40 page printout Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship. This disk, its printout, or copies of either are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold. Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 **** **** THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. INTRODUCTION. My book is ready for the printer, and as I begin this preface my eye lights upon the crowd of Russian peasants at work on the Neva under my windows. With pick and shovel they are letting the rays of the April sun into the great ice barrier which binds together the modern quays and the old granite fortress where lie the bones of the Romanoff Czars. This barrier is already weakened; it is widely decayed, in many places thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is, as a whole, so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in shallows, so wedged into crannies on either shore, that it is a great danger. The waters from thousands of swollen streamlets above are pressing behind it; wreckage and refuse are piling up against it; every one knows that it must yield. But there is danger that it may resist the pressure too long and break suddenly, wrenching even the granite quays from their foundations, bringing desolation to a vast population, and leaving, after the subsidence of the flood, a widespread residue of slime, a fertile breeding-bed for the germs of disease. But the patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The barrier, exposed more and more to the warmth of spring by the scores of channels they are making, will break away gradually, and the river will flow on beneficent and beautiful. My work in this book is like that of the Russian mujiks on the Neva. I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to medieval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among us -- a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the whole normal evolution of society. For behind this barrier also the flood is rapidly rising -- the flood of increased knowledge and new thought; and this barrier also, though honeycombed and in many places thin, creates a danger -- danger of a sudden breaking away, distressing and calamitous, sweeping before it not only outworn creeds and noxious dogmas, but cherished principles and ideals, and even wrenching out most precious religious and moral foundations of the whole social and political fabric. My hope is to aid -- even if it be but a little -- in the gradual and healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason, that the stream of "religion pure and undefiled" may flow on broad and clear, a blessing to humanity. And now a few words regarding the evolution of this book. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 1 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. It is something over a quarter of a century since I labored with Ezra Cornell in founding the university which bears his honored name. Our purpose was to establish in the State of New York an institution for advanced instruction and research, in which science, pure and applied, should have an equal place with literature; in which the study of literature, ancient and modern, should be emancipated as much as possible from pedantry; and which should be free from various useless trammels and vicious methods which at that period hampered many, if not most, of the American universities and colleges. We had especially determined that the institution should be under the control of no political party and of no single religious sect, and with Mr. Cornell's approval I embodied stringent provisions to this effect in the charter. It had certainly never entered into the mind of either of us that in all this we were doing anything irreligious or unchristian. Mr. Cornell was reared a member of the Society of Friends; he had from his fortune liberally aided every form of Christian effort which he found going on about him, and among the permanent trustees of the public library which he had already founded, he had named all the clergymen of the town -- Catholic and Protestant. As for myself, I had been bred a churchman, had recently been elected a trustee of one church college, and a professor in another; those nearest and dearest to me were devoutly religious; and, if I may be allowed to speak of a matter so personal to myself, my most cherished friendships were among deeply religious men and women, and my greatest sources of enjoyment were ecclesiastical architecture, religious music, and the more devout forms of poetry. So far from wishing to injure Christianity, we both hoped to promote it; but we did not confound religion with sectarianism, and we saw in the sectarian character of American colleges and universities, as a whole, a reason for the poverty of the advanced instruction then given in so many of them. It required no great acuteness to see that a system of control which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or Language or Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first and above all to what sect or even to what wing or branch of a sect he belonged, could hardly do much to advance the moral, religious, or intellectual development of mankind. The reasons for the new foundation seemed to us, then, so cogent that we expected the cooperation of all good citizens, and anticipated no opposition from any source, As I look back across the intervening years, I know not whether to be more astonished or amused at our simplicity. Opposition began at once. In the State Legislature it confronted us at every turn, and it was soon in full blaze throughout the State -- from the good Protestant bishop who proclaimed that all professors should be in holy orders, since to the Church alone was given the command, "Go, teach all nations," to Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 2 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. the zealous priest who published a charge that Goldwin Smith -- a profoundly Christian scholar -- had come to Cornell in order to inculcate the "infidelity of the Westminster Review"; and from the eminent divine who went from city to city denouncing the "atheistic and pantheistic tendencies" of the proposed education, to the perfervid minister who informed a denominational synod that Agassiz, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a devout theist, was "preaching Darwinism and atheism" in the new institution. As the struggle deepened, as hostile resolutions were introduced into various ecclesiastical bodies, as honored clergymen solemnly warned their flocks first against the "atheism," then against the "infidelity," and finally against the "indifferentism "of the university, as devoted pastors endeavored to dissuade young men from matriculation, I took the defensive, and, in answer to various attacks from pulpits and religious newspapers, attempted to allay the fears of the public. "Sweet reasonableness" was fully tried. There was established and endowed in the university perhaps the most effective Christian pulpit, and one of the most vigorous branches of the Christian Association, then in the United States; but all this did nothing to ward off the attack. The clause in the charter of the university forbidding it to give predominance to the doctrines of any sect, and above all the fact that much prominence was given to instruction in various branches of science, seemed to prevent all compromise, and it soon became clear that to stand on the defensive only made matters worse. Then it was that there was borne in upon me a sense of the real difficulty -- the antagonism between the theological and scientific view of the universe and of education in relation to it; therefore it was that, having been invited to deliver a lecture in the great hall of the Cooper Institute at New York, I took as my subject The Battlefields of Science, maintaining this thesis which follows: In all modern history, interfere with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science, and invariably; and, on the other hand, all untrammelled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and of science. The lecture was next day published in the New York Tribune at the request of Horace Greeley, its editor, who was also one of the Cornell University trustees. As a result of this widespread publication and of sundry attacks which it elicited, I was asked to maintain my thesis before various university associations and literary clubs; and I shall always remember with gratitude that among those who stood by me and presented me on the lecture platform with words of approval and cheer was my revered instructor, the Rev. Dr. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, at that time President of Yale College. My lecture grew -- first into a couple of magazine articles, and then into a little book called The Warfare of Science, for which, when republished in England, Prof. John Tyndall wrote a preface. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 3 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. Sundry translations of this little book were published, but the most curious thing in its history is the fact that a very friendly introduction to the Swedish translation was written by a Lutheran bishop. Meanwhile Prof, John W. Draper published his book on The Conflict between Science and Religion, a work of great ability, which, as I then thought, ended the matter, So far as my giving it further attention was concerned. But two things led me to keep on developing my own work in this field: First, I had become deeply interested in it, and could not refrain from directing my observation and study to it; secondly, much as I admired Draper's treatment of the questions involved, his point of view and mode of looking at history were different from mine. He regarded the struggle as one between Science and Religion. I believed then, and am convinced now, that it was a struggle between Science and Dogmatic Theology. More and more I saw that it was the conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought -- the theological and the scientific. So I kept on, and from time to time published New Chapters in the rene as mag of Science magazine articles in The Popular Science Monthly. This was done under many difficulties. For twenty years, as President of Cornell University and Professor of History in that institution, I was immersed in the work of its early development. Besides this, I could not hold myself entirely aloof from public affairs, and was three times sent by the Government of the United States to do public duty abroad: first as a commissioner to Santo Domingo, in 1870; afterward as minister to Germany, in 1879; finally, as minister to Russia, in 1892; and was also called upon by the State of New York to do considerable labor in connection with international exhibitions at Philadelphia and at Paris. I was also obliged from time to time to throw off by travel the effects of overwork. The variety of residence and occupation arising from these causes may perhaps explain some peculiarities in this book which might otherwise puzzle my reader. While these journeyings have enabled me to collect materials over a very wide range -- in the New World, from Quebec to Santo Domingo and from Boston to Mexico, San Francisco, and Seattle, and in the Old World from Trondhjem to Cairo and from St. Petersburg to Palermo -- they have often obliged me to write under circumstances not very favorable: sometimes on an Atlantic steamer, sometimes on a Nile boat, and not only in my, own library at Cornell, but in those of Berlin, Helsingfors, Munich, Florence, and the British Museum. This fact will explain to the benevolent reader not only the citation of different editions of the same authority in different chapters, but some iterations which in the steady quiet of my own library would not have been made. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 4 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. It has been my constant endeavor to write for the general reader, avoiding scholastic and technical terms as much as possible and stating the truth simply as it presents itself to me. That errors of omission and commission will be found here and there is probable -- nay, certain; but the substance of the book will, I believe, be found fully true. I am encouraged in this belief by the fact that, of the three bitter attacks which this work in its earlier form has already encountered, one was purely declamatory, objurgatory, and hortatory, and the others based upon ignorance of facts easily pointed out. And here I must express my thanks to those who have aided me. First and above all to my former student and dear friend, Prof. George Lincoln Burr, of Cornell University, to whose contributions, suggestions, criticisms, and cautions I am most deeply indebted; also to my friends U.G. Weatherly, formerly Travelling Fellow of Cornell, and now Assistant Professor in the University of Indiana, -- Prof. and Mrs. Earl Barnes and Prof. William H. Hudson, of Stanford University, -- and Prof. E. P. Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan, but now of Munich, for extensive aid in researches upon the lines I have indicated to them, but which I could never have prosecuted without their cooperation. In libraries at home and abroad they have all worked for me most effectively, and I am deeply grateful to them. This book is presented as a sort of Festschrift -- a tribute to Cornell University as it enters the second quarter-century of its existence, and probably my last tribute. The ideas for which so bitter a struggle was made at its foundation have triumphed. Its faculty, numbering over one hundred and fifty; its students numbering but little short of two thousand; its noble buildings and equipment; the munificent gifts, now amounting to millions of dollars, which it has received from public-spirited men and women; the evidences of public confidence on all sides; and, above all, the adoption of its cardinal principles and main features by various institutions of learning in other States, show this abundantly. But there has been a triumph far greater and wider. Everywhere among the leading modern nations the same general tendency is seen. During the quarter-century, just past the control of public instruction, not only in America but in the leading nations of Europe, has passed more and more from the clergy to the laity. Not only are the presidents of the larger universities in the United States, with but one or two exceptions, laymen, but the same thing is seen in the old European strongholds of metaphysical theology. At my first visit to Oxford and Cambridge, forty years ago, they were entirely under ecclesiastical control. Now, all this is changed. An eminent member of the present British Government has recently said, "A candidate for high university position is handicapped by holy orders." I refer to this with not the slightest feeling of hostility toward the clergy, for I have none; among them are many of my dearest friends; no one honors their proper work more than I; but the above fact is simply noted as proving the continuance of that evolution which I have endeavored to describe in this series of monographs -- an evolution, indeed, in which the warfare of Theology against Science Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 5 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. has been one of the most active and powerful agents. My belief is that in the field left to them -- their proper field -- the clergy will more and more, as they cease to struggle against scientific methods and conclusions, do work even nobler and more beautiful than anything they have heretofore done. And this is saying much. My conviction is that Science, though it has evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on biblical texts and ancient modes of thought, will go hand in hand with Religion; and that, although theological control will continue to diminish, Religion, as seen in the recognition of "a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," and in the love of God and of our neighbor, will steadily grow stronger and stronger, not only in the American institutions of learning but in the world at large. Thus may the declaration of Micah as to the requirements of Jehovah, the definition by St. James of "pure religion and undefiled," and, above all, the precepts and ideals of the blessed Founder of Christianity himself, be brought to bear more and more effectively on mankind. I close this preface some days after its first lines were written. The sun of spring has done its work on the Neva the great river flows tranquilly on, a blessing and a joy; the mujiks are forgotten. A.D.W. LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES, ST. PETERSBURG, April 14, 1894. P.S. -- Owing to a wish to give more thorough revision to some parts of my work, it has been withheld from the press until the present date. CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y., August 15, 1895. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* In this computerized version of this work all footnotes will follow immediately after the astrach (*) and not at the bottom of the page as in the printed voliams. These notes will be between lines at the top and bottom (the same as this note) and we suggest these notes be skipped over when reading for general information. This is necessary to prevent the notes from being misplaced in the various electronic formats this work will be transfered into. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. CHAPTER I. FROM CREATION TO EVOLUTION. I. THE VISIBLE UNIVERSE. AMONG those masses of cathedral sculpture which preserve so much of medieval theology, one frequently recurring group is noteworthy for its presentment of a time-honored doctrine regarding the origin of the universe. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 6 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. The Almighty, in human form, sits benignly, making the sun, moon, and stars, and hanging them from the solid firmament which supports the "heaven above" and overarches the "earth beneath." The furrows of thought on the Creator's brow show that in this work he is obliged to contrive; the knotted muscles upon his arms show that he is obliged to toil; naturally, then, the sculptors and painters of the medieval and early modern period frequently represented him as the writers whose conceptions they embodied had done -- as, on the seventh day, weary after thought and toil, enjoying well-earned repose and the plaudits of the hosts of heaven. In these thought-fossils of the cathedrals, and in other revelations of the same idea through sculpture, painting, glass- staining, mosaic work, and engraving, during the Middle Ages and the two centuries following, culminated a belief which had been developed through thousands of years, and which has determined the world's thought until our own time. Its beginnings lie far back in human history; we find them among the early records of nearly all the great civilizations, and they hold a most prominent place in the various sacred books of the world. In nearly all of them is revealed the conception of a Creator of whom man is an imperfect image, and who literally and directly created the visible universe with his hands and fingers. Among these theories, of especial interest to us are those which controlled theological thought in Chaldea. The Assyrian inscriptions which have been recently recovered and given to the English-speaking peoples by Layard, George Smith, Sayce, and others, show that in the ancient religions of Chaldea and Babylonia there was elaborated a narrative of the creation which, in its most important features, must have been the source of that in our own sacred books. It has now become perfectly clear that from the same sources which inspired the accounts of the creation of the universe among the Chaldco-Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Phoenician, and other ancient civilizations came the ideas which hold so prominent a place in the sacred books of the Hebrews. In the two accounts imperfectly fused together in Genesis, and also in the account of which we have indications in the book of job and in the Proverbs, there is presented, often Avith the greatest sublimity, the same early conception of the Creator and of the creation -- the conception, so natural in the childhood of civilization, of a Creator who is an enlarged human being working literally with his own hands, and of a creation which is "the work of his fingers." To supplcirient this view there was developed the belief in this Creator as one who, having . . ."from his ample palm Launched forth the rolling planets into space," sits on high, enthroned "upon the circle of the heavens," perpetually controlling and directing them. From this idea of creation was evolved in time a somewhat nobler view. Ancient thinkers, and especially, as is now found, in Egypt, suggested that the main agency in creation was not the hands Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 7 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. and fingers of the Creator, but his voice. Hence was mingled with the earlier, cruder belief regarding the origin of the earth and heavenly bodies by the Almighty the more impressive idea that "he spake and they were made" -- that they were brought into existence by his word.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* Among the many mediaeval representations of the creation of the universe, I especially recall from personal observation those sculptured above the portals of the cathedrals of Freiburg and Upsala, the paintings on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa, and, most striking of all, the mosaics of the Cathedral of Monreale and those in the Cappella Palatina at Palermo. Among peculiarities showing the simplicity of the earlier conception the representation of the repose of the Almighty on the seventh day is very striking. He is shown as seated in almost the exact attitude of the "weary Mercury" of classic sculpture -- bent, and with a very marked expression of fatigue upon his countenance and in the whole disposition of his body. The Monreale mosaics are painted in the great work of Gravina, and the Pisa frescoes in Didron's Iconographie, Paris, 1843, p. 598. For an exact statement of the resemblances which have settled the question among the most eminent scholars in favour of the derivation of the Hebrew cosmogony from that of Assyria, see Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 304, 306; also Franz Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmographien der alten Volker, Leipsic, 1893, pp. 3546; also George Smith's Chaldean Genesis, especially the German translation with additions by Delitzsch, Leipsic, 1876, and Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, Giessen, 1883, pp. 1-54, etc. See also Renan, Histoire du peuple d'Israel, vol. i, chap. i, L'antique influence babylonienne. Fro Egyptian views regarding creation, and especially for the transition from the idea of creation by the hands and fingers of the Creator to creation by his voice and his "word," see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of Civilization, pp. 145-146. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ Among the early fathers of the Church this general view of creation became fundamental; they impressed upon Christendom more and more strongly the belief that the universe was created in a perfectly literal sense by the hands or voice of God. Here and there sundry theologians of larger mind attempted to give a more spiritual view regarding some parts of the creative work, and of these were St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine. Ready as they were to accept the literal text of Scripture, they revolted against the conception of an actual creation of the universe by the hands and fingers of a Supreme Being, and in this they were followed by Bede and a few others; but the more material conceptions prevailed, and we find these taking shape not only in the sculptures and mosaics and stained glass of cathedrals, and in the illuminations of missals and psalters, but later, at the close of the Middle Ages, in the pictured Bibles and in general literature. Into the Anglo-Saxon mind this ancient material conception of the creation was riveted by two poets whose works appealed especially to the deeper religious feelings. In the seventh century Coedmon paraphrased the account given in Genesis, bringing out this Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 8 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. material conception in the most literal form; and a thousand years later Milton developed out of the various statements in the Old Testament, mingled with a theology regarding "the creative Word" which had been drawn from the New, his description of the creation by the second person in the Trinity, than which nothing could be more literal and material: "He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe and all created things. One foot he centered, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, ' Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds: This be thy just circumference, O world!" * ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and the general subject of the development of an evolution theory among the Greeks, see the excellent work by Dr. Osborn, 'From the Greeks to Darwin, pp. 33 and following; for Caedmon, see any edition -- I have used Bouterwek's, Gutersloh, 1854; for Milton, see Paradise Lost, book vii, lines 225-231. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ So much for the orthodox view of the manner of creation. The next point developed in this theologic evolution had reference to the matter of which the universe was made, and it was decided by an overwhelming majority that no material substance existed before the creation of the material universe -- that "God created everything out of nothing." Some venturesome thinkers, basing their reasoning upon the first verses of Genesis, hinted at a different view -- namely, that the mass, "without form and void," existed before the universe; but this doctrine was soon swept out of sight. The vast majority of the fathers were explicit on this point. Tertullian especially was very severe against those who took any other view than that generally accepted as orthodox: he declared that, if there had been any preexisting matter out of which the world was formed, Scripture would have mentioned it; that by not mentioning it God has given us a clear proof that there was no such thing; and, after a manner not unknown in other theological controversies, he threatens Hermogenes, who takes the opposite view, with "the woe which impends on all who add to or take away from the written word." St. Augustine, who showed signs of a belief in a preexistence of matter, made his peace with the prevailing belief by the simple reasoning that, "although the world has been made of some material, that very same material must have been made out of nothing." In the wake of these great men the universal Church steadily followed. The Fourth Lateran Council declared that God created everything out of nothing; and at the present hour the vast majority of the faithful -- whether Catholic or Protestant -- are taught the same doctrine; on this point the syllabus of Pius IX and the Westminster Catechism fully agree.* Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 9 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For Tertullian, see Tertullian against Hermogenes, chaps. xx and xxii; for St. Augustine regarding "creation from nothing," see the De Genesi contra Manichaeos, lib. i, cap. vi; for St. Ambrose, see the Hexameron, lib. i, cap. iv; for the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council, and the view received in the Church to-day, see the article Creation in Addis and Arnold's Catholic Dictionary. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ Having thus disposed of the manner and matter of creation, the next subject taken up by theologians was the time required for the great work. Here came a difficulty. The first of the two accounts given in Genesis extended the creative operation through six days, each of an evening and a morning, with much explicit detail regarding the progress made in each. But the second account spoke of "the day" in which "the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." The explicitness of the first account and its Naturalness to the minds of the great mass of early theologians gave it at first a decided advantage; but Jewish thinkers, like Philo, and Christian thinkers, like Origen, forming higher conceptions of the Creator and his work, were not content with this, and by them was launched upon the troubled sea of Christian theology the idea that the creation was instantaneous, this idea being strengthened not only by the second of the Genesis legends, but by the great text, "He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast" -- or, as it appears in the Vulgate and in most translations, "He spake, and they were made; be commanded, and they were created." As a result, it began to be held that the safe and proper course was to believe literally both statements; that in some mysterious manner God created the universe in six days, and yet brought it all into existence in a moment. In spite of the outcries of sundry great theologians, like Ephrem Syrus, that the universe was created in exactly six days of twenty-four hours each, this compromise was promoted by St. Athanasius and St. Basil in the East, and by St. Augustine and St. Hilary in the West. Serious difficulties were found in reconciling these two views, which to the natural mind seem absolutely contradictory; but by ingenious manipulation of texts, by dexterous play upon phrases, and by the abundant use of metaphysics to dissolve away facts, a reconciliation was effected, and men came at least to believe that they believed in a creation of the universe instantaneous and at the same time extended through six days.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For Origen, see his Contra Cesum, cap. xxxvi, xxxvii also his De Principibus, cap. v; for St. Augustine, see his De Genesi contra Manichaeos and De Genesi ad Litteram, passim; for Athanasius, see his Discourses against the Arians, ii, 48, 49. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ Some of the efforts to reconcile these two accounts were so fruitful as to deserve especial record. The fathers, Eastern and Western, developed out of the double account in Genesis, and the indications in the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the book of Job, a Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 10 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. vast mass of sacred science bearing upon this point. As regards the whole work of creation, stress was laid upon certain occult powers in numerals. Philo Judaeus, while believing in an instantaneous creation, had also declared that the world was created in six days because" of all numbers six is the most productive"; he had explained the creation of the heavenly bodies on the fourth day by "the harmony of the number four"; of the animals on the fifth day by the five senses; of man on the sixth day by the same virtues in the number six which had caused it to be set as a limit to the creative work; and, greatest of all, the rest on the seventh day by the vast mass of mysterious virtues in the number seven. St. Jerome held that the reason why God did not pronounce the work of the second day "good" is to be found in the fact that there is something essentially evil in the number two, and this was echoed centuries afterward, afar off in Britain, by Bede. St. Augustine brought this view to bear upon the Church in the following statement: "There are three classes of numbers -- the more than perfect, the perfect, and the less than perfect, according as the sum of them is greater than, equal to, or less than the original number. Six is the first perfect number: wherefore we must not say that six is a perfect number because God finished all his works in six days, but that God finished all his works in six days because six is a perfect number." Reasoning of this sort echoed along through the medieval Church until a year after the discovery of America, when the Nuremberg Chronicle re-echoed it as follows: "The creation of things is explained by the number six, the parts of which, one, two, and three, assume the form of a triangle." This view of the creation of the universe as instantaneous and also as in six days, each made up of an evening and a morning, became virtually universal. Peter Lombard and Hugo of St. Victor, authorities of vast weight, gave it their sanction in the twelfth century, and impressed it for ages upon the mind of the Church. Both these lines of speculation -- as to the creation of everything out of nothing, and the reconciling of the instantaneous creation of the universe with its creation in six days -- were still further developed by other great thinkers of the Middle Ages. St. Hilary of Poictiers reconciled the two conceptions as follows: "For, although according to Moses there is an appearance of regular order in the fixing of the firmament, the laying bare of the dry land, the gathering together of the waters, the formation of the heavenly bodies, and the arising of living things from land and water, yet the creation of the heavens, earth, and other elements is seen to be the work of a single moment." St. Thomas Aquinas drew from St. Augustine a subtle distinction which for ages cased the difficulties in the case he taught in effect that God created the substance of things in a moment, but gave to the work of separating, shaping, and adorning this creation, six days.* Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 11 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For Philo Judaeus, see his Creation of the World, chap. iii; for St. Augustine on the powers of numbers in creation, see his De Genesi ad Litteram, iv, chap. ii; for Peter Lombard, see the Sentential, lib. ii, dist. xv, 5; and for Hugo of St. Victor, see De Sacramentis, lib. i, pars i; also, Annotat. Elucidate in Pentateuchum, cap. v, vi, vii; for St. Hilary, see De Trinitate, lib. xii; for St. Thomas Aquinas, see his Summa Theologies, quest. lxxxiv, arts. i and ii; the passage in the Aluremberg Chronicle, 1493, is in fol. iii; for Bossuet, see his Dissours sur l'Histoire Universelle; for the sacredness of the number seven among the Babylonians, see especially Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, pp. 21, 22; also George Smith et al,; for general ideas on the occult powers of various numbers, especially the number seven, and the influence of these ideas on theology and science, see my chapter on astronomy. As to medieval ideas on the same subject, see Detzel, Christliche Ikonografihie, Freiburg, 1894, pp. 44 and following. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ The early reformers accepted and developed the same view, and Luther especially showed himself equal to the occasion. With his usual boldness he declared, first, that Moses "spoke properly and plainly, and neither allegorically nor figuratively," and that therefore "the world with all creatures was created in six days." And he then goes on to show how, by a great miracle, the whole creation was also instantaneous. Melanchthon also insisted that the universe was created out of nothing and in a mysterious way, both in an instant and in six days, citing the text: "He spake, and they were made." Calvin opposed the idea of an instantaneous creation, and laid especial stress on the creation in six days: having called attention to the fact that the biblical chronology shows the world to be not quite six thousand years old and that it is now near its end, he says that "creation was extended through six days that it might not be tedious for us to occupy the whole of life in the consideration of it." Peter Martyr clinched the matter by declaring: "So important is it to comprehend the work of creation that we see the creed of the Church take this as its starting point. Were this article taken away there would be no original sin, the promise of Christ would become void, and all the vital force of our religion would be destroyed." The Westminster divines in drawing up their Confession of Faith specially laid it down as necessary to believe that all things visible and invisible were created not only out of nothing but in exactly six days. Nor were the Roman divines less strenuous than the Protestant reformers regarding the necessity of holding closely to the so- called Mosaic account of creation. As late as the middle of the eighteenth century, when Buffon attempted to state simple geological truths, the theological faculty of the Sorbonne forced Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 12 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. him to make and to publish a most ignominious recantation which ended with these words: "I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses." Theologians, having thus settled the manner of the creation, the matter used in it, and the time required for it, now exerted themselves to fix its date. The long series of efforts by the greatest minds in the Church, from Eusebius to Archbishop Usher, to settle this point are presented in another chapter. Suffice it here that the general conclusion arrived at by an overwhelming majority of the most competent students of the biblical accounts was that the date of creation was, in round numbers, four thousand years before our era; and in the seventeenth century, in his great work, Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and one of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his time, declared, as the result of his most profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures, that "heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water," and that "this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine o'clock in the morning." Here was, indeed, a triumph of Lactantius's method, the result of hundreds of years of biblical study and theological thought since Bede in the eighth century, and Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth, had declared that creation must have taken place in the spring. Yet, alas! within two centuries after Lightfoot's great biblical demonstration as to the exact hour of creation, it was discovered that at that hour an exceedingly cultivated people, enjoying all the fruits of a highly developed civilization, had long been swarming in the great cities of Egypt, and that other nations hardly less advanced had at that time reached a high development in Asia.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For Luther, see his Commentary on Genesis, 1545, introduction, and his comments on chap. i, verse 12; the quotations from Luther's commentary are taken mainly from the translation by Henry Cole, D. D., Edinburgh, 1858; for Melanchthon, see Loci Theologici, in Melanchthon, Malanchthon, Opera, ed. Betschneider, vol. xxi, pp. 269, 270, also pp. 637, 638 -- in quoting the text (Ps. xxiii, 9) I have used, as does Melanchthon himself, the form of the Vulgate; for the citations from Calvin, see his Commentary on Genesis (Opera omnia, Amsterdam, 1671, tom. i, cap. ii, p. 8); also in the Institutes, Allen's translation, London, 1838, Vol- i, chap. xv, pp. 126, 127; for Peter Martyr, see his Commentary on Genesis, cited by Zbckler, vol. i, p. 690; for the articles in the Westminster Confession of Faith, see chap. iv; for Buffon's recantation, see Lyell, Principles of Theology, chap. iii, p. 57. For Lightfoot's declaration, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 13 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. But, strange as it may seem, even after theologians had thus settled the manner of creation, the matter employed in it, the time required for it, and the exact date of it, there remained virtually unsettled the first and greatest question of all; and this was nothing less than the question, WHO actually created the universe? Various theories more or less nebulous, but all centered in texts of Scripture, had swept through the mind of the Church. By some theologians it was held virtually that the actual creative agent was the third person of the Trinity, who, in the opening words of our sublime creation poem, "moved upon the face of the waters." By others it was held that the actual Creator was the second person of the Trinity, in behalf of whose agency many texts were cited from the New Testament. Others held that the actual Creator was the first person, and this view was embodied in the two great formulas known as the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, which explicitly assigned the work to "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." Others, finding a deep meaning in the words "Let us make," ascribed in Genesis to the Creator, held that the entire Trinity directly created all things; and still others, by curious metaphysical processes, seemed to arrive at the idea that peculiar combinations of two persons of the Trinity achieved the creation. In all this there would seem to be considerable courage in view of the fearful condemnations launched in the Athanasian Creed against all who should "confound the persons" or "divide the substance of the Trinity." These various stages in the evolution of scholastic theology were also embodied in sacred art, and especially in cathedral sculpture, in glass-staining, in mosaic working, and in missal painting. The creative Being is thus represented sometimes as the third person of the Trinity, in the form of a dove brooding over chaos; sometimes as the second person, and therefore a youth; sometimes as the first person, and therefore fatherly and venerable; sometimes as the first and second persons, one being venerable and the other youthful; and sometimes as three persons, one venerable and one youthful, both wearing papal crowns, and each holding in his lips a tip of the wing of the dove, which thus seems to proceed from both and to be suspended between them. Nor was this the most complete development of the medieval idea. The Creator was sometimes represented with a single body, but with three faces, thus showing that Christian belief had in some pious minds gone through substantially the same cycle which an earlier form of belief had made ages before in India, when the Supreme Being was represented with one body but with the three faces of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. But at the beginning of the modern period the older view in its primitive Jewish form was impressed upon Christians by the most mighty genius in art the world has known; for in 1512, after four years of Titanic labor, Michael Angelo uncovered his frescoes within the vault of the Sistine Chapel. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 14 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. They had been executed by the command and under the sanction of the ruling Pope, Julius II, to represent the conception of Christian theology then dominant, and they remain to-day in all their majesty to show the highest point ever attained by the older thought upon the origin of the visible universe. In the midst of the expanse of heaven the Almighty Father -- the first person of the Trinity -- in human form, august and venerable, attended by angels and upborne by mighty winds, Sweeps over the abyss, and, moving through successive compartments of the great vault, accomplishes the Work of the creative days. With a simple gesture he divides the light from the darkness, rears on high the solid firmament, gathers together beneath it the seas, or summons into existence the sun, moon, and planets, and sets them circling about the earth. In this sublime work culminated the thought of thousands of years; the strongest minds accepted it or pretended to accept it, and nearly two centuries later this conception, in accordance with the first of the two accounts given in Genesis, was especially enforced by Bossuet, and received a new lease of life in the Church, both Catholic and Protestant.* But to these discussions was added yet another, which, beginning in the early days of the Church, was handed down the ages until it had died out among the theologians of our own time.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For strange representations of the Creator and of the creation by one, two, or three persons of the Trinity, see Didron, Icomografihie Chretienne, pp. 35, 178, 224, 483, 567-580), and elsewhere; also DetzeI as already cited. The most naive of all survivals of the medieval idea of creation which the present writer has ever seen was exhibited in 1894 on the banner of one of the guilds at the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Munich Cathedral. Jesus of Nazareth, as a beautiful boy and with a nimbus encircling his head, was shown turning and shaping the globe on a lathe, which he keeps in motion with his foot. The emblems of the Passion are about him, God the Father looking approvingly upon him from a cloud, and the dove hovering between the two. The date upon the banner was 1727. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ In the first of the biblical accounts light is created and the distinction between. day and night thereby made on the first day, while the sun and moon are not created until the fourth day. Masses of profound theological and pseudo-scientific reasoning have been developed to account for this -- masses so great that for ages they have obscured the simple fact that the original text is a precious revelation to us of one of the most ancient of recorded beliefs -- the belief that light and darkness are entities independent of the heavenly bodies, and that the sun, moon, and stars exist not merely to increase light but to "divide the day from the night, to be for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years," and "to rule the day and the night." Of this belief we find survivals among the early fathers, and especially in St. Ambrose. In his work on creation he tells us: "We must remember that the light of day is one thing and the light of Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 15 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. the sun, moon, and stars another -- the sun by his rays appearing to add lustre to the daylight. For before sunrise the day dawns, but is not in full refulgence, for the sun adds still further to its splendor." This idea became, one of the "treasures of sacred knowledge committed to the Church," and was faithfully received by the Middle Ages. The medieval mysteries and miracle plays give curious evidences of this: In a performance of the creation, when God separates light from darkness, the stage direction is, "Now a painted cloth is to be exhibited, one half black and the other half white." It was also given more permanent form. In the mosaics of San Marco at Venice, in the frescoes of the Baptistery at Florence and of the Church of St. Francis at Assisi, and in the altar carving at Salerno, we find a striking realization of it -- the Creator placing in the heavens two disks or living figures of equal size, each suitably colored or inscribed to show that one represents light and the other darkness. This conception was without doubt that of the person or persons who compiled from the Chaldean and other earlier statements the accounts of the creation in the first of our sacred books.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For scriptural indications of the independent existence of light and darkness, compare with the first verses of the first chapter of Genesis such passages as Job xxxviii, 19, 24; for the general prevalence of this early view, see Lukas, Kosmogonie PP. 31, 33, 41, 74, and passim; for the view of St. Ambrose regarding the creation of light and of the sun, see his ffexameron, lib. 4, cap. iii; for an excellent general statement, see Huxley, Mr. Gladstone and Genesis, in the Nineteenth Century, 1886, reprinted in his Essays on Contriverted Questions, London, 1892, note, pp. 126 et seq.; for the acceptance in the miracle plays of the scriptural idea of light and darkness as independent creations, see Wright, Essays on Archaeological Subjects, vol. ii, P. 178; for an account, with illustrations, of the mosaics, etc., representing this idea, see Tikkanen, Die Genesis-mosaiken von San Marco, Helsingfors, 1889, pp. 14 and 16 of text and Plates I and II. Very naively the Salerno carver, not wishing to color the ivory which he wrought, has inscribed on one disk the word "LUX" and on the other "NOX." See also Didron, Iconographie, P. 482. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ Thus, down to a period almost within living memory, it was held, virtually "always, everywhere, and by all," that the universe, as we now see it, was created literally and directly by the voice or hands of the Almighty, or by both -- out of nothing -- in an instant or in six days, or in both -- about four thousand years before the Christian era -- and for the convenience of the dwellers upon the earth, which was at the base and foundation of the whole structure. But there had been implanted along through the ages germs of another growth in human thinking, some of them even as early as the Babylonian period. In the Assyrian inscriptions we find recorded the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of an evolution of the universe out of the primeval flood or "great deep," and of the animal creation out of the earth and sea. This idea, recast, partially at least, into mono-theistic form, passed naturally into the sacred books of the Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 16 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. neighbors and pupils of the Chaldeans -- the Hebrews; but its growth in Christendom afterward was checked, as we shall hereafter find, by the more powerful influence of other inherited statements which appealed more intelligibly to the mind of the Church. Striking, also, was the effect of this idea as rewrought by the early Ionian philosophers, to whom it was probably transmitted from the Chaldeans through the Phoenicians. In the minds of Ionians like Anaximander and Anaximenes it was most clearly developed: the first of these conceiving of the visible universe as the result of processes of evolution, find the latter pressing further the same mode of reasoning, and dwelling on agencies in cosmic development recognized in modern science. This general idea of evolution in Nature thus took strong hold upon Greek thought and was developed in many ways, some ingenious, some perverse. Plato, indeed, withstood it; but Aristotle sometimes developed it in a manner which reminds us of modern views. Among the Romans Lucretius caught much from it, extending the evolutionary process virtually to all things. In the early Church, as we have seen, the idea of a creation direct, material, and by means like those used by man, was all- powerful for the exclusion of conceptions based on evolution. From the more simple and crude of the views of creation given in the Babylonian legends, and thence incorporated into Genesis, rose the stream of orthodox thought on the subject, which grew into a flood and swept on through the Middle Ages and into modern times. Yet here and there in the midst of this flood were high grounds of thought held by strong men. Scotus Erigena and Duns Scotus, among the schoolmen, bewildered though they were, had caught some rays of this ancient light, and passed on to their successors, in modified form, doctrines of an evolutionary process in the universe. In the latter half of the sixteenth century these evolutionary theories seemed to take more definite form in the mind of Giordano Bruno, who evidently divined the fundamental idea of what is now known as the "nebular hypothesis"; but with his murder by the Inquisition at Rome this idea seemed utterly to disappear -- dissipated by the flames which in 1600 consumed his body on the Campo dei Fiori. Yet within the two centuries divided by Bruno's death the world was led into a new realm of thought in which an evolution theory of the visible universe was sure to be rapidly developed. For there came, one after the other, five of the greatest men our race has produced -- Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton -- and when their work was done the old theological conception of the universe was gone. "The spacious firmament on high" -- "the crystalline spheres" -- the Almighty enthroned upon "the circle of the heavens," and with his own hands, or with angels as his agents, keeping sun, moon, and planets in motion for the benefit of the earth, opening and closing the "windows of heaven," letting down upon the earth the "waters above the firmament," "setting his bow in the cloud," hanging out "signs and wonders," hurling comets, "casting forth lightnings" to scare the wicked, and "shaking the earth " in his wrath: all this had disappeared. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 17 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. These five men had given a new divine revelation to the world; and through the last, Newton, had come a vast new conception, destined to be fatal to the old theory of creation, for he had shown throughout the universe, in place of almighty caprice, all- pervading law. The bitter opposition of theology to the first four of these men is well known; but the fact is not so widely known that Newton, in spite of his deeply religious spirit, was also strongly opposed. It was vigorously urged against him that by his statement of the law of gravitation he "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," 'and that he "substituted gravitation for Providence." But, more than this, these men gave a new basis for the theory of evolution as distinguished from the theory of creation. Especially worthy of note is it that the great work of Descartes, erroneous as many of its deductions were, and, in view of the lack of physical knowledge in his time, must be, had done much to weaken the old conception. His theory of a universe brought out of all-pervading matter, wrought into orderly arrangement by movements in accordance with physical laws -- though it was but a provisional hypothesis -- had done much to draw men's minds from the old theological view of creation; it was an example of intellectual honesty arriving at errors, but thereby aiding the advent of truths. Crippled though Descartes was by his almost morbid fear of the Church, this part of his work was no small factor in bringing in that attitude of mind which led to a reception of the thoughts of more unfettered thinkers. Thirty years later came, in England, an effort of a different sort, but with a similar result. In 1678 Ralph Cudworth published his Intellectual System of the Universe. To this day he remains, in breadth of scholarship, in strength of thought, in tolerance, and in honesty, one of the greatest glories of the English Church, and his work was worthy of him. He purposed to build a fortress which should protect Christianity against all dangerous theories of the universe, ancient or modern. The foundations of the structure were laid with old thoughts thrown often into new and striking forms; but, as the superstructure arose more and more into view, while genius marked every part of it, features appeared which gave the rigidly orthodox serious misgivings. From the old theories of direct personal action on the universe by the Almighty he broke utterly. He dwelt on the action of law, rejected the continuous exercise of miraculous intervention, pointed out the fact that in the natural world there are "errors" and "bungles," and argued vigorously in favor of the origin and maintenance of the universe as a slow and gradual development of Nature in obedience to an inward principle. The Balaks of seventeenth-century orthodoxy might well condemn this honest Baalim. Toward the end of the next century a still more profound genius, Immanuel Kant, presented the nebular theory, giving it, in the light of Newton's great utterances, a consistency which it never before had; and about the same time Laplace gave it yet greater strength by mathematical reasoning of wonderful power and extent, thus implanting firmly in modern thought the idea that our Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 18 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. own solar system and others -- suns and planets, satellites, and their various movements, distances, and magnitudes -- necessarily result from the obedience of nebulous masses to natural laws. Throughout the theological world there was an outcry at once against "atheism," and war raged fiercely. Herschel and others pointed out many nebulous patches apparently gaseous. They showed by physical and mathematical demonstrations that the hypothesis accounted for the great body of facts, and, despite clamor, were gaining ground, when the improved telescopes resolved some of the patches of nebulous matter into multitudes of stars. The opponents of the nebular hypothesis were overjoyed; they now sang paeans to astronomy, because, as they said, it had proved the truth of Scripture. They had jumped to the conclusion that all nebulae must be alike; that, if some are made up of systems of stars, all must be so made up; that none can be masses of attenuated gaseous matter, because some are not. Science halted for a time. The accepted doctrine became this: that the only reason why all the nebulae are not resolved into distinct stars is that our telescopes are not sufficiently powerful. But in time came the discovery of the spectroscope and spectrum analysis, and thence Fraunhofer's discovery that the spectrum of an ignited gaseous body is non-continuous, with interrupting lines; and Draper's discovery that the spectrum of an ignited solid is continuous, with no interrupting lines. And now the spectroscope was turned upon the nebulae, and many of them were found to be gaseous. Here, then, was ground for the inference that in these nebulous masses at different stages of condensation -- some apparently mere patches of mist, some with luminous centers -- we have the process of development actually going on, and observations like those of Lord Rosse and Arrest gave yet further confirmation to this view. Then came the great contribution of the nineteenth century to physics, aiding to explain important parts of the vast process by the mechanical theory of heat. Again the nebular hypothesis came forth stronger than ever, and about 1850 the beautiful experiment of Plateau on the rotation of a fluid globe came in apparently to illustrate if not to confirm it. Even so determined a defender of orthodoxy as Mr. Gladstone at last acknowledged some form of a nebular hypothesis as probably true. Here, too, was exhibited that form of surrendering theological views to science under the claim that science concurs with theology, which we have seen in so many other fields; and, as typical, an example may be given, which, however restricted in its scope, throws light on the process by which such surrenders are obtained. A few years since one of the most noted professors of chemistry in the city of New York, under the auspices of one of its most fashionable churches, gave a lecture which, as was claimed in the public prints and in placards posted in the streets, was to show that science supports the theory of creation given in the sacred books ascribed to Moses. A large audience assembled, and a brilliant series of elementary experiments with oxygen, hydrogen, and carbonic acid was concluded by the Plateau demonstration. It was beautifully made. As the colored globule of oil, representing Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 19 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. the earth, was revolved in a transparent medium of equal density, as it became flattened at the poles, as rings then broke forth from it and revolved about it, and, finally, as some of these rings broke into satellites, which for a moment continued to circle about the central mass, the audience, as well they might, rose and burst into rapturous applause. Thereupon a well-to-do citizen arose and moved the thanks of the audience to the eminent professor for "this perfect demonstration of the exact and literal conformity of the statements given in Holy Scripture with the latest results of science." The motion was carried unanimously and with applause, and the audience dispersed, feeling that a great service had been rendered to orthodoxy. Sancta silplicitas! What this incident exhibited on a small scale has been seen elsewhere with more distinguished actors and on a broader stage. Scores of theologians, chief among whom of late in zeal if not in knowledge, has been Mr. Gladstone, have endeavored to "reconcile" the two accounts in Genesis with each other and with the truths regarding the origin of the universe gained by astronomy, geology, geography, physics, and chemistry. The result has been recently stated by an eminent theologian, the Hulsean Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He declares, "No attempt at reconciling Genesis with the exacting requirements of modern sciences has ever been known to succeed without entailing a degree of special pleading or forced interpretation to which, in such a question, we should be wise to have no recourse."* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For an interesting reference to the outcry against Newton, see McCosh, The Religious Aspect of Evolution, New York, 1890, pp. 103, 104; for germs of an evolutionary view among the Babylonians, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, pp. 74, 75; for a germ of the same thought in Lucretius, see his De Natura Rerum, lib. v, pp. 187-194, 447-454; for Bruno's conjecture (in 1591), see Jevons, Ptincifiks of Science, London, 1874, vol. ii, p. 299; for Kant's statement, see his Naturgeschichte des Hitnmets; for his part in the nebular hypothesis, see Lange, Geschichte def Materialismus, vol. i. p. 266; for value of Plateau's beautiful experiment, very cautiously estimated, see Jevons, vol. ii, p. 36; also Elisic Reclus, The Earth, translated by Woodward, vol. i, pp, 14-18, for an estimate still more careful; for a general account of discoveries of the nature of nebulae by spectroscope, see Draper, Conflict between Religion and Science; for a careful discussion regarding the spectra of solid, liquid, and gaseous bodies, see Schellen, Spectrum Analysis, pp. 100 et seg.; for a very thorough discussion of the bearings of discoveries made by spectrum analysis upon the nebular hypothesis, ibid., pp. 532-537; for a presentation of the difficulties yet unsolved, see an article by Plummer in the London Popular Science Review for January 1875; for an excellent short summary of recent observations and thought on this subject, see T. Sterry Hunt, Address at the Priestley Centennial, pp. 7, 8; for an interesting modification of this hypothesis, see Proctor's writings; for a still more recent view, see Lockyer's two articles on The Sun's Place in Nature, in Nature for February 14 and 25, 1895. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 20 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. The revelations of another group of sciences, though sometimes bitterly opposed and sometimes "reconciled" by theologians, have finally set the whole question at rest. First, there have come the biblical critics -- earnest Christian scholars, working for the sake of truth -- and these have revealed beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt the existence of at least two distinct accounts of creation in our book of Genesis, which can sometimes be forced to agree, but which are generally absolutely at variance with each other. These scholars have further shown the two accounts to be not the cunningly devised fables of priestcraft, but evidently fragments of earlier legends, myths, and theologies, accepted in good faith and brought together for the noblest of purposes by those who put in order the first of our sacred books. Next have come the archaeologists and philologists, the devoted students of ancient monuments and records; of these are such as Rawlinson, George Smith, Sayce, Oppert, Jensen, Schrader, Delitzsch, and a phalanx of similarly devoted scholars, who have deciphered a multitude of ancient texts, especially the inscriptions found in the great library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, and have discovered therein an account of the origin of the world identical in its most important features with the later accounts in our own book of Genesis. These men have had the courage to point out these facts and to connect them with the truth that these Chaldean and Babylonian myths, legends, and theories were far earlier than those of the Hebrews, which so strikingly resemble them, and which we have in our sacred books; and they have also shown us how natural it was that the Jewish accounts of the creation should have been obtained at that remote period when the earliest Hebrews were among the Chaldeans, and how the great Hebrew poetic accounts of creation were drawn either from the sacred traditions of these earlier peoples or from antecedent sources common to various ancient nations. In a summary which for profound thought and fearless integrity does honor not only to himself but to the great position which he holds, the Rev. Dr. Driver, Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church at Oxford, has recently stated the case fully and fairly. Having pointed out the fact that the Hebrews were one people out of many who thought upon the origin of the universe, he says that they "framed theories to account for the beginnings of the earth and man"; that "they either did this for themselves or borrowed those of their neighbors that "of the theories current in Assyria and Phoenicia fragments have been preserved, and these exhibit points of resemblance with the biblical narrative sufficient to warrant the inference that both are derived from the same cycle of tradition." After giving some extracts from the Chaldean creation tablets he say: "In the light of these facts it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the biblical narrative is drawn from the same source as these other records. The biblical historians, it is plain, derived their materials from the best human sources Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 21 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. available. . . . The materials which with other nations were combined into the crudest physical theories or associated with a grotesque polytheism were vivified and transformed by the inspired genius of the Hebrew historians, and adapted to become the vehicle of profound religious truth." Not less honorable to the sister university and to himself is the statement recently made by the Rev. Dr. Ryle, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. He says that to suppose that a Christian "must either renounce his confidence in the achievements of scientific research or abandon his faith in Scripture is a monstrous perversion of Christian freedom." He declares: "The old position is no longer tenable; a new position has to be taken up at once, prayerfully chosen, and hopefully held." He then goes on to compare the Hebrew story of creation with the earlier stories developed among kindred peoples, and especially with the preexisting Assyro-Babylonian cosmogony, and shows that they are from the same source. He points out that any attempt to explain particular features of the story into harmony with the modern scientific ideas necessitates "a non-natural "interpretation; but he says that, if we adopt a natural interpretation, "we shall consider that the Hebrew description of the visible universe is unscientific as judged by modern standards, and that it shares the limitations of the imperfect knowledge of the age at which it was committed to writing." Regarding the account in Genesis of man's physical origin, he says that it "is expressed in the simple terms of prehistoric legend, of unscientific pictorial description." In these statements and in a multitude of others made by eminent Christian investigators in other countries is indicated what the victory is which has now been fully won over the older theology. Thus, from the Assyrian researches as well as from other sources, it has come to be acknowledged by the most eminent scholars at the leading seats of Christian learning that the accounts of creation with which for nearly two thousand years all scientific discoveries have had to be "reconciled" -- the accounts which blocked the way of Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and Laplace -- were simply transcribed or evolved from a mass of myths and legends largely derived by the Hebrews from their ancient relations with Chaldea, rewrought in a monotheistic sense, imperfectly welded together, and then thrown into poetic forms in the sacred books which we have inherited. On one hand, then, we have the various groups of men devoted to the physical sciences all converging toward the proofs that the universe, as we at present know it, is the result of an evolutionary process -- that is, of the gradual working of physical laws upon an early condition of matter; on the other hand, we have other great groups of men devoted to historical, philological, and archaeological science whose researches all converge toward the conclusion that our sacred accounts of creation were the result of an evolution from an early chaos of rude opinion. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 22 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. The great body of theologians who have so long resisted the conclusions of the men of science have claimed to be fighting especially for "the truth of Scripture," and their final answer to the simple conclusions of science regarding the evolution of the material universe has been the cry, "The Bible is true." And they are right -- though in a sense nobler than they have dreamed. Science, while conquering them, has found in our Scriptures a far nobler truth than that literal historical exactness for which theologians have so long and so vainly contended. More and more as we consider the results of the long struggle in this field we are brought to the conclusion that the inestimable value of the great sacred books of the world is found in their revelation of the steady striving of our race after higher conceptions, beliefs, and aspirations, both in morals and religion. Unfolding and exhibiting this long-continued effort, each of the great sacred books of the world is precious, and all, in the highest sense, are true. Not one of them, indeed, confirms to the measure of what mankind has now reached in historical and scientific truth; to make a claim to such conformity is folly, for it simply exposes those who make it and the books for which it is made to loss of their just influence. That to which the great sacred books of the world conform, and our own most of all, is the evolution of the highest conceptions, beliefs, and aspirations of our race from its childhood through the great turning-points in its history. Herein lies the truth of all bibles, and especially of our own. Of vast value they indeed often are as a record of historical outward fact; recent researches in the East are constantly increasing this value; but it is not for this that we prize them most: they are eminently precious, not as a record of outward fact, but as a mirror of the evolving heart, mind, and soul of man. They are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to scoff at the law of the universe. In welding together into noble form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and modern science, in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for the old -- the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea of evolution for that of creation -- has added and is steadily adding a new revelation divinely inspired. In the light of these two evolutions, then -- One of the visible universe, the other of a sacred creation-legend -- science and theology, if the master minds in both are wise, may at last be reconciled. A great step in this reconciliation was recently seen at the main center of theological thought among English-speaking people, when, in the collection of essays entitled Lux Mundi, emanating from the college established in these latter days as a fortress of orthodoxy at Oxford, the legendary character of the creation accounts in our sacred books was acknowledged, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury asked, "May not the Holy Spirit at times have made use of myth and legend?* Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 23 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For the first citations above made, see The Cosmogony of Genesis, by the Rev. S. R. Driver, D. D., Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, in The Expositor for January, 1886; for the second series of citations, see The Early Narratives of Genesis, by Herbert Edward Ryle, Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, London, 1892. For evidence that even the stiffest of Scotch Presbyterians have now come to discard the old literal biblical narrative of creation and to regard the declaration of the Westminster Confession thereon as a "disproved theory of creation," see Principal John Tulloch, in Contemporary Review, March, 1877, on Religious Thought in Scotland -- especially page 550. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ II. THEOLOGICAL TEACHINGS REGARDING THE ANIMALS AND MAN. IN one of the windows of the cathedral at Ulm a medieval glass-stainer has represented the Almighty as busily engaged in creating the animals, and there has just left the divine hands an elephant fully accoutred, with armor, harness, and housings, ready for war. Similar representations appear in illuminated manuscripts and even in early printed books, and, as the culmination of the whole, the Almighty is shown as fashioning the first man from a hillock of clay and extracting from his side, with evident effort, the first woman. This view of the general process of creation bad come from far, appearing under varying forms in various ancient cosmogonies. In the Egyptian temples at Philae and Denderah may still be seen representations of the Nile gods modelling lumps of clay into men, and a similar work is ascribed in the Assyrian tablets to the gods of Babylonia. Passing into our own sacred books, these ideas became the starting point of a vast new development of theology.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For representations of Egyptian gods creating men out of lumps of clay, see Maspero and Sayce, Tee Dawn of History, p. 156 for the Chaldean legends of the creation of men and animals, see ibid., p. 543 also George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, Sayce's edition, pp. 36, 72, and 93; also for similar legends in other ancient nations, Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire, pp. 17 et seq.; for medieval representations of the creation of man and woman, see Didron, Iconografihie, pp- 35, 78, 224, 537. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ The fathers of the Church generally received each of the two conflicting creation legends in Genesis literally, and then, having done their best to reconcile them with each other and to mould them together, made them the final test of thought upon the universe and all things therein. At the beginning of the fourth century Lactantius struck the keynote of this mode of subordinating all other things in the study of creation to the literal text of Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 24 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. Scripture, and he enforces his view of the creation of man by a bit of philology, saying the final being created "is called man because he is made from the ground -- homo ex hilmo." In the second half of the same century this view as to the literal acceptance of the sacred text was reasserted by St. Ambrose, who, in his work on the creation, declared that "Moses opened his mouth and poured forth what God had said to him." But a greater than either of them fastened this idea into the Christian theologies. St. Augustine, preparing his Commentary on the Book of Genesis, laid down in one famous sentence the law which has lasted in the Church until our own time: "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind." The vigor of the sentence in its original Latin carried it ringing down the centuries: "Major est Scripture, auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenii capacitas." Through the medieval period, in spite of a revolt led by no other than St. Augustine himself, and followed by a series of influential churchmen, contending, as we shall hereafter see, for a modification of the accepted view of creation, this phrase held the minds of men firmly. The great Dominican encyclopaedist, Vincent of Beauvais, in his Mirror of Nature, while mixing ideas brought from Aristotle with a theory drawn from the Bible, stood firmly by the first of the accounts given in Genesis, and assigned the special virtue of the number six as a reason why all things were created in six days; and in the later Middle Ages that eminent authority, Cardinal d'Ailly, accepted everything regarding creation in the sacred books literally. Only a faint dissent is seen in Gregory Reisch, another authority of this later period, who, while giving, in his book on the beginning of things, a full-length woodcut showing the Almighty in the act of extracting Eve from Adam's side, with all the rest of new-formed Nature in the background, leans in his writings, like St. Augustine, toward a belief in the preexistence of matter. At the Reformation the vast authority of Luther was thrown in favor of the literal acceptance of Scripture as the main source of natural science. The allegorical and mystical interpretations of earlier theologians he utterly rejected. "Why," he asks, "should Moses use allegory when he is not speaking of allegorical creatures or of an allegorical world, but of real creatures and of a visible world, which can be seen, felt, and grasped? Moses calls things by their right names, as we ought to do. . . . I hold that the animals took their being at once upon the word of God, as did also the fishes in the sea." Not less explicit in his adherence to the literal account of creation given in Genesis was Calvin. He warns those who, by taking another view than his own, "basely insult the Creator, to expect a judge who will annihilate them." He insists that all species of animals were created in six days, each made up of an evening and a morning, and that no new species has ever appeared since. He dwells on the production of birds from the water as resting upon certain warrant of Scripture, but adds, "If the question is to be argued on physical grounds, we know that water is more akin to air than the Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 25 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. earth is." As to difficulties in the scriptural account of creation, he tells us that God "wished by these to give proofs of his power which should fill us with astonishment." The controlling minds in the Roman Church steadfastly held this view. In the seventeenth century Bossuct threw his vast authority in its favor, and in his Discourse oiz Universal History, which has remained the foundation not only of theological but of general historical teaching in France down to the present republic, we find him calling attention to what he regards as the culminating act of creation, and asserting that, literally, for the creation of man earth was used, and "the finger of God applied to corruptible matter." The Protestant world held this idea no less persistently. In the seventeenth century Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the great rabbinical scholar of his time, attempted to reconcile the two main legends in Genesis by saying that of the "clean sort of beasts there were seven of every kind created, three couples for breeding and the odd one for Adam's sacrifice on his fall, which God foresaw"; and that of unclean beasts only one couple was created. So literal was this whole conception of the work of creation that in these days it can scarcely be imagined. The Almighty was represented in theological literature, in the pictured Bibles, and in works of art generally, as a sort of enlarged and venerable Nuremberg toy-maker. At times the accounts in Genesis were illustrated with even more literal exactness; thus, in connection with a well-known passage in the sacred text, the Creator was shown as a tailor, seated, needle in hand, diligently sewing together skins of beasts into coats for Adam and Eve. Such representations presented no difficulties to the docile minds of the Middle Ages and the Reformation period; and in the same spirit, when the discovery of fossils began to provoke thought, these were declared to be "models of his works approved or rejected by the great Artificer," "outlines of future creations," "sports of Nature," or "objects placed in the strata to bring to naught human curiosity"; and this kind of explanation lingered on until in our own time an eminent naturalist, in his anxiety to save the literal account in Genesis, has urged that Jehovah tilted and twisted the strata, scattered the fossils through them, scratched the glacial furrows upon them, spread over them the marks of erosion by water, and set Niagara pouring -- all in an instant -- thus mystifying the world "for some inscrutable purpose, but for his own glory."* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For the citation from Lactantius, see Divin. Instit., lib. ii, cap. xi, in Migne, tome vi, pp. 311, 312; for St. Augustine's great phrase, see the De Genes. ad litt., ii, 5; for St. Ambrose, see lib. i, cap. ii; for Vincent of Beauvais, see the Speculum Naturale, lib. i, cap. ii, and lib. ii, cap. xv and xxx; also Bourgeat, Etudes sur Vincent de Beauvais, Paris, 1856, especially chaps. vii, xii, and xvi; for Cardinal d'Ailly, see the Imago Mundi, and for Reisch, see the various editions of the Margarita Philosofihica; for Luther's statements, see Luther's Schriften, ed. Walch, Halle, 1740, Commentary on Genesis, vol. i; Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 26 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. for Calvin's view of the creation of the animals, including the immutability of species, see the Comm. in Gen., tome i of his Opera. omnia, Amst., 1671, cap. i, v, xx, p. 5, also cap. ii, v, ii, p. 8, and elsewhere; for Bossuet, see his Discours sur l'Histoire universelle (in his Euvres, tome v, Paris, 1846); for Lightfoot, see his works, edited by Pitman, London, 1822; for Bede, see the Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, p. 21; for Mr. Gosse's modern defence of the literal view, see his Omphalos, London, 1857, passim. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ The next important development of theological reasoning had regard to the divisions of the animal kingdom. Naturally, one of the first divisions which struck the inquiring mind was that between useful and noxious creatures, and the question therefore occurred, How could a good God create tigers and serpents, thorns and thistles? The answer was found in theological considerations upon sin. To man's first disobedience all woes were due. Great men for eighteen hundred years developed the theory that before Adam's disobedience there was no death, and therefore neither ferocity nor venom, Some typical utterances in the evolution of this doctrine are worthy of a passing glance. St. Augustine expressly confirmed and emphasized the view that the vegetable as well as the animal kingdom was cursed on account of man's sin. Two hundred years later this utterance had been echoed on from father to father of the Church until it was caught by Bede; he declared that before man's fall animals were harmless, but were made poisonous or hurtful by Adam's sin, and he said, "Thus fierce and poisonous animals were created for terrifying man (because God foresaw that he would sin), in order that he might be made aware of the final punishment of hell." In the twelfth century this view was incorporated by Peter Lombard into his great theological work, the Sentences, which became a text-book of theology through the middle ages. He affirmed that "no created things would have been hurtful to man had he not sinned; they became hurtful for the sake of terrifying and punishing vice or of proving and perfecting virtue; they were created harmless, and on account of sin became hurtful." This theological theory regarding animals was brought out in the eighteenth century with great force by John Wesley. He declared that before Adam's sin" none of these attempted to devour or in any wise hurt one another"; "the spider was as harmless as the fly, and did not lie in wait for blood." Not only Wesley, but the eminent Dr. Adam Clarke and Dr. Richard Watson, whose ideas had the very greatest weight among the English Dissenters, and even among leading thinkers in the Established Church, held firmly to this theory; so that not until, in our own time, geology revealed the remains of vast multitudes of carnivorous creatures, many of them with half-digested remains of other animals in their stomachs, all extinct long ages before the appearance of man upon earth, was a victory won by science over theology in this field. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 27 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. A curious development of this doctrine was seen in the belief drawn by sundry old commentators from the condemnation of the serpent in Genesis -- a belief, indeed, perfectly natural, since it was evidently that of the original writers of the account preserved in the first of our sacred books. This belief was that, until the tempting serpent was cursed by the Almighty, all serpents stood erect, walked, and talked. This belief was handed down through the ages as part of "the sacred deposit of the faith" until Watson, the most prolific writer of the evangelical reform in the eighteenth century and the standard theologian of the evangelical party, declared: "We have no reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in any mode or degree until its transformation; that he was then degraded to a reptile to go upon his belly imports, on the contrary, an entire loss and alteration of the original form." Here, again, was a ripe result of the theologic method diligently pursued by the strongest thinkers in the Church during nearly two thousand years; but this "sacred deposit" also faded away when the geologists found abundant remains of fossil serpents dating from periods long before the appearance of man. Troublesome questions also arose among theologians regarding animals classed as "superfluous." St. Augustine was especially exercised thereby. He says: "I confess I am ignorant why mice and frogs were created, or flies and worms. . . . All creatures are either useful, hurtful, or superfluous to us. . . . As for the hurtful creatures, we are either punished, or disciplined, or terrified by them, so that we may not cherish and love this life." As to the "superfluous animals," he says, "Although they are not necessary for our service, yet the whole design of the universe is thereby completed and finished." Luther, who followed St. Augustine in so many other matters, declined to follow him fully in this. To him a fly was not merely superfluous, it was noxious -- sent by the devil to vex him when reading. Another subject which gave rise to much searching of Scripture and long trains of theological reasoning was the difference between the creation of man and that of other living beings. Great stress was laid by theologians, from St. Basil and St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and Bossuct, and from Luther to Wesley, on the radical distinction indicated in Genesis, God having created man "in his own image." What this statement meant was seen in the light of the later biblical statement that "Adam begat Seth in his own likeness, after his image." In view of this and of well-known texts incorporated from older creation legends into the Hebrew sacred books it came to be widely held that, while man was directly molded and fashioned separately by the Creator's hand, the animals generally were evoked in numbers from the earth and sea by the Creator's voice. A question now arose naturally as to the distinctions of species among animals. The vast majority of theologians agreed in representing all animals as created "in the beginning," and named by Adam, preserved in the ark, and continued ever afterward under Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 28 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. exactly the same species. This belief ripened into a dogma. Like so many other dogmas in the Church, Catholic and Protestant, its real origins are to be found rather in pagan philosophy than in the Christian Scriptures; it came far more from Plato and Aristotle than from Moses and St. Paul. But this was not considered: more and more it became necessary to believe that each and every difference of species was impressed by the Creator "in the beginning," and that no change had taken place or could have taken place since. Some difficulties arose here and there as zoology progressed and revealed ever-increasing numbers of species; but through the Middle Ages, and indeed long after the Reformation, these difficulties were easily surmounted by making the ark of Noah larger and larger, and especially by holding that there had been a human error in regard to its measurement.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For St. Augustine, see De Genesi and De Tinitate, passim; for Bede, see Hexameron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-38, 42; and De Sex Dierum Creations, in Migne, tome xciii, p, 215; for Peter Lombard on "noxious animals," see his Sententice, lib. ii, dist. xv, 3, Migne, tome cxcii, p. 682; for Wesley, Clarke, and Watson, see quotations from them and notes thereto in my chapter on Geology; for St. Augustine on "superfluous animals," see the De Genesi, lib. i, Cap. xvi, 26; on Luther's view of flies, see the Table Talk and his famous utterance, "Odio muscas quia sunt imagines diaboli et hereticorum"; for the agency of Aristotle and Plato in fastening the belief in the fixity of species into Christian theology, see Sachs, Geschichee der Botanik, Munchen, 1875, P. 107 and note, also p. 113. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ But naturally there was developed among both ecclesiastics and laymen a human desire to go beyond these special points in the history of animated beings -- a desire to know what the creation really is. Current legends, stories, and travellers' observations, poor as they were, tended powerfully to stimulate curiosity in this field. Three centuries before the Christian era Aristotle had made the first really great attempt to satisfy this curiosity, and had begun a development of studies in natural history which remains one of the leading achievements in the story of our race. But the feeling which we have already seen so strong in the early Church -- that all study of Nature was futile in view of the approaching end of the world -- indicated so clearly in the New Testament and voiced so powerfully by Lactantius and St. Augustine -- held back this current of thought for many centuries. Still, the better tendency in humanity continued to assert itself. There was, indeed, an influence coming from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves which wrought powerfully to this end; for, in spite of all that Lactantius or St. Augustine might say as to the futility of any study of Nature, the grand utterances in the Psalms regarding the beauties and wonders of creation, in all the glow of the truest poetry, ennobled the study even among those whom logic drew away from it. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 29 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. But, as a matter of course, in the early Church and throughout the Middle Ages all such studies were cast in a theologic mould. Without some purpose of biblical illustration or spiritual edification they were considered futile; too much prying into the secrets of Nature was very generally held to be dangerous both to body and soul; only for showing forth God's glory and his purposes in the creation were such studies praiseworthy. The great work of Aristotle was under eclipse. The early Christian thinkers gave little attention to it, and that little was devoted to transforming it into something absolutely opposed to his whole spirit and method; in place of it they developed the Physiologus and the Bestiaries, mingling scriptural statements, legends of the saints, and fanciful inventions with Pious intent and childlike. simplicity. In place of research came authority -- the authority of the Scriptures as interpreted by the Physiologus and the Bestiaries -- and these remained the principal source of thought on animated Nature for over a thousand years. Occasionally, indeed, fear was shown among the rulers in the Church, even at such poor prying into the creation as this, and in the fifth century a synod under Pope Gelasius administered a rebuke to the Physiologus; but the interest in Nature was too strong: the great work on Creation by St. Basil had drawn from the Physiologus precious illustrations of Holy Writ, and the strongest of the early popes, Gregory the Great, virtually sanctioned it. Thus was developed a sacred science of creation and of the divine purpose in Nature, which went on developing from the fourth century to the nineteenth -- from St. Basil to St. Isidore of Seville, from Isidore to Vincent of Beauvais, and from Vincent to Archdeacon Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises. Like all else in the Middle Ages, this sacred science was developed purely by theological methods. Neglecting the wonders which the dissection of the commonest animals' would have afforded them, these naturalists attempted to throw light into Nature by ingenious use of scriptural texts, by research among the lives of the saints, and by the plentiful application of metaphysics. Hence even such strong men as St. Isidore of Seville treasured up accounts of the unicorn and dragons mentioned in the Scriptures and of the phoenix and basilisk in profane writings. Hence such contributions to knowledge as that the basilisk kills serpents by his breath and men by his glance, that the lion when pursued effaces his tracks with the end of his tail, that the pelican nourishes her young with her own blood, that serpents lay aside their venom before drinking, that the salamander quenches fire, that the hyena can talk with shepherds, that certain birds are born of the fruit of a certain tree when it happens to fall into the water, with other masses of science equally valuable. As to the method of bringing science to bear on Scripture, the Plzysiologus gives an example, illustrating the passage in the book of Job which speaks of the old lion perishing for lack of prey. Out of the attempt to explain an unusual Hebrew word in the text there came a curious development of error, until we find fully evolved an account of the "ant-lion," which, it gives us to understand, was the lion mentioned by Job, and it says: "As to the ant-lion, his Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 30 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. father hath the shape of a lion, his mother that of an ant; the father liveth upon flesh and the mother upon herbs; these bring forth the ant-lion, a compound of both and in part like to either; for his fore part is like that of a lion and his hind part like that of an ant. Being thus composed, he is neither able to eat flesh like his father nor herbs like his mother, and so he perisheth." In the middle of the thirteenth century we have a triumph of this theological method in the great work of the English Franciscan Bartholomew on The Properties of Things. The theological method as applied to science consists largely in accepting tradition and in spinning arguments to fit it. In this field Bartholomew was a master. Having begun with the intent mainly to explain the allusions in Scripture to natural objects, he soon rises logically into a survey of all Nature. Discussing the "cockatrice" of Scripture, he tells us: "He drieth and burneth leaves with his touch, and he is of so great venom and perilous that he slayeth and wasteth him that nigheth him without tarrying; and yet the weasel overcometh him, for the biting of the weasel is death to the cockatrice. Nevertheless the biting of the cockatrice is death to the weasel if the weasel eat not rue before. And though the cockatrice be venomous without remedy while he is alive, yet he looseth all the malice when he is burnt to ashes. His ashes be accounted profitable in working of alchemy, and namely in turning and changing of metals." Bartholomew also enlightens us on the animals of Egypt, and says, "If the crocodile findeth a man by the water's brim he slayeth him, and then he weepeth over him and swalloweth him." Naturally this good Franciscan naturalist devotes much thought to the "dragons" mentioned in Scripture. He says: "The dragon is most greatest of all serpents, and oft he is drawn out of his den and riseth up into the air, and the air is moved by him, and also the sea swelleth against his venom, and he hath a crest, and reareth his tongue, and hath teeth like a saw, and hath strength, and not only in teeth but in tail, and grieveth with biting and with stinging. Whom he findeth he slayeth. Oft four or five of them fasten their tails together and rear up their heads, and sail over the sea to get good meat. Between elephants and dragons is everlasting fighting; for the dragon with his tail spanneth the elephant, and the elephant with his nose throweth down the dragon. . . . The cause why the dragon desireth his blood is the coldness thereof, by the which the dragon desireth to cool himself. Jerome saith that the dragon is a full thirsty beast, insomuch that he openeth his mouth against the wind to quench the burning of his thirst in that wise. Therefore, when he seeth ships in great wind he flieth against the sail to take the cold wind, and overthroweth the ship." These ideas of Friar Bartholomew spread far and struck deep into the popular mind. His book was translated into the principal languages of Europe, and was one of those most generally read during the Ages of Faith. It maintained its position nearly three hundred years; even after the invention of printing it held its own, and in the fifteenth century there were issued no less than Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 31 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. ten editions of it in Latin, four in French, and various versions of it in Dutch, Spanish, and English. Preachers found it especially useful in illustrating the ways of God to man. It was only when the great voyages of discovery substituted ascertained fact for theological reasoning in this province that its authority was broken. The same sort of science flourished in the Bestiaries, which were used everywhere, and especially in the pulpits, for the edification of the faithful. In all of these, as in that compiled early in the thirteenth century by an ecclesiastic, William of Normandy, we have this lesson, borrowed from the Physiologus: "The lioness giveth birth to cubs which remain three days without life. Then cometh the lion, breatheth upon them, and bringeth them to life. . . . Thus it is that Jesus Christ during three days was deprived of life, but God the Father raised him gloriously." Pious use was constantly made of this science, especially by monkish preachers. The phoenix rising from his ashes proves the doctrine of the resurrection; the structure and mischief of monkeys proves the existence of demons; the fact that certain monkeys have no tails proves that Satan. has been shorn of his glory; the weasel, which "constailtly changes its place, is a type of the man estranged from the word of God, who findeth no rest." The moral treatises of the time often took the form of works on natural history, in order the more fully to exploit these religious teachings of Nature. Thus from the book On Bees, of the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpre', we learn that wasps persecute bees and make war on them out of natural hatred"; and these, he tells us, typify the demons who dwell in the air and with lightning and tempest assail and vex mankind -- whereupon he fills a long chapter with anecdotes of such demonic warfare on mortals. In like manner his fellow-Dominican, the inquisitor Nider, in his book The Ant Hill, teaches us that the ants in Ethiopia, which are said to have horns and to grow so large as to look like dogs, are emblems of atrocious heretics, like Wyclif and the Hussites, who bark and bite against the truth; while the ants of India, which dig up gold out of the sand with their feet and hoard it, though they make no use of it, symbolize the fruitless toil with which the heretics dig out the gold of Holy Scripture and hoard it in their books to no purpose. This pious spirit not only pervaded science; it bloomed out in art, and especially in the cathedrals. In the gargoyles overhanging the walls, in the grotesques clambering about the towers or perched upon pinnacles, in the dragons prowling under archways or lurking in bosses of foliage, in the apocalyptic beasts carved upon the stalls of the choir, stained into the windows, wrought into the tapestries, illuminated in the letters and borders of psalters and missals, these marvels of creation suggested everywhere morals from the Physiologus, the Bestiaries, and the Exempla.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For the Physiologus, Bestiaries, etc., see Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Telratologigues; also Hippeau's edition of the Bestiaire de Cuillaume de Normandie, Caen, 1852, and such medieval Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 32 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. books of Exempla as the Lumen Natura; also Hoefer, Histoire de la Zoologic; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilization Franraise, Paris, 1885, vol. i, pp. 368, 369 also Cardinal Pitra, preface to the Spicilegium Solismense, Paris, 1885, passim also Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie; and, for an admirable summary, the article Physiologus in the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the illuminated manuscripts in the Library of Cornell University are some very striking examples of grotesques. For admirably illustrated articles on the Bestiaries, see Cahier and Martin, melanges d'archeologie, Paris, 1851, 1852, and 1856, vol. ii of the first series, pp. 85-232, and second series, volume on Curiosites Mysterieuses, pp. 106-164; also J. R. Allen, Early Christian Symbolism in Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1887), lecture vi; for an exhaustive discussion of the subject, see Das Thierbuch des normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Cleic, herausgegeben von Reinisch, Leipsic, 1890; and, for an Italian example, Goldstaub und Wendriner, Ein Tosco- Venezianischer Bestiarius, Halle, 1892, where is given, on pp. 369-371, a very pious but very comical tradition regarding the beaver, hardly mentionable to ears polite. For Friar Bartholomew, see (besides his book itself) Medieval Lore, edited by Robert Steele, London, 1893, PP. 118-138. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ Here and there among men who were free from church control we have work of a better sort. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Abd Allatif made observations upon the natural history of Egypt which showed a truly scientific spirit, and the Emperor Frederick II attempted to promote a more fruitful study of Nature; but one of these men was abhorred as a Mussulman and the other as an infidel. Far more in accordance with the spirit of the time was the ecclesiastic Giraldus Cambrensis, whose book on the topography of Ireland bestows much attention upon the animals of the island, and rarely fails to make each contribute an appropriate moral. For example, he says that in Ireland "eagles live for so many ages that they seem to contend with eternity itself; so also the saints, having put off the old man and put on the new, obtain the blessed fruit of everlasting life." Again, he tells us: "Eagles often fly so high that their wings are scorched by the sun; so those who in the Holy Scriptures strive to unravel the deep and hidden secrets of the heavenly mysteries, beyond what is allowed, fall below, as if the wings of the presumptuous imaginations on which they are borne were scorched." In one of the great men of the following century appeared a gleam of healthful criticism: Albert the Great, in his work on the animals, dissents from the widespread belief that certain birds spring from trees and are nourished by the sap, and also from the theory that some are generated in the sea from decaying wood. But it required many generations for such skepticism to produce much effect, and we find among the illustrations in an edition of Mandeville published just before the Reformation not only careful accounts but pictured representations both of birds and of beasts produced in the fruit of trees.* Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 33 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For Giraldus Cambrensis, see the edition in the Bohn Library, London, 1863, p. 30; for Abd Allatif and Frederick II, see Hoefer, as above; for Albertus Magnus, see the De Animalibus, lib. xxiii; for the illustrations in Mandeville, see the Strasburg edition, 1484; for the history of the myth of the tree which produces birds, see Max Muller's Lectures on the Science of Language, second series, lect. xii. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ This general employment of natural science for pious purposes went on after the Reformation. Luther frequently made this use of it, and his example controlled his followers. In 1612, Wolfgang Franz, Professor of Theology at Luther's university, gave to the world his sacred history of animals, which went through many editions. It contained a very ingenious classification, describing "natural dragons," which have three rows of teeth to each jaw, and he piously adds, the principal dragon is the Devil." Near the end of the same century, Father Kircher, the great Jesuit professor at Rome, holds back the skeptical current, insists upon the orthodox view, and represents among the animals entering the ark sirens and griffins. Yet even among theologians we note here and there a skeptical spirit in natural science,. Early in the same seventeenth century Eugene Roger published his Travels in Palestine. As regards the utterances of Scripture he is soundly orthodox: he prefaces his work with a map showing, among other important points referred to in biblical history, the place where Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of in ass, the cavern which Adam and Eve inhabited after their expulsion from paradise, the spot where Baalim's ass spoke, the place where Jacob wrestled with the angel, the steep place down which the swine possessed of devils plunged into the sea, the position of the salt statue which was once Lot's wife, the place at sea where Jonah was swallowed by the whale, and "the exact spot where St. Peter caught one hundred and fifty-three fishes." As to natural history, he describes and discusses with great theological acuteness the basilisk. He tells us that the animal is about a foot and a half long, is shaped like a crocodile, and kills people with a single glance. The one which he saw was dead, fortunately for him, since in the time of Pope Leo IV -- as he tells us -- one appeared in Rome and killed many people by merely looking at them; but the Pope destroyed it with his prayers and the sign of the cross. He informs us that Providence has wisely and mercifully protected man by requiring the monster to cry aloud two or three times whenever it leaves its den, and that the divine wisdom in creation is also shown by the fact that the monster is obliged to look its victim in the eye, and at a certain fixed distance, before its glance can penetrate the victim's brain and so pass to his heart. He also gives a reason for supposing that the same divine mercy has provided that the crowing of a cock will kill the basilisk. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 34 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. Yet even in this good and credulous missionary we see the influence of Bacon and the dawn of experimental science; for, having been told many stories regarding the salamander, he secured one, placed it alive upon the burning coals, and reports to us that the legends concerning its power to live in the fire are untrue. He also tried experiments with the chameleon, and found that the stories told of it were to be received with much allowance: while, then, be locks up his judgment whenever he discusses the letter of Scripture, he uses his mind in other things much after the modern method. In the second half of the same century Hottinger, in his Theological Examination of the History of Creation, breaks from the belief in the phoenix; but his skepticism is carefully kept within the limits imposed by Scripture. He avows his doubts, first, "because God created the animals in couples, while the phoenix is represented as a single, un-mated creature"; secondly, "because Noah, when he entered the ark, brought the animals in by sevens, while there were never so many individuals of the phoenix species"; thirdly, because "no man is known who dares assert that he has ever seen this bird"; fourthly, because "those who assert there is a phoenix differ among themselves." In view of these attacks on the salamander and the phoenix, we are not surprised to find, before the end of the century, skepticism regarding the basilisk: the eminent Prof. Kirchmaier, at the University of Wittenberg, treats phoenix and basilisk alike as old wives' fables. As to the phoenix, he denies its existence, not only because Noah took no such bird into the ark, but also because, as he pithily remarks, "birds come from eggs, not from ashes." But the unicorn he can not resign, nor will he even concede that the unicorn is a rhinoceros; he appeals to Job and to Marco Polo to prove that this animal, as usually conceived, really exists, and says, "Who would not fear to deny the existence of the unicorn, since Holy Scripture names him with distinct praises?" As to the other great animals mentioned in Scripture, he is so rationalistic as to admit that behemoth was an elephant and leviathan a Whale. But these germs of a fruitful skepticism grew, and we soon find Dannhauer going a step further and declaring his disbelief even in the unicorn, insisting that it was a rhinoceros -- only that and nothing more. Still, the main current continued strongly theological. In 1712 Samuel Bochart published his great work upon the animals of Holy Scripture. As showing its spirit we may take the titles of the chapters on the horse: "Chapter VI. Of the Hebrew Name of the Horse" "Chapter VII. Of the Colors of the Six Horses in Zechariah." "Chapter VIII. Of the Horses in Job." "Chapter IX. Of Solomon's Horses, and of the Texts wherein the Writers praise the Excellence of Horses." Chapter X. Of the Consecrated Horses of the Sun." Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 35 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. Among the other titles of chapters are such as: Of Baalim's Ass; Of the Thousand Philistines slain by Samson with the Jawbone of an Ass; Of the Golden Calves of Aaron and Jeroboam; Of the Bleating, Milk, Wool, External and Internal Parts of Sheep mentioned in Scripture; Of Notable Things told regarding Lions in Scripture; Of Noah's Dove and of the Dove which appeared at Christ's Baptism. Mixed up in the book, with the principal mass drawn from Scripture, were many facts and reasonings taken from investigations by naturalists; but all were permeated by the theological spirit.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For Franz and Kircher, see Perrier, La Philosophie Zoologique avant Darwin, Paris, 1884, p. 29; for Roger, see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664, pp. 89-92, 139, 218, etc.; for Hottinger, see his Historie Creationis Examen theologieo- fihilologicum, Heidelberg, 1659, lib. vi, quoest. lxxxiii; for Kirchmaier, see his Disputationes Zoologies, (published collectively after his death), Jena, 1736; for Dannhauer, see his Disputationes Theologics', Leipsic, 1707, p.14; for Bochart, see his Hierozoikon, sive De Animalibus Sacrae, Scripture, Leyden, 1712. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method -- the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically -- the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts. At that time Edward Wotton led the way in England and Conrad Gesner on the Continent, by observations widely extended, carefully noted, and thoughtfully classified. This better method of interrogating Nature soon led to the formation of societies for the same purpose. In 1560 was founded an Academy for the Study of Nature at Naples, but theologians, becoming alarmed, suppressed it, and for nearly one hundred years there was no new combined effort of that sort, until in 1645 began the meetings in London of what was afterward the Royal Society. Then came the Academy of Sciences in France, and the Accademia del Cimento in Italy; others followed in all parts of the world, and a great new movement was begun. Theologians soon saw a danger in this movement. In Italy, Prince Leopold de' Medici, a protector of the Florentine Academy, was bribed with a cardinal's hat to neglect it, and from the days of Urban VIII to Pius IX a similar spirit was there shown. In France, there were frequent ecclesiastical interferences, of which Button's humiliation for stating a simple scientific truth was a noted example. In England, Protestantism was at first hardly more favorable toward the Royal Society, and the great Dr. South denounced it in his sermons as irreligious. Fortunately, one thing prevented an open breach between theology and science: while new investigators had mainly given up the medieval method so dear to the Church, they had very generally Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 36 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. retained the conception of direct creation and of design throughout creation -- a design having as its main purpose the profit, instruction, enjoyment, and amusement of man. On this the naturally opposing tendencies of theology and, science were compromised. Science, while somewhat freed from its old limitations, became the handmaid of theology in illustrating the doctrine of creative design, and always with apparent deference to the Chaldean and other ancient myths and legends embodied in the Hebrew sacred books. About the middle of the seventeenth century came a great victory of the scientific over the theologic method. At that time Francesco Redi published the results of his inquiries into the doctrine of spontaneous generation. For ages a widely accepted doctrine had been that water, filth, and carrion had received power from the Creator to generate worms, insects, and a multitude of the smaller animals; and this doctrine had been especially welcomed by St. Augustine and many of the fathers, since it relieved the Almighty of making, Adam of naming, and Noah of living in the ark with these innumerable despised species. But to this fallacy Redi put an end. By researches which could not be gainsaid, he showed that every one of these animals came from an egg; each, therefore, must be the lineal descendant of an animal created, named, and preserved from the beginning." Similar work went on in England, but under more distinctly theological limitations. In the same seventeenth century a very famous and popular English book was published by the naturalist John Ray, a fellow of the Royal Society, who produced a number of works on plants, fishes, and birds; but the most widely read of all was entitled The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation. Between the years 1691 and 1827 it Passed through nearly twenty editions. Ray argued the goodness and wisdom of God from the adaptation of the animals not only to man's uses but to their own lives and surroundings. In the first years of the eighteenth century Dr. Nehemiah Grew, of the Royal Society, published his Cosmologia Sacra to refute anti-scriptural opinions by producing evidences of creative design. Discussing "the ends of Providence," he says, "A crane, which is scurvy meat, lays but two eggs in the year, but a pheasant and partridge, both excellent meat, lay and hatch fifteen or twenty." He points to the fact that "those of value which lay few at a time sit the oftener, as the woodcock and the dove." He breaks decidedly from the doctrine that noxious things in Nature are caused by sin, and shows that they, too, are useful; that, "if nettles sting, it is to secure an excellent medicine for children and cattle"; that, "if the bramble hurts man, it makes all the better hedge"; and that, "if it chances to prick the owner, it tears the thief." "Weasels, kites, and other hurtful animals induce us to watchfulness; thistles and moles, to good husbandry; lice oblige us to cleanliness in our bodies, spiders in our houses, and the moth in our clothes." This very optimistic view, triumphing over the theological theory of noxious animals and plants as Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 37 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. effects of sin, which prevailed with so much force from St. Augustine to Wesley, was developed into nobler form during the century by various thinkers, and especially by Archdeacon Paley, whose Natural Theology exercised a powerful influence down to recent times. The same tendency appeared in other countries, though various philosophers showed weak points in the argument, and Goethe made sport of it in a noted verse, praising the forethought of the Creator in foreordaining the cork tree to furnish stoppers for wine-bottles. Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century the main movement culminated in the Bridgezeatcr Treatises. Pursuant to the will of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the President of the Royal Society selected eight persons, each to receive a thousand pounds sterling for writing and publishing a treatise on the "power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." Of these, the leading essays in regard to animated Nature were those of Thomas Chalmers, on The Adaption of External Nature to the oral and Intellectual Condition of Man; of Sir Charles Bell, on The Hand as evincing Design; of Roget, on Animal and Vegetable Physiology with reference to Natural Theology; and of Kirby, on The Habits and Instincts of Animals with reference to Natural Theology. Besides these there were treatises by Whewell, Buckland, Kidd, and Profit. The work was well done. It was a marked advance on all that had appeared before, in matter, method, and spirit. Looking back upon it now we can see that it was provisional, but that it was none the less fruitful in truth, and we may well remember Darwin's remark on the stimulating effect of mistaken theories, as compared with the sterilizing effect of mistaken observations: mistaken observations lead men astray, mistaken theories suggest true theories. An effort made in so noble a spirit certainly does not deserve the ridicule that, in our own day, has sometimes been lavished upon it. Curiously, indeed, one of the most contemptuous of these criticisms has been recently made by one of the most strenuous defenders of orthodoxy. No less eminent a standard-bearer of the faith than the Rev. Prof. Zoeckler says of this movement to demonstrate creative purpose and design, and of the men who took part in it, "The earth appeared in their representation of it like a great clothing shop and soup kitchen, and God as a glorified rationalistic professor." Such a statement as this is far from just to the conceptions of such men as Butler, Paley, and Chalmers, no matter how fully the thinking world has now outlived them.* ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ NOTE:* For a very valuable and interesting study on the old idea of the generation of insects from carrion, see Osten-Sacken, On the Oxen-born Bees of the Ancients, Heidelberg, 1894; for Ray, see the work cited, London, 1827, p. 153; for Grew, see Cosmologia Sacra, or a Discourse on the Universe, as it is the Creature and Kingdom of God; chiefly written to demonstrate the Truth and Excellency of the Bible, by Dr. Nehemiah Grew, Fellow of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society, London, 1701; for Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, see the usual editions; also Lange, History of Rationalism. Goethe's couplet ran as follows: Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 38 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. Welche Verehrung verdient der Weltenerschopfer, der Gnadig, Als er den Korkbaum erschuf, gleich auch die Stopfel erfand." For the quotation from Zoeckler, see his work already cited, vol. ii, PP. 74, 440. ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ But, noble as the work of these men was, the foundation of fact on which they reared it became evidently more and more insecure. For as far back as the seventeenth century acute theologians had begun to discern difficulties more serious than any that had before confronted them. More and more it was seen that the number of different species was far greater than the world had hitherto imagined. Greater and greater had become the old difficulty in conceiving that, of these innumerable species, each had been specially created by the Almighty hand; that each had been brought before Adam by the Almighty to be named; and that each, in couples or in sevens, had been gathered by Noah into the ark. But the difficulties thus suggested were as nothing compared to those raised by the distribution of animals. Even in the first days of the Church this had aroused serious thought, and above all in the great mind of St. Augustine. In his City of God he had stated the difficulty as follows: But there is a question about all these kinds of beasts, which are neither tamed by man, nor spring from the earth like frogs, such as wolves and others of that sort, . . . as to how they could find their way to the islands after that flood which destroyed every living thing not preserved in the ark. . . . Some, indeed, might be thought to reach islands by swimming, in case these were very near; but some islands are so remote from continental lands that it does not seem possible that any creature could reach them by swimming. It is not an incredible thing, either, that some animals may have been captured by men and taken with them to those lands which they intended to inhabit, in order that they might have the pleasure of hunting; and it can not be denied that the transfer may have been accomplished through the agency of angels, commanded or allowed to perform this labor by God." But this difficulty had now assumed a magnitude of which St. Augustine never dreamed. Most powerful of all agencies to increase it were the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci, and other navigators of the period of discovery. Still more serious did it become as the great islands of the southern seas were explored. Every navigator brought home tidings of new species of animals and of races of men living in parts of the world where the theologians, relying on the statement of St. Paul that the gospel had gone into all lands, had for ages declared there could be none; until finally it overtaxed even the theological imagination to conceive of angels, in obedience to the divine command, distributing the various animals over the earth, dropping the megatherium in South America, the archeopteryx in Europe, the ornithorhynchus in Australia, and the opossum in North America. Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 39 THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY. The first striking evidence of this new difficulty was shown by the eminent Jesuit missionary, Joseph Acosta. In his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, published in 1590, he proved himself honest and lucid. Though entangled in most of the older scriptural views, he broke away from many; but the distribution of animals gave him great trouble. Having shown the futility of St. Augustine's other Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201 incomplete.