Up till the introduction of man upon our planet, the humbler creatures,
his predecessors, formed but mere figures in its various landscapes, and
failed to alter or affect by their works the face of nature. They were
conspicuous, not from what they _did_, but from what they _were_. At a
very early period reefs of coral, the work of minute zoophytes, whitened
the shallows of the ocean, or encircled with pale, ever broadening
frames, solitary islands green with the shrubs and trees of extinct
floras; but, though products of the animal world, they were not built up
under the direction of even an instinctive intelligence, but were as
entirely the results of a _vegetative_ process of mere growth as the
forests or reed brakes of the old Carboniferous savannahs. At a later
time an ant hill might be here and there descried, rearing its squat,
brown pyramid amid the recesses of some Oolitic forest; or, in a period
still more recent, the dam of the gigantic beaver might be seen
extending its minute eye-like circlet of blue amid the windings of some
bosky ravine of the Pliocene age; or existing as a little mound-skirted
pond, with the rude half-submerged _cottage_ of the creature, its
architect, rising beside it, on some rivulet of the Pleistocene. But how
inconsiderable such works, compared with the wide extent of prospect in
which they were included! How entirely inconspicuous rather, save when
placed in the immediate foreground of the pictures into whose
composition they entered! Not until the introduction of man upon earth
do we find a creature whose works sensibly affect and modify the aspects
of nature. But when man appears, how mighty the change which he effects!
Immediately on his creation he takes under his care the vegetable
productions of use and show: it becomes his business to keep and dress a
garden. He next becomes a tiller of fields, then a planter of vineyards:
here he cuts down great forests; there he rears extensive woods. He
makes himself places of habitation; and busy cities spring up as the
trophies of his diligence and skill. His labors, as they grow upon the
waste, affect the appearance of vast continents; until at length, from
many a hill-top and tall spire, scarce a rood of ground can be seen on
which he has not built, or sown, or planted, or around which lie has not
erected his walls or reared his hedges. Man, in this great department of
industry, is what none of his predecessors upon the earth ever were,--"a
fellow-worker" with the Creator. He is a mighty _improver_ of creation.
We recognize that as improvement which adapts nature more thoroughly to
man's own necessities and wants, and renders it more pleasing both to
his sense of the æsthetic and to his more material senses also. He adds
to the beauty of the flowers which he takes under his charge,--to the
delicacy and fertility of the fruits; the seeds of the wild grasses
become corn beneath his care; the green herbs grow great of root or
bulb, or bulky and succulent of top and leaf; the wild produce of nature
_sports_ under his hand; the rose and lily broaden their disks and
multiply their petals; the harsh green crab swells out into a delicious
golden-rinded apple, streaked with crimson; the productions of his
kitchen garden, strangely metamorphosed to serve the uses of his table,
bear forms unknown to nature; an occult law of change and development
inherent to these organisms meets in him with the developing instinct
and ability, and they are regenerated under his surveillance. Nor is his
influence over many of the animals less marked. The habits which he
imparts to the parents become _nature_, in his behalf, in their
offspring. The dog acquires, under his tutelage, the virtues of fidelity
to a master and affection to a friend. The ox and horse learn to assist
him in the labors of the fields. The udders of the cow and goat distend
beneath his care far beyond the size necessary in the wild state, and
supply him with rich milk, and the other various products of the dairy.
The fleece of the sheep becomes finer of texture and longer of fibre in
his pens and folds; and even the indocile silkworm spins, in his
sheltered conservatories, and among the mulberry trees which he has
planted, a larger, and brighter, and more glistening cocoon. Man is the
great creature-worker of the world,--its one created being, that, taking
up the work of the adorable Creator, carries it on to higher results and
nobler developments, and finds a field for his persevering ingenuity and
skill in every province in which his Maker had expatiated before him. He
is evidently--to adopt and modify the remark of Oken--God's image
"manifest in the flesh."
Surveyed from the special point of view furnished by this peculiar
nature of man, unique in creation, all the past of our planet divides
into two periods;--the period, inclusive of every age known to the
geologist, during which only the Creator wrought; and the period during
which man has wrought, and to which all human history belongs. In such a
view we are presented with two sets of works,--those of the
Creator-worker, and those of the creature-worker; and the vast fund of
materials on which the natural theologian frames his arguments
demonstrative of design or contrivance, assumes a new significancy and
interest when employed as evidence that there exists a certain
correspondence of nature and intellect between the two workers, human
and Divine. The ability of accomplishing the same ends by the same
means,--in other words, of thinking and acting in the same practical
tract,--indicates a similarity, if not identity, of intellectual nature.
In the Chinese centre of civilization, for instance, printing,
gunpowder, the mariner's compass, with the various chemical and
mechanical arts of elegant life, were originated without concert with
the European centre of civilization, simply because in China, as in
Europe, the same human faculties, prompted by the same tastes and
necessities, had expatiated in the same tracts of invention, and had, as
a consequence, educed the same results. I was much struck, when spending
half an hour in a museum illustrative of the arts in China, by the
identity of these with our own, especially in the purely mechanical
departments; and again, when similarly employed in that apartment
devoted, in the British Museum, to the domestic utensils of the ancient
Egyptians. The identity of the more common contrivances which I
witnessed, with familiar contrivances in our own country, I regarded as
altogether as conclusive of an identity of mind in the individuals who
had originated them, as if I had actually seen human creatures at work
on them all. One class of productions showed me that the potter's wheel
and the turning lathe had been known and employed as certainly in China
and ancient Egypt as in Britain. Another, that their weaving processes
must have been nearly the same. The Chinese know, for instance, as well
as ourselves, that patterns can be delicately brought out,--as in the
damasks,--without the assistance of color, simply by exposing silken or
flaxen fibre at different angles to the light; and they have fallen, as
their work shows, on the right methods of producing it. And the
Egyptians anticipated us in even our most homely household contrivances.
They even fermented their bread and trussed their fowls after the same
fashion; and thus gave evidence, in these familiar matters, that they
thought and contrived "after the manner of men." Now, in acquainting
myself with the organisms of the geologic periods, I have been similarly
but more deeply impressed by what I must be permitted to term the
_human_ cast and character of the contrivances which they exemplified.
Not only could I understand the principles on which they were
constructed, but further, not a few of them had, I found, been actually
introduced into works of human invention ages ere they were discovered
in the rock. What the great Creator-worker had originated in the
Palæozoic and Secondary periods, had been in after times originated by
the little creature-worker, wholly unaware that his contrivance had been
anticipated, and was but a repetition of a previously executed design.
In the later geologic ages the organization of the various extinct
animals so nearly resembled that of the animals which still live, that
we may regard it as not inadequately represented by the illustrations of
Paley. A few such exceptional contrivances appear among the mammals of
the Tertiary as that formed by the huge pickaxe-like tusks of the
Dinotherium, or a few such extraordinary modifications of the ordinary
mammalian framework as that exhibited in the enormously massive pelvic
arches and hinder limbs of the Mylodon and Megatherium. But not until we
pass into the deposits of the Secondary period, and get among its
cephalopoda, do we find a mechanism altogether unlike any with which we
are acquainted among living organisms. As admirably shown by Buckland,
the partitions which separate into chambers all the whorls of the
ammonite except the outermost one, were exquisitely adapted to
strengthen, by the tortuous windings of their outer edges, a shell which
had to combine great lightness with great powers of resistance. Itself a
continuous arch throughout, it was supported by a series of continuous
arches inside, somewhat resembling in form the groined ribs of the
Gothic roof, but which, unlike the ponderous stone work of the mediæval
architects, were as light as they were strong. And to this combination
of arches there was added, in the ribs and grooves of the shell, yet
another element of strength,--that which has of late been introduced
into iron roofs, which, by means of their corrugations,--ribs and
grooves like those of the ammonite,--are made to span over wide spaces,
without the support of beams or rafters. Still more recently, the same
principle has been introduced into metallic boats, which, when
corrugated, like the old ammonites, are found to be sufficiently strong
to resist almost any degree of pressure without the wonted addition of
an interior framework. Similar evidences of design appear in the other
extinct molluscs peculiar to these geologic ages, such as the hamite
and turrilite. The belemnite seems to have united the principle of the
float to that of the sinker, as we see both united in some of our modern
life boats, which are steadied on their keel by one principle, and
preserved from foundering by the other; or as we find them united by the
boy in his mimic smack, which he hollows out and decks, in order to
render it sufficiently light, while at the same time he furnishes it
with a keel of lead, in order to render it sufficiently steady. The old
articulata abound in marks of ingenious mechanical contrivance. The
trilobites were covered over back and head with the most exquisitely
constructed plate armor: but as their abdomens seem to have been soft
and defenceless, they had the ability of coiling themselves round on the
approach of danger, plate moving on plate with the nicest adjustment,
till the rim of the armed tail rested on that of the armed head, and the
creature presented the appearance of a ball defended at every point. In
some genera, as in Calymene, the tail consisted of jointed segments till
its termination; in others, as in Illænus, there was a great caudal
shield, that in size and form corresponded to the shield which covered
the head; the segments of Calymene, from the flexibility of their
joints, fitted close to the cerebral rim; while the same effect was
produced in the inflexible shields, caudal and cephalic, of Illænus, by
their exact correspondence, and the flexibility of the connecting rings,
which enabled them to fit together like two equal-sized cymbals brought
into contact at every point by the hand. Nor were the ancient crinoids
less remarkable for the amount of nice contrivance which their
structures exhibited, than the ancient molluscs or crustaceans. In their
calyx-like bodies, consisting always of many parts, we find the
principle of the arch introduced in almost every possible form and
modification, and the utmost flexibility secured to their stony arms by
the amazing number of the pieces of which they were composed, and the
nice disposition of the joints. In the Pentacrinites of the Secondary
period (see Fig. 97) an immense spread of arms, about a thousand in
number, and composed of about a hundred thousand separate pieces, had
all the flexibility, though formed of solid lime, of a _drift_ of nets,
and yet were so nicely jointed, tooth fitting into tooth in all their
numerous parts, and the whole so bound together by ligament, that, with
all the flexibility, they had also all the toughness and tenacity, of
pieces of thread network. Human ingenuity, with the same purposes to
effect, that is, the sweeping of shoals of swimming animals into a
central receptacle, would probably construct a somewhat similar machine;
but it would take half a lifetime to execute one equally elaborate.
[Illustration: Fig. 94.
AMMONITES HUMPHRIESIANUS.
(_Oolite._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 95.
ENCRINITES MONILIFORMIS.
(_Trias._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 96.
CUPRESSOCRINUS CRASSUS.
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 97.[21]
PENTACRINUS FASCICULOSUS.
(_Lias._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 98.
_a_, CHAMFERED SCALES. (_Osteolepis._)
_b_, IMBRICATED SCALES. (_Glyptolepis._)
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
In carefully examining, for purposes of restoration, some of the
earliest ganoidal fishes, I was not a little impressed by the peculiar
mechanical contrivances exhibited in their largely developed dermal
skeletons. In some cases these contrivances were sufficiently simple,
resembling those which we find exemplified in the humbler trades,
originated in comparatively unenlightened ages; and yet their simplicity
had but the effect of rendering the peculiarly _human_ cast of the mind
exhibited in their production all the more obvious. The bony scales
which covered fishes such as the Osteolepis and Diplopterus of the Old
Red Sandstone, or the Megalichthys of the Coal Measures, were of
considerable mass and thickness. They could not, compatibly with much
nicety of finish, be laid over each other, like the thin horny scales of
the salmon or herring; and so we find them curiously fitted together,
not like slates on a modern roof, but like hewn stones on an ancient
one. There ran on the upper surface of each, along the anterior side and
higher end, a groove of a depth equal to half the thickness of the
scale; and along the posterior side and lower end, on the under surface,
a sort of bevelled chamfer, which, fitting into the grooves of the
scales immediately behind and beneath it, brought their surfaces to the
same line, and rendered the shining coverings of these strongly armed
ganoids as smooth and even as those of the most delicately coated fishes
of the present day. In the scales of the Celacanth family the
arrangement was different. Though exceedingly massive in some of the
genera, they were imbricated, like those of the Pangolins; and were
chiefly remarkable for the combination of contrivances which they
exhibited for securing the greatest possible amount of strength from the
least possible amount of thickness. The scales of _Holoptychius
giganteus_ may be selected as representative of those of the family to
which it belonged. It consisted of three plates, or rather, like the
human skull, of two solid plates, with a _diploe_ or spongy layer
between. The outer surface was curiously fretted into alternate ridges
and furrows; and hence the name of the genus,--_wrinkled scale_; and
these imparted to the exterior plate on which they occurred, and which
was formed of solid bone, the strength which results from a corrugated
or fluted surface. Cromwell, in commissioning a friend to send him a
helmet, shrewdly stipulated that it should be a "fluted pot;" and we
find that the Holoptychius had got the principle of the fluted pot
exemplified in the outer plate of each of its scales, untold ages
before. The spongy middle plate must, like the diploe of the skull, have
served to deaden the vibrations of a blow dealt from the outside. It was
a stratum of sand bags piled up in the middle of a plank rampart. Their
innermost table was formed, like the outer, of solid bone, but had a
different arrangement. It was properly not one, but several tables, in
each of which the osseous fibres, spread out in the general plane of
the scale, lay at a diverse angle from those of the table immediately in
contact with it. The principle was evidently that of the double-woven
cloth, or cloth of two incorporated layers, such as _moleskin_, in
which, from the arrangement of the threads, what a draper would term the
_tear_ of the one layer or fold lies at a different angle in the general
fabric from that of the other. We are thus presented, in a single fossil
scale little more than the eighth part of an inch in thickness, with
three distinct strengthening principles,--the principle of Cromwell's
"fluted pot,"--the principle of a rampart lined with plank, and filled
with sand bags in the centre,--and the principle of the double-woven
fabrics of the "moleskin" manufacturer.[22] The contrivances exemplified
in the cuirass of the Pterichthys were scarce less remarkable. It was
formed of bony plates, strongly arched above, but comparatively flat
beneath; and along both its anterior and posterior rims a sudden
thickening of the plates formed a massive band, which served to
strengthen the entire structure, as transverse ribs of stone are found
strengthening Gothic vaults of the Norman age. The scale covered tail of
the creature issued from within the posterior rim, which formed around
it a complete though irregular ring, arched above and depressed beneath;
whereas the anterior rim, to which the head was attached, was incomplete
when separated from it. It was, in its detached state, an arch wanting
the keystone. A keystone, however, projected outwards from the occipital
plate of the head; and, as it had to form at once the bond of
connection between the cerebral armature of the creature and its
cuirass, and to complete the arch formed by the strengthening belt or
rib of the latter, it curiously combined the principle of both the
dovetail of the carpenter and the keystone of the mason. Viewed from
above, it was a dovetail, forming a strong attachment of the head to the
body; viewed in the transverse section, it was an efficient keystone,
that gave solidity and strength to the arched belt or rib. Both keystone
and dovetail are comparatively simple contrivances; but I know not that
they have been united in the same piece, save in the very ancient
instance furnished by the strong bony plate which connected the helmet
of the Pterichthys with its cuirass.
[Illustration: Fig. 99.
SCALE OF HOLOPTYCHIUS GIGANTEUS.
(Nat. size.)
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 100.
SECTION OF SCALE OF HOLOPTYCHIUS.
(Mag. eight diameters.)]
A brief anecdote, yet further illustrative of the framework of this
ancient ganoid, may throw some additional light on what I have ventured
to term the _human_ cast of the contrivances exhibited in the organisms
of the old geologic ages. After carefully examining many specimens, I
published a restoration of both the upper and under side of Pterichthys
fully fifteen years ago. The greatest of living ichthyologists, however,
misled by a series of specimens much less complete than mine, differed
from me in my conclusions; and what I had represented as the creature's
under or abdominal side, he represented as its upper or dorsal side;
while its actual upper side he regarded as belonging to another, though
closely allied, genus. I had no opportunity, as he resided on the
Continent at the time, of submitting to him the specimens on which I had
founded; though, at once certain of his thorough candor and love of
truth, and of the solidity of my data, I felt confident that, in order
to alter his decision, it was but necessary that I should submit to him
my evidence. Meanwhile, however, the case was regarded as settled
against me; and I found at least one popular and very ingenious writer
on geology, after referring to my description of the Pterichthys, going
on to say that, though graphic, it was not correct, and that he himself
could describe it at least more truthfully, if not more vividly, than I
had done. And then there followed a description identical with that by
which mine had been supplanted. Five years had passed, when one day our
greatest British authority on fossil fishes, Sir Philip Egerton, was
struck, when passing an hour among the ichthyic organisms of his
princely collection, by the appearance presented by a central plate in
the cuirass of the Pterichthys. It is of a lozenge form, and, occupying
exactly such a place in the nether armature of the creature as that
occupied by the lozenge shaped spot on the ace of diamonds, it comes in
contact with four other plates that lie around it, and represent, so to
speak, the white portions of the card. And Sir Philip now found, that
instead of lying over, it lay under, the four contiguous plates: they
overlapped it, instead of being overlapped by it. This, he at once said,
on ascertaining the fact, cannot be the _upper_ side of the Pterichthys.
A plate so arranged would have formed no proper protection to the
exposed dorsal surface of the creature's body, as a slight blow would
have at once sent it in upon the interior framework; but a proper enough
one to the under side of a heavy swimmer, that, like the flat fishes,
kept close to the bottom;--a character which, as shown by the massive
bulk of its body, and its small spread of fin, must have belonged to the
Pterichthys. Sir Philip followed up his observations on the central
plate by a minute examination of the other parts of the creature's
armature; and the survey terminated in a recognition of the earlier
restoration,--set aside so long before,--as virtually the true one;--a
recognition in which Agassiz, when made acquainted with the nature of
the evidence, at once acquiesced. Now, here was there a question which
had been raised regarding the true mechanism of one of the oldest
ganoidal fishes, and settled erroneously on wrong data, again opened up,
to be settled anew on one of the most obvious mechanical principles
exemplified in the simple art of the slater or tiler. The argument of
Sir Philip amounted simply to this:--If the accepted restoration be a
true one, then the Creator of the Pterichthys must have committed a
mistake in mechanics which an ordinary slater would have avoided; but as
the Creator commits no such blunders, the mistake probably occurs in but
the restoration. I may mention, that the dorsal surface of this ancient
fish had also its central plate,--a lozenge truncated at its two longer
ends; and that, moulded to meet the necessities of its position, it was
not flat, like the under one, but strongly arched; and that on four of
its six sides it overrode by a squamose suture the lower plates with
which it came in contact.
These are but humble illustrations of the designing principle, as
exhibited of old; and yet they impress none the less strongly on that
account. Among the many contrivances of the Chinese Museum, to which I
have already referred, none seemed more to excite the curiosity of
visitors than a set of tall-backed, elaborately carved chairs,
exceedingly like those which were used in our own country two centuries
ago, and which Cowper so exquisitely describes. For thousands of miles
in the wide tract that spreads out between European Christendom and the
great wall, the inhabitants squat upon mats or carpets, or loll on
divans; and the contrivance of the chair is unknown: it reappears in
China, however, and reappears, not as a mere seat or stool, but as, in
every bar and limb, the identical chair of Europe arrested a century or
two back in its development. And every corresponding tenon and mortise
exhibited by the Chinese and European examples of this simple piece of
furniture served more forcibly to show an identity of character in the
minds which had originated them in countries so far apart, than the more
elaborate contrivances which, though illustrative of the same principles
of invention, were less easily understood. It is so with the more simple
and familiar instances of adaptation furnished by the works of the
Creator. We infer from them, more directly than from the complex
mechanisms, that he who wrought of old after the manner of a man must
have, in his intellectual character, if I may so express myself, certain
man-like qualities and traits. In all those works on Natural Theology
that treat, like the work of Paley, on the argument of design, the
assumption of a certain unity of the intellectual nature of the Creator
and creature is made, tacitly at least, the basis of all the reasonings;
and it is in the cases in which the design is most simple that the
argument is most generally understood. It is in the lower _skirts_ of
the Divine nature that we most readily trace the resemblance to the
nature of man,--an effect, mayhap, of the narrow reach of our faculties
in their present infantile state.
[Illustration: Fig. 101.
SIGILLARIA GROESERI
(_Coal Measures._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 102.
Fig. 103. Fig. 104.
WHORLED SHELLS OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.[23]]
But the resemblance is not restricted to the constructive department.
Both in the Chinese collection and among the Egyptian antiquities
exhibited in the British Museum, I found color as certainly as
mechanical contrivance. And the color furnished not only a practical
example from both the early and the remote peoples of the same sort of
chemical science as exists at the present time among ourselves in our
dyeworks and pigment manufactories, but it also showed a certain
identity with our own of their sense of beauty. The Chinese satins are
gorgeous with green, blue, yellow, scarlet, crimson, and purple, and
have fringes heavy with thread of gold. Gilding is as common among this
distant people as among ourselves, and at once shows a familiarity with
the art of the gold beater, and a sensibility to the beauty of a golden
surface; and in the painted ornaments I detected the rich tints of
vermilion and crimson lake, with the mineral blues, yellows, and greens.
In the Egyptian department, though the blanching influences of three
thousand years had dimmed the tints and tarnished the metals, I found
evidence of the same regard to hue and lustre as exists still in China
and among ourselves; all that now pleases the eye in London and Pekin
had pleased it in Thebes during the times of the earlier Pharaohs. And
just as we infer from the mechanical contrivances of the Creative-Worker
that he possesses a certain identity of mind in the _constructive_
department with his creature-workers, and this upon the principle on
which we infer an identity of mind between the creature-workers of
China, ancient Egypt, and our own country, seeing that their works are
identical, must we not also infer, on the same principle, that he
possesses in the _æsthetic_ department a certain identity with them
also. True, this region of the beautiful, ever surrounded by an
atmosphere of obscure, ill-settled metaphysics, is greatly less clear
than that mechanical province of whose various machines, whether of
Divine or human contrivance, it can be at least affirmed that machines
they _are_, and that they effect their purposes by contrivances of the
same or of resembling kinds. And yet the appearance in nature, age after
age, of the same forms and colors of beauty which man, in gratifying his
taste for the lovely in shape and hue, is ever reproducing for himself,
does seem to justify our inference of an identity of mind in this
province also. The colors of the old geologic organisms, like those of
the paintings of ancient Egypt, are greatly faded. A few, however, of
the Secondary, and even Palæozoic shells, still retain the rich
prismatic hues of the original nacre. Many of the Tertiary division
still bear the distinctive painted spots. Some of the later fossil
fishes, when first laid open in the rock, exhibit the pearly gleam that
must of old have lighted up the green depths of the water as they darted
through. Not a few of the fossil corals preserve enough of their former
color to impart much delicacy of tint to the marbles in which they
occur. But it is chiefly in form, not in shade or hue, that we find in
the organisms of the geologic ages examples of that beauty in which man
delights, and which he is ever reproducing for himself. There is scarce
an architectural ornament of the Gothic or Grecian styles which may not
be found existing as fossils in the rocks. The Ulodendron was sculptured
into gracefully arranged rows of pointed and closely imbricated leaves,
similar to those into which the Roman architects fretted the torus of
the Corinthian order. The Sigillaria were fluted columns ornately
carved in the line of the channelled flutes; the Lepidodendra bore,
according to their species, sculptured scales, or lozenges, or egg-like
hollows, set in a sort of frame, and relieved into knobs and furrows;
all of them furnishing examples of a delicate diaper work, like that so
admired in our more ornate Gothic buildings, such as Westminster Abbey,
or Canterbury and Chichester Cathedrals, only greatly more exquisite in
their design and finish. The scroll shells, a very numerous section of
the class in the earlier ages, such as Maclurea, Euomphalus, Clymenia,
and the great family of the ammonites, were volutes of varying
proportions, but not less graceful than the ornament of similar
proportions so frequently introduced into Greek and Roman architecture,
and of which we have such prominent examples in the capitals of the
Ionic, Corinthian, and composite orders. In what is known as the modern
Ionic the spiral of the volute is not all on one plane; it is a
Euomphalus: in the central volutes of the Corinthian the spiral is an
open one; it is a Lituite or Gyroceras: in the ancient Ionic it is
either wholly flat, as in Planorbus or the upper side of Maclurea, or
slightly relieved, as in the ammonites. There is no form of the volute
known to the architect which may not be found in the rocks, but there
are many forms in the rocks unknown to the architect. Nor are the
spire-like shells (see Fig. 105) less remarkable for the rich and varied
style of their ornamentation than the whorled ones. They are spires,
pinnacles, turrets, broaches; ornate, in some instances, beyond the
reach of the architect, and illustrative, in almost all, of his happiest
forms and proportions. We detect among the fossils the germs of numerous
designs developed in almost every department of art; but merely to
enumerate them would require a volume. One form of the old classic lamp
was that of the nautilus; another, that of _Gyphæa incurva_; the zigzag
mouldings of the Norman Gothic may be found in the carinated oysters of
the Greensand; the more delicate frettings of similar form which
roughened the pillars of a somewhat later age occur on Conularia and the
dorsal spines of Gyracanthus. The old corals, too, abound in ornamental
patterns, which man, unaware of their existence at the time, devised
long after for himself. In an article on calico printing, which forms
part of a recent history of Lancashire, there are a few of the patterns
introduced, backed by the recommendation that they were the most
successful ever tried. Of one of these, known as "Lane's Net," there
sold a greater number of pieces than of any other pattern ever brought
into the market. It led to many imitations; and one of the most popular
of these answers line for line, save that it is more stiff and
rectilinear, to the pattern in a recently discovered Old Red Sandstone
coral, the _Smithia Pengellyi_. The beautifully arranged lines which so
smit the dames of England, that each had to provide herself with a gown
of the fabric which they adorned, had been stamped amid the rocks _eons_
of ages before. And it must not be forgotten, that all these forms and
shades of beauty which once filled all nature, but of which only a few
fragments, or a few faded tints, survive, were created, not to gratify
man's love of the æsthetic, seeing that man had no existence until long
after they had disappeared, but in meet harmony with the tastes and
faculties of the Divine Worker, who had in his wisdom produced them all.
[Illustration: Fig. 105.
MURCHISONIA BIGRANULOSA.
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 106.
CONULARIA ORNATA.
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 107.
CALICO PATTERN.
(_Manchester._)]
[Illustration: Fig. 108.
SMITHIA PENGELLYI.
(_Old Red Sandstone._)]
You will, I trust, bear with me should I seek, in depths where the light
shed by science becomes obscure, to guide my steps by light derived from
another and wholly different source. In an assembly such as that which I
have now the honor of addressing, there must be many shades of religious
opinion. I shall, however, assail no man's faith, but simply lay before
you a few deductions which, founded on my own, have supplied me with
what I deem a consistent theory of the curious class of phenomena with
which this evening we have been mainly dealing. First, then, I must hold
that we receive the true explanation of the _man_-like character of the
Creator's workings ere man was, in the remarkable text in which we are
told that "God made man in his own image and likeness." There is no
restriction here to moral quality: the moral image man had, and in large
measure lost; but the intellectual image he still retains. As a
geometrician, as an arithmetician, as a chemist, as an astronomer,--in
short, in all the departments of what are known as the strict
sciences,--man differs from his Maker, not in kind, but in degree,--not
as matter differs from mind, or darkness from light, but simply as a
mere portion of space or time differs from _all_ space or _all_ time. I
have already referred to mechanical contrivances as identically the same
in the Divine and human productions; nor can I doubt that, not only in
the pervading sense of the beautiful in form and color which it is our
privilege as men in some degree to experience and possess, but also in
that perception of harmony which constitutes the _musical_ sense, and in
that poetic feeling of which Scripture furnishes us with at once the
earliest and the highest examples, and which we may term the _poetic_
sense, we bear the stamp and impress of the Divine image. Now, if this
be so, we must look upon the schemes of Creation, Revelation, and
Providence, not as schemes of mere adaptation to man's nature, but as
schemes also specially adapted to the nature of God as the pattern and
original nature. Further, it speaks, I must hold, of the harmony and
unity of one sublime scheme, that, after long ages of immaturity,--after
the dynasties of the fish, the reptile, and the mammal should in
succession have terminated,--man should have at length come upon the
scene in the image of God; and that, at a still later period, God
himself should have come upon the scene in the form of man; and that
thus all God's workings in creation should be indissolubly linked to God
himself, not by any such mere likeness or image of the Divinity as that
which the first Adam bore, but by Divinity itself in the Second Adam; so
that on the rainbow-encircled apex of the pyramid of created being the
Son of God and the Son of Man should sit enthroned forever in one
adorable person. That man should have been made in the image of God
seems to have been a meet preparation for God's after assumption of the
form of man. It was perhaps thus secured that _stock_ and _graft_, if I
may venture on such a metaphor, should have the necessary affinity, and
be capable of being united in a single person. The false gods of the
Egyptians assumed, it was fabled, the forms of brutes: it was the human
form and nature that was assumed by the true God;--so far as we know,
the only form and nature that could have brought him into direct union
with at once the matter and mind of the universe which he had created
and made,--with "true body and reasonable soul." Yet further, I learn by
inevitable inference from one of the more distinctive articles of my
creed, that as certainly as the dynasty of the fish was predetermined in
the scheme of Providence to be succeeded by the higher dynasty of the
reptile, and that of the reptile by the still higher dynasty of the
mammal, so it was equally predetermined that the dynasty of responsible,
fallible man should be succeeded by the dynasty of glorified, immortal
man; and that, in consequence, the present mixed state of things is not
a mere result, as some theologians believe, of a certain human act which
was perpetrated about six thousand years ago, but was, virtually at
least, the effect of a God-determined decree, old as eternity,--a decree
in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme. In
looking abroad on that great history of life, of which the latter
portions are recorded in the pages of revelation, and the earlier in the
rocks, I feel my grasp of a doctrine first taught me by our Calvinistic
Catechism at my mother's knee, tightening instead of relaxing. "The
decrees of God are his eternal purposes," I was told, "according to the
counsel of his will, whereby for his own glory he hath foreordained
whatsoever comes to pass." And what I was told early I still believe.
The programme of Creation and Providence, in all its successive periods,
is of God, not of man. With the arrangements of the old geologic
periods it is obvious man could have had nothing to do: the primeval
ages of wondrous plants and monster animals ran their course without
counsel taken of him; and in reading their record in the bowels of the
earth, and in learning from their strange characters that such ages
there were, and what they produced, we are the better enabled to
appreciate the impressive directness of the sublime message to Job, when
the "Lord answered him out of the whirlwind, and said, Where wast thou
when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast
understanding." And I can as little regard the present scene of things
as an ultimate consequence of what man had willed or wrought, as even
any of the pre-Adamic ages. It is simply one scene in a foreordained
series,--a scene intermediate in place between the age of the
irresponsible mammal and of glorified man; and to provide for the upward
passage to the ultimate state, we know that, in reference to the
purposes of the Eternal, he through whom the work of restoration has
been effected was in reality what he is designated in the remarkable
text, "The Lamb slain from the _foundations_ of the world." First in the
course of things, man in the image of God, and next, in meet sequence,
God in the form of man, have been equally from all eternity
predetermined actors in the same great scheme.
I approach a profound and terrible mystery. We can see how in the
pre-Adamic ages higher should have succeeded lower dynasties. To be low
was not to be immoral; to be low was not to be guilt-stained and
miserable. The sea anemone on its half-tide rock, and the fern on its
mossy hill-side, are low in their respective kingdoms; but they are,
notwithstanding, worthy, in their quiet, unobtrusive beauty, of the God
who formed them. It is only when the human period begins that we are
startled and perplexed by the problem of a lowness not innocent,--an
inferiority tantamount to moral deformity. In the period of
responsibility, to be low means to be evil; and how, we ask, could a
lowness and inferiority resolvable into moral evil have had any place in
the decrees of that Judge who ever does what is right, and in whom moral
evil can have no place? The subject is one which it seems not given to
man thoroughly to comprehend. Permit me, however, to remark in reply,
that in a sense so plain, so obvious, so unequivocally true, that it
would lead an intelligent jury, impannelled in the case, conscientiously
to convict, and a wise judge righteously to condemn, all that is evil in
the present state of things man may as certainly have wrought out for
himself, as the criminals whom we see sentenced at every justiciary
court work out for themselves the course of punishment to which they are
justly subjected.
It has been well said of the Author of all by the poet, that, "binding
nature fast in fate," he "left free the human will." And it is this
freedom or independency of will operating on an intellect moulded after
the image and likeness of the Divinity that has rendered men capable of
being what the Scriptures so emphatically term "fellow-workers with
God." In a humble and restricted sense, as I have already
remarked,--humble and restricted, but in that restricted sense obviously
true,--the surface of the earth far and wide testifies to this fact of
fellowship in working. The deputed lord of creation, availing himself of
God's natural laws, does what no mere animal of the old geologic ages
ever did, or ever could have done,--he adorns and beautifies the earth,
and adds tenfold to its original fertility and productiveness. In this
special sense, then, he is a fellow-worker with Him who, according to
the Psalmist, "causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for
the service of man, and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil
that maketh his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's
heart." But it is in a greatly higher sense, and in reference to God's
moral laws, that he is fitted to be his fellow-worker in the Scriptural
sense. And his proper employment in this department is the elevation and
development, moral and intellectual, of himself and his fellow-men, both
in adaptation to the demands of the present time, and in preparation for
a future state.
All experience, however, serves to show that in this paramount
department man greatly fails; nay, that he is infinitely less true to
his proper end and destiny than the beasts that perish to their several
instincts. And yet it may be remarked, that such of the lower animals as
are guided by pure instinct are greatly more infallible within their
proper spheres than the higher, half-reasoning animals. The mathematical
bee never constructs a false angle; the sagacious dog is not
unfrequently _out_ in his calculations. The higher the animal in the
scale, the greater its liability to error. But it is not the less true,
that no fish, no reptile, no mammal, of the geologic or the recent ages,
ever so failed in working out the purposes it was created to serve, as
man has failed in working out _his_; further, in no creature save in man
does there exist that war of the mind between appetite and duty of which
the Apostle so consciously complained. And we must seek an explanation
of these twin facts in that original freedom of the will which, while it
rendered man capable of being _of choice_ God's fellow-worker, also
conferred on him an ability of choosing _not_ to work with God. And his
choice of not working with him, or of working against him, being once
freely made, we may see how, from man's very constitution and nature, as
an intelligence united to matter that increases his kind from generation
to generation in virtue of the original law, the ability of again
working with God might be forever destroyed. And thus man's general
condition as a lapsed creature may be as unequivocally a consequence of
man's own act, as the condition of individuals born free, but doomed to
slavery in punishment of their offences, is a consequence of _their_ own
acts. A brief survey of the many-colored and variously-placed human
family, as at present distributed on the earth, may enable us in some
degree to conceive of a matter which, involving, as it does, that master
problem of moral science, the origin of evil, seems, as I have said, not
to be given to man fully to comprehend.
"The different races of mankind," says Humboldt, employing, let me
remark, the language of the distinguished German naturalist Müller, to
give expression to the view which he himself adopts,--"the different
races of mankind are not different species of a genus, but forms of one
sole species." "The human species," says Cuvier, "appears to be single."
"When we compare," says Pritchard, "all the facts and observations which
have been heretofore fully established as to the specific instincts and
separate psychical endowments of all the distinct tribes of sentient
beings in the universe, we are entitled to draw confidently the
conclusion, that all human races are of one species and one family."
"God hath made of one blood," said the Apostle Paul, in addressing
himself to the _élite_ of Athens, "all nations, for to dwell on the face
of all the earth." Such, on this special head, is the testimony of
Revelation, and such the conclusion of our highest scientific
authorities. The question has, indeed, been raised in these latter
times, whether each species of animals may not have been originally
created, not by single pairs or in single centres, but by several pairs
and in several centres, and, of course, the human species among the
rest? And the _query_,--for in reality it amounts to nothing more,--has
been favorably entertained on the other side of the Atlantic. On purely
scientific grounds it is of course difficult to prove a negative in the
case, just as it would be difficult to prove a negative were the
question to be, whether the planet Venus was not composed of quartz
rock, or the planet Mars of Old Red Sandstone? But the portion of the
problem really solvable by science,--the identity of the human race
under all its conditions, and in all its varieties,--science _has_
solved. It has determined that all the various tribes of man are but
forms of a single species. And in the definition of species,--waiving
the American _doubt_ until it shall at least become something more,--I
am content to follow the higher authorities. "We unite," says M. de
Candolle, "under the designation of a _species_, all those individuals
that mutually bear to each other so close a resemblance as to allow of
our supposing that they may have proceeded originally from a single
being or a single pair." "A _species_," says Buffon, "is a constant
succession of individuals similar to and capable of reproducing each
other." "A _species_," says Cuvier, "is a succession of individuals
which reproduces and perpetuates itself."
Now, all history and all tradition, so far as they throw light on the
question at all, agree in showing that the centre in which the human
species originated must have been somewhere in the temperate regions of
the East, not far distant from the Caucasian group of mountains. All the
old seats of civilization,--that of Nineveh, Babylon, Palestine, Egypt,
and Greece,--are spread out around this centre. And it is certainly a
circumstance worthy of notice, and surely not without bearing on the
_physical_ condition of primeval humanity, that in this centre we find a
variety of the species which naturalists of the highest standing regard
as fundamentally typical of the highest races of the globe. "The
natives of the Caucasus," says Cuvier, "are even now considered as the
handsomest on earth." And wherever man has, if I may so speak, _fallen_
least,--wherever he has retained, at least intellectually, the Divine
image,--this Caucasian type of feature and figure, with, of course,
certain national modifications, he also retains. It was developed in a
remarkable degree among the old Greeks, as may be seen from the busts of
some of their handsomer men; and still more remarkably in their _beau
ideal_ of beauty, as exemplified in the statues of their gods. We see it
also, though dashed with a shade of severity, in the strong forms and
stern features of monarchs that reigned of old in Nineveh and Babylon,
as brought to light in their impressive effigies by the excavations of
Rawlinson and Layard. And further, though somewhat modified by the
African dash, we detect it in the colossal statues of Egypt. Nor, as
shown by Egyptian paintings still fresh in color and outline, was it
less traceable in the ancient Jewish countenance and figure. It is still
palpable, too, amid all the minor peculiarities of national physiognomy,
in the various peoples of Europe. We may see it in our own country,
though, as Sir Walter Scott truly tells us,--
"The rugged form may mark the mountain band,
And harsher features and a mien more grave."
It walks, however, the boards of our Parliament House here in a very
respectable type of Caucasian man; and all agree that nowhere else in
modern Europe is it to be found more true to its original contour than
among the high-bred aristocracy of England, especially among the female
members of the class. Looking, then, at the entire evidence,--at the
admitted fact that the Circassians of the present day are an eminently
handsome people,--that the old Greeks, Ninevites, Egyptians, Jews,
Romans, and with these all the modern nations of Europe, are but the
varieties of the central race that have retained in greatest perfection
the original traits,--I do not see how we are to avoid the conclusion
that this Caucasian type was the type of Adamic man. Adam, the father of
mankind, was no squalid savage of doubtful humanity, but a noble
specimen of man; and Eve a soft Circassian beauty, but exquisitely
lovely beyond the lot of fallen humanity.
"The loveliest pair
That ever yet in love's embraces met:
Adam, the goodliest man of men since born
His sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve."
I know not whether I should add what follows. It has been said that
Luke, the "beloved physician," was also a painter. It has been said that
that traditionary, time-honored form, which we at once recognize in the
pictures of the old masters as that of the Saviour of mankind, he in
reality bore when he walked this earth in the flesh. I know not what
degree of probability attaches to the belief. I know not whether the
traditionary form be in reality the true one. This, however, I know,
that _if_ such was the form which the adorable Redeemer assumed when he
took to himself a real body and a reasonable soul, the second Adam, like
the first, exemplified, when upon earth, the perfect type of Caucasian
man.
Let me next remark, that the further we remove from the original centre
of the race, the more degraded and sunk do we find the several varieties
of humanity. We must set wholly aside, in our survey, the disturbing
element of modern emigration. Caucasian man has been pressing outwards.
In the backwoods of America, in Southern Africa, in Australia, and in
the Polynesian islands, the old Adamic type has been asserting its
superiority, and annihilating before it the degraded races. But taking
into account merely the aboriginal varieties, it seems to be a general
rule, that the further we remove in any direction from the Adamic
centre, the more animalized and sunk do we find the various tribes or
races. Contrary to the conceptions of the assertors of the development
hypothesis, we ascertain, as we proceed outwards, that the course is not
one of progression from the low to the high, but of descent from the
high to the low. Passing northwards, we meet, where the lichen-covered
land projects into the frozen ocean, with the diminutive Laps, squat,
ungraceful, with their flat features surmounted by pyramidal skulls of
small capacity, and, as a race, unfitted for the arts either of peace or
war. We meet also with the timid Namollas, with noses so flat as to be
scarce visible in the women and children of the race; and with the
swarthy Kamtschatkans, with their broad faces, protuberant bellies, and
thin, ill-formed legs. Passing southwards, we come to the negro tribes,
with their sooty skins, broad noses, thick lips, projecting jawbones,
and partially-webbed fingers. And then we find ourselves among the
squalid Hottentots, repulsively ugly, and begrimmed with filth; or the
still more miserable Bushmen. Passing eastwards, after taking leave of
the Persian and Indian branches of the Caucasian race, we meet with the
squat Mongolian, with his high cheek bones set on a broad face, and his
compressed, unintellectual, pig-like eyes; or encounter, in the Indian
Archipelago or the Australian interior, the pitiably low Alforian races,
with their narrow, retreating foreheads, slim, feeble limbs, and
baboon-like faces. Or, finally, passing westward, we find the
large-jawed, copper-colored Indians of the New World, vigorous in some
of the northern tribes as animals, though feeble as men, but gradually
sinking in southern America, as among the wild Caribs or spotted
Araucans; till at the extremity of the continent we find, naked and
shivering among their snows, the hideous, small-eyed, small-limbed,
flat-headed Fuegians, perhaps the most wretched of human creatures. And
all these varieties of the species, in which we find humanity "fallen,"
according to the poet, "into disgrace," are varieties that have lapsed
from the original Caucasian type. They are all the descendants of man as
God created him; but they do not exemplify man as God created him. They
do not represent, save in hideous caricature, the glorious creature
moulded of old by the hand of the Divine Worker. They are
fallen,--degraded; many of them, as races, hopelessly lost. For all
experience serves to show, that when a tribe of men falls beneath a
certain level, it cannot come into competition with civilized man,
pressing outwards from his old centres to possess the earth, without
becoming extinct before him. Sunk beneath a certain level, as in the
forests of America, in Van Dieman's Land, in New South Wales, and among
the Bushmen of the Cape, the experience of more than a hundred years
demonstrates that its destiny is extinction,--not restoration.
Individuals may be recovered by the labors of some zealous missionary;
but it is the fate of the race, after a few generations, to disappear.
It has fallen too hopelessly low to be restored. There remain curious
traces in the New World of these perished tribes. The Bible, translated
into an old Indian language, from which the devoted David Brainerd
taught so successfully a nation of Red Men, still exists; but it speaks
in a dead tongue, which no one can now understand; for the nation to
whom he preached has become extinct. And Humboldt tells us, in referring
to a perished tribe of South America, that there lived in 1806, when he
visited their country, an old parrot in Maypures, which could not be
understood, because, as the natives informed him, it spoke the language
of the Atures. Tribes of the aborigines of Australia have wholly
disappeared during the present generation; and I remember seeing it
stated in a newspaper paragraph, which appeared a few years ago, that
the last male survivor of the natives of Tasmania was at that time in
the latter stages of consumption.
But if man, in at least the more degraded varieties of the race, be so
palpably _not_ what the Creator originally made him, by whom, then, was
he made the poor lost creature which in these races we find him to be?
He was made what he is, I reply, by man himself; and this, in many
instances, by a process which we may see every day taking place among
ourselves in individuals and families, though happily, not in races.
Man's nature again,--to employ the condensed statement of the poet,--has
been bound fast in fate, but his will has been left free. He is free
either to resign himself to the indolence and self-indulgence so natural
to the species; or, "spurning delights, to live laborious days;"--free
either to sink into ignorant sloth, dependent uselessness, and
self-induced imbecility, bodily and mental, or to assert by honest labor
a noble independence,--to seek after knowledge as for hidden treasures,
and, in the search, to sharpen his faculties and invigorate his mind.
And while we see around us some men addressing themselves with stout,
brave hearts to what Carlyle terms, with homely vigor, their "heavy job
of work," and, by denying themselves many an insidious indulgence, doing
it effectually and well, and rearing up well-taught families in
usefulness and comfort, to be the stay of the future, we see other men
yielding to the ignoble solicitations of appetite or of indolence, and
becoming worse than useless themselves, and the parents of ignorant,
immoral, and worse than useless families. The wandering vagrants of
Great Britain at the present time have been estimated at from fifteen to
twenty thousand souls; the hereditary paupers of England,--a vastly
more numerous class,--have become, in a considerable degree, a sept
distinct from the general community; and in all our large towns there
are certain per centages of the population,--unhappily ever increasing
per centages,--that, darkened in mind and embruted in sentiment, are
widely recognized as emphatically the dangerous classes of the
community. And let us remember that we are witnessing in these instances
no new thing in the history of the species: every period since that of
the vagabond Cain has had its waifs and stragglers, who fell behind in
the general march. In circumstances such as obtained in the earlier ages
of the human family, all the existing nomades and paupers of our country
would have passed into distinct races of men. For in the course of a few
generations their forms and complexions would begin to tell of the
self-induced degradation that had taken place in their minds; and in a
few ages more they would have become permanent varieties of the species.
There are cases in which not more than from two to three centuries have
been found sufficient thoroughly to alter the original physiognomy of a
race. "On the plantation of Ulster in 1611, and afterwards, on the
success of the British against the rebels in 1641 and 1689," says a
shrewd writer of the present day, himself an Irishman, "great multitudes
of the native Irish were driven from Armagh and the south of Down, into
the mountainous tract extending from the Barony of Fleurs eastward to
the sea; on the other side of the kingdom the same race were exposed to
the worst effects of hunger and ignorance, the two great brutalizers of
the human race. The descendants of these exiles are now distinguished
physically by great degradation. They are remarkable for open,
projecting mouths, with prominent teeth and exposed gums; and their
advancing cheek bones and depressed noses bear barbarism on their very
front. In Sligo and northern Mayo the consequences of the two centuries
of degradation and hardship exhibit themselves in the whole physical
condition of the people, affecting not only the features, but the frame.
Five feet two inches on an average,--pot-bellied, bow-legged, abortively
featured, their clothing a wisp of rags,--these spectres of a people
that were once well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, stalk abroad into
the daylight of civilization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness
and Irish want."
Such is man as man himself has made him,--not man as he came from the
hand of the Creator. In many instances the degradation has been
voluntary; in others it has been forced upon families and races by the
iron hand of oppression; in almost all,--whether self-chosen by the
parents or imposed upon them,--the children and the children's children
have, as a matter of inevitable necessity, been born to it. For,
whatever we may think of the Scriptural doctrine on this special head,
it is a fact broad and palpable in the economy of nature, that parents
_do_ occupy a federal position; and that the lapsed progenitors, when
cut off from civilization and all external interference of a missionary
character, become the founders of a lapsed race. The iniquities of the
parents are visited upon the children. And in all such instances it is
_man_ left to the freedom of his own will that is the deteriorator of
man. The doctrine of the Fall, in its purely theologic aspect, is a
doctrine which must be apprehended by faith; but it is at least
something to find that the analogies of science, instead of running
counter to it, run in exactly the same line. It is one of the inevitable
consequences of that nature of man which the Creator "bound fast in
fate," while he left free his will, that the free will of the parent
should become the destiny of the child.
But the subject is one in which we can see our way as but "through a
glass darkly." Nay, it is possible that the master problem which it
involves no created intelligence can thoroughly unlock. It has been well
said, that the "poet's heart" is informed by a "terrible sagacity;" and
I am at times disposed to regard Milton's conception of the perplexity
of the fallen spirits, when reasoning on "fixed fate, free will,
foreknowledge absolute," and finding "no end in wandering mazes lost,"
much rather as a sober truth caught from the invisible world, than as
merely an ingenious fancy. The late Robert Montgomery has rather
unhappily chosen Satan as one of the themes of his muse; and in his long
poem, designated in its second title "Intellect without God," he has set
that personage a-reasoning in a style which, I fear, more completely
demonstrates the absence of God than the presence of intellect. It has,
however, sometimes occurred to me, that a poet of the larger calibre,
who to the Divine faculty and vision added such a knowledge of geologic
science as that which Virgil possessed of the Natural History of his
time, or as that which Milton possessed of the general learning of
_his_, might find, in a somewhat similar subject, the materials of a
poem which "posterity would not willingly let die." There is one of the
satirists justly severe on a class of critics
"Who, drily plain, without invention's aid,
Write dull receipts how poems may be made."
But at some risk of rendering myself obnoxious to his censure, I shall
attempt indicating at least the general scope and character of what the
schoolmen might term a _possible_ poem; which, if vivified by the genius
of some of the higher masters of the lyre, broad of faculty, and at once
great poets and great men, might prove one precious boon more to the
world, suited, conformably to the special demands of these latter times,
to
"assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."
There has been war among the intelligences of God's spiritual creation.
Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen like fire from heaven; and our
present earth, existing as a half-extinguished hell, has received him
and his angels. Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits
vitality exists; but not yet in all the universe of God has the vitality
been united to the matter; animal life, to even the profound
apprehension of the fallen angel, is an inconceivable idea. Meanwhile,
as the scarce reckoned centuries roll by, vacantly and dull, like the
cheerless days and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the
miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there is a slow
change taking place in the condition of their prison-house. Where a low,
dark archipelago of islands raise their flat backs over the thermal
waters, the heat glows less intensely than of old; the red fire bursts
forth less frequently; the dread earthquake shakes more rarely; save in
a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no longer boils like a
pot; and though the heavens are still shut out by a gray ceiling of
thick vapor, through which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy
twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls
more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes
a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that
God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto
verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are
creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery
of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest
intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All
Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in
which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange
wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen
spirit--profound and active beyond the lot of humanity--would have found
ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly
asking what these strange things might mean.
With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed
creation,--as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,--must not
that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine
Worker,--scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the
inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to
depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately
to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the
chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with
him, how thoroughly must he not have seen, and with what bitter
malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and
that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his
powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained
an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had
rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically
spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the
quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know!
"Shall he that coutendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that
reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or
canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?" With what wild
thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the
tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter
mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their
sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth,
barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of
plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away,
and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land
rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean,--how, when looking back
upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been,
the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the
features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds,--how must
he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening,
and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by
the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence,--how
must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner
mysteries of animal life, with their strange prophecies, the truth had
at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast
coming to the birth,--man, the moral agent,--man, the ultimate work and
end of creation,--man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals,
vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior
animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy
have quickened,--how must solicitude have grown,--when, after the
dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile,
and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time
had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and
the proud waves of ocean had been stayed,--when, after species and
genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent
of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and
the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how
strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to
darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his
experience,--stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic
vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God's
spiritual universe,--that all _animals_ should die,--that all _moral
agents_ should live. How, in this new creature,--this prodigy of
creation, who was to unite what never before had been united,--the
nature of the animals that _die_ with the standing and responsibility of
the moral agents that _live_,--how, in this partaker of the double
nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were
the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute
_immortality_, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with
and shade into the _mortality_ which, let us extend the term of previous
vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final
annihilation and the ceasing to be?
At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by God's
own finger, and in God's own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an
exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet
undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure
of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to
breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made.
And yet, left to the freedom of his own will, there is a weakness in the
flesh that betrays his earthly lineage. It is into the dust of the
ground that the living soul has been breathed. The son of the soil, who,
like the inferior animals, his subjects, sleeps and wakes, and can feel
thirst and hunger, and the weariness of toil, and the sweets of rest,
and who come under the general law, "increase and multiply," promulgated
of old to them, stands less firmly than the immaterial spirits stood of
old; and yet even they rebelled against Heaven, and fell. There awakes a
grim hope in the sullen lord of the first revolt. Ages beyond tale or
reckoning has this temple of creation been in building. Long have its
mute prophecies in fishes and in creeping things, in bird and in beast,
told of coming man, its final object and end. And now there needeth but
one blow, and the whole edifice is destroyed, God's purposes marred and
frustrated, and this new favorite of earth dashed back to the dust out
of which he was created, and brought, like the old, extinct races, under
the eternal law of death. Armed with the experience in evil of unsummed
ages, the Tempter plies his work: nor is it to low or ignoble appetites
that he appeals. It is to the newly-formed creature's thirst for
knowledge; it is to his love stronger than death. The wiles of the Old
Serpent prevail; man falls prostrate before him; creation trembles; and
then from amid the trees of the garden comes the voice of God. And lo!
in an enigma mysterious and dark a new dispensation of prophecy begins.
Victims bleed; altars smoke; the tabernacle arises amid the white tents
of the desert; the temple ascends all glorious on the heights of Mount
Zion; prophet after prophet declares his message. At length, in the
fulness of time, the Messiah comes; and, in satisfying the law, and in
fulfilling all righteousness, and in bringing life and immortality to
light, abundantly shows forth that the terminal dynasty of all creation
had been of old foreordained, ere the foundations of the world, to
possess for its eternal lord and monarch, not primeval man, created in
the image of God, but God, made manifest in the flesh, in the form of
primeval man. But how breaks on the baffled Tempter the sublime
revelation? Wearily did he toil,--darkly did he devise, and take, in his
great misery, deep counsel against the Almighty; and yet all the while,
while striving and resisting as an enemy, has he been wielded as a tool;
when, glaring aloof in his proud rebellion, the grasp of the Omnipotent
has been upon him, and the Eternal Purposes have encompassed him, and he
has been working out, all unwittingly, the foreordained decree, "For our
God maketh the wrath of the wicked to praise him, and the remainder
thereof doth he restrain."
But enough, for the present, of the poems that might be. Permit me,
however, to add, in the words of one of the most suggestive, and
certainly not least powerful, of English thinkers, that "a fall of some
sort or other,--the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute,--is the
fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this
hypothesis," he adds, "man is unintelligible,--with it every phenomenon
is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight."
Such, in this matter, was the ultimate judgment of a man who in youth
had entertained very opposite views,--the poet Coleridge.
It has been said that the inferences of the geologist militate against
those of the theologian. Nay, not those of our higher geologists and
higher theologians,--not what our Murchisons and Sedgwicks infer in the
one field, with what our Chalmerses and Isaac Taylors infer in the
other. Between the Word and the Works of God there can be no actual
discrepancies; and the seeming ones are discernible only by the men who
see worst.
"Mote-like they flicker in unsteady eyes,
And weakest his who best descries."
The geologist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province
exclusively his own; and were the theologian ever to remember that the
Scriptures could not possibly have been given to us as revelations of
scientific truth, seeing that a single scientific truth they never yet
revealed, and the geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science
those truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science these
truths were never yet found, there would be little danger even of
difference among them, and none of collision. Nay, there is, I doubt
not, a time coming in which the Butlers and Chalmerses of the future
will be content to recognize the geologic field as that of their richest
and most pregnant analogies. It is with the history of the pre-Adamic
ages that geology sets itself to deal; and by carefully conning the
ancient characters graven in the rocks, and by deciphering the strange
inscriptions which they compose, it greatly extends the record of God's
doings upon the earth. And what more natural to expect, or rational to
hold, than that the Unchangeable One should have wrought in all time
after one general type and pattern, or than that we may seek, in the
hope of finding, meet correspondences and striking analogies between his
revealed workings during the human period, and his previous workings of
old during the geologic periods,--correspondences and analogies suited
to establish the identity of the worker, and, of course, from that
identity to demonstrate the authenticity of the revelation? Permit me to
bring out, in conclusion, what I have often thought on this subject, but
have not been able so tersely to express, in a brief quotation from one
of the most instructive works of the present age, the "Method of the
Divine Government," by the Rev. Dr. M'Cosh:--"Science has a foundation,"
says this solid thinker and accomplished writer, "and so has religion.
Let them unite their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and
they will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the glory of
God. Let the one be the outer and the other the inner court. In the one
let all look, and admire, and adore; and in the other let those who have
faith kneel, and pray, and praise. Let the one be the sanctuary where
human learning may present its richest incense as an offering to God,
and the other, the holiest of all, separated from it by a veil now rent
in twain, and in which, on a blood-sprinkled mercy seat, we pour out the
love of a reconciled heart, and hear the oracles of the living God."
LECTURE SEVENTH.
THE NOACHIAN DELUGE.