ousands of country pulpits and Sunday-schools it
was shown as a tribute of science to Scripture.

Nor was this influence confined to American Sunday-school children:
Lynch had innocently set a trap into which several European theologians
stumbled. One of these was Dr. Lorenz Gratz, Vicar-General of Augsburg,
a theological professor. In the second edition of his Theatre of the
Holy Scriptures, published in 1858, he hails Lynch's discovery of the
salt pillar with joy, forgets his allusion to the old theory regarding
it as a superstition, and does not stop to learn that this was one of a
succession of statues washed out yearly by the rains, but accepts it as
the originaL Lot's wife.

The French churchmen suffered most. About two years after Lynch, De
Saulcy visited the Dead Sea to explore it thoroughly, evidently in the
interest of sacred science--and of his own promotion. Of the modest
thoroughness of Robinson there is no trace in his writings. He promptly
discovered the overwhelmed cities, which no one before or since has ever
found, poured contempt on other investigators, and threw over his whole
work an air of piety. But, unfortunately, having a Frenchman's dread of
ridicule, he attempted to give a rationalistic explanation of what he
calls "the enormous needles of salt washed out by the winter rain," and
their connection with the Lot's wife myth, and declared his firm belief
that she, "being delayed by curiosity or terror, was crushed by a rock
which rolled down from the mountain, and when Lot and his children
turned about they saw at the place where she had been only the rock of
salt which covered her body."

But this would not do at all, and an eminent ecclesiastic privately and
publicly expostulated with De Saulcy--very naturally declaring that "it
was not Lot who wrote the book of Genesis."

The result was that another edition of De Saulcy's work was published by
a Church Book Society, with the offending passage omitted; but a passage
was retained really far more suggestive of heterodoxy, and this was an
Arab legend accounting for the origin of certain rocks near the Dead Sea
curiously resembling salt formations. This in effect ran as follows:

"Abraham, the friend of God, having come here one day with his mule to
buy salt, the salt-workers impudently told him that they had no salt to
sell, whereupon the patriarch said: 'Your words are, true, you have
no salt to sell,' and instantly the salt of this whole regi