new edition of Horne's
Introduction to the Scriptures, the standard textbook of orthodoxy, its
accustomed use of fossils to prove the universality of the Deluge was
quietly dropped.(167)

(167) This was about 1856; see Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 329.

A like capitulation in the United States was foreshadowed in 1841, when
an eminent Professor of Biblical Literature and interpretation in the
most important theological seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church,
Dr. Samuel Turner, showed his Christian faith and courage by virtually
accepting the new view; and the old contention was utterly cast away
by the thinking men of another great religious body when, at a later
period, two divines among the most eminent for piety and learning in
the Methodist Episcopal Church inserted in the Biblical Cyclopaedia,
published under their supervision, a candid summary of the proofs
from geology, astronomy, and zoology that the Deluge of Noah was not
universal, or even widely extended, and this without protest from any
man of note in any branch of the American Church.(168)

(168) For Dr. Turner, see his Companion to the Book of Genesis, London
and New York, 1841, pp. 216-219. For McClintock and Strong, see their
Cyclopaedia of Biblical Knowledge, etc., article Deluge. For similar
surrenders of the Deluge in various other religious encyclopedias and
commentaries, see Huxley, Essays on controverted questions, chap. xiii.

The time when the struggle was relinquished by enlightened theologians
of the Roman Catholic Church may be fixed at about 1862, when Reusch,
Professor of Theology at Bonn, in his work on The Bible and Nature,
cast off the old diluvial theory and all its supporters, accepting the
conclusions of science.(169)

(169) See Reusch, Bibel und Natur, chap. xxi.

But, though the sacred theory with the Deluge of Noah as a universal
solvent for geological difficulties was evidently dying, there still
remained in various quarters a touching fidelity to it. In Roman
Catholic countries the old theory was widely though quietly cherished,
and taught from the religious press, the pulpit, and the theological
professor's chair. Pope Pius IX was doubtless in sympathy with this
feeling when, about 1850, he forbade the scientific congress of Italy to
meet at Bologna.(170)

(170) See Whiteside, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, vol. iii, chap.
xiv.

In 1856 Father Debreyne congratulated the