Part 25 (2/2)

(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 s.h.i.+elds.

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 s.h.i.+p 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)

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