Smith, Lyell, Silliman, Hitchcock, Murchison, Agassiz, Dana, and a host of noble champions besides, press on, and the battle for truth is won.
And was it won merely for men of science? The whole civilized world declares that it was won for religion—that thereby was infinitely increased the knowledge of the power and goodness of God.
Did time permit, we might go over other battle-fields no less instructive than those we have seen. We might go over the battlefields of Agricultural Progress, and note how, by a most curious perversion of a text of Scripture, great masses of the peasantry of Russia were prevented from raising and eating potatoes,[1] and how in Scotland at the beginning of this century the use of fanning-mills for winnowing grain was denounced as contrary to the text "the wind bloweth where it listeth," etc., as leaguing with Satan, who is "prince of the powers of the air," and as sufficient cause for excommunication from the Scotch Church.[2]
We might go over the battle-fields of Industrial Science, and note how the introduction of railways into France was declared, by the Archbishop of Besançon, an evidence of the divine displeasure against country innkeepers who set meat before their guests on fast-days, and now were punished by seeing travelers carried by their doors; and how railroad and telegraph were denounced from a noted pulpit as "heralds of Antichrist." And then we might pass to Protestant England and recall the sermon of the Curate of Rotherhithe at the breaking in of the Thames Tunnel, so destructive to life and property, declaring that "it was but a just judgment upon the presumptuous aspirations of mortal man."[3]
We might go over the battle-fields of Ethnology and note how a few years since an honored American investigator, proposing in a learned society the discussion of the question between the origin of the human race from a single pair and from many pairs, was called to order and silenced as atheistic, by a Protestant divine whose memory is justly dear to thousands of us.[4]
Interesting would it be to look over the field of Meteorology—beginning with the conception, supposed to be scriptural, of angels opening and shutting "the windows of heaven" and letting out "the waters that be above the firmament" upon the earth—continuing
- ↑ See Haxthausen, "Études sur la Russie."
- ↑ Burton, "History of Scotland," vol. viii., p. 511. See also Mause Headrigg's views in Scott's "Old Mortality," chapter vii. For the case of a person debarred from the communion for "raising the devil's wind" with a winnowing-machine, see works of Sir J. Y. Simpson, vol. ii. Those doubting the authority or motives of Simpson may be reminded that he was, to the day of his death, one of the strictest adherents of Scotch orthodoxy.
- ↑ See Journal of Sir I. Brunel, for May 20, 1827, in "Life of I. K. Brunel," p. 30.
- ↑ This scene will be recalled, easily, by many leading ethnologists in America, and especially by Mr. E. G. Squier, formerly minister of the United States to Central America.
