NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 599 



How unsatisfactory all such rationalism, must be to a truly 

 theological mind is seen not only in the dealings with Prof. Rob- 

 ertson Smith in Scotland and Prof. Woodrow in South Carolina, 

 but, most clearly, in a book published in 1886 by Monseigneur 

 Hausman de Wandelbourg. This work appeared in two ponder- 

 ous volumes and with a great flourish of trumpets. To the name 

 of the author was attached a long list of titles : among other 

 things, he is Prelate of the Pope's Household, a Mitred Abbot, 

 Canon of the Holy Sepulchre, and a Doctor of Theology of the 

 Pontifical University at Rome, and the work is introduced by 

 approving letters from Pope Leo XIII and the Patriarch of Jeru- 

 salem. Monseigneur de Wandelbourg scorns the idea that the 

 salt column at Usdum is not the statue of Lot's wife ; he points 

 out not only the danger of yielding this evidence of miracle to 

 rationalism, but the fact that the divinely inspired authority of 

 the Book of Wisdom, written, at the latest, two hundred and fifty 

 years before Christ, distinctly refers to it. He summons Josephus 

 as a witness. He dwells on the fact that Pope St. Clement, Ire- 

 naeus, Hegesippus, and St. Cyril, " who as Bishop of Jerusalem 

 must have known better than any other person what existed in 

 Palestine," with St. Jerome, St. Chrysostom, and a multitude of 

 others, attest as a matter of their own knowledge or of popular 

 notoriety that the remains of Lot's wife really existed in their 

 time in the form of a column of salt ; and he points triumphantly 

 to the fact that Lieutenant Lynch found this very column. 



In the presence of such a continuous line of witnesses, some of 

 them divinely inspired, and all of them greatly revered a line 

 extending through thirty-seven hundred years he condemns 

 most vigorously all those who do not believe that the pillar of 

 salt now at Usdum is identical with the wife of Lot, and stigma- 

 tizes them as people who " do not wish to believe the truth of the 

 word of God." His ignorance of many of the simplest facts bear- 

 ing upon the legend is very striking, yet he does not hesitate to 

 speak of men who know far more and have thought far more 

 upon the subject as "grossly ignorant." The most laughable 

 feature in his ignorance is the fact that he is utterly unaware of 

 the annual changes in the salt statue. He is entirely ignorant of 

 such facts as that the priest Gabriel Giraudet in the sixteenth 

 century found the statue lying down; that the monk Zwinner 

 found it in the seventeenth century standing, and accompanied by 

 a dog also transformed into salt ; that Prince Radziwill found no 

 statue at all ; that the pious Vincent Briemle in the eighteenth 

 century found the monument renewing itself; that about the 

 middle of the nineteenth century Lynch found it in the shape of a 

 tower or column forty feet high ; that within two years afterward 

 De Saulcy found it washed into the form of a spire ; that a year 



