Long before the end of the struggle already described, even at a very early period, the futility of the usual scholastic weapons had been seen by the more keen-sighted champions of orthodoxy; and, as the difficulties of the ordinary attack upon science became more and more evident, many of these champions endeavoured to patch up a truce. So began the third stage in the war—the period of attempts at compromise.
The position which the compromise party took was that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah.
This position was strong, for it was apparently based upon Scripture. Moreover, it had high ecclesiastical sanction, some of the fathers having held that fossil remains, even on the highest mountains, represented animals destroyed at the Deluge. Tertullian was especially firm on this point, and St. Augustine thought that a fossil tooth discovered in North Africa must have belonged to one of the giants mentioned in Scripture.(152)
(152) For Tertullian, see his De Pallio, c. ii (Migne, Patr. Lat.,
vol. ii, p. 1033). For Augustine's view, see Cuvier, Recherches sur les
Ossements fossiles, fourth edition, vol. ii, p. 143.
In the sixteenth century especially, weight began to be attached to this idea by those who felt the worthlessness of various scholastic explanations. Strong men in both the Catholic and the Protestant camps accepted it; but the man who did most to give it an impulse into modern theology was Martin Luther. He easily saw that scholastic phrase-making could not meet the difficulties raised by fossils, and he naturally urged the doctrine of their origin at Noah's Flood.(153)
(153) For Luther's opinion, see his Commentary on Genesis.
With such support, it soon became the dominant theory in Christendom: nothing seemed able to stand against it; but before the end of the same sixteenth century it met some serious obstacles. Bernard Palissy, one of the most keen-sighted of scientific thinkers in France, as well as one of the most devoted of Christians, showed that it was utterly untenable. Conscientious investigators in other parts of Europe, and especially in Italy, showed the same thing; all in vain.(154) In vain did good men protest against the injury sure to be brought upon religion by tying it to a scientific theory sure to be exploded; the doctrine that fossils are the remains of animals drowned at the Flood continued to be upheld by the great majority of theological leaders for nearly three centuries as "sound doctrine," and as a blessed means of reconciling science with Scripture. To sustain this scriptural view, efforts energetic and persistent were put forth both by Catholics and Protestants.
(154) For a very full statement of the honourable record of Italy in
this respect, and for the enlightened views of some Italian churchmen,
see Stoppani, Il Dogma a le Scienze Positive, Milan, 1886, pp. 203 et
seq.
In France, the learned Benedictine, Calmet, in his great works on the Bible, accepted it as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, believing the mastodon's bones exhibited by Mazurier to be those of King Teutobocus, and holding them valuable testimony to the existence of the giants mentioned in Scripture and of the early inhabitants of the earth overwhelmed by the Flood.(155)
(155) For the steady adherence to this sacred theory, see Audiat, Vie de
Palissy, p. 412, and Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xv, p. 492. For
Calmet, see his Dissertation sur les Geants, cited in Berger de Xivery,
Traditions Teratologiques, p. 191.