Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/613

Rh 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 Königsberg, 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 another is that accumulations of petroleum and inflammable gas escaped through a fissure, took fire, and so produced the catastrophe.

Against this sort of rationalism perhaps the most vigorous of recent protests appeared in 1876, in an edition of Monseigneur Mislin's work on "The Holy Places." In order to give weight to the book, he spread his qualities at great length on the title-page. Among other things, he was prelate of the papal household, apostolic prothonotary, a doctor of theology and of philosophy, and his work is prefaced by letters from Pope Pius IX and sundry high ecclesiastics—and from Alexandre Dumas. His hatred of Protestant missionaries in the East is phenomenal; he calls them "bagmen," ascribing all mischief and infamy to them; and his hatred is only exceeded by his credulity. He cites all the arguments in favor of the salt statue at Usdum as the identical one into which Lot's wife was changed, adds some of his own, and presents her as "a type of doubt and heresy." With the proverbial facility of theologians in translating any word of a dead language into anything that suits their purpose, he says that the word in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis, which is translated "statue" or "pillar," may be translated "eternal monument"; he is especially