THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT
COMPROMISE, BASED ON THE FLOOD OF NOAH.
Long before the end of the struggle already described, even at
a very early period, the futility of the usual scholastic
weapons had been seen by the more keen-sighted champions of
orthodoxy; and, as the difficulties of the ordinary attack upon
science became more and more evident, many of these champions
endeavoured to patch up a truce. So began the third stage in the
war—the period of attempts at compromise.
The position which the compromise party took was that the
fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah.
This position was strong, for it was apparently based upon
Scripture. Moreover, it had high ecclesiastical sanction, some
of the fathers having held that fossil remains, even on the
highest mountains, represented animals destroyed at the Deluge.
Tertullian was especially firm on this point, and St. Augustine
thought that a fossil tooth discovered in North Africa must have
belonged to one of the giants mentioned in Scripture.
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.
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 exhibited by
Mazurier to be those of King Teutobocus, and holding them
valuable testimony to the existence of the giants mentioned in
Scripture and of the early inhabitants of the earth overwhelmed
by the Flood.
But the greatest champion appeared in England. We have already
seen how, near the close of the seventeenth century, Thomas
Burnet prepared the way in his Sacred Theory of the Earth by
rejecting the discoveries of Newton, and showing how sin led to
the breaking up of the "foundations of the great deep" "and we
have also seen how Whiston, in his New Theory of the Earth,
while yielding a little and accepting the discoveries of Newton,
brought in a comet to aid in producing the Deluge; but far more
important than these in permanent influence was John Woodward,
professor at Gresham College, a leader in scientific thought at
the University of Cambridge, and, as a patient collector of
fossils and an earnest investigator of their meaning, deserving
of the highest respect. In 1695 he published his Natural History
of the Earth, and rendered one great service to science, for he
yielded another point, and thus destroyed the foundations for
the old theory of fossils. He showed that they were not "sports
of Nature," or "models inserted by the Creator in the strata
for some inscrutable purpose," but that they were really remains
of living beings, as Xenophanes had asserted two thousand years
before him. So far, he rendered a great service both to science
and religion; but, this done, the text of the Old Testament
narrative and the famous passage in St. Peter's Epistle were too
strong for him, and he, too, insisted that the fossils were
produced by the Deluge. Aided by his great authority, the
assault on the true scientific position was vigorous: Mazurier
exhibited certain fossil remains of a mammoth discovered in
France as bones of the giants mentioned in Scripture; Father
Torrubia did the same thing in Spain; Increase Mather sent to
England similar remains discovered in America, with a like statement.
For the edification of the faithful, such "bones of the giants
mentioned in Scripture" were hung up in public places. Jurieu
saw some of them thus suspended in one of the churches of
Valence; and Henrion, apparently under the stimulus thus given,
drew up tables showing the size of our antediluvian ancestors,
giving the height of Adam as 123 feet 9 inches and that of Eve
as 118 feet 9 inches and 9 lines.
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":
discovery was hailed everywhere with joy, for it seemed to prove
not only that human beings were drowned at the Deluge, but that
"there were giants in those days." Cheered by the applause thus
gained, he determined to make the theological position
impregnable. Mixing together various texts of Scripture with
notions derived from the philosophy of Descartes and the
speculations of Whiston, he developed the theory that "the
fountains of the great deep" were broken up by the direct
physical action of the hand of God, which, being literally
applied to the axis of the earth, suddenly stopped the earth's
rotation, broke up "the fountains of the great deep," spilled
the water therein contained, and produced the Deluge. But his
service to sacred science did not end here, for he prepared an
edition of the Bible, in which magnificent engravings in great
number illustrated his view and enforced it upon all readers. Of
these engravings no less than thirty-four were devoted to the
Deluge alone.
In the midst all this came an episode very comical but very
instructive; for it shows that the attempt to shape the
deductions of science to meet the exigencies of dogma may
mislead heterodoxy as absurdly as orthodoxy.
About the year 1760 news of the discovery of marine fossils in
various elevated districts of Europe reached Voltaire. He, too,
had a theologic system to support, though his system was opposed
to that of the sacred books of the Hebrews; and, fearing that
these new discoveries might be used to support the Mosaic
accounts of the Deluge, all his wisdom and wit were compacted
into arguments to prove that the fossil fishes were remains of
fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown away by
travellers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped by
crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land; and that
the fossil bones found between Paris and Etampes were parts of
a skeleton belonging to the cabinet of some ancient philosopher.
Through chapter after chapter, Voltaire, obeying the supposed
necessities of his theology, fought desperately the growing
results of the geologic investigations of his time.
But far more prejudicial to Christianity was the continued
effort on the other side to show that the fossils were caused by
the Deluge of Noah.
No supposition was too violent to support this theory, which was
considered vital to the Bible. By taking the mere husks and
rinds of biblical truth for truth itself, by taking sacred
poetry as prose, and by giving a literal interpretation of it,
the followers of Burnet, Whiston, and Woodward built up systems
which bear to real geology much the same relation that the
Christian Topography of Cosmas bears to real geography. In vain
were exhibited the absolute geological, zoological, astronomical
proofs that no universal deluge, or deluge covering any large
part of the earth, had taken place within the last six thousand
or sixty thousand years; in vain did so enlightened a churchman
as Bishop Clayton declare that the Deluge could not have
extended beyond that district where Noah lived before the Flood;
in vain did others, like Bishop Croft and Bishop Stillingfleet,
and the nonconformist Matthew Poole, show that the Deluge might
not have been and probably was not universal; in vain was it
shown that, even if there had been a universal deluge, the
fossils were not produced by it: the only answers were the
citation of the text, "And all the high mountains which were
under the whole heaven were covered," and, to clinch the matter,
Worthington and men like him insisted that any argument to show
that fossils were not remains of animals drowned at the Deluge
of Noah was "infidelity." In England, France, and Germany, belief
that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah was widely
insisted upon as part of that faith essential to salvation.
But the steady work of science went on: not all the force of the
Church—not even the splendid engravings in Scheuchzer's
Bible—could stop it, and the foundations of this theological
theory began to crumble away. The process was, indeed, slow; it
required a hundred and twenty years for the searchers of God's
truth, as revealed in Nature—such men as Hooke, Linnaeus,
Whitehurst, Daubenton, Cuvier, and William Smith—to push their
works under this fabric of error, and, by statements which could
not be resisted, to undermine it. As we arrive at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, science is becoming irresistible in
this field. Blumenbach, Von Buch, and Schlotheim led the way,
but most important on the Continent was the work of Cuvier. In
the early years of the present century his researches among
fossils began to throw new light into the whole subject of
geology. He was, indeed, very conservative, and even more wary
and diplomatic; seeming, like Voltaire, to feel that "among
wolves one must howl a little." It was a time of reaction.
Napoleon had made peace with the Church, and to disturb that
peace was akin to treason. By large but vague concessions Cuvier
kept the theologians satisfied, while he undermined their
strongest fortress. The danger was instinctively felt by some of
the champions of the Church, and typical among these was
Chateaubriand, who in his best-known work, once so great, now so
little—the Genius of Christianity—grappled with the questions
of creation by insisting upon a sort of general deception "in
the beginning," under which everything was created by a sudden
fiat, but with appearances of pre-existence. His words are as
follows: "It was part of the perfection and harmony of the
nature which was displayed before men's eyes that the deserted
nests of last year's birds should be seen on the trees, and that
the seashore should be covered with shells which had been the
abode of fish, and yet the world was quite new, and nests and
shells had never been inhabited."
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.
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."
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.
The defection of Buckland was especially felt by the orthodox
party. His ability, honesty, and loyalty to his profession, as
well as his position as Canon of Christ Church and Professor of
Geology at Oxford, gave him great authority, which he exerted to
the utmost in soothing his brother ecclesiastics. In his
inaugural lecture he had laboured to show that geology confirmed
the accounts of Creation and the Flood as given in Genesis, and
in 1823, after his cave explorations had revealed overwhelming
evidences of the vast antiquity of the earth, he had still clung
to the Flood theory in his Reliquiae Diluvianae.
This had not, indeed, fully satisfied the anti-scientific party,
but as a rule their attacks upon him took the form not so much
of abuse as of humorous disparagement. An epigram by
Shuttleworth, afterward Bishop of Chichester, in imitation of
Pope's famous lines upon Newton, ran as follows:
"Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood:
Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud."
On his leaving Oxford for a journey to southern Europe, Dean
Gaisford was heard to exclaim: "Well, Buckland is gone to
Italy; so, thank God, we shall have no more of this geology!"
Still there was some comfort as long as Buckland held to the
Deluge theory; but, on his surrender, the combat deepened:
instead of epigrams and caricatures came bitter attacks, and
from the pulpit and press came showers of missiles. The worst of
these were hurled at Lyell. As we have seen, he had published in
1830 his Principles of Geology. Nothing could have been more
cautious. It simply gave an account of the main discoveries up
to that time, drawing the necessary inferences with plain yet
convincing logic, and it remains to this day one of those works
in which the Anglo-Saxon race may most justly take pride,—one of
the land-marks in the advance of human thought.
But its tendency was inevitably at variance with the Chaldean
and other ancient myths and legends regarding the Creation and
Deluge which the Hebrews had received from the older
civilizations among their neighbours, and had incorporated into
the sacred books which they transmitted to the modern world; it
was therefore extensively "refuted."
Theologians and men of science influenced by them insisted that
his minimizing of geological changes, and his laying stress on
the gradual action of natural causes still in force, endangered
the sacred record of Creation and left no place for miraculous
intervention; and when it was found that he had entirely cast
aside their cherished idea that the great geological changes of
the earth's surface and the multitude of fossil remains were
due to the Deluge of Noah, and had shown that a far longer time
was demanded for Creation than any which could possibly be
deduced from the Old Testament genealogies and chronicles,
orthodox indignation burst forth violently; eminent dignitaries
of the Church attacked him without mercy and for a time he was
under social ostracism.
As this availed little, an effort was made on the scientific
side to crush him beneath the weighty authority of Cuvier; but
the futility of this effort was evident when it was found that
thinking men would no longer listen to Cuvier and persisted in
listening to Lyell. The great orthodox text-book, Cuvier's
Theory of the Earth, became at once so discredited in the
estimation of men of science that no new edition of it was
called for, while Lyell's work speedily ran through twelve
editions and remained a firm basis of modern thought.
As typical of his more moderate opponents we may take Fairholme,
who in 1837 published his Mosaic Deluge, and argued that no
early convulsions of the earth, such as those supposed by
geologists, could have taken place, because there could have
been no deluge "before moral guilt could possibly have been
incurred"—that is to say, before the creation of mankind. In
touching terms he bewailed the defection of the President of the
Geological Society and Dean Buckland—protesting against
geologists who "persist in closing their eyes upon the solemn
declarations of the Almighty"
Still the geologists continued to seek truth: the germs planted
especially by William Smith, "the Father of English Geology"
were developed by a noble succession of investigators, and the
victory was sure. Meanwhile those theologians who felt that
denunciation of science as "godless" could accomplish little,
laboured upon schemes for reconciling geology with Genesis. Some
of these show amazing ingenuity, but an eminent religious
authority, going over them with great thoroughness, has well
characterized them as "daring and fanciful." Such attempts have
been variously classified, but the fact regarding them all is
that each mixes up more or less of science with more or less of
Scripture, and produces a result more or less absurd. Though a
few men here and there have continued these exercises, the
capitulation of the party which set the literal account of the
Deluge of Noah against the facts revealed by geology was at last
clearly made.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
In the Lutheran branch of the Protestant Church we also find
echoes of the old belief. Keil, eminent in scriptural
interpretation at the University of Dorpat, gave forth in 1860
a treatise insisting that geology is rendered futile and its
explanations vain by two great facts: the Curse which drove
Adam and Eve out of Eden, and the Flood that destroyed all
living things save Noah, his family, and the animals in the ark.
In 1867, Phillippi, and in 1869, Dieterich, both theologians of
eminence, took virtually the same ground in Germany, the latter
attempting to beat back the scientific hosts with a phrase
apparently pithy, but really hollow—the declaration that
"modern geology observes what is, but has no right to judge
concerning the beginning of things." As late as 1876, Zugler
took a similar view, and a multitude of lesser lights, through
pulpit and press, brought these antiscientific doctrines to bear
upon the people at large—the only effect being to arouse grave
doubts regarding Christianity among thoughtful men, and
especially among young men, who naturally distrusted a cause
using such weapons.
For just at this time the traditional view of the Deluge
received its death-blow, and in a manner entirely unexpected. By
the investigations of George Smith among the Assyrian tablets of
the British Museum, in 1872, and by his discoveries just
afterward in Assyria, it was put beyond a reasonable doubt that
a great mass of accounts in Genesis are simply adaptations of
earlier and especially of Chaldean myths and legends. While this
proved to be the fact as regards the accounts of Creation and
the fall of man, it was seen to be most strikingly so as regards
the Deluge. The eleventh of the twelve tablets, on which the
most important of these inscriptions was found, was almost
wholly preserved, and it revealed in this legend, dating from
a time far earlier than that of Moses, such features peculiar to
the childhood of the world as the building of the great ship or
ark to escape the flood, the careful caulking of its seams, the
saving of a man beloved of Heaven, his selecting and taking with
him into the vessel animals of all sorts in couples, the
impressive final closing of the door, the sending forth
different birds as the flood abated, the offering of sacrifices
when the flood had subsided, the joy of the Divine Being who had
caused the flood as the odour of the sacrifice reached his
nostrils; while throughout all was shown that partiality for the
Chaldean sacred number seven which appears so constantly in the
Genesis legends and throughout the Hebrew sacred books.
Other devoted scholars followed in the paths thus opened—Sayce
in England, Lenormant in France, Schrader in Germany—with the
result that the Hebrew account of the Deluge, to which for ages
theologians had obliged all geological research to conform, was
quietly relegated, even by most eminent Christian scholars, to
the realm of myth and legend.
Sundry feeble attempts to break the force of this discovery, and an
evidently widespread fear to have it known, have certainly impaired
not a little the legitimate influence of the Christian clergy.
And yet this adoption of Chaldean myths into the Hebrew
Scriptures furnishes one of the strongest arguments for the
value of our Bible as a record of the upward growth of man; for,
while the Chaldean legend primarily ascribes the Deluge to the
mere arbitrary caprice of one among many gods (Bel), the Hebrew
development of the legend ascribes it to the justice, the
righteousness, of the Supreme God; thus showing the evolution of
a higher and nobler sentiment which demanded a moral cause
adequate to justify such a catastrophe.
Unfortunately, thus far, save in a few of the broader and nobler
minds among the clergy, the policy of ignoring such new
revelations has prevailed, and the results of this policy, both
in Roman Catholic and in Protestant countries, are not far to
seek. What the condition of thought is among the middle classes
of France and Italy needs not to be stated here. In Germany, as
a typical fact, it may be mentioned that there was in the year
1881 church accommodation in the city of Berlin for but two per
cent of the population, and that even this accommodation was
more than was needed. This fact is not due to the want of a deep
religious spirit among the North Germans: no one who has lived
among them can doubt the existence of such a spirit; but it is
due mainly to the fact that, while the simple results of
scientific investigation have filtered down among the people at
large, the dominant party in the Lutheran Church has steadily
refused to recognise this fact, and has persisted in imposing on
Scripture the fetters of literal and dogmatic interpretation
which Germany has largely outgrown. A similar danger threatens
every other country in which the clergy pursue a similar policy.
No thinking man, whatever may be his religious views, can fail
to regret this. A thoughtful, reverent, enlightened clergy is a
great blessing to any country. and anything which undermines
their legitimate work of leading men out of the worship of
material things to the consideration of that which is highest is
a vast misfortune.