9 an English Franciscan, in his book "The Properties of Things" which went through ten editions in the fifteenth century and was much used by preachers tells us that "If the crocodile findeth a man by the water's brim he slayeth him, then he weepeth over him and swalloweth him." Bestiaries such as that of William of Normandy were widely employed. "Pious use was made of this science, especially by monkish preachers. The phenix rising from his ashes proves the doctrine of the resurrection; the structure and mischief of monkeys proves the existence of demons; the fact that certain monkeys have no tails proves that Satan has been shorn of his glory; the weasel, which 'constantly changes its place' is a type of the man estranged from the word of God, who findeth no rest." 10 The Dominican Nider in the "Ant Hill" asserted that the Ethiopian ants were as large as dogs and had horns. He thought they typified the heretics, Wyclif and Huss, who "bark and bite against the truth." At the end of the seventeenth century Father Kircher, a Jesuit professor at Rome, was sure that sirens and griffins were among the animals taken into the ark. The Protestant Reformation, in spite of its protest against the authority of tradition as set forth by the church, instead of introducing the rule of reason but served to strengthen the position of the Bible as the source of knowledge. Luther and Calvin held as firmly to its literal interpretation as did Bossuet or Aquinas. Luther denounced reason as the "arch-whore," "the devil's bride." He called Aristotle "prince of darkness, horrid impostor, public and professed liar, beast and twice execrable." To Copernicus he is equally complimentary: 9 WHITE, A. D. o. c., p. 34. 10 Ibid., p. 35. "This upstart astrologer,' this 'fool who wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy,' for 'sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth.'" 11 Well might Erasmus say: Learning perished where Luther reigned." 12 66 was The general belief of this later day may be thus stated. Accepting the calculation of the famous Dr. Lightfoot, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, "man created by the Trinity on 23d October, 4004 B. C., at nine o'clock in the morning." Moreover, his studies enabled him to declare that “heaven and earth, center and circumference, were created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water." 13 Melanchthon put the date of creation at 3963 B. C. while Pope Urban VIII fixed it in the year 5199 B. C. The chronology of Bishop Usher was printed in many editions of the Bible and was quite generally regarded as almost if not quite inspired. So accurate was this general scheme considered that in the nineteenth century Dr. Adam Clark wrote "to preclude the possibility of a mistake, the unerring Spirit of God directed Moses in the selection of his facts and the ascertaining of his dates," while a famous Egyptologist, Wilkinson, modified the dates got from the monuments to fit the accepted date of the flood.14 Yet two hundred years after Lightfoot, it was known that a great and ancient civilization flourished in Asia at the time he thought creation took place. All the different kinds of plants and animals had been created in the week set apart for that purpose. The 11 CLODD, EDW. o. c., p. 89. 12 Ibid., p. 87. 13 WHITE, A. D. o. c., p. 9. 14 Ibid., pp. 1-256. crowning achievement was man, woman being but an afterthought a side issue, as it were — and many held that man had one less rib than woman. The contrast between man and the other animals was often emphasized. He had been directly formed by the hands of God, while the others had appeared at the call of his voice from the earth or sea. In spite of the threats of the Athanasian creed against all who should "confound the persons or "divide the substance of the Trinity" there was considerable discussion as to the actual creator. In 1667 Abraham Milius, author of "The Origin of Animals and the Migrations of Peoples," suggested that: "the earth and the waters, and especially the heat of the sun with that slimy and putrid quality which seems to be inherent in the soil, may furnish the origin for fishes, terrestrial animals and birds." " 15 He seems to have based this idea on the sentence "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind." In the seventh century St. Isidore had claimed that "bees are generated from decomposed veal, beetles from horseflesh, grasshoppers from mules, scorpions from crabs." 16 This conception of a secondary or indirect creation of many lower forms was widely held. ... Early in the eighteenth century Nehemiah Grew of the Royal Society wrote in his " Cosmologia Sacra" that "a crane which is scurvy meat, lays but two eggs but a pheasant and partridge, both excellent meat, lay and hatch fifteen or twenty. Those of value which lay few at a time sit the oftener, as the woodcock and the dove. . . . If nettles sting, it is to secure an excellent medicine for children and cattle. . . . If the bramble hurts man, it makes all the better hedge. If it chances to prick the owner, it tears the thief. Weasels, kites, and other 15 WHITE, A. D. o. c., p. 46. 16 Ibid., pp. 1-55. ... ... 7 cause God foresaw that he would sin) in order that he might be made aware of the final punishment of hell.”▾ Peter Lombard thought "no created things would have been hurtful to man had he not sinned: they became hurtful for the sake of terrifying and punishing vice or of proving and perfecting virtue: they were created harmless and on account of sin became hurtful." Wesley wrote: "None of these attempted to devour or in any wise hurt one another: . . . the spider was as harmless as the fly, and did not lie in wait for blood.”▾ Watson, the evangelical reformer of the eighteenth century, thought the serpent had been punished for his sins. "We have no reason at all to believe that the animal had a serpentine form in any mode or degree until its transformation: that he was then degraded to a reptile to go upon his belly imports, on the contrary, an entire loss and alteration of the original form.” 7 Augustine thought that many forms of life were superfluous, yet that in some way they completed the design of nature, while Luther held flies to be the images of devils and heretics sent by the devil to bother him while reading. The appeal to authority produced other results in the field of natural history equally interesting. "Hence such contributions to knowledge as that the basilisk kills serpents by his breath and men by his glance, that the lion when pursued effaces his tracks with the end of his own tail, that the pelican nurses her young with her own blood, that serpents lay aside their venom before drinking, that the salamander quenches fire, that the hyena can talk with shepherds, that certain birds are born of the fruit of a certain tree when it happens to fall into the water, with other masses of science equally valuable." 8 Bartholomew, 7 WHITE, A. D. o. c., pp. 28, 29. 8 Ibid., p. 33. 9 an English Franciscan, in his book "The Properties of Things" which went through ten editions in the fifteenth century and was much used by preachers tells us that "If the crocodile findeth a man by the water's brim he slayeth him, then he weepeth over him and swalloweth him." Bestiaries such as that of William of Normandy were widely employed. "Pious use was made of this science, especially by monkish preachers. The phenix rising from his ashes proves the doctrine of the resurrection; the structure and mischief of monkeys proves the existence of demons; the fact that certain monkeys have no tails proves that Satan has been shorn of his glory; the weasel, which 'constantly changes its place' is a type of the man estranged from the word of God, who findeth no rest." 10 The Dominican Nider in the "Ant Hill" asserted that the Ethiopian ants were as large as dogs and had horns. He thought they typified the heretics, Wyclif and Huss, who "bark and bite against the truth." At the end of the seventeenth century Father Kircher, a Jesuit professor at Rome, was sure that sirens and griffins were among the animals taken into the ark. The Protestant Reformation, in spite of its protest against the authority of tradition as set forth by the church, instead of introducing the rule of reason but served to strengthen the position of the Bible as the source of knowledge. Luther and Calvin held as firmly to its literal interpretation as did Bossuet or Aquinas. Luther denounced reason as the "arch-whore," "the devil's bride." He called Aristotle "prince of darkness, horrid impostor, public and professed liar, beast and twice execrable." To Copernicus he is equally complimentary: 9 WHITE, A. D. o. c., p. 34. 10 Ibid., p. 35. |