CHAPTER IX. THE +quot;FALL OF MAN+quot; AND ETHNOLOGY. WE have seen that, closely connecte

                          CHAPTER IX.
               THE "FALL OF MAN" AND ETHNOLOGY.

WE have seen that, closely connected with the main lines of
investigation in archaeology and anthropology, there were other
researches throwing much light on the entire subject. In a
previous chapter we saw especially that Lafitau and Jussieu were
among the first to collect and compare facts bearing on the
natural history of man, gathered by travellers in various parts
of the earth, thus laying foundations for the science of
comparative ethnology. It was soon seen that ethnology had most
important bearings upon the question of the material,
intellectual, moral, and religious evolution of the human race;
in every civilized nation, therefore, appeared scholars who
began to study the characteristics of various groups of men as
ascertained from travellers, and to compare the results thus
gained with each other and with those obtained by archaeology.

Thus, more and more clear became the evidences that the tendency
of the race has been upward from low beginnings. It was found
that groups of men still existed possessing characteristics of
those in the early periods of development to whom the drift and
caves and shell-heaps and pile-dwellings bear witness; groups of
men using many of the same implements and weapons, building
their houses in the same way, seeking their food by the same
means, enjoying the same amusements, and going through the same
general stages of culture; some being in a condition corresponding
to the earlier, some to the later, of those early periods.

From all sides thus came evidence that we have still upon the
earth examples of all the main stages in the development of
human civilization; that from the period when man appears little
above the brutes, and with little if any religion in any
accepted sense of the word, these examples can be arranged in an
ascending series leading to the highest planes which humanity
has reached; that philosophic observers may among these examples
study existing beliefs, usages, and institutions back through
earlier and earlier forms, until, as a rule, the whole evolution
can be easily divined if not fully seen. Moreover, the basis of
the whole structure became more and more clear: the fact that
"the lines of intelligence have always been what they are, and
have always operated as they do now; that man has progressed
from the simple to the complex, from the particular to the general."

As this evidence from ethnology became more and more strong, its
significance to theology aroused attention, and naturally most
determined efforts were made to break its force. On the
Continent the two great champions of the Church in this field
were De Maistre and De Bonald; but the two attempts which may be
especially recalled as the most influential among
English-speaking peoples were those of Whately, Archbishop of
Dublin, and the Duke of Argyll.

First in the combat against these new deductions of science was
Whately. He was a strong man, whose breadth of thought and
liberality in practice deserve all honour; but these very
qualities drew upon him the distrust of his orthodox brethren;
and, while his writings were powerful in the first half of the
present century to break down many bulwarks of unreason, he
seems to have been constantly in fear of losing touch with the
Church, and therefore to have promptly attacked some scientific
reasonings, which, had he been a layman, not holding a brief for
the Church, he would probably have studied with more care and
less prejudice. He was not slow to see the deeper significance
of archaeology and ethnology in their relations to the
theological conception of "the Fall," and he set the battle in
array against them.

His contention was, to use his own words, that "no community
ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a
state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called
civilization"; and that, in short, all imperfectly civilized,
barbarous, and savage races are but fallen descendants of races
more fully civilized. This view was urged with his usual
ingenuity and vigour, but the facts proved too strong for him:
they made it clear, first, that many races were without simple
possessions, instruments, and arts which never, probably, could
have been lost if once acquired--as, for example, pottery, the
bow for shooting, various domesticated animals, spinning, the
simplest principles of agriculture, household economy, and the
like; and, secondly, it was shown as a simple matter of fact
that various savage and barbarous tribes _had_ raised themselves
by a development of means which no one from outside could have
taught them; as in the cultivation and improvement of various
indigenous plants, such as the potato and Indian corn among the
Indians of North America; in the domestication of various
animals peculiar to their own regions, such as the llama among
the Indians of south America; in the making of sundry fabrics
out of materials and by processes not found among other nations,
such as the bark cloth of the Polynesians; and in the
development of weapons peculiar to sundry localities, but known
in no others, such as the boomerang in Australia.

Most effective in bringing out the truth were such works as
those of Sir John Lubbock and Tylor; and so conclusive were
they that the arguments of Whately were given up as untenable by
the other of the two great champions above referred to, and an
attempt was made by him to form the diminishing number of
thinking men supporting the old theological view on a new line
of defence.

This second champion, the Duke of Argyll, was a man of wide
knowledge and strong powers in debate, whose high moral sense
was amply shown in his adhesion to the side of the American
Union in the struggle against disunion and slavery, despite the
overwhelming majority against him in the high aristocracy to
which he belonged. As an honest man and close thinker, the duke
was obliged to give up completely the theological view of the
antiquity of man. The whole biblical chronology as held by the
universal Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," he
sacrificed, and gave all his powers in this field to support the
theory of "the Fall." _Noblesse oblige_: the duke and his
ancestors had been for centuries the chief pillars of the Church
of Scotland, and it was too much to expect that he could break
away from a tenet which forms really its "chief cornerstone."

Acknowledging the insufficiency of Archbishop Whately's
argument, the duke took the ground that the lower, barbarous,
savage, brutal races were the remains of civilized races which,
in the struggle for existence, had been pushed and driven off to
remote and inclement parts of the earth, where the conditions
necessary to a continuance in their early civilization were
absent; that, therefore, the descendants of primeval, civilized
men degenerated and sank in the scale of culture. To use his own
words, the weaker races were "driven by the stronger to the
woods and rocks," so that they became "mere outcasts of the
human race."

In answer to this, while it was conceded, first, that there have
been examples of weaker tribes sinking in the scale of culture
after escaping from the stronger into regions unfavourable to
civilization, and, secondly, that many powerful nations have
declined and decayed, it was shown that the men in the most
remote and unfavourable regions have not always been the lowest
in the scale; that men have been frequently found "among the
woods and rocks" in a higher state of civilization than on the
fertile plains, such examples being cited as Mexico, Peru, and
even Scotland; and that, while there were many examples of
special and local decline, overwhelming masses of facts point to
progress as a rule.

The improbability, not to say impossibility, of many of the
conclusions arrived at by the duke appeared more and more
strongly as more became known of the lower tribes of mankind. It
was necessary on his theory to suppose many things which our
knowledge of the human race absolutely forbids us to believe:
for example, it was necessary to suppose that the Australians or
New Zealanders, having once possessed so simple and convenient
an art as that of the potter, had lost every trace of it; and
that the same tribes, having once had so simple a means of
saving labour as the spindle or small stick weighted at one end
for spinning, had given it up and gone back to twisting threads
with the hand. In fact, it was necessary to suppose that one of
the main occupations of man from "the beginning" had been the
forgetting of simple methods, processes, and implements which
all experience in the actual world teaches us are never entirely
forgotten by peoples who have once acquired them.

Some leading arguments of the duke were overthrown by simple
statements of fact. Thus, his instance of the Eskimo as pushed
to the verge of habitable America, and therefore living in the
lowest depths of savagery, which, even if it were true, by no
means proved a general rule, was deprived of its force by the
simple fact that the Eskimos are by no means the lowest race on
the American continent, and that various tribes far more
centrally and advantageously placed, as, for instance, those in
Brazil, are really inferior to them in the scale of culture.
Again, his statement that "in Africa there appear to be no
traces of any time when the natives were not acquainted with the
use of iron," is met by the fact that from the Nile Valley to
the Cape of Good Hope we find, wherever examination has been
made, the same early stone implements which in all other parts
of the world precede the use of iron, some of which would not
have been made had their makers possessed iron. The duke also
tried to show that there were no distinctive epochs of stone,
bronze, and iron, by adducing the fact that some stone
implements are found even in some high civilizations. This is
indeed a fact. We find some few European peasants to-day using
stone mallet-heads; but this proves simply that the old stone
mallet-heads have survived as implements cheap and effective.

The argument from Comparative Ethnology in support of the view
that the tendency of mankind is upward has received strength
from many sources. Comparative Philology shows that in the less
civilized, barbarous, and savage races childish forms of speech
prevail--frequent reduplications and the like, of which we have
survivals in the later and even in the most highly developed
languages. In various languages, too, we find relics of ancient
modes of thought in the simplest words and expressions used for
arithmetical calculations. Words and phrases for this purpose
are frequently found to be derived from the words for hands,
feet, fingers, and toes, just as clearly as in our own language
some of our simplest measures of length are shown by their names
to have been measures of parts of the human body, as the cubit,
the foot, and the like, and therefore to date from a time when
exactness was not required. To add another out of many examples,
it is found to-day that various rude nations go through the
simplest arithmetical processes by means of pebbles. Into our
own language, through the Latin, has come a word showing that
our distant progenitors reckoned in this way: the word
_calculate_ gives us an absolute proof of this. According to the
theory of the Duke of Argyll, men ages ago used pebbles
(_calculi_) in performing the simplest arithmetical calculations
because we to-day "_calculate_." No reduction to absurdity could
be more thorough. The simple fact must be that we "calculate"
because our remote ancestors used pebbles in their arithmetic.

Comparative Literature and Folklore also show among peoples of
a low culture to-day childish modes of viewing nature, and
childish ways of expressing the relations of man to nature, such
as clearly survive from a remote ancestry; noteworthy among
these are the beliefs in witches and fairies, and multitudes of
popular and poetic expressions in the most civilized nations.

So,too, Comparative Ethnography, the basis of Ethnology, shows
in contemporary barbarians and savages a childish love of
playthings and games, of which we have many survivals.

All these facts, which were at first unobserved or observed as
matters of no significance, have been brought into connection
with a fact in biology acknowledged alike by all important
schools; by Agassiz on one hand and by Darwin on the
other--namely, as stated by Agassiz, that "the young states of
each species and group resemble older forms of the same group,"
or, as stated by Darwin, that "in two or more groups of
animals, however much they may at first differ from each other
in structure and habits, if they pass through closely similar
embryonic stages, we may feel almost assured that they have
descended from the same parent form, and are therefore closely
related."[308]


                          CHAPTER X.
                THE "FALL OF MAN" AND HISTORY.

THE history of art, especially as shown by architecture, in the
noblest monuments of the most enlightened nations of antiquity;
gives abundant proofs of the upward tendency of man from the
rudest and simplest beginnings. Many columns of early Egyptian
temples or tombs are but bundles of Nile reeds slightly
conventionalized in stone; the temples of Greece, including not
only the earliest forms, but the Parthenon itself, while in
parts showing an evolution out of Egyptian and Assyrian
architecture, exhibit frequent reminiscences and even imitations
of earlier constructions in wood; the medieval cathedrals, while
evolved out of Roman and Byzantine structures, constantly show
unmistakable survivals of prehistoric construction.[310]

So, too, general history has come in, illustrating the unknown
from the known: the development of man in the prehistoric period
from his development within historic times. Nothing is more
evident from history than the fact that weaker bodies of men
driven out by stronger do not necessarily relapse into
barbarism, but frequently rise, even under the most unfavourable
circumstances, to a civilization equal or superior to that from
which they have been banished. Out of very many examples showing
this law of upward development, a few may be taken as typical.
The Slavs, who sank so low under the pressure of stronger races
that they gave the modern world a new word to express the most
hopeless servitude, have developed powerful civilizations
peculiar to themselves; the, barbarian tribes who ages ago took
refuge amid the sand-banks and morasses of Holland, have
developed one of the world's leading centres of civilization;
the wretched peasants who about the fifth century took refuge
from invading hordes among the lagoons and mud banks of Venetia,
developed a power in art, arms, and politics which is among the
wonders of human history; the Puritans, driven from the
civilization of Great Britain to the unfavourable climate, soil,
and circumstances of early New England,--the Huguenots, driven
from France, a country admirably fitted for the highest growth
of civilization, to various countries far less fitted for such
growth,--the Irish peasantry, driven in vast numbers from their
own island to other parts of the world on the whole less fitted
to them--all are proofs that, as a rule, bodies of men once
enlightened, when driven to unfavourable climates and brought
under the most depressing circumstances, not only retain what
enlightenment they have, but go on increasing it. Besides these,
we have such cases as those of criminals banished to various
penal colonies, from whose descendants has been developed a
better morality; and of pirates, like those of the Bounty,
whose descendants, in a remote Pacific island, became sober,
steady citizens. Thousands of examples show the prevalence of
this same rule--that men in masses do not forget the main gains
of their civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations,
their tendency is upward.

Another class of historic facts also testifies in the most
striking manner to this same upward tendency: the decline and
destruction of various civilizations brilliant but hopelessly
vitiated. These catastrophes are seen more and more to be but
steps in, this development. The crumbling away of the great
ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the
despotism of monarch, priest, or mob--the decline and fall of
Roman civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable
generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the
development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the
terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared
to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought in,
with the downfall of feudalism, the beginnings of the
centralizing, civilizing monarchical period; the French
Revolution, once thought a mere outburst of diabolic passion,
but now seen to be an unduly delayed transition from the
monarchical to the constitutional epoch: all show that even
widespread deterioration and decline--often, indeed, the
greatest political and moral catastrophes--so far from leading
to a fall of mankind, tend in the long run to raise humanity to
higher planes.

Thus, then, Anthropology and its handmaids, Ethnology,
Philology, and History, have wrought out, beyond a doubt, proofs
of the upward evolution of humanity since the appearance of man
upon our planet.

Nor have these researches been confined to progress in man's
material condition. Far more important evidences have been found
of upward evolution in his family, social, moral, intellectual,
and religious relations. The light thrown on this subject by
such men as Lubbock, Tylor, Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Draper, Max
Muller, and a multitude of others, despite mistakes, haltings,
stumblings, and occasional following of delusive paths, is among
the greatest glories of the century now ending. From all these
investigators in their various fields, holding no brief for any
system sacred or secular, but seeking truth as truth, comes the
same general testimony of the evolution of higher out of lower.
The process has been indeed slow and painful, but this does not
prove that it may not become more rapid and less fruitful in
sorrow as humanity goes on.[312]

While, then, it is not denied that many instances of
retrogression can be found, the consenting voice of unbiased
investigators in all lands has declared more and more that the
beginnings of our race must have been low and brutal, and that
the tendency has been upward. To combat this conclusion by
examples of decline and deterioration here and there has become
impossible: as well try to prove that, because in the
Mississippi there are eddies in which the currents flow
northward, there is no main stream flowing southward; or that,
because trees decay and fall, there is no law of upward growth
from germ to trunk, branches, foliage, and fruit.

A very striking evidence that the theological theory had become
untenable was seen when its main supporter in the scientific
field, Von Martius, in the full ripeness of his powers, publicly
declared his conversion to the scientific view.

Yet, while the tendency of enlightened human thought in recent
times is unmistakable, the struggle against the older view is
not yet ended. The bitterness of the Abbe Hamard in France has
been carried to similar and even greater extremes among sundry
Protestant bodies in Europe and America. The simple truth of
history mates it a necessity, unpleasant though it be, to
chronicle two typical examples in the United States.

In the year 1875 a leader in American industrial enterprise
endowed at the capital of a Southern State a university which
bore his name. It was given into the hands of one of the
religious sects most powerful in that region, and a bishop of
that sect became its president. To its chair of Geology was
called Alexander Winchell, a scholar who had already won
eminence as a teacher and writer in that field, a professor
greatly beloved and respected in the two universities with which
he had been connected, and a member of the sect which the
institution of learning above referred to represented.

But his relations to this Southern institution were destined to
be brief. That his lectures at the Vanderbilt University were
learned, attractive, and stimulating, even his enemies were
forced to admit; but he was soon found to believe that there had
been men earlier than the period as signed to Adam, and even
that all the human race are not descended from Adam. His desire
was to reconcile science and Scripture, and he was now treated
by a Methodist Episcopal Bishop in Tennessee just as, two
centuries before, La Peyrere had been treated, for a similar
effort, by a Roman Catholic vicar-general in Belgium. The
publication of a series of articles on the subject,
contributed by the professor to a Northern religious newspaper
at its own request, brought matters to a climax; for, the
articles having fallen under the notice of a leading
Southwestern organ of the denomination controlling the Vanderbilt
University, the result was a most bitter denunciation of
Prof. Winchell and of his views. Shortly afterward the
professor was told by Bishop McTyeire that "our people are of
the opinion that such views are contrary to the plan of
redemption," and was requested by the bishop to quietly resign
his chair, To this the professor made the fitting reply: "If
the board of trustees have the manliness to dismiss me for cause,
and declare the cause, I prefer that they should do it. No power
on earth could persuade me to resign."

"We do not propose," said the bishop, with quite gratuitous
suggestiveness, "to treat you as the Inquisition treated Galileo."

"But what you propose is the same thing," rejoined Dr. Winchell.
"It is ecclesiastical proscription for an opinion which must be
settled by scientific evidence."

Twenty-four hours later Dr. Winchell was informed that his chair
had been abolished, and its duties, with its salary, added to
those of a colleague; the public were given to understand that
the reasons were purely economic; the banished scholar was
heaped with official compliments, evidently in hope that he would
keep silence.

Such was not Dr. Winchell's view. In a frank letter to the
leading journal of the university town he stated the whole
matter. The intolerance-hating press of the country, religious
and secular, did not hold its peace. In vain the authorities of
the university waited for the storm to blow over. It was evident,
at last, that a defence must be made, and a local organ of the
sect, which under the editorship of a fellow-professor had always
treated Dr. Winchell's views with the luminous inaccuracy which
usually characterizes a professor's ideas of a rival's teachings,
assumed the task. In the articles which followed, the usual
scientific hypotheses as to the creation were declared to be
"absurd," "vague and unintelligible," "preposterous and
gratuitous." This new champion stated that "the objections drawn
from the fossiliferous strata and the like are met by reference
to the analogy of Adam and Eve, who presented the phenomena of
adults when they were but a day old, and by the Flood of Noah and
other cataclysms, which, with the constant change of Nature, are
sufficient to account for the phenomena in question"!

Under inspiration of this sort the Tennessee Conference of the
religious body in control of the university had already, in
October, 1878, given utterance to its opinion of unsanctified
science as follows: "This is an age in which scientific atheism,
having divested itself of the habiliments that most adorn and
dignify humanity, walks abroad in shameless denudation. The
arrogant and impertinent claims of this `science, falsely so
called,' have been so boisterous and persistent, that the
unthinking mass have been sadly deluded; but our university
alone has had the courage to lay its young but vigorous hand upon
the mane of untamed Speculation and say, `We will have no more
of this.'" It is a consolation to know how the result, thus
devoutly sought, has been achieved; for in the "ode" sung at
the laying of the corner-stone of a new theological building of
the same university, in May, 1880, we read:



           "Science and Revelation here
            In perfect harmony appear,
            Guiding young feet along the road
            Through grace and Nature up to God."



It is also pleasing to know that, while an institution calling
itself a university thus violated the fundamental principles on
which any institution worthy of the name must be based, another
institution which has the glory of being the first in the entire
North to begin something like a university organization--the
State University of Michigan--recalled Dr. Winchell at once to
his former professorship, and honoured itself by maintaining him
in that position, where, unhampered, he was thereafter able to
utter his views in the midst of the largest body of students on
the American Continent.

Disgraceful as this history was to the men who drove out
Dr. Winchell, they but succeeded, as various similar bodies of
men making similar efforts have done, in advancing their supposed
victim to higher position and more commanding influence.[316]

A few years after this suppression of earnest Christian thought
at an institution of learning in the western part of our
Southern States, there appeared a similar attempt in sundry
seaboard States of the South.

As far back as the year 1857 the Presbyterian Synod of
Mississippi passed the following resolution:

"_Whereas_, We live in an age in which the most insidious attacks
are made on revealed religion through the natural sciences, and
as it behooves the Church at all times to have men capable of
defending the faith once delivered to the saints;

"_Resolved_, That this presbytery recommend the endowment of a
professorship of Natural Science as connected with revealed
religion in one or more of our theological seminaries."

Pursuant to this resolution such a chair was established in the
theological seminary at Columbia, S. C., and James Woodrow was
appointed professor. Dr. Woodrow seems to have been admirably
fitted for the position--a devoted Christian man, accepting the
Presbyterian standards of faith in which he had been brought up,
and at the same time giving every effort to acquaint himself
with the methods and conclusions of science. To great natural
endowments he added constant labours to arrive at the truth in
this field. Visiting Europe, he made the acquaintance of many of
the foremost scientific investigators, became a student in
university lecture rooms and laboratories, an interested hearer
in scientific conventions, and a correspondent of leading men of
science at home and abroad. As a result, he came to the
conclusion that the hypothesis of evolution is the only one
which explains various leading facts in natural science. This he
taught, and he also taught that such a view is not incompatible
with a true view of the sacred Scriptures.

In 1882 and 1883 the board of directors of the theological
seminary, in fear that "scepticism in the world is using alleged
discoveries in science to impugn the Word of God," requested
Prof. Woodrow to state his views in regard to evolution. The
professor complied with this request in a very powerful address,
which was published and widely circulated, to such effect that
the board of directors shortly afterward passed resolutions
declaring the theory of evolution as defined by Prof. Woodrow
not inconsistent with perfect soundness in the faith.

In the year 1884 alarm regarding Dr. Woodrow's teachings began
to show itself in larger proportions, and a minority report was
introduced into the Synod of South Carolina declaring that "the
synod is called upon to decide not upon the question whether the
said views of Dr. Woodrow contradict the Bible in its highest
and absolute sense, but upon the question whether they
contradict the interpretation of the Bible by the Presbyterian
Church in the United States."

Perhaps a more self-condemnatory statement was never presented,
for it clearly recognized, as a basis for intolerance, at least
a possible difference between "the interpretation of the Bible
by the Presbyterian Church" and the teachings of "the Bible in
its highest and absolute sense."

This hostile movement became so strong that, in spite of the
favourable action of the directors of the seminary, and against
the efforts of a broad-minded minority in the representative
bodies having ultimate charge of the institution, the delegates
from the various synods raised a storm of orthodoxy and drove
Dr. Woodrow from his post. Happily, he was at the same time
professor in the University of South Carolina in the same city
of Columbia, and from his chair in that institution he continued
to teach natural science with the approval of the great majority
of thinking men in that region; hence, the only effect of the
attempt to crush him was, that his position was made higher,
respect for him deeper, and his reputation wider.

In spite of attempts by the more orthodox to prevent students of
the theological seminary from attending his lectures at the
university, they persisted in hearing him; indeed, the
reputation of heresy seemed to enhance his influence.

It should be borne in mind that the professor thus treated had
been one of the most respected and beloved university
instructors in the South during more than a quarter of a
century, and that he was turned out of his position with no
opportunity for careful defence, and, indeed, without even the
formality of a trial. Well did an eminent but thoughtful divine
of the Southern Presbyterian Church declare that "the method of
procedure to destroy evolution by the majority in the Church is
vicious and suicidal," and that "logical dynamite has been used
to put out a supposed fire in the upper stories of our house,
and all the family in the house at that." Wisely, too, did he
refer to the majority as "sowing in the fields of the Church
the thorns of its errors, and cumbering its path with the
_debris_ and ruin of its own folly."

To these recent cases may be added the expulsion of Prof. Toy
from teaching under ecclesiastical control at Louisville, and
his election to a far more influential chair at Harvard
University; the driving out from the American College at Beyrout
of the young professors who accepted evolution as probable, and
the rise of one of them, Mr. Nimr, to a far more commanding
position than that which he left--the control of three leading
journals at Cairo; the driving out of Robertson Smith from his
position at Edinburgh, and his reception into the far more
important and influential professorship at the English
University of Cambridge; and multitudes of similar cases. From
the days when Henry Dunster, the first President of Harvard
College, was driven from his presidency, as Cotton Mather said,
for "falling into the briers of Antipedobaptism" until now,
the same spirit is shown in all such attempts. In each we have
generally, on one side, a body of older theologians, who since
their youth have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, sundry
professors who do not wish to rewrite their lectures, and a mass
of unthinking ecclesiastical persons of little or no importance
save in making up a retrograde majority in an ecclesiastical
tribunal; on the other side we have as generally the thinking,
open-minded, devoted men who have listened to the revelation of
their own time as well as of times past, and who are evidently
thinking the future thought of the world.

Here we have survivals of that same oppression of thought by
theology which has cost the modern world so dear; the system
which forced great numbers of professors, under penalty of
deprivation, to teach that the sun and planets revolve about the
earth; that comets are fire-balls flung by an angry God at a
wicked world; that insanity is diabolic possession; that
anatomical investigation of the human frame is sin against the
Holy Ghost; that chemistry leads to sorcery; that taking
interest for money is forbidden by Scripture; that geology must
conform to ancient Hebrew poetry. From the same source came in
Austria the rule of the "Immaculate Oath," under which
university professors, long before the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception was defined by the Church, were obliged to swear to
their belief in that dogma before they were permitted to teach
even arithmetic or geometry; in England, the denunciation of
inoculation against smallpox; in Scotland, the protests against
using chloroform in childbirth as "vitiating the primal curse
against woman"; in France, the use in clerical schools of a
historical text-book from which Napoleon was left out; and, in
America, the use of Catholic manuals in which the Inquisition is
declared to have been a purely civil tribunal, or Protestant
manuals in which the Puritans are shown to have been all that we
could now wish they had been.

So, too, among multitudes of similar efforts abroad, we have
during centuries the fettering of professors at English and
Scotch universities by test oaths, subscriptions to articles,
and catechisms without number. In our own country we have had in
a vast multitude of denominational colleges, as the first
qualification for a professorship, not ability in the subject to
be taught, but fidelity to the particular shibboleth of the
denomination controlling the college or university.

Happily, in these days such attempts generally defeat
themselves. The supposed victim is generally made a man of mark
by persecution, and advanced to a higher and wider sphere of
usefulness. In withstanding the march of scientific truth, any
Conference, Synod, Board of Commissioners, Board of Trustees, or
Faculty, is but as a nest of field-mice in the path of a steam plough.

The harm done to religion in these attempts is far greater than
that done to science; for thereby suspicions are widely spread,
especially among open-minded young men, that the accepted
Christian system demands a concealment of truth, with the
persecution of honest investigators, and therefore must be
false. Well was it said in substance by President McCosh, of
Princeton, that no more sure way of making unbelievers in
Christianity among young men could be devised than preaching to
them that the doctrines arrived at by the great scientific
thinkers of this period are opposed to religion.

Yet it is but justice here to say that more and more there is
evolving out of this past history of oppression a better spirit,
which is making itself manifest with power in the leading
religious bodies of the world. In the Church of Rome we have
to-day such utterances as those of St. George Mivart, declaring
that the Church must not attempt to interfere with science; that
the Almighty in the Galileo case gave her a distinct warning
that the priesthood of science must remain with the men of
science. In the Anglican Church and its American daughter we
have the acts and utterances of such men as Archbishop Tait,
Bishop Temple, Dean Stanley, Dean Farrar, and many others,
proving that the deepest religious thought is more and more
tending to peace rather than warfare with science; and in the
other churches, especially in America, while there is yet much
to be desired, the welcome extended in many of them to Alexander
Winchell, and the freedom given to views like his, augur well
for a better state of things in the future.

From the science of Anthropology, when rightly viewed as a
whole, has come the greatest aid to those who work to advance
religion rather than to promote any particular system of
theology; for Anthropology and its subsidiary sciences show more
and more that man, since coming upon the earth, has risen, from
the period when he had little, if any, idea of a great power
above him, through successive stages of fetichism, shamanism,
and idolatry, toward better forms of belief, making him more and
more accessible to nobler forms of religion. The same sciences
show, too, within the historic period, the same tendency, and
especially within the events covered by our sacred books, a
progress from fetichism, of which so many evidences crop out in
the early Jewish worship as shown in the Old Testament
Scriptures, through polytheism, when Jehovah was but "a god
above all gods," through the period when he was "a jealous
God," capricious and cruel, until he is revealed in such
inspired utterances as those of the nobler Psalms, the great
passages in Isaiah, the sublime preaching of Micah, and, above
all, through the ideal given to the world by Jesus of Nazareth.

Well indeed has an eminent divine of the Church of England in
our own time called on Christians to rejoice over this
evolution, "between the God of Samuel, who ordered infants to
be slaughtered, and the God of the Psalmist, whose tender
mercies are over all his works; between the God of the
Patriarchs, who was always repenting, and the God of the
Apostles, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, with
whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning, between the
God of the Old Testament, who walked in the garden in the cool
of the day, and the God of the New Testament, whom no man hath
seen nor can see; between the God of Leviticus, who was so
particular about the sacrificial furniture and utensils, and the
God of the Acts, who dwelleth not in temples made with hands;
between the God who hardened Pharaoh's heart, and the God who
will have all men to be saved; between the God of Exodus, who is
merciful only to those who love him, and the God of Christ--the
heavenly Father--who is kind unto the unthankful and the evil."

However overwhelming, then, the facts may be which Anthropology,
History, and their kindred sciences may, in the interest of
simple truth, establish against the theological doctrine of
"the Fall"; however completely they may fossilize various
dogmas, catechisms, creeds, confessions, "plans of salvation"
and "schemes of redemption," which have been evolved from the
great minds of the theological period: science, so far from
making inroads on religion, or even upon our Christian
development of it, will strengthen all that is essential in it,
giving new and nobler paths to man's highest aspirations. For
the one great, legitimate, scientific conclusion of anthropology
is, that, more and more, a better civilization of the world,
despite all its survivals of savagery and barbarism, is
developing men and women on whom the declarations of the nobler
Psalms, of Isaiah, of Micah, the Sermon on the Mount, the first
great commandment, and the second, which is like unto it, St.
Paul's praise of charity and St. James's definition of "pure
religion and undefiled," can take stronger hold for the more
effective and more rapid uplifting of our race.[322]


                          CHAPTER XI.
   FROM "THE PRINCE OF THE POWER OF THE AIR" TO METEOROLOGY

              I. GROWTH OF A THEOLOGICAL THEORY.

THE popular beliefs of classic antiquity regarding storms,
thunder, and lightning, took shape in myths representing Vulcan
as forging thunderbolts, Jupiter as flinging them at his
enemies, AEolus intrusting the winds in a bag to AEneas, and the
like. An attempt at their further theological development is seen
in the Pythagorean statement that lightnings are intended to
terrify the damned in Tartarus.

But at a very early period we see the beginning of a scientific
view. In Greece, the Ionic philosophers held that such phenomena
are obedient to law. Plato, Aristotle, and many lesser lights,
attempted to account for them on natural grounds; and their
explanations, though crude, were based upon observation and
thought. In Rome, Lucretius, Seneca, Pliny, and others,
inadequate as their statements were, implanted at least the
germs of a science. But, as the Christian Church rose to power,
this evolution was checked; the new leaders of thought found, in
the Scriptures recognized by them as sacred, the basis for a new
view, or rather for a modification of the old view.

This ending of a scientific evolution based upon observation and
reason, and this beginning of a sacred science based upon the
letter of Scripture and on theology, are seen in the utterances
of various fathers in the early Church. As to the general
features of this new development, Tertullian held that sundry
passages of Scripture prove lightning identical with hell-fire;
and this idea was transmitted from generation to generation of
later churchmen, who found an especial support of Tertullian's
view in the sulphurous smell experienced during thunderstorms.
St. Hilary thought the firmament very much lower than the
heavens, and that it was created not only for the support of the
upper waters, but also for the tempering of our atmosphere.[324]
St. Ambrose held that thunder is caused by the winds breaking
through the solid firmament, and cited from the prophet Amos the
sublime passage regarding "Him that establisheth the
thunders."[324b] He shows, indeed, some conception of the true
source of rain; but his whole reasoning is limited by various
scriptural texts. He lays great stress upon the firmament as a
solid outer shell of the universe: the heavens he holds to be
not far outside this outer shell, and argues regarding their
character from St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians and from
the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm. As to "the waters which
are above the firmament," he takes up the objection of those who
hold that, this outside of the universe being spherical, the
waters must slide off it, especially if the firmament revolves;
and he points out that it is by no means certain that the
_outside_ of the firmament _is_ spherical, and insists that, if it
does revolve, the water is just what is needed to lubricate and
cool its axis.

St. Jerome held that God at the Creation, having spread out the
firmament between heaven and earth, and having separated the
upper waters from the lower, caused the upper waters to be
frozen into ice, in order to keep all in place. A proof of this
view Jerome found in the words of Ezekiel regarding "the
crystal stretched above the cherubim."[324c]

The germinal principle in accordance with which all these
theories were evolved was most clearly proclaimed to the world
by St. Augustine in his famous utterance: "Nothing is to be
accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is
that authority than all the powers of the human mind."[325] No
treatise was safe thereafter which did not breathe the spirit
and conform to the letter of this maxim. Unfortunately, what was
generally understood by the "authority of Scripture" was the
tyranny of sacred books imperfectly transcribed, viewed through
distorting superstitions, and frequently interpreted by party spirit.

Following this precept of St. Augustine there were developed, in
every field, theological views of science which have never led
to a single truth--which, without exception, have forced mankind
away from the truth, and have caused Christendom to stumble for
centuries into abysses of error and sorrow. In meteorology, as
in every other science with which he dealt, Augustine based
everything upon the letter of the sacred text; and it is
characteristic of the result that this man, so great when
untrammelled, thought it his duty to guard especially the whole
theory of the "waters above the heavens."

In the sixth century this theological reasoning was still
further developed, as we have seen, by Cosmas Indicopleustes.
Finding a sanction for the old Egyptian theory of the universe
in the ninth chapter of Hebrews, he insisted that the earth is
a flat parallelogram, and that from its outer edges rise immense
walls supporting the firmament; then, throwing together the
reference to the firmament in Genesis and the outburst of poetry
in the Psalms regarding the "waters that be above the heavens,"
he insisted that over the terrestrial universe are solid arches
bearing a vault supporting a vast cistern "containing the
waters"; finally, taking from Genesis the expression regarding
the "windows of heaven," he insisted that these windows are
opened and closed by the angels whenever the Almighty wishes to
send rain upon the earth or to withhold it.

This was accepted by the universal Church as a vast contribution
to thought; for several centuries it was the orthodox doctrine,
and various leaders in theology devoted themselves to developing
and supplementing it.

About the beginning of the seventh century, Isidore, Bishop of
Seville, was the ablest prelate in Christendom, and was showing
those great qualities which led to his enrolment among the
saints of the Church. His theological view of science marks an
epoch. As to the "waters above the firmament," Isidore contends
that they must be lower than, the uppermost heaven, though
higher than the lower heaven, because in the one hundred and
forty-eighth Psalm they are mentioned _after_ the heavenly bodies
and the "heaven of heavens," but _before_ the terrestrial
elements. As to their purpose, he hesitates between those who
held that they were stored up there by the prescience of God
for the destruction of the world at the Flood, as the words of
Scripture that "the windows of heaven were opened" seemed to
indicate, and those who held that they were kept there to
moderate the heat of the heavenly bodies. As to the firmament,
he is in doubt whether it envelops the earth "like an eggshell,"
or is merely spread over it "like a curtain"; for he holds that
the passage in the one hundred and fourth Psalm may be used to
support either view.

Having laid these scriptural foundations, Isidore shows
considerable power of thought; indeed, at times, when he
discusses the rainbow, rain, hail, snow, and frost, his theories
are rational, and give evidence that, if he could have broken
away from his adhesion to the letter of Scripture, he might have
given a strong impulse to the evolution of a true science.[326]

About a century later appeared, at the other extremity of
Europe, the second in the trio of theological men of science in
the early Middle Ages--Bede the Venerable. The nucleus of his
theory also is to be found in the accepted view of the "firmament"
and of the "waters above the heavens," derived from Genesis.
The firmament he holds to be spherical, and of a nature
subtile and fiery; the upper heavens, he says, which
contain the angels, God has tempered with ice, lest they inflame
the lower elements. As to the waters placed above the firmament,
lower than the spiritual heavens, but higher than all corporeal
creatures, he says, "Some declare that they were stored there
for the Deluge, but others, more correctly, that they are
intended to temper the fire of the stars." He goes on with long
discussions as to various elements and forces in Nature, and
dwells at length upon the air, of which he says that the upper,
serene air is over the heavens; while the lower, which is
coarse, with humid exhalations, is sent off from the earth, and
that in this are lightning, hail, Snow, ice, and tempests,
finding proof of this in the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm,
where these are commanded to "praise the Lord from the earth."[327]

So great was Bede's authority, that nearly all the anonymous
speculations of the next following centuries upon these subjects
were eventually ascribed to him. In one of these spurious
treatises an attempt is made to get new light upon the sources
of the waters above the heavens, the main reliance being the
sheet containing the animals let down from heaven, in the vision
of St. Peter. Another of these treatises is still more curious,
for it endeavours to account for earthquakes and tides by means
of the leviathan mentioned in Scripture. This characteristic
passage runs as follows: "Some say that the earth contains the
animal leviathan, and that he holds his tail after a fashion of
his own, so that it is sometimes scorched by the sun, whereupon
he strives to get hold of the sun, and so the earth is shaken by
the motion of his indignation; he drinks in also, at times, such
huge masses of the waves that when he belches them forth all the
seas feel their effect." And this theological theory of the
tides, as caused by the alternate suction and belching of
leviathan, went far and wide.[327]

In the writings thus covered with the name of Bede there is much
showing a scientific spirit, which might have come to something
of permanent value had it not been hampered by the supposed
necessity of conforming to the letter of Scripture. It is as
startling as it is refreshing to hear one of these medieval
theorists burst out as follows against those who are content to
explain everything by the power of God: "What is more pitiable
than to say that a thing _is_, because God is able to do it, and
not to show any reason why it is so, nor any purpose for which
it is so; just as if God did everything that he is able to do!
You talk like one who says that God is able to make a calf out
of a log. But _did_ he ever do it? Either, then, show a reason
why a thing is so, or a purpose wherefore it is so, or else
cease to declare it so."[328]

The most permanent contribution of Bede to scientific thought in
this field was his revival of the view that the firmament is
made of ice; and he supported this from the words in the
twenty-sixth chapter of Job, "He bindeth up the waters in his
thick cloud, and the cloud is not rent under them."

About the beginning of the ninth century appeared the third in
that triumvirate of churchmen who were the oracles of sacred
science throughout the early Middle Ages--Rabanus Maurus, Abbot
of Fulda and Archbishop of Mayence. Starting, like all his
predecessors, from the first chapter of Genesis, borrowing here
and there from the ancient philosophers, and excluding
everything that could conflict with the letter of Scripture, he
follows, in his work upon the universe, his two predecessors,
Isidore and Bede, developing especially St. Jerome's theory,
drawn from Ezekiel, that the firmament is strong enough to hold
up the "waters above the heavens," because it is made of ice.

For centuries the authority of these three great teachers was
unquestioned, and in countless manuals and catechisms their
doctrine was translated and diluted for the common mind. But
about the second quarter of the twelfth century a priest,
Honorius of Autun, produced several treatises which show that
thought on this subject had made some little progress. He
explained the rain rationally, and mainly in the modern manner;
with the thunder he is less successful, but insists that the
thunderbolt "is not stone, as some assert." His thinking is
vigorous and independent. Had theorists such as he been many, a
new science could have been rapidly evolved, but the theological
current was too strong.[329]

The strength of this current which overwhelmed the thought of
Honorius is seen again in the work of the Dominican monk, John
of San Geminiano, who in the thirteenth century gave forth his
_Summa de Exemplis_ for the use of preachers in his order. Of its
thousand pages, over two hundred are devoted to illustrations
drawn from the heavens and the elements. A characteristic
specimen is his explanation of the Psalmist's phrase, "The
arrows of the thunder." These, he tells us, are forged out of a
dry vapour rising from the earth and kindled by the heat of the
upper air, which then, coming into contact with a cloud just
turning into rain, "is conglutinated like flour into dough,"
but, being too hot to be extinguished, its particles become
merely sharpened at the lower end, and so blazing arrows,
cleaving and burning everything they touch.[329b]

But far more important, in the thirteenth century, was the fact
that the most eminent scientific authority of that age, Albert
the Great, Bishop of Ratisbon, attempted to reconcile the
speculations of Aristotle with theological views derived from
the fathers. In one very important respect he improved upon the
meteorological views of his great master. The thunderbolt, he
says, is no mere fire, but the product of black clouds
containing much mud, which, when it is baked by the intense
heat, forms a fiery black or red stone that falls from the sky,
tearing beams and crushing walls in its course: such he has seen
with his own eyes.[330]

The monkish encyclopedists of the later Middle Ages added little
to these theories. As we glance over the pages of Vincent of
Beauvais, the monk Bartholomew, and William of Conches, we note
only a growing deference to the authority of Aristotle as
supplementing that of Isidore and Bede and explaining sacred
Scripture. Aristotle is treated like a Church father, but
extreme care is taken not to go beyond the great maxim of St.
Augustine; then, little by little, Bede and Isidore fall into
the background, Aristotle fills the whole horizon, and his
utterances are second in sacredness only to the text of Holy Writ.

A curious illustration of the difficulties these medieval
scholars had to meet in reconciling the scientific theories of
Aristotle with the letter of the Bible is seen in the case of
the rainbow. It is to the honour of Aristotle that his
conclusions regarding the rainbow, though slightly erroneous,
were based upon careful observation and evolved by reasoning
alone; but his Christian commentators, while anxious to follow
him, had to bear in mind the scriptural statement that God had
created the rainbow as a sign to Noah that there should never
again be a Flood on the earth. Even so bold a thinker as
Cardinal d'Ailly, whose speculations as to the geography of the
earth did so much afterward in stimulating Columbus, faltered
before this statement, acknowledging that God alone could
explain it; but suggested that possibly never before the Deluge
had a cloud been suffered to take such a position toward the sun
as to cause a rainbow.

The learned cardinal was also constrained to believe that
certain stars and constellations have something to do in causing
the rain, since these would best explain Noah's foreknowledge
of the Deluge. In connection with this scriptural doctrine of
winds came a scriptural doctrine of earthquakes: they were
believed to be caused by winds issuing from the earth, and this
view was based upon the passage in the one hundred and
thirty-fifth Psalm, "He bringeth the wind out of his treasuries."[331]

Such were the main typical attempts during nearly fourteen
centuries to build up under theological guidance and within
scriptural limitations a sacred science of meteorology. But
these theories were mainly evolved in the effort to establish a
basis and general theory of phenomena: it still remained to
account for special manifestations, and here came a twofold
development of theological thought.

On one hand, these phenomena were attributed to the Almighty,
and, on the other, to Satan. As to the first of these theories,
we constantly find the Divine wrath mentioned by the earlier
fathers as the cause of lightning, hailstorms, hurricanes, and
the like.

In the early days of Christianity we see a curious struggle
between pagan and Christian belief upon this point. Near the
close of the second century the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his
effort to save the empire, fought a hotly contested battle with
the Quadi, in what is now Hungary. While the issue of this great
battle was yet doubtful there came suddenly a blinding storm
beating into the faces of the Quadi, and this gave the Roman
troops the advantage, enabling Marcus Aurelius to win a
decisive victory. Votaries of each of the great religions
claimed that this storm was caused by the object of their own
adoration. The pagans insisted that Jupiter had sent the storm
in obedience to their prayers, and on the Antonine Column at
Rome we may still see the figure of Olympian Jove casting his
thunderbolts and pouring a storm of rain from the open heavens
against the Quadi. On the other hand, the Christians insisted
that the storm had been sent by Jehovah in obedience to _their_
prayers; and Tertullian, Eusebius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St.
Jerome were among those who insisted upon this meteorological
miracle; the first two, indeed, in the fervour of their
arguments for its reality, allowing themselves to be carried
considerably beyond exact historical truth.[332]

As time went on, the fathers developed this view more and more
from various texts in the Jewish and Christian sacred books,
substituting for Jupiter flinging his thunderbolts the Almighty
wrapped in thunder and sending forth his lightnings. Through the
Middle Ages this was fostered until it came to be accepted as a
mere truism, entering into all medieval thinking, and was still
further developed by an attempt to specify the particular sins
which were thus punished. Thus even the rational Florentine
historian Villani ascribed floods and fires to the "too great
pride of the city of Florence and the ingratitude of the
citizens toward God," which, "of course," says a recent
historian, "meant their insufficient attention to the
ceremonies of religion."[332b]

In the thirteenth century the Cistercian monk, Cesarius of
Heisterbach, popularized the doctrine in central Europe. His
rich collection of anecdotes for the illustration of religious
truths was the favourite recreative reading in the convents for
three centuries, and exercised great influence over the thought
of the later Middle Ages. In this work he relates several
instances of the Divine use of lightning, both for rescue and
for punishment. Thus he tells us how the steward (_cellerarius_)
of his own monastery was saved from the clutch of a robber by a
clap of thunder which, in answer to his prayer, burst suddenly
from the sky and frightened the bandit from his purpose: how, in
a Saxon theatre, twenty men were struck down, while a priest
escaped, not because he was not a greater sinner than the rest,
but because the thunderbolt had respect for his profession! It
is Cesarius, too, who tells us the story of the priest of
Treves, struck by lightning in his own church, whither he had
gone to ring the bell against the storm, and whose sins were
revealed by the course of the lightning, for it tore his clothes
from him and consumed certain parts of his body, showing that
the sins for which he was punished were vanity and unchastity.[333]

This mode of explaining the Divine interference more minutely is
developed century after century, and we find both Catholics and
Protestants assigning as causes of unpleasant meteorological
phenomena whatever appears to them wicked or even unorthodox.
Among the English Reformers, Tyndale quotes in this kind of
argument the thirteenth chapter of I. Samuel, showing that, when
God gave Israel a king, it thundered and rained. Archbishop
Whitgift, Bishop Bale, and Bishop Pilkington insisted on the
same view. In Protestant Germany, about the same period,
Plieninger took a dislike to the new Gregorian calendar and
published a volume of _Brief Reflections_, in which he insisted
that the elements had given utterance to God's anger against it,
calling attention to the fact that violent storms raged over
almost all Germany during the very ten days which the Pope had
taken out for the correction of the year, and that great floods
began with the first days of the corrected year.[333b]

Early in the seventeenth century, Majoli, Bishop of Voltoraria,
in southern Italy, produced his huge work _Dies Canicularii_, or
Dog Days, which remained a favourite encyclopedia in Catholic
lands for over a hundred years. Treating of thunder and
lightning, he compares them to bombs against the wicked, and
says that the thunderbolt is "an exhalation condensed and
cooked into stone," and that "it is not to be doubted that, of
all instruments of God's vengeance, the thunderbolt is the
chief"; that by means of it Sennacherib and his army were
consumed; that Luther was struck by lightning in his youth as a
caution against departing from the Catholic faith; that
blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking are the sins to which this
punishment is especially assigned, and he cites the case of
Dathan and Abiram. Fifty years later the Jesuit Stengel
developed this line of thought still further in four thick
quarto volumes on the judgments of God, adding an elaborate
schedule for the use of preachers in the sermons of an entire
year. Three chapters were devoted to thunder, lightning, and
storms. That the author teaches the agency in these of
diabolical powers goes without saying; but this can only act,
he declares, by Divine permission, and the thunderbolt is always
the finger of God, which rarely strikes a man save for his sins,
and the nature of the special sin thus punished may be inferred
from the bodily organs smitten. A few years later, in Protestant
Swabia, Pastor Georg Nuber issued a volume of "weather-sermons,"
in which he discusses nearly every sort of elemental
disturbances--storms, floods, droughts, lightning, and
hail. These, he says, come direct from God for human sins, yet
no doubt with discrimination, for there are five sins which God
especially punishes with lightning and hail--namely,
impenitence, incredulity, neglect of the repair of churches,
fraud in the payment of tithes to the clergy, and oppression of
subordinates, each of which points he supports with a mass of
scriptural texts.[334]

This doctrine having become especially precious both to
Catholics and to Protestants, there were issued handbooks of
prayers against bad weather: among these was the _Spiritual
Thunder and Storm Booklet_, produced in 1731 by a Protestant
scholar, Stoltzlin, whose three or four hundred pages of prayer
and song, "sighs for use when it lightens fearfully," and
"cries of anguish when the hailstorm is drawing on," show a
wonderful adaptability to all possible meteorological
emergencies. The preface of this volume is contributed by Prof.
Dilherr, pastor of the great church of St. Sebald at Nuremberg,
who, in discussing the Divine purposes of storms, adds to the
three usually assigned--namely, God's wish to manifest his
power, to display his anger, and to drive sinners to
repentance--a fourth, which, he says, is that God may show us "with
what sort of a stormbell he will one day ring in the last judgment."

About the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century we
find, in Switzerland, even the eminent and rational Professor of
Mathematics, Scheuchzer, publishing his _Physica Sacra_, with the
Bible as a basis, and forced to admit that the elements, in the
most literal sense, utter the voice of God. The same pressure
was felt in New England. Typical are the sermons of Increase
Mather on _The Voice of God in Stormy Winds_. He especially lays
stress on the voice of God speaking to Job out of the whirlwind,
and upon the text, "Stormy wind fulfilling his word." He
declares, "When there are great tempests, the angels oftentimes
have a hand therein,... yea, and sometimes evil angels." He
gives several cases of blasphemers struck by lightning, and
says, "Nothing can be more dangerous for mortals than to
contemn dreadful providences, and, in particular, dreadful tempests."

His distinguished son, Cotton Mather, disentangled himself
somewhat from the old view, as he had done in the interpretation
of comets. In his _Christian Philosopher_, his _Thoughts for the
Day of Rain_, and his _Sermon preached at the Time of the Late
Storm_ (in 1723), he is evidently tending toward the modern view.
Yet, from time to time, the older view has reasserted itself,
and in France, as recently as the year 1870, we find the Bishop
of Verdun ascribing the drought afflicting his diocese to the
sin of Sabbath-breaking.[335]

This theory, which attributed injurious meteorological
phenomnena mainly to the purposes of God, was a natural
development, and comparatively harmless; but at a very early
period there was evolved another theory, which, having been
ripened into a doctrine, cost the earth dear indeed. Never,
perhaps, in the modern world has there been a dogma more
prolific of physical, mental, and moral agony throughout whole
nations and during whole centuries. This theory, its development
by theology, its fearful results to mankind, and its destruction
by scientific observation and thought, will next be considered.


                II. DIABOLIC AGENCY IN STORMS.

While the fathers and schoolmen were labouring to deduce a
science of meteorology from our sacred books, there oozed up in
European society a mass of traditions and observances which had
been lurking since the days of paganism; and, although here and
there appeared a churchman to oppose them, the theologians and
ecclesiastics ere long began to adopt them and to clothe them
with the authority of religion.

Both among the pagans of the Roman Empire and among the
barbarians of the North the Christian missionaries had found it
easier to prove the new God supreme than to prove the old gods
powerless. Faith in the miracles of the new religion seemed to
increase rather than to diminish faith in the miracles of the
old; and the Church at last began admitting the latter as facts,
but ascribing them to the devil. Jupiter and Odin sank into the
category of ministers of Satan, and transferred to that master
all their former powers. A renewed study of Scripture by
theologians elicited overwhelming proofs of the truth of this
doctrine. Stress was especially laid on the declaration of
Scripture, "The gods of the heathen are devils."[336] Supported
by this and other texts, it soon became a dogma. So strong was
the hold it took, under the influence of the Church, that not
until late in the seventeenth century did its substantial truth
begin to be questioned.

With no field of action had the sway of the ancient deities been
more identified than with that of atmospheric phenomena. The
Roman heard Jupiter, and the Teuton heard Thor, in the thunder.
Could it be doubted that these powerful beings would now take
occasion, unless hindered by the command of the Almighty, to
vent their spite against those who had deserted their altars?
Might not the Almighty himself be willing to employ the malice
of these powers of the air against those who had offended him?

It was, indeed, no great step, for those whose simple faith
accepted rain or sunshine as an answer to their prayers, to
suspect that the untimely storms or droughts, which baffled
their most earnest petitions, were the work of the archenemy,
"the prince of the power of the air."

The great fathers of the Church had easily found warrant for
this doctrine in Scripture. St. Jerome declared the air to be
full of devils, basing this belief upon various statements in
the prophecies of Isaiah and in the Epistle to the Ephesians.
St. Augustine held the same view as beyond controversy.[337]

During the Middle Ages this doctrine of the diabolical origin of
storms went on gathering strength. Bede had full faith in it,
and narrates various anecdotes in support of it. St. Thomas
Aquinas gave it his sanction, saying in his all authoritative
_Summa_, "Rains and winds, and whatsoever occurs by local impulse
alone, can be caused by demons." "It is," he says, "a dogma of
faith that the demons can produce wind, storms, and rain of fire
from heaven."

Albert the Great taught the same doctrine, and showed how a
certain salve thrown into a spring produced whirlwinds. The
great Franciscan--the "seraphic doctor"--St. Bonaventura,
whose services to theology earned him one of the highest places
in the Church, and to whom Dante gave special honour in
paradise, set upon this belief his high authority. The lives of
the saints, and the chronicles of the Middle Ages, were filled
with it. Poetry and painting accepted the idea and developed it.
Dante wedded it to verse, and at Venice this thought may still
be seen embodied in one of the grand pictures of Bordone: a
shipload of demons is seen approaching Venice in a storm,
threatening destruction to the city, but St. Mark, St. George, and
St. Nicholas attack the vessel, and disperse the hellish crew.[338]

The popes again and again sanctioned this doctrine, and it was
amalgamated with various local superstitions, pious
imaginations, and interesting arguments, to strike the fancy of
the people at large. A strong argument in favour of a diabolical
origin of the thunderbolt was afforded by the eccentricities of
its operation. These attracted especial attention in the Middle
Ages, and the popular love of marvel generalized isolated
phenomena into rules. Thus it was said that the lightning
strikes the sword in the sheath, gold in the purse, the foot in
the shoe, leaving sheath and purse and shoe unharmed; that it
consumes a human being internally without injuring the skin;
that it destroys nets in the water, but not on the land; that it
kills one man, and leaves untouched another standing beside him;
that it can tear through a house and enter the earth without
moving a stone from its place; that it injures the heart of a
tree, but not the bark; that wine is poisoned by it, while
poisons struck by it lose their venom; that a man's hair may be
consumed by it and the man be unhurt.[338b]

These peculiar phenomena, made much of by the allegorizing
sermonizers of the day, were used in moral lessons from every
pulpit. Thus the Carmelite, Matthias Farinator, of Vienna, who
at the Pope's own instance compiled early in the fifteenth
century that curious handbook of illustrative examples for
preachers, the _Lumen Animae_, finds a spiritual analogue for
each of these anomalies.[338c]

This doctrine grew, robust and noxious, until, in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, we find its bloom in a
multitude of treatises by the most learned of the Catholic and
Protestant divines, and its fruitage in the torture chambers and
on the scaffolds throughout Christendom. At the Reformation
period, and for nearly two hundred years afterward, Catholics
and Protestants vied with each other in promoting this growth.
John Eck, the great opponent of Luther, gave to the world an
annotated edition of Aristotle's _Physics_, which was long
authoritative in the German universities; and, though the text
is free from this doctrine, the woodcut illustrating the earth's
atmosphere shows most vividly, among the clouds of mid-air, the
devils who there reign supreme.[339]

Luther, in the other religious camp, supported the superstition
even more zealously, asserting at times his belief that the
winds themselves are only good or evil spirits, and declaring
that a stone thrown into a certain pond in his native region
would cause a dreadful storm because of the devils, kept
prisoners there.[339b]

Just at the close of the same century, Catholics and Protestants
welcomed alike the great work of Delrio. In this, the power of
devils over the elements is proved first from the Holy
Scriptures, since, he declares, "they show that Satan brought
fire down from heaven to consume the servants and flocks of Job,
and that he stirred up a violent wind, which overwhelmed in ruin
the sons and daughters of Job at their feasting." Next, Delrio
insists on the agreement of all the orthodox fathers, that it
was the devil himself who did this, and attention is called to
the fact that the hail with which the Egyptians were punished is
expressly declared in Holy Scripture to have been brought by the
evil angels. Citing from the Apocalypse, he points to the four
angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back
the winds and preventing their doing great damage to mortals;
and he dwells especially upon the fact that the devil is called
by the apostle a "prince of the power of the air." He then goes
on to cite the great fathers of the Church--Clement, Jerome,
Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.[340]

This doctrine was spread not only in ponderous treatises, but in
light literature and by popular illustrations. In the _Compendium
Maleficarum_ of the Italian monk Guacci, perhaps the most amusing
book in the whole literature of witchcraft, we may see the
witch, _in propria persona_, riding the diabolic goat through the
clouds while the storm rages around and beneath her; and we may
read a rich collection of anecdotes, largely contemporary, which
establish the required doctrine beyond question.

The first and most natural means taken against this work of
Satan in the air was prayer; and various petitions are to be
found scattered through the Christian liturgies--some very
beautiful and touching. This means of escape has been relied
upon, with greater or less faith, from those days to these.
Various medieval saints and reformers, and devoted men in all
centuries, from St. Giles to John Wesley, have used it with
results claimed to be miraculous. Whatever theory any thinking
man may hold in the matter, he will certainly not venture a
reproachful word: such prayers have been in all ages a natural
outcome of the mind of man in trouble.[340b]

But against the "power of the air" were used other means of a
very different character and tendency, and foremost among these
was exorcism. In an exorcism widely used and ascribed to Pope
Gregory XIII, the formula is given: "I, a priest of Christ,...
do command ye, most foul spirits, who do stir up these
clouds,... that ye depart from them, and disperse yourselves
into wild and untilled places, that ye may be no longer able to
harm men or animals or fruits or herbs, or whatsoever is
designed for human use." But this is mild, indeed, compared to
some later exorcisms, as when the ritual runs: "All the people
shall rise, and the priest, turning toward the clouds, shall
pronounce these words: `I exorcise ye, accursed demons, who have
dared to use, for the accomplishment of your iniquity, those
powers of Nature by which God in divers ways worketh good to
mortals; who stir up winds, gather vapours, form clouds, and
condense them into hail.... I exorcise ye,... that ye relinquish
the work ye have begun, dissolve the hail, scatter the clouds,
disperse the vapours, and restrain the winds.'" The rubric goes
on to order that then there shall be a great fire kindled in an
open place, and that over it the sign of the cross shall be
made, and the one hundred and fourteenth Psalm chanted, while
malodorous substances, among them sulphur and asafoetida, shall
be cast into the flames. The purpose seems to have been
literally to "smoke out" Satan.[341]

Manuals of exorcisms became important--some bulky quartos,
others handbooks. Noteworthy among the latter is one by the
Italian priest Locatelli, entitled _Exorcisms most Powerful and
Efficacious for the Dispelling of Aerial Tempests, whether
raised by Demons at their own Instance or at the Beck of some
Servant of the Devil_.[341b]

The Jesuit Gretser, in his famous book on _Benedictions and
Maledictions_, devotes a chapter to this subject, dismissing
summarily the scepticism that questions the power of devils over
the elements, and adducing the story of Job as conclusive.[341c]

Nor was this theory of exorcism by any means confined to the
elder Church. Luther vehemently upheld it, and prescribed
especially the first chapter of St. John's gospel as of
unfailing efficacy against thunder and lightning, declaring that
he had often found the mere sign of the cross, with the text,
"The word was made flesh," sufficient to put storms to flight.[342]

From the beginning of the Middle Ages until long after the
Reformation the chronicles give ample illustration of the
successful use of such exorcisms. So strong was the belief in
them that it forced itself into minds comparatively rational,
and found utterance in treatises of much importance.

But, since exorcisms were found at times ineffectual, other
means were sought, and especially fetiches of various sorts. One
of the earliest of these appeared when Pope Alexander I,
according to tradition, ordained that holy water should be kept
in churches and bedchambers to drive away devils.[342b] Another
safeguard was found in relics, and of similar efficacy were the
so-called "conception billets" sold by the Carmelite monks. They
contained a formula upon consecrated paper, at which the devil
might well turn pale. Buried in the corner of a field, one of
these was thought to give protection against bad weather and
destructive insects.[342c]

But highest in repute during centuries was the _Agnus Dei_--a
piece of wax blessed by the Pope's own hand, and stamped with
the well-known device representing the "Lamb of God." Its
powers were so marvellous that Pope Urban V thought three of
these cakes a fitting gift from himself to the Greek Emperor. In
the Latin doggerel recounting their virtues, their
meteorological efficacy stands first, for especial stress is
laid on their power of dispelling the thunder. The stress thus
laid by Pope Urban, as the infallible guide of Christendom, on
the efficacy of this fetich, gave it great value throughout
Europe, and the doggerel verses reciting its virtues sank deep
into the popular mind. It was considered a most potent means of
dispelling hail, pestilence, storms, conflagrations, and
enchantments; and this feeling was deepened by the rules and
rites for its consecration. So solemn was the matter, that the
manufacture and sale of this particular fetich was, by a papal
bull of 1471, reserved for the Pope himself, and he only
performed the required ceremony in the first and seventh years
of his pontificate. Standing unmitred, he prayed: "O God,... we
humbly beseech thee that thou wilt bless these waxen forms,
figured with the image of an innocent lamb,... that, at the
touch and sight of them, the faithful may break forth into
praises, and that the crash of hailstorms, the blast of
hurricanes, the violence of tempests, the fury of winds, and the
malice of thunderbolts may be tempered, and evil spirits flee
and tremble before the standard of thy holy cross, which is
graven upon them."[343]

Another favourite means with the clergy of the older Church for
bringing to naught the "power of the air," was found in great
processions bearing statues, relics, and holy emblems through
the streets. Yet even these were not always immediately
effective. One at Liege, in the thirteenth century, thrice
proved unsuccessful in bringing rain, when at last it was found
that the image of the Virgin had been forgotten! A new procession
was at once formed, the _Salve Regina_ sung, and the rain came
down in such torrents as to drive the devotees to shelter.[344]

In Catholic lands this custom remains to this day, and very
important features in these processions are the statues and the
reliquaries of patron saints. Some of these excel in bringing
sunshine, others in bringing rain. The Cathedral of Chartres is
so fortunate as to possess sundry relics of St. Taurin,
especially potent against dry weather, and some of St. Piat,
very nearly as infallible against wet weather. In certain
regions a single saint gives protection alternately against wet
and dry weather--as, for example, St. Godeberte at Noyon.
Against storms St. Barbara is very generally considered the most
powerful protectress; but, in the French diocese of Limoges,
Notre Dame de Crocq has proved a most powerful rival, for when,
a few years since, all the neighbouring parishes were ravaged by
storms, not a hailstone fell in the canton which she protected.
In the diocese of Tarbes, St. Exupere is especially invoked
against hail, peasants flocking from all the surrounding country
to his shrine.[344b]

But the means of baffling the powers of the air which came to be
most widely used was the ringing of consecrated church bells.

This usage had begun in the time of Charlemagne, and there is
extant a prohibition of his against the custom of baptizing
bells and of hanging certain tags[344c] on their tongues as a
protection against hailstorms; but even Charlemagne was
powerless against this current of medieval superstition.
Theological reasons were soon poured into it, and in the year
968 Pope John XIII gave it the highest ecclesiastical sanction
by himself baptizing the great bell of his cathedral church, the
Lateran, and christening it with his own name.[345]

This idea was rapidly developed, and we soon find it supported
in ponderous treatises, spread widely in sermons, and
popularized in multitudes of inscriptions cast upon the bells
themselves. This branch of theological literature may still be
studied in multitudes of church towers throughout Europe. A bell
at Basel bears the inscription, "Ad fugandos demones." Another,
in Lugano, declares "The sound of this bell vanquishes
tempests, repels demons, and summons men." Another, at the
Cathedral of Erfurt, declares that it can "ward off lightning
and malignant demons." A peal in the Jesuit church at the
university town of Pont-a-Mousson bore the words, "They praise
God, put to flight the clouds, affright the demons, and call the
people." This is dated 1634. Another bell in that part of France
declares, "It is I who dissipate the thunders"(_Ego sum qui
dissipo tonitrua_).[345b]

Another, in one of the forest cantons of Switzerland, bears a
doggerel couplet, which may be thus translated:


     "On the devil my spite I'll vent,
     And, God helping, bad weather prevent."[345c]

Very common were inscriptions embodying this doctrine in sonorous Latin.

Naturally, then, there grew up a ritual for the consecration of
bells. Knollys, in his quaint translation of the old chronicler
Sleidan, gives us the usage in the simple English of the middle
of the sixteenth century:

"In lyke sorte [as churches] are the belles used. And first,
forsouth, they must hange so, as the Byshop may goe round about
them. Whiche after he hath sayde certen Psalmes, he
consecrateth water and salte, and mingleth them together,
wherwith he washeth the belle diligently both within and
without, after wypeth it drie, and with holy oyle draweth in it
the signe of the crosse, and prayeth God, that whan they shall
rynge or sounde that bell, all the disceiptes of the devyll may
vanyshe away, hayle, thondryng, lightening, wyndes, and
tempestes, and all untemperate weathers may be aswaged. Whan he
hath wipte out the crosse of oyle wyth a linen cloth, he maketh
seven other crosses in the same, and within one only. After
saying certen Psalmes, he taketh a payre of sensours and senseth
the bel within, and prayeth God to sende it good lucke. In many
places they make a great dyner, and kepe a feast as it were at
a solemne wedding."[346]

These bell baptisms became matters of great importance. Popes,
kings, and prelates were proud to stand as sponsors. Four of the
bells at the Cathedral of Versailles having been destroyed
during the French Revolution, four new ones were baptized, on
the 6th of January, 1824, the Voltairean King, Louis XVIII, and
the pious Duchess d'Angouleme standing as sponsors.

In some of these ceremonies zeal appears to have outrun
knowledge, and one of Luther's stories, at the expense of the
older Church, was that certain authorities thus christened a
bell "Hosanna," supposing that to be the name of a woman.

To add to the efficacy of such baptisms, water was sometimes
brought from the river Jordan.[346b]

The prayers used at bell baptisms fully recognise this doctrine.
The ritual of Paris embraces the petition that, "whensoever
this bell shall sound, it shall drive away the malign influences
of the assailing spirits, the horror of their apparitions, the
rush of whirlwinds, the stroke of lightning, the harm of
thunder, the disasters of storms, and all the spirits of the
tempest." Another prayer begs that "the sound of this bell may
put to flight the fiery darts of the enemy of men"; and others
vary the form but not the substance of this petition. The great
Jesuit theologian, Bellarmin, did indeed try to deny the reality
of this baptism; but this can only be regarded as a piece of
casuistry suited to Protestant hardness of heart, or as strategy
in the warfare against heretics.[347]

Forms of baptism were laid down in various manuals sanctioned
directly by papal authority, and sacramental efficacy was
everywhere taken for granted.[347b] The development of this idea
in the older Church was too strong to be resisted;[347c] but, as
a rule, the Protestant theologians of the Reformation, while
admitting that storms were caused by Satan and his legions,
opposed the baptism of bells, and denied the theory of their
influence in dispersing storms. Luther, while never doubting
that troublesome meteorological phenomena were caused by devils,
regarded with contempt the idea that the demons were so childish
as to be scared by the clang of bells; his theory made them
altogether too powerful to be affected by means so trivial. The
great English Reformers, while also accepting very generally the
theory of diabolic interference in storms, reproved strongly the
baptizing of bells, as the perversion of a sacrament and
involving blasphemy. Bishop Hooper declared reliance upon bells
to drive away tempests, futile. Bishop Pilkington, while arguing
that tempests are direct instruments of God's wrath, is very
severe against using "unlawful means," and among these he names
"the hallowed bell"; and these opinions were very generally
shared by the leading English clergy.[348]

Toward the end of the sixteenth century the Elector of Saxony
strictly forbade the ringing of bells against storms, urging
penance and prayer instead; but the custom was not so easily
driven out of the Protestant Church, and in some quarters was
developed a Protestant theory of a rationalistic sort, ascribing
the good effects of bell-ringing in storms to the calling
together of the devout for prayer or to the suggestion of
prayers during storms at night. As late as the end of the
seventeenth century we find the bells of Protestant churches in
northern Germany rung for the dispelling of tempests. In
Catholic Austria this bell-ringing seems to have become a
nuisance in the last century, for the Emperor Joseph II found it
necessary to issue an edict against it; but this doctrine had
gained too large headway to be arrested by argument or edict,
and the bells may be heard ringing during storms to this day in
various remote districts in Europe.[348b] For this was no mere
superficial view. It was really part of a deep theological
current steadily developed through the Middle Ages, the
fundamental idea of the whole being the direct influence of the
bells upon the "Power of the Air"; and it is perhaps worth our
while to go back a little and glance over the coming of this
current into the modern world. Having grown steadily through the
Middle Ages, it appeared in full strength at the Reformation
period; and in the sixteenth century Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of
Upsala and Primate of Sweden, in his great work on the northern
nations, declares it a well-established fact that cities and
harvests may be saved from lightning by the ringing of bells and
the burning of consecrated incense, accompanied by prayers; and
he cautions his readers that the workings of the thunderbolt are
rather to be marvelled at than inquired into. Even as late as
1673 the Franciscan professor Lealus, in Italy, in a schoolbook
which was received with great applause in his region, taught
unhesitatingly the agency of demons in storms, and the power of
bells over them, as well as the portentousness of comets and the
movement of the heavens by angels. He dwells especially, too,
upon the perfect protection afforded by the waxen _Agnus Dei_. How
strong this current was, and how difficult even for
philosophical minds to oppose, is shown by the fact that both
Descartes and Francis Bacon speak of it with respect, admitting
the fact, and suggesting very mildly that the bells may
accomplish this purpose by the concussion of the air.[349]

But no such moderate doctrine sufficed, and the renowned Bishop
Binsfeld, of Treves, in his noted treatise on the credibility of
the confessions of witches, gave an entire chapter to the effect
of bells in calming atmospheric disturbances. Basing his general
doctrine upon the first chapter of Job and the second chapter of
Ephesians, he insisted on the reality of diabolic agency in
storms; and then, by theological reasoning, corroborated by the
statements extorted in the torture chamber, he showed the
efficacy of bells in putting the hellish legions to flight.[350]
This continued, therefore, an accepted tenet, developed in every
nation, and coming to its climax near the end of the seventeenth
century. At that period--the period of Isaac Newton--Father
Augustine de Angelis, rector of the Clementine College at Rome,
published under the highest Church authority his lectures upon
meteorology. Coming from the centre of Catholic Christendom, at
so late a period, they are very important as indicating what had
been developed under the influence of theology during nearly
seventeen hundred years. This learned head of a great college at
the heart of Christendom taught that "the surest remedy against
thunder is that which our Holy Mother the Church practises,
namely, the ringing of bells when a thunderbolt impends: thence
follows a twofold effect, physical and moral--a physical,
because the sound variously disturbs and agitates the air, and
by agitation disperses the hot exhalations and dispels the
thunder; but the moral effect is the more certain, because by
the sound the faithful are stirred to pour forth their prayers,
by which they win from God the turning away of the thunderbolt."
Here we see in this branch of thought, as in so many others, at
the close of the seventeenth century, the dawn of rationalism.
Father De Angelis now keeps demoniacal influence in the
background. Little, indeed, is said of the efficiency of bells
in putting to flight the legions of Satan: the wise professor is
evidently preparing for that inevitable compromise which we see
in the history of every science when it is clear that it can no
longer be suppressed by ecclesiastical fulminations.[350b]


                  III. THE AGENCY OF WITCHES.

But, while this comparatively harmless doctrine of thwarting the
powers of the air by fetiches and bell-ringing was developed,
there were evolved another theory, and a series of practices
sanctioned by the Church, which must forever be considered as
among the most fearful calamities in human history. Indeed, few
errors have ever cost so much shedding of innocent blood over
such wide territory and during so many generations. Out of the
old doctrine--pagan and Christian--of evil agency in
atmospheric phenomena was evolved the belief that certain men,
women, and children may secure infernal aid to produce
whirlwinds, hail, frosts, floods, and the like.

As early as the ninth century one great churchman, Agobard,
Archbishop of Lyons, struck a heavy blow at this superstition.
His work, _Against the Absurd Opinion of the Vulgar touching
Hail and Thunder_, shows him to have been one of the most devoted
apostles of right reason whom human history has known. By
argument and ridicule, and at times by a lofty eloquence, he
attempted to breast this tide. One passage is of historical
significance. He declares: "The wretched world lies now under
the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of
such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen
to believe."[351]

All in vain; the tide of superstition continued to roll on;
great theologians developed it and ecclesiastics favoured it;
until as we near the end of the medieval period the infallible
voice of Rome is heard accepting it, and clinching this belief
into the mind of Christianity. For, in 1437, Pope Eugene IV, by
virtue of the teaching power conferred on him by the Almighty,
and under the divine guarantee against any possible error in the
exercise of it, issued a bull exhorting the inquisitors of
heresy and witchcraft to use greater diligence against the human
agents of the Prince of Darkness, and especially against those
who have the power to produce bad weather. In 1445 Pope Eugene
returned again to the charge, and again issued instructions and
commands infallibly committing the Church to the doctrine. But
a greater than Eugene followed, and stamped the idea yet more
deeply into the mind of the Church. On the 7th of December,
1484, Pope Innocent VIII sent forth his bull _Summis
Desiderantes_. Of all documents ever issued from Rome, imperial
or papal, this has doubtless, first and last, cost the greatest
shedding of innocent blood. Yet no document was ever more
clearly dictated by conscience. Inspired by the scriptural
command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," Pope Innocent
exhorted the clergy of Germany to leave no means untried to
detect sorcerers, and especially those who by evil weather
destroy vineyards, gardens, meadows, and growing crops. These
precepts were based upon various texts of Scripture, especially
upon the famous statement in the book of Job; and, to carry them
out, witch-finding inquisitors were authorized by the Pope to
scour Europe, especially Germany, and a manual was prepared for
their use--the Witch-Hammer, _Malleus Maleficarum_. In this
manual, which was revered for centuries, both in Catholic and
Protestant countries, as almost divinely inspired, the doctrine
of Satanic agency in atmospheric phenomena was further
developed, and various means of detecting and punishing it were
dwelt upon.[352]

With the application of torture to thousands of women, in
accordance with the precepts laid down in the _Malleus_, it was
not difficult to extract masses of proof for this sacred theory
of meteorology. The poor creatures, writhing on the rack, held
in horror by those who had been nearest and dearest to them,
anxious only for death to relieve their sufferings, confessed to
anything and everything that would satisfy the inquisitors and
judges. All that was needed was that the inquisitors should ask
leading questions[352b] and suggest satisfactory answers: the
prisoners, to shorten the torture, were sure sooner or later to
give the answer required, even though they knew that this would
send them to the stake or scaffold. Under the doctrine of
"excepted cases," there was no limit to torture for persons
accused of heresy or witchcraft; even the safeguards which the
old pagan world had imposed upon torture were thus thrown down,
and the prisoner _must_ confess.

The theological literature of the Middle Ages was thus enriched
with numberless statements regarding modes of Satanic influence
on the weather. Pathetic, indeed, are the records; and none more
so than the confessions of these poor creatures, chiefly women
and children, during hundreds of years, as to their manner of
raising hailstorms and tempests. Such confessions, by tens of
thousands, are still to be found in the judicial records of
Germany, and indeed of all Europe. Typical among these is one on
which great stress was laid during ages, and for which the world
was first indebted to one of these poor women. Crazed by the
agony of torture, she declared that, returning with a demon
through the air from the witches' sabbath, she was dropped upon
the earth in the confusion which resulted among the hellish
legions when they heard the bells sounding the _Ave Maria_. It is
sad to note that, after a contribution so valuable to sacred
science, the poor woman was condemned to the flames. This
revelation speedily ripened the belief that, whatever might be
going on at the witches' sabbath--no matter how triumphant Satan
might be--at the moment of sounding the consecrated bells the
Satanic power was paralyzed. This theory once started, proofs
came in to support it, during a hundred years, from the torture
chambers in all parts of Europe.

Throughout the later Middle Ages the Dominicans had been the
main agents in extorting and promulgating these revelations, but
in the centuries following the Reformation the Jesuits devoted
themselves with even more keenness and vigour to the same task.
Some curious questions incidentally arose. It was mooted among
the orthodox authorities whether the damage done by storms
should or should not be assessed upon the property of convicted
witches. The theologians inclined decidedly to the affirmative;
the jurists, on the whole, to the negative.[354]

In spite of these tortures, lightning and tempests continued,
and great men arose in the Church throughout Europe in every
generation to point out new cruelties for the discovery of
"weather-makers," and new methods for bringing their
machinations to naught.

But here and there, as early as the sixteenth century, we begin
to see thinkers endeavouring to modify or oppose these methods.
At that time Paracelsus called attention to the reverberation of
cannon as explaining the rolling of thunder, but he was
confronted by one of his greatest contemporaries. Jean Bodin, as
superstitious in natural as he was rational in political
science, made sport of the scientific theory, and declared
thunder to be "a flaming exhalation set in motion by evil
spirits, and hurled downward with a great crash and a horrible
smell of sulphur." In support of this view, he dwelt upon the
confessions of tortured witches, upon the acknowledged agency of
demons in the Will-o'-the-wisp, and specially upon the passage in
the one hundred and fourth Psalm, "Who maketh his angels
spirits, his ministers a flaming fire."

To resist such powerful arguments by such powerful men was
dangerous indeed. In 1513, Pomponatius, professor at Padua,
published a volume of _Doubts as to the Fourth Book of
Aristotle's Meteorologica_, and also dared to question this power
of devils; but he soon found it advisable to explain that, while
as a _philosopher_ he might doubt, yet as a _Christian_ he of course
believed everything taught by Mother Church--devils and all--and
so escaped the fate of several others who dared to question the
agency of witches in atmospheric and other disturbances.

A few years later Agrippa of Nettesheim made a somewhat similar
effort to breast this theological tide in northern Europe. He
had won a great reputation in various fields, but especially in
natural science, as science was then understood. Seeing the
folly and cruelty of the prevailing theory, he attempted to
modify it, and in 1518, as Syndic of Metz, endeavoured to save
a poor woman on trial for witchcraft. But the chief inquisitor,
backed by the sacred Scriptures, the papal bulls, the
theological faculties, and the monks, was too strong for him; he
was not only forced to give up his office, but for this and
other offences of a similar sort was imprisoned, driven from
city to city and from country to country, and after his death
his clerical enemies, especially the Dominicans, pursued his
memory with calumny, and placed over his grave probably the most
malignant epitaph ever written.

As to argument, these efforts were met especially by Jean Bodin
in his famous book, the _Demonomanie des Sorciers_, published in
1580. It was a work of great power by a man justly considered
the leading thinker in France, and perhaps in Europe. All the
learning of the time, divine and human, he marshalled in support
of the prevailing theory. With inexorable logic he showed that
both the veracity of sacred Scripture and the infallibility of
a long line of popes and councils of the Church were pledged to
it, and in an eloquent passage this great publicist warned
rulers and judges against any mercy to witches--citing the
example of King Ahab condemned by the prophet to die for having
pardoned a man worthy of death, and pointing significantly to
King Charles IX of France, who, having pardoned a sorcerer, died
soon afterward.[355]

In the last years of the sixteenth century the persecutions for
witchcraft and magic were therefore especially cruel; and in the
western districts of Germany the main instrument in them was
Binsfeld, Suffragan Bishop of Treves.

At that time Cornelius Loos was a professor at the university of
that city. He was a devoted churchman, and one of the most
brilliant opponents of Protestantism, but he finally saw through
the prevailing belief regarding occult powers, and in an evil
hour for himself embodied his idea in a book entitled _True and
False Magic_. The book, though earnest, was temperate, but this
helped him and his cause not at all. The texts of Scripture
clearly sanctioning belief in sorcery and magic stood against
him, and these had been confirmed by the infallible teachings of
the Church and the popes from time immemorial; the book was
stopped in the press, the manuscript confiscated, and Loos
thrown into a dungeon.

The inquisitors having wrought their will upon him, in the
spring of 1593 he was brought out of prison, forced to recant on
his knees before the assembled dignitaries of the Church, and
thenceforward kept constantly under surveillance and at times in
prison. Even this was considered too light a punishment, and his
arch-enemy, the Jesuit Delrio, declared that, but for his death
by the plague, he would have been finally sent to the stake.[356]

That this threat was not unmeaning had been seen a few years
earlier in a case even more noted, and in the same city. During
the last decades of the sixteenth century, Dietrich Flade, an
eminent jurist, was rector of the University of Treves, and
chief judge of the Electoral Court, and in the latter capacity
he had to pass judgment upon persons tried on the capital charge
of magic and witchcraft. For a time he yielded to the long line
of authorities, ecclesiastical and judicial, supporting the
reality of this crime; but he at last seems to have realized
that it was unreal, and that the confessions in his torture
chamber, of compacts with Satan, riding on broomsticks to the