of Beauvais insisted that, as the Bible declares that Noah, when
five hundred years old, had children born to him, he must have possessed
alchemical means of preserving life; and much later Dickinson insisted
that the patriarchs generally must have owed their long lives to such
means. It was loudly declared that the reality of the philosopher's
stone was proved by the words of St. John in the Revelation. "To him
that overcometh I will give a white stone." The reasonableness of
seeking to develop gold out of the baser metals was for many generations
based upon the doctrine of the resurrection of the physical body, which,
though explicitly denied by St. Paul, had become a part of the creed
of the Church. Martin Luther was especially drawn to believe in the
alchemistic doctrine of transmutation by this analogy. The Bible was
everywhere used, both among Protestants and Catholics, in support of
these mystic adulterations of science, and one writer, as late as 1751,
based his alchemistic arguments on more than a hundred passages of
Scripture. As an example of this sort of reasoning, we have a proof that
the elect will preserve the philosopher's stone until the last judgment,
drawn from a passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, "We have
this treasure in earthen vessels."

The greatest thinkers devoted themselves to adding new ingredients to
this strange mixture of scientific and theologic thought. The Catholic
philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the Protestant mysticism of Jacob Boehme,
and the alchemistic reveries of Basil Valentine were all cast into this
seething mass.

And when alchemy in its old form had been discredited, we find
scriptural arguments no less perverse, and even comical, used on the
other side. As an example of this, just before the great discoveries by
Stahl, we find the valuable scientific efforts of Becher opposed with
the following syllogism: "King Solomon, according to the Scriptures,
possessed the united wisdom of heaven and earth; but King Solomon knew
nothing about alchemy (or chemistry in the form it then took), and sent
his vessels to Ophir to seek gold, and levied taxes upon his subjects;
ergo alchemy (or chemistry) has no reality or truth." And we find that
Becher is absolutely turned away from his labours, and obliged to devote
himself to proving that Solomon used more money than he possibly could
have obtained from Ophir or his subjects, and therefore that he must
have possessed a knowled