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(NOTE: this para should have been moved from pp 18 to pp 19.)
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
witch-sabbath, raising tempests, producing diseases, and the
like, were either the results of madness or of willingness to
confess anything and everything, and even to die, in order to
shorten the fearful tortures to which the accused were in all
cases subjected until a satisfactory confession was obtained.

On this conviction of the unreality of many at least of the
charges Flade seems to have acted, and he at once received his
reward. He was arrested by the authority of the archbishop and
charged with having sold himself to Satan--the fact of his
hesitation in the persecution being perhaps what suggested his
guilt. He was now, in his turn, brought into the torture chamber
over which he had once presided, was racked until he confessed
everything which his torturers suggested, and finally, in 1589,
was strangled and burnt.

Of that trial a record exists in the library of Cornell
University in the shape of the original minutes of the case, and
among them the depositions of Flade when under torture, taken
down from his own lips in the torture chamber. In these
depositions this revered and venerable scholar and jurist
acknowledged the truth of every absurd charge brought against
him--anything, everything, which would end the fearful torture:
compared with that, death was nothing.[357]

Nor was even a priest secure who ventured to reveal the
unreality of magic. When Friedrich Spee, the Jesuit poet of
western Germany, found, in taking the confessions of those about
to be executed for magic, that without exception, just when
about to enter eternity and utterly beyond hope of pardon, they
all retracted their confessions made under torture, his
sympathies as a man rose above his loyalty to his order, and he
published his _Cautio Criminalis_ as a warning, stating with
entire moderation the facts he had observed and the necessity of
care. But he did not dare publish it under his own name, nor did
he even dare publish it in a Catholic town; he gave it to the
world anonymously, and, in order to prevent any tracing of the
work to him through the confessional, he secretly caused it to
be published in the Protestant town of Rinteln.

Nor was this all. Nothing shows so thoroughly the hold that this
belief in magic had obtained as the conduct of Spee's powerful
friend and contemporary, John Philip von Schonborn, later the
Elector and Prince Archbishop of Mayence.

As a youth, Schonborn had loved and admired Spee, and had
especially noted his persistent melancholy and his hair whitened
even in his young manhood. On Schonborn's pressing him for the
cause, Spee at last confessed that his sadness, whitened hair,
and premature old age were due to his recollections of the
scores of men and women and children whom he had been obliged to
see tortured and sent to the scaffold and stake for magic and
witchcraft, when he as their father confessor positively knew
them to be innocent. The result was that, when Schonborn became
Elector and Archbishop of Mayence, he stopped the witch
persecutions in that province, and prevented them as long as he
lived. But here was shown the strength of theological and
ecclesiastical traditions and precedents. Even a man so strong
by family connections, and enjoying such great temporal and
spiritual power as Schonhorn, dared not openly give his reasons
for this change of policy. So far as is known, he never uttered
a word publicly against the reality of magic, and under his
successor in the electorate witch trials were resumed.

The great upholders of the orthodox view retained full
possession of the field. The victorious Bishop Binsfeld, of
Treves, wrote a book to prove that everything confessed by the
witches under torture, especially the raising of storms and the
general controlling of the weather, was worthy of belief; and
this book became throughout Europe a standard authority, both
among Catholics and Protestants. Even more inflexible was
Remigius, criminal judge in Lorraine. On the title-page of his
manual he boasts that within fifteen years he had sent nine
hundred persons to death for this imaginary crime.[358]

Protestantism fell into the superstition as fully as
Catholicism. In the same century John Wier, a disciple of
Agrippa, tried to frame a pious theory which, while satisfying
orthodoxy, should do something to check the frightful cruelties
around him. In his book _De Praestigiis Daemnonum_, published in
1563, he proclaimed his belief in witchcraft, but suggested that
the compacts with Satan, journeys through the air on
broomsticks, bearing children to Satan, raising storms and
producing diseases--to which so many women and children
confessed under torture--were delusions suggested and propagated
by Satan himself, and that the persons charged with witchcraft
were therefore to be considered "as possessed"--that is,
rather as sinned against than sinning.[359]

But neither Catholics nor Protestants would listen for a moment
to any such suggestion. Wier was bitterly denounced and
persecuted. Nor did Bekker, a Protestant divine in Holland, fare
any better in the following century. For his _World Bewitched_,
in which he ventured not only to question the devil's power over
the weather, but to deny his bodily existence altogether, he was
solemnly tried by the synod of his Church and expelled from his
pulpit, while his views were condemned as heresy, and
overwhelmed with a flood of refutations whose mere catalogue
would fill pages; and these cases were typical of many.

The Reformation had, indeed, at first deepened the superstition;
the new Church being anxious to show itself equally orthodox and
zealous with the old. During the century following the first
great movement, the eminent Lutheran jurist and theologian
Benedict Carpzov, whose boast was that he had read the Bible
fifty-three times, especially distinguished himself by his skill
in demonstrating the reality of witchcraft, and by his cruelty
in detecting and punishing it. The torture chambers were set at
work more vigorously than ever, and a long line of theological
jurists followed to maintain the system and to extend it.

To argue against it, or even doubt it, was exceedingly
dangerous. Even as late as the beginning of the eighteenth
century, when Christian Thomasius, the greatest and bravest
German between Luther and Lessing, began the efforts which put
an end to it in Protestant Germany, he did not dare at first,
bold as he was, to attack it in his own name, but presented his
views as the university thesis of an irresponsible student.[360]

The same stubborn resistance to the gradual encroachment of the
scientific spirit upon the orthodox doctrine of witchcraft was
seen in Great Britain. Typical as to the attitude both of Scotch
and English Protestants were the theory and practice of King
James I, himself the author of a book on _Demonology_, and nothing
if not a theologian. As to theory, his treatise on _Demonology_
supported the worst features of the superstition; as to
practice, he ordered the learned and acute work of Reginald
Scot, _The Discoverie of Witchcraft_, one of the best treatises
ever written on the subject, to be burned by the hangman, and he
applied his own knowledge to investigating the causes of the
tempests which beset his bride on her voyage from Denmark.
Skilful use of unlimited torture soon brought these causes to
light. A Dr. Fian, while his legs were crushed in the "boots"
and wedges were driven under his finger nails, confessed that
several hundred witches had gone to sea in a sieve from the port of
Leith, and had raised storms and tempests to drive back the princess.

With the coming in of the Puritans the persecution was even more
largely, systematically, and cruelly developed. The great
witch-finder, Matthew Hopkins, having gone through the county of
Suffolk and tested multitudes of poor old women by piercing them
with pins and needles, declared that county to be infested with
witches. Thereupon Parliament issued a commission, and sent two
eminent Presbyterian divines to accompany it, with the result
that in that county alone sixty persons were hanged for
witchcraft in a single year. In Scotland matters were even
worse. The _auto da fe_ of Spain was celebrated in Scotland under
another name, and with Presbyterian ministers instead of Roman
Catholic priests as the main attendants. At Leith, in 1664, nine
women were burned together. Condemnations and punishments of
women in batches were not uncommon. Torture was used far more
freely than in England, both in detecting witches and in
punishing them. The natural argument developed in hundreds of
pulpits was this: If the Allwise God punishes his creatures with
tortures infinite in cruelty and duration, why should not his
ministers, as far as they can, imitate him?

The strongest minds in both branches of the Protestant Church
in Great Britain devoted themselves to maintaining the
superstition. The newer scientific modes of thought, and
especially the new ideas regarding the heavens, revealed first
by Copernicus and Galileo and later by Newton, Huygens, and
Halley, were gradually dissipating the whole domain of the
Prince of the Power of the Air; but from first to last a long
line of eminent divines, Anglican and Calvinistic, strove to
resist the new thought. On the Anglican side, in the seventeenth
century, Meric Casaubon, Doctor of Divinity and a high dignitary
of Canterbury,--Henry More, in many respects the most eminent
scholar in the Church,--Cudworth, by far the most eminent
philosopher, and Dr. Joseph Glanvil, the most cogent of all
writers in favour of witchcraft, supported the orthodox
superstition in treatises of great power; and Sir Matthew Hale,
the greatest jurist of the period, condemning two women to be
burned for witchcraft, declared that he based his judgment on
the direct testimony of Holy Scripture. On the Calvinistic side
were the great names of Richard Baxter, who applauded some of
the worst cruelties in England, and of Increase and Cotton
Mather, who stimulated the worst in America; and these marshalled
in behalf of this cruel superstition a long line of eminent
divines, the most earnest of all, perhaps, being John Wesley.

Nor was the Lutheran Church in Sweden and the other Scandinavian
countries behind its sister churches, either in persecuting
witchcraft or in repressing doubts regarding the doctrine which
supported it.

But in spite of all these great authorities in every land, in
spite of such summary punishments as those of Flade, Loos, and
Bekker, and in spite of the virtual exclusion from church
preferment of all who doubted the old doctrine, the new
scientific view of the heavens was developed more and more; the
physical sciences were more and more cultivated; the new
scientific atmosphere in general more and more prevailed; and at
the end of the seventeenth century this vast growth of
superstition began to wither and droop. Montaigne, Bayle, and
Voltaire in France, Thomasius in Germany, Calef in New England,
and Beccaria in Italy, did much also to create an intellectual
and moral atmosphere fatal to it.

And here it should be stated, to the honour of the Church of
England, that several of her divines showed great courage in
opposing the dominant doctrine. Such men as Harsnet, Archbishop
of York, and Morton, Bishop of Lichfield, who threw all their
influence against witch-finding cruelties even early in the
seventeenth century, deserve lasting gratitude. But especially
should honour be paid to the younger men in the Church, who
wrote at length against the whole system: such men as Wagstaffe
and Webster and Hutchinson, who in the humbler ranks of the
clergy stood manfully for truth, with the certainty that by so
doing they were making their own promotion impossible.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the doctrine was
evidently dying out. Where torture had been abolished, or even
made milder, "weather-makers" no longer confessed, and the
fundamental proofs in which the system was rooted were evidently
slipping away. Even the great theologian Fromundus, at the
University of Louvain, the oracle of his age, who had
demonstrated the futility of the Copernican theory, had foreseen
this and made the inevitable attempt at compromise, declaring
that devils, though _often_, are not _always_ or even for the most
part the causes of thunder. The learned Jesuit Caspar Schott,
whose _Physica Curiosa_ was one of the most popular books of the
seventeenth century, also ventured to make the same mild
statement. But even such concessions by such great champions of
orthodoxy did not prevent frantic efforts in various quarters to
bring the world back under the old dogma: as late as 1743 there
was published in Catholic Germany a manual by Father Vincent of
Berg, in which the superstition was taught to its fullest
extent, with the declaration that it was issued for the use of
priests under the express sanction of the theological professors
of the University of Cologne; and twenty-five years later, in
1768, we find in Protestant England John Wesley standing firmly
for witchcraft, and uttering his famous declaration, "The
giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the
Bible." The latest notable demonstration in Scotland was made as
late as 1773, when "the divines of the Associated Presbytery"
passed a resolution declaring their belief in witchcraft, and
deploring the general scepticism regarding it.[363]


                 IV. FRANKLIN'S LIGHTNING-ROD.

But in the midst of these efforts by Catholics like Father
Vincent and by Protestants like John Wesley to save the old
sacred theory, it received its death-blow. In 1752 Franklin made
his experiments with the kite on the banks of the Schuylkill;
and, at the moment when he drew the electric spark from the
cloud, the whole tremendous fabric of theological meteorology
reared by the fathers, the popes, the medieval doctors, and the
long line of great theologians, Catholic and Protestant,
collapsed; the "Prince of the Power of the Air" tumbled from
his seat; the great doctrine which had so long afflicted the
earth was prostrated forever.

The experiment of Franklin was repeated in various parts of
Europe, but, at first, the Church seemed careful to take no
notice of it. The old church formulas against the Prince of the
Power of the Air were still used, but the theological theory,
especially in the Protestant Church, began to grow milder. Four
years after Franklin's discovery Pastor Karl Koken, member of
the Consistory and official preacher to the City Council of
Hildesheim, was moved by a great hailstorm to preach and publish
a sermon on _The Revelation of God in Weather_. Of "the Prince of
the Power of the Air" he says nothing; the theory of diabolical
agency he throws overboard altogether; his whole attempt is to
save the older and more harmless theory, that the storm is the
voice of God. He insists that, since Christ told Nicodemus that
men "know not whence the wind cometh," it can not be of mere
natural origin, but is sent directly by God himself, as David
intimates in the Psalm, "out of His secret places." As to the
hailstorm, he lays great stress upon the plague of hail sent by
the Almighty upon Egypt, and clinches all by insisting that God
showed at Mount Sinai his purpose to startle the body before
impressing the conscience.

While the theory of diabolical agency in storms was thus
drooping and dying, very shrewd efforts were made at compromise.
The first of these attempts we have already noted, in the effort
to explain the efficacy of bells in storms by their simple use
in stirring the faithful to prayer, and in the concession made
by sundry theologians, and even by the great Lord Bacon himself,
that church bells might, under the sanction of Providence,
disperse storms by agitating the air. This gained ground
somewhat, though it was resisted by one eminent Church
authority, who answered shrewdly that, in that case, cannon
would be even more pious instruments. Still another argument
used in trying to save this part of the theological theory was
that the bells were consecrated instruments for this purpose,
"like the horns at whose blowing the walls of Jericho fell."[365]

But these compromises were of little avail. In 1766 Father
Sterzinger attacked the very groundwork of the whole diabolic
theory. He was, of course, bitterly assailed, insulted, and
hated; but the Church thought it best not to condemn him. More
and more the "Prince of the Power of the Air" retreated before
the lightning-rod of Franklin. The older Church, while clinging
to the old theory, was finally obliged to confess the supremacy
of Franklin's theory practically; for his lightning-rod did
what exorcisms, and holy water, and processions, and the _Agnus
Dei_, and the ringing of church bells, and the rack, and the
burning of witches, had failed to do. This was clearly seen,
even by the poorest peasants in eastern France, when they
observed that the grand spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which
neither the sacredness of the place, nor the bells within it,
nor the holy water and relics beneath it, could protect from
frequent injuries by lightning, was once and for all protected
by Franklin's rod. Then came into the minds of multitudes the
answer to the question which had so long exercised the leading
theologians of Europe and America, namely, "Why should the
Almighty strike his own consecrated temples, or suffer Satan to
strike them?"

Yet even this practical solution of the question was not
received without opposition.

In America the earthquake of 1755 was widely ascribed,
especially in Massachusetts, to Franklin's rod. The Rev. Thomas
Prince, pastor of the Old South Church, published a sermon on
the subject, and in the appendix expressed the opinion that the
frequency of earthquakes may be due to the erection of "iron
points invented by the sagacious Mr. Franklin." He goes on to
argue that "in Boston are more erected than anywhere else in
New England, and Boston seems to be more dreadfully shaken. Oh!
there is no getting out of the mighty hand of God."

Three years later, John Adams, speaking of a conversation with
Arbuthnot, a Boston physician, says: "He began to prate upon
the presumption of philosophy in erecting iron rods to draw the
lightning from the clouds. He railed and foamed against the
points and the presumption that erected them. He talked of
presuming upon God, as Peter attempted to walk upon the water,
and of attempting to control the artillery of heaven."

As late as 1770 religious scruples regarding lightning-rods were
still felt, the theory being that, as thunder and lightning were
tokens of the Divine displeasure, it was impiety to prevent
their doing their full work. Fortunately, Prof. John Winthrop,
of Harvard, showed himself wise in this, as in so many other
things: in a lecture on earthquakes he opposed the dominant
theology; and as to arguments against Franklin's rods, he
declared, "It is as much our duty to secure ourselves against
the effects of lightning as against those of rain, snow, and
wind by the means God has put into our hands."

Still, for some years theological sentiment had to be regarded
carefully. In Philadelphia, a popular lecturer on science for
some time after Franklin's discovery thought it best in
advertising his lectures to explain that "the erection of
lightning-rods is not chargeable with presumption nor
inconsistent with any of the principles either of natural or
revealed religion."[366]

In England, the first lightning conductor upon a church was not
put up until 1762, ten years after Franklin's discovery. The
spire of St. Bride's Church in London was greatly injured by
lightning in 1750, and in 1764 a storm so wrecked its masonry
that it had to be mainly rebuilt; yet for years after this the
authorities refused to attach a lightning-rod. The Protestant
Cathedral of St. Paul's, in London, was not protected until
sixteen years after Franklin's discovery, and the tower of the
great Protestant church at Hamburg not until a year later still.
As late as 1783 it was declared in Germany, on excellent
authority, that within a space of thirty-three years nearly four
hundred towers had been damaged and one hundred and twenty
bell-ringers killed.

In Roman Catholic countries a similar prejudice was shown, and
its cost at times was heavy. In Austria, the church of
Rosenberg, in the mountains of Carinthia, was struck so
frequently and with such loss of life that the peasants feared
at last to attend service. Three times was the spire rebuilt,
and it was not until 1778--twenty-six years after Franklin's
discovery--that the authorities permitted a rod to be attached.
Then all trouble ceased.

A typical case in Italy was that of the tower of St. Mark's, at
Venice. In spite of the angel at its summit and the bells
consecrated to ward off the powers of the air, and the relics in
the cathedral hard by, and the processions in the adjacent
square, the tower was frequently injured and even ruined by
lightning. In 1388 it was badly shattered; in 1417, and again in
1489, the wooden spire surmounting it was utterly consumed; it
was again greatly injured in 1548, 1565, 1653, and in 1745 was
struck so powerfully that the whole tower, which had been
rebuilt of stone and brick, was shattered in thirty-seven
places. Although the invention of Franklin had been introduced
into Italy by the physicist Beccaria, the tower of St. Mark's
still went unprotected, and was again badly struck in 1761 and
1762; and not until 1766--fourteen years after Franklin's
discovery--was a lightning-rod placed upon it; and it has never
been struck since.[368]

So, too, though the beautiful tower of the Cathedral of Siena,
protected by all possible theological means, had been struck
again and again, much opposition was shown to placing upon it
what was generally known as "the heretical rod" "but the tower
was at last protected by Franklin's invention, and in 1777,
though a very heavy bolt passed down the rod, the church
received not the slightest injury. This served to reconcile
theology and science, so far as that city was concerned; but the
case which did most to convert the Italian theologians to the
scientific view was that of the church of San Nazaro, at
Brescia. The Republic of Venice had stored in the vaults of this
church over two hundred thousand pounds of powder. In 1767,
seventeen years after Franklin's discovery, no rod having been
placed upon it, it was struck by lightning, the powder in the
vaults was exploded, one sixth of the entire city destroyed, and
over three thousand lives were lost.[368b]

Such examples as these, in all parts of Europe, had their
effect. The formulas for conjuring off storms, for consecrating
bells to ward off lightning and tempests, and for putting to
flight the powers of the air, were still allowed to stand in the
liturgies; but the lightning-rod, the barometer, and the
thermometer, carried the day. A vigorous line of investigators
succeeding Franklin completed his victory, The traveller in
remote districts of Europe still hears the church bells ringing
during tempests; the Polish or Italian peasant is still
persuaded to pay fees for sounding bells to keep off hailstorms;
but the universal tendency favours more and more the use of the
lightning-rod, and of the insurance offices where men can be
relieved of the ruinous results of meteorological disturbances
in accordance with the scientific laws of average, based upon
the ascertained recurrence of storms. So, too, though many a
poor seaman trusts to his charm that has been bathed in holy
water, or that has touched some relic, the tendency among
mariners is to value more and more those warnings which are sent
far and wide each day over the earth and under the sea by the
electric wires in accordance with laws ascertained by observation.

Yet, even in our own time, attempts to revive the old
theological doctrine of meteorology have not been wanting. Two
of these, one in a Roman Catholic and another in a Protestant
country, will serve as types of many, to show how completely
scientific truth has saturated and permeated minds supposed to
be entirely surrendered to the theological view.

The Island of St. Honorat, just off the southern coast of
France, is deservedly one of the places most venerated in
Christendom. The monastery of Lerins, founded there in the
fourth century, became a mother of similar institutions in
western Europe, and a centre of religious teaching for the
Christian world. In its atmosphere, legends and myths grew in
beauty and luxuriance. Here, as the chroniclers tell us, at the
touch of St. Honorat, burst forth a stream of living water,
which a recent historian of the monastery declares a greater
miracle than that of Moses; here he destroyed, with a touch of
his staff, the reptiles which infested the island, and then
forced the sea to wash away their foul remains. Here, to please
his sister, Sainte-Marguerite, a cherry tree burst into full
bloom every month; here he threw his cloak upon the waters and
it became a raft, which bore him safely to visit the
neighbouring island; here St. Patrick received from St. Just the
staff with which he imitated St. Honorat by driving all reptiles
from Ireland.

Pillaged by Saracens and pirates, the island was made all the
more precious by the blood of Christian martyrs. Popes and kings
made pilgrimages to it; saints, confessors, and bishops went
forth from it into all Europe; in one of its cells St. Vincent
of Lerins wrote that famous definition of pure religion which,
for nearly fifteen hundred years, has virtually superseded that
of St. James. Naturally the monastery became most illustrious,
and its seat "the Mediterranean Isle of Saints."

But toward the close of the last century, its inmates having
become slothful and corrupt, it was dismantled, all save a small
portion torn down, and the island became the property first of
impiety, embodied in a French actress, and finally of heresy,
embodied in an English clergyman.

Bought back for the Church by the Bishop of Frejus in 1859,
there was little revival of life for twelve years. Then came the
reaction, religious and political, after the humiliation of
France and the Vatican by Germany; and of this reaction the
monastery of St. Honorat was made one of the most striking
outward and visible signs. Pius IX interested himself directly
in it, called into it a body of Cistercian monks, and it became
the chief seat of their order in France. To restore its
sacredness the strict system of La Trappe was
established--labour, silence, meditation on death. The word thus
given from Rome was seconded in France by cardinals,
archbishops, and all churchmen especially anxious for promotion
in this world or salvation in the next. Worn-out dukes and
duchesses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain united in this
enterprise of pious reaction with the frivolous youngsters, the
_petits creves_, who haunt the purlieus of Notre Dame de Lorette.
The great church of the monastery was handsomely rebuilt and a
multitude of altars erected; and beautiful frescoes and stained
windows came from the leaders of the reaction. The whole effect
was, perhaps, somewhat theatrical and thin, but it showed none
the less earnestness in making the old "Isle of Saints" a
protest against the hated modern world.

As if to bid defiance still further to modern liberalism, great
store of relics was sent in; among these, pieces of the true
cross, of the white and purple robes, of the crown of thorns,
sponge, lance, and winding-sheet of Christ,--the hair, robe,
veil, and girdle of the Blessed Virgin; relics of St. John the
Baptist, St. Joseph, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Paul, St. Barnabas,
the four evangelists, and a multitude of other saints: so many
that the bare mention of these treasures requires twenty-four
distinct heads in the official catalogue recently published at
the monastery. Besides all this--what was considered even more
powerful in warding off harm from the revived monastery--the
bones of Christian martyrs were brought from the Roman catacombs
and laid beneath the altars.[371]

All was thus conformed to the medieval view; nothing was to be
left which could remind one of the nineteenth century; the
"ages of faith" were to be restored in their simplicity. Pope
Leo XIII commended to the brethren the writings of St. Thomas
Aquinas as their one great object of study, and works published
at the monastery dwelt upon the miracles of St. Honorat as the
most precious refutation of modern science.

High in the cupola, above the altars and relics, were placed the
bells. Sent by pious donors, they were solemnly baptized and
consecrated in 1871, four bishops officiating, a multitude of
the faithful being present from all parts of Europe, and the
sponsors of the great tenor bell being the Bourbon claimant to
the ducal throne of Parma and his duchess. The good bishop who
baptized the bells consecrated them with a formula announcing
their efficacy in driving away the "Prince of the Power of the
Air" and the lightning and tempests he provokes.

And then, above all, at the summit of the central spire, high
above relics, altars, and bells, was placed--_a lightning-rod_![371b]

The account of the monastery, published under the direction of
the present worthy abbot, more than hints at the saving, by its
bells, of a ship which was wrecked a few years since on that
coast; and yet, to protect the bells and church and monks and
relics from the very foe whom, in the medieval faith, all these
were thought most powerful to drive away, recourse was had to the
scientific discovery of that "arch-infidel," Benjamin Franklin!

Perhaps the most striking recent example in Protestant lands of
this change from the old to the new occurred not long since in
one of the great Pacific dependencies of the British crown. At
a time of severe drought an appeal was made to the bishop, Dr.
Moorhouse, to order public prayers for rain. The bishop refused,
advising the petitioners for the future to take better care of
their water supply, virtually telling them, "Heaven helps those
who help themselves." But most noteworthy in this matter was it
that the English Government, not long after, scanning the
horizon to find some man to take up the good work laid down by
the lamented Bishop Fraser, of Manchester, chose Dr. Moorhouse;
and his utterance upon meteorology, which a few generations
since would have been regarded by the whole Church as blasphemy,
was universally alluded to as an example of strong good sense,
proving him especially fit for one of the most important
bishoprics in England.

Throughout Christendom, the prevalence of the conviction that
meteorology is obedient to laws is more and more evident. In
cities especially, where men are accustomed each day to see
posted in public places charts which show the storms moving over
various parts of the country, and to read in the morning papers
scientific prophecies as to the weather, the old view can hardly
be very influential.

Significant of this was the feeling of the American people
during the fearful droughts a few years since in the States west
of the Missouri. No days were appointed for fasting and prayer
to bring rain; there was no attribution of the calamity to the
wrath of God or the malice of Satan; but much was said regarding
the folly of our people in allowing the upper regions of their
vast rivers to be denuded of forests, thus subjecting the States
below to alternations of drought and deluge. Partly as a result
of this, a beginning has been made of teaching forest culture in
many schools, tree-planting societies have been formed, and
"Arbor Day" is recognised in several of the States. A true and
noble theology can hardly fail to recognise, in the love of
Nature and care for our fellow-men thus promoted, something far
better, both from a religious and a moral point of view, than
any efforts to win the Divine favour by flattery, or to avert
Satanic malice by fetichism.


                         CHAPTER XII.
             FROM MAGIC TO CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS.

                              I.

IN all the earliest developments of human thought we find a
strong tendency to ascribe mysterious powers over Nature to men
and women especially gifted or skilled. Survivals of this view
are found to this day among savages and barbarians left behind
in the evolution of civilization, and especially is this the
case among the tribes of Australia, Africa, and the Pacific
coast of America. Even in the most enlightened nations still
appear popular beliefs, observances, or sayings, drawn from this
earlier phase of thought.

Between the prehistoric savage developing this theory, and
therefore endeavouring to deal with the powers of Nature by
magic, and the modern man who has outgrown it, appears a long
line of nations struggling upward through it. As the
hieroglyphs, cuneiform inscriptions, and various other records
of antiquity are read, the development of this belief can be
studied in Egypt, India, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, and
Phoenicia. From these civilizations it came into the early
thought of Greece and Rome, but especially into the Jewish and
Christian sacred books. Both in the Old Testament and in the New
we find magic, witchcraft, and soothsaying constantly referred
to as realities.[373]

The first distinct impulse toward a higher view of research into
natural laws was given by the philosophers of Greece. It is true
that philosophical opposition to physical research was at times
strong, and that even a great thinker like Socrates considered
certain physical investigations as an impious intrusion into the
work of the gods. It is also true that Plato and Aristotle,
while bringing their thoughts to bear upon the world with great
beauty and force, did much to draw mankind away from those
methods which in modern times have produced the best results.

Plato developed a world in which the physical sciences had
little if any real reason for existing; Aristotle, a world in
which the same sciences were developed largely indeed by
observation of what is, but still more by speculation on what
ought to be. From the former of these two great men came into
Christian theology many germs of medieval magic, and from the
latter sundry modes of reasoning which aided in the evolution of
these; yet the impulse to human thought given by these great
masters was of inestimable value to our race, and one legacy
from them was especially precious--the idea that a science of
Nature is possible, and that the highest occupation of man is
the discovery of its laws. Still another gift from them was
greatest of all, for they gave scientific freedom. They laid no
interdict upon new paths; they interposed no barriers to the
extension of knowledge; they threatened no doom in this life or
in the next against investigators on new lines; they left the
world free to seek any new methods and to follow any new paths
which thinking men could find.

This legacy of belief in science, of respect for scientific
pursuits, and of freedom in scientific research, was especially
received by the school of Alexandria, and above all by
Archimedes, who began, just before the Christian era, to open
new paths through the great field of the inductive sciences by
observation, comparison, and experiment.[375]

The establishment of Christianity, beginning a new evolution of
theology, arrested the normal development of the physical
sciences for over fifteen hundred years. The cause of this
arrest was twofold: First, there was created an atmosphere in
which the germs of physical science could hardly grow--an
atmosphere in which all seeking in Nature for truth as truth was
regarded as futile. The general belief derived from the New
Testament Scriptures was, that the end of the world was at hand;
that the last judgment was approaching; that all existing
physical nature was soon to be destroyed: hence, the greatest
thinkers in the Church generally poured contempt upon all
investigators into a science of Nature, and insisted that
everything except the saving of souls was folly.

This belief appears frequently through the entire period of the
Middle Ages; but during the first thousand years it is clearly
dominant. From Lactantius and Eusebius, in the third century,
pouring contempt, as we have seen, over studies in astronomy, to
Peter Damian, the noted chancellor of Pope Gregory VII, in the
eleventh century, declaring all worldly sciences to be
"absurdities" and "fooleries," it becomes a very important
element in the atmosphere of thought.[376]

Then, too, there was established a standard to which all science
which did struggle up through this atmosphere must be made to
conform--a standard which favoured magic rather than science,
for it was a standard of rigid dogmatism obtained from literal
readings in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. The most
careful inductions from ascertained facts were regarded as
wretchedly fallible when compared with any view of nature
whatever given or even hinted at in any poem, chronicle, code,
apologue, myth, legend, allegory, letter, or discourse of any
sort which had happened to be preserved in the literature which
had come to be held as sacred.

For twelve centuries, then, the physical sciences were thus
discouraged or perverted by the dominant orthodoxy. Whoever
studied nature studied it either openly to find illustrations of
the sacred text, useful in the "saving of souls," or secretly
to gain the aid of occult powers, useful in securing personal
advantage. Great men like Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Rabanus
Maurus, accepted the scriptural standard of science and used it
as a means of Christian edification. The views of Bede and
Isidore on kindred subjects have been shown in former chapters;
and typical of the view taken by Rabanus is the fact that in his
great work on the _Universe_ there are only two chapters which
seem directly or indirectly to recognise even the beginnings of
a real philosophy of nature. A multitude of less-known men found
warrant in Scripture for magic applied to less worthy purposes.[376b]

But after the thousand years had passed to which various
thinkers in the Church, upon supposed scriptural warrant, had
lengthened out the term of the earth's existence, "the end of
all things" seemed further off than ever; and in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, owing to causes which need not be
dwelt upon here, came a great revival of thought, so that the
forces of theology and of science seemed arrayed for a contest.
On one side came a revival of religious fervour, and to this
day the works of the cathedral builders mark its depth and
strength; on the other side came a new spirit of inquiry
incarnate in a line of powerful thinkers.

First among these was Albert of Bollstadt, better known as
Albert the Great, the most renowned scholar of his time.
Fettered though he was by the methods sanctioned in the Church,
dark as was all about him, he had conceived better methods and
aims; his eye pierced the mists of scholasticism. he saw the
light, and sought to draw the world toward it. He stands among
the great pioneers of physical and natural science; he aided in
giving foundations to botany and chemistry; he rose above his
time, and struck a heavy blow at those who opposed the
possibility of human life on opposite sides of the earth; he
noted the influence of mountains, seas, and forests upon races
and products, so that Humboldt justly finds in his works the
germs of physical geography as a comprehensive science.

But the old system of deducing scientific truth from scriptural
texts was renewed in the development of scholastic theology, and
ecclesiastical power, acting through thousands of subtle
channels, was made to aid this development. The old idea of the
futility of physical science and of the vast superiority of
theology was revived. Though Albert's main effort was to
Christianize science, he was dealt with by the authorities of
the Dominican order, subjected to suspicion and indignity, and
only escaped persecution for sorcery by yielding to the
ecclesiastical spirit of the time, and working finally in
theological channels by, scholastic methods.

It was a vast loss to the earth; and certainly, of all
organizations that have reason to lament the pressure of
ecclesiasticism which turned Albert the Great from natural
philosophy to theology, foremost of all in regret should be the
Christian Church, and especially the Roman branch of it. Had
there been evolved in the Church during the thirteenth century
a faith strong enough to accept the truths in natural science
which Albert and his compeers could have given, and to have
encouraged their growth, this faith and this encouragement would
to this day have formed the greatest argument for proving the
Church directly under Divine guidance; they would have been
among the brightest jewels in her crown. The loss to the Church
by this want of faith and courage has proved in the long run
even greater than the loss to science.[378]

The next great man of that age whom the theological and
ecclesiastical forces of the time turned from the right path was
Vincent of Beauvais. During the first half of the twelfth
century he devoted himself to the study of Nature in several of
her most interesting fields. To astronomy, botany, and zoology
he gave special attention, but in a larger way he made a
general study of the universe, and in a series of treatises
undertook to reveal the whole field of science. But his work
simply became a vast commentary on the account of creation given
in the book of Genesis. Beginning with the work of the Trinity
at the creation, he goes on to detail the work of angels in all
their fields, and makes excursions into every part of creation,
visible and invisible, but always with the most complete
subordination of his thought to the literal statements of
Scripture. Could he have taken the path of experimental
research, the world would have been enriched with most precious
discoveries; but the force which had given wrong direction to
Albert of Bollstadt, backed as it was by the whole
ecclesiastical power of his time, was too strong, and in all the
life labour of Vincent nothing appears of any permanent value.
He reared a structure which the adaptation of facts to literal
interpretations of Scripture and the application of theological
subtleties to nature combine to make one of the most striking
monuments of human error.[379]

But the theological spirit of the thirteenth century gained its
greatest victory in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. In him was
the theological spirit of his age incarnate. Although he yielded
somewhat at one period to love of natural science, it was he who
finally made that great treaty or compromise which for ages
subjected science entirely to theology. He it was who reared the
most enduring barrier against those who in that age and in
succeeding ages laboured to open for science the path by its own
methods toward its own ends.

He had been the pupil of Albert the Great, and had gained much
from him. Through the earlier systems of philosophy, as they
were then known, and through the earlier theologic thought, he
had gone with great labour and vigour; and all his mighty
powers, thus disciplined and cultured, he brought to bear in
making a truce which was to give theology permanent supremacy
over science.

The experimental method had already been practically initiated:
Albert of Bollstadt and Roger Bacon had begun their work in
accordance with its methods; but St. Thomas gave all his
thoughts to bringing science again under the sway of theological
methods and ecclesiastical control. In his commentary on
Aristotle's treatise upon _Heaven and Earth_ he gave to the world
a striking example of what his method could produce,
illustrating all the evils which arise in combining theological
reasoning and literal interpretation of Scripture with
scientific facts; and this work remains to this day a monument
of scientific genius perverted by theology.[380]

The ecclesiastical power of the time hailed him as a deliverer,
it was claimed that miracles were vouchsafed, proving that the
blessing of Heaven rested upon his labours, and among the
legends embodying this claim is that given by the Bollandists
and immortalized by a renowned painter. The great philosopher
and saint is represented in the habit of his order, with book
and pen in hand, kneeling before the image of Christ crucified,
and as he kneels the image thus addresses him: "Thomas, thou
hast written well concerning me; what price wilt thou receive
for thy labour?" The myth-making faculty of the people at large
was also brought into play. According to a widespread and
circumstantial legend, Albert, by magical means, created an
android--an artificial man, living, speaking, and answering all
questions with such subtlety that St. Thomas, unable to answer
its reasoning, broke it to pieces with his staff.

Historians of the Roman Church like Rohrbacher, and historians
of science like Pouchet, have found it convenient to propitiate
the Church by dilating upon the glories of St. Thomas Aquinas in
thus making an alliance between religious and scientific
thought, and laying the foundations for a "sanctified science";
but the unprejudiced historian can not indulge in this
enthusiastic view: the results both for the Church and for
science have been most unfortunate. It was a wretched delay in
the evolution of fruitful thought, for the first result of this
great man's great compromise was to close for ages that path in
science which above all others leads to discoveries of
value--the experimental method--and to reopen that old path of
mixed theology and science which, as Hallam declares, "after
three or four hundred years had not untied a single knot or
added one unequivocal truth to the domain of philosophy"--the
path which, as all modern history proves, has ever since led
only to delusion and evil.[380b]

The theological path thus opened by these strong men became the
main path for science during ages, and it led the world ever
further and further from any fruitful fact or useful method.
Roger Bacon's investigations already begun were discredited:
worthless mixtures of scriptural legends with imperfectly
authenticated physical facts took their place. Thus it was that
for twelve hundred years the minds in control of Europe regarded
all real science as _futile_, and diverted the great current of
earnest thought into theology.

The next stage in this evolution was the development of an idea
which acted with great force throughout the Middle Ages--the
idea that science is _dangerous_. This belief was also of very
ancient origin. From the time when the Egyptian magicians made
their tremendous threat that unless their demands were granted
they would reach out to the four corners of the earth, pull down
the pillars of heaven, wreck the abodes of the gods above and
crush those of men below, fear of these representatives of
science is evident in the ancient world.

But differences in the character of magic were recognised, some
sorts being considered useful and some baleful. Of the former
was magic used in curing diseases, in determining times
auspicious for enterprises, and even in contributing to
amusement; of the latter was magic used to bring disease and
death on men and animals or tempests upon the growing crops.
Hence gradually arose a general distinction between white magic,
which dealt openly with the more beneficent means of nature, and
black magic, which dealt secretly with occult, malignant powers.

Down to the Christian era the fear of magic rarely led to any
persecution very systematic or very cruel. While in Greece and
Rome laws were at times enacted against magicians, they were
only occasionally enforced with rigour, and finally, toward the
end of the pagan empire, the feeling against them seemed dying
out altogether. As to its more kindly phases, men like Marcus
Aurelius and Julian did not hesitate to consult those who
claimed to foretell the future. As to black magic, it seemed
hardly worth while to enact severe laws, when charms, amulets,
and even gestures could thwart its worst machinations.

Moreover, under the old empire a real science was coming in, and
thought was progressing. Both the theory and practice of magic
were more and more held up to ridicule. Even as early a writer
as Ennius ridiculed the idea that magicians, who were generally
poor and hungry themselves, could bestow wealth on others;
Pliny, in his _Natural Philosophy_, showed at great length their
absurdities and cheatery; others followed in the same line of
thought, and the whole theory, except among the very lowest
classes, seemed dying out.

But with the development of Christian theology came a change.
The idea of the active interference of Satan in magic, which had
come into the Hebrew mind with especial force from Persia during
the captivity of Israel, had passed from the Hebrew Scriptures
into Christianity, and had been made still stronger by various
statements in the New Testament. Theologians laid stress
especially upon the famous utterances of the Psalmist that "all
the gods of the heathen are devils," and of St. Paul that "the
things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils";
and it was widely held that these devils were naturally
indignant at their dethronement and anxious to wreak vengeance
upon Christianity. Magicians were held to be active agents of
these dethroned gods, and this persuasion was strengthened by
sundry old practitioners in the art of magic--impostors who
pretended to supernatural powers, and who made use of old rites
and phrases inherited from paganism.

Hence it was that as soon as Christianity came into power it
more than renewed the old severities against the forbidden art,
and one of the first acts of the Emperor Constantine after his
conversion was to enact a most severe law against magic and
magicians, under which the main offender might be burned alive.
But here, too, it should be noted that a distinction between the
two sorts of magic was recognised, for Constantine shortly
afterward found it necessary to issue a proclamation stating
that his intention was only to prohibit deadly and malignant
magic; that he had no intention of prohibiting magic used to
cure diseases and to protect the crops from hail and tempests.
But as new emperors came to the throne who had not in them that
old leaven of paganism which to the last influenced Constantine,
and as theology obtained a firmer hold, severity against magic
increased. Toleration of it, even in its milder forms, was more
and more denied. Black magic and white were classed together.

This severity went on increasing and threatened the simplest
efforts in physics and chemistry; even the science of
mathematics was looked upon with dread. By the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, the older theology having arrived at the
climax of its development in Europe, terror of magic and
witchcraft took complete possession of the popular mind. In
sculpture, painting, and literature it appeared in forms ever
more and more striking. The lives of saints were filled with it.
The cathedral sculpture embodied it in every part. The storied
windows made it all the more impressive. The missal painters
wrought it not only into prayer books, but, despite the fact
that hardly a trace of the belief appears in the Psalms, they
illustrated it in the great illuminated psalters from which the
noblest part of the service was sung before the high altar. The
service books showed every form of agonizing petition for
delivery from this dire influence, and every form of exorcism
for thwarting it.

All the great theologians of the Church entered into this belief
and aided to develop it. The fathers of the early Church were
full and explicit, and the medieval doctors became more and more
minute in describing the operations of the black art and in
denouncing them. It was argued that, as the devil afflicted Job,
so he and his minions continue to cause diseases; that, as Satan
is the Prince of the power of the air, he and his minions cause
tempests; that the cases of Nebuchadnezzar and Lot's wife prove
that sorcerers can transform human beings into animals or even
lifeless matter; that, as the devils of Gadara were cast into
swine, all animals could be afflicted in the same manner; and
that, as Christ himself had been transported through the air by
the power of Satan, so any human being might be thus transported
to "an exceeding high mountain."

Thus the horror of magic and witchcraft increased on every hand,
and in 1317 Pope John XXII issued his bull _Spondent pariter_,
levelled at the alchemists, but really dealing a terrible blow
at the beginnings of chemical science. That many alchemists were
knavish is no doubt true, but no infallibility in separating the
evil from the good was shown by the papacy in this matter. In
this and in sundry other bulls and briefs we find Pope John, by
virtue of his infallibility as the world's instructor in all
that pertains to faith and morals, condemning real science and
pseudo-science alike. In two of these documents, supposed to be
inspired by wisdom from on high, he complains that both he and
his flock are in danger of their lives by the arts of the
sorcerers; he declares that such sorcerers can send devils into
mirrors and finger rings, and kill men and women by a magic
word; that they had tried to kill him by piercing a waxen image
of him with needles in the name of the devil. He therefore
called on all rulers, secular and ecclesiastical, to hunt down
the miscreants who thus afflicted the faithful, and he
especially increased the powers of inquisitors in various parts
of Europe for this purpose.

The impulse thus given to childish fear and hatred against the
investigation of nature was felt for centuries; more and more
chemistry came to be known as one of the "seven devilish arts."

Thus began a long series of demonstrations against magic from
the centre of Christendom. In 1437, and again in 1445, Pope
Eugene IV issued bulls exhorting inquisitors to be more diligent
in searching out and delivering over to punishment magicians and
witches who produced bad weather, the result being that
persecution received a fearful impulse. But the worst came forty
years later still, when, in 1484, there came the yet more
terrible bull of Pope Innocent VIII, known as _Summis
Desiderantes_, which let inquisitors loose upon Germany, with
Sprenger at their head, armed with the _Witch-Hammer_, the fearful
manual _Malleus Maleficarum_, to torture and destroy men and women
by tens of thousands for sorcery and magic. Similar bulls were
issued in 1504 by Julius II, and in 1523 by Adrian VI.

The system of repression thus begun lasted for hundreds of
years. The Reformation did little to change it, and in Germany,
where Catholics and Protestants vied with each other in proving
their orthodoxy, it was at its worst. On German soil more than
one hundred thousand victims are believed to have been
sacrificed to it between the middle of the fifteenth and the
middle of the sixteenth centuries.

Thus it was that from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, from
Aquinas to Luther, and from Luther to Wesley, theologians of
both branches of the Church, with hardly an exception, enforced
the belief in magic and witchcraft, and, as far as they had
power, carried out the injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live."

How this was ended by the progress of scientific modes of
thought I shall endeavour to show elsewhere: here we are only
concerned with the effect of this widespread terrorism on the
germs and early growth of the physical sciences.

Of course, the atmosphere created by this persecution of
magicians was deadly to any open beginnings of experimental
science. The conscience of the time, acting in obedience to the
highest authorities of the Church, and, as was supposed, in
defence of religion, now brought out a missile which it hurled
against scientific investigators with deadly effect. The
medieval battlefields of thought were strewn with various forms
of it. This missile was the charge of unlawful compact with
Satan, and it was most effective. We find it used against every
great investigator of nature in those times and for ages after.
The list of great men in those centuries charged with magic, as
given by Naude, is astounding; it includes every man of real
mark, and in the midst of them stands one of the most thoughtful
popes, Sylvester II (Gerbert), and the foremost of mediaeval
thinkers on natural science, Albert the Great. It came to be the
accepted idea that, as soon as a man conceived a wish to study
the works of God, his first step must be a league with the devil.

It was entirely natural, then, that in 1163 Pope Alexander III,
in connection with the Council of Tours, forbade the study of
physics to all ecclesiastics, which, of course, in that age
meant prohibition of all such scientific studies to the only
persons likely to make them. What the Pope then expressly
forbade was, in the words of the papal bull, "the study of
physics or the laws of the world," and it was added that any
person violating this rule "shall be avoided by all and
excommunicated."[386]

The first great thinker who, in spite of some stumbling into
theologic pitfalls, persevered in a truly scientific path, was
Roger Bacon. His life and works seem until recently to have been
generally misunderstood: he was formerly ranked as a
superstitious alchemist who happened upon some inventions, but
more recent investigation has shown him to be one of the great
masters in the evolution of human thought. The advance of sound
historical judgment seems likely to bring the fame of the two
who bear the name of Bacon nearly to equality. Bacon of the
chancellorship and of the _Novum Organum_ may not wane, but Bacon
of the prison cell and the _Opus Majus_ steadily approaches him in
brightness.

More than three centuries before Francis Bacon advocated the
experimental method, Roger Bacon practised it, and the results
as now revealed are wonderful. He wrought with power in many
sciences, and his knowledge was sound and exact. By him, more
than by any other man of the Middle Ages, was the world brought
into the more fruitful paths of scientific thought--the paths
which have led to the most precious inventions; and among these
are clocks, lenses, and burning specula, which were given by him
to the world, directly or indirectly. In his writings are found
formulae for extracting phosphorus, manganese, and bismuth. It
is even claimed, with much appearance of justice, that he
investigated the power of steam, and he seems to have very
nearly reached some of the principal doctrines of modern
chemistry. But it should be borne in mind that his _method_ of
investigation was even greater than its _results_. In an age when
theological subtilizing was alone thought to give the title of
scholar, he insisted on _real_ reasoning and the aid of natural
science by mathematics; in an age when experimenting was sure to
cost a man his reputation, and was likely to cost him his life,
he insisted on experimenting, and braved all its risks. Few
greater men have lived. As we follow Bacon's process of
reasoning regarding the refraction of light, we see that he was
divinely inspired.

On this man came the brunt of the battle. The most conscientious
men of his time thought it their duty to fight him, and they
fought him steadily and bitterly. His sin was not disbelief in
Christianity, not want of fidelity to the Church, not even
dissent from the main lines of orthodoxy; on the contrary, he
showed in all his writings a desire to strengthen Christianity,
to build up the Church, and to develop orthodoxy. He was
attacked and condemned mainly because he did not believe that
philosophy had become complete, and that nothing more was to be
learned; he was condemned, as his opponents expressly declared,
"on account of certain suspicious novelties"--"_propter
quasdam novitates suspectas_."

Upon his return to Oxford, about 1250, the forces of unreason
beset him on all sides. Greatest of all his enemies was
Bonaventura. This enemy was the theologic idol of the period:
the learned world knew him as the "seraphic Doctor"; Dante gave
him an honoured place in the great poem of the Middle Ages; the
Church finally enrolled him among the saints. By force of great
ability in theology he had become, in the middle of the
thirteenth century, general of the Franciscan order: thus, as
Bacon's master, his hands were laid heavily on the new teaching,
so that in 1257 the troublesome monk was forbidden to lecture;
all men were solemnly warned not to listen to his teaching, and
he was ordered to Paris, to be kept under surveillance by the
monastic authorities. Herein was exhibited another of the myriad
examples showing the care exercised over scientific teaching by
the Church. The reasons for thus dealing with Bacon were
evident: First, he had dared attempt scientific explanations of
natural phenomena, which under the mystic theology of the Middle
Ages had been referred simply to supernatural causes. Typical
was his explanation of the causes and character of the rainbow.
It was clear, cogent, a great step in the right direction as
regards physical science: but there, in the book of Genesis,
stood the legend regarding the origin of the rainbow, supposed
to have been dictated immediately by the Holy Spirit; and,
according to that, the "bow in the cloud" was not the result
of natural laws, but a "sign" arbitrarily placed in the heavens
for the simple purpose of assuring mankind that there was not to
be another universal deluge.

But this was not the worst: another theological idea was arrayed
against him--the idea of Satanic intervention in science; hence
he was attacked with that goodly missile which with the epithets
"infidel" and "atheist" has decided the fate of so many
battles--the charge of magic and compact with Satan.

He defended himself with a most unfortunate weapon--a weapon
which exploded in his hands and injured him more than the enemy;
for he argued against the idea of compacts with Satan, and
showed that much which is ascribed to demons results from
natural means. This added fuel to the flame. To limit the power
of Satan was deemed hardly less impious than to limit the power
of God.

The most powerful protectors availed him little. His friend Guy
of Foulques, having in 1265 been made Pope under the name of
Clement IV, shielded him for a time; but the fury of the enemy
was too strong, and when he made ready to perform a few
experiments before a small audience, we are told that all Oxford
was in an uproar. It was believed that Satan was about to be let
loose. Everywhere priests, monks, fellows, and students rushed
about, their garments streaming in the wind, and everywhere rose
the cry, "Down with the magician!" and this cry, "Down with
the magician!" resounded from cell to cell and from hall to hall.

Another weapon was also used upon the battlefields of science in
that time with much effect. The Arabs had made many noble
discoveries in science, and Averroes had, in the opinion of
many, divided the honours with St. Thomas Aquinas; these facts
gave the new missile--it was the epithet "Mohammedan"; this,
too, was flung with effect at Bacon.

The attack now began to take its final shape. The two great
religious orders, Franciscan and Dominican, then in all the
vigour of their youth, vied with each other in fighting the new
thought in chemistry and physics. St. Dominic solemnly condemned
research by experiment and observation; the general of the
Franciscan order took similar ground. In 1243 the Dominicans
interdicted every member of their order from the study of
medicine and natural philosophy, and in 1287 this interdiction
was extended to the study of chemistry.

In 1278 the authorities of the Franciscan order assembled at
Paris, solemnly condemned Bacon's teaching, and the general of
the Franciscans, Jerome of Ascoli, afterward Pope, threw him
into prison, where he remained for fourteen years, Though Pope
Clement IV had protected him, Popes Nicholas III and IV, by
virtue of their infallibility, decided that he was too dangerous
to be at large, and he was only released at the age of
eighty--but a year or two before death placed him beyond the
reach of his enemies. How deeply the struggle had racked his
mind may be gathered from that last affecting declaration of
his, "Would that I had not given myself so much trouble for the
love of science!"

The attempt has been made by sundry champions of the Church to
show that some of Bacon's utterances against ecclesiastical and
other corruptions in his time were the main cause of the
severity which the Church authorities exercised against him.
This helps the Church but little, even if it be well based; but
it is not well based. That some of his utterances of this sort
made him enemies is doubtless true, but the charges on which St.
Bonaventura silenced him, and Jerome of Ascoli imprisoned him,
and successive popes kept him in prison for fourteen years, were
"dangerous novelties" and suspected sorcery.

Sad is it to think of what this great man might have given to
the world had ecclesiasticism allowed the gift. He held the key
of treasures which would have freed mankind from ages of error
and misery. With his discoveries as a basis, with his method as
a guide, what might not the world have gained! Nor was the wrong
done to that age alone; it was done to this age also. The
nineteenth century was robbed at the same time with the
thirteenth. But for that interference with science the
nineteenth century would be enjoying discoveries which will not
be reached before the twentieth century, and even later.
Thousands of precious lives shall be lost, tens of thousands
shall suffer discomfort, privation, sickness, poverty,
ignorance, for lack of discoveries and methods which, but for
this mistaken dealing with Roger Bacon and his compeers, would
now be blessing the earth.

In two recent years sixty thousand children died in England and
in Wales of scarlet fever; probably quite as many died in the
United States. Had not Bacon been hindered, we should have had
in our hands, by this time, the means to save two thirds of
these victims; and the same is true of typhoid, typhus, cholera,
and that great class of diseases of whose physical causes
science is just beginning to get an inkling. Put together all
the efforts of all the atheists who have ever lived, and they
have not done so much harm to Christianity and the world as has
been done by the narrow-minded, conscientious men who persecuted
Roger Bacon, and closed the path which he gave his life to open.

But despite the persecution of Bacon and the defection of those
who ought to have followed him, champions of the experimental
method rose from time to time during the succeeding centuries.
We know little of them personally; our main knowledge of their
efforts is derived from the endeavours of their persecutors.

Under such guidance the secular rulers were naturally vigorous.
In France Charles V forbade, in 1380, the possession of furnaces
and apparatus necessary for chemical processes; under this law
the chemist John Barrillon was thrown into prison, and it was
only by the greatest effort that his life was saved. In England
Henry IV, in 1404, issued a similar decree. In Italy the
Republic of Venice, in 1418, followed these examples. The
judicial torture and murder of Antonio de Dominis were not
simply for heresy his investigations in the phenomena of light
were an additional crime. In Spain everything like scientific
research was crushed out among Christians. Some earnest efforts
were afterward made by Jews and Moors, but these were finally
ended by persecution; and to this hour the Spanish race, in some
respects the most gifted in Europe, which began its career with
everything in its favour and with every form of noble
achievement, remains in intellectual development behind every
other in Christendom.

To question the theological view of physical science was, even
long after the close of the Middle Ages, exceedingly perilous.
We have seen how one of Roger Bacon's unpardonable offences was
his argument against the efficacy of magic, and how, centuries
afterward, Cornelius Agrippa, Weyer, Flade, Loos, Bekker, and a
multitude of other investigators and thinkers, suffered
confiscation of property, loss of position, and even torture and
death, for similar views.[391]

The theological atmosphere, which in consequence settled down
about the great universities and colleges, seemed likely to
stifle all scientific effort in every part of Europe, and it is
one of the great wonders in human history that in spite of this
deadly atmosphere a considerable body of thinking men, under
such protection as they could secure, still persisted in
devoting themselves to the physical sciences.

In Italy, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, came a
striking example of the difficulties which science still
encountered even after the Renaissance had undermined the old
beliefs. At that time John Baptist Porta was conducting his
investigations, and, despite a considerable mixture of
pseudo-science, they were fruitful. His was not "black magic,"
claiming the aid of Satan, but "white magic," bringing into
service the laws of nature--the precursor of applied science.
His book on meteorology was the first in which sound ideas were
broached on this subject; his researches in optics gave the
world the camera obscura, and possibly the telescope; in
chemistry he seems to have been the first to show how to reduce
the metallic oxides, and thus to have laid the foundation of
several important industries. He did much to change natural
philosophy from a black art to a vigorous open science. He
encountered the old ecclesiastical policy. The society founded
by him for physical research, "I Secreti," was broken up, and
he was summoned to Rome by Pope Paul III and forbidden to
continue his investigations.

So, too, in France. In 1624, some young chemists at Paris having
taught the experimental method and cut loose from Aristotle, the
faculty of theology beset the Parliament of Paris, and the
Parliament prohibited these new chemical researches under the
severest penalties.

The same war continued in Italy. Even after the belief in magic
had been seriously weakened, the old theological fear and
dislike of physical science continued. In 1657 occurred the
first sitting of the Accademia del Cimento at Florence, under
the presidency of Prince Leopold de' Medici This academy
promised great things for science; it was open to all talent;
its only fundamental law was "the repudiation of any favourite
system or sect of philosophy, and the obligation to investigate
Nature by the pure light of experiment"; it entered into
scientific investigations with energy. Borelli in mathematics,
Redi in natural history, and many others, enlarged the
boundaries of knowledge. Heat, light, magnetism, electricity,
projectiles, digestion, and the incompressibility of water were
studied by the right method and with results that enriched the world.

The academy was a fortress of science, and siege was soon laid
to it. The votaries of scholastic learning denounced it as
irreligious, quarrels were fomented, Leopold was bribed with a
cardinal's hat and drawn away to Rome, and, after ten years of
beleaguering, the fortress fell: Borelli was left a beggar;
Oliva killed himself in despair.

So, too, the noted Academy of the Lincei at times incurred the
ill will of the papacy by the very fact that it included
thoughtful investigators. It was "patronized" by Pope Urban VIII
in such manner as to paralyze it, and it was afterward
vexed by Pope Gregory XVI. Even in our own time sessions of
scientific associations were discouraged and thwarted by as
kindly a pontiff as Pius IX.[394]

A hostility similar in kind, though less in degree, was shown in
Protestant countries.

Even after Thomasius in Germany and Voltaire in France and
Beccaria in Italy had given final blows to the belief in magic
and witchcraft throughout Christendom, the traditional orthodox
distrust of the physical sciences continued for a long time.

In England a marked dislike was shown among various leading
ecclesiastics and theologians towards the Royal Society, and
later toward the Association for the Advancement of Science; and
this dislike, as will hereafter be seen, sometimes took shape in
serious opposition.

As a rule, both in Protestant and Catholic countries instruction
in chemistry and physics was for a long time discouraged by
Church authorities; and, when its suppression was no longer
possible, great pains were taken to subordinate it to
instruction supposed to be more fully in accordance with the
older methods of theological reasoning.

I have now presented in outline the more direct and open
struggle of the physical sciences with theology, mainly as an
exterior foe. We will next consider their warfare with the same
foe in its more subtle form, mainly as a vitiating and
sterilizing principle in science itself.

We have seen thus far, first, how such men as Eusebius,
Lactantius, and their compeers, opposed scientific investigation
as futile; next, how such men as Albert the Great, St. Thomas
Aquinas, and the multitude who followed them, turned the main
current of medieval thought from science to theology; and,
finally, how a long line of Church authorities from Popes John XXII
and Innocent VIII, and the heads of the great religious orders,
down to various theologians and ecclesiastics, Catholic and
Protestant, of a very recent period, endeavoured first to crush
and afterward to discourage scientific research as dangerous.

Yet, injurious as all this was to the evolution of science,
there was developed something in many respects more destructive;
and this was the influence of mystic theology, penetrating,
permeating, vitiating, sterilizing nearly every branch of
science for hundreds of years. Among the forms taken by this
development in the earlier Middle Ages we find a mixture of
physical science with a pseudo-science obtained from texts of
Scripture. In compounding this mixture, Jews and Christians vied
with each other. In this process the sacred books were used as
a fetich; every word, every letter, being considered to have a
divine and hidden meaning. By combining various scriptural
letters in various abstruse ways, new words of prodigious
significance in magic were obtained, and among them the great
word embracing the seventy-two mystical names of God--the mighty
word "_Schemhamphoras._" Why should men seek knowledge by
observation and experiment in the book of Nature, when the book
of Revelation, interpreted by the Kabbalah, opened such
treasures to the ingenious believer?

So, too, we have ancient mystical theories of number which the
theological spirit had made Christian, usurping an enormous
place in medieval science. The sacred power of the number three
was seen in the Trinity; in the three main divisions of the
universe--the empyrean, the heavens, and the earth; in the three
angelic hierarchies; in the three choirs of seraphim, cherubim,
and thrones; in the three of dominions, virtues, and powers; in
the three of principalities, archangels, and angels; in the
three orders in the Church--bishops, priests, and deacons; in the
three classes--the baptized, the communicants, and the monks; in
the three degrees of attainment--light, purity, and knowledge;
in the three theological virtues--faith, hope, and charity--and
in much else. All this was brought into a theologico-scientific
relation, then and afterward, with the three dimensions of
space; with the three divisions of time--past, present, and
future; with the three realms of the visible world--sky, earth,
and sea; with the three constituents of man--body, soul, and
spirit; with the threefold enemies of man--the world, the flesh,
and the devil; with the three kingdoms in nature--mineral,
vegetable, and animal; with "the three colours"--red, yellow,
and blue; with "the three eyes of the honey-bee"--and with a
multitude of other analogues equally precious. The sacred power
of the number seven was seen in the seven golden candlesticks
and the seven churches in the Apocalypse; in the seven cardinal
virtues and the seven deadly sins; in the seven liberal arts and
the seven devilish arts, and, above all, in the seven
sacraments. And as this proved in astrology that there could be
only seven planets, so it proved in alchemy that there must be
exactly seven metals. The twelve apostles were connected with
the twelve signs in the zodiac, and with much in physical
science. The seventy-two disciples, the seventy-two interpreters
of the Old Testament, the seventy-two mystical names of God,
were connected with the alleged fact in anatomy that there were
seventy-two joints in the human frame.

Then, also, there were revived such theologic and metaphysical
substitutes for scientific thought as the declaration that the
perfect line is a circle, and hence that the planets must move
in absolute circles--a statement which led astronomy astray even
when the great truths of the Copernican theory were well in
sight; also, the declaration that nature abhors a vacuum--a
statement which led physics astray until Torricelli made his
experiments; also, the declaration that we see the lightning
before we hear the thunder because "sight is nobler than hearing."

In chemistry we have the same theologic tendency to magic, and,
as a result, a muddle of science and theology, which from one
point of view seems blasphemous and from another idiotic, but
which none the less sterilized physical investigation for ages.
That debased Platonism which had been such an important factor
in the evolution of Christian theology from the earliest days of
the Church continued its work. As everything in inorganic nature
was supposed to have spiritual significance, the doctrines of
the Trinity and Incarnation were turned into an argument in
behalf of the philosopher's stone; arguments for the scheme of
redemption and for transubstantiation suggested others of
similar construction to prove the transmutation of metals; the
doctrine of the resurrection of the human body was by similar
mystic jugglery connected with the processes of distillation and
sublimation. Even after the Middle Ages were past, strong men
seemed unable to break away from such reasoning as this--among
them such leaders as Basil Valentine in the fifteenth century,
Agricola in the sixteenth, and Van Helmont in the seventeenth.

The greatest theologians contributed to the welter of unreason
from which this pseudo-science was developed. One question
largely discussed was, whether at the Redemption it was
necessary for God to take the human form. Thomas Aquinas
answered that it was necessary, but William Occam and Duns
Scotus answered that it was not; that God might have taken the
form of a stone, or of a log, or of a beast. The possibilities
opened to wild substitutes for science by this sort of reasoning
were infinite. Men have often asked how it was that the
Arabians accomplished so much in scientific discovery as
compared with Christian investigators; but the answer is easy:
the Arabians were comparatively free from these theologic
allurements which in Christian Europe flickered in the air on
all sides, luring men into paths which led no-whither.

Strong investigators, like Arnold of Villanova, Raymond Lully,
Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and their compeers, were thus drawn
far out of the only paths which led to fruitful truths. In a
work generally ascribed to the first of these, the student is
told that in mixing his chemicals he must repeat the psalm
_Exsurge Domine_, and that on certain chemical vessels must be
placed the last words of Jesus on the cross. Vincent of Beauvais
insisted that, as the Bible declares that Noah, when five
hundred years old, had children born to him, he must have
possessed alchemical means of preserving life; and much later
Dickinson insisted that the patriarchs generally must have owed
their long lives to such means. It was loudly declared that the
reality of the philosopher's stone was proved by the words of
St. John in the Revelation. "To him that overcometh I will give
a white stone." The reasonableness of seeking to develop gold
out of the baser metals was for many generations based upon the
doctrine of the resurrection of the physical body, which, though
explicitly denied by St. Paul, had become a part of the creed of
the Church. Martin Luther was especially drawn to believe in the
alchemistic doctrine of transmutation by this analogy. The Bible
was everywhere used, both among Protestants and Catholics, in
support of these mystic adulterations of science, and one
writer, as late as 1751, based his alchemistic arguments on more
than a hundred passages of Scripture. As an example of this sort
of reasoning, we have a proof that the elect will preserve the
philosopher's stone until the last judgment, drawn from a
passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, "We have this
treasure in earthen vessels."

The greatest thinkers devoted themselves to adding new
ingredients to this strange mixture of scientific and theologic
thought. The Catholic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the
Protestant mysticism of Jacob Boehme, and the alchemistic
reveries of Basil Valentine were all cast into this seething mass.

And when alchemy in its old form had been discredited, we find
scriptural arguments no less perverse, and even comical, used on
the other side. As an example of this, just before the great
discoveries by Stahl, we find the valuable scientific efforts of
Becher opposed with the following syllogism: "King Solomon,
according to the Scriptures, possessed the united wisdom of
heaven and earth; but King Solomon knew nothing about alchemy
[or chemistry in the form it then took], and sent his vessels to
Ophir to seek gold, and levied taxes upon his subjects; _ergo_
alchemy [or chemistry] has no reality or truth." And we find
that Becher is absolutely turned away from his labours, and
obliged to devote himself to proving that Solomon used more
money than he possibly could have obtained from Ophir or his
subjects, and therefore that he must have possessed a knowledge
of chemical methods and the philosopher's stone as the result of
them.[399]

Of the general reasoning enforced by theology regarding physical
science, every age has shown examples; yet out of them all I
will select but two, and these are given because they show how
this mixture of theological with scientific ideas took hold upon
the strongest supporters of better reasoning even after the
power of medieval theology seemed broken.

The first of these examples is Melanchthon. He was the scholar
of the Reformation, and justly won the title "Preceptor of
Germany." His mind was singularly open, his sympathies broad,
and his usual freedom from bigotry drew down upon him that wrath
of Protestant heresy-hunters which embittered the last years of
his life and tortured him upon his deathbed. During his career
at the University of Wittenberg he gave a course of lectures on
physics, and in these he dwelt upon scriptural texts as
affording scientific proofs, accepted the interference of the
devil in physical phenomena as in other things, and applied the
medieval method throughout his whole work.[400]

Yet far more remarkable was the example, a century later, of the
man who more than any other led the world out of the path opened
by Aquinas, and into that through which modern thought has
advanced to its greatest conquests. Strange as it may at first
seem, Francis Bacon, whose keenness of sight revealed the
delusions of the old path and the promises of the new, and whose
boldness did so much to turn the world from the old path into
the new, presents in his own writings one of the most striking
examples of the evil he did so much to destroy.

The _Novum Organon_, considering the time when it came from his
pen, is doubtless one of the greatest exhibitions of genius in
the history of human thought. It showed the modern world the way
out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into the
experimental method and reverence for fact. In it occur many
passages which show that the great philosopher was fully alive
to the danger both to religion and to science arising from their
mixture. He declares that the "corruption of philosophy from
superstition and theology introduced the greatest amount of evil
both into whole systems of philosophy and into their parts." He
denounces those who "have endeavoured to found a natural
philosophy on the books of Genesis and Job and other sacred
Scriptures, so `seeking the dead among the living.'" He speaks
of the result as "an unwholesome mixture of things human and
divine; not merely fantastic philosophy, but heretical
religion." He refers to the opposition of the fathers to the
doctrine of the rotundity of the earth, and says that, "thanks
to some of them, you may find the approach to any kind of
philosophy, however improved, entirely closed up." He charges
that some of these divines are "afraid lest perhaps a deeper
inquiry into nature should, penetrate beyond the allowed limits
of sobriety"; and finally speaks of theologians as sometimes
craftily conjecturing that, if science be little understood,
"each single thing can be referred more easily to the hand and
rod of God," and says, "_This is nothing more or less than
wishing to please God by a lie_."

No man who has reflected much upon the annals of his race can,
without a feeling of awe, come into the presence of such
clearness of insight and boldness of utterance, and the first
thought of the reader is that, of all men, Francis Bacon is the
most free from the unfortunate bias he condemns; that he,
certainly, can not be deluded into the old path. But as we go on
through his main work we are surprised to find that the strong
arm of Aquinas has been stretched over the intervening ages, and
has laid hold upon this master-thinker of the seventeenth
century; for only a few chapters beyond those containing the
citations already made we find Bacon alluding to the recent
voyage of Columbus, and speaking of the prophecy of Daniel
regarding the latter days, that "many shall run to and fro, and
knowledge be increased," as clearly signifying "that... the
circumnavigation of the world and the increase of science should
happen in the same age."[401]

In his great work on the _Advancement of Learning_ the firm grasp
which the methods he condemned held upon him is shown yet more
clearly. In the first book of it he asserts that "that
excellent book of Job, if it be revolved with diligence, will be
found pregnant and swelling with natural philosophy," and he
endeavours to show that in it the "roundness of the earth," the
"fixing of the stars, ever standing at equal distances," the
"depression of the southern pole," the "matter of generation,"
and "matter of minerals" are "with great elegancy noted."
But, curiously enough, he uses to support some of these truths
the very texts which the fathers of the Church used to destroy
them, and those for which he finds Scripture warrant most
clearly are such as science has since disproved. So, too, he
says that Solomon was enabled in his Proverbs, "by donation of
God, to compile a natural history of all verdure."[402]

Such was the struggle of the physical sciences in general. Let
us now look briefly at one special example out of many, which
reveals, as well as any, one of the main theories which prompted
theological interference with them.

It will doubtless seem amazing to many that for ages the weight
of theological thought in Christendom was thrown against the
idea of the suffocating properties of certain gases, and
especially of carbonic acid. Although in antiquity we see men
forming a right theory of gases in mines, we find that, early in
the history of the Church, St. Clement of Alexandria put forth
the theory that these gases are manifestations of diabolic
action, and that, throughout Christendom, suffocation in
caverns, wells, and cellars was attributed to the direct action
of evil spirits. Evidences of this view abound through the
medieval period, and during the Reformation period a great
authority, Agricola, one of the most earnest and truthful of
investigators, still adhered to the belief that these gases in
mines were manifestations of devils, and he specified two
classes--one of malignant imps, who blow out the miners' lamps,
and the other of friendly imps, who simply tease the workmen in
various ways. He went so far as to say that one of these spirits
in the Saxon mine of Annaberg destroyed twelve workmen at once
by the power of his breath.

At the end of the sixteenth century we find a writer on
mineralogy complaining that the mines in France and Germany had
been in large part abandoned on account of the "evil spirits of
metals which had taken possession of them."

Even as late as the seventeenth century, Van Helmont, after he
had broken away from alchemy and opened one of the great paths
to chemistry--even after he had announced to the world the
existence of various gases and the mode of their generation--was
not strong enough to free himself from theologic bias; he still
inclined to believe that the gases he had discovered, were in
some sense living spirits, beneficent or diabolical.

But at various. periods glimpses of the truth had been gained.
The ancient view had not been entirely forgotten; and as far
back as the first part of the thirteenth century Albert the
Great suggested a natural cause in the possibility of
exhalations from minerals causing a "corruption of the air";
but he, as we have seen, was driven or dragged off into,
theological studies, and the world relapsed into the
theological view.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century there had come a great
genius laden with important truths in chemistry, but for whom
the world was not ready--Basil Valentine. His discoveries
anticipated much that has brought fame and fortune to chemists
since, yet so fearful of danger was he that his work was
carefully concealed. Not until after his death was his treatise
on alchemy found, and even then it was for a long time not known
where and when he lived. The papal bull, _Spondent pariter_, and
the various prohibitions it bred, forcing other alchemists to
conceal their laboratories, led him to let himself be known
during his life at Erfurt simply as an apothecary, and to wait
until after his death to make a revelation of truth which during
his lifetime might have cost him dear. Among the legacies of
this greatest of the alchemists was the doctrine that the air
which asphyxiates workers in mines is similar to that which is
produced by fermentation of malt, and a recommendation that, in
order to drive away the evil and to prevent serious accidents,
fires be lighted and jets of steam used to ventilate the
mines--stress being especially laid upon the idea that the danger
in the mines is produced by "exhalations of metals."

Thanks to men like Valentine, this idea of the interference of
Satan and his minions with the mining industry was gradually
weakened, and the working of the deserted mines was resumed; yet
even at a comparatively recent period we find it still
lingering, and among leading divines in the very heart of
Protestant Germany. In 1715 a cellar-digger having been stifled
at Jena, the medical faculty of the university decided that the
cause was not the direct action of the devil, but a deadly gas.
Thereupon Prof. Loescher, of the University of Wittenberg,
entered a solemn protest, declaring that the decision of the
medical faculty was "only a proof of the lamentable license
which has so taken possession of us, and which, if we are not
earnestly on our guard, will finally turn away from us the
blessing of God."[404] But denunciations of this kind could not
hold back the little army of science; in spite of adverse
influences, the evolution of physics and chemistry went on. More
and more there rose men bold enough to break away from
theological methods and strong enough to resist ecclesiastical
bribes and threats. As alchemy in its first form, seeking for
the philosopher's stone and the transmutation of metals, had
given way to alchemy in its second form, seeking for the elixir
of life and remedies more or less magical for disease, so now
the latter yielded to the search for truth as truth. More and
more the "solemnly constituted impostors" were resisted in
every field. A great line of physicists and chemists began to
appear.[404b]


                              II.

Just at the middle of the seventeenth century, and at the very
centre of opposition to physical science, Robert Boyle began the
new epoch in chemistry. Strongly influenced by the writings of
Bacon and the discoveries of Galileo, he devoted himself to
scientific research, establishing at Oxford a laboratory and
putting into it a chemist from Strasburg. For this he was at
once bitterly attacked. In spite of his high position, his
blameless life, his liberal gifts to charity and learning, the
Oxford pulpit was especially severe against him, declaring that
his researches were destroying religion and his experiments
undermining the university. Public orators denounced him, the
wits ridiculed him, and his associates in the peerage were
indignant that he should condescend to pursuits so unworthy. But
Boyle pressed on. His discoveries opened new paths in various
directions and gave an impulse to a succession of vigorous
investigators. Thus began the long series of discoveries
culminating those of Black, Bergmann, Cavendish, Priestley, and
Lavoisier, who ushered in the chemical science of the
nineteenth century.

Yet not even then without a sore struggle against unreason. And
it must here be noticed that this unreason was not all
theological. The unreasoning heterodox when intrusted with
irresponsible power can be as short-sighted and cruel as the
unreasoning orthodox. Lavoisier, one of the best of our race,
not only a great chemist but a true man, was sent to the
scaffold by the Parisian mob, led by bigoted "liberals" and
atheists, with the sneer that the republic had no need of
_savants_. As to Priestley, who had devoted his life to science
and to every good work among his fellow-men, the Birmingham mob,
favoured by the Anglican clergymen who harangued them as
"fellow-churchmen," wrecked his house, destroyed his library,
philosophical instruments, and papers containing the results of
long years of scientific research, drove him into exile, and
would have murdered him if they could have laid their hands upon
him. Nor was it entirely his devotion to rational liberty, nor
even his disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity, which brought
on this catastrophe. That there was a deep distrust of his
scientific pursuits, was evident when the leaders of the mob took
pains to use his electrical apparatus to set fire to his papers.

Still, though theological modes of thought continued to
sterilize much effort in chemistry, the old influence was more
and more thrown off, and truth sought more and more for truth's
sake. "Black magic" with its Satanic machinery vanished, only
reappearing occasionally among marvel-mongers and belated
theologians. "White magic" became legerdemain.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, physical research,
though it went on with ever-increasing vigour, felt in various
ways the reaction which followed the French Revolution. It was
not merely under the Bourbons and Hapsburgs that resistance was
offered; even in England the old spirit lingered long. As late
as 1832, when the British Association for the Advancement of
Science first visited Oxford, no less amiable a man than John
Keble--at that time a power in the university--condemned
indignantly the conferring of honorary degrees upon the leading
men thus brought together. In a letter of that date to Dr. Pusey
he complained bitterly, to use his own words, that "the Oxford
doctors have truckled sadly to the spirit of the times in
receiving the hotchpotch of philosophers as they did." It is
interesting to know that among the men thus contemptuously
characterized were Brewster, Faraday, and Dalton.

Nor was this a mere isolated exhibition of feeling; it lasted
many years, and was especially shown on both sides of the
Atlantic in all higher institutions of learning where theology
was dominant. Down to a period within the memory of men still in
active life, students in the sciences, not only at Oxford and
Cambridge but at Harvard and Yale, were considered a doubtful if
not a distinctly inferior class, intellectually and socially--to
be relegated to different instructors and buildings, and to
receive their degrees on a different occasion and with different
ceremonies from those appointed for students in literature. To
the State University of Michigan, among the greater American
institutions of learning which have never possessed or been
possessed by a theological seminary, belongs the honour of
first breaking down this wall of separation.

But from the middle years of the century chemical science
progressed with ever-accelerating force, and the work of Bunsen,
Kirchhoff, Dalton, and Faraday has, in the last years of the
century, led up to the establishment of Mendeleef's law, by
which chemistry has become predictive, as astronomy had become
predictive by the calculations of Newton, and biology by the
discoveries of Darwin.

While one succession of strong men were thus developing
chemistry out of one form of magic, another succession were
developing physics out of another form.

First in this latter succession may be mentioned that line of
thinkers who divined and reasoned out great physical laws--a
line extending from Galileo and Kepler and Newton to Ohm and
Faraday and Joule and Helmholtz. These, by revealing more and
more clearly the reign of law, steadily undermined the older
theological view of arbitrary influence in nature. Next should