of the Lincei, and with 
 public instruction generally, see Carutti, Storia della Accademia dei Lincei, p. 126. 
 Pius IX, with all his geniality, seems to have allowed his hostility to voluntary 
 associations to carry him very far at times. For his answer to an application made 
 through Lord Odo Russell regarding a society for the prevention of cruelty to 
 animals and his answer that " such an association could not be sanctioned by the 
 Holy See, being founded on a theological error, to wit, that Christians owed any 
 duties to animals," see Frances Power Cobbe, Hopes of the Human Race, p. 207.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 395 
 
 I have now presented in outline the more direct and open 
 struggle of the physical sciences with theology, mainly as an 
 exterior foe. We will next consider their warfare with the 
 same foe in its more subtle form, mainly as a vitiating and 
 sterilizing principle in science itself. 
 
 We have seen thus far, first, how such men as Eusebius, 
 Lactantius, and their compeers, opposed scientific investiga- 
 tion as futile ; next, how such men as Albert the Great, St. 
 Thomas Aquinas, and the multitude who followed them, 
 turned the main current of mediaeval thought from science 
 to theology ; and, finally, how a long line of Church author- 
 ities from Popes John XXII and Innocent VIII, and the 
 heads of the great religious orders, down to various theolo- 
 gians and ecclesiastics, Catholic and Protestant, of a very 
 recent period, endeavoured first to crush and afterward to 
 discourage scientific research as dangerous. 
 
 Yet, injurious as all this was to the evolution of science, 
 there was developed something in many respects more de- 
 structive ; and this was the influence of mystic theology, 
 penetrating, permeating, vitiating, sterilizing nearly every 
 branch of science for hundreds of years. Among the forms 
 taken by this development in the earlier Middle Ages we find 
 a mixture of physical science with a pseudo-science obtained 
 from texts of Scripture. In compounding this mixture, Jews 
 and Christians vied with each other. In this process the 
 sacred books were used as a fetich ; every word, every let- 
 ter, being considered to have a divine and hidden meaning. 
 By combining various scriptural letters in various abstruse 
 ways, new words of prodigious significance in magic were 
 obtained, and among them the great word embracing the 
 seventy-two mystical names of God the mighty word 
 " Schcmhamphoras" Why should men seek knowledge by 
 observation and experiment in the book of Nature, when 
 the book of Revelation, interpreted by the Kabbalah, opened 
 such treasures to the ingenious believer ? 
 
 So, too, we have ancient mystical theories of number 
 which the theological spirit had made Christian, usurping 
 an enormous place in mediaeval science. TH P ;a.rrpH power 
 QJ the number three was seen in the Trinity ; in the three 
 main divisions of the universe the empyrean, the heavens,
 
 396 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 and the earth ; in the three angelic hierarchies ; in the three 
 choirs of seraphim, cherubim, and thrones; in the three of 
 dominions, virtues, and powers ; in the three of principalities, 
 archangels, and angels ; in the three orders in the Church 
 bishops, priests, and deacons ; in the three classes the bap- 
 tized, the communicants, and the monks; in the three de- 
 grees of attainment light, purity, and knowledge ; in the 
 three theological virtues faith, hope, and charity and in 
 much else. All this was brought into a theologico-scientific 
 relation, then and afterward, with the three dimensions of 
 space ; with the three divisions of time past, present, and 
 future; with the three realms of the visible world sky, 
 earth, and sea ; with the three constituents of man body, 
 soul, and spirit; with the threefold enemies of man the 
 world, the flesh, and the devil ; with the three kingdoms in 
 nature mineral, vegetable, and animal ; with " the three 
 colours " red, yellow, and blue ; with " the three eyes of 
 the honey-bee " and with a multitude of other analogues 
 equally precious. The sacred power of the number seven 
 was seen in the seven golden candlesticks and the seven 
 churches in the Apocalypse ; in the seven cardinal virtues 
 and the seven deadly sins ; in the seven liberal arts and the 
 seven devilish arts, and, above all, in the seven sacraments. 
 And as this proved in astrology that there could be only 
 seven planets, so it proved in alchemy that there must be 
 exactly seven metals. The twelve apostles were connected 
 with the twelve signs in the zodiac, and with much in phys- 
 ical science. The seventy-two disciples, the seventy-two in- 
 terpreters of the Old Testament, the seventy-two mystical 
 names of God, were connected with the alleged fact in 
 anatomy that there were seventy-two joints in the human 
 frame. 
 
 Then, also, there were revived such theologic and meta- 
 physical substitutes for scientific thought as the declaration 
 that the perfect line is a circle, and hence that the planets 
 must move in absolute circles a statement which led astron- 
 omy astray even when the great truths of the Copernican 
 theory were well in sight; also, the declaration that nature 
 abhors a vacuum a statement which led physics astray 
 until Torricelli made his experiments ; also, the declaration
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 397 
 
 that we see the lightning before we hear the thunder be- 
 cause " sight is nobler than hearing." 
 
 In chemistry we have the same theologic tendency to 
 magic, and, as a result, a muddle of science and theology, 
 which from one point of view seems blasphemous and from 
 another idiotic, but which none the less sterilized physical 
 investigation for ages. That debased Platonism which had 
 been such an important factor in the evolution of Christian 
 theology from the earliest days of the Church continued its 
 work. As everything in inorganic nature was supposed to 
 have spiritual significance, the doctrines of the Trinity and 
 Incarnation were turned into an argument in behalf of the 
 philosopher's stone; arguments for the scheme of redemp- 
 tion and for transubstantiation suggested others of similar 
 construction to prove the transmutation of metals ; the doc- 
 trine of the resurrection of the human body was by similar 
 mystic jugglery connected with the processes of distillation 
 and sublimation. Even after the Middle Ages were past, 
 strong men seemed unable to break away from such reason- 
 ing as this among them such leaders as Basil Valentine in 
 the fifteenth century, Agricola in the sixteenth, and Van 
 Helmont in the seventeenth. 
 
 The greatest theologians contributed to the welter of un- 
 reason from which this pseudo-science was developed. One 
 question largely discussed was, whether at the Redemption 
 it was necessary for God to take the human form. Thomas 
 Aquinas answered that it was necessary, but William Oc- 
 cam and Duns Scotus answered that it was not ; that God 
 might have taken the form of a stone, or of a log, or of a 
 beast. The possibilities opened to wild substitutes for sci- 
 ence by this sort of reasoning were infinite. Men have often 
 asked how it was that the Arabians accomplished so much 
 in scientific discovery as compared with Christian investiga- 
 tors ; but the answer is easy : the Arabians were compara- 
 tively free from these theologic allurements which in Chris- 
 tian Europe flickered in the air on all sides, luring men into 
 paths which led no-whither. 
 
 Strong investigators, like Arnold of Villanova, Raymond 
 Lully, Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and their compeers, were 
 thus drawn far out of the only paths which led to fruitful
 
 398 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 truths. In a work generally ascribed to the first of these, 
 the student is told that in mixing his chemicals he must re. 
 peat the psalm Exsurge Domine, and that on certain chemical 
 vessels must be placed the last words of Jesus on the cross. 
 Vincent of Beauvais insisted that, as the Bible declares that 
 Noah, when five hundred years old, had children born to 
 him, he must have possessed alchemical means of preserving 
 life ; and much later Dickinson insisted that the patriarchs 
 generally must have owed their long lives to such means. 
 It was loudly declared that the reality of the philosopher's 
 stone was proved by the words of St. John in the Revela- 
 tion. "To him that overcometh I will give a white stone." 
 The reasonableness of seeking to develop gold out of the 
 baser metals was for many generations based upon the doc- 
 trine of the resurrection of the physical body, which, though 
 explicitly denied by St. Paul, had become a part of the 
 creed of the Church. Martin Luther was especially drawn 
 to believe in the alchemistic doctrine of transmutation by 
 this analogy. The Bible was everywhere used, both among 
 Protestants and Catholics, in support of these mystic adul- 
 terations of science, and one writer, as late as 1751, based 
 his alchemistic arguments on more than a hundred passages 
 of Scripture. As an example of this sort of reasoning, we 
 have a proof that the elect will preserve the philosopher's 
 stone until the last judgment, drawn from a passage in St. 
 Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, " We have this treasure in 
 earthen vessels." 
 
 The greatest thinkers devoted themselves to adding new 
 ingredients to this strange mixture of scientific and theologic 
 thought. The Catholic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the 
 Protestant mysticism of Jacob Boehme, and the alchemistic 
 reveries of Basil Valentine were all cast into this seething 
 mass. 
 
 And when alchemy in its old form had been discredited, 
 we find scriptural arguments no less perverse, and even 
 comical, used on the other side. As an example of this, just 
 before the great discoveries by Stahl, we find the valuable 
 scientific efforts of Becher opposed with the following syl- 
 logism : " King Solomon, according to the Scriptures, pos- 
 sessed the united wisdom of heaven and earth ; but King
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 399 
 
 Solomon knew nothing about alchemy [or chemistry in the 
 form it then took], and sent his vessels to Ophir to seek gold, 
 and levied taxes upon his subjects ; ergo alchemy [or chem- 
 istry] has no reality or truth." And we find that Becher is 
 absolutely turned away from his labours, and obliged to de- 
 vote himself to proving that Solomon used more money than 
 he possibly could have obtained from Ophir or his subjects, 
 and therefore that he must have possessed a knowledge of 
 chemical methods and the philosopher's stone as the result 
 of them.* 
 
 Of the general reasoning enforced by theology regarding 
 physical science, every age has shown examples; yet out of 
 them all I will select but two, and these are given because 
 
 * For an extract from Agrippa's Occulta Philosophia giving examples of the 
 way in which mystical names were obtained from the Bible, see Rydberg, Magic 
 of the Middle Ages, pp. 143 et seq. For the germs of many mystic beliefs regard- 
 ing number and the like, which were incorporated into mediaeval theology, see 
 Zeller, Plato and the Older Academy, English translation, pp. 254 and 572, and 
 elsewhere. As to the connection of spiritual things with inorganic nature in rela- 
 tion to chemistry, see Eicken, p. 634. On the injury to science wro ;ght by Plato- 
 nism acting through mediaeval theology, see Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie, vol. i, p. 
 90. As to the influence of mysticism upon strong men in science, see Hoefer ; 
 also Kopp, Geschichte der Alchemic, vol. i, p. 211. For a very curious Catholic 
 treatise on sacred numbers, see the Abbe Auber, Symbolisme Religieux, Paris, 1870 ; 
 also Detzel, Christliche Ikonographie, pp. 44 et seq. ; and for an equally important 
 Protestant work, see Samuell, Seven the Sacred Number, London, 1887. It is in- 
 teresting to note that the latter writer, having been forced to give up the seven 
 planets, consoles himself with the statement that " the earth is the seventh planet, 
 counting from Neptune and calling the asteroids one " (see p. 426). For the eUc- 
 trum magicum, the seven metals composing it, and its wonderful qualities, see ex- 
 tracts from Paracelsus's writings in Hartmann's Life of Paracelsus, London, 1887, 
 pp. 169 et seq. As to the more rapid transmission of light than sound, the follow- 
 ing expresses the scholastic method well : " What is the cause why we see sooner 
 the lightning than we heare the thunder clappe ? That is because our sight is both 
 nobler and sooner perceptive of its object than our eare ; as being the more active 
 part, and priore to our hearing : besides, the visible species are more subtile and 
 less corporeal than the audible species." Person's Varieties, Meteors, p. 82. For 
 Basil Valentine's view, see Hoefer, vol. i, pp. 453-465 ; Schmieder, Geschichte der 
 Alchemic, pp. 197-209 ; Allgemeine deutsche Biographic, article Basilius. For the 
 discussions referred to on possibilities of God assuming forms of stone, or log, or beast, 
 see Lippert, Christenthum, Volksglaube, und Volksbrauch, pp. 372, 373, where cita- 
 tions are given, etc. For the syllogism regarding Solomon, see Figuier, LAlchimie 
 et les Alchimistes, pp. 106, 107. For careful appreciation of Becher's position in 
 the history of chemistry, see Kopp, Ansichten iiber die Aufgabe der Chemie, etc., 
 von Geber bis Stahl, Braunschweig, 1875, pp. 201 et seq. For the text proving the 
 existence of the philosopher's stone from the book of Revelation, see Figuier, p. 22.
 
 4QO FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 they show how this mixture of theological with scientific ideas 
 took hold upon the strongest supporters of better reasoning 
 even after the power of mediasval theology seemed broken. 
 
 The first of these examples is Melanchthon. He was the 
 scholar of the Reformation, and justly won the title " Pre- 
 ceptor of Germany." His mind was singularly open, his 
 sympathies broad, and his usual freedom from bigotry drew 
 down upon him that wrath of Protestant heresy-hunters 
 which embittered the last years of his life and tortured him 
 upon his deathbed. During his career at the University of 
 Wittenberg he gave a course of lectures on physics, and in 
 these he dwelt upon scriptural texts as affording scientific 
 proofs, accepted the interference of the devil in physical phe- 
 nomena as in other things, and applied the mediaeval method 
 throughout his whole work.* 
 
 Yet far more remarkable was the example, a century 
 later, of the man who more than any other led the world out 
 of the path opened by Aquinas, and into that through which 
 modern thought has advanced to its greatest conquests. 
 Strange as it may at first seem, Francis Bacon, whose keen- 
 ness of sight revealed the delusions of the old path and the 
 promises of the new, and whose boldness did so much to 
 turn the world from the old path into the new, presents in 
 his own writings one of the most striking examples of the 
 evil he did so much to destroy. 
 
 The Novum Organon, considering the time when it came 
 from his pen, is doubtless one of the greatest exhibitions of 
 genius in the history of human thought. It showed the 
 modern world the way out of the scholastic method and 
 reverence for dogma into the experimental method and 
 reverence for fact. In it occur many passages which show 
 that the great philosopher was fully alive to the danger both 
 to religion and to science arising from their mixture. He 
 declares that the " corruption of philosophy from supersti- 
 tion and theology introduced the greatest amount of evil 
 both into whole systems of philosophy and into their parts." 
 He denounces those who " have endeavoured to found a 
 
 * For Melanchthon's ideas on physics, see his Initia Doctrina Physica, Witten- 
 berg, 1557, especially pp. 243 and 274 ; also in vol. xiii of Bretschneider's edition 
 of the collected works, and especially pp. 339-343.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 4OI 
 
 natural philosophy on the books of Genesis and Job and 
 other sacred Scriptures, so 'seeking the dead among the 
 living.' " He speaks of the result as " an unwholesome mix- 
 ture of things human and divine ; not merely fantastic phi- 
 losophy, but heretical religion." He refers to the opposition 
 of the fathers to the doctrine of the rotundity of the earth, 
 and says that, " thanks to some of them, you may find the 
 approach to any kind of philosophy, however improved, en- 
 tirely closed up." He charges that some of these divines 
 are " afraid lest perhaps a deeper inquiry into nature should 
 penetrate beyond the allowed limits of sobriety " ; and final- 
 ly speaks of theologians as sometimes craftily conjecturing 
 that, if science be little understood, " each single thing can 
 be referred more easily to the hand and rod of God," and 
 says, " This is nothing more or less than wishing to please God 
 by a lie" 
 
 No man who has reflected much upon the annals of his 
 race can, without a feeling of awe, come into the presence 
 of such clearness of insight and boldness of utterance, and 
 the first thought of the reader is that, of all men, Francis 
 Bacon is the most free from the unfortunate bias he con- 
 demns ; that he, certainly, can not be deluded into the old 
 path. But as we go on through his main work we are sur- 
 prised to find that the strong arm of Aquinas has been 
 stretched over the intervening ages, and has laid hold upon 
 this master-thinker of the seventeenth century ; for only a 
 few chapters beyond those containing the citations already 
 made we find Bacon alluding to the recent voyage of Colum- 
 bus, and speaking of the prophecy of Daniel regarding the 
 latter days, that " many shall run to and fro, and knowledge 
 be increased," as clearly signifying " that . . . the circum- 
 navigation of the world and the increase of science should 
 happen in the same age." * 
 
 In his great work on the Advancement of Learning the 
 firm grasp which the methods he condemned held upon him 
 is shown yet more clearly. In the first book of it he asserts 
 that " that excellent book of Job, if it be revolved with dili- 
 
 * See the Novum Organon, translated by the Rev. G. W. Kitchin, Oxford, 
 1855, chaps. Ixv and Ixxxix. 
 27
 
 402 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 gence, will be found pregnant and swelling with natural phi- 
 losophy," and he endeavours to show that in it the " round- 
 ness of the earth," the " fixing of the stars, ever standing at 
 equal distances," the " depression of the southern pole," the 
 " matter of generation," and " matter of minerals " are " with 
 great elegancy noted." But, curiously enough, he uses to 
 support some of these truths the very texts which the fathers 
 of the Church used to destroy them, and those for which 
 he finds Scripture warrant most clearly are such as science 
 has since disproved. So, too, he says that Solomon was en- 
 abled in his Proverbs, " by donation of God, to compile a 
 natural history of all verdure." * 
 
 Such was the struggle of the physical sciences in general. 
 Let us now look briefly at one special example out of many, 
 which reveals, as well as any, one of the main theories which 
 prompted theological interference with them. 
 
 It will doubtless seem amazing to many that for ages the 
 weight of theological thought in Christendom was thrown 
 against the idea of the suffocating properties of certain gases, 
 and especially of carbonic acid. Although in antiquity we see 
 men forming a right theory of gases in mines, we find that, 
 early in the history of the Church, St. Clement of Alexan- 
 dria put forth the theory that these gases are manifestations 
 of diabolic action, and that, throughout Christendom, suffo- 
 cation in caverns, wells, and cellars was attributed to the 
 direct action of evil spirits. Evidences of this view abound 
 through the mediseval period, and during the Reformation 
 period a great authority, Agricola, one of the most earnest 
 and truthful of investigators, still adhered to the belief that 
 these gases in mines were manifestations of devils, and he 
 specified two classes one of malignant imps, who blow out 
 the miners' lamps, and the other of friendly imps, who 
 
 * See Bacon, Advancement of Learning, edited by W. Aldis Wright, London, 
 1873, pp. 47, 48. Certainly no more striking examples of the strength of the evil 
 which he had all along been denouncing could be exhibited than these in his own 
 writings. Nothing better illustrates the sway of the mediaeval theology, or better 
 explains his blindness to the discoveries of Copernicus and to the experiments of 
 Gilbert. For a very contemptuous statement of Lord Bacon's claim to his position 
 as a philosopher, see Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, Leipsic, 18741 vol. i, p. 
 219. For a more just statement, see Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton, See 
 also Jevons, Principles of Science, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 298.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 403 
 
 simply tease the workmen in various ways. He went so far 
 as to say that one of these spirits in the Saxon mine of Anna- 
 berg destroyed twelve workmen at once by the power of his 
 breath. 
 
 At the end of the sixteenth century we find a writer on 
 mineralogy complaining that the mines in France and Ger- 
 many had been in large part abandoned on account of 
 the '-evil spirits of metals which had taken possession of 
 them." 
 
 Even as late as the seventeenth century, Van Helmont, 
 after he had broken away from alchemy and opened one of 
 the great paths to chemistry even after he had announced 
 to the world the existence of various gases and the mode of 
 their generation was not strong enough to free himself from 
 theologic bias ; he still inclined to believe that the gases he 
 had discovered, were in some sense living spirits, beneficent 
 or diabolical. 
 
 But at various periods glimpses of the truth had been 
 gained. The ancient view had not been entirely forgotten; 
 and as far back as the first part of the thirteenth century 
 Albert the Great suggested a natural cause in the possibility 
 of exhalations from minerals causing a " corruption of the 
 air"; but he, as we have seen, was driven or dragged off 
 into theological studies, and the world relapsed into the 
 theological view. 
 
 Toward the end of the fifteenth century there had come 
 a great genius laden with important truths in chemistry, but 
 for whom the world was not ready Basil Valentine. His 
 discoveries anticipated much that has brought fame and for- 
 tune to chemists since, yet so fearful of danger was he that 
 his work was carefully concealed. Not until after his death 
 was his treatise on alchemy found, and even then it was for 
 a long time not known where and when he lived. The papal 
 bull, Spondent paritcr, and the various prohibitions it bred, 
 forcing other alchemists to conceal their laboratories, led 
 him to let himself be known during his life at Erfurt simply 
 as an apothecary, and to wait until after his death to make 
 a revelation of truth which during his lifetime might have 
 cost him dear. Among the legacies of this greatest of the 
 alchemists was the doctrine that the air which asphyxiates
 
 404 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 workers in mines is similar to that which is produced by fer- 
 mentation of malt, and a recommendation that, in order to 
 drive away the evil and to prevent serious accidents, fires 
 be lighted and jets of steam used to ventilate the mines 
 stress being especially laid upon the idea that the danger in 
 the mines is produced by " exhalations of metals." 
 
 Thanks to men like Valentine, this idea of the interfer- 
 ence of Satan and his minions with the mining industry 
 was gradually weakened, and the working of the deserted 
 mines was resumed ; yet even at a comparatively recent 
 period we find it still lingering, and among leading divines 
 in the very heart of Protestant Germany. In 1715 a 
 cellar-digger having been stifled at Jena, the medical 
 faculty of the university decided that the cause was not the 
 direct action of the devil, but a deadly gas. Thereupon 
 Prof. Loescher, of the University of Wittenberg, entered a 
 solemn protest, declaring that the decision of the medical 
 faculty was " only a proof of the lamentable license which 
 has so taken possession of us, and which, if we are not ear- 
 nestly on our guard, will finally turn away from us the bless- 
 ing of God."* But denunciations of this kind could not 
 hold back the little army of science ; in spite of adverse in- 
 fluences, the evolution of physics and chemistry went on. 
 More and more there rose men bold enough to break away 
 from theological methods and strong enough to resist ec- 
 clesiastical bribes and threats. As alchemy in its first 
 form, seeking for the philosopher's stone and the transmuta- 
 tion of metals, had given way to alchemy in its second form, 
 seeking for the elixir of life and remedies more or less 
 magical for disease, so now the latter yielded to the search 
 for truth as truth. More and more the " solemnly consti- 
 tuted impostors " were resisted in every field. A great 
 line of physicists and chemists began to appear, f 
 
 * For Loescher's protest, see Julian Schmidt, Geschichte des geistigen Lebens, 
 etc., vol. i, p. 319. 
 
 f For the general view of noxious gases as imps of Satan, see Hoefer, Histoire 
 de la Chimie, vol. i, p. 350 ; vol. ii, p. 48. For the work of Black, Priestley, Berg- 
 mann, and others, see main authorities already cited, and especially the admirable 
 paper of Dr. R. G. Eccles on The Evolution of Chemistry, New York, D. Apple- 
 ton & Co , 1891. For the treatment of Priestley, see Spence's Essays, London, 
 1892 ; also Rutt, Life and Correspondence of Priestley, vol. ii, pp. 115 et seq.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 405 
 
 II. 
 
 Just at the middle of the seventeenth century, and at 
 the very centre of opposition to physical science, Robert 
 Boyle began the new epoch in chemistry. Strongly influ- 
 enced by the writings of Bacon and the discoveries of Gali- 
 leo, he devoted himself to scientific research, establishing at 
 Oxford a laboratory and putting into it a chemist from Stras- 
 burg. For this he was at once bitterly attacked. In spite of 
 his high position, his blameless life, his liberal gifts to char- 
 ity and learning, the Oxford pulpit was especially severe 
 against him, declaring that his researches were destroying 
 religion and his experiments undermining the university. 
 Public orators denounced him, the wits ridiculed him, and 
 his associates in the peerage were indignant that he should 
 condescend to pursuits so unworthy. But Boyle pressed 
 on. His discoveries opened new paths in various directions 
 and gave an impulse to a succession of vigorous investiga- 
 tors. Thus began the long series of discoveries culminating 
 in those of Black, Bergmann, Cavendish, Priestley, and La- 
 voisier, who ushered in the chemical science of the nine- 
 teenth century. 
 
 Yet not even then without a sore struggle against un- 
 reason. And it must here be noticed that this unreason was 
 not all theological. The unreasoning heterodox when in- 
 trusted with irresponsible power can be as short-sighted and 
 cruel as the unreasoning orthodox. Lavoisier, one of the 
 best of our race, not only a great chemist but a true man, 
 was sent to the scaffold by the Parisian mob, led by bigoted 
 " liberals " and atheists, with the sneer that the republic 
 had no need of savants. As to Priestley, who had devoted 
 his life to science and to every good work among his fel- 
 low-men, the Birmingham mob, favoured by the Anglican 
 clergymen who harangued them as " fellow-churchmen," 
 wrecked his house, destroyed his library, philosophical in- 
 struments, and papers containing the results of long years of 
 scientific research, drove him into exile, and would have 
 murdered him if they could have laid their hands upon him. 
 
 Nor was it entirely his devotion to rational liberty, nor
 
 406 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 even his disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity, which 
 brought on this catastrophe. That there was a deep distrust 
 of his scientific pursuits, was evident when the leaders of the 
 mob took pains to use his electrical apparatus to set fire to 
 his papers. 
 
 Still, though theological modes of thought continued to 
 sterilize much effort in chemistry, the old influence was more 
 and more thrown off, and truth sought more and more for 
 truth's sake. " Black magic " with its Satanic machinery 
 vanished, only reappearing occasionally among marvel- 
 mongers and belated theologians. " White magic " became 
 legerdemain. 
 
 In the early years of the nineteenth century, physical re- 
 search, though it went on with ever-increasing vigour, felt 
 in various ways the reaction which followed the French 
 Revolution. It was not merely under the Bourbons and 
 Hapsburgs that resistance was offered ; even in England the 
 old spirit lingered long. As late as 1832, when the British 
 Association for the Advancement of Science first visited Ox- 
 ford, no less amiable a man than John Keble at that time a 
 power in the university condemned indignantly the con- 
 ferring of honorary degrees upon the leading men thus 
 brought together. In a letter of that date to Dr. Pusey he 
 complained bitterly, to use his own words, that " the Oxford 
 doctors have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in re- 
 ceiving the hotchpotch of philosophers as they did." It is 
 interesting to know that among the men thus contemptu- 
 ously characterized were Brewster, Faraday, and Dalton. 
 
 Nor was this a mere isolated exhibition of feeling ; it 
 lasted many years, and was especially shown on both sides 
 of the Atlantic in all higher institutions of learning where 
 theology was dominant. Down to a period within the 
 memory of men still in active life, students in the sciences, 
 not only at Oxford and Cambridge but at Harvard and 
 Yale, were considered a doubtful if not a distinctly inferior 
 class, intellectually and socially to be relegated to different 
 instructors and buildings, and to receive their degrees on a 
 different occasion and with different ceremonies from those 
 appointed for students in literature. To the State Univer- 
 sity of Michigan, among the greater American institutions
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 407 
 
 of learning which have never possessed or been possessed 
 by a theological seminary, belongs the honour of first break- 
 ing down this wall of separation. 
 
 But from the middle years of the century chemical 
 science progressed with ever-accelerating force, and the 
 work of Bunsen, Kirchhoff, Dalton, and Faraday has, in the 
 last years of the century, led up to the establishment of 
 Mendeleef's law, by which chemistry has become predictive, 
 as astronomy had become predictive by the calculations of 
 Newton, and biology by the discoveries of Darwin. 
 
 While one succession of strong men were thus develop- 
 ing chemistry out of one form of magic, another succession 
 were developing physics out of another form. 
 
 First in this latter succession may be mentioned that line 
 of thinkers who divined and reasoned out great physical 
 laws a line extending from Galileo and Kepler and Newton 
 to Ohm and Faraday and Joule and Helmholtz. These, by 
 revealing more and more clearly the reign of law, steadily 
 undermined the older theological view of arbitrary influence 
 in nature. Next should be mentioned the line of profound 
 observers, from Galileo and Torricelli to Kelvin. These 
 have as thoroughly undermined the old theologic substitu- 
 tion of phrases for facts. When Galileo dropped the differ- 
 ing weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he began the 
 end of Aristotelian authority in physics. When Torricelli 
 balanced a column of mercury against a column of water 
 and each of these against a column of air, he ended the theo- 
 logic phrase that " nature abhors a vacuum." When New- 
 ton approximately determined the velocity of sound, he 
 ended the theologic argument that we see the flash before 
 we hear the roar because " sight is nobler than hearing." 
 When Franklin showed that lightning is caused by elec- 
 tricity, and Ohm and Faraday proved that electricity obeys 
 ascertained laws, they ended the theological idea of a divin- 
 ity seated above the clouds and casting thunderbolts. 
 
 Resulting from the labour of both these branches of phys- 
 ical science, we have the establishment of the great laws of 
 the indestructibility of matter, the correlation of forces, and 
 chemical affinity. Thereby is ended, with various other 
 sacred traditions, the theological theory of a visible uni-
 
 408 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 verse created out of nothing, so firmly imbedded in the the- 
 ological thought of the Middle Ages and in the Westmin- 
 ster Catechism.* 
 
 In our own time some attempt has been made to renew 
 this war against the physical sciences. Joseph de Maistre, 
 uttering his hatred of them, declaring that mankind has paid 
 too dearly for them, asserting that they must be subjected 
 to theology, likening them to fire good when confined and 
 dangerous when scattered about has been one of the main 
 leaders among those who can not relinquish the idea that 
 our body of sacred literature should be kept a controlling 
 text-book of science. The only effect of such teachings has 
 been to weaken the legitimate hold of religion upon men. 
 
 In Catholic countries exertion has of late years been 
 mainly confined to excluding science or diluting it in univer- 
 sity teachings. Early in the present century a great effort 
 was made by Ferdinand VII of Spain. He simply dismissed 
 the scientific professors from the University of Salamanca, 
 and until a recent period there has been general exclusion 
 from Spanish universities of professors holding to the New- 
 tonian physics. So, too, the contemporary Emperor of Aus- 
 tria attempted indirectly something of the same sort ; and at 
 a still later period Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX dis- 
 couraged, if they did not forbid, the meetings of scientific 
 associations in Italy. In France, war between theology and 
 science, which had long been smouldering, came in the years 
 1867 and 1868 to an outbreak. Toward the end of the last 
 century, after the Church had held possession of advanced 
 instruction for more than a thousand years, and had, so far 
 as it was able, kept experimental science in servitude after 
 
 * For a reappearance of the fundamental doctrines of black magic among theolo- 
 gians, see Rev. Dr. Jewett, Professor of Pastoral Theology in the Prot. Episc. Gen. 
 Theolog. Seminary of New York, Diabolology : The Person and Kingdom of Satan, 
 New York, 1889. For their reappearance among theosophists, see Eliphas Levi, 
 Histoire de la Magie, especially the final chapters. For opposition to Boyle and 
 chemical studies at Oxford in the latter half of the seventeenth century, see the 
 address of Prof. Dixon, F. R. S., before the British Association, 1894. For the 
 recent progress of chemistry, and opposition to its earlier development at Oxford, 
 see Lord Salisbury's address as President of the British Association, in 1894. For 
 the Protestant survival of the mediaeval assertion that the universe was created out 
 of nothing, see the Westminster Catechism, question 15.
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 409 
 
 it had humiliated Buffon in natural science, thrown its 
 weight against Newton in the physical sciences, and wrecked 
 Turgot's noble plans for a system of public instruction the 
 French nation decreed the establishment of the most thor- 
 ough and complete system of higher instruction in science 
 ever known. It was kept under lay control and became one 
 of the glories of France ; but, emboldened by the restoration 
 of the Bourbons in 1815, the Church began to undermine 
 this hated system, and in 1868 had made such progress that 
 all was ready for the final assault. 
 
 Foremost among the leaders of the besieging party was 
 the Bishop of Orleans, Dupanloup, a man of many winning 
 characteristics and of great oratorical power. In various 
 ways, and especially in an open letter, he had fought the 
 " materialism " of science at Paris, and especially were his 
 attacks levelled at Profs. Vulpian and S6e and the Minister 
 of Public Instruction, Duruy, a man of great merit, whose 
 only crime was devotion to the improvement of education 
 and to the promotion of the highest research in science.* 
 
 The main attack was made rather upon biological science 
 than upon physics and chemistry, yet it was clear that all 
 were involved together. 
 
 The first onslaught was made in the French Senate, and 
 the storming party in that body was led by a venerable and 
 conscientious prelate, Cardinal de Bonnechose, Archbishop 
 of Rouen. It was charged by him and his party that the 
 tendencies of the higher scientific teaching at Paris were 
 fatal to religion and morality. Heavy missiles were hurled 
 such phrases as "sapping the foundations," "breaking 
 down the bulwarks," and the like ; and, withal, a new missile 
 was used with much effect the epithet " materialist." 
 
 The results can be easily guessed : crowds came to the 
 lecture-rooms of the attacked professors, and the lecture- 
 room of Prof. S6e, the chief offender, was crowded to suffo- 
 cation. 
 
 A siege was begun in due form. A young physician was 
 
 * For the exertions of the restored Bourbons to crush the universities of Spain, 
 see Hubbard, Hist. Contemporaine de I' Espagne, Paris, 1878, chaps, i and iii. For 
 Dupanloup, Lettre d un Cardinal, see the Revue de The"rapcutique of 1868, p. 221.
 
 4io 
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 sent by the cardinal's party into the heterodox camp as a 
 spy. Having heard one lecture of Prof. S6e, he returned 
 with information that seemed to promise easy victory to the 
 besieging party : he brought a terrible statement one that 
 seemed enough to overwhelm See, Vulpian, Duruy, and the 
 whole hated system of public instruction in France the state- 
 ment that Se"e had denied the existence of the human soul. 
 
 Cardinal Bonnechose seized the tremendous weapon at 
 once. Rising in his place in the Senate, he launched a most 
 eloquent invective against the Minister of State who could 
 protect such a fortress of impiety as the College of Medi- 
 cine ; and, as a climax, he asserted, on the evidence of his 
 spy fresh from Prof. SeVs lecture-room, that the professor 
 had declared, in his lecture of the day before, that so long 
 as he had the honour to hold his professorship he would 
 combat the false idea of the existence of the soul. The 
 weapon seemed resistless and the wound fatal, but M. Du- 
 ruy rose and asked to be heard. 
 
 His statement was simply that he held in his hand docu- 
 mentary proofs that Prof. See never made such a declara- 
 tion. He held the notes used by Prof. S6e in his lecture. 
 Prof. S6e, it appeared, belonged to a school in medical sci- 
 ence which combated certain ideas regarding medicine as 
 an art. The inflamed imagination of the cardinal's heresy- 
 hunting emissary had, as the lecture-notes proved, led him 
 to mistake the word " art " for " dme" and to exhibit Prof. Se"e 
 as treating a theological when he was discussing a purely 
 scientific question. Of the existence of the soul the pro- 
 fessor had said nothing. 
 
 The forces of the enemy were immediately turned ; they 
 retreated in confusion, amid the laughter of all France ; and 
 a quiet, dignified statement as to the rights of scientific in- 
 structors by Wurtz, dean of the faculty, completed their 
 discomfiture. Thus a well-meant attempt to check science 
 simply ended in bringing ridicule on religion, and in thrusting 
 still deeper into the minds of thousands of men that most 
 mistaken of all mistaken ideas : the conviction that religion 
 and science are enemies.* 
 
 * For a general account of the Vulpian and See matter, see Revue des Deux 
 Mondts, 31 mai, 1868, "Chronique de la Quinzaine," pp. 763-765. As to the result
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 4II 
 
 But justice forbids raising an outcry against Roman 
 Catholicism for this. In 1864 a number of excellent men in 
 England drew up a declaration to be signed by students in 
 the natural sciences, expressing " sincere regret that re- 
 searches into scientific truth are perverted by some in our 
 time into occasion for casting doubt upon the truth and au- 
 thenticity of the Holy Scriptures." Nine tenths of the lead- 
 ing scientific men of England refused to sign it ; nor was this 
 all : Sir John Herschel, Sir John Bowring, and Sir W. R. 
 Hamilton administered, through the press, castigations which 
 roused general indignation against the proposers of the cir- 
 cular, and Prof. De Morgan, by a parody, covered memorial 
 and memorialists with ridicule. It was the old mistake, and 
 the old result followed in the minds of multitudes of thought- 
 ful young men.* 
 
 And in yet another Protestant country this same mistake 
 was made. In 1868 several excellent churchmen in Prus- 
 sia thought it their duty to meet for the denunciation of 
 " science falsely so called." Two results followed : upon the 
 great majority of these really self-sacrificing men whose 
 first utterances showed complete ignorance of the theories 
 they attacked there came quiet and widespread contempt; 
 upon Pastor Knak, who stood forth and proclaimed views of 
 the universe which he thought scriptural, but which most 
 schoolboys knew to be childish, came a burst of good-na- 
 tured derision from every quarter of the German nation, f 
 
 But in all the greater modern nations warfare of this 
 kind, after the first quarter of the nineteenth century, became 
 more and more futile. While conscientious Roman bishops, 
 and no less conscientious Protestant clergymen in Europe 
 and America continued to insist that advanced education, 
 not only in literature but in science, should be kept under 
 careful control in their own sectarian universities and col- 
 leges, wretchedly one-sided in organization and inadequate 
 
 on popular thought, may be noted the following comment on the affair by the 
 Revue, which is as free as possible from anything like rabid anti-ecclesiastical ideas : 
 " Elle a e'te' vraiment curieuse, instructive, assez triste et mfime un peu amusante." 
 For Wurtz's statement, see Revue de Thtrapeutique for 1868, p. 303. 
 
 * De Morgan, Paradoxes, pp. 421428 ; also Daubeny's Essays. 
 
 \ See the Berlin newspapers for the summer of 1868, especially Kladderadatsch.
 
 412 
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 in equipment ; while Catholic clerical authorities in Spain 
 were rejecting all professors holding the Newtonian theory, 
 and in Austria and Italy all holding unsafe views regarding 
 the Immaculate Conception, and while Protestant clerical 
 authorities in Great Britain and America were keeping out 
 of professorships men holding unsatisfactory views regard- 
 ing the Incarnation, or Infant Baptism, or the Apostolic Suc- 
 cession, or Ordination by Elders, or the Perseverance of the 
 Saints ; and while both Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics 
 were openly or secretly weeding out of university faculties 
 all who showed willingness to consider fairly the ideas of 
 Darwin, a movement was quietly in progress destined to 
 take instruction, and especially instruction in the physical 
 and natural sciences, out of its old subordination to theology 
 and ecclesiasticism.* 
 
 The most striking beginnings of this movement had been 
 seen when, in the darkest period of the French Revolution, 
 there was founded at Paris the great Conservatory of Arts 
 and Trades, and when, in the early years of the nineteenth 
 century, scientific and technical education spread quietly 
 upon the Continent. By the middle of the century France 
 and Germany were dotted with well-equipped technical and 
 scientific schools, each having chemical and physical labora- 
 tories. 
 
 The English-speaking lands lagged behind. In England, 
 Oxford and Cambridge showed few if any signs of this 
 movement, and in the United States, down to 1850, evi- 
 dences of it were few and feeble. Very significant is it that, 
 at that period, while Yale College had in its faculty Silliman 
 and Olmsted the professor of chemistry and the professor 
 of physics most widely known in the United States it had 
 no physical or chemical laboratory in the modern sense, and 
 
 * Whatever may be thought of the system of philosophy advocated by Presi- 
 dent McCosh at Princeton, every thinking man must honour him for the large way 
 in which he, at least, broke away from the traditions of that centre of thought ; pre- 
 vented, so far as he was able, persecution of scholars for holding to the Darwinian 
 view ; and paved the way for the highest researches in physical science in that uni- 
 versity. For a most eloquent statement of the opposition of modern physical sci- 
 ence to mediaeval theological views, as shown in the case of Sir Isaac Newton, see 
 Dr. Thomas Chalmers, cited in Gore, Art of Scientific Discovery, London, 1878, 
 p. 247. 

 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 413 
 
 confined its instruction in these subjects to examinations 
 upon a text-book and the presentation of a few lectures. At 
 the State University of Michigan, which had even then taken 
 a foremost place in the higher education west of the Great 
 Lakes, there was very meagre instruction in chemistry and 
 virtually none in physics. This being the state of things in 
 the middle of the century in institutions remarkably free 
 from clerical control, it can be imagined what was the posi- 
 tion of scientific instruction in smaller colleges and univer- 
 sities where theological considerations were entirely domi- 
 nant. 
 
 But in 1851, with the International Exhibition at London, 
 began in Great Britain and America a movement in favour 
 of scientific education ; men of wealth and public spirit be- 
 gan making contributions to them, and thus came the growth 
 of a new system of instruction in which Chemistry and 
 Physics took just rank. 
 
 By far the most marked feature in this movement was 
 seen in America, when, in 1857, Justin S. Morrill, a young 
 member of Congress from Vermont, presented the project 
 of a law endowing from the public lands a broad national 
 system of colleges in which scientific and technical studies 
 should be placed on an equality with studies in classical lit- 
 erature, one such college to be established in every State of 
 the Union. The bill, though opposed mainly by representa- 
 tives from the Southern States, where doctrinaire politics 
 and orthodox theology were in strong alliance with negro 
 slavery, was passed by both Houses of Congress, but vetoed 
 by President Buchanan, in whom the doctrinaire and ortho- 
 dox spirit was incarnate. But Morrill persisted and again 
 presented his bill, which was again carried in spite of the 
 opposition of the Southern members, and again vetoed in 
 1859 by President Buchanan. Then came the civil war; 
 but Morrill and his associates did not despair of the repub- 
 lic. In the midst of all the measures for putting vast armies 
 into the field and for saving the Union from foreign interfer- 
 ence as well as from domestic anarchy, they again passed the 
 bill, and in 1862, in the darkest hour of the struggle for na- 
 tional existence, it became a law by the signature of Presi- 
 dent Lincoln.
 
 4 1 4 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 And here it should not be unrecorded, that, while the vast 
 majority of the supporters of the measure were laymen, most 
 efficient service was rendered by a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. 
 Amos. Brown, born in New Hampshire, but at that time an 
 instructor in a little village of New York. His ideas were 
 embodied in the bill, and his efforts did much for its passage. 
 
 Thus was established, in every State of the American 
 Union, at least one institution in which scientific and tech- 
 nical studies were given equal rank with classical, and pro- 
 moted by laboratories for research in physical and natural 
 science. Of these institutions there are now nearly fifty : all 
 have proved valuable, and some of them, by the addition of 
 splendid gifts from individuals and from the States in which 
 they are situated, have been developed into great univer- 
 sities. 
 
 Nor was this all. Many of the older universities and col- 
 leges thus received a powerful stimulus in the new direction. 
 The great physical and chemical laboratories founded by 
 gifts from public-spirited individuals, as at Harvard, Yale, 
 and Chicago, or by enlightened State legislators, as in Michi- 
 gan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, Kansas, and Nebraska, 
 have also become centres from which radiate influences 
 favouring the unfettered search for truth as truth. 
 
 This system has been long enough in operation to enable 
 us to note in some degree its effects on religion, and these 
 are certainly such as to relieve those who have feared that 
 religion was necessarily bound up with the older instruction 
 controlled by theology. While in Europe, by a natural re- 
 action, the colleges under strict ecclesiastical control have 
 sent forth the most powerful foes the Christian Church has 
 ever known, of whom Voltaire and Diderot and Volney and 
 Sainte-Beuve and Renan are types, no such effects have been 
 noted in these newer institutions. While the theological 
 way of looking at the universe has steadily yielded, there has 
 been no sign of any tendency toward irreligion. On the 
 contrary, it is the testimony of those best acquainted with 
 the American colleges and universities during the last forty- 
 five years that there has been in them a great gain, not only 
 as regards morals, but as regards religion in its highest and 
 best sense. The reason is not far to seek. Under the old
 
 FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
 
 415 
 
 American system the whole body of students at a university 
 were confined to a single course, for which the majority 
 cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a result, 
 widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable. Under 
 the new system, presenting various courses, and especially 
 courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and 
 aims, the great majority of students are interested, and conse- 
 quently indolence and dissipation have steadily diminished. 
 Moreover, in the majority of American institutions of learn- 
 ing down to the middle of the century, the main reliance for 
 the religious culture of students was in the perfunctory pres- 
 entation of sectarian theology, and the occasional stirring 
 up of what were called " revivals," which, after a period of 
 unhealthy stimulus, inevitably left the main body of students 
 in a state of religious and moral reaction and collapse. This 
 method is now discredited, and in the more important 
 American universities it has become impossible. Religious 
 truth, to secure the attention of the modern race of students 
 in the better American institutions, is presented, not by " sen- 
 sation preachers," but by thoughtful, sober-minded scholars. 
 Less and less avail sectarian arguments ; more and more im- 
 pressive becomes the presentation of fundamental religious 
 truths. The result is, that while young men care less and 
 less for the great mass of petty, cut-and-dried sectarian for- 
 mulas, they approach the deeper questions of religion with 
 increasing reverence. 
 
 While striking differences exist between the European 
 universities and those of the United States, this at least may 
 be said, that on both sides of the Atlantic the great majority 
 of the leading institutions of learning are under the sway of 
 enlightened public opinion as voiced mainly by laymen, and 
 that, this being the case, the physical and natural sciences 
 are henceforth likely to be developed normally, and without 
 fear of being sterilized by theology or oppressed by ecclesi- 
 asticism. 
 
 END OF VOLUME ONE.
 
 

 
 University of California 
 
 SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 
 
 Return this material to the library 
 
 from which it was borrowed. 
 
 'REC'D C.L DEC o 6