6o2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



strictly maintained. The editor committed the article ' Deluge ' to a 

 man of very considerable ability, but, when the article came to him, he 

 found that it was so excessively heretical that he could not venture to 

 put it in. There was not time for a second article under that head, 

 and, if you look in that dictionary, you will find under the word 

 * Deluge ' a reference to ' Flood.' Before ' Flood ' came, a second arti- 

 cle had been commissioned from a source that was believed safely con- 

 servative. But, when the article came in, it was found to be worse 

 than the first. A third article was then commissioned, and care was 

 taken to secure its * safety.' If you look for the word ' Flood ' in the 

 dictionary, you will find a reference to ' Noah.' Under that name you 

 will find an article written by a distinguished professor of Cambridge, of 

 which I remember that Bishop Colenso said to me at the time, ' In a 

 very guarded way the writer concedes the whole thing.' You will see 

 by this under what trammels scientific thought has labored in this de- 

 partment of inquiry."* 



A similar surrender was seen when from a new edition of Bishop 

 Home's " Introduction to the Scriptures," the standard text-book of 

 orthodoxy, its accustomed use of fossils to prove the universality of 

 the Deluge was quietly dropped, f 



The date of a similar capitulation in the United States was fixed, 

 when somewhat later two divines, among the most eminent for piety 

 and scholarship, inserted in the " Biblical Cycloposdia " published 

 under their supervision, a candid summary of the proofs from geology, 

 astronomy, and zoology that the Deluge of Noah was not universal, 

 or even widely extended, and this without protest from any man of 

 note in any branch of the American Church. J 



The time when the struggle was relinquished by enlightened theo- 

 logians of the Roman Catholic Church may be fixed at about 1862, 

 when Reusch, professor of theology at Bonn, in his work on " The 

 Bible and Nature," cast oft' the old diluvial theory and all its sup- 

 porters, accepting the conclusions of science.** 



But, though the sacred theory with the Deluge of Noah as a uni- 

 versal solvent for geological difficulties was dead, there still remained 

 in various quarters a touching fidelity to its memory. In Roman 

 Catholic countries the old theory has been widely though quietly 

 cherished and taught from the religious press, the pulpit, and the 

 theological professor's chair : Pope Pius IX Avas doubtless in sympa- 

 thy with this feeling when, about 1S50, he forbade the scientific con- 

 gress of Italy to meet at Bologna.|| 



* Sec " OHRcial Report of the Xational Conference of Unitarian and other Christian 

 Churches, held at Saratoga, 1R82," p. 97. 



f This was about 1850; sec Tylor, "Early History of Mankind," p 328. 



X llcClintock and Strong, " Cyclopaedia of Diblical Knowledge," etc., article "Deluge." 



* Sec Reusch, " Bibel und Natur," chap. xxi. 



I See Whiteside, " Italy in the Nineteenth Century," vol. iii, chap. xiv. 



