Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE. 261
effort of this sort. In that year appeared the Rev. Dr.
Cunningham Geikie's valuable work on The Holy Land and
the Bible. In it he makes the following statement as to the
salt formation at Usdum :
" Here and there, hardened por-
tions of salt withstanding the water, while all around them
melts and wears off, rise up isolated pillars, one of
'
bears among the Arabs the name of Lot's wife.'
which
"
at
In the light of the previous history, there is something
once pathetic and comical in this attempt to throw the
myth upon the shoulders of the poor Arabs. The myth
was not originated by Mohammedans ;
seen, first among the Jews, and, I need hardly
it appears, as we have
remind the
reader, comes out in the Book of Wisdom and in Josephus,
and has been steadily maintained by fathers, martyrs, and
doctors of the Church, by at least one pope, and by innumer-
able bishops, priests, monks, commentators, and travellers,
Catholic and Protestant, ever since. In thus throwing the
responsibility of the myth upon the Arabs Dr. Geikie ap-
pears to show both the " perfervid genius " of his countrymen
and their incapacity to recognise a joke.
Nor is he more happy in his rationalistic explanations of
the whole mass of myths. He supposes a terrific storm, in
which the lightning kindled the combustible materials of the
cities, aided perhaps by an earthquake ; but this shows a disposition
to break away from the exact statements of the
sacred books which would have been most severely condemned
by the universal Church during at least eighteen
hundred years of its history. Nor would the explanations
of Sir William Dawson have fared any better: it is very
doubtful whether either of them could escape unscathed to-
day from a synod of the Free Church of Scotland, or of any
of the leading orthodox bodies in the Southern States of the
American Union.*
How unsatisfactory all such rationalism must be to a
truly theological hiind is seen not only in the dealings with
Prof. Robertson Smith in Scotland and Prof. Woodrow in
* For these most recent explanations, see Rev. Cunningham Geikie, D. D., in
work cited ; also Sir J. W. Dawson, Egypt and Syria, published by the Religious
Tract Society, 1887, pp. 125, 126 ; see also Dawson's article in The Expositor for
January, 1886.