Part 25 (1/2)
(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 s.h.i.+elds, 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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)