f these men; persecution but intrenched
them more firmly in the hearts of all intelligent well-wishers of
Christianity. The triumphs won by their opponents in assemblies, synods,
conventions, and conferences were really victories for the nominally
defeated, since they revealed to the world the fact that in each of
these bodies the strong and fruitful thought of the Church, the thought
which alone can have any hold on the future, was with the new race of
thinkers; no theological triumphs more surely fatal to the victors have
been won since the Vatican defeated Copernicus and Galileo.

And here reference must be made to a series of events which, in the
second half of the nineteenth century, have contributed most powerful
aid to the new school of biblical research.

V. VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS.

While this struggle for the new truth was going on in various fields,
aid appeared from a quarter whence it was least expected.

The great discoveries by Botta and Layard in Assyria were supplemented
by the researches of Rawlinson, George Smith, Oppert, Sayce, Sarzec,
Pinches, and others, and thus it was revealed more clearly than ever
before that as far back as the time assigned in Genesis to the creation
a great civilization was flourishing in Mesopotamia; that long ages,
probably two thousand years, before the scriptural date assigned to the
migration of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, this Chaldean civilization
had bloomed forth in art, science, and literature; that the ancient
inscriptions recovered from the sites of this and kindred civilizations
presented the Hebrew sacred myths and legends in earlier forms--forms
long antedating those given in the Hebrew Scriptures; and that the
accounts of the Creation, the Tree of Life in Eden, the institution and
even the name of the Sabbath, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, and much
else in the Pentateuch, were simply an evolution out of earlier Chaldean
myths and legends. So perfect was the proof of this that the most
eminent scholars in the foremost seats of Christian learning were
obliged to acknowledge it.(494)

(494) As to the revelations of the vast antiquity of Chaldean
civilization, and especially regarding the Nabonidos inscription, see
Records of the Past, vol. i, new series, first article, and especially
pp. 5, 6, where a translation of that inscription is given; also Hommel,
Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, introduction, in whi