History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom Part 25

(161) Genie du Christianisme, chap.v, pp. 1-14, cited by Reusch, vol. i, p. 250.

(162) For admirable sketches of Brongniart and other paleobotanists, see Ward, as above.

Still the struggle was not ended, and, a few years later, a forlorn hope was led in England by Granville Penn.

His fundamental thesis was that "our globe has undergone only two revolutions, the Creation and the Deluge, and both by the immediate fiat of the Almighty"; he insisted that the Creation took place in exactly six days of ordinary time, each made up of "the evening and the morning"; and he ended with a piece of that peculiar presumption so familiar to the world, by calling on Cuvier and all other geologists to "ask for the old paths and walk therein until they shall simplify their system and reduce their numerous revolutions to the two events or epochs only--the six days of Creation and the Deluge."(163) The geologists showed no disposition to yield to this peremptory summons; on the contrary, the President of the British Geological Society, and even so eminent a churchman and geologist as Dean Buckland, soon acknowledged that facts obliged them to give up the theory that the fossils of the coal measures were deposited at the Deluge of Noah, and to deny that the Deluge was universal.

(163) See the Works of Granville Penn, vol. ii, p. 273.

The defection of Buckland was especially felt by the orthodox party. His ability, honesty, and loyalty to his profession, as well as his position as Canon of Christ Church and Professor of Geology at Oxford, gave him great authority, which he exerted to the utmost in soothing his brother ecclesiastics. In his inaugural lecture he had laboured to show that geology confirmed the accounts of Creation and the Flood as given in Genesis, and in 1823, after his cave explorations had revealed overwhelming evidences of the vast antiquity of the earth, he had still clung to the Flood theory in his Reliquiae Diluvianae.

This had not, indeed, fully satisfied the anti-scientific party, but as a rule their attacks upon him took the form not so much of abuse as of humorous disparagement. An epigram by Shuttleworth, afterward Bishop of Chichester, in imitation of Pope's famous lines upon Newton, ran as follows:

"Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood: Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud."

On his leaving Oxford for a journey to southern Europe, Dean Gaisford was heard to exclaim: "Well, Buckland is gone to Italy; so, thank G.o.d, we shall have no more of this geology!"

Still there was some comfort as long as Buckland held to the Deluge theory; but, on his surrender, the combat deepened: instead of epigrams and caricatures came bitter attacks, and from the pulpit and press came showers of missiles. The worst of these were hurled at Lyell. As we have seen, he had published in 1830 his Principles of Geology. Nothing could have been more cautious. It simply gave an account of the main discoveries up to that time, drawing the necessary inferences with plain yet convincing logic, and it remains to this day one of those works in which the Anglo-Saxon race may most justly take pride,--one of the land-marks in the advance of human thought.

But its tendency was inevitably at variance with the Chaldean and other ancient myths and legends regarding the Creation and Deluge which the Hebrews had received from the older civilizations among their neighbours, and had incorporated into the sacred books which they transmitted to the modern world; it was therefore extensively "refuted."

Theologians and men of science influenced by them insisted that his minimizing of geological changes, and his laying stress on the gradual action of natural causes still in force, endangered the sacred record of Creation and left no place for miraculous intervention; and when it was found that he had entirely cast aside their cherished idea that the great geological changes of the earth's surface and the mult.i.tude of fossil remains were due to the Deluge of Noah, and had shown that a far longer time was demanded for Creation than any which could possibly be deduced from the Old Testament genealogies and chronicles, orthodox indignation burst forth violently; eminent dignitaries of the Church attacked him without mercy and for a time he was under social ostracism.

As this availed little, an effort was made on the scientific side to crush him beneath the weighty authority of Cuvier; but the futility of this effort was evident when it was found that thinking men would no longer listen to Cuvier and persisted in listening to Lyell. The great orthodox text-book, Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, became at once so discredited in the estimation of men of science that no new edition of it was called for, while Lyell's work speedily ran through twelve editions and remained a firm basis of modern thought.(164)

(164) For Buckland and the various forms of attack upon him, see Gordon, Life of Buckland, especially pp. 10, 26, 136. For the attack on Lyell and his book, see Huxley, The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science.

As typical of his more moderate opponents we may take Fairholme, who in 1837 published his Mosaic Deluge, and argued that no early convulsions of the earth, such as those supposed by geologists, could have taken place, because there could have been no deluge "before moral guilt could possibly have been incurred"--that is to say, before the creation of mankind. In touching terms he bewailed the defection of the President of the Geological Society and Dean Buckland--protesting against geologists who "persist in closing their eyes upon the solemn declarations of the Almighty"

Still the geologists continued to seek truth: the germs planted especially by William Smith, "the Father of English Geology" were developed by a n.o.ble succession of investigators, and the victory was sure. Meanwhile those theologians who felt that denunciation of science as "G.o.dless" 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 cla.s.sified, but the fact regarding them all is that each mixes up more or less of science with more or less of Scripture, and produces a result more or less absurd. Though a few men here and there have continued these exercises, the capitulation of the party which set the literal account of the Deluge of Noah against the facts revealed by geology was at last clearly made.(165)

(165) For Fairholme, see his Mosaic Deluge, London, 1837, p. 358. For a very just characterization of various schemes of "reconciliation," see Shields, The Final Philosophy, p. 340.

One of the first evidences of the completeness of this surrender has been so well related by the eminent physiologist, Dr. W. B. Carpenter, that it may best be given in his own words: "You are familiar with a book of considerable value, Dr. W. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible. I happened to know the influences under which that dictionary was framed. The idea of the publisher and of the editor was to give as much scholarship and such results of modern criticism as should be compatible with a very judicious conservatism. There was to be no objection to geology, but the universality of the Deluge was to be strictly maintained. The editor committed the article Deluge to a man of very considerable ability, but when the article came to him he found that it was so excessively heretical that he could not venture to put it in.

There was not time for a second article under that head, and if you look in that dictionary you will find under the word Deluge a reference to Flood. Before Flood came, a second article had been commissioned from a source that was believed safely conservative; but when the article came in it was found to be worse than the first. A third article was then commissioned, and care was taken to secure its 'safety.' If you look for the word Flood in the dictionary, you will find a reference to Noah.

Under that name you will find an article written by a distinguished professor of Cambridge, of which I remember that Bishop Colenso said to me at the time, 'In a very guarded way the writer concedes the whole thing.' You will see by this under what trammels scientific thought has laboured in this department of inquiry."(166)

(166) See Official Report of the National Conference of Unitarian and other Christian Churches held at Saratoga, 1882, p. 97.

A similar surrender was seen when from a new edition of Horne's Introduction to the Scriptures, the standard textbook of orthodoxy, its accustomed use of fossils to prove the universality of the Deluge was quietly dropped.(167)

(167) This was about 1856; see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 329.

A like capitulation in the United States was foreshadowed in 1841, when an eminent Professor of Biblical Literature and interpretation in the most important theological seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Dr. Samuel Turner, showed his Christian faith and courage by virtually accepting the new view; and the old contention was utterly cast away by the thinking men of another great religious body when, at a later period, two divines among the most eminent for piety and learning in the Methodist Episcopal Church inserted in the Biblical Cyclopaedia, published under their supervision, a candid summary of the proofs from geology, astronomy, and zoology that the Deluge of Noah was not universal, or even widely extended, and this without protest from any man of note in any branch of the American Church.(168)

(168) For Dr. Turner, see his Companion to the Book of Genesis, London and New York, 1841, pp. 216-219. For McClintock and Strong, see their Cyclopaedia of Biblical Knowledge, etc., article Deluge. For similar surrenders of the Deluge in various other religious encyclopedias and commentaries, see Huxley, Essays on controverted questions, chap. xiii.

The time when the struggle was relinquished by enlightened theologians of the Roman Catholic Church may be fixed at about 1862, when Reusch, Professor of Theology at Bonn, in his work on The Bible and Nature, cast off the old diluvial theory and all its supporters, accepting the conclusions of science.(169)

(169) See Reusch, Bibel und Natur, chap. xxi.

But, though the sacred theory with the Deluge of Noah as a universal solvent for geological difficulties was evidently dying, there still remained in various quarters a touching fidelity to it. In Roman Catholic countries the old theory was widely though quietly cherished, and taught from the religious press, the pulpit, and the theological professor's chair. Pope Pius IX was doubtless in sympathy with this feeling when, about 1850, he forbade the scientific congress of Italy to meet at Bologna.(170)

(170) See Whiteside, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, vol. iii, chap.

xiv.

In 1856 Father Debreyne congratulated the theologians of France on their admirable att.i.tude: "Instinctively," he says, "they still insist upon deriving the fossils from Noah's Flood."(171) In 1875 the Abbe Choyer published at Paris and Angers a text-book widely approved by Church authorities, in which he took similar ground; and in 1877 the Jesuit father Bosizio published at Mayence a treatise on Geology and the Deluge, endeavouring to hold the world to the old solution of the problem, allowing, indeed, that the "days" of Creation were long periods, but making atonement for this concession by sneers at Darwin.(172)

(171) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 472.

(172) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 478, and Bosizio, Geologie und die Sundfluth, Mayence, 1877, preface, p. xiv.

In the Russo-Greek Church, in 1869, Archbishop Macarius, of Lithuania, urged the necessity of believing that Creation in six days of ordinary time and the Deluge of Noah are the only causes of all that geology seeks to explain; and, as late as 1876, another eminent theologian of the same Church went even farther, and refused to allow the faithful to believe that any change had taken place since "the beginning" mentioned in Genesis, when the strata of the earth were laid, tilted, and twisted, and the fossils scattered among them by the hand of the Almighty during six ordinary days.(173)

(173) See Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 472, 571, and elsewhere; also citations in Reusch and Shields.

In the Lutheran branch of the Protestant Church we also find echoes of the old belief. Keil, eminent in scriptural interpretation at the University of Dorpat, gave forth in 1860 a treatise insisting that geology is rendered futile and its explanations vain by two great facts: the Curse which drove Adam and Eve out of Eden, and the Flood that destroyed all living things save Noah, his family, and the animals in the ark. In 1867, Phillippi, and in 1869, Dieterich, both theologians of eminence, took virtually the same ground in Germany, the latter attempting to beat back the scientific hosts with a phrase apparently pithy, but really hollow--the declaration that "modern geology observes what is, but has no right to judge concerning the beginning of things."

As late as 1876, Zugler took a similar view, and a mult.i.tude of lesser lights, through pulpit and press, brought these antiscientific doctrines to bear upon the people at large--the only effect being to arouse grave doubts regarding Christianity among thoughtful men, and especially among young men, who naturally distrusted a cause using such weapons.

For just at this time the traditional view of the Deluge received its death-blow, and in a manner entirely unexpected. By the investigations of George Smith among the a.s.syrian tablets of the British Museum, in 1872, and by his discoveries just afterward in a.s.syria, it was put beyond a reasonable doubt that a great ma.s.s of accounts in Genesis are simply adaptations of earlier and especially of Chaldean myths and legends. While this proved to be the fact as regards the accounts of Creation and the fall of man, it was seen to be most strikingly so as regards the Deluge. The eleventh of the twelve tablets, on which the most important of these inscriptions was found, was almost wholly preserved, and it revealed in this legend, dating from a time far earlier than that of Moses, such features peculiar to the childhood of the world as the building of the great ship or ark to escape the flood, the careful caulking of its seams, the saving of a man beloved of Heaven, his selecting and taking with him into the vessel animals of all sorts in couples, the impressive final closing of the door, the sending forth different birds as the flood abated, the offering of sacrifices when the flood had subsided, the joy of the Divine Being who had caused the flood as the odour of the sacrifice reached his nostrils; while throughout all was shown that partiality for the Chaldean sacred number seven which appears so constantly in the Genesis legends and throughout the Hebrew sacred books.

Other devoted scholars followed in the paths thus opened--Sayce in England, Lenormant in France, Schrader in Germany--with the result that the Hebrew account of the Deluge, to which for ages theologians had obliged all geological research to conform, was quietly relegated, even by most eminent Christian scholars, to the realm of myth and legend.(174)