Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/603

Rh eminent commentators took a similar view, and insisted that the sin of Lot's wife was venial, and therefore, at the worst, could only subject her to the fires of purgatory.

The eleventh chapter discusses at length the question liow she was converted into salt, and, mentioning many theological opinions, dwells especially upon the view of Rivetus—that a thunderholt, made up apparently of fire, sulphur, and salt, wrought her transformation at the same time that it blasted the land; and he bases this opinion upon the twenty-ninth chapter of Deuteronomy and the one hundred and seventh Psalm.

Later, there is presented a sacred scientific theory that "saline particles entered into her until her whole body was infected"; and with this Masius connects another piece of sanctified science, to the effect that "stagnant bile" may have rendered the surface of her body "entirely shining, bitter, dry, and deformed."

Finally, in the fourth division of the second section, he comes to the great question whether the salt pillar is still in existence. On this he is full and fair. On one hand he allows that Luther thought that it was involved in the general destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he cites various travelers who had failed to find it; but, on the other hand, he gives a long chain of evidence to show that it continued to exist: very wisely he reminds the reader that the positive testimony of those who have seen it must outweigh the negative testimony of those who have not, and finally decides that the salt statue is still in being.

No doubt a work like this produced a considerable effect in Protestant countries; indeed, this effect seems evident as far off as England, for, in 1720, we find in Dean Prideaux's "Old and New Testament connected" a map on which the statue of salt is carefully indicated. So, too, in Holland, in the "Sacred Geography," published at Utrecht in 1758, by the theologian Bachiène, we find him, while showing many signs of rationalism, evidently inclined to the old views as to the existence of the salt pillar; but just here comes a curious evidence of the real direction of the current of thought through the century, for, nine years later, in the German translation of Bachiène's work we find copious notes by the translator in a far more rationalistic spirit; indeed, we see the dawn of the inevitable day of compromise, for we now have, instead of the old argument that the divine power by one miraculous act changed Lot's wife into a salt pillar, the suggestion that she was caught in a shower of sulphur and saltpeter, covered by it, and that the result was a lump, which, in a general way, is called in our sacred books "a pillar of salt."