Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM.
312
The book of Genesis was universally held to be an ac-
count, not only divinely comprehensive but miraculously
exact, of the creation and of the beginnings of life on the
earth ; an account to which all discoveries in every branch
of science must, under pains and penalties, be made to conform.
In English-speaking lands this has lasted until our
own time : the most eminent of recent English biologists
has told us how in every path of natural science he has, at
some stage in his career, come across a barrier labelled " No
thoroughfare. Moses."
A favourite subject of theological eloquence was the per-
fection of the Pentateuch, and especially of Genesis, not only
as a record of the past, but as a revelation of the future.
The culmination of this view in the Protestant Church
was the Pansophia Mosaica of Pfeiffer, a Lutheran general
superintendent, or bishop, in northern Germany, near the be-
ginning of the seventeenth century. He declared that the
text of Genesis " "
must be received ; strictly that " it contains
all knowledge, human and divine"; that "twenty-eight
"
articles of the Augsburg Confession are to be found in it ;
that " it is an arsenal of arguments against all sects and sorts
of atheists, pagans, Jews, Turks, Tartars, papists, Calvinists,
"
the source of all sciences and
Socinians, and Baptists " ;
arts, including law, medicine, philosophy, and rhetoric " ;
" the source and essence of all histories and of all professions,
trades, and works"; "an exhibition of all virtues and vices";
" the origin of all consolation."
This utterance resounded through Germany from pulpit
to pulpit, growing in strength and volume, until a century
later it was echoed back by Huet, the eminent bishop and
commentator of France. He cited a hundred authors, sacred
and profane, to prove that Moses wrote the Pentateuch ;
and
not only this, but that from the Jewish lawgiver came the
heathen theology that Moses was, in fact, nearly the whole
pagan pantheon rolled into one, and really the being worshipped
under such names as Bacchus, Adonis, and Apollo.*
* For the passage from Huxley regardinp; Mosaic barriers to modem thought,
see his Essays, recently published. For PfeiflFer, see Zoeckler, Theologie und Na-
turwissenschaft, vol. i, pp. 688, 689. For St. Jerome's indifference as to the Mosaic