Nor is it merely a rude, unintelligent, sensuous enjoyment. Man primeval is not a lazy savage gathering acorns. He is made in the image of the Creator; he is to keep and dress his garden, and it is furnished with every plant good for food and pleasant to the sight. In the midst of our material civilization we need to disabuse ourselves of some prejudices before we can realize the fact that man, without the arts of life or any need of them, is not necessarily a barbarian or a savage. Yet even Adam must have been an agriculturist with strong and willing hands, and must have had some need of agricultural implements such as those with which the least civilized of his descendants have been wont to till the soil. Still, without art or with very little of it, he could enjoy all that is beautiful and grand in nature, and could rise from the observation of nature to communion with G.o.d. We need the more to realize this, inasmuch as there seems so strong a tendency to confound material civilization with higher culture, and to hold that man primeval must have been low and debased simply because he may have had no temples and no machinery. We must remember that he had nature, which is higher than fine art, and that when in harmony with his surroundings he may have had no need either of exhausting labor or of mechanical contrivances. Farther, in the contemplation of nature and in seeking after G.o.d, he had higher teachers than our boasted civilization can claim.
Alas for fallen man, with his poor civilization gathered little by little from the dust of earth, and his paltry art that halts immeasurably behind nature. How little is he able even to appreciate the high estate of his great ancestor. The world of fallen men has worshipped art too much, reverenced and studied G.o.d and nature too little. The savage displays the lowest taste when he admires the rude figures which he paints on his face or his garments more than the glorious painting that adorns nature; yet even he acknowledges the pre-eminent excellence of nature by imitating her forms and colors, and by adapting her painted plumes and flowers to his own use. There is a wide interval, including many gradations, between this low position and that of the cultivated amateur or artist. The art of the latter makes a nearer approach to the truly beautiful, inasmuch as it more accurately represents the geometric and organic forms and the coloring of nature; and inasmuch as it devises ideal combinations not found in the actual world; which ideal combinations, however, are beautiful or monstrous just as they realize or violate the harmonies of nature. It is only the highest culture that brings man back to his primitive refinement.
Art takes her true place when she sits at the feet of nature, and brings her students to drink in its beauties, that they may endeavor, however imperfectly, to reproduce them. On the other hand, the student of nature must not content himself with "writing Latin names on white paper," wherewith to label nature"s productions, but must rise to the contemplation of the order and beauty of the Cosmos as a revelation of Divinity. Both will thus rise to that highest taste which will enable them to appreciate not only the elegance of individual forms, but their structure, their harmonies, their grouping and their relations, their special adaptation, and their places as parts of a great system.
Thus art will attain that highest point in which it displays original genius, without violating natural truth and unity, and nature will be regarded as the highest art.
Much is said and done in our time with reference to the cultivation of popular taste for fine art as a means of civilization; and this, so far as it goes, is well; but the only sure path to the highest taste-education is the cultivation of the study of nature. This is also an easier branch of education, provided the instructors have sufficient knowledge. Good works of art are rare and costly; but good works of nature are everywhere around us, waiting to be examined. Such education, popularly diffused, would react on the efforts of art. It would enable a widely extended public to appreciate real excellence, and would cause works of art to be valued just in proportion to the extent to which they realize or deviate from natural truth and unity.
I do not profess to speak authoritatively on such subjects, but I confess that the strong impression on my mind is that neither the revered antique models, nor the practice and principles of the generality of modern art reformers, would endure such criticism; and that if we could combine popular enthusiasm for art with scientific appreciation of nature, a new and better art might arise from the union.
I may appear to dwell too long upon this topic; but my excuse must be that it leads to a true estimate both of natural history and of the sacred Scriptures. The study of nature guides to those large views of the unity and order of creation which alone are worthy of a being of the rank of man, and which lead him to adequate conceptions of the Creator; but the truly wise recognize three grades of beauty. First, that of art, which, in its higher efforts, can raise ordinary minds far above themselves. Secondly, that of nature, which, in its most common objects, must transcend the former, since its artist is that G.o.d of whose infinite mind the genius of the artist is only a faint reflection. Thirdly, that pre-eminent beauty of moral goodness revealed only in the spiritual nature of the Supreme. The first is one of the natural resources of fallen man in his search for happiness.
The second was man"s joy in his primeval innocence. The third is the inheritance of man redeemed. It is folly to place these on the same level. It is greater folly to worship either or both of the first without regard to the last. It is true wisdom to aspire to the last, and to regard nature as the handmaid of piety, art as but the handmaid of nature.
Nature to the un.o.bservant is merely a ma.s.s of things more or less beautiful or interesting, but without any definite order or significance. An observer soon arrives at the conclusion that it is a series of circling changes, ever returning to the same points, ever renewing their courses, under the action of invariable laws. But if he rests here, he falls infinitely short of the idea of the Cosmos, and stands on the brink of the profound error of eternal succession. A little further progress conducts him to the inviting field of special adaptation and mutual relation of things. He finds that nothing is without its use; that every structure is most nicely adjusted to special ends; that the supposed ceaseless circling of nature is merely the continuous action of great powers, by which an infinity of utilities are worked out--the great fly-wheel which, in its unceasing and at first sight apparently aimless round, is giving motion to thousands of reels and spindles and shuttles, that are spinning and weaving, in all its varied patterns, the great web of life.
But the observer, as he looks on this web, is surprised to find that it has in its whole extent a wondrous pattern. He rises to the contemplation of type in nature, a great truth to which science has only lately opened its eyes. He begins dimly to perceive that the Creator has from the beginning had a plan before his mind, that this plan embraced various types or patterns of existence; that on these patterns he has been working out the whole system of nature, adapting each to all the variety of uses by an infinity of minor modifications.
That, in short, whether he study the eye of a gnat or the structure of a mountain chain, he sees not only objects of beauty and utility, but parts of far-reaching plans of infinite wisdom, by which all objects, however separated in time or s.p.a.ce, are linked together.
How much of positive pleasure does that man lose who pa.s.ses through life absorbed with its wants and its artificialities, and regarding with a "brute, unconscious gaze" the grand revelation of a higher intelligence in the outer world. It is only in an approximation through our Divine Redeemer to the moral likeness of G.o.d that we can be truly happy; but of the subsidiary pleasures which we are here permitted to enjoy, the contemplation of nature is one of the best and purest. It was the pleasure, the show, the spectacle prepared for man in Eden, and how much true philosophy and taste shine in the simple words that in paradise G.o.d planted trees "pleasant to the sight," as well as "good for food." Other things being equal, the nearer we can return to this primitive taste, the greater will be our sensuous enjoyment, the better the influence of our pleasures on our moral nature, because they will then depend on the cultivation of tastes at once natural and harmless, and will not lead us to communion with and reverence for merely human genius, but will conduct us into the presence of the infinite perfection of the Creator.
The Bible knows but one species of man. It is not said that men were created after their species, as we read of the groups of animals. Man was made, "male and female;" and in the fuller details afterwards given in the second chapter--where the writer, having finished his general narrative, commences his special history of man--but one primitive pair is introduced to our notice. We scarcely need the detailed tables of affiliation afterward given, or the declaration of the apostle who preached to the supposed autochthones of Athens, that "G.o.d has made of one blood all nations," to a.s.sure us of the Scriptural unity of man. If, therefore, there were any good reason to believe that man is not of one but several origins, we must admit Moses to have been very imperfectly informed. Nor, on the other hand, does the Bible any more than geology allow us to a.s.sign a very high antiquity to the origin of man relatively to that of the earth on which he dwells. The genealogical tables of the Bible may admit of some limits of difference of opinion as to the age of the human world or aeon, and also of that of the deluge, from which man took his second point of departure; but they do not allow us to put the origin of man farther back than that of the present or modern condition of our continents and the present races of animals. They therefore limit us to the modern or quaternary period of geology. The question of man"s antiquity, so much agitated now, demands, however, a separate and careful consideration; but we must first devote a few pages to the simple statements of the Bible respecting the Sabbath of creation and its relation to human history.
CHAPTER XII.
THE REST OF THE CREATOR.
"And the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day G.o.d ended his work which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And G.o.d blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because that in it G.o.d rested from all his work which he had created to make."--Genesis ii., 1-3.
The end of the sixth day closed the work of creation properly so called, as well as that of forming and arranging the things created.
The beginning of the seventh introduced a period which, according to the views already stated, was to be occupied by the continued increase and diffusion of man and the creatures under his dominion, and by the gradual disappearance of tribes of creatures unconnected with his well-being.
Science in this well accords with Scripture. No proof exists of the production of a new species since the creation of man; and all geological and archaeological evidence points to him and a few of the higher mammals as the newest of the creatures. There is, on the other hand, good evidence that several species have become extinct since his creation. Those who believe in the continuous evolution of animals and men, it is true, can see no actual termination of the process with the introduction of man; but even they see that the appearance of a rational and moral being at least changes the nature and order of the development. Nor can they doubt that man is the last born of nature, and that the whole animal creation is crowned by him as its capital or topmost pinnacle. The later speculators on this subject have never reached any truth beyond that long ago stated by the lamented Edward Forbes--a most careful observer and accurate reasoner on the more recent changes of the earth"s surface. He infers, from the distribution of species from their centres of creation, that man is the latest product of creative power; or, in other words, that none of those species or groups of species which he had been able to trace to their centres, or the spots at which they probably originated, appear to be of later or as late origin as man. "This consideration," he says, "induces me to believe that the last province in time was completed by the coming of man, and to maintain an hypothesis that man stands unique in s.p.a.ce and time, himself equal to the sum of any pre-existing centre of creation or of all--an hypothesis consistent with man"s moral and social position in the world."
The seventh day, then, was to have been that in which all the happiness, beauty, and perfection of the others were to have been concentrated. But an element of instability was present in the being who occupied the summit of the animal scale. Not regulated by blind and unerring instincts, but a free agent, with a high intellectual and moral nature, and liable to be acted on by temptation from without; under such influence he lost his moral balance in stretching out his hand to grasp the peculiar powers of Deity, and fell beyond the hope of self-redemption--perpetuating, by one of those laws which regulate the transmission of mixed corporeal and spiritual natures, his degradation to every generation of his species. And so G.o.d"s great work was marred, and all his plans seemed to be foiled, when they had just reached their completion. Thus far science might carry us unaided; for there is not a true naturalist, however skeptical as to revealed religion, who does not feel in his inmost heart the disjointed state of the present relations of man to nature; the natural wreck that results from his artificial modes of life, the long trains of violations of the symmetry of nature that follow in the wake of his most boasted achievements. But here natural science stops; and just as we have found that, in tracing back the world"s history, the Bible carries us much farther than geology, so science, having led us to suspect the fallen state of man, leaves us henceforth to the teaching of revelation. And how glorious that teaching! G.o.d did not find himself baffled--his resources are infinite--he had foreseen and prepared for all this apparent evil; and out of the moral wreck he proceeds to work out the grand process of _redemption_, which is the especial object of the seventh day, and which will result in the production of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. In the seventh, as in the former days, the evening precedes the morning. For four thousand years the world groped in its darkness--a darkness tenanted by moral monsters as powerful and destructive as the old pre-Adamite reptiles. The Sun of Righteousness at length arose, and the darkness began to pa.s.s away; but eighteen centuries have elapsed, and we still see but the gray dawn of morning, which we yet firmly believe will brighten into a glorious day that shall know no succeeding night.[100]
The seventh day is the modern or human era in geology; and, though it can not yet boast of any physical changes so great as those of past periods, it is still of much interest, as affording the facts on which we must depend for explanations of past changes; and as immediately connected in time with those later tertiary periods which afford so many curious problems to the geological student. The actual connection of the human with preceding periods is still involved in some obscurity; and, as we shall see, there has recently been a strong tendency to throw back the origin of man into prehistoric ages of enormous length, on grounds which are, however, much less certain than is commonly imagined. This question we have to examine; but before entering upon it may shortly sketch the actual import of the statements of the Hebrew Scriptures respecting what may be called the prehistoric duration of the human species. This is the more necessary, as the most crude notions seem very widely to prevail on the subject.
I shall, therefore, in this place notice some general facts deducible from the Bible, and which may be useful in appreciating the true relation of the human era to those which preceded it. It will be understood that I shall endeavor merely to present a picture of what the Bible actually teaches, and which any one can verify by reading the book of Genesis.
1. The local centre of creation of the human species, and probably of a group of creatures coeval with it, was Eden; a country of which the Scriptures give a somewhat minute geographical description. It was evidently a district of Western Asia; and, from its possession of several important rivers, rather a region or large territory than a limited spot, such as many, who have discussed the question of the site of Eden, seem to suppose. In this view it is a matter of no moment to fix its site more nearly than the indication of the Bible that it included the sources and probably large portions of the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and perhaps the Oxus and Jaxartes. Into the minor difficulties respecting the site of Eden it would be unprofitable to enter, and it will matter little if we accept that view, which, however, I think less probable, that it was placed in the lower part of the valley of the Euphrates. I may merely mention one particular of the Biblical description, because it throws light on the great antiquity of this geographical delineation, and has been strangely misconceived by expositors--the relation of those rivers to Cush or Ethiopia and Havilah, a tribal name derived from that of a grandson of Cush. On consulting the tenth chapter of Genesis, it will be found that the Cus.h.i.tes under Nimrod, very soon after the deluge, are stated to have pushed their migrations and conquests along the Tigris to the northward, and established there the first empire. It is probably this primitive Cus.h.i.te empire, called Ethiopia in our translation, which in the epoch of the description of Eden occupied the Euphratean valley, and being bounded on one side by the river called Gihon, was thus believed to extend over the old site of Eden.
Thus the Cush or Ethiopia of the description has no direct connection with the African Ethiopia, and speculations based on such a supposed connection are groundless. On the other hand this feature furnishes an interesting coincidence with other parts of Genesis, and throws light on many obscure points in the early history of man; and since this Cus.h.i.te empire had perished even before the time of Moses, it indicates a still more ancient tradition respecting the primeval abode of our species.
2. Before the deluge this region must have been the seat of a dense population, which, according to the Biblical account, must have made considerable advances in the arts, and at the same time sunk very low in moral debas.e.m.e.nt.[101] Whether any remains of the central portions of this ancient population or its works exist will probably not be determined with absolute certainty till we have accurate geological investigations of the whole country in the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea and along the great rivers of Western Asia, though there is nothing unreasonable in the belief that some of the old prehistoric men whose remains are discovered in caves and river gravels in Europe may belong to the antediluvian race. Should such remains be found, we might infer, from the extreme longevity and other characteristics a.s.signed to the antediluvians, that their skeletons would present peculiarities ent.i.tling them to be considered a well-marked variety of the human species, and this not of a low type of physical organization. We may also infer that the family of man very early divided into two races--one retaining in greater purity the moral endowments of the species, the other excelling in the mechanical and fine arts; and that there were rude and savage outlying communities of men then as at present. If the so-called palaeolithic men of Europe are antediluvian, they were probably of such outlying tribes, and possibly of the mixed race which sprung up in the later antediluvian age, and who are described as mighty men physically, and men of violence. It would be quite natural that this intermixture of the Sethite and Cainite races should produce a race excelling both in energy and physical endowments--the "giants" that were in those days.[102] If any remains of the two central nations of the antediluvian period are ever discovered, we may confidently antic.i.p.ate that the distinctive characteristics of these races may be detected in their osseous structures as well as in their works of art. Farther, it is to be inferred from notices in the fourth chapter of Genesis, that before the deluge there was both a nomadic and a settled population, and that the princ.i.p.al seat of the Cainite, or more debased yet energetic branch of the human family, was to the eastward of the site of Eden.
No intimations are given by which the works of art of antediluvian times could be distinguished from those of later periods; but that curious summary of the treasures of antediluvian man contained in the notice that the land of Havilah produced gold and agate and pearl (Gen. ii., 12) would lead us to believe that the early antediluvian age was on the whole an age of stone, in which flint for weapons, and gold and sh.e.l.l wampum for ornaments, were the leading kinds of wealth.
On the other hand, the notices of antediluvian metallurgy, and the building and construction of the ark, would lead us to infer that the later antediluvians had attained to much perfection in some constructive arts--a conclusion which harmonizes with the otherwise inexplicable perfection of such art soon after the deluge, as evidenced not only by the story of Babel, but also by the early works of the a.s.syrians and Egyptians.
3. When the antediluvian population had fully proved itself unfit to enter into the divine scheme of moral renovation, it was swept away by a fearful physical catastrophe. The deluge might, in all its relations, furnish material for an entire treatise. I may remark here, as its most important geological peculiarity, that it was evidently a _local_ convulsion. The object, that of destroying the human race and the animal population of its peculiar centre of creation, the preservation of specimens of these creatures in the ark, and the physical requirements of the case, necessitate this conclusion, which is now accepted by the best Biblical expositors,[103] and which inflicts no violence on the terms of the record. Viewed in this light, the phenomena recorded in the Bible, in connection with geological probabilities, lead us to infer that the physical agencies evoked by the divine power to destroy this unG.o.dly race were a subsidence of the region they inhabited, so as to admit the oceanic waters, and extensive atmospherical disturbances connected with that subsidence, and perhaps with the elevation of neighboring regions. In this case it is possible that the Caspian Sea, which is now more than eighty feet below the level of the ocean,[104] and which was probably much more extensive then than at present, received much of the drainage of the flood, and that the mud and sand deposits of this sea and the adjoining desert plains, once manifestly a part of its bottom, conceal any remains that exist of the antediluvian population. In connection with this, it may be remarked that, in the book of Job, Eliphaz speaks as if the locality of those wicked nations which existed before the deluge was known and accessible in his time:
"Hast thou marked the ancient way Which wicked men have trodden, Who were seized [by the waters] in a moment, And whose foundations a flood swept away?"
--Job xxii., 15.
On comparing this statement with the answer of Job in the 26th chapter, verse 5th, it would seem that the unG.o.dly antediluvians were supposed to be still under the waters; a belief quite intelligible if the Caspian, which, on the latest and most probable views of the locality of the events of this book, was not very remote from the residence of Job,[105] was supposed to mark the position of the pre-Noachic population, as the Dead Sea afterward did that of the cities of the plain. Some of the dates a.s.signed to the book of Job would, however, render it possible that this last catastrophe is that to which _he_ refers:
"The _Rephaim_ tremble from beneath The waters and their inhabitants.
Sheol is naked before him, And destruction hath no covering."
The word _Rephaim_ here has been variously rendered "shades of the dead" and "giants." It is properly the family or national name of certain tribes of gigantic Hamite men (the Anakim, Emim, etc.) inhabiting Western Asia at a very remote period; and it must here refer either to them or to the still earlier antediluvian giants.[106]
It is also an important point to be noticed here that the narrative of the deluge in Genesis is given as the testimony or record of an eye-witness, and is to be so understood; and that the terms of the record imply, not as usually held that all sorts of animals were taken into Noah"s ark, but only a selection, the character of which is clearly indicated by a comparison of the five lists of animals given in the narrative. Bearing this in mind, and noticing that the writer tells of his own experience as to the rise of the water, the drifting of the ark, the disappearance of all visible sh.o.r.e, and the sounding fifteen cubits where a hill had before been, all the difficulties of the narrative of the deluge will at once disappear. These difficulties have in fact arisen from regarding the story as the composition of a historian, not as what it manifestly is, the log or journal of a contemporary, introduced with probably little change by the compiler of the book.
After the deluge, we find the human race settled in the plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, attracted thither by the fertility of their alluvial soils. There we find them engaging in a great political scheme, no doubt founded on recollections of the old antediluvian nationalities, and on a dread of the evils which able and aspiring men would antic.i.p.ate from that wide dispersion of the human race that appears to have been intended by the Creator in the new circ.u.mstances of the earth. They commenced accordingly the erection of a city or tower at Babel, in the plain of Shinar, to form a common bond of union, a great public work that should be a rallying-point for the race, and around which its patriotism might concentrate itself. The attempt was counteracted by an interposition of divine Providence; and thenceforth the diffusion of the human race proceeded unchecked, carrying with it everywhere the memory of the celebrated tower, which perpetuated itself not only in the mounds of a.s.syria and Babylon and the pyramids of Egypt, but in the teocallis and temple mounds of the New World. The Babel enterprise is in fact the first recorded development of that mound-building instinct which the earlier races everywhere evince, and which has been a distinguishing characteristic more especially of the Cus.h.i.te or Turanian race, and has apparently made them the teachers of constructive arts to all other peoples.
Perhaps a dread of the total decay and loss of the surviving antediluvian arts in construction and other matters may have been one impelling motive to the building of Babel. Perhaps it was connected with the communistic ideas of the Turanian race, and their conflict with the patriarchal habits of the Semites. Out of the enterprise at Babel, however, arose a new type of evil, which, in the forms of military despotism, the spirit of conquest, hero-worship, and the alliance of these influences with literature and the arts, has been handed down through every succeeding age to our own time. The name of Nimrod, the son of Cush, has been preserved to us in the Bible, and also apparently in the tablets and inscriptions of a.s.syria, as the founder of the first despotism. This bold and ambitious man, subsequently deified under different names, established a Hamite or Turanian empire, which appears to have extended its sway over the tribes occupying Southwestern Asia and Northeastern Africa, everywhere supporting its power by force of arms, and introducing a debasing polytheistic hero-worship, and certain forms of art probably derived from antediluvian times. The centre of this Cus.h.i.te empire, however, gave way to the rising power of a.s.syria or the Ashurite branch of the sons of Shem, at a period antecedent to the dawn of profane history, except in its mythical form; and when the light of secular history first breaks upon us, we find Egypt standing forth as the only stable representative of the arts, the systems, and the superst.i.tions of the old Cus.h.i.te empire, of which it had been the southern branch; while other remnants of the Hamite races, included in the empire of Nimrod, were scattered over Western Asia, and, migrating into Europe, with or after the ruder but less demoralized sons of j.a.pheth, carried with them their characteristic civilization and mythology, to take root in new forms in Greece and Italy.[107] Meanwhile the a.s.syrian and Persian (Elamite) races were growing in Middle Asia, and probably driving the more eastern remnants of the Nimrodic empire into India, borrowing at the same time their superst.i.tions and their claims to universal dominion. These views, which I believe to correspond with the few notices in the Bible and in ancient history, and to be daily receiving new confirmations from the investigations of the ancient a.s.syrian monuments, enable us to understand many mysterious problems in the early history of man. They give us reason to suspect that the _principle_ of the first empire was an imitation of the antediluvian world, and that its arts and customs were mainly derived from that source. They show how it happens that Egypt, a country so far removed from the starting-point of man after the deluge, should appear to be the cradle of the arts, and they account for the Hamite and perhaps antediluvian elements, mixed with primeval Biblical ideas, as the cherubim, etc., in the old heathenism of India, a.s.syria, and Southern Europe, and which they share with Egypt, having derived them from the same source. They also show how it is that in the most remote antiquity we find two well-developed and opposite religious systems; the pure theism of Noah, and those who retained his faith, and the idolatry of those tribes which regarded with adoring veneration the objects and stages of the creative work, the grander powers and objects of nature, the mighty Cainites of the world before the flood, and the postdiluvian leaders who followed them in their violence, their cultivation of the arts, and their rebellion against G.o.d. These heroes were identified with imaginative conceptions of the heavenly bodies, animals, and other natural objects, a.s.sociated with the fortunes of cities and nations, with particular territories, and with war and the useful arts, transmitted under different names to one country after another, and localized in each; and it is only in comparatively modern times that we have been able to recognize the full certainty of the view held long since by many ingenious writers, that among the greater G.o.ds of Egypt and a.s.syria, and of consequence among those also of Greece and Rome, were Nimrod, Ham, Ashur, Noah, Mizraim, and other worthies and tyrants of the old world; and to suspect that Tubalcain and Naamah, and other antediluvian names, were similarly honored, though subsequently overshadowed by more recent divinities. The later a.s.syrian readings of Rawlinson, Hincks, and the lamented George Smith, and the more recent works on Egyptian antiquities, are full of pregnant hints on these subjects. It would, however, lead us too far from our immediate subject to enter more fully into these questions. I have referred to them merely to point out connecting-links between the secular and sacred history of the earlier part of the human period, as a useful sequel to our comparison of the latter with the conclusions of science, and as furnishing hints which may guide the geologist in connecting the human with the tertiary period, and in distinguishing between the antediluvian and postdiluvian portions of the former.
It may be said, however, that all this Biblical history, however it may accord with the little that remains to us of the written annals of early Oriental nations, is entirely at variance with those modern archaeological discussions which point to an immense antiquity of the human race, and to a primitive barbarism out of which all human culture was little by little evolved; and which results of archaeological investigation, while contradictory to the Hebrew Scriptures, are entirely in accord with the evolutionist philosophy.
The prominence now given to such views as these renders it necessary that we should denote a special chapter to their discussion.
CHAPTER XIII.
UNITY AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN.
"These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood."--Genesis x., 32.
The theologians and evangelical Christians of our time, and with them the credibility of the Holy Scriptures, are supposed by many to have been impaled on a zoological and archaeological dilemma, in a manner which renders nugatory all attempts to reconcile the Mosaic cosmogony with science. The Bible, as we have seen, knows but one Adam, and that Adam not a myth or an ethnic name, but a veritable man; but some naturalists and ethnologists think that they have found decisive evidence that man is not of one but of several origins. The religious tendency of this doctrine no Christian can fail to perceive. In whatever way put, or under whatever disguise, it renders the Bible history worthless, reduces us to that isolation of race from race cultivated in ancient times by the various local idolatries, and destroys the brotherhood of man and the universality of that Christian atonement which proclaims that "as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive."
Fortunately, however, the greater weight of biological and archaeological evidence is here on the side of the Bible, and philology comes in with strong corroborative proof. But just as the orthodox theologian is beginning to congratulate himself on the aid he has thus received, some of his new friends gravely tell him that, in order to maintain their view, it is necessary to believe that man has resided on earth for countless ages, and that it is quite a mistake to suppose that his starting-point is so recent as the Mosaic deluge.
Nay, some very rampant theorists of some ethnological schools try to pierce Moses and his abettors with both horns of the dilemma at once, maintaining that men may be of different species, and yet may have existed for an enormous length of time as well. The recent prevalence of theories of evolution has, however, thrown quite into the background the discussions formerly active respecting the unity of man, but has, along with geological and archaeological discovery, given increased prominence to those relating to the date of the origin of our species and the manner of its introduction.
The Bible gives us a definite epoch, that of the deluge, about 2000 to 3000 B.C., for all existing races of men; but this, according to it, was only the second starting-point of humanity, and though no family but that of Noah survived the terrible catastrophe, it would be a great error to suppose that nothing antediluvian appears in the subsequent history of man. Before the deluge there were arts and an old civilization, extending over at least two thousand years, and after the deluge men carried with them these heirlooms of the old world to commence with them new nations. This has been tacitly ignored by many of the writers who underrate the value of the Hebrew history.
It may be as well for this reason to place, in a series of propositions, the princ.i.p.al points in Genesis which relate to the questions now before us.
1. Adam and Isha, the woman, afterward called Eve (Life-giver), in consequence of the promise of a Redeemer, commenced a life of husbandry on their expulsion from Eden, which, on the ordinary views of the Bible chronology, may be supposed to have occurred from 4000 to 5000 years before the Christian era; and during the lifetime of the primal pair, the sheep, at least, was domesticated. The Bible, of course, knows nothing of the imaginary continent of Lemuria, in which, according to some hypotheses, men are supposed to have had their birth from apes. A few generations after, in the time of Lamech, cattle were domesticated; and the metals copper and iron were applied to use--the latter probably meteoric iron; and hence, it may be, the Hindoo and h.e.l.lenic myths of Twachtrei and Hephaestos in connection with the thunderbolt. We learn, however, incidentally, as already mentioned, in the description of Eden in Genesis, chapter 2d, that there was a previous stone age, in which "flint, pearls or sh.e.l.l beads, and stream-gold" were the chief treasures of man, for this is implied in the "gold, bedolach, and onyx" of the land of Havilah. It is certain also, from the discoveries made in a.s.syria, on the site of Troy, and elsewhere, that the use of stone implements continued in Western Asia long after the deluge. In the time of Noah the distinction of clean and unclean beasts, and the taking of seven pairs of certain beasts and birds into the ark, imply that certain mammals and birds were domesticated.[108]
2. Before the flood, as already remarked, there was a division of man into two nationalities or races; and there was a citizen, an agricultural, a pastoral, and a nomadic population. Farther, the remarkable progress in the arts implied in the building of such structures as the Tower of Babel, and other temple and palace mounds in a.s.syria, and of the pyramids of Egypt, within a few generations after the deluge, proves that a very advanced material civilization and great skill in constructive arts had been reached in antediluvian times.[109]
3. After the deluge, the arts of the antediluvians and their citizen life were almost immediately revived in the plain of Shinar; but the plans of the Babel leaders, like those of many others who have attempted to force distinct tribes into one nationality, failed. The guilt attributed to them probably relates to the attempt to break up the patriarchal and tribal organization, which in these early times was the outward form of true religion, in favor of some sort of national organization, not compatible with the extension of man immediately over the world, and tending to consolidation into dense communities. It may be a question here whether the tribal communism which has prevailed among the American Indians and other rude races was the primitive form of society which the Babel-builders essayed to change, or whether the Semitic patriarchal system had at first prevailed, and the Babel difficulties were connected with a conflict between this and communism or despotism, both new Turanian or Aryan introductions. In any case, Babel, and Babylon its successor, remain in the subsequent Biblical literature as types of the G.o.d-defying and antichristian systems that have succeeded each other from the time of Nimrod to this day.
4. The human race was scattered over the earth in family groups or tribes, each headed by a leading patriarch, who gave it its name.
First, the three sons of Noah formed three main stems, and from these diverged several family branches. The ethnological chart in the 10th chapter of Genesis gives the princ.i.p.al branches under patriarchal and ethnic names; but these, of course, continued to subdivide beyond the s.p.a.ce and time referred to by the sacred writer. It is simply absurd to object, as some writers have done, to the universality of the statements in Genesis, that they do not mention in detail the whole earth. They refer to a few generations only, and beyond this restrict themselves to the one branch of the human family to which the Bible princ.i.p.ally relates. We should be thankful for so much of the leading lines of ethnological divergence, without complaining that it is not followed out into its minute ramifications and into all history.
5. The tripart.i.te division in Genesis x. indicates a somewhat strict geographical separation of the three main trunks. The regions marked out for j.a.pheth include Europe and Northwestern Asia. The name j.a.pheth, as well as the statements in the table, indicate a versatile, nomadic, and colonizing disposition as characteristic of these tribes.[110] The Median population, the same with a portion of that now often called Aryan,[111] was the only branch remaining near the original seats of the species, and in a settled condition. The outlying portions of the posterity of j.a.pheth, on account of their wide dispersion, must at a very early period have fallen into comparative barbarism, such as we find in historic periods all over Western and Northern Europe and Northern Asia. Owing to their habitat, the j.a.phet.i.tes of the Bible include none of the black races, unless certain Indian and Australian nations are outlying portions of this family. The Shemite nations showed little tendency to migrate, being grouped about the Euphrates and Tigris valleys and neighboring regions. For this reason, with the exception of certain Arab tribes, they present no instances of barbarism, and generally retained a high cerebral organization, and respectable though stationary civilization, and they possess the oldest alphabet and literature. The posterity of Ham differs remarkably from the others. It spread itself over Southern, Central, and Eastern Asia, Southern Europe, and Northern Africa, and const.i.tutes the stock alike of the Turanian and African races, as well as probably of the American tribes. It has all along displayed a great capacity for certain forms of art and semi-civilization, but has rarely risen to the level of the Shemite and j.a.phet.i.te races. It established the earliest military and monarchical inst.i.tutions, and presents at the dawn of history--in a.s.syria, in Egypt, and India--settled and arbitrary forms in politics and religion, of a character so much resembling that of an old and corrupt civilization that we can scarcely avoid supposing that Ham and his family had preserved more than any of the other Noachian races the arts and inst.i.tutions of the old world before the flood. It certainly presents itself in early postdiluvian times as the first representative and teacher of art and material civilization. The Hamite race is remarkable for the early development of pantheism and hero-worship, and for the artificial character of its culture. It presents us with the darkest colors, and in the vast solitudes of Africa and Central Asia its outlying tribes must have fallen into comparative barbarism a few centuries after the deluge. It is farther to be observed that, according to the Bible, the Canaanites and other Hamite nations spoke languages not essentially different from those of the Shemites, while the j.a.phet.i.te nations were to them barbarians--"a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand." There was, too, at the date of the dispersion of Babel, already a distinction of tongues within each of the great races of men.