Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/616

598 Of the great mass of pious legends they are shy enough, but that of Lot's wife, as a rule, they seem never to have heard of, and, if they do allude to it, they simply cover the whole subject with a haze of conventionality and sacred rhetoric.

Naturally, under this state of things, there has followed the usual attempt to throw off from Christendom the responsibility of the old belief, and in 1887 came a curious 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 portions of salt, withstanding the water, while all around them melts and wears off, rise up isolated pillars, one of which bears among the Arabs the name of Lot's wife."

In the light of the previous history, there is something at 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; it appears, as we have seen, first among the Jews, and, I need hardly 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 innumerable bishops, priests, monks, commentators, and travelers, Catholic and Protestant, ever since. In thus throwing the responsibility of the myth upon the Arabs Dr. Geikie appears to show both the "perf ervid genius" of his countrymen and their incapacity to recognize 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.