Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.
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Principal Dawson has ventured the explanation that a flood
of salt mud coming from a volcano incrusted her.
But theologians themselves were the first to show the
inadequacy of these explanations. The more rationalistic
pointed out the fact that they were contrary to the sacred
text : Von Bohlen, an eminent professor at Konigsberg, in
his sturdy German honesty, declared that the salt pillar
gave rise to the story, and compared the pillar of salt
causing this transformation legend to the rock in Greek
mythology which gave rise to the transformation legend
of Niobe.
On the other hand, the more severely orthodox protested
against such attempts to explain away the clear statements
of Holy Writ. Dom Calmet, while presenting many of
these explanations made as early as his time, gives
us to
understand that nearly all theologians adhered to the idea
that Lot's wife was instantly and really changed into salt ;
and in our own time, as we shall presently see, have come
some very vigorous protests.
Similar attempts were made to explain the other ancient
legends regarding
the Dead Sea. One of the most recent
of these is that the cities of the plain, having been built with
blocks of bituminous rock, were set on fire by lightning, a
contemporary earthquake helping on the work. Still an-
other is that accumulations of petroleum and inflammable
gas escaped through a fissure, took fire, and so produced
the catastrophe.*
The revolt against such efforts to reconcile scientific fact
with myth and legend had become very evident about the
middle of the nineteenth century. In 185 1 and 1852 Van de
Velde made his journey. He was a most devout man,
but he confessed that the volcanic action at the Dead Sea
must have been far earlier than the catastrophe mentioned
in our sacred books, and that " the overthrow of Sodom and
* For Kranzel, see his Reise nach Jerusalem, etc. For Schegg, see his Gedenk-
buch einer Pilger reise, etc., 1867, chap. xxiv. For Palmer, see his Desert of the
Exodus, vol. ii, pp. 478, 479. For the various compromises, see works already
cited, passim. For Von Bohlen, see his Genesis, Konigsberg, 1835, pp. 200-213.
For Calmet, see his Dictionarium, etc., Venet., 1766. For very recent compromises,
see J. W. Dawson and Dr. Cunningham Geikie in works cited.
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