History Of The Conflict Between Religion And Science Part 13

It seems to be satisfactorily established, that a race allied to the Basques may be traced back to the Neolithic age. At that time the British Islands were undergoing a change of level, like that at present occurring in the Scandinavian Peninsula. Scotland was rising, England was sinking. In the Pleistocene age there existed in Central Europe a rude race of hunters and fishers closely allied to the Esquimaux.

In the old glacial drift of Scotland the relics of man are found along with those of the fossil elephant. This carries us back to that time above referred to, when a large portion of Europe was covered with ice, which had edged down from the polar regions to southerly lat.i.tudes, and, as glaciers, descended from the summits of the mountain-chains into the plains. Countless species of animals perished in this cataclysm of ice and snow, but man survived.

In his primitive savage condition, living for the most part on fruits, roots, sh.e.l.l-fish, man was in possession of a fact which was certain eventually to insure his civilization. He knew how to make a fire. In peat-beds, under the remains of trees that in those localities have long ago become extinct, his relics are still found, the implements that accompany him indicating a distinct chronological order. Near the surface are those of bronze, lower down those of bone or horn, still lower those of polished stone, and beneath all those of chipped or rough stone. The date of the origin of some of these beds cannot be estimated at less than forty or fifty thousand years.

The caves that have been examined in France and elsewhere have furnished for the Stone age axes, knives, lance and arrow points, sc.r.a.pers, hammers. The change from what may be termed the chipped to the polished stone period is very gradual. It coincides with the domestication of the dog, an epoch in hunting-life. It embraces thousands of centuries. The appearance of arrow-heads indicates the invention of the bow, and the rise of man from a defensive to an offensive mode of life. The introduction of barbed arrows shows how inventive talent was displaying itself; bone and horn tips, that the huntsman was including smaller animals, and perhaps birds, in his chase; bone whistles, his companionship with other huntsmen or with his dog. The sc.r.a.ping-knives of flint indicate the use of skin for clothing, and rude bodkins and needles its manufacture. Sh.e.l.ls perforated for bracelets and necklaces prove how soon a taste for personal adornment was acquired; the implements necessary for the preparation of pigments suggest the painting of the body, and perhaps tattooing; and batons of rank bear witness to the beginning of a social organization.

With the utmost interest we look upon the first germs of art among these primitive men. They have left its rude sketches on pieces of ivory and flakes of bone, and carvings, of the animals contemporary with them. In these prehistoric delineations, sometimes not without spirit, we have mammoths, combats of reindeer. One presents us with a man harpooning a fish, another a hunting-scene of naked men armed with the dart. Man is the only animal who has the propensity of depicting external forms, and of availing himself of the use of fire.

Sh.e.l.l-mounds, consisting of bones and sh.e.l.ls, some of which may be justly described as of vast extent, and of a date anterior to the Bronze age, and full of stone implements, bear in all their parts indications of the use of fire. These are often adjacent to the existing coasts sometimes, however, they are far inland, in certain instances as far as fifty miles. Their contents and position indicate for them a date posterior to that of the great extinct mammals, but prior to the domesticated. Some of these, it is said, cannot be less than one hundred thousand years old.

The lake-dwellings in Switzerland--huts built on piles or logs, wattled with boughs--were, as may be inferred from the accompanying implements, begun in the Stone age, and continued into that of Bronze. In the latter period the evidences become numerous of the adoption of an agricultural life.

It must not be supposed that the periods into which geologists have found it convenient to divide the progress of man in civilization are abrupt epochs, which hold good simultaneously for the whole human race.

Thus the wandering Indians of America are only at the present moment emerging from the Stone age. They are still to be seen in many places armed with arrows, tipped with flakes of flint. It is but as yesterday that some have obtained, from the white man, iron, fire-arms, and the horse.

So far as investigations have gone, they indisputably refer the existence of man to a date remote from us by many hundreds of thousands of years. It must be borne in mind that these investigations are quite recent, and confined to a very limited geographical s.p.a.ce. No researches have yet been made in those regions which might reasonably be regarded as the primitive habitat of man.

We are thus carried back immeasurably beyond the six thousand years of Patristic chronology. It is difficult to a.s.sign a shorter date for the last glaciation of Europe than a quarter of a million of years, and human existence antedates that. But not only is it this grand fact that confronts us, we have to admit also a primitive animalized state, and a slow, a gradual development. But this forlorn, this savage condition of humanity is in strong contrast to the paradisiacal happiness of the garden of Eden, and, what is far more serious, it is inconsistent with the theory of the Fall.

I have been induced to place the subject of this chapter out of its proper chronological order, for the sake of presenting what I had to say respecting the nature of the world more completely by itself. The discussions that arose as to the age of the earth were long after the conflict as to the criterion of truth--that is, after the Reformation; indeed, they were substantially included in the present century. They have been conducted with so much moderation as to justify the term I have used in the t.i.tle of this chapter, "Controversy," rather than "Conflict." Geology has not had to encounter the vindictive opposition with which astronomy was a.s.sailed, and, though, on her part, she has insisted on a concession of great antiquity for the earth, she has herself pointed out the unreliability of all numerical estimates thus far offered. The attentive reader of this chapter cannot have failed to observe inconsistencies in the numbers quoted. Though wanting the merit of exactness, those numbers, however, justify the claim of vast antiquity, and draw us to the conclusion that the time-scale of the world answers to the s.p.a.ce-scale in magnitude.

CHAPTER VIII.

CONFLICT RESPECTING THE CRITERION OF TRUTH.

Ancient philosophy declares that man has no means of ascertaining the truth.

Differences of belief arise among the early Christians--An ineffectual attempt is made to remedy them by Councils.-- Miracle and ordeal proof introduced.

The papacy resorts to auricular confession and the Inquisition.--It perpetrates frightful atrocities for the suppression of differences of opinion.

Effect of the discovery of the Pandects of Justinian and development of the canon law on the nature of evidence.--It becomes more scientific.

The Reformation establishes the rights of individual reason.--Catholicism a.s.serts that the criterion of truth is in the Church. It restrains the reading of books by the Index Expurgatorius, and combats dissent by such means as the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve.

Examination of the authenticity of the Pentateuch as the Protestant criterion.--Spurious character of those books.

For Science the criterion of truth is to be found in the revelations of Nature: for the Protestant, it is in the Scriptures; for the Catholic, in an infallible Pope.

"WHAT is truth?" was the pa.s.sionate demand of a Roman procurator on one of the most momentous occasions in history. And the Divine Person who stood before him, to whom the interrogation was addressed, made no reply--unless, indeed, silence contained the reply.

Often and vainly had that demand been made before--often and vainly has it been made since. No one has yet given a satisfactory answer.

When, at the dawn of science in Greece, the ancient religion was disappearing like a mist at sunrise, the pious and thoughtful men of that country were thrown into a condition of intellectual despair.

Anaxagoras plaintively exclaims, "Nothing can be known, nothing can be learned, nothing can be certain, sense is limited, intellect is weak, life is short." Xenophanes tells us that it is impossible for us to be certain even when we utter the truth. Parmenides declares that the very const.i.tution of man prevents him from ascertaining absolute truth.

Empedocles affirms that all philosophical and religious systems must be unreliable, because we have no criterion by which to test them.

Democritus a.s.serts that even things that are true cannot impart certainty to us; that the final result of human inquiry is the discovery that man is incapable of absolute knowledge; that, even if the truth be in his possession, he cannot be certain of it. Pyrrho bids us reflect on the necessity of suspending our judgment of things, since we have no criterion of truth; so deep a distrust did he impart to his followers, that they were in the habit of saying, "We a.s.sert nothing; no, not even that we a.s.sert nothing." Epicurus taught his disciples that truth can never be determined by reason. Arcesilaus, denying both intellectual and sensuous knowledge, publicly avowed that he knew nothing, not even his own ignorance! The general conclusion to which Greek philosophy came was this--that, in view of the contradiction of the evidence of the senses, we cannot distinguish the true from the false; and such is the imperfection of reason, that we cannot affirm the correctness of any philosophical deduction.

It might be supposed that a revelation from G.o.d to man would come with such force and clearness as to settle all uncertainties and overwhelm all opposition. A Greek philosopher, less despairing than others, had ventured to affirm that the coexistence of two forms of faith, both claiming to be revealed by the omnipotent G.o.d, proves that neither of them is true. But let us remember that it is difficult for men to come to the same conclusion as regards even material and visible things, unless they stand at the same point of view. If discord and distrust were the condition of philosophy three hundred years before the birth of Christ, discord and distrust were the condition of religion three hundred years after his death. This is what Hilary, the Bishop of Poictiers, in his well-known pa.s.sage written about the time of the Nicene Council, says:

"It is a thing equally deplorable and dangerous that there are, as many creeds as opinions among men, as many doctrines as inclinations, and as many sources of blasphemy as there are faults among us, because we make creeds arbitrarily and explain them as arbitrarily. Every year, nay, every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries; we repent of what we have done; we defend those who repent; we anathematize those whom we defend; we condemn either the doctrines of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others; and, reciprocally tearing each other to pieces, we have been the cause of each other's ruin."

These are not mere words; but the import of this self-accusation can be realized fully only by such as are familiar with the ecclesiastical history of those times. As soon as the first fervor of Christianity as a system of benevolence had declined, dissensions appeared. Ecclesiastical historians a.s.sert that "as early as the second century began the contest between faith and reason, religion and philosophy, piety and genius." To compose these dissensions, to obtain some authoritative expression, some criterion of truth, a.s.semblies for consultation were resorted to, which eventually took the form of councils. For a long time they had nothing more than an advisory authority; but, when, in the fourth century, Christianity had attained to imperial rule, their dictates became compulsory, being enforced by the civil power. By this the whole face of the Church was changed. Oec.u.menical councils--parliaments of Christianity--consisting of delegates from all the churches in the world, were summoned by the authority of the emperor; he presided either personally or nominally in them--composed all differences, and was, in fact, the Pope of Christendom. Mosheim, the historian, to whom I have more particularly referred above, speaking of these times, remarks that "there was nothing to exclude the ignorant from ecclesiastical preferment; the savage and illiterate party, who looked on all kinds of learning, particularly philosophy, as pernicious to piety, was increasing;" and, accordingly, "the disputes carried on in the Council of Nicea offered a remarkable example of the greatest ignorance and utter confusion of ideas, particularly in the language and explanations of those who approved of the decisions of that council." Vast as its influence has been, "the ancient critics are neither agreed concerning the time nor place in which it was a.s.sembled, the number of those who sat in it, nor the bishop who presided. No authentic acts of its famous sentence have been committed to writing, or, at least, none have been transmitted to our times." The Church had now become what, in the language of modern politicians, would be called "a confederated republic." The will of the council was determined by a majority vote, and, to secure that, all manner of intrigues and impositions were resorted to; the influence of court females, bribery, and violence, were not spared. The Council of Nicea had scarcely adjourned,--when it was plain to all impartial men that, as a method of establishing a criterion of truth in religious matters, such councils were a total failure. The minority had no rights which the majority need respect. The protest of many good men, that a mere majority vote given by delegates, whose right to vote had never been examined and authorized, could not be received as ascertaining absolute truth, was pa.s.sed over with contempt, and the consequence was, that council was a.s.sembled against council, and their jarring and contradictory decrees spread perplexity and confusion throughout the Christian world. In the fourth century alone there were thirteen councils adverse to Arius, fifteen in his favor, and seventeen for the semi-Arians--in all, forty-five. Minorities were perpetually attempting to use the weapon which majorities had abused.

The impartial ecclesiastical historian above quoted, moreover, says that "two monstrous and calamitous errors were adopted in this fourth century: 1. That it was an act of virtue to deceive and lie when, by that means, the interests of the Church might be promoted. 2. That errors in religion, when maintained and adhered to after proper admonition, were punishable with civil penalties and corporal tortures."

Not without astonishment can we look back at what, in those times, were popularly regarded as criteria of truth. Doctrines were considered as established by the number of martyrs who had professed them, by miracles, by the confession of demons, of lunatics, or of persons possessed of evil spirits: thus, St. Ambrose, in his disputes with the Arians, produced men possessed by devils, who, on the approach of the relics of certain martyrs, acknowledged, with loud cries, that the Nicean doctrine of the three persons of the G.o.dhead was true. But the Arians charged him with suborning these infernal witnesses with a weighty bribe. Already, ordeal tribunals were making their appearance.

During the following six centuries they were held as a final resort for establishing guilt or innocence, under the forms of trial by cold water, by duel, by the fire, by the cross.

What an utter ignorance of the nature of evidence and its laws have we here! An accused man sinks or swims when thrown into a pond of water; he is burnt or escapes unharmed when he holds a piece of red-hot iron in his hand; a champion whom he has hired is vanquished or vanquishes in single fight; he can keep his arms outstretched like a cross, or fails to do so longer than his accuser, and his innocence or guilt of some imputed crime is established! Are these criteria of truth?

Is it surprising that all Europe was filled with imposture miracles during those ages?--miracles that are a disgrace to the common-sense of man!

But the inevitable day came at length. a.s.sertions and doctrines based upon such preposterous evidence were involved in the discredit that fell upon the evidence itself. As the thirteenth century is approached, we find unbelief in all directions setting in. First, it is plainly seen among the monastic orders, then it spreads rapidly among the common people. Books, such as "The Everlasting Gospel," appear among the former; sects, such as the Catharists, Waldenses, Petrobrussians, arise among the latter. They agreed in this, "that the public and established religion was a motley system of errors and superst.i.tions, and that the dominion which the pope had usurped over Christians was unlawful and tyrannical; that the claim put forth by Rome, that the Bishop of Rome is the supreme lord of the universe, and that neither princes nor bishops, civil governors nor ecclesiastical rulers, have any lawful power in church or state but what they receive from him, is utterly without foundation, and a usurpation of the rights of man."

To withstand this flood of impiety, the papal government established two inst.i.tutions: 1. The Inquisition; 2. Auricular confession--the latter as a means of detection, the former as a tribunal for punishment.

In general terms, the commission of the Inquisition was, to extirpate religious dissent by terrorism, and surround heresy with the most horrible a.s.sociations; this necessarily implied the power of determining what const.i.tutes heresy. The criterion of truth was thus in possession of this tribunal, which was charged "to discover and bring to judgment heretics lurking in towns, houses, cellars, woods, caves, and fields."

With such savage alacrity did it carry out its object of protecting the interests of religion, that between 1481 and 1808 it had punished three hundred and forty thousand persons, and of these nearly thirty-two thousand had been burnt! In its earlier days, when public opinion could find no means of protesting against its atrocities, "it often put to death, without appeal, on the very day that they were accused, n.o.bles, clerks, monks, hermits, and lay persons of every rank." In whatever direction thoughtful men looked, the air was full of fearful shadows. No one could indulge in freedom of thought without expecting punishment. So dreadful were the proceedings of the Inquisition, that the exclamation of Pagliarici was the exclamation of thousands: "It is hardly possible for a man to be a Christian, and die in his bed."

The Inquisition destroyed the sectaries of Southern France in the thirteenth century. Its unscrupulous atrocities extirpated Protestantism in Italy and Spain. Nor did it confine itself to religious affairs; it engaged in the suppression of political discontent. Nicolas Eymeric, who was inquisitor-general of the kingdom of Aragon for nearly fifty years, and who died in 1399, has left a frightful statement of its conduct and appalling cruelties in his "Directorium Inquisitorum."

This disgrace of Christianity, and indeed of the human race, had different const.i.tutions in different countries. The papal Inquisition continued the tyranny, and eventually superseded the old episcopal inquisitions. The authority of the bishops was unceremoniously put aside by the officers of the pope.

By the action of the fourth Lateran Council, A.D. 1215, the power of the Inquisition was frightfully increased, the necessity of private confession to a priest--auricular confession--being at that time formally established. This, so far as domestic life was concerned, gave omnipresence and omniscience to the Inquisition. Not a man was safe.

In the hands of the priest, who, at the confessional, could extract or extort from them their most secret thoughts, his wife and his servants were turned into spies. Summoned before the dread tribunal, he was simply informed that he lay under strong suspicions of heresy. No accuser was named; but the thumb-screw, the stretching-rope, the boot and wedge, or other enginery of torture, soon supplied that defect, and, innocent or guilty, he accused himself!

Notwithstanding all this power, the Inquisition failed of its purpose.

When the heretic could no longer confront it, he evaded it. A dismal disbelief stealthily pervaded all Europe,--a denial of Providence, of the immortality of the soul, of human free-will, and that man can possibly resist the absolute necessity, the destiny which envelops him.

Ideas such as these were cherished in silence by mult.i.tudes of persons driven to them by the tyrannical acts of ecclesiasticism. In spite of persecution, the Waldenses still survived to propagate their declaration that the Roman Church, since Constantine, had degenerated from its purity and sanct.i.ty; to protest against the sale of indulgences, which they said had nearly abolished prayer, fasting, alms; to affirm that it was utterly useless to pray for the souls of the dead, since they must already have gone either to heaven or h.e.l.l. Though it was generally believed that philosophy or science was pernicious to the interests of Christianity or true piety, the Mohammedan literature then prevailing in Spain was making converts among all cla.s.ses of society. We see very plainly its influence in many of the sects that then arose; thus, "the Brethren and Sisters of the Free. Spirit" held that "the universe came by emanation from G.o.d, and would finally return to him by absorption; that rational souls are so many portions of the Supreme Deity; and that the universe, considered as one great whole, is G.o.d." These are ideas that can only be entertained in an advanced intellectual condition. Of this sect it is said that many suffered burning with unclouded serenity, with triumphant feelings of cheerfulness and joy. Their orthodox enemies accused them of gratifying their pa.s.sions at midnight a.s.semblages in darkened rooms, to which both s.e.xes in a condition of nudity repaired. A similar accusation, as is well known, was brought against the primitive Christians by the fashionable society of Rome.

The influences of the Averroistic philosophy were apparent in many of these sects. That Mohammedan system, considered from a Christian point of view, led to the heretical belief that the end of the precepts of Christianity is the union of the soul with the Supreme Being; that G.o.d and Nature have the same relations to each other as the soul and the body; that there is but one individual intelligence; and that one soul performs all the spiritual and rational functions in all the human race.

When, subsequently, toward the time of the Reformation, the Italian Averroists were required by the Inquisition to give an account of themselves, they attempted to show that there is a wide distinction between philosophical and religious truth; that things may be philosophically true, and yet theologically false--an exculpatory device condemned at length by the Lateran Council in the time of Leo X.

But, in spite of auricular confession, and the Inquisition, these heretical tendencies survived. It has been truly said that, at the epoch of the Reformation, there lay concealed, in many parts of Europe, persons who entertained the most virulent enmity against Christianity.

In this pernicious cla.s.s were many Aristotelians, such as Pomponatius; many philosophers and wits, such as Bodin, Rabelais, Montaigne; many Italians, as Leo X., Bembo, Bruno.

Miracle-evidence began to fall into discredit during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The sarcasms of the Hispano-Moorish philosophers had forcibly drawn the attention of many of the more enlightened ecclesiastics to its illusory nature. The discovery of the Pandects of Justinian, at Amalfi, in 1130, doubtless exerted a very powerful influence in promoting the study of Roman jurisprudence, and disseminating better notions as to the character of legal or philosophical evidence. Hallam has cast some doubt on the well-known story of this discovery, but he admits that the celebrated copy in the Laurentian library, at Florence, is the only one containing the entire fifty books. Twenty years subsequently, the monk Gratian collected together the various papal edicts, the canons of councils, the declarations of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, in a volume called "The Decretum," considered as the earliest authority in canon law. In the next century Gregory IX. published five books of Decretals, and Boniface VIII. subsequently added a sixth. To these followed the Clementine Const.i.tutions, a seventh book of Decretals, and "A Book of Inst.i.tutes," published together, by Gregory XIII., in 1580, under the t.i.tle of "Corpus Juris Canonici." The canon law had gradually gained enormous power through the control it had obtained over wills, the guardianship of orphans, marriages, and divorces.

The rejection of miracle-evidence, and the subst.i.tution of legal evidence in its stead, accelerated the approach of the Reformation. No longer was it possible to admit the requirement which, in former days, Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his treatise, "Cur Deus h.o.m.o,"

had enforced, that we must first believe without examination, and may afterward endeavor to understand what we have thus believed. When Cajetan said to Luther, "Thou must believe that one single drop of Christ's blood is sufficient to redeem the whole human race, and the remaining quant.i.ty that was shed in the garden and on the cross was left as a legacy to the pope, to be a treasure from which indulgences were to be drawn," the soul of the st.u.r.dy German monk revolted against such a monstrous a.s.sertion, nor would he have believed it though a thousand miracles had been worked in its support. This shameful practice of selling indulgences for the commission of sin originated among the bishops, who, when they had need of money for their private pleasures, obtained it in that way. Abbots and monks, to whom this gainful commerce was denied, raised funds by carrying about relics in solemn procession, and charging a fee for touching them. The popes, in their pecuniary straits, perceiving how lucrative the practice might become, deprived the bishops of the right of making such sales, and appropriated it to themselves, establishing agencies, chiefly among the mendicant orders, for the traffic. Among these orders there was a sharp compet.i.tion, each boasting of the superior value of its indulgences through its greater influence at the court of heaven, its familiar connection with the Virgin Mary and the saints in glory. Even against Luther himself, who had been an Augustinian monk, a calumny was circulated that he was first alienated from the Church by a traffic of this kind having been conferred on the Dominicans, instead of on his own order, at the time when Leo X. was raising funds by this means for building St. Peter's, at Rome, A.D. 1517. and there is reason to think that Leo himself, in the earlier stages of the Reformation, attached weight to that allegation.

Indulgences were thus the immediate inciting cause of the Reformation, but very soon there came into light the real principle that was animating the controversy. It lay in the question, Does the Bible owe its authenticity to the Church? or does the Church owe her authenticity to the Bible? Where is the criterion of truth?