Authors: Matthew Goodman
the sun and the moon
primary assumptions and to submit its boldest conceptions to certain formalities which retard and check it.” For three decades, going back to the turn of the century, America had been in the grip of the Second Great Awakening—a nationwide religious revival meant to root out the vestiges of deism (a heresy, it was widely felt, to which far too many of the Founding Fathers had fallen prey) and replace it with a stricter, more evangelical brand of Christianity. P. T. Barnum had seen the Second Great Awakening up close in Connecticut; he had grown to adulthood fearing it, had gone to jail for opposing it, and had eventually fled from it to New York City.
(As a twenty-two-year-old newspaper editor, Barnum had been jailed for incurring the wrath of a church leader; as a twenty-five-year-old newspaper editor, Locke had been fired for the same offense.) It was a time when almost all American colleges were organized and supported by churches, when the forces of rationalism and free thought were being expunged from campuses everywhere, when science courses instructed students in the precepts of “natural theology,” according to which science served as the handmaiden of theology, its highest purpose to illuminate God’s ultimate design. From university to laboratory to observatory, theology exerted its dominion over science and received its tribute, like a biblical king, in almost every scientific work that issued from every press.
Though Richard Adams Locke was an enthusiast of geology—he referred to it as “this grand and particularly attractive study”—he had always been especially interested in astronomy. He knew well the work of the religious astronomers; he had read the accounts of the sublime scenery to be found on the moon, the reports of lunar fortifications, the schemes to communicate with the lunarians by means of vast Siberian figures. As he explained in his letter, he was continually astonished, and horrified, at the credence given to this fairy-tale version of astronomy, this “
pseudo
philosophy” (as he called it) that dressed itself so extravagantly in the robes of piety and faith; furthermore, he was convinced that if its power remained unchecked, it would continue to exert its baneful influence on future generations of young minds.
And so he related to the
New World’
s readers how he had come to write the story of the late discoveries in the moon:
I, therefore, resolved to throw a pebble at this Colossus, not, certainly, with the hope of rivalling the feat of David, but merely to express my independent and utter contempt for the imaginative and canting school,
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by endeavoring to out-imagine it, and ape its solemn cant, under the mask of dignified and plausible science.
The religious astronomers professed their faith in the existence of life on the moon; he would give them life on the moon. They believed that life there was a paradise; he would give them a paradise, a world in which all of God’s creatures—man-bat and unicorn and biped beaver alike—lived together in harmony. They insisted that the creatures of the moon must be religious, if not avowedly Christian; he would give them lunarian temples of sapphire and gold. Moreover, he would garb his own discoveries in the very language used by the religious astronomers, full of pious platitudes and scientific-sounding nonsense—and in the process, he would expose the entire philosophy for the humbug that it was.
Great Astronomical Discoveries
had not been intended as a hoax at all; it had been intended as a satire.
In 1838 Thomas Dick published another popular work of religious astronomy, entitled
Celestial Scenery; or, the Wonders of the Planetary System Displayed, Illustrating the Perfections of Deity and a Plurality of
Worlds
. The section of the book called “Lunar Inhabitants” contained an extraordinary footnote—it took up nearly an entire page—in which Dick replied, for the first and only time, to Richard Adams Locke’s moon series.
“A short time ago,” he wrote, “a
hoax
was attempted to be played off on the public in relation to this subject. . . . The author of this deception, I understand, is a young man in the city of New York, who makes some pretensions to scientific acquirements, and he may perhaps be disposed to congratulate himself on the success of his experiment on the public.” He continued sternly: But it ought to be remembered that all such attempts to deceive are violations of the laws of the Creator, who is the “God of Truth,” and who requires “truth in the inward parts;” and, therefore, they who wilfully and deliberately contrive such impositions ought to be ranked in the class of liars and deceivers. The “Law of
Truth
” ought never for a moment to be sported with. On the universal observance of this law depend the happiness of the whole intelligent system and the foundations of the throne of the Eternal. The greatest part of the evils which have afflicted our world have arisen from a violation of this law, and were it to be
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universally
violated, the inhabitants of all worlds would be thrown into a state of confusion and misery, and creation transformed into a chaos.
The final sentence of the footnote was addressed directly to Richard Adams Locke: “It is to be hoped that the author of the deception to which I have adverted, as he advances in years and in wisdom, will perceive the folly and immorality of such conduct.”
Richard Adams Locke had read
Celestial Scenery
, including that disapproving footnote, and he resented the notion of Thomas Dick lecturing him on the fundamental nature of truth. “So far from feeling that I deserve the coarse reproaches of Dr. Dick,” he wrote in his letter to the
New
World
, “I think it quite laudable in any man to satirize, as I did, that school of crude speculation and cant of which he is so eminent a professor.” His own astronomical production had been merely a satire, not intended to be taken seriously. “But what has Dr. Dick to say in defence of his own hoaxes, which were chiefly instrumental in preparing the way for mine, and without which I cannot conceive that it could have obtained so instantaneous and extraordinary a circulation?”
In his letter Locke addressed only a single point from
Celestial Scenery,
which he believed would be sufficient to illustrate “the serious trespasses of Dr. Dick’s theological school of philosophy upon the paramount juris-diction of physical science.” Thomas Dick had long insisted—in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary—that there could be no volcanoes on the moon. Volcanoes, like earthquakes and hurricanes, were evidence of God’s displeasure, and God could be displeased only with sinners; because the lunarians existed in a state of innocence, their landscape would not be blemished with such agents of physical destruction. “Is not this pretty stuff to pass for philosophy,” asked Locke, “and to be presented to our youth as a rule of judgment in determining questions of fact?”
The real world of nature, he pointed out, contains an astonishing mul-tiplicity of functions, and it was the height of arrogance—not to mention pitiable scientific reasoning—to reserve to oneself the right to define certain of them, arbitrarily, as the products of “goodness” or “sin.”
The fang of the viper, the claws of the tiger, the tail of the spider, the sting of the wasp, and the beak and talons of the eagle, are as “very good,” for their respective purposes, as the milky foundations of the mammalia, or the curious chrysalis of the butterfly. All nature abounds
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with destructive agents; in fact the whole system of nature is one of production and destruction. The leaves of autumn fall to give birth to the buds of spring; the aged tree dies to give place to the sapling at its feet; and so the generations of all sentient beings pass away that others may succeed them. . . . As to man in his paradisiacal state (perhaps I should say estate)—that is Adam, for there was only one man, and only he for a little while, for whom volcanoes and such things were improper—it is only necessary to say that if he had fallen into the river Pison before he had learned to swim, it would have closed his account for him almost as quickly as Mount Vesuvius or Etna. And without intending the least dis-respect to our mother Eve, I can venture to affirm that if the serpent had crawled down her pretty throat when she was asleep with her mouth open under the tree of life, it would as certainly have been the death of her as if she had been swallowed up by an earthquake.
The bogus science perpetrated by Dick and his colleagues in their many best-selling books was “a trampling upon all the evidences of nature’s inherent laws to elevate a familiar figment of a creed.” To lampoon it, Locke had filled the lunar “seas” with real water, built on its surface shining temples and smoke-emitting cottages (even in the absence of a lunar atmosphere), and supplied many of the moon’s creatures with hairy veils to shield their eyes from the great extremes of light and dark— when, as he well knew, the side of the moon that faces the earth receives no great changes of light at all. “Could such an outrage upon science have deceived for a moment,” Locke asked the readers of the
New
World
, “had not the canting philosophy of the Dick school prepared the public to swallow any thing however absurd, that came to them recommended by this peculiar stamp?”
Locke had written
Great Astronomical Discoveries
as a satire—but the religious astronomy of the time precluded satire, so credulous was the general public about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, so well schooled were they in the theories of Thomas Dick and his colleagues. The great mass of the public (nine out of ten, estimated Poe; all but the most hardened skeptics, agreed Barnum) hailed the story as truth, and then, when its authorship was revealed, condemned it as a hoax. It was neither.
Richard Adams Locke understood the tremendous influence of the religious astronomers—it was what had inspired him to write the moon series in the first place—but he could hardly have anticipated just how deeply
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ingrained their ideas had become. His friend William Griggs later remarked, “So thoroughly was the popular mind, even among the best educated and most reading classes, imbued with these fanciful anticipations of vast lunar discoveries, that, at the time Mr. Locke’s ‘Moon Story’ was written, scarcely any thing could have been devised and announced upon the subject too extravagant for general credulity to receive.” In 1852 Griggs issued a new edition of the complete series in a book entitled
The Celebrated
“Moon Story,” Its Origins and Incidents.
In the introduction to the volume he revealed Locke’s “disappointment and chagrin” at the response of the public to
Great Astronomical Discoveries
. As the excitement over the series continued to grow, Locke confided to close friends his own sense of failure about it—how foolish he felt about the response it had gotten. “If the story be either received as a veritable account, or rejected as a hoax,”
he told them, “it is quite evident that it is an abortive satire.
“And in either case,” he added ruefully, “I am the best self-hoaxed man in the whole community.”
Five years before Locke’s letter to the
New World
, on December 5, 1835, the six-penny paper
Evening Star
reported on South Carolina governor George McDuffie’s recent message proclaiming that slavery “is consistent with the laws of God, and is expressly sanctioned by the Old and New Testaments.” The
Star’
s editor, Mordecai Manuel Noah, was among slavery’s most visible defenders in New York, and he agreed with McDuffie’s position. Anticipating that his readers would share his views, Noah suggested, “We should like to see this point discussed and explained.” Three days later, in the
Sun
, Richard Adams Locke offered his own discussion— facing what he acknowledged was “the certain condemnation of public opinion”—in an item headlined “Mr. Noah’s Request Complied with.”
The governor’s propositions were “glaringly atrocious,” Locke declared, for slavery was “a monstrously unjust and iniquitous system” that could never find absolution in the authority of scripture. “We hesitate not to say,” he wrote,
that even if the sacred scriptures of the Old and New Testaments really did sanction slavery in those ages in which they were written, and among those people to whom they were addressed, their authority on such a question would be no more binding in the present age, and upon the nations of the world, than the Old Testament sanction of polygamy,
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or the New Testament sanction of the “right divine” of kings. The Scriptures are considered, by all believers in their divine inspiration, to be of immutable authority upon matters of faith; but upon modes of government, and systems of social polity, if not, indeed, even upon religious rites and ceremonies, it is admitted by nearly every commentator, their authority was only temporary, and not designed to extend through all future periods of time.
What would have become of the Declaration of Independence, Locke wanted to know, if the colonists had obeyed St. Paul’s injunction to
“honor the king”? There was not much in that document of the “submission” demanded by the apostle in an earlier age. And how were the other tenets of scripture observed by believers today? The Christians rejected the Jewish doctrines and Jews the Christian ones. The Calvinists took issue with the Methodists even on the interpretation of the same texts, to say nothing of the interpretations variously preferred by the Quakers, the Dunkers, the Jumpers, the Universalists, the Swedenborgians, the Sublap-sarians, and the Supralapsarians, not to mention all the other religious sects that “have so divided the sacred volume among them, that nothing short of a theological resurrection could restore its identity in the world of faith.” However infallible the ancient text might be in itself, wrote Locke, fallibility was everywhere in the human
interpretation
of it. Thus the supposed biblical “authority” claimed by one faction should never be imposed on the conduct or conscience of another—least of all in an attempt to justify slavery. The Hebrew slaves had been emancipated from their bondage in Egypt, despite having been “as useful to the Pharoahs in building pyramids and cultivating fields, as the southern slaves are to their taskmasters and sovereigns.” Moreover, Locke noted pointedly, the Bible abounds with examples of bloodshed “given expressly upon divine command,” and which could be produced “to justify a negro insurrection against the slave proprietors of the South, and tell the slaves that unless they slew them all, with their wives and little ones, so that not one should be left alive, divine anger would rest upon them for their forbearance.”