Part 24 (1/2)

This attempt to scare men from the science having failed, various other means were taken. To say nothing about England, it is humiliating to human nature to remember the annoyances, and even trials, to which the pettiest and narrowest of men subjected such Christian scholars in our own country as Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitchc.o.c.k and Louis Aga.s.siz.

But it is a duty and a pleasure to state here that one great Christian scholar did honour to religion and to himself by quietly accepting the claims of science and making the best of them, despite all these clamours. This man was Nicholas Wiseman, better known afterward as Cardinal Wiseman. The conduct of this pillar of the Roman Catholic Church contrasts admirably with that of timid Protestants, who were filling England with shrieks and denunciations.(149)

(149) Wiseman, Twelve Lectures on the Connection between Science and Revealed Religion, first American edition, New York, 1837. As to the comparative severity of the struggle regarding astronomy, geology, etc., in the Catholic and Protestant countries, see Lecky's England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. ix, p. 525.

And here let it be noted that one of the most interesting skirmishes in this war occurred in New England. Prof. Stuart, of Andover, justly honoured as a Hebrew scholar, declared that to speak of six periods of time for the creation was flying in the face of Scripture; that Genesis expressly speaks of six days, each made up of ”the evening and the morning,” and not six periods of time.

To him replied a professor in Yale College, James Kingsley. In an article admirable for keen wit and kindly temper, he showed that Genesis speaks just as clearly of a solid firmament as of six ordinary days, and that, if Prof. Stuart had surmounted one difficulty and accepted the Copernican theory, he might as well get over another and accept the revelations of geology. The encounter was quick and decisive, and the victory was with science and the broader scholars.h.i.+p of Yale.(150)

(150) See Silliman's Journal, vol. x.x.x, p. 114.

Perhaps the most singular attempt against geology was made by a fine survival of the eighteenth century Don--Dean c.o.c.kburn, of York--to SCOLD its champions off the field. Having no adequate knowledge of the new science, he opened a battery of abuse, giving it to the world at large from the pulpit and through the press, and even through private letters.

From his pulpit in York Minster he denounced Mary Somerville by name for those studies in physical geography which have made her name honoured throughout the world.

But the special object of his antipathy was the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science. He issued a pamphlet against it which went through five editions in two years, sent solemn warnings to its president, and in various ways made life a burden to Sedgwick, Buckland, and other eminent investigators who ventured to state geological facts as they found them.

These weapons were soon seen to be ineffective; they were like Chinese gongs and dragon lanterns against rifled cannon; the work of science went steadily on.(151)

(151) Prof. Goldwin Smith informs me that the papers of Sir Robert Peel, yet unpublished, contain very curious specimens of the epistles of Dean c.o.c.kburn. See also Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, Boston, 1874, pp. 139 and 375. Compare with any statement of his religious views that Dean c.o.c.kburn was able to make, the following from Mrs. Somerville: ”Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and 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.

III. THE FIRST GREAT EFFORT AT COMPROMISE, BASED ON THE FLOOD OF NOAH.

Long before the end of the struggle already described, even at a very early period, the futility of the usual scholastic weapons had been seen by the more keen-sighted champions of orthodoxy; and, as the difficulties of the ordinary attack upon science became more and more evident, many of these champions endeavoured to patch up a truce. So began the third stage in the war--the period of attempts at compromise.

The position which the compromise party took was that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah.

This position was strong, for it was apparently based upon Scripture.

Moreover, it had high ecclesiastical sanction, some of the fathers having held that fossil remains, even on the highest mountains, represented animals destroyed at the Deluge. Tertullian was especially firm on this point, and St. Augustine thought that a fossil tooth discovered in North Africa must have belonged to one of the giants mentioned in Scripture.(152)

(152) For Tertullian, see his De Pallio, c. ii (Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. ii, p. 1033). For Augustine's view, see Cuvier, Recherches sur les Oss.e.m.e.nts fossiles, fourth edition, vol. ii, p. 143.

In the sixteenth century especially, weight began to be attached to this idea by those who felt the worthlessness of various scholastic explanations. Strong men in both the Catholic and the Protestant camps accepted it; but the man who did most to give it an impulse into modern theology was Martin Luther. He easily saw that scholastic phrase-making could not meet the difficulties raised by fossils, and he naturally urged the doctrine of their origin at Noah's Flood.(153)

(153) For Luther's opinion, see his Commentary on Genesis.

With such support, it soon became the dominant theory in Christendom: nothing seemed able to stand against it; but before the end of the same sixteenth century it met some serious obstacles. Bernard Palissy, one of the most keen-sighted of scientific thinkers in France, as well as one of the most devoted of Christians, showed that it was utterly untenable.