The triumphs won by
their opponents in assemblies, synods, conventions, and conferences
were really victories for the nominally defeated, since they
revealed to the world the fact that in each of these bodies the
strong and fruitful thought of the Church, the thought which alone
can have any hold on the future, was with the new race of thinkers;
no theological triumphs more surely fatal to the victors have been
won since the Vatican defeated Copernicus and Galileo.
And here reference must be made to a series of events which, in the
second half of the nineteenth century, have contributed most
powerful aid to the new school of biblical research.
V. YICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS.
While this struggle for the new truth was going on in various
fields, aid appeared from a quarter whence it was least expected.
The great discoveries by Botta and Layard in Assyria were
supplemented by the researches of Rawlinson, George Smith, Oppert,
Sayce, Sarzec, Pinches, and others, and thus it was revealed more
clearly than ever before that as far back as the time assigned in
Genesis to the creation a great civilization was flourishing in
Mesopotamia; that long ages, probably two thousand years, before
the scriptural date assigned to the migration of Abraham from Ur of
the Chaldees, this Chaldean civilization had bloomed forth in art,
science, and literature; that the ancient inscriptions recovered
from the sites of this and kindred civilizations presented the
Hebrew sacred myths and legends in earlier forms--forms long
antedating those given in the Hebrew Scriptures; and that the
accounts of the Creation, the Tree of Life in Eden, the institution
and even the name of the Sabbath, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel,
and much else in the Pentateuch, were simply an evolution out of
earlier Chaldean myths and legends.
Pages:
1343
1344
1345
1346
1347
1348
1349
1350
1351
1352
1353
1354
1355
1356
1357
1358
1359
1360
1361
1362
1363
1364
1365
1366
1367