i 4 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



At the Reformation this view was not disturbed. The same 

 manner of accepting the sacred text which led Luther, Melanch- 

 thon, and the great Protestant leaders generally, to oppose the 

 Copernican theory, fixed them firmly in this biblical chronology ; 

 the key-note was sounded for them by Luther when he said, " We 

 know, on the authority of Moses, that longer ago than six thousand 

 years the world did not exist." Melanchthon, more exact, fixed 

 the creation of man at 3963 b. c. 



But the great Christian scholars continued the old endeavor to 

 make the time of man's origin more precise ; there seems to have 

 been a sort of fascination in the subject which developed a long 

 array of chronologists, all weighing the minutest indications in 

 our sacred books, until the Protestant divine, De Vignolles, who 

 had given forty years to the study of biblical chronology, de- 

 clared that he had gathered no less than two hundred computa- 

 tions based upon Scripture, and no two alike. 



As to the Roman Church, about 1580 there was published, by 

 authority of Pope Gregory XIII, the Roman Martyrology, and 

 this, both as originally published and as revised in 1640 under 

 Pope Urban VIII, declared that the creation of man took place 

 5199 years before Christ. 



But of all who gave themselves up to these chronological 

 studies, the man who exerted the most powerful influence upon 

 the dominant nations of Christendom was Archbishop Usher. In 

 1650 he published his Annals of the Ancient and New Testaments, 

 and it at once became the greatest authority for all English-speak- 

 ing peoples. Usher was a man of deep and wide theological 

 learning, powerful in controversy; and his careful conclusion, 

 after years of the most profound study of the Hebrew Scriptures, 

 was, that man was created 4004 years before the Christian era. 

 His verdict was widely received as final ; his dates were inserted 

 in the margins of the authorized version of the English Bible, 

 and were soon practically regarded as equally inspired with the 

 sacred text itself ; to question them seriously was to risk prefer- 

 ment in the Church and reputation in the world at large. 



The same adhesion to the Hebrew Scriptures which had influ- 

 enced Usher, brought leading men of the older Church to the same 

 view ; men who would have burned each other at the stake for 



creation in ascertaining the antiquity of man, see especially Eicken, Geschichte der 

 mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung ; also Wallace, True Age of the World, pp. 2,3. For 

 the views of St. Augustine, see Topinard, Anthropologic, citing the De Civ. Dei., lib. xvi, 

 c. viii, lib. xii, c. x. For the views of Philastrius, see the De Haeresibus, c. 102, 112, et 

 passim, in Migne. For Eusebius's simple credulity, see the tables in Palmer's Egyptian 

 Chronicles, vol. ii, pp. 828, 829. For Bede, see Usher's Chronologia Sacra, cited in Wallace, 

 True Age of the World, p. 35. For Isidore of Seville, see Isidore, Etymologia, lib. v, c. 39 ; 

 also lib. iii, 617. 



