conceived than the theory, seriously proposed, that the first human being was born of a mermaid.
Hence it was that, between these two extremes of theology, De Maillet received no recognition until, very recently, the greatest men of science in England and France have united in giving him his due. But his work was not lost, even in his own day; Robinet and Bonnet pushed forward victoriously on helpful lines.
In the second half of the eighteenth century a great barrier was thrown across this current–the authority of Linnaeus. He was the most eminent naturalist of his time, a wide observer, a close thinker; but the atmosphere in which he lived and moved and had his being was saturated with biblical theology, and this permeated all his thinking.
He who visits the tomb of Linnaeus to-day, entering the beautiful cathedral of Upsala by its southern porch, sees above it, wrought in stone, the Hebrew legend of creation. In a series of medallions, the Almighty–in human form–accomplishes the work of each creative day. In due order he puts in place the solid firmament with the waters above it, the sun, moon, and stars within it, the beasts, birds, and plants below it, and finishes his task by taking man out of a little hillock of “the earth beneath,” and woman out of man’s side. Doubtless Linnaeus, as he went to his devotions, often smiled at this childlike portrayal. Yet he was never able to break away from the idea it embodied. At times, in face of the difficulties which beset the orthodox theory, he ventured to favour some slight concessions. Toward the end of his life he timidly advanced the hypothesis that all the species of one genus constituted at the creation one species; and from the last edition of his Systema Naturae he quietly left out the strongly orthodox statement of the fixity of each species, which he had insisted upon in his earlier works. But he made no adequate declaration. What he might expect if he openly and decidedly sanctioned a newer view he learned to his cost; warnings came speedily both from the Catholic and Protestant sides.
At a time when eminent prelates of the older Church were eulogizing debauched princes like Louis XV, and using the unspeakably obscene casuistry of the Jesuit Sanchez in the education of the priesthood as to the relations of men to women, the modesty of the Church authorities was so shocked by Linnaeus’s proofs of a sexual system in plants that for many years his writings were prohibited in the Papal States and in various other parts of Europe where clerical authority was strong enough to resist the new scientific current. Not until 1773 did one of the more broad-minded cardinals–Zelanda–succeed in gaining permission that Prof. Minasi should discuss the Linnaean system at Rome.
And Protestantism was quite as oppressive. In a letter to Eloius, Linnaeus tells of the rebuke given to science by one of the great Lutheran prelates of Sweden, Bishop Svedberg. From various parts of Europe detailed statements had been sent to the Royal Academy of Science that water had been turned into blood, and well-meaning ecclesiastics had seen in this an indication of the wrath of God, certainly against the regions in which these miracles had occurred and possibly against the whole world. A miracle of this sort appearing in Sweden, Linnaeus looked into it carefully and found that the reddening of the water was caused by dense masses of minute insects. News of this explanation having reached the bishop, he took the field against it; he denounced this scientific discovery as “a Satanic abyss” (abyssum Satanae), and declared “The reddening of the water is NOT natural,” and “when God allows such a miracle to take place Satan endeavours, and so do his ungodly, self-reliant, self-sufficient, and worldly tools, to make it signify nothing.” In face of this onslaught Linnaeus retreated; he tells his correspondent that “it is difficult to say anything in this matter,” and shields himself under the statement “It is certainly a miracle that so many millions of creatures can be so suddenly propagated,” and “it shows undoubtedly the all-wise power of the Infinite.”
The great naturalist, grown old and worn with labours for science, could no longer resist the contemporary theology; he settled into obedience to it, and while the modification of his early orthodox view was, as we have seen, quietly imbedded in the final edition of his great work, he made no special effort to impress it upon the world. To all appearance he continued to adhere to the doctrine that all existing species had been created by the Almighty “in the beginning,” and that since “the beginning” no new species had appeared.
Yet even his great authority could not arrest the swelling tide; more and more vast became the number of species, more and more incomprehensible under the old theory became the newly ascertained facts in geographical distribution, more and more it was felt that the universe and animated beings had come into existence by some process other than a special creation “in the beginning,” and the question was constantly pressing, “By WHAT process?”
Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century one man was at work on natural history who might have contributed much toward an answer to this question: this man was Buffon. His powers of research and thought were remarkable, and his gift in presenting results of research and thought showed genius. He had caught the idea of an evolution in Nature by the variation of species, and was likely to make a great advance with it; but he, too, was made to feel the power of theology.
As long as he gave pleasing descriptions of animals the Church petted him, but when he began to deduce truths of philosophical import the batteries of the Sorbonne were opened upon him; he was made to know that “the sacred deposit of truth committed to the Church” was, that “in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth” and that “all things were made at the beginning of the world.” For his simple statement of truths in natural science which are to-day truisms, he was, as we have seen, dragged forth by the theological faculty, forced to recant publicly, and to print his recantation. In this he announced, “I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses.”[21]
[21] For Descartes and his relation to the Copernican theory, see Saisset, Descartes et ses Precurseurs; also Fouillee, Descartes, Paris, 1893, chaps. ii and iii; also other authorities cited in my chapter on Astronomy; for his relation to the theory of evolution, see the Principes de Philosophie, 3eme partie, S 45. For de Maillet, see Quatrefages, Darwin et ses Precurseurs francais, chap i, citing D’Archiac, Paleontologie, Stratigraphie, vol. i; also, Perrier, La Philosophie zoologique avant Darwin, chap. vi; also the admirable article Evolution, by Huxley, in Ency. Brit. The title of De Maillet’s book is Telliamed, ou Entretiens d’un Philosophe indien avec un Missionaire francais sur la Diminution de la Mer, 1748, 1756. For Buffon, see the authorities previously given, also the chapter on Geology in this work. For the resistance of both Catholic and Protestant authorities to the Linnaean system and ideas, see Alberg, Life of Linnaeus, London, 1888, pp. 143-147, and 237. As to the creation medallions at the Cathedral of Upsala, it is a somewhat curious coincidence that the present writer came upon them while visiting that edifice during the preparation of this chapter.
But all this triumph of the Chaldeo-Babylonian creation legends which the Church had inherited availed but little.
For about the end of the eighteenth century fruitful suggestions and even clear presentations of this or that part of a large evolutionary doctrine came thick and fast, and from the most divergent quarters. Especially remarkable were those which came from Erasmus Darwin in England, from Maupertuis in France, from Oken in Switzerland, and from Herder, and, most brilliantly of all, from Goethe in Germany.
Two men among these thinkers must be especially mentioned–Treviranus in Germany and Lamarck in France; each independently of the other drew the world more completely than ever before in this direction.
From Treviranus came, in 1802, his work on biology, and in this he gave forth the idea that from forms of life originally simple had arisen all higher organizations by gradual development; that every living feature has a capacity for receiving modifications of its structure from external influences; and that no species had become really extinct, but that each had passed into some other species. From Lamarck came about the same time his Researches, and a little later his Zoological Philosophy, which introduced a new factor into the process of evolution–the action of the animal itself in its efforts toward a development to suit new needs–and he gave as his principal conclusions the following:
1. Life tends to increase the volume of each living body and of all its parts up to a limit determined by its own necessities.
2. New wants in animals give rise to new organs.
3. The development of these organs is in proportion to their employment.
4. New developments may be transmitted to offspring.
His well-known examples to illustrate these views, such as that of successive generations of giraffes lengthening their necks by stretching them to gather high-growing foliage, and of successive generations of kangaroos lengthening and strengthening their hind legs by the necessity of keeping themselves erect while jumping, provoked laughter, but the very comicality of these illustrations aided to fasten his main conclusion in men’s memories.
In both these statements, imperfect as they were, great truths were embodied–truths which were sure to grow.
Lamarck’s declaration, especially, that the development of organs is in ratio to their employment, and his indications of the reproduction in progeny of what is gained or lost in parents by the influence of circumstances, entered as a most effective force into the development of the evolution theory.
The next great successor in the apostolate of this idea of the universe was Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. As early as 1795 he had begun to form a theory that species are various modifications of the same type, and this theory he developed, testing it at various stages as Nature was more and more displayed to him. It fell to his lot to bear the brunt in a struggle against heavy odds which lasted many years.
For the man who now took up the warfare, avowedly for science but unconsciously for theology, was the foremost naturalist then living–Cuvier. His scientific eminence was deserved; the highest honours of his own and other countries were given him, and he bore them worthily. An Imperial Councillor under Napoleon; President of the Council of Public Instruction and Chancellor of the University under the restored Bourbons; Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, a Peer of France, Minister of the Interior, and President of the Council of State under Louis Philippe; he was eminent in all these capacities, and yet the dignity given by such high administrative positions was as nothing compared to his leadership in natural science. Science throughout the world acknowledged in him its chief contemporary ornament, and to this hour his fame rightly continues. But there was in him, as in Linnaeus, a survival of certain theological ways of looking at the universe and certain theological conceptions of a plan of creation; it must be said, too, that while his temperament made him distrust new hypotheses, of which he had seen so many born and die, his environment as a great functionary of state, honoured, admired, almost adored by the greatest, not only in the state but in the Church, his solicitude lest science should receive some detriment by openly resisting the Church, which had recaptured Europe after the French Revolution, and had made of its enemies its footstool–all these considerations led him to oppose the new theory. Amid the plaudits, then, of the foremost church-men he threw across the path of the evolution doctrines the whole mass of his authority in favour of the old theory of catastrophic changes and special creations.
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire stoutly withstood him, braving non-recognition, ill-treatment, and ridicule. Treviranus, afar off in his mathematical lecture-room at Bremen, seemed simply forgotten.
But the current of evolutionary thought could not thus be checked: dammed up for a time, it broke out in new channels and in ways and places least expected; turned away from France, it appeared especially in England, where great paleontologists and geologists arose whose work culminated in that of Lyell. Specialists throughout all the world now became more vigorous than ever, gathering facts and thinking upon them in a way which caused the special creation theory to shrink more and more. Broader and more full became these various rivulets, soon to unite in one great stream of thought.
In 1813 Dr. Wells developed a theory of evolution by natural selection to account for varieties in the human race. About 182O Dean Herbert, eminent as an authority in horticulture, avowed his conviction that species are but fixed varieties. In 1831 Patrick Matthews stumbled upon and stated the main doctrine of natural selection in evolution; and others here and there, in Europe and America, caught an inkling of it.
But no one outside of a circle apparently uninfluential cared for these things: the Church was serene: on the Continent it had obtained reactionary control of courts, cabinets, and universities; in England, Dean Cockburn was denouncing Mary Somerville and the geologists to the delight of churchmen; and the Rev. Mellor Brown was doing the same thing for the edification of dissenters.
In America the mild suggestions of Silliman and his compeers were met by the protestations of the Andover theologians headed by Moses Stuart. Neither of the great English universities, as a rule, took any notice of the innovators save by sneers.
To this current of thought there was joined a new element when, in 1844, Robert Chambers published his Vestiges of Creation. The book was attractive and was widely read. In Chambers’s view the several series of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, were the result of two distinct impulses, each given once and for all time by the Creator. The first of these was an impulse imparted to forms of life, lifting them gradually through higher grades; the second was an impulse tending to modify organic substances in accordance with external circumstances; in fact, the doctrine of the book was evolution tempered by miracle–a stretching out of the creative act through all time–a pious version of Lamarck.
Two results followed, one mirth-provoking, the other leading to serious thought. The amusing result was that the theologians were greatly alarmed by the book: it was loudly insisted that it promoted atheism. Looking back along the line of thought which has since been developed, one feels that the older theologians ought to have put up thanksgivings for Chambers’s theory, and prayers that it might prove true. The more serious result was that it accustomed men’s minds to a belief in evolution as in some form possible or even probable. In this way it was provisionally of service.
Eight years later Herbert Spencer published an essay contrasting the theories of creation and evolution–reasoning with great force in favour of the latter, showing that species had undoubtedly been modified by circumstances; but still only few and chosen men saw the significance of all these lines of reasoning which had been converging during so many years toward one conclusion.
On July 1, 1858, there were read before the Linnaean Society at London two papers–one presented by Charles Darwin, the other by Alfred Russel Wallace–and with the reading of these papers the doctrine of evolution by natural selection was born. Then and there a fatal breach was made in the great theological barrier of the continued fixity of species since the creation.
The story of these papers the scientific world knows by heart: how Charles Darwin, having been sent to the University of Cambridge to fit him for the Anglican priesthood, left it in 1831 to go upon the scientific expedition of the Beagle; how for five years he studied with wonderful vigour and acuteness the problems of life as revealed on land and at sea–among volcanoes and coral reefs, in forests and on the sands, from the tropics to the arctic regions; how, in the Cape Verde and the Galapagos Islands, and in Brazil, Patagonia, and Australia he interrogated Nature with matchless persistency and skill; how he returned unheralded, quietly settled down to his work, and soon set the world thinking over its first published results, such as his book on Coral Reefs, and the monograph on the Cirripedia; and, finally, how he presented his paper, and followed it up with treatises which made him one of the great leaders in the history of human thought.
The scientific world realizes, too, more and more, the power of character shown by Darwin in all this great career; the faculty of silence, the reserve of strength seen in keeping his great thought–his idea of evolution by natural selection–under silent study and meditation for nearly twenty years, giving no hint of it to the world at large, but working in every field to secure proofs or disproofs, and accumulating masses of precious material for the solution of the questions involved.
To one man only did he reveal his thought–to Dr. Joseph Hooker, to whom in 1844, under the seal of secrecy, he gave a summary of his conclusions. Not until fourteen years later occurred the event which showed him that the fulness of time had come–the letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, to whom, in brilliant researches during the decade from 1848 to 1858, in Brazil and in the Malay Archipelago, the same truth of evolution by natural selection had been revealed. Among the proofs that scientific study does no injury to the more delicate shades of sentiment is the well-known story of this letter. With it Wallace sent Darwin a memoir, asking him to present it to the Linnaean Society: on examining it, Darwin found that Wallace had independently arrived at conclusions similar to his own–possibly had deprived him of fame; but Darwin was loyal to his friend, and his friend remained ever loyal to him. He publicly presented the paper from Wallace, with his own conclusions; and the date of this presentation–July 1, 1858–separates two epochs in the history, not merely of natural science, but of human thought.
In the following year, 1859, came the first instalment of his work in its fuller development–his book on The Origin of Species. In this book one at least of the main secrets at the heart of the evolutionary process, which had baffled the long line of investigators and philosophers from the days of Aristotle, was more broadly revealed. The effective mechanism of evolution was shown at work in three ascertained facts: in the struggle for existence among organized beings; in the survival of the fittest; and in heredity. These facts were presented with such minute research, wide observation, patient collation, transparent honesty, and judicial fairness, that they at once commanded the world’s attention. It was the outcome of thirty years’ work and thought by a worker and thinker of genius, but it was yet more than that–it was the outcome, also, of the work and thought of another man of genius fifty years before. The book of Malthus on the Principle of Population, mainly founded on the fact that animals increase in a geometrical ratio, and therefore, if unchecked, must encumber the earth, had been generally forgotten, and was only recalled with a sneer. But the genius of Darwin recognised in it a deeper meaning, and now the thought of Malthus was joined to the new current. Meditating upon it in connection with his own observations of the luxuriance of Nature, Darwin had arrived at his doctrine of natural selection and survival of the fittest.
As the great dogmatic barrier between the old and new views of the universe was broken down, the flood of new thought pouring over the world stimulated and nourished strong growths in every field of research and reasoning: edition after edition of the book was called for; it was translated even into Japanese and Hindustani; the stagnation of scientific thought, which Buckle, only a few years before, had so deeply lamented, gave place to a widespread and fruitful activity; masses of accumulated observations, which had seemed stale and unprofitable, were made alive; facts formerly without meaning now found their interpretation. Under this new influence an army of young men took up every promising line of scientific investigation in every land. Epoch-making books appeared in all the great nations. Spencer, Wallace, Huxley, Galton, Tyndall, Tylor, Lubbock, Bagehot, Lewes, in England, and a phalanx of strong men in Germany, Italy, France, and America gave forth works which became authoritative in every department of biology. If some of the older men in France held back, overawed perhaps by the authority of Cuvier, the younger and more vigorous pressed on.
One source of opposition deserves to be especially mentioned–Louis Agassiz.
A great investigator, an inspired and inspiring teacher, a noble man, he had received and elaborated a theory of animated creation which he could not readily change. In his heart and mind still prevailed the atmosphere of the little Swiss parsonage in which he was born, and his religious and moral nature, so beautiful to all who knew him, was especially repelled by sundry evolutionists, who, in their zeal as neophytes, made proclamations seeming to have a decidedly irreligious if not immoral bearing. In addition to this was the direction his thinking had received from Cuvier. Both these influences combined to prevent his acceptance of the new view.
He was the third great man who had thrown his influence as a barrier across the current of evolutionary thought. Linnaeus in the second half of the eighteenth century, Cuvier in the first half, and Agassiz in the second half of the nineteenth–all made the same effort. Each remains great; but not all of them together could arrest the current. Agassiz’s strong efforts throughout the United States, and indeed throughout Europe, to check it, really promoted it. From the great museum he had founded at Cambridge, from his summer school at Penikese, from his lecture rooms at Harvard and Cornell, his disciples went forth full of love and admiration for him, full of enthusiasm which he had stirred and into fields which he had indicated; but their powers, which he had aroused and strengthened, were devoted to developing the truth he failed to recognise; Shaler, Verrill, Packard, Hartt, Wilder, Jordan, with a multitude of others, and especially the son who bore his honoured name, did justice to his memory by applying what they had received from him to research under inspiration of the new revelation.
Still another man deserves especial gratitude and honour in this progress–Edward Livingston Youmans. He was perhaps the first in America to recognise the vast bearings of the truths presented by Darwin, Wallace, and Spencer. He became the apostle of these truths, sacrificing the brilliant career on which he had entered as a public lecturer, subordinating himself to the three leaders, and giving himself to editorial drudgery in the stimulation of research and the announcement of results.
In support of the new doctrine came a world of new proofs; those which Darwin himself added in regard to the cross-fertilization of plants, and which he had adopted from embryology, led the way, and these were followed by the discoveries of Wallace, Bates, Huxley, Marsh, Cope, Leidy, Haeckel, Muller, Gaudry, and a multitude of others in all lands.[22]
[22] For Agassiz’s opposition to evolution, see the Essay on Classification, vol. i, 1857, as regards Lamark, and vol. iii, as regards Darwin; also Silliman’s Journal, July 1860; also the Atlantic Monthly, January 1874; also his Life and Correspondence, vol. ii, p. 647; also Asa Gray, Scientific Papers, vol. ii, p. 484. A reminiscence of my own enables me to appreciate his deep ethical and religious feeling. I was passing the day with him at Nahant in 1868, consulting him regarding candidates for various scientific chairs at the newly established Cornell University, in which he took a deep interest. As we discussed one after another of the candidates, he suddenly said: “Who is to be your Professor of Moral Philosophy? That is a far more important position than all the others.”
IV. THE FINAL EFFORT OF THEOLOGY.
Darwin’s Origin of Species had come into the theological world like a plough into an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons, books light and heavy, came flying at the new thinker from all sides.
The keynote was struck at once in the Quarterly Review by Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. He declared that Darwin was guilty of “a tendency to limit God’s glory in creation”; that “the principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God”; that it “contradicts the revealed relations of creation to its Creator”; that it is “inconsistent with the fulness of his glory”; that it is “a dishonouring view of Nature”; and that there is “a simpler explanation of the presence of these strange forms among the works of God”: that explanation being–“the fall of Adam.” Nor did the bishop’s efforts end here; at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science he again disported himself in the tide of popular applause. Referring to the ideas of Darwin, who was absent on account of illness, he congratulated himself in a public speech that he was not descended from a monkey. The reply came from Huxley, who said in substance: “If I had to choose, I would prefer to be a descendant of a humble monkey rather than of a man who employs his knowledge and eloquence in misrepresenting those who are wearing out their lives in the search for truth.”
This shot reverberated through England, and indeed through other countries.
The utterances of this the most brilliant prelate of the Anglican Church received a sort of antiphonal response from the leaders of the English Catholics. In an address before the “Academia,” which had been organized to combat “science falsely so called,” Cardinal Manning declared his abhorrence of the new view of Nature, and described it as “a brutal philosophy–to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam.”
These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical fashion for several years. One distinguished clerical reviewer, in spite of Darwin’s thirty years of quiet labour, and in spite of the powerful summing up of his book, prefaced a diatribe by saying that Darwin “might have been more modest had he given some slight reason for dissenting from the views generally entertained.” Another distinguished clergyman, vice-president of a Protestant institute to combat “dangerous” science, declared Darwinism “an attempt to dethrone God.” Another critic spoke of persons accepting the Darwinian views as “under the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas,” and of Darwin’s argument as “a jungle of fanciful assumption.” Another spoke of Darwin’s views as suggesting that “God is dead,” and declared that Darwin’s work “does open violence to everything which the Creator himself has told us in the Scriptures of the methods and results of his work.” Still another theological authority asserted: “If the Darwinian theory is true, Genesis is a lie, the whole framework of the book of life falls to pieces, and the revelation of God to man, as we Christians know it, is a delusion and a snare.” Another, who had shown excellent qualities as an observing naturalist, declared the Darwinian view “a huge imposture from the beginning.”
Echoes came from America. One review, the organ of the most widespread of American religious sects, declared that Darwin was “attempting to befog and to pettifog the whole question”; another denounced Darwin’s views as “infidelity”; another, representing the American branch of the Anglican Church, poured contempt over Darwin as “sophistical and illogical,” and then plunged into an exceedingly dangerous line of argument in the following words: “If this hypothesis be true, then is the Bible an unbearable fiction;…then have Christians for nearly two thousand years been duped by a monstrous lie….Darwin requires us to disbelieve the authoritative word of the Creator.” A leading journal representing the same church took pains to show the evolution theory to be as contrary to the explicit declarations of the New Testament as to those of the Old, and said: “If we have all, men and monkeys, oysters and eagles, developed from an original germ, then is St. Paul’s grand deliverance–`All flesh is not the same flesh; there is one kind of flesh of men, another of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds’–untrue.”
Another echo came from Australia, where Dr. Perry, Lord Bishop of Melbourne, in a most bitter book on Science and the Bible, declared that the obvious object of Chambers, Darwin, and Huxley is “to produce in their readers a disbelief of the Bible.”
Nor was the older branch of the Church to be left behind in this chorus. Bayma, in the Catholic World, declared, “Mr. Darwin is, we have reason to believe, the mouthpiece or chief trumpeter of that infidel clique whose well-known object is to do away with all idea of a God.”
Worthy of especial note as showing the determination of the theological side at that period was the foundation of sacro-scientific organizations to combat the new ideas. First to be noted is the “Academia,” planned by Cardinal Wiseman. In a circular letter the cardinal, usually so moderate and just, sounded an alarm and summed up by saying, “Now it is for the Church, which alone possesses divine certainty and divine discernment, to place itself at once in the front of a movement which threatens even the fragmentary remains of Christian belief in England.” The necessary permission was obtained from Rome, the Academia was founded, and the “divine discernment” of the Church was seen in the utterances which came from it, such as those of Cardinal Manning, which every thoughtful Catholic would now desire to recall, and in the diatribes of Dr. Laing, which only aroused laughter on all sides. A similar effort was seen in Protestant quarters; the “Victoria institute” was created, and perhaps the most noted utterance which ever came from it was the declaration of its vice-president, the Rev. Walter Mitchell, that “Darwinism endeavours to dethrone God.”[23]
[23] For Wilberforce’s article, see Quarterly Review, July, 1860. For the reply of Huxley to the bishop’s speech I have relied on the account given in Quatrefages, who had it from Carpenter; a somewhat different version is given in the Life and Letters of Darwin. For Cardinal Manning’s attack, see Essays on Religion and Literature, London, 1865. For the review articles, see the Quarterly already cited, and that for July, 1874; also the North British Review, May 1860; also, F. O. Morris’s letter in the Record, reprinted at Glasgow, 1870; also the Addresses of Rev. Walter Mitchell before the Victoria Institute, London, 1867; also Rev. B. G. Johns, Moses not Darwin, a Sermon, March 31, 1871. For the earlier American attacks, see Methodist Quarterly Review, April 1871; The American Church Review, July and October, 1865, and January, 1866. For the Australian attack, see Science and the Bible, by the Right Reverand Charles Perry, D. D., Bishop of Melbourne, London, 1869. For Bayma, see the Catholic World, vol. xxvi, p.782. For the Academia, see Essays edited by Cardinal Manning, above cited; and for the Victoria Institute, see Scientia Scientarum, by a member of the Victoria Institute, London, 1865.
In France the attack was even more violent. Fabre d’Envieu brought out the heavy artillery of theology, and in a long series of elaborate propositions demonstrated that any other doctrine than that of the fixity and persistence of species is absolutely contrary to Scripture. The Abbe Desorges, a former Professor of Theology, stigmatized Darwin as a “pedant,” and evolution as “gloomy”. Monseigneur Segur, referring to Darwin and his followers, went into hysterics and shrieked: “These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions. They come from hell and return thither, taking with them the gross creatures who blush not to proclaim and accept them.”
In Germany the attack, if less declamatory, was no less severe. Catholic theologians vied with Protestants in bitterness. Prof. Michelis declared Darwin’s theory “a caricature of creation.” Dr. Hagermann asserted that it “turned the Creator out of doors.”
Dr. Schund insisted that “every idea of the Holy Scriptures, from the first to the last page, stands in diametrical opposition to the Darwinian theory”; and, “if Darwin be right in his view of the development of man out of a brutal condition, then the Bible teaching in regard to man is utterly annihilated.” Rougemont in Switzerland called for a crusade against the obnoxious doctrine. Luthardt, Professor of Theology at Leipsic, declared: “The idea of creation belongs to religion and not to natural science; the whole superstructure of personal religion is built upon the doctrine of creation”; and he showed the evolution theory to be in direct contradiction to Holy Writ.
But in 1863 came an event which brought serious confusion to the theological camp: Sir Charles Lyell, the most eminent of living geologists, a man of deeply Christian feeling and of exceedingly cautious temper, who had opposed the evolution theory of Lamarck and declared his adherence to the idea of successive creations, then published his work on the Antiquity of Man, and in this and other utterances showed himself a complete though unwilling convert to the fundamental ideas of Darwin. The blow was serious in many ways, and especially so in two–first, as withdrawing all foundation in fact from the scriptural chronology, and secondly, as discrediting the creation theory. The blow was not unexpected; in various review articles against the Darwinian theory there had been appeals to Lyell, at times almost piteous, “not to flinch from the truths he had formerly proclaimed.” But Lyell, like the honest man he was, yielded unreservedly to the mass of new proofs arrayed on the side of evolution against that of creation.
At the same time came Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature, giving new and most cogent arguments in favour of evolution by natural selection.
In 1871 was published Darwin’s Descent of Man. Its doctrine had been anticipated by critics of his previous books, but it made, none the less, a great stir; again the opposing army trooped forth, though evidently with much less heart than before. A few were very violent. The Dublin University Magazine, after the traditional Hibernian fashion, charged Mr. Darwin with seeking “to displace God by the unerring action of vagary,” and with being “resolved to hunt God out of the world.” But most notable from the side of the older Church was the elaborate answer to Darwin’s book by the eminent French Catholic physician, Dr. Constantin James. In his work, On Darwinism, or the Man-Ape, published at Paris in 1877, Dr. James not only refuted Darwin scientifically but poured contempt on his book, calling it “a fairy tale,” and insisted that a work “so fantastic and so burlesque” was, doubtless, only a huge joke, like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, or Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. The princes of the Church were delighted. The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris assured the author that the book had become his “spiritual reading,” and begged him to send a copy to the Pope himself. His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, acknowledged the gift in a remarkable letter. He thanked his dear son, the writer, for the book in which he “refutes so well the aberrations of Darwinism.” “A system,” His Holiness adds, “which is repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all peoples, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to Reason herself, would seem to need no refutation, did not alienation from God and the leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this tissue of fables….And, in fact, pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things and proclaiming man independent, wishing him to be his own king, his own priest, and his own God–pride goes so far as to degrade man himself to the level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless matter, thus unconsciously confirming the Divine declaration, WHEN PRIDE COMETH, THEN COMETH SHAME. But the corruption of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand that such fancies, altogether absurd though they are, should–since they borrow the mask of science–be refuted by true science.” Wherefore the Pope thanked Dr. James for his book, “so opportune and so perfectly appropriate to the exigencies of our time,” and bestowed on him the apostolic benediction. Nor was this brief all. With it there came a second, creating the author an officer of the Papal Order of St. Sylvester. The cardinal archbishop assured the delighted physician that such a double honour of brief and brevet was perhaps unprecedented, and suggested only that in a new edition of his book he should “insist a little more on the relation existing between the narratives of Genesis and the discoveries of modern science, in such fashion as to convince the most incredulous of their perfect agreement.” The prelate urged also a more dignified title. The proofs of this new edition were accordingly all submitted to His Eminence, and in 1882 it appeared as Moses and Darwin: the Man of Genesis compared with the Man-Ape, or Religious Education opposed to Atheistic. No wonder the cardinal embraced the author, thanking him in the name of science and religion. “We have at last,” he declared, “a handbook which we can safely put into the hands of youth.”
Scarcely less vigorous were the champions of English Protestant orthodoxy. In an address at Liverpool, Mr. Gladstone remarked: “Upon the grounds of what is termed evolution God is relieved of the labour of creation; in the name of unchangeable laws he is discharged from governing the world”; and, when Herbert Spencer called his attention to the fact that Newton with the doctrine of gravitation and with the science of physical astronomy is open to the same charge, Mr. Gladstone retreated in the Contemporary Review under one of his characteristic clouds of words. The Rev. Dr. Coles, in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, declared that the God of evolution is not the Christian’s God. Burgon, Dean of Chichester, in a sermon preached before the University of Oxford, pathetically warned the students that “those who refuse to accept the history of the creation of our first parents according to its obvious literal intention, and are for substituting the modern dream of evolution in its place, cause the entire scheme of man’s salvation to collapse.” Dr. Pusey also came into the fray with most earnest appeals against the new doctrine, and the Rev. Gavin Carlyle was perfervid on the same side. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge published a book by the Rev. Mr. Birks, in which the evolution doctrine was declared to be “flatly opposed to the fundamental doctrine of creation.” Even the London Times admitted a review stigmatizing Darwin’s Descent of Man as an “utterly unsupported hypothesis,” full of “unsubstantiated premises, cursory investigations, and disintegrating speculations,” and Darwin himself as “reckless and unscientific.”[24]
[24] For the French theological oppostition to the Darwinian theory, see Pozzy, La Terre at le Recit Biblique de la Creation, 1874, especially pp. 353, 363; also Felix Ducane, Etudes sur la Transformisme, 1876, especially pp. 107 to 119. As to Fabre d’Envieu, see especially his Proposition xliii. For the Abbe Desogres, “former Professor of Philosophy and Theology,” see his Erreurs Modernes, Paris, 1878, pp. 677 and 595 to 598. For Monseigneur Segur, see his La Foi devant la Science Moderne, sixth ed., Paris, 1874, pp. 23, 34, etc. For Herbert Spencer’s reply to Mr. Gladstone, see his study of Sociology; for the passage in the Dublin Review, see the issue for July, 1871. For the Review in the London Times, see Nature for April 20, 1871. For Gavin Carlyle, see The Battle of Unbelief, 1870, pp. 86 and 171. For the attacks by Michelis and Hagermann, see Natur und Offenbarung, Munster, 1861 to 1869. For Schund, see his Darwin’s Hypothese und ihr Verhaaltniss zu Religion und Moral, Stuttgart, 1869. For Luthardt, see Fundamental Truths of Christianity, translated by Sophia Taylor, second ed., Edinburgh, 1869. For Rougemont, see his L’Homme et le Singe, Neuchatel, 1863 (also in German trans.). For Constantin James, see his Mes Entretiens avec l’Empereur Don Pedro sur la Darwinisme, Paris, 1888, where the papal briefs are printed in full. For the English attacks on Darwin’s Descent of Man, see the Edinburgh Review July, 1871 and elsewhere; the Dublin Review, July, 1871; the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, April, 1886. See also The Scripture Doctrine of Creation, by the Rev. T. R. Birks, London, 1873, published by the S. P. C. K. For Dr. Pusey’s attack, see his Unscience, not Science, adverse to Faith, 1878; also Darwin’s Life and Letters, vol. ii, pp. 411, 412.
But it was noted that this second series of attacks, on the Descent of Man, differed in one remarkable respect–so far as England was concerned–from those which had been made over ten years before on the Origin of Species. While everything was done to discredit Darwin, to pour contempt upon him, and even, of all things in the world, to make him–the gentlest of mankind, only occupied with the scientific side of the problem–“a persecutor of Christianity,” while his followers were represented more and more as charlatans or dupes, there began to be in the most influential quarters careful avoidance of the old argument that evolution–even by natural selection–contradicts Scripture.
It began to be felt that this was dangerous ground. The defection of Lyell had, perhaps, more than anything else, started the question among theologians who had preserved some equanimity, “WHAT IF, AFTER ALL, THE DARWINIAN THEORY SHOULD PROVE TO BE TRUE?” Recollections of the position in which the Roman Church found itself after the establishment of the doctrines of Copernicus and Galileo naturally came into the minds of the more thoughtful. In Germany this consideration does not seem to have occurred at quite so early a day. One eminent Lutheran clergyman at Magdeburg called on his hearers to choose between Darwin and religion; Delitszch, in his new commentary on Genesis, attempted to bring science back to recognise human sin as an important factor in creation; Prof. Heinrich Ewald, while carefully avoiding any sharp conflict between the scriptural doctrine and evolution, comforted himself by covering Darwin and his followers with contempt; Christlieb, in his address before the Evangelical Alliance at New York in 1873, simply took the view that the tendencies of the Darwinian theory were “toward infidelity,” but declined to make any serious battle on biblical grounds; the Jesuit, Father Pesch, in Holland, drew up in Latin, after the old scholastic manner, a sort of general indictment of evolution, of which one may say that it was interesting–as interesting as the display of a troop in chain armour and with cross-bows on a nineteenth-century battlefield.
From America there came new echoes. Among the myriad attacks on the Darwinian theory by Protestants and Catholics two should be especially mentioned. The first of these was by Dr. Noah Porter, President of Yale College, an excellent scholar, an interesting writer, a noble man, broadly tolerant, combining in his thinking a curious mixture of radicalism and conservatism. While giving great latitude to the evolutionary teaching in the university under his care, he felt it his duty upon one occasion to avow his disbelief in it; but he was too wise a man to suggest any necessary antagonism between it and the Scriptures. He confined himself mainly to pointing out the tendency of the evolution doctrine in this form toward agnosticism and pantheism.
To those who knew and loved him, and had noted the genial way in which by wise neglect he had allowed scientific studies to flourish at Yale, there was an amusing side to all this. Within a stone’s throw of his college rooms was the Museum of Paleontology, in which Prof. Marsh had laid side by side, among other evidences of the new truth, that wonderful series of specimens showing the evolution of the horse from the earliest form of the animal, “not larger than a fox, with five toes,” through the whole series up to his present form and size–that series which Huxley declared an absolute proof of the existence of natural selection as an agent in evolution. In spite of the veneration and love which all Yale men felt for President Porter, it was hardly to be expected that these particular arguments of his would have much permanent effect upon them when there was constantly before their eyes so convincing a refutation.
But a far more determined opponent was the Rev. Dr. Hodge, of Princeton; his anger toward the evolution doctrine was bitter: he denounced it as thoroughly “atheistic”; he insisted that Christians “have a right to protest against the arraying of probabilities against the clear evidence of the Scriptures”; he even censured so orthodox a writer as the Duke of Argyll, and declared that the Darwinian theory of natural selection is “utterly inconsistent with the Scriptures,” and that “an absent God, who does nothing, is to us no God”; that “to ignore design as manifested in God’s creation is to dethrone God”; that “a denial of design in Nature is virtually a denial of God”; and that “no teleologist can be a Darwinian.” Even more uncompromising was another of the leading authorities at the same university–the Rev. Dr. Duffield. He declared war not only against Darwin but even against men like Asa Gray, Le Conte, and others, who had attempted to reconcile the new theory with the Bible: he insisted that “evolutionism and the scriptural account of the origin of man are irreconcilable”–that the Darwinian theory is “in direct conflict with the teaching of the apostle, `All scripture is given by inspiration of God'”; he pointed out, in his opposition to Darwin’s Descent of Man and Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, that in the Bible “the genealogical links which connect the Israelites in Egypt with Adam and Eve in Eden are explicitly given.” These utterances of Prof. Duffield culminated in a declaration which deserves to be cited as showing that a Presbyterian minister can “deal damnation round the land” ex cathedra in a fashion quite equal to that of popes and bishops. It is as follows: “If the development theory of the origin of man,” wrote Dr. Duffield in the Princeton Review, “shall in a little while take its place–as doubtless it will–with other exploded scientific speculations, then they who accept it with its proper logical consequences will in the life to come have their portion with those who in this life `know not God and obey not the gospel of his Son.'”
Fortunately, at about the time when Darwin’s Descent of Man was published, there had come into Princeton University “deus ex machina” in the person of Dr. James McCosh. Called to the presidency, he at once took his stand against teachings so dangerous to Christianity as those of Drs. Hodge, Duffield, and their associates. In one of his personal confidences he has let us into the secret of this matter. With that hard Scotch sense which Thackeray had applauded in his well-known verses, he saw that the most dangerous thing which could be done to Christianity at Princeton was to reiterate in the university pulpit, week after week, solemn declarations that if evolution by natural selection, or indeed evolution at all, be true, the Scriptures are false. He tells us that he saw that this was the certain way to make the students unbelievers; he therefore not only checked this dangerous preaching but preached an opposite doctrine. With him began the inevitable compromise, and, in spite of mutterings against him as a Darwinian, he carried the day. Whatever may be thought of his general system of philosophy, no one can deny his great service in neutralizing the teachings of his predecessors and colleagues–so dangerous to all that is essential in Christianity.
Other divines of strong sense in other parts of the country began to take similar ground–namely, that men could be Christians and at the same time Darwinians. There appeared, indeed, here and there, curious discrepancies: thus in 1873 the Monthly Religious Magazine of Boston congratulated its readers that the Rev. Mr. Burr had “demolished the evolution theory, knocking the breath of life out of it and throwing it to the dogs.” This amazing performance by the Rev. Mr. Burr was repeated in a very striking way by Bishop Keener before the Oecumenical Council of Methodism at Washington in 1891. In what the newspapers described as an “admirable speech,” he refuted evolution doctrines by saying that evolutionists had “only to make a journey of twelve hours from the place where he was then standing to find together the bones of the muskrat, the opossum, the coprolite, and the ichthyosaurus.” He asserted that Agassiz–whom the good bishop, like so many others, seemed to think an evolutionist–when he visited these beds near Charleston, declared: “These old beds have set me crazy; they have destroyed the work of a lifetime.” And the Methodist prelate ended by saying: “Now, gentlemen, brethren, take these facts home with you; get down and look at them. This is the watch that was under the steam hammer–the doctrine of evolution; and this steam hammer is the wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds.” Exhibitions like these availed little. While the good bishop amid vociferous applause thus made comically evident his belief that Agassiz was a Darwinian and a coprolite an animal, scientific men were recording in all parts of the world facts confirming the dreaded theory of an evolution by natural selection. While the Rev. Mr. Burr was so loudly praised for “throwing Darwinism to the dogs,” Marsh was completing his series leading from the five-toed ungulates to the horse. While Dr. Tayler Lewis at Union, and Drs. Hodge and Duffield at Princeton, were showing that if evolution be true the biblical accounts must be false, the indefatigable Yale professor was showing his cretaceous birds, and among them Hesperornis and Ichthyornis with teeth. While in Germany Luthardt, Schund, and their compeers were demonstrating that Scripture requires a belief in special and separate creations, the Archaeopteryx, showing a most remarkable connection between birds and reptiles, was discovered.
While in France Monseigneur Segur and others were indulging in diatribes against “a certain Darwin,” Gaudry and Filhol were discovering a striking series of “missing links” among the carnivora. In view of the proofs accumulating in favour of the new evolutionary hypothesis, the change in the tone of controlling theologians was now rapid. From all sides came evidences of desire to compromise with the theory. Strict adherents of the biblical text pointed significantly to the verses in Genesis in which the earth and sea were made to bring forth birds and fishes, and man was created out of the dust of the ground. Men of larger mind like Kingsley and Farrar, with English and American broad churchmen generally, took ground directly in Darwin’s favour. Even Whewell took pains to show that there might be such a thing as a Darwinian argument for design in Nature; and the Rev. Samuel Houghton, of the Royal Society, gave interesting suggestions of a divine design in evolution.
Both the great English universities received the new teaching as a leaven: at Oxford, in the very front of the High Church party at Keble College, was elaborated a statement that the evolution doctrine is “an advance in our theological thinking.” And Temple, Bishop of London, perhaps the most influential thinker then in the Anglican episcopate, accepted the new revelation in the following words: “It seems something more majestic, more befitting him to whom a thousand years are as one day, thus to impress his will once for all on his creation, and provide for all the countless varieties by this one original impress, than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what he had previously made.”
In Scotland the Duke of Argyll, head and front of the orthodox party, dissenting in many respects from Darwin’s full conclusions, made concessions which badly shook the old position.
Curiously enough, from the Roman Catholic Church, bitter as some of its writers had been, now came argument to prove that the Catholic faith does not prevent any one from holding the Darwinian theory, and especially a declaration from an authority eminent among American Catholics–a declaration which has a very curious sound, but which it would be ungracious to find fault with–that “the doctrine of evolution is no more in opposition to the doctrine of the Catholic Church than is the Copernican theory or that of Galileo.”
Here and there, indeed, men of science like Dawson, Mivart, and Wigand, in view of theological considerations, sought to make conditions; but the current was too strong, and eminent theologians in every country accepted natural selection as at least a very important part in the mechanism of evolution.
At the death of Darwin it was felt that there was but one place in England where his body should be laid, and that this place was next the grave of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. The noble address of Canon Farrar at his funeral was echoed from many pulpits in Europe and America, and theological opposition as such was ended. Occasionally appeared, it is true, a survival of the old feeling: the Rev. Dr. Laing referred to the burial of Darwin in Westminster Abbey as “a proof that England is no longer a Christian country,” and added that this burial was a desecration–that this honour was given him because he had been “the chief promoter of the mock doctrine of evolution of the species and the ape descent of man.”
Still another of these belated prophets was, of all men, Thomas Carlyle. Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great’s generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an “apostle of dirt worship.”
The last echoes of these utterances reverberated between Scotland and America. In the former country, in 1885, the Rev. Dr. Lee issued a volume declaring that, if the Darwinian view be true, “there is no place for God”; that “by no method of interpretation can the language of Holy Scripture be made wide enough to re-echo the orang-outang theory of man’s natural history”; that “Darwinism reverses the revelation of God” and “implies utter blasphemy against the divine and human character of our Incarnate Lord”; and he was pleased to call Darwin and his followers “gospellers of the gutter.” In one of the intellectual centres of America the editor of a periodical called The Christian urged frantically that “the battle be set in array, and that men find out who is on the Lord’s side and who is on the side of the devil and the monkeys.”
To the honour of the Church of England it should be recorded that a considerable number of her truest men opposed such utterances as these, and that one of them–Farrar, Archdeacon of Westminster–made a protest worthy to be held in perpetual remembrance. While confessing his own inability to accept fully the new scientific belief, he said: “We should consider it disgraceful and humiliating to try to shake it by an ad captandum argument, or by a clap-trap platform appeal to the unfathomable ignorance and unlimited arrogance of a prejudiced assembly. We should blush to meet it with an anathema or a sneer.”
All opposition had availed nothing; Darwin’s work and fame were secure. As men looked back over his beautiful life–simple, honest, tolerant, kindly–and thought upon his great labours in the search for truth, all the attacks faded into nothingness.
There were indeed some dark spots, which as time goes on appear darker. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Whewell, the “omniscient,” author of the History of the Inductive Sciences, refused to allow a copy of the Origin of Species to be placed in the library. At multitudes of institutions under theological control–Protestant as well as Catholic–attempts were made to stamp out or to stifle evolutionary teaching. Especially was this true for a time in America, and the case of the American College at Beyrout, where nearly all the younger professors were dismissed for adhering to Darwin’s views, is worthy of remembrance. The treatment of Dr. Winchell at the Vanderbilt University in Tennessee showed the same spirit; one of the truest of men, devoted to science but of deeply Christian feeling, he was driven forth for views which centred in the Darwinian theory.
Still more striking was the case of Dr. Woodrow. He had, about 1857, been appointed to a professorship of Natural Science as connected with Revealed Religion, in the Presbyterian Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina. He was a devoted Christian man, and his training had led him to accept the Presbyterian standards of faith. With great gifts for scientific study he visited Europe, made a most conscientious examination of the main questions under discussion, and adopted the chief points in the doctrine of evolution by natural selection. A struggle soon began. A movement hostile to him grew more and more determined, and at last, in spite of the efforts made in his behalf by the directors of the seminary and by a large and broad-minded minority in the representative bodies controlling it, an orthodox storm, raised by the delegates from various Presbyterian bodies, drove him from his post. Fortunately, he was received into a professorship at the University of South Carolina, where he has since taught with more power than ever before.
This testimony to the faith by American provincial Protestantism was very properly echoed from Spanish provincial Catholicism. In the year 1878 a Spanish colonial man of science, Dr. Chil y Marango, published a work on the Canary Islands. But Dr. Chil had the imprudence to sketch, in his introduction, the modern hypothesis of evolution, and to exhibit some proofs, found in the Canary Islands, of the barbarism of primitive man. The ecclesiastical authorities, under the lead of Bishop Urquinaona y Bidot, at once grappled with this new idea. By a solemn act they declared it “falsa, impia, scandalosa”; all persons possessing copies of the work were ordered to surrender them at once to the proper ecclesiastics, and the author was placed under the major excommunication.
But all this opposition may be reckoned among the last expiring convulsions of the old theologic theory. Even from the new Catholic University at Washington has come an utterance in favour of the new doctrine, and in other universities in the Old World and in the New the doctrine of evolution by natural selection has asserted its right to full and honest consideration. More than this, it is clearly evident that the stronger men in the Church have, in these latter days, not only relinquished the struggle against science in this field, but have determined frankly and manfully to make an alliance with it. In two very remarkable lectures given in 1892 at the parish church of Rochdale, Wilson, Archdeacon of Manchester, not only accepted Darwinism as true, but wrought it with great argumentative power into a higher view of Christianity; and what is of great significance, these sermons were published by the same Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge which only a few years before had published the most bitter attacks against the Darwinian theory. So, too, during the year 1893, Prof. Henry Drummond, whose praise is in all the dissenting churches, developed a similar view most brilliantly in a series of lectures delivered before the American Chautauqua schools, and published in one of the most widespread of English orthodox newspapers.
Whatever additional factors may be added to natural selection–and Darwin himself fully admitted that there might be others–the theory of an evolution process in the formation of the universe and of animated nature is established, and the old theory of direct creation is gone forever. In place of it science has given us conceptions far more noble, and opened the way to an argument for design infinitely more beautiful than any ever developed by theology.[24]
[24] For the causes of bitterness shown regarding the Darwinian hypothesis, see Reusch, Bibel und Natur, vol. ii, pp. 46 et seq. For hostility in the United States regarding the Darwinian theory, see, among a multitude of writers, the following: Dr. Charles Hodge, of Princeton, monograph, What is Darwinism? New York, 1874; also his Systematic Theology, New York, 1872,vol. ii, part 2, Anthropology; also The Light by which we see Light, or Nature and the Scriptures, Vedder Lectures, 1875, Rutgers College, New York, 1875; also Positivism and Evolutionism, in the American Catholic Quarterly, October 1877, pp. 607, 619; and in the same number, Professor Huxley and Evolution, by Rev. A. M. Kirsch, pp. 662, 664; The Logic of Evolution, by Prof. Edward F. X. McSweeney, D. D., July, 1879, p. 561; Das Hexaemeron und die Geologie, von P. Eirich, Pastor in Albany, N. Y., Lutherischer Concordia-Verlag, St. Louis, Mo., 1878, pp. 81, 82, 84, 92-94; Evolutionism respecting Man and the Bible, by John T. Duffield, of Princeton, January, 1878, Princeton Review, pp. 151, 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 188; a Lecture on Evolution , before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York, May 25, 1886, by ex- President Noah Porter, pp. 4, 26-29. For the laudatory notice of the Rev. E. F. Burr’s demolition of evolution in his book Pater Mundi, see Monthly Religious Magazine, Boston, May, 1873, p. 492. Concerning the removal of Dr. James Woodrow, Professor of Natural Science in the Columbia Theological Seminary, see Evolution or Not, in the New York Weekly Sun, October 24, 1888. For the dealings of Spanish ecclesiastics with Dr. Chil and his Darwinian exposition, see the Revue d’Anthropologie, cited in the Academy for April 6, 1878; see also the Catholic World, xix, 433, A Discussion with an Infidel, directed against Dr. Louis Buchner and his Kraft und Stoff; also Mind and Matter, by Rev. james Tait, of Canada, p. 66 (in the third edition the author bemoans the “horrible plaudits” that “have accompanied every effort to establish man’s brutal descent”); also The Church Journal, New York, May 28, 1874. For the effort in favour of a teleological evolution, see Rev. Samuel Houghton, F. R. S., Principles of Animal Mechanics, London, 1873, preface and p. 156 and elsewhere. For the details of the persecutions of Drs. Winchell and Woodrow, and of the Beyrout professors, with authorities cited, see my chapter on The Fall of Man and Anthropology. For more liberal views among religious thinkers regarding the Darwinian theory, and for efforts to mitigate and adapt it to theological views, see, among the great mass of utterances, the following: Charles Kingsley’s letters to Darwin, November 18, 1859, in Darwin’s Life and Letters, vol. ii, p. 82; Adam Sedgwick to Charles Darwin, December 24, 1859, see ibid., vol. ii, pp. 356-359; the same to Miss Gerard, January 2, 1860, see Sedgewick’s Life and Letters, vol. ii, pp. 359, 360; the same in The Spectator, London, March 24, 1860; The Rambler, March 1860, cited by Mivart, Genesis of Species, p. 30; The Dublin Review, May, 1860; The Christian Examiner, May, 1860; Charles Kingsley to F. D. Maurice in 1863, in Kingsley’s Life, vol. ii, p. 171; Adam Sedgwick to Livingstone (the explorer), March 16, 1865, in Life and Letters of Sedgwick, vol. ii, pp. 410-412; the Duke of Argyll, The Reign of Law, New York, pp. 16, 18, 31, 116, 117, 120, 159; Joseph P. Thompson, D. D., LL.D., Man in Genesis and Geology, New York, 1870, pp. 48, 49, 82; Canon H. P. Liddon, Sermons preached before the University of Oxford, 1871, Sermon III; St. George Mivart, Evolution and its Consequences, Contemporary Review, Jan. 1872; British and Foreign Evangelical Review, 1872, article on The Theory of Evolution; The Lutheran Quarterly, Gettysburg, Pa., April, 1872, article by Rev. Cyrus Thomas, Assistant United States Geological Survey on The Descent of Man, pp. 214, 239, 372-376; The Lutheran Quarterly, July, 1873, article on Some Assumptions against Christianity, by Rev. C. A. Stork, Baltimore, Md., pp. 325, 326; also, in the same number, see a review of Dr. Burr’s Pater Mundi, pp. 474, 475, and contrast with the review in the Andover Review of that period; an article in the Religious Magazine and Monthly Review, Boston, on Religion and Evolution, by Rev. S. R. Calthrop, September, 1873, p. 200; The Popular Science Monthly, January, 1874, article Genesis, Geology, and Evolution; article by Asa Gray, Nature, London, June 4, 1874; Materialism, by Rev. W. Streissguth, Lutheran Quarterly, July, 1875, originally written in German, and translated by J. G. Morris, D. D., pp. 406, 408; Darwinismus und Christenthum, von R. Steck, Ref. Pfarrer in Dresden, Berlin, 1875, pp. 5,6,and 26, reprinted from the Protestantische Kirchenzeitung, and issued as a tract by the Protestantenverein; Rev. W. E. Adams, article in the Lutheran Quarterly, April, 1879, on Evolution: Shall it be Atheistic? John Wood, Bible Anticipations of Modern Science, 1880, pp. 18, 19, 22; Lutheran Quarterly, January, 1881, Some Postulates of the New Ethics, by Rev. C. A. Stork, D. D.; Lutheran Quarterly, January, 1882, The Religion of Evolution as against the Religion of Jesus, by Prof. W. H. Wynn, Iowa State Agricultural College–this article was republished as a pamphlet; Canon Liddon, prefatory note to sermon on The Recovery of St. Thomas, pp. 4, 11, 12, 13, and 26, preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral, April 23, 1882; Lutheran Quarterly, January 1882, Evolution and the Scripture, by Rev. John A. Earnest, pp. 101, 105; Glimpses in the Twilight, by Rev. F. G. Lee, D. D., Edinburgh, 1885, especially pp. 18 and 19; the Hibbert Lectures for 1883, by Rev. Charles Beard, pp. 392, 393, et seq.; F. W. Farrar, D. D., Canon of Westminster, The History of Interpretation, being the Bampton Lectures for 1885, pp. 426, 427; Bishop Temple, Bampton Lectures, pp. 184-186; article Evolution in the Dictionary of Religion, edited by Rev. William Benham, 1887; Prof. Huxley, An Episcopal Trilogy, Nineteenth Century, November, 1887–this article discusses three sermons delivered by the bishops of Carlisle, Bedford, and Manchester, in Manchester Cathedral, during the meeting of the British Association, September, 1887–these sermons were afterward published in pamphlet form under the title The Advance of Science; John Fiske, Darwinism, and Other Essays, Boston, 1888; Harriet Mackenzie, Evolution illuminating the Bible, London, 1891, dedicated to Prof. Huxley; H. E. Rye, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, The Early Narratives of Genesis, London, 1892, preface, pp. vii-ix, pp. 7, 9, 11; Rev. G. M. Searle, of the Catholic University, Washington, article in the Catholic World, November, 1892, pp. 223, 227, 229, 231; for the statement from Keble College, see Rev. Mr. Illingworth, in Lux Mundi. For Bishop Temple, see citation in Laing. For a complete and admirable acceptance of the evolutionary theory as lifting Christian doctrine and practice to a higher plane, with suggestions for a new theology, see two Sermons by Archdeacon Wilson, of Manchester, S. P. C. K.. London, and Young & Co., New York, 1893; and for a characteristically lucid statement of the most recent development of evolution doctrines, and the relations of Spencer, Weismann, Galton, and others to them, see Lester F. Ward’s Address as President of the Biological Society, Washington, 1891; also, recent articles in the leading English reviews. For a brilliant glorification of evolution by natural selection as a doctrine necessary to thenhighest and truest view of Christianity, see Prof. Drummond’s Chautaqua Lectures, published in the British Weekly, London, from April 20 to May 11, 1893.
CHAPTER II.
GEOGRAPHY.
I. THE FORM OF THE EARTH.
Among various rude tribes we find survivals of a primitive idea that the earth is a flat table or disk, ceiled, domed, or canopied by the sky, and that the sky rests upon the mountains as pillars. Such a belief is entirely natural; it conforms to the appearance of things, and hence at a very early period entered into various theologies.
In the civilizations of Chaldea and Egypt it was very fully developed. The Assyrian inscriptions deciphered in these latter years represent the god Marduk as in the beginning creating the heavens and the earth: the earth rests upon the waters; within it is the realm of the dead; above it is spread “the firmament”–a solid dome coming down to the horizon on all sides and resting upon foundations laid in the “great waters” which extend around the earth.
On the east and west sides of this domed firmament are doors, through which the sun enters in the morning and departs at night; above it extends another ocean, which goes down to the ocean surrounding the earth at the horizon on all sides, and which is supported and kept away from the earth by the firmament. Above the firmament and the upper ocean which it supports is the interior of heaven.
The Egyptians considered the earth as a table, flat and oblong, the sky being its ceiling–a huge “firmament” of metal. At the four corners of the earth were the pillars supporting this firmament, and on this solid sky were the “waters above the heavens.” They believed that, when chaos was taking form, one of the gods by main force raised the waters on high and spread them out over the firmament; that on the under side of this solid vault, or ceiling, or firmament, the stars were suspended to light the earth, and that the rains were caused by the letting down of the waters through its windows. This idea and others connected with it seem to have taken strong hold of the Egyptian priestly caste, entering into their theology and sacred science: ceilings of great temples, with stars, constellations, planets, and signs of the zodiac figured upon them, remain to-day as striking evidences of this.
In Persia we have theories of geography based upon similar conceptions and embalmed in sacred texts.
From these and doubtless from earlier sources common to them all came geographical legacies to the Hebrews. Various passages in their sacred books, many of them noble in conception and beautiful in form, regarding “the foundation of the earth upon the waters,” “the fountains of the great deep,” “the compass upon the face of the depth,” the “firmament,” the “corners of the earth,” the “pillars of heaven,” the “waters above the firmament,” the “windows of heaven,” and “doors of heaven,” point us back to both these ancient springs of thought.[25]
[25] For survivals of the early idea, among the Eskimos, of the sky as supported by mountains, and, among sundry Pacific islanders, of the sky as a firmament or vault of stone, see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, second edition, London, 1870, chap. xi; Spencer, Sociology, vol. i, chap vii, also Andrew Lang, La Mythologie, Paris, 1886, pp. 68-73. For the Babylonian theories, see George Smith’s Chaldean Genesis, and especially the German translation by Delitzsch, Leipsic, 1876; also, Jensen, Die Kosmogonien der Babylonier, Strasburg, 1890; see especially in the appendices, pp. 9 and 10, a drawing representing the whole Babylonian scheme so closely followed in the Hebrew book Genesis. See also Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmogonien der alten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, for a most thorough summing up of the whole subject, with texts showing the development of Hebrew out of Chaldean and Egyptian conceptions, pp. 44, etc.; also pp. 127 et seq. For the early view in India and Persia, see citations from the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. i. For the Egyptian view, see Champollion; also Lenormant, Histoire Ancienne, Maspero, and others. As to the figures of the heavens upon the ceilings of Egyptian temples, see Maspero, Archeologie Egyptienne, Paris, 1890; and for engravings of them, see Lepsius, Denkmaler, vol. i, Bl. 41, and vol. ix, Abth. iv, Bl. 35; also the Description de l’Egypte, published by order of Napoleon, tome ii, Pl. 14; also Prisse d’Avennes, Art Egyptien, Atlas, tome i, Pl. 35; and especially for a survival at the Temple of Denderah, see Denon, Voyage en Egypte, Planches 129, 130. For the Egyptian idea of “pillars of heaven,” as alluded to on the stele of victory of Thotmes III,in the Cairo Museum, see Ebers, Uarda, vol. ii,p. 175, note, Leipsic, 1877. For a similar Babylonian belief, see Sayce’s Herodotus, Appendix, p. 403. For the belief of Hebrew scriptural writers in a solid “firmament,” see especially Job, xxxviii, 18; also Smith’s Bible Dictionary. For engravings showing the earth and heaven above it as conceived by Egyptians and Chaldeans, with “pillars of heaven” and “firmament,” see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, London, 1894, pp. 17 and 543.
But, as civilization was developed, there were evolved, especially among the Greeks, ideas of the earth’s sphericity. The Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle especially cherished them. These ideas were vague, they were mixed with absurdities, but they were germ ideas, and even amid the luxuriant growth of theology in the early Christian Church these germs began struggling into life in the minds of a few thinking men, and these men renewed the suggestion that the earth is a globe.[26]
[26] The agency of the Pythagoreans in first spreading the doctrine of the earth’s sphericity is generally acknowledged, but the first full and clear utterance of it to the world was by Aristotle. Very fruitful, too, was the statement of the new theory given by Plato in the Timaeus; see Jowett’s translation, 62, c. Also the Phaedo, pp.449 et seq. See also Grote on Plato’s doctrine on the sphericity of the earth; also Sir G. C. Lewis’s Astronomy of the Ancients, London, 1862, chap. iii, section i, and note. Cicero’s mention of the antipodes, and his reference to the passage in the Timaeus, are even more remarkable than the latter, in that they much more clearly foreshadow the modern doctrine. See his Academic Questions, ii; also Tusc. Quest., i and v, 24. For a very full summary of the views of the ancients on the sphericity of the earth, see Kretschmer, Die physische Erkunde im christlichen Mittelalter, Wien, 1889, pp. 35 et seq.; also Eiken, Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, Stuttgart, 1887, Dritter Theil, chap. vi. For citations and summaries, see Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, vol. i, p. 189, and St. Martin, Hist. de la Geog., Paris, 1873, p. 96; also Leopardi, Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi, Firenze, 1851, chap. xii, pp. 184 et seq.
A few of the larger-minded fathers of the Church, influenced possibly by Pythagorean traditions, but certainly by Aristotle and Plato, were willing to accept this view, but the majority of them took fright at once. To them it seemed fraught with dangers to Scripture, by which, of course, they meant their interpretation of Scripture. Among the first who took up arms against it was Eusebius. In view of the New Testament texts indicating the immediately approaching, end of the world, he endeavoured to turn off this idea by bringing scientific studies into contempt. Speaking of investigators, he said, “It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them, but through contempt of their useless labour, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to better things.” Basil of Caesarea declared it “a matter of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan.” Lactantius referred to the ideas of those studying astronomy as “bad and senseless,” and opposed the doctrine of the earth’s sphericity both from Scripture and reason. St. John Chrysostom also exerted his influence against this scientific belief; and Ephraem Syrus, the greatest man of the old Syrian Church, widely known as the “lute of the Holy Ghost,” opposed it no less earnestly.
But the strictly biblical men of science, such eminent fathers and bishops as Theophilus of Antioch in the second century, and Clement of Alexandria in the third, with others in centuries following, were not content with merely opposing what they stigmatized as an old heathen theory; they drew from their Bibles a new Christian theory, to which one Church authority added one idea and another, until it was fully developed. Taking the survival of various early traditions, given in the seventh verse of the first chapter of Genesis, they insisted on the clear declarations of Scripture that the earth was, at creation, arched over with a solid vault, “a firmament,” and to this they added the passages from Isaiah and the Psalms, in which it declared that the heavens are stretched out “like a curtain,” and again “like a tent to dwell in.” The universe, then, is like a house: the earth is its ground floor, the firmament its ceiling, under which the Almighty hangs out the sun to rule the day and the moon and stars to rule the night. This ceiling is also the floor of the apartment above, and in this is a cistern, shaped, as one of the authorities says, “like a bathing-tank,” and containing “the waters which are above the firmament.” These waters are let down upon the earth by the Almighty and his angels through the “windows of heaven.” As to the movement of the sun, there was a citation of various passages in Genesis, mixed with metaphysics in various proportions, and this was thought to give ample proofs from the Bible that the earth could not be a sphere.[27]
[27] For Eusebius, see the Proep. Ev., xv, 61. For Basil, see the Hexaemeron, Hom. ix. For Lactantius, see his Inst. Div., lib. iii, cap. 3; also citations in Whewell, Hist. Induct. Sciences, London, 1857, vol. i, p. 194, and in St. Martin, Histoire de la Geographie, pp. 216, 217. For the views of St. John Chrysostom, Ephraem Syrus, and other great churchmen, see Kretschmer as above, chap i.
In the sixth century this development culminated in what was nothing less than a complete and detailed system of the universe, claiming to be based upon Scripture, its author being the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes. Egypt was a great treasure-house of theologic thought to various religions of antiquity, and Cosmas appears to have urged upon the early Church this Egyptian idea of the construction of the world, just as another Egyptian ecclesiastic, Athanasius, urged upon the Church the Egyptian idea of a triune deity ruling the world. According to Cosmas, the earth is a parallelogram, flat, and surrounded by four seas. It is four hundred days’ journey long and two hundred broad. At the outer edges of these four seas arise massive walls closing in the whole structure and supporting the firmament or vault of the heavens, whose edges are cemented to the walls. These walls inclose the earth and all the heavenly bodies.
The whole of this theologico-scientific structure was built most carefully and, as was then thought, most scripturally. Starting with the expression applied in the ninth chapter of Hebrews to the tabernacle in the desert, Cosmas insists, with other interpreters of his time, that it gives the key to the whole construction of the world. The universe is, therefore, made on the plan of the Jewish tabernacle–boxlike and oblong. Going into details, he quotes the sublime words of Isaiah: “It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth;…that stretcheth out the heavens like a curtain, and spreadeth them out like a tent to dwell in”; and the passage in Job which speaks of the “pillars of heaven.” He works all this into his system, and reveals, as he thinks, treasures of science.
This vast box is divided into two compartments, one above the other. In the first of these, men live and stars move; and it extends up to the first solid vault, or firmament, above which live the angels, a main part of whose business it is to push and pull the sun and planets to and fro. Next, he takes the text, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,” and other texts from Genesis; to these he adds the text from the Psalms, “Praise him, ye heaven of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens” then casts all, and these growths of thought into his crucible together, finally brings out the theory that over this first vault is a vast cistern containing “the waters.” He then takes the expression in Genesis regarding the “windows of heaven” and establishes a doctrine regarding the regulation of the rain, to the effect that the angels not only push and pull the heavenly bodies to light the earth, but also open and close the heavenly windows to water it.
To understand the surface of the earth, Cosmas, following the methods of interpretation which Origen and other early fathers of the Church had established, studies the table of shew-bread in the Jewish tabernacle. The surface of this table proves to him that the earth is flat, and its dimensions prove that the earth is twice as long as broad; its four corners symbolize the four seasons; the twelve loaves of bread, the twelve months; the hollow about the table proves that the ocean surrounds the earth. To account for the movement of the sun, Cosmas suggests that at the north of the earth is a great mountain, and that at night the sun is carried behind this; but some of the commentators ventured to express a doubt here: they thought that the sun was pushed into a pit at night and pulled out in the morning.
Nothing can be more touching in its simplicity than Cosmas’s summing up of his great argument, He declares, “We say therefore with Isaiah that the heaven embracing the universe is a vault, with Job that it is joined to the earth, and with Moses that the length of the earth is greater than its breadth.” The treatise closes with rapturous assertions that not only Moses and the prophets, but also angels and apostles, agree to the truth of his doctrine, and that at the last day God will condemn all who do not accept it.
Although this theory was drawn from Scripture, it was also, as we have seen, the result of an evolution of theological thought begun long before the scriptural texts on which it rested were written. It was not at all strange that Cosmas, Egyptian as he was, should have received this old Nile-born doctrine, as we see it indicated to-day in the structure of Egyptian temples, and that he should have developed it by the aid of the Jewish Scriptures; but the theological world knew nothing of this more remote evolution from pagan germs; it was received as virtually inspired, and was soon regarded as a fortress of scriptural truth. Some of the foremost men in the Church devoted themselves to buttressing it with new texts and throwing about it new outworks of theological reasoning; the great body of the faithful considered it a direct gift from the Almighty. Even in the later centuries of the Middle Ages John of San Geminiano made a desperate attempt to save it. Like Cosmas, he takes the Jewish tabernacle as his starting-point, and shows how all the newer ideas can be reconciled with the biblical accounts of its shape, dimensions, and furniture.[28]
[28] For a notice of the views of Cosmas in connection with those of Lactantius, Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, and others, see Schoell, Histoire de la Litterature Grecque, vol. vii, p. 37. The main scriptural passages referred to are as follows: (1) Isaiah xi, 22; (2) Genesis i, 6; (3) Genesis vii, 11; (4) Exodus xxiv, 10; (5) Job xxvi, 11, and xxxvii, 18 (6) Psalm cxlviii, 4, and civ, 9; (7) Ezekiel i, 22-26. For Cosmas’s theory, see Montfaucon, Collectio Nova Patrum, Paris, 1706, vol. ii, p.188; also pp. 298, 299. The text is illustrated with engravings showing walls and solid vault (firmament), with the whole apparatus of “fountains of the great deep,” “windows of heaven,” angels, and the mountain behind which the sun is drawn. For reduction of one of them, see Peschel, Gesschichte der Erdkunds, p. 98; also article Maps, in Knight’s Dictionary of Mechanics, New York, 1875. For curious drawings showing Cosmas’s scheme in a different way from that given by Montfaucon, see extracts from a Vatican codex of the ninth century in Garucci, Storia de l’Arte Christiana, vol. iii, pp. 70 et seq. For a good discussion of Cosmas’s ideas, see Santarem, Hist. de la Cosmographie, vol. ii, pp. 8 et seq., and for a very thorough discussion of its details, Kretschmer, as above. For still another theory, very droll, and thought out on similar principles, see Mungo Park, cited in De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 309. For Cosmas’s joyful summing up, see Montfaucon, Collectio Nova Patrum, vol. ii, p. 255. For the curious survival in the thirteenth century of the old idea of the “waters above the heavens,” see the story in Gervase of Tilbury, how in his time some people coming out of church in England found an anchor let down by a rope out of the heavens, how there came voices from sailors above trying to loose the anchor, and, finally, how a sailor came down the rope, who, on reaching the earth, died as if drowned in water. See Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, edit. Liebrecht, Hanover, 1856, Prima Decisio, cap. xiii. The work was written about 1211. For John of San Germiniano, see his Summa de Exemplis, lib. ix, cap. 43. For the Egyptian Trinitarian views, see Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. i, pp. 94, 102.
From this old conception of the universe as a sort of house, with heaven as its upper story and the earth as its ground floor, flowed important theological ideas into heathen, Jewish, and Christian mythologies. Common to them all are legends regarding attempts of mortals to invade the upper apartment from the lower. Of such are the Greek legends of the Aloidae, who sought to reach heaven by piling up mountains, and were cast down; the Chaldean and Hebrew legends of the wicked who at Babel sought to build “a tower whose top may reach heaven,” which Jehovah went down from heaven to see, and which he brought to naught by the “confusion of tongues”; the Hindu legend of the tree which sought to grow into heaven and which Brahma blasted; and the Mexican legend of the giants who sought to reach heaven by building the Pyramid of Cholula, and who were overthrown by fire from above.
Myths having this geographical idea as their germ developed in luxuriance through thousands of years. Ascensions to heaven and descents from it, “translations,” “assumptions,” “annunciations,” mortals “caught up” into it and returning, angels flying between it and the earth, thunderbolts hurled down from it, mighty winds issuing from its corners, voices speaking from the upper floor to men on the lower, temporary openings of the floor of heaven to reveal the blessedness of the good, “signs and wonders” hung out from it to warn the wicked, interventions of every kind–from the heathen gods coming down on every sort of errand, and Jehovah coming down to walk in Eden in the cool of the day, to St. Mark swooping down into the market-place of Venice to break the shackles of a slave–all these are but features in a vast evolution of myths arising largely from this geographical germ.
Nor did this evolution end here. Naturally, in this view of things, if heaven was a loft, hell was a cellar; and if there were ascensions into one, there were descents into the other. Hell being so near, interferences by its occupants with the dwellers of the earth just above were constant, and form a vast chapter in medieval literature. Dante made this conception of the location of hell still more vivid, and we find some forms of it serious barriers to geographical investigation. Many a bold navigator, who was quite ready to brave pirates and tempests, trembled at the thought of tumbling with his ship into one of the openings into hell which a widespread belief placed in the Atlantic at some unknown distance from Europe. This terror among sailors was one of the main obstacles in the great voyage of Columbus. In a medieval text-book, giving science the form of a dialogue, occur the following question and answer: “Why is the sun so red in the evening?” “Because he looketh down upon hell.”
But the ancient germ of scientific truth in geography–the idea of the earth’s sphericity–still lived. Although the great majority of the early fathers of the Church, and especially Lactantius, had sought to crush it beneath the utterances attributed to Isaiah, David, and St. Paul, the better opinion of Eudoxus and Aristotle could not be forgotten. Clement of Alexandria and Origen had even supported it. Ambrose and Augustine had tolerated it, and, after Cosmas had held sway a hundred years, it received new life from a great churchman of southern Europe, Isidore of Seville, who, however fettered by the dominant theology in many other things, braved it in this. In the eighth century a similar declaration was made in the north of Europe by another great Church authority, Bede. Against the new life thus given to the old truth, the sacred theory struggled long and vigorously but in vain. Eminent authorities in later ages, like Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Vincent of Beauvais, felt obliged to accept the doctrine of the earth’s sphericity, and as we approach the modern period we find its truth acknowledged by the vast majority of thinking men. The Reformation did not at first yield fully to this better theory. Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin were very strict in their adherence to the exact letter of Scripture. Even Zwingli, broad as his views generally were, was closely bound down in this matter, and held to the opinion of the fathers that a great firmament, or floor, separated the heavens from the earth; that above it were the waters and angels, and below it the earth and man.
The main scope given to independent thought on this general subject among the Reformers was in a few minor speculations regarding the universe which encompassed Eden, the exact character of the conversation of the serpent with Eve, and the like.
In the times immediately following the Reformation matters were even worse. The interpretations of Scripture by Luther and Calvin became as sacred to their followers as the Scripture itself. When Calixt ventured, in interpreting the Psalms, to question the accepted belief that “the waters above the heavens” were contained in a vast receptacle upheld by a solid vault, he was bitterly denounced as heretical.
In the latter part of the sixteenth century Musaeus interpreted the accounts in Genesis to mean that first God made the heavens for the roof or vault, and left it there on high swinging until three days later he put the earth under it. But the new scientific thought as to the earth’s form had gained the day. The most sturdy believers were obliged to adjust their, biblical theories to it as best they could.[29]
[29] For a discussion of the geographical views of Isidore and Bede, see Santarem, Cosmographie, vol i, pp. 22-24. For the gradual acceptance of the idea of the earth’s sphericity after the eighth century, see Kretschmer, pp. 51 et seq., where citations from a multitude of authors are given. For the views of the Reformers, see Zockler, vol. i, pp. 679 and 693. For Calixt, Musaeus, and others, ibid., pp. 673-677 and 761.
II. THE DELINEATION OF THE EARTH.
Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central city or most holy place as necessarily the centre of the earth.
The Chaldeans held that their “holy house of the gods” was the centre. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the centre of it Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was Babylon; for the Hindus, it was Mount Meru; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized world was concerned, Olympus or the temple at Delphi; for the modern Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone; the Chinese, to this day, speak of their empire as the “middle kingdom.” It was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human thought that the Jews believed the centre of the world to be Jerusalem.
The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy city. Throughout the “ages of faith” this was very generally accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding the earth’s form. St. Jerome, the greatest authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jerusalem could be nowhere but at the earth’s centre; in the ninth century Archbishop Rabanus Maurus reiterated the same argument; in the eleventh century Hugh of St. Victor gave to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration; and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the crusade, declared, “Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth”; in the thirteenth century an ecclesiastical writer much in vogue, the monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, declared, “As the heart in the midst of the body, so is Jerusalem situated in the midst of our inhabited earth,”–“so it was that Christ was crucified at the centre of the earth.” Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a certainty, wedding it to immortal verse; and in the pious book of travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, so widely read in the Middle Ages, it is declared that Jerusalem is at the centre of the world, and that a spear standing erect at the Holy Sepulchre casts no shadow at the equinox.
Ezekiel’s statement thus became the standard of orthodoxy to early map-makers. The map of the world at Hereford Cathedral, the maps of Andrea Bianco, Marino Sanuto, and a multitude of others fixed this view in men’s minds, and doubtless discouraged during many generations any scientific statements tending to unbalance this geographical centre revealed in Scripture.[30]
[30] For beliefs of various nations of antiquity that the earth’s center was in their most sacred place, see citations from Maspero, Charton, Sayce, and others in Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, chap. iv. As to the Greeks, we have typical statements in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, where the stone in the altar at Delphi is repeatedly called “the earth’s navel”–which is precisely the expression used regarding Jerusalem in the Septuagint translation of Ezekiel (see below). The proof texts on which the mediaeval geographers mainly relied as to the form of the earth were Ezekiel v, 5, and xxxviii, 12. The progress of geographical knowledge evidently caused them to be softened down somewhat in our King James’s version; but the first of them reads, in the Vulgate, “Ista est Hierusalem, in medio gentium posui eam et in circuitu ejus terrae”; and the second reads, in the Vulgate, “in medio terrae,” and in the Septuagint,
That the literal centre of the earth was understood, see proof in St. Jerome, Commentat. in Ezekiel, lib. ii; and for general proof, see Leopardi, Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi, pp. 207, 208. For Rabanus Maurus, see his De Universo, lib. xii, cap. 4, in Migne, tome cxi, p. 339. For Hugh of St. Victor, se his De Situ Terrarum, cap. ii. For Dante’s belief, see Inferno, canto xxxiv, 112-115:
“E se’ or sotto l’emisperio giunto,
Ch’ e opposito a quel che la gran secca Coverchia, e sotto il cui colmo consunto Fu l’uom che nacque e visse senza pecca.”
For orthodox geography in the Middle Ages, see Wright’s Essays on Archaeology, vol. ii, chapter on the map of the world in Hereford Cathedral; also the rude maps in Cardinal d’Ailly’s Ymago Mundi; also copies of maps of Marino Sanuto and others in Peschel, Erdkunde, p. 210; also Munster, Fac Simile dell’ Atlante di Andrea Bianco, Venezia, 1869. And for discussions of the whole subject, see Satarem, vol. ii, p. 295, vol. iii, pp. 71, 183, 184, and elsewhere. For a brief summary with citations, see Eiken, Geschichte, etc., pp. 622, 623.
Nor did medieval thinkers rest with this conception. In accordance with the dominant view that physical truth must be sought by theological reasoning, the doctrine was evolved that not only the site of the cross on Calvary marked the geographical centre of the world, but that on this very spot had stood the tree which bore the forbidden fruit in Eden. Thus was geography made to reconcile all parts of the great theologic plan. This doctrine was hailed with joy by multitudes; and we find in the works of medieval pilgrims to Palestine, again and again, evidence that this had become precious truth to them, both in theology and geography. Even as late as 1664 the eminent French priest Eugene Roger, in his published travels in Palestine, dwelt upon the thirty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel, coupled with a text from Isaiah, to prove that the exact centre of the earth is a spot marked on the pavement of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and that on this spot once stood the tree which bore the forbidden fruit and the cross of Christ.[31]
[31] For the site of the cross on Calvary, as the point where stood “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in Eden, at the centre of the earth, see various Eastern travellers cited in Tobler; but especially the travels of Bishop Arculf in the Holy Land, in Wright’s Early Travels in Palestine, p. 8; also Travels of Saewulf, ibid, p. 38; also Sir John Mandeville, ibid., pp. 166, 167. For Roger, see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664, pp. 89-217, etc.; see also Quaresmio, Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio, 1639, for similar view; and, for one narrative in which the idea was developed into an amazing mass of pious myths, see Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel, edited by Sir C. W. Wilson, London, 1885, p. 14. (The passage deserves to be quoted as an example of myth-making; it is as follows: “At the time of our Lord’s crucifixion, when he gave up the ghost on the cross, the veil of the temple was rent, and the rock above Adam’s skull opened, and the blood and water which flowed from Christ’s side ran down through the fissure upon the skull, thus washing away the sins of men.”)
Nor was this the only misconception which forced its way from our sacred writings into medieval map-making: two others were almost as marked. First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog and Magog. Few passages in the Old Testament are more sublime than the denunciation of these great enemies by Ezekiel; and the well-known statement in the Apocalypse fastened the Hebrew feeling regarding them with a new meaning into the mind of the early Church: hence it was that the medieval map-makers took great pains to delineate these monsters and their habitations on the maps. For centuries no map was considered orthodox which did not show them.
The second conception was derived from the mention in our sacred books of the “four winds.” Hence came a vivid belief in their real existence, and their delineation on the maps, generally as colossal heads with distended cheeks, blowing vigorously toward Jerusalem.
After these conceptions had mainly disappeared we find here and there evidences of the difficulty men found in giving up the scriptural idea of direct personal interference by agents of Heaven in the ordinary phenomena of Nature: thus, in a noted map of the sixteenth century representing the earth as a sphere, there is at each pole a crank, with an angel laboriously turning the earth by means of it; and, in another map, the hand of the Almighty, thrust forth from the clouds, holds the earth suspended by a rope and spins it with his thumb and fingers. Even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century Heylin, the most authoritative English geographer of the time, shows a like tendency to mix science and theology. He warps each to help the other, as follows: “Water, making but one globe with the earth, is yet higher than it. This appears, first, because it is a body not so heavy; secondly, it is observed by sailors that their ships move faster to the shore than from it, whereof no reason can be given but the height of the water above the land; thirdly, to such as stand on the shore the sea seems to swell into the form of a round hill till it puts a bound upon our sight. Now that the sea, hovering thus over and above the earth, doth not overwhelm it, can be ascribed only to his Providence who `hath made the waters to stand on an heap that they turn not again to cover the earth.'”[32]
[32] For Gog and Magog, see Ezekiel xxxviii and xxxix, and Rev. xx, 8; and for the general subject, Toy, Judaism and Christianity, Boston, 1891, pp. 373, 374. For maps showing these two great terrors, and for geographical discussion regarding them, see Lelewel, Geog. du Moyen Age, Bruxelles, 1850, Atlas; also Ruge, Gesch. des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, Berlin, 1881, pp. 78, 79; also Peschel’s Abhandlungen, pp.28-35, and Gesch. der Erdkunde, p. 210. For representations on maps of the “Four Winds,” see Charton, Voyageurs, tome ii, p. 11; also Ruge, as above, pp. 324, 325; also for a curious mixture of the scriptural winds issuing from the bags of Aeolus, see a map of the twelfth century in Leon Gautier, La Chevalerie, p. 153; and for maps showing additional winds, see various editions of Ptolemy. For a map with angels turning the earth by means of cranks at the poles, see Grynaeus, Novus Orbis, Basileae, 1537. For the globe kept spinning by the Almighty, see J. Hondius’s map, 1589; and for Heylin, his first folio, 1652, p. 27.
III. THE INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH.
Even while the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was undecided, another question had been suggested which theologians finally came to consider of far greater importance. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth naturally led to thought regarding its inhabitants, and another ancient germ was warmed into life–the idea of antipodes: of human beings on the earth’s opposite sides.
In the Greek and Roman world this idea had found supporters and opponents, Cicero and Pliny being among the former, and Epicurus, Lucretius, and Plutarch among the latter. Thus the problem came into the early Church unsolved.
Among the first churchmen to take it up was, in the East, St. Gregory Nazianzen, who showed that to sail beyond Gibraltar was impossible; and, in the West, Lactantius, who asked: “Is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads?. . . that the crops and trees grow downward?. . . that the rains and snow and hail fall upward toward the earth?. . . I am at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once erred, steadily persevere in their folly and defend one vain thing by another.”
In all this contention by Gregory and Lactantius there was nothing to be especially regretted, for, whatever their motive, they simply supported their inherited belief on grounds of natural law and probability.
Unfortunately, the discussion was not long allowed to rest on these scientific and philosophical grounds; other Christian thinkers followed, who in their ardour adduced texts of Scripture, and soon the question had become theological; hostility to the belief in antipodes became dogmatic. The universal Church was arrayed against it, and in front of the vast phalanx stood, to a man, the fathers.
To all of them this idea seemed dangerous; to most of them it seemed damnable. St. Basil and St. Ambrose were tolerant enough to allow that a man might be saved who thought the earth inhabited on its opposite sides; but the great majority of the fathers doubted the possibility of salvation to such misbelievers. The great champion of the orthodox view was St. Augustine. Though he seemed inclined to yield a little in regard to the sphericity of the earth, he fought the idea that men exist on the other side of it, saying that “Scripture speaks of no such descendants of Adam,” he insists that men could not be allowed by the Almighty to live there, since if they did they could not see Christ at His second coming descending through the air. But his most cogent appeal, one which we find echoed from theologian to theologian during a thousand years afterward, is to the nineteenth Psalm, and to its confirmation in the Epistle to the Romans; to the words, “Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” He dwells with great force on the fact that St. Paul based one of his most powerful arguments upon this declaration regarding the preachers of the gospel, and that he declared even more explicitly that “Verily, their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.” Thenceforth we find it constantly declared that, as those preachers did not go to the antipodes, no antipodes can exist; and hence that the supporters of this geographical doctrine “give the lie direct to King David and to St. Paul, and therefore to the Holy Ghost.” Thus the great Bishop of Hippo taught the whole world for over a thousand years that, as there was no preaching of the gospel on the opposite side of the earth, there could be no human beings there.
The great authority of Augustine, and the cogency of his scriptural argument, held the Church firmly against the doctrine of the antipodes; all schools of interpretation were now agreed–the followers of the allegorical tendencies of Alexandria, the strictly literal exegetes of Syria, the more eclectic theologians of the West. For over a thousand years it was held in the Church, “always, everywhere, and by all,” that there could not be human beings on the opposite sides of the earth, even if the earth had opposite sides; and, when attacked by gainsayers, the great mass of true believers, from the fourth century to the fifteenth, simply used that opiate which had so soothing an effect on John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century–securus judicat orbis terrarum.
Yet gainsayers still appeared. That the doctrine of the antipodes continued to have life, is shown by the fact that in the sixth century Procopius of Gaza attacks it with a tremendous argument. He declares that, if there be men on the other side of the earth, Christ must have gone there and suffered a second time to save them; and, therefore, that there must have been there, as necessary preliminaries to his coming, a duplicate Eden, Adam, serpent, and deluge.
Cosmas Indicopleustes also attacked the doctrine with especial bitterness, citing a passage from St. Luke to prove that antipodes are theologically impossible.
At the end of the sixth century came a man from whom much might be expected–St. Isidore of Seville. He had pondered over ancient thought in science, and, as we have seen, had dared proclaim his belief in the sphericity of the earth; but with that he stopped. As to the antipodes, the authority of the Psalmist, St. Paul, and St. Augustine silences him; he shuns the whole question as unlawful, subjects reason to faith, and declares that men can not and ought not to exist on opposite sides of the earth.[33]
[33]For the opinions of Basil, Ambrose, and others, see Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe, New York, 1872, vol. i, p. 279. Also Letronne, in Revue des Deux Mondes, March, 1834. For Lactantius, see citations already given. For St. Augustine’s opinion, see the De Civitate Dei, xvi, 9, where this great father of the church shows that the antipodes “nulla ratione credendum est.” For the unanimity of the fathers against the antipodes, see Zockler, vol. 1, p. 127. For a very naive summary, see Joseph Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, Grimston’s translation, republished by the Hakluyt Soc., chaps. vii and viii; also citations in Buckle’s Posthumous Works, vol. ii, p. 645. For Procopius of Gaza, see Kretschmer, p. 55. See also, on the general subject, Peschel, Geschichte der Erdkunde, pp. 96-97. For Isidore, see citations already given. To understand the embarrassment caused by these utterances of the fathers to scientific men of a later period, see letter of Agricola to Joachim Vadianus in 1514. Agricola asks Vadianus to give his views regarding the antipodes, saying that he himself does not know what to do, between the fathers on the one side and the learned men of modern times on the other. On the other hand, for the embarrassment caused to the Church by this mistaken zeal of the fathers, see Kepler’s references and Fromund’s replies; also De Morgan, Paradoxes, p. 58. Kepler appears to have taken great delight in throwing the views of Lactantius into the teeth of his adversaries.
Under such pressure this scientific truth seems to have disappeared for nearly two hundred years; but by the eighth century the sphericity of the earth had come to be generally accepted among the leaders of thought, and now the doctrine of the antipodes was again asserted by a bishop, Virgil of Salzburg.
There then stood in Germany, in those first years of the eighth century, one of the greatest and noblest of men–St. Boniface. His learning was of the best then known. In labours he was a