World History, Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Two
The Nineteenth Century
1800-1850

For the time period of 1800 to 1850 we are going to first look at the Napoleonic Wars which started the century. Napoleon had raised a new army and faced Austrian military victories against him in Italy, crossing the Alps and taking several Italian cities and after the bloody battles of Montebello and Marengo felt assured of victory by June. He fought the Austrians in Germany then and they sued for peace which was granted in February of 1801 at the Treaty of Luneville, at which time Spain ceded Louisiana to France, which in turn sold the Louisiana territory to the United States. However, things went bad for Napoleon when he invaded Egypt as a joint Anglo-Turkish army defeated him there.

The war at sea began with Russia, Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden joining forces to protect their shipping from an increasingly aggressive Great Britain. Britain replied by sending a squadron of over 50 war ships to the Baltic Sea under Admiral Sir Hyde Parker with the soon to be famous Horatio Nelson as second in command. At the Battle of Copenhagen, Nelson, disobeying Parker’s orders, attacked and defeated the Danish Navy and Czar Alexander I of Russia signed a convention ceasing all hostilities.

Finally, there was peace between England and France with the 1802 Treaty of Amiens which was ended in 1803 when Britain imposed a naval blockade of Europe while Napoleon planned to invade England. British sea power stood in his way and made the invasion impossible. In fact, the British navy was considered to be the only thing standing in between Napoleon and domination of the world. Napoleon was crowned emperor in 1804 and in 1805 Britain joined forces with Austria, Russia, and Sweden against him. Napoleon took the initiative, abandoning plans to invade England and his Grand Army marched eastward, defeating his Austrian enemies again. He marched on Vienna, Austria’s capital, and defeating a Russian force, and occupied it by the end of 1805.

Napoleon marched north and met the Allied forces again at the Battle of Austerlitz in December of 1805, defeating them conclusively in what is considered one of the most brilliant military battles of history. The war at sea did not go as well for Napoleon with the great defeat at the sea Battle of Trafalgar at the hands of Admiral Nelson in which Nelson was mortally wounded aboard his flagship Victory as it closed in violent combat with the French ship Redoutable in October before Austerlitz.

On land, Napoleon controlled Central and Western Germany and in 1806 ended the Holy Roman Empire’s existence after a thousand years of rule. Francis II, emperor, became Francis I, Emperor of Austria. Napoleon defeated the Prussians at the Battles of Jena and Auerstadt. Napoleon’s victories were masterpieces of generalship and had a tremendous psychological effect on his enemies. By November 30 of 1806 the conqueror marched into Poland having invaded Austria, Germany, and Prussia. Napoleon had several great generals rise to prominence under his command; among these being Ney and Murat. The result of the Polish campaign was a truce with Russia and Napoleon becoming the virtual ruler of all Western and Central Europe by 1807.

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Now, England (Great Britain) alone faced him. According to Alan Schom, in his book Napoleon Bonaparte, the conqueror’s followers stated that he was beyond normal human history now, that he was a giant that belonged more appropriately to more heroic times. Ominously, at this time, the famous prime minister, Talleyrand, who had seemed to serve Napoleon so well, as he had served the king before him, resigned over the thin Franco-Russian Alliance. It is believed now that Talleyrand was a traitor to the emperor, assisting hostile powers with information.

Among the rules for war stated by Napoleon in David Chandler’s The Military Maxims of Napoleon, he says never to do what the enemy wants you to do, and that is something Napoleon tried to live by. With his ally, Spain’s, permission, he invaded Portugal in 1807 because it was the only access for British trade into Europe. In 1808 he marched into his ally’s country and had his brother, Joseph, crowned King of Spain. The Spaniards rebelled and the British invaded but this ended badly for the British the following year. With Spain and Portugal, the Iberian Peninsula, seemingly under control Napoleon returned to Paris and faced a renewed war with Austria in 1809 which Austria lost miserably.

Franco-Russian relations had become frayed as Poland, formerly under Russian domination, was reviving as a power under Napoleon. Napoleon refused to help Czar Alexander fight the Turks. England appealed to Russia. Then, Russia renounced Napoleon’s “Continental System”, the attempt to keep Britain isolated. In 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia and, like Hitler after him, was finally destroyed, not by human effort but by the frozen winter. With his army all but wiped out in the long retreat from Russia he was reduced to desperately defending France. His empire crumbled. Napoleon blamed his efforts in Spain for tying down so much of his resources that he could not be successful but history shows that it was his poorly thought out idea of invading Russia that finished him. A renewed British invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1809 under the great British General Wellesley had proven disastrous, however, for France and England’s superior sea power was also a factor.

Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba in 1814 but in 1815 returned for the reign of “The Hundred Days” in 1815, finally being defeated by the British Duke Wellington and Prussian General Blucher at the Battle of Waterloo. He was then exiled to the island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821.

The major powers of Europe met at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to redraw the map of Europe and restore hereditary monarchies that Napoleon had overthrown. Among the decision makers at the congress was Metternich, an important Austrian statesman. Czar Alexander proposed the Holy Alliance which wanted to uphold the type of church and state union that had dominated politics in Europe for so long. The problem was the growing menace, to them, of liberty and freedom in the young United States of America. President Monroe, in the United States, formulated the Monroe Doctrine which demanded that the European powers stay out of the western hemisphere.

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Although the Holy Alliance is supposed to have died with the death of Czar Alexander in 1825, it was claimed that various popes and the heads of Catholic European countries actually worked behind the scenes to harm the American Republic. America’s evolving concept and Constitutional guarantee of Freedom of Religion was seen as a threat to sovereign’s everywhere who did not believe in Freedom of Conscience and did believe the head of state had much to say about the religious practices of his subjects. The divine right of kings, as a concept, died hard.

During the wars with Napoleon, the powers of Europe often paid tribute or payoff money to the 4 Barbary States of North Africa; Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, and the Kingdom of Morocco. The first three were independent satellites of the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. These states engaged in piracy of European and American shipping in the Mediterranean.
President Thomas Jefferson took punitive action against them in what is called the Tripolitan-American War between 1801-1805 after the Pasha of Tripoli declared war when his demands for more payoff money weren’t realized. For 2 years a small naval force from America blockaded Tripoli ineffectually. Then, in 1803, with the arrival of Commodore Edward Preble the US Navy began hunting down pirate ships. When the USS Philadelphia was captured, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur led a party of men to burn and destroy the captured ship. The US finally made peace with Tripoli and Tunis. In 1815 a war began with Algiers with now Commodore Stephen Decatur achieving peace.

The great power of the British on the high seas that seemed to thwart the French at every turn did not impress the fledgling American Navy of 14 seaworthy vessels and in 1812 the US fought several successful sea engagements with the mighty British Navy including “Old Ironsides” or the USS Constitution captained by Isaac Hull when he beat the HMS Geurriere and then William Bainbridge when he forced the HMS Java to surrender. The USS Wasp beat the HMS Frolic and Stephen Decatur’s USS United States trounced the HMS Macedonian. The British had a 100 vessels engaged in a blockade of the American coastline however, and this former friend of France was being pulled into the war in Europe and a second conflict with the mighty British Empire. The War of 1812 had begun in which Britain was unsuccessful in its attempt to quash the young United States, with the final engagement at the Battle of New Orleans actually taking place after peace had been signed.

Back in France, the restored monarchy was toppled with revolution in Paris in 1830. A new constitutional monarchy was formed. During this time, and until 1848, France invaded and conquered North Africa. The famed French Foreign Legion was formed. Another insurrection in France occurred in 1848. Spain, too, was undergoing upheaval and the first half of the century saw it lose all its territory but Cuba and Puerto Rico in the New World after the Wars of Independence that occurred between 1800 and 1825 led by men like Simon Bolivar, a European trained Venezuelan.

Belgium gained its independence from the Netherlands, during this period, in 1839. The Austrian Empire, a coalition of German, Slav, Magyar, Bohemian, and Latin groups

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took the place of the Holy Roman Empire dominated by foreign minister Metternich. In Germany, with much discord, states began to form around Prussia as the nucleus.

The Austrians now ruled Italy and there were several revolts leading up to a failed Italian War of Independence in 1848-1849. One of the principal revolutionaries who led a red-shirted “Legion” and remains a hero in Italian history was Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Russia fought a war with the declining but still powerful Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1828. Poland, punished for its cooperation with Napoleon at the Congress of Vienna fought its Austrian overlords furiously up until 1846. Serbia rebelled against Turkish rule after that congress. Greece fought a War of Independence from 1821 to 1832 resisting Turkish rule. It was successful mostly because of a joint Anglo-French Naval attack on Egyptian and Turkish forces at the sea gun battle of Navarino in 1827. Serbia became autonomous in 1829. Turkey and Egypt, allies against Greece, then went to war against each other with Mohammed Ali, Ottoman governor of Egypt, becoming a king in his own right and securing Egypt’s independence from Greece. Before his revolt he massacred the remainder of the powerful Mamelukes. Persia suffered through wars with Turkey and Afghanistan during this period up until 1850.

In Africa, the French conquered Algeria in 1830. Back in 1806, the great Ashanti king Osei Bonsu conquered the west coast of Africa in the area called the Gold Coast. The economic situation changed greatly in 1811 when Britain abolished the slave trade, with Holland and France following along with most European countries. The British went to war with the Ashanti in 1824 and after several setbacks, defeated them. Liberia, formed as an American colony for freed slaves in 1822, achieved its independence in 1847. In South Africa Britain took the Dutch Boer Colony after the Treaty of Paris officially ended the Napoleonic wars in 1814. Boer and British interests collided and a growing friction developed in the early part of the century because, with the abolition of slavery, the Boers felt that they had not adequately been compensated for the loss of their slaves.

The Zulu began to move southward into South Africa and became a powerful warrior army under Shaka beginning in 1816 and the Zulu Empire was created between 1819 and 1828. Boers, chafing under British control made what was called the Great Trek of the Boers between 1835 and 1837 when 12,000 of them moved north to create states independent of Britain. British, Boer, Bantu, and Zulu fought back and forth during the period.

India came under control of England and the Second Sikh War ended in 1849 with the British annexing their territory, as well. (The Sikhs are a community of people living within a religion founded 500 years ago by a teacher named Nanak or Guru Nanak who died in 1539. Guru is an Hindi (Indian) word meaning teacher like Rabbi in Hebrew. Sikh’s live predominantly in Northwestern India.). Southeast Asia came increasingly under British control during this period with Singapore being founded by Sir Stamford


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Raffles in 1819. In China, in order to force it to continue to allow the sale of opium to the Chinese people, the First Opium War was fought between 1839 and 1842. The opium trade which enslaved millions of Chinese people to the slavery of drug addiction made fortunes in both Britain and America. Some of our most famous political and industrial families in this country and Europe made their original wealth in the opium trade of the early 1800’s. While the horror of the slave trade was being abolished in the west, the horror of enslaving an entire nation of millions of human beings to opium was raging full blown in the east. Hong Kong became a British Colony in 1843.

In the society of Europe the increase in technological advances, industry, and the consolidation of power around the world in the hands of a few major powers all helped to create a rehashing of old philosophies and unrest among the exploited mass of people who worked in unsafe conditions and lived in squalor. The rise of the popular press and newspapers made communicating the unrest easier. Governments that had been used to absolute authority over their subjects, like France, experienced growing unrest which culminated in the Revolution of 1848. Philosophers like Hegel created an intellectual climate whereby revolutionary philosophers such as Karl Marx came into prominence. Dissatisfaction with the state church of England; the Anglican Church, and its stranglehold over advancement in the society helped create a demand for Charles Darwin’s theories and their propagation by his own version of Paul, Thomas Huxley.

Born into a German Jewish family that converted to Christianity, Karl Marx issued his prophetic The Communist Manifesto in 1848. One of the three men who helped create the modern anti-Biblical view of the world (the others were Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud), he called for the abolition of marriage and private property, free public education, and a central bank. As much maligned as Karl Marx has been and as much of a failure nations that claimed to follow his philosophy are, the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth at this time, has adopted or is moving toward virtually all of his demands. The Communist Manifesto is free in numerous places online to read and is a real eye opener to what has been happening in the world over the last 150 years.

The foundation of the philosophies that came out of the minds of the intelligentsia (intellectual elite, from the Russian intelligentsiya) were the great Christ rejecting philosophers of this period. Some worthy of note have been the already mentioned Hegel who developed what is called Hegel’s dialectic followed by everyone from Marx to Martin Luther King, Jr.. Hegel was influenced by the works of previous philosophers such as Spinoza, Kant, Rousseau, and Goethe. He was also fascinated by the upheaval produced by the French Revolution. He himself influenced Marx and Engels, the most outspoken Communist philosophers, as well as Kierkegaard and Feuerbach. Hegel’s dialectic states, in my understanding, that history moves forward when a thesis or proposition, encounters an anti-thesis, or counter-proposition, and what the result of the conflict produces is called a synthesis, which contains elements of both. The assumption for all of these philosophers is that man is getting better all on his own and that God either does not exist or is irrelevant except as a source of conflict. The study of the word

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“dialectic” is important to the study of worldly philosophy. Hindu, Socratic, and Buddhist dialectic all can be characterized by an upward evolution rather than the Biblical “devolution” which states clearly that mankind is only getting worse and his and her only hope is individually the indwelling of the Lord Jesus Christ and collectively His physical return to rule the earth. The characteristic of all atheistic and Satanic religious belief is that mankind is on an upward journey by virtue of his own ability to reason and to attain a certain spiritual level and a golden age of justice and peace.

The issue of slavery came to the forefront in Europe’s drive to end the outrage. In America the issue also became one that threatened to tear the new republic apart. From the beginning of the formation of the USA there were elements who were not wholeheartedly in agreement with the union, the constitution, or the power of the federal government, preferring to retain most of the political power in the state governments. First, with regard to trade tariffs, the desire to uphold a “right of nullification” whereby an individual state could nullify a federal law within its own borders that it felt threatened its own sovereignty, then slavery became an issue when the great abolitionist movement began to take root in America following its success in England. Slavery became known in the southern United States as that “peculiar institution” and many clung to the right to own slaves as a foundation of their freedom and for a period of at least 40 years before the American Civil War expressed their willingness to abandon the union of the United States for it.

There was, however, a particularly Christian groundswell against slavery which became much more a profitable practice after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin which removed the seeds from cotton. Until its invention around 1793, removing those seeds was very labor intensive. After its invention the slavery system in the United States was much more sustainable and the slave’s use in the harvesting of cotton was much more efficient. Many preachers preached sermons against the institution of slavery. Among these were John Wesley’s 1774 sermon entitled Thoughts upon Slavery (free online) which credits its rebirth after a long period of relative unimportance in most of the world to the discovery of America.

Connecticut, USA born Congregationalist Charles G. Finney, was another important Christian of the early 1800’s. Born in 1792 he went on to become an evangelist who often remarked on slavery although his most important work was to get men saved. He said in his memoirs, "I had made up my mind on the question of slavery, and was exceedingly anxious to arouse public attention to the subject. In my prayers and preaching, I so often alluded to slavery, and denounced it, that a considerable excitement came to exist among the people."

Presbyterian Lyman Beecher was also an early 19th century outspoken opponent of slavery. There were many others. I want to mention here, not in regard to slavery, the English Baptist, William Carey, the forerunner of the modern missionary movement, who went to India in 1793. His motto of “Expect great things from God, Attempt Great Things

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for God” marked his efforts. In the words of one biographer, F. Dealville Walker, "He, with a few contemporaries, was almost singlehanded in conquering the prevailing indifference and hostility to missionary effort; Carey developed a plan for missions, and printed his amazing Enquiry; he influenced timid and hesitating men to take steps to the evangelizing of the world." Another wrote of him, "Taking his life as a whole, it is not too much to say that he was the greatest and most versatile Christian missionary sent out in modern times."

Richard Allen and Absalom Jones were former slaves who purchased an old black-smith shop in 1794 and founded the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Allen saw his church grow to over 7500 members by 1820.

John Nelson Darby, an influential evangelist in the Christian group, The Plymouth Brethren, was born in London in 1801. He went on to become an influential preacher and Bible commentator. He is considered by those who don’t agree with Dispensationalism, usually followers of what is called Covenant Theology, as the father of modern Dispensationalism, although there were many adherents of that line of thinking all through Christian history without it being named as such. Differing opinions about doctrinal issues within the framework of believing in salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ have characterized the faith throughout the centuries. Even the enemies of Darby’s premillennial faith and belief in the restoration of Israel and the rapture of the church acknowledge that his Bible commentary which can be found on the internet is very useful. It is the same with the English Baptist and staunch Calvinist, John Gill, who wrote in the previous century. Even if you don’t agree with him on every point you will find a great deal of helpful commentary in his writings found on crosswalk.com among other Christian websites.

However, there is a line that one can cross where disagreement turns to heresy and blasphemy, and a flesh based cult is formed around the personality of a single individual who defines a theology that is based on purely their private interpretation of scriptures. This is something we are warned about in 2 Peter 1:20 in the Authorized Version of the Bible. So it is with a cult and a modern religion called Mormonism and the Latter Day Saints movement. Adding additional books to the canon of the Bible and claiming a special revelation unknown to other people were two of the many claims made by Joseph Smith, self-claimed prophet who allegedly talked to angels. He was born in 1805 and died in 1844 after starting a movement that became modern day Mormonism. Utah, in the United States, is its stronghold.

During this period of time in the secular world, between 1800 and 1850, the arts went through its continual development with theater costumes and scenery becoming increasingly more realistic and dependent upon much more research into the period being
addressed by the play. Actors costumes were becoming much more realistic and even furniture was expected to be appropriate to the time period in which the play was set.


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Chinese theater used few backdrops and often had items like a horsehair duster to represent abstract notions like spirituality but did use elaborate costumes. In the USA gas light began to be installed in theaters and plays were so popular that playwrights and actors could actually begin to make a living. Plays about frontiersmen became very popular in America.

Western style theater became popular in the Middle East during this time period. Increasingly, in Europe and America responsibility for all aspects of the production of a play began to be shouldered by one individual and the profession of Director came into being. Until 1956 directors were called producers in England. Before this, playwrights and actors and stage managers loosely supervised production. Theater became very popular everywhere during the early 1800’s. A Tale of Mystery, a play by English playwright Thomas Holcroft opened in London in 1802 and is considered to be the first melodrama (a play characterized by exaggerated emotions and stereotypical characters, the forerunner of our modern television dramas) produced in England. Tears and Smiles, an American comedy by James Nelson Barker, is produced in 1808.

Ludwig von Beethoven wrote and performed his greatest musical works during this time. Niccolo Paganini, composer and violin virtuoso, begins touring Europe in 1805. By 1828 Austrian Franz Schubert will have composed over 600 pieces of music. In 1833 German composer, Robert Schumann founds a music journal that helps establish the fame of Frederic Chopin, Johannes Brahms, and Louis-Hector Berlioz.

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Dejection: An Ode in 1802. Poet William Blake publishes Jerusalem. William Wordsworth publishes a volume of poetry in 1807 that includes his famous poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. American writer Washington Irving publishes his satire of New York’s history in 1809 with the character Knickerbocker. Jane Austen publishes Sense and Sensibility in 1811. In 1816, while vacationing on Lake Geneva, Switzerland English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and their friend Lord Byron engage in a ghost story competition which results in Mary writing the novel Frankenstein, which will be published in 1818. Walter Scott publishes Ivanhoe in 1819. English Poet John Keats writes his greatest poetry by 1819. James Fenimore Cooper writes what are known as his Leatherstocking Tales, featuring the character Natty Bumppo, between 1823 and 1841. Edgar Allan Poe begins his road to fame by winning a Baltimore newspaper contest in 1833 by his MS Found in a Bottle. Charles Dickens has his first work published the same year. Hans Christian Andersen publishes more than 150 fairy tales beginning in 1835. Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his first book, Nature, in 1836. He gave a landmark address at the Harvard commencement in 1837 that included Henry David Thoreau of later fame in the audience.

American painter Benjamin West paints Death on a Pale Horse in 1802. French artist Jacques-Louis David paints Coronation of Napoleon in 1805-07 after Beethoven withdrew a musical piece praising the conqueror when he named himself emperor. Be-

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tween 1810 and 1814 Francisco de Goya paints The Disasters of War. In the 1840’s the Barbizon School of Landscape painting began to flourish in France.

Famed Austrian ballerina Fanny Eissler makes her debut at the Paris Opera in 1834. She tours the United States between 1839-1842. Opera singer, Jenny Lind, known as The Swedish Nightingale debuts in Stockholm, Sweden in 1838.

In 1839, Louis Daguerre created the first commercially viable photographic process called the Daguerreotype. That same year, British astronomer John Herschel first uses the term photography, basing the term on the Greek words for light and writing. Just as Jesus and the Apostles used current Greek words referring to a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem and the Greek ideas of a place where the dead go, Hades, and a place of torment, Tartarus, to describe and define the Hebrew word, Sheol, when used of an eternal place of punishment, we modern people have used cognates of words already in existence to create new words to describe things for which there were no words such as photography and television. In the following decade American photographers Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes became known for their daguerreotype portraits. Andrew Jackson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were among the notables photographed. In the 1840’s Native American art became popular among American settlers in the southwest.

Other notable authors and poets began publishing before 1850, among these are Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Makepeace Thackeray, Alexander Dumas pere (The Count of Monte Cristo, also a famous Savateur), and feminist Margaret Fuller. Composers included Hungarian Pianist Franz Liszt who became court music conductor for the German Weimar, making it the new European center for music. In 1847, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte’ begin publishing their famous novels. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne publish, as well.

In science, the direct application of the scientific method to solving man’s problems and answering his questions begins to be interlaced with speculation designed to overthrow his religious beliefs and a method of interpreting evidence so that any mention of the supernatural or God is thrown out as being superstitious and ignorant, thereby excluding the theoretical scientist from many avenues of understanding and enquiry. Theology, the study of God’s revelations to man, once called the Queen of Sciences, becomes marginalized slowly by naturalistic philosophers, who in order to justify their own sin and lost estate, relegate mankind to a mere brute aggregate of atoms accountable to no higher authority than the state or himself. This archaic and pagan way of looking at
existence has its roots in the Renaissance and in ancient Greek philosophy gleaned from the many cultures that preceded it and heavily borrowed from a perverted view of the Hebrew scriptures which I have shown previously that they were well acquainted with and this view of the world and of this idea of God begins to affect the most scholarly segments of the religious world..

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In 1799 a French soldier in Napoleon’s army invading Egypt discovered a black stone near the town of Rosetta. The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is found to date to 197BC and is written in three languages; Greek and two forms of hieroglyphics. Using this stone in 1822 scholars such as Jean-Francois Champollion begin reading ancient texts, based on the assumption that this one stone is the authority they could trust and that hieroglyphics hadn’t changed their meaning between 2000BC and 197BC. In 1839, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood begin their expedition that will uncover Mayan ruins in Central America. In the 1840’s British Archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard begins to excavate Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh, Iraq. In 1846 Henry Creswicke Rawlinson begins to decipher Mesopotamian cuneiform that had been carved into a cliff in Persia during the reign of Darius the Great copying ignored work already done by German Georg Grotefend in 1802. In the same year in America the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio is excavated by F. George Squier and Edward H. Davis.

Around 1800 the Keuper fossil beds in Germany are described linking them to a period of remote pre-history called the late Triassic period by students of science. In the Connecticut Valley Pliny Moody finds fossil prints that are claimed to belong to dinosaurs of the same imaginary period and later Solomon Ellsworth, Jr. and Nathan Smith would work in that area. In 1811 British paleontologist Mary Anning discovers the first complete skeleton of what is called an ichthyosaur. French anatomist Baron Cuvier discovers a fossil of what is to be called a pterodactyl, thought to be a flying dinosaur, although some scientists today insist it was just a large bird complete with feathers and all the fantastic drawings showing the flying dino are just that, fantasy. He also publishes Inquiry into Fossil Remains, the first major work on paleontology. He invented the view called Catastrophism, that fossils do not represent ancestors of modern animals but separate creations that ended in extinction as the result of great cataclysms. In 1821, Gabriel de Mortillet, who will begin using the term Paleolithic or Old Stone Age, is born. The term dinosaur isn’t introduced until 1841.

True science, as opposed to the junk science or as the Bible puts it, “science falsely so called” mentioned above, also makes great headway during this period. Technology, Medicine, and Chemistry leap forward with William Nicholson constructing an electric battery in 1800. Johann Ritter invents electroplating at about the same time. Humphrey Davy discovers nitrous oxide or laughing gas which will become the first anesthetic. Robert Fulton, who will gain fame as the inventor of the first successful steamship is the first to use metal to build a submarine at that time. Dr. Hedenus of Germany performs the first removal of a thyroid gland to treat goiters. The advancement of science in this period in contrast to the parallel “advancement” of speculation clothed in scientific terms would be a great independent study.

One of the most important “scientific” personages of this time was a man named Charles Darwin, grandson of Erasmus Darwin, Unitarian (a group that denies Christ’s divinity) and proponent of evolution who foreshadowed the work of Lamarck. Charles Darwin served as the naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836 in a British

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scientific expedition that traveled around the world. His encounter with life on the Galapagos Islands off the coast of South America in the Pacific Ocean served as the basis for his own theory of evolution and his profound and harmful influence on a world ready to accept any theory, not matter how unproveable, unscientific, or preposterous to justify its rejection of the Bible. People bound for Hell will grab at any rationale to justify the journey.

In 1800, Italian Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery. In 1801 Joseph-Marie Jacquard invents the Jacquard Loom, using punched cards to guide needle motions to produce patterned textiles. Later, in 1834, Charles Babbage will realize that punched cards can control calculator processes. This will eventually lead the way for the computer. U.S. farmer, Thomas Moore invents the first icebox, the progenitor of the refrigerator, in 1802 while the first vacuum packed foods are packaged by Nicholas Appert in his factory in France. In 1804 the first steam locomotive to operate on a railroad, constructed by British inventor Richard Trevithick, travels nearly ten miles and achieves speeds of almost five miles per hour.

Leaving science in the first half of the nineteenth century let’s now go to some of the world changing events that started in the Anglican Church or, the Church of England.
Richard Froude, John Keble, and Edward Pusey were all leaders of what became known as the Tractarian movement within the Anglican Church, also called Puseyites. They, as scholars in the Anglican Church, the state church of England, which was now the dominant world power, conquering more territory than any empire in history, believed and expressed in the Tracts they published that the Roman Catholic Church was correct in that Christ’s body was really present in communion which they viewed the same as the Catholic Mass. They urged a closer accord with Rome. One of their disciples, John Henry Newman, also published various tracts. While he claimed that the Anglican Church was more worthy of being called the inheritor of apostolic authority than the Church of Rome, he was accused by some of being an agent of Rome and trying to steer the Anglican Church back into a union with Rome.

The Oxford Movement, based at the University there, of what are called High Anglicans, believed in the need for a full communion between Rome and the English Church. This movement was resisted by many of the orthodox but slowly began making itself important. It supposedly ended when Newman converted to the Roman Catholic religion in 1845. Anglo-Catholicism is a very powerful force even today worldwide and it is believed by many that one day the two churches will mend the breach caused by Henry
VIII and reunite. This movement had a very great detrimental effect on other Protestant churches and even American evangelical and fundamentalist churches in the early 20th century.

Another important person in early 19th century Anglicanism was the son of a Unitarian minister, named Frederick Maurice or F.D. Maurice, who championed the cause of what was called Christian Socialism in response to the harsh working class conditions of

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England. His many heresies would shape many of the personalities which began to alter the shape of Christian thinking.

In the late 1700’s and early 1800’s there developed a school of thinking at the German universities that was a direct result of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation line of Biblical criticism in an effort to unseat the Bible as the Christian’s authority. Led by men like Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Johannes Semler and others and heavily influenced by the secular philosophies of John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Hegel the German school of what came to be called “Higher Criticism” denied the inspiration of the Bible and even the authenticity of its writing. Moses did not write the books attributed to him and there were several authors of the first five books of the Bible and what was written about events before Moses was based on oral tradition not God’s direct inspiration, according to their line of thinking. Isaiah didn’t write all of Isaiah In addition, the gospels weren’t written by the apostles but by much later Christians using their names to give authority to their work. This unbelieving view of looking at God’s word was not based on actual evidence as much as it was secular philosophy and the ideas of Catholic critics of the scriptures. It was claimed and is claimed today that there were more than 30 gospel versions circulating among the early Church including the recently touted “Gospel of Judas” when, in fact, the early church leaders, called fathers by Rome, did not quote these spurious gospels but quoted the ones we have today and when they mentioned one they dismissed it as the work of gnostics or other heretics. This also, in spite of the fact, that the gospel of Mark is thought to have been written around 45AD and there is a copy of part of the Gospel of Matthew that was convincingly shown by papyrologist, Carsten Thiede, to have been written within the lifetime of Matthew by the use of scientific methods of inspecting the papyrus with a special microscope and comparing it with other extant (still existing) writings.

A drug addicted poet and philosopher, one of the founders of the Romantic movement in English poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, brought these ideas to England. No greater damage has been done to Christianity by forces outside of it than by these men working from within. Scholars and Anglican churchmen like Benjamin Jowett would travel to Germany to study the criticism of the Bible, falling under the spell of men like F.C. Bauer, leader of the Tubingen School of Theology. Tubingen would become important later as the home university of Gerhard Kittel, a man who was tried as a war criminal after World War II for being Hitler’s main Christian apologist. He and his father, Rudolf, are also highly respected Bible scholars whose works grace many a fundamentalist Pastor’s bookshelves.

These Anglican scholars in the early part of the 19th century would come to believe things like Semler’s Accomodation Theory whereby it is said that you can’t really believe Genesis literally as God was trying to make things as simple as possible for these ignorant tent dwelling Semites and that Jesus and Paul were also accomodating the level of sophistication or lack thereof of their listeners. It is clear that the foxes were now in the henhouse and that wolves in sheep’s clothing had infested the most scholarly church in

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Christendom. With arguments put forth by men like Johann Jakob Griesbach and Karl Lachmann, who presumed the New Testament to be hopelessly corrupted, against the Bible it would take less than a hundred years for this level of unbelief and blasphemy to filter to the American evangelical denominations. The idea that the Bible, a supernatural book with prophecies that have double and triple applications, with verses split in half by thousands of years of history, and with the ability to change a believer’s heart and life, was just another old book, full of faults, mistakes, and mythology served to undermine its proper place in the Christian’s heart and life. Up until this time if there was something the average Christian didn’t understand he was told to read it again and again, prayerfully asking God for light. After this time he was just supposed to dismiss the passage as the ramblings of a “wise” person of a less sophisticated age or perhaps an error. In this way, the authority of the Bible is transferred to the scholar as it was to the priest in the Dark Ages. Now, many Christians want the words of God to submit to them rather than them to it. The entire basis for the Reformation, the authority of the word of God over the word of Man is in grave danger, if not defeated, in the hearts and minds of the majority of Protestant denominations.

During this time, The Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, which had been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 were reinstated by Pope Pius VII in 1814. Their success in derailing the Reformation is attested to by their establishment of many Jesuit colleges and universities in which many Protestant scholars and personalities like Norman Geisler and Bob Jones IV have been indoctrinated.

In 1846 the longest reigning Pope in Roman Catholic history, Pope Pius IX, took control. His reign, called a Pontificate, lasted from 1846 to 1878. During his time the Papacy lost its control over what was called the Papal States and called the First Vatican Council. He established the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in that she was free from the stain of original sin so was sinless like the Lord Jesus Christ. This heresy was added to the dogma of Papal Infallibility he established formally that stated that the Pope was incapable of error.

In the political realm he fought against anti-Catholic laws in many heavily Catholic countries and, according to General Thomas Harris of the committee that investigated the assasination of President Lincoln in his book, Rome’s Responsibility for the Assasination of Abraham Lincoln, and Charles Chiniquy in his 50 Years in the Church of Rome, he oversaw the flooding of the United States with immigrants from poor Roman Catholic countries in a strategy of taking control of this country and derailing the intents of the “Founding Fathers”. General Harris, goes on to accuse this Pope and his Church in his
1897 book of the assasination of early 19th century presidents, Harrison and Taylor. General Harris, a highly respected military person of the 19th century was not attacked so much for his accusations, as he was ignored after creating a small stir. Many other authors had come out with the same statements and it is difficult to say if they all were arrived at by independent study or from the same sources. It is acknowledged by all that President Lincoln was mystified at the Pope’s acknowledgement of the legitimacy of

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Confederate President Jefferson Davis as a sovereign leader of a country after the Battle of Gettysburg which resulted in a high desertion rate for formerly loyal Irish Catholic troops. The United States had been dedicated to the Virgin Mary in Baltimore in 1846, as well.

At this point in history, 1850 or thereabouts, England is the most powerful nation on earth and claims as its own more territory than any empire in the history of mankind. It is not only a powerhouse political machine but vying for control of the world spiritually with the Roman Catholic Church in its Anglican Church of England, the spiritual justification of its empire, and in its many other churches and missionary societies. Truly, it will soon be said that the sun never sets on the British Empire as it is the first global empire whose navy literally controls the seas and whose army seems unstoppable. Great Britain has risen from a third rate power vying for position after losing all of its continental territorial claims to being the greatest empire in the history of the world. Its navy patrols the seas and its missionaries search out the jungles of Africa and Asia. From Captain James Cook’s exploration of what is now Australia and the Pacific Ocean Islands in the late 1700’s to the great missionaries of the late 1800’s the theme of “Rule Britannia” dominated the world in the 1800’s. Next we will explore the latter half of that century before moving onto the 1900’s, the 20th Century.
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