e twelfth century this view was incorporated by Peter Lombard into
his great theological work, the Sentences, which became a text-book of
theology through the middle ages. He affirmed that "no created things
would have been hurtful to man had he not sinned; they became hurtful
for the sake of terrifying and punishing vice or of proving and
perfecting virtue; they were created harmless, and on account of sin
became hurtful."

This theological theory regarding animals was brought out in the
eighteenth century with great force by John Wesley. He declared that
before Adam's sin "none of these attempted to devour or in any wise hurt
one another"; "the spider was as harmless as the fly, and did not lie
in wait for blood." Not only Wesley, but the eminent Dr. Adam Clarke and
Dr. Richard Watson, whose ideas had the very greatest weight among the
English Dissenters, and even among leading thinkers in the Established
Church, held firmly to this theory; so that not until, in our own
time, geology revealed the remains of vast multitudes of carnivorous
creatures, many of them with half-digested remains of other animals in
their stomachs, all extinct long ages before the appearance of man upon
earth, was a victory won by science over theology in this field.

A curious development of this doctrine was seen in the belief drawn
by sundry old commentators from the condemnation of the serpent in
Genesis--a belief, indeed, perfectly natural, since it was evidently
that of the original writers of the account preserved in the first of
our sacred books. This belief was that, until the tempting serpent was
cursed by the Almighty, all serpents stood erect, walked, and talked.

This belief was handed down the ages as part of "the sacred deposit of
the faith" until Watson, the most prolific writer of the evangelical
reform in the eighteenth century and the standard theologian of the
evangelical party, declared: "We have no reason at all to believe
that the animal had a serpentine form in any mode or degree until its
transformation; that he was then degraded to a reptile to go upon his
belly imports, on the contrary, an entire loss and alteration of the
original form." Here, again, was a ripe result of the theologic method
diligently pursued by the strongest thinkers in the Church during nearly
two thousand years; but this "sacred deposit" also faded away when the
geologists found abundant remains of fossil serpents dating from periods
long befo