The Warfare of Science

GEOLOGY

I now ask you to look at another part of the great warfare, and I select it because it shows more clearly than any other how Protestant nations, and in our own time, have suffered themselves to be led into the same errors that have wrought injury to religion and science in other times. We will look very briefly at the battle-fields of Geology.

From the first lispings of this science there was war. The prevailing doctrine of the Church was, that "in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth;" that "all things were made at the beginning of the world;" and that to say that stones and fossils have been made since "the beginning," is contrary to Scripture. The theological substitutes for scientific explanations ripened into such as these: that the fossils are "sports of Nature," or "creations of plastic force," or "results of a seminal air acting upon rocks," or "models" made by the Creator before he had fully decided upon the best manner of creating various beings. But, while some latitude was allowed among these theologico-scientific explanations, it was held essential to believe that they were placed in all the strata, on one of the creation-days, by the hand of the Almighty; and that this was done for some mysterious purpose of his own, probably for the trial of human faith.

In the sixteenth century Fracastoro and Palissy broached the true idea, but produced little effect. Near the beginning of the seventeenth century De Clave, Bitaud, and De Villon revived it; straight-way the theologic faculty of Paris protested against the doctrine as unscriptural, destroyed the offending treatises, banished the authors from Paris, and forbade them to live in towns or enter places of public resort. ¹²⁰ At the middle of the eighteenth century, Buffon made another attempt to state simple and fundamental geological truths. The theological faculty of the Sorbonne immediately dragged him from his high position, forced him to recant ignominiously, and to print his recantation. It required a hundred and fifty years for science to carry the day fairly against this single preposterous theory. The champion who dealt it the deadly blow was Scilla, and his weapons were facts revealed by the fossils of Calabria.

But the advocates of tampering with scientific reasoning now retired to a new position. It was strong, for it was apparently based on Scripture, though, as the whole world now knows, an utterly false interpretation of Scripture. The new position was, that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah.

In vain had it been shown, by such devoted Christians as Bernard Palissy, that this theory was utterly untenable; in vain did good men protest against the injury sure to result to religion by tying it to a scientific theory sure to be exploded: the doctrine that fossils were the remains of animals drowned at the flood continued to be upheld by the great majority as "sound doctrine," and as a blessed means of reconciling science with Scripture. ¹²¹

To sustain this "Scriptural view," so called, efforts were put forth absolutely herculean, both by Catholics and Protestants. Mazurier declared certain fossil remains of a mammoth, discovered in France, to be bones of giants mentioned in Scripture. Father Torrubia did the same thing in Spain. Increase Mather sent similar remains, discovered in America, to England, with a similar statement. Scheuchzer made parade of the bones of a great lizard discovered in Germany, as the homo diluvii testis, the fossil man, proving the reality of the Deluge. ¹²²

In the midst of this appears an episode very comical but very instructive; for it shows that the attempt to shape the deductions of science to meet the exigencies of theology may mislead heterodoxy as absurdly as orthodoxy.

About the year 1760 news of the discovery of marine fossils in various elevated districts of Europe reached Voltaire. He, too, had a theologic system to support, though his system was opposed to that of the sacred books of the Hebrews. He feared that these new discoveries might be used to support the Mosaic accounts of the Deluge. All his wisdom and wit, therefore, were compacted into arguments to prove that the fossil fishes were remains of fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown away by travelers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped by Crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land; and that sundry fossil bones found between Paris and Étampes were parts of a skeleton belonging to the cabinet of some ancient philosopher. Through chapter after chapter, Voltaire, obeying the supposed necessities of his theology, fights desperately the growing results of the geologic investigations of his time. ¹²³

But far more widespread and disastrous was the effort on the other side to show that the fossils were caused by the Deluge of Noah.

No supposition was too violent to support a theory which was considered vital to the Bible. Sometimes it was claimed that the tail of a comet had produced the Deluge. Sometimes, by a prosaic rendering of the expression regarding the breaking up of "the fountains of the great deep," a theory was started that the earth contained a great cistern, from which the waters came and to which they retired. By taking sacred poetry as prose, and by giving a literal interpretation of it, Thomas Burnet, in his "Sacred Theory of the Earth," Whiston, in his "Theory of the Deluge," and others like them, built up systems which bear to real geology much the same relation that the "Christian Topography" of Cosmas bears to real geography. In vain were exhibited the absolute geological, zoölogical, astronomical proofs that no universal deluge, or deluge covering any great extent of the earth, had taken place within the last six thousand or sixty thousand years; in vain did Bishop Clayton declare, that the Deluge could not have taken place save in that district where Noah lived before the flood; in vain was it shown that, even if there had been a universal deluge, the fossils were not produced by it: the only answers were the citation of the text, "And all the high mountains which were under the whole heaven were covered," and denunciations of infidelity. In England, France, and Germany, belief that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah was insisted upon as part of that faith essential to salvation. ¹²⁴ It took a hundred and twenty years for the searchers of God's truth as revealed in Nature—such men as Buffon, Linnæus, Whitehurst, and Daubenton—to push their works under these mighty fabrics of error, and, by statements which could not be resisted, to explode them.

Strange as it may at first seem, the war on geology was waged more fiercely in Protestant countries than in Catholic; the older Church had learned, by her earlier wretched mistakes, what dangers to her claim of infallibility lay in meddling with a growing science; in Italy, then entirely under papal control, little open opposition was made; and, of all countries, England furnished the most bitter opponents to geology at first, and the most active negotiators in patching up a truce on a basis of sham science afterward. ¹²⁵

You have noted already that there are, generally, two sorts of attack on a new science. First, there is the attack by pitting against science some great doctrine in theology. You saw this in astronomy, when Bellarmin and others insisted that the doctrine of the earth revolving about the sun is contrary to the doctrine of the incarnation. So now, against geology, it was urged that the scientific doctrine that the fossils represented animals which died before Adam, was contrary to the doctrine of Adam's fall, and that "death entered the world by sin."

Then, there is the attack by literal interpretation of texts, based upon the idea that the Bible is a compendium of history or a text-book of natural science, which serves a better purpose, generally, in rousing prejudices.

Toward the close of the last century, in England, the opponents of geology on Biblical grounds seemed likely to sweep all before them. Cramping our sacred volume within the rules of an historical compend, they showed the terrible dangers arising from the revelations of geology, which make the earth older than the six thousand years required by Archbishop Usher's interpretation of the Old Testament. Nor was this panic confined to ecclesiastics. Williams, a thoughtful layman, declared that such researches led to infidelity and atheism, and are "nothing less than to depose the Almighty Creator of the universe from his office." The poet Cowper, one of the mildest of men, was also roused by these dangers, and in his most elaborate poem wrote:

 
"Some drill and bore
The solid earth, and from the strata there
Extract a register, by which we learn
That he who made it, and revealed its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age!"
 

And difficult as it is to realize it now, within the memory of many of us the battle was still raging most fiercely in England, and both kinds of artillery usually brought against a new science were in full play, and filling the civilized world with their roar.

About thirty years ago, the Rev. J. Mellor Brown, the Rev. Henry Cole, and others, were hurling at all geologists alike, and especially at such Christian divines as Dr. Buckland and Dean Conybeare, and Pye Smith, and such religious scholars as Prof. Sedgwick, the epithets of "infidel," "impugner of the sacred record," and "assailant of the volume of God." ¹²⁶

Their favorite weapon was the charge that these men were "attacking the truth of God," forgetting that they were simply opposing the mistaken interpretations of Messrs. Brown, Cole, and others, like them, inadequately informed.

They declared geology "not a subject of lawful inquiry," denouncing it as "a dark art," as "dangerous and disreputable," as "a forbidden province," as "infernal artillery," and as "an awful evasion of the testimony of revelation." ¹²⁷

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

But it is a duty and a pleasure to state here that one great Christian scholar did honor to religion and to himself by standing up for the claims of science, despite all these clamors. That man was Nicholas Wiseman, better known afterward as Cardinal Wiseman. The conduct of this pillar of the Roman Catholic Church contrasts nobly with that of timid Protestants, who were filling England with shrieks and denunciations. ¹²⁸

And here let me note, that one of the prettiest skirmishes in this war was made in New England. Prof. Stuart, of Andover, justly honored as a Hebrew scholar, virtually declared that geology was becoming dangerous; that to speak of six periods of time for the creation was flying in the face of Scripture; that Genesis expressly speaks of six days, each made up of an evening and a morning, and not six periods of time.

To him replied a professor in Yale College, James Kingsley. In an article admirable for keen wit and kindly temper, he showed that Genesis speaks just as clearly of a solid firmament as of six ordinary days, and that if Prof. Stuart had got over one difficulty and accepted the Copernican theory, he might as well get over another and accept the revelations of geology. The encounter was quick and decisive, and the victory was with science and our own honored Yale. ¹²⁹

But perhaps the most singular attempt against geology was made by a fine specimen of the English Don—Dean Cockburn, of York—to scold its champions out of the field. Without, apparently, the simplest elementary knowledge of geology, he opened a battery of abuse. He gave it to the world at large, by pulpit and press; he even inflicted it upon leading statesmen by private letters. ¹³⁰ From his pulpit in York minster, Mary Somerville was denounced coarsely, by name, for those studies in physical geography which have made her honored throughout the world. ¹³¹

But these weapons did not succeed. They were like Chinese gongs and dragon-lanterns against rifled cannon. Buckland, Pye Smith, Lyell, Silliman, Hitchcock, Murchison, Agassiz, Dana, and a host of noble champions besides, press on, and the battle for truth is won.

And was it won merely for men of science? The whole civilized world declares that it was won for religion—that thereby was infinitely increased the knowledge of the power and goodness of God.

POLITICAL ECONOMY

From the many questions on which the supporters of right reason in Political and Social Science have only conquered conscientious opposition after centuries of war, I select the taking of interest on loans; in hardly any struggle has rigid adherence to the Bible as a scientific text-book been more prolonged or injurious. ¹³²

Certainly, if the criterion of truth, as regards any doctrine, be that it has been believed in the Church "always, everywhere, and by all," then on no point may a Christian of these days be more sure than that every savings-institution, every loan and trust company, every bank, every loan of capital by an individual, every means by which accumulated capital has been lawfully lent, even at the most moderate interest, to make the masses of men workers rather than paupers, is based on deadly sin.

The fathers of the Christian Church received from the ancient world a strong prejudice against any taking of interest whatever; in Greece, Aristotle had condemned it; in Rome it was regarded during many generations as a crime. ¹³³

But far greater, in the early Church, was the influence of certain texts in the Old and New Testaments. Citations from Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Ezekiel, and St. Luke, were universally held to condemn all loans at interest. ¹³⁴

On these texts the doctrine and legislation of the universal Church, as regards interest for money, were based and developed. The fathers of the Eastern Church, and among them St. Basil, St. Chrysostom, and St. Gregory Nazianzen; the fathers of the Western Church, and among them Tertullian, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome, joined most earnestly in this condemnation. St. Chrysostom says: "What can be more unreasonable than to sow without land, without rain, without ploughs? All those who give themselves up to this damnable agriculture shall reap only tares. Let us cut off these monstrous births of gold and silver; let us stop this execrable fecundity." St. Jerome threw the argument into the form of a dilemma, which was used as a weapon against money-lenders for centuries. ¹³⁵

This entire agreement of the fathers of the Church led to the crystallization of the hostility to interest-bearing loans into numberless decrees of popes and councils, and kings and legislatures, throughout Christendom, during more than fifteen hundred years; and the canon law was shaped in accordance with these. In the ninth century, Alfred, in England, confiscated the estates of money-lenders, and denied them burial in consecrated ground; and similar decrees were made in other parts of Europe. In the twelfth century the Greek Church seems to have relaxed its strictness somewhat, but the Roman Church only grew more and more severe. St. Bernard, reviving religious earnestness in the Church, was especially strenuous in denouncing loans at interest; and, in 1179, the Third Council of the Lateran decreed that every impenitent money-lender should be excluded from the altar, from absolution in the hour of death, and from Christian burial!

In the thirteenth century this mistaken idea was still more firmly knit into the thought of the Church by St. Thomas Aquinas; hostility to loans at interest had been poured into his mind, not only from the Scriptures, but from Aristotle.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Council of Vienne, presided over by Pope Clement V., declared that, if any one "shall pertinaciously presume to affirm that the taking of interest for money is not a sin, we decree him to be a heretic fit for punishment." ¹³⁶

The economical and social results of this conscientious policy were exceedingly unfortunate. Money could only be loaned, in most countries, at the risk of incurring odium in this world and damnation in the next; hence there was but little capital and few lenders; hence came enormous rates of interest; thereby were commerce, manufactures, and general enterprise dwarfed, while pauperism flourished.

But even worse than this were the moral results. For nations to do what they believe is evil, is only second in bad consequences to their doing what is really evil: all lending and borrowing, even for the most legitimate purposes and at the most reasonable rates, tended to debase the character of both borrower and lender. ¹³⁷ And these moral evils took more definite shapes than might at first be thought possible. Sismondi, one of the most thoughtful of modern political philosophers and historians, declares that the prohibition of interest for the use of money in Continental Europe did very much to promote a passion for luxury and to discourage economy; the rich who were not engaged in business finding no easy way of employing their savings productively. ¹³⁸

These evils became so manifest, when trade began to revive throughout Europe in the fifteenth century, that most earnest efforts were made to induce the Church to change its position.

The first important effort of this kind was made by John Gerson. His general learning had made him Chancellor of the University of Paris; his sacred learning made him the leading theologian and orator at the Council of Constance; his piety led men to attribute to him "The Imitation of Christ." Shaking off theological shackles, he declared: "Better is it to lend money at reasonable interest, and thus to give aid to the poor, than to see them reduced by poverty to steal, waste their goods, and sell, at a low price, their personal and real property." ¹³⁹

But this idea was at once suppressed by the Church—buried beneath citations from Scripture, the fathers, councils, popes, and the canon law. Even in the most active countries there seemed no hope. In England, under Henry VII., Cardinal Morton, the lord-chancellor, addressed Parliament, asking them to take into consideration loans of money at interest, and the result was a law which imposed on lenders at interest a fine of a hundred pounds, besides the annulment of the loan; and, to show that there was an offence against religion involved, there was added a clause "reserving to the Church, notwithstanding this punishment, the correction of their souls according to the laws of the same." ¹⁴⁰ Similar enactments were made by civil authority in various parts of Europe, and, as a climax, just as the trade and commerce and manufactures of the modern epoch had received an immense impulse from the great series of voyages of discovery, by such as Columbus, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, and the Cabots, this barrier against enterprise was strengthened by a decree from Pope Leo X. ¹⁴¹

But this mistaken policy was not confined to the older Church. The Reformed Church was led by Luther and several of his associates into the same line of thought and practice. Said Luther: "To exchange anything with any one and gain by the exchange, is not to do a charity, but to steal. Every usurer is a thief worthy of the gibbet. I call those usurers who lend money at five or six per cent." ¹⁴²

The English Reformers showed the same tendency. Under Henry VIII., the law of Henry VII. against taking interest had been modified; but the revival of religious feeling under Edward VI. caused, in 1552, the passage of the "Bill of Usury." In this it is said: "Forasmuch as usury is by the Word of God utterly prohibited, as a vice most odious and detestable, as in divers places of the Holy Scriptures it is evident to be seen, which thing by no godly teachings and persuasions can sink into the hearts of divers greedy, uncharitable, and covetous persons of this realm, nor yet by any terrible threatenings of God's wrath and vengeance," etc., etc., it is enacted that whosoever shall thereafter lend money "for any manner of usury, increase, lucre, gain, or interest, to be had, received, or hoped for," shall forfeit principal and interest, and suffer imprisonment and fine at the king's pleasure. ¹⁴³

But, most fortunately, it happened that Calvin turned in the right direction, and there was developed among Protestants the serviceable fiction that "usury" means illegal or oppressive interest. Under cover of this fiction commerce and trade revived rapidly in Protestant countries, though with occasional checks from exact interpreters of Scripture.

But, in the older Church, the more correct though less fortunate interpretation of the sacred texts relating to interest continued. When it was attempted in France, in the seventeenth century, to argue that "usury" means oppressive interest, the Theological Faculty of the Sorbonne declared that usury is the taking of any interest at all, no matter how little, and the eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel was cited to clinch this judgment.

Another attempt to ease the burden on industry and commerce was made by declaring that "usury means interest demanded not as matter of favor but as matter of right." This, too, was solemnly condemned by Pope Innocent XI.

Again the army of right reason pressed forward, declaring that "usury is interest greater than the law allows." This, too, was condemned, and the declaration that "usury is interest on loans not for a fixed time" was condemned by Pope Alexander VII.

Still the attacking forces pressed on, and among them, in the seventeenth century, in France, was Richard Simon: he attempts to gloss over the strict interpretation of Scripture in this matter by an elaborate treatise: he is immediately confronted by Bossuet.

It seems hardly possible that one of the greatest intellects of a period so near us could have been so doubly deceived. Yet Bossuet, the glory of the French Church, one of the keenest and strongest of thinkers, not only mingled Scripture with astronomy, and opposed the Copernican theory, but also mingled Scripture with political economy, and denounced the lending of money at interest. He declared that the Scriptures, the councils of the Church from the beginning, the popes, the fathers, all interpreted the prohibition of "usury" to be a prohibition of any lending at interest, and Bossuet demonstrated this interpretation as the true one. Simon was put to confusion, and his book condemned. ¹⁴⁴

There was but too much reason for Bossuet's interpretation. The prohibition of this, one of the most simple and beneficial principles in political and economical science, was affirmed not only by the fathers, but by twenty-eight councils of the Church (six of them general councils), and by seventeen popes, to say nothing of innumerable doctors in theology and canon law. ¹⁴⁵

But about the middle of the eighteenth century the evil could be endured no longer—a way of escape must be found. The army opposed to the Church had become so formidable, that the Roman authorities saw that a concession must be made. In 1748 appeared Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws; in it were concentrated twenty years' study and thought of a great thinker on the necessities of the world about him. In eighteen months it went through twenty-two editions, and it was translated into every civilized language; this work attacked, among other abuses, the position of the Church regarding interest for money.

The Church authorities had already taken the alarm. Benedict XIV. saw that the best thing for him—nay, the only thing—was a surrender under form of a compromise. In a brief he declared substantially that the law of the Church was opposed to the taking of interest on loans; and then, after sundry non-committal and ambiguous statements, he hinted that there were possible exceptions to the rule.

Like the casuistry of Boscovich in using the Copernican theory for "convenience in argument," while acquiescing in its condemnation by the Church, this casuistry of Benedict broke the spell. Turgot, Adam Smith, Bentham, and their disciples, pressed on, and science won for mankind another great victory.

Yet in this case, as in others, insurrections against the sway of scientific truth appeared among some over-zealous religionists. When the Sorbonne, having retreated from its old position, armed itself with sundry new casuistries against those who held to its earlier decisions, provincial doctors in theology protested indignantly, making the old citations from the Scriptures, fathers, saints, doctors, popes, councils, and canonists. And even as late as 1830, when the Roman court, though declining to commit itself on the doctrine involved, decreed that confessors should no longer disquiet lenders of money at legal interest, the old weapons were again furbished and hurled by the Abbé Laborde, Vicar of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Auch, and by the Abbé Dennavit, Professor of Theology at Lyons. Good Abbé Dennavit declared that he refused absolution to those who took interest, and to priests who pretend that the sanction of the civil law is sufficient. ¹⁴⁶

But the peace on this question is too profound to be disturbed by such outcries. The Torlonia family at Rome, to-day, with its palaces, chapels, intermarriages, affiliations, and papal favor, all won by lending money at interest, and by devotion to the Roman See, is a growth on ramparts long since surrendered and deserted.