Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/100

90 This sort of exegetical jugglery, with its allegorical, anagogical, and tropological methods of exposition, is not confined to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, but extends to the sacred books of all nations. Veda, Avesta, Tripitaka, Taò-tĕ-King, Koziki, Kur'an, Adi Granth, Kurral, and Popol Vuh have all been put to the rack by hermeneutical inquisitors and made to confess whatever doctrines their tormentors wished them to teach. We have a striking illustration of this tendency in recent attempts to deprive the Hebrew cosmogony of its true character as the terse and highly poetical version of an ancient Assyrian creation myth, in order to bring it into harmony with the modern theory of evolution.

The same fatality compels the Church in the nineteenth century to observe the forms of propitiation, incantation, and conjuration which were the natural outgrowth and consistent expression of primitive demonolatry, but are utterly repugnant to all rational conceptions of the constitution of the universe and of the laws that govern it. Some years ago the writer was the guest of a Catholic priest in a remote region of the Tyrol. The house was a massive building of the tenth century, formerly used as a cloister, and still adorned with portraits of the old abbots and distinguished monks who were once its inmates. Attached to it was a spacious chapel which now served as the parish church. One day as a severe storm was gathering the church bells began to ring violently in order to affright and drive away the devils who were supposed to be riding on the tempest as satellites of the "prince of the power of the air," and hurling thunderbolts against the habitations of men. The priest admitted that the custom was a relic of pagan superstition and of no efficacy whatever, denied the demonic origin of meteorological phenomena, and added that the ringing of many large bells, like the firing of cannon, would rather tend to produce storms by agitating the air than to disperse them. "But if I should act according to my own judgment and neglect this time-honored practice," he continued, "I should be held morally responsible for all damage done by lightning within the precincts of my parish." He placed his own person and property under the protection of a lightning-rod, but was constrained by his ecclesiastical affiliations to pander to mediæeval tradition, and cause the mountain valley to resound with the devil-defeating clangor of consecrated bells.

In November, 1894, it was reported that a statue of the Virgin Mary at Reggio, in Calabria, had been seen opening her mouth and moving her lips, and this absurd rumor attracted thousands of persons, who came to present offerings and to prostrate themselves before the wonderful image, praying to be delivered from the perils of earthquake and similar calamities. It is not