beheaded Dytiscus[16], and other reflex actions in animals, to the
food-seeking movements of the tentaculæ of the Hydra or fresh-water
Polype, which hover doubtfully between reflex and instinctive action:
go forward through the innumerable gradations of instinct till you
come, for instance, to the spider, weaving its symmetrical web, rushing
out of its lair to seize the prey when the web is shaken lightly,
but keeping itself close from a too dangerous foe when the web is
vehemently shaken. Examine the nest of the Mygale (the trap-door
spider) lined with silken tapestry, furnished with a door on a silken
hinge, which it covers above with materials like the surrounding soil,
and holds from beneath against an intruder, by applying its claws to
the most advantageous point, the point most distant from the hinge:
consider the little Sylvia Sutoria, or tailor-bird, which draws
filaments of cotton from the cotton-plant, and sews leaves together
with its beak and feet to form a nest; go to the huts and river-dams of
the beaver; attend a conclave of rooks judging an offender; look into
the hive of the hive-bee; observe the conscious vanity of the peacock;
preach liberty to the slave-making ants; watch the sagacious ways of
dogs and horses; and then lastly see if it be possible to resist the
conclusion that, were all forms that ever existed, from the earliest
geological times to our own, present before us in the order of their
genealogies, we should see them to be the members of a single family,
now, indeed, immensely divergent, yet all united by some affinity or
affinities, whether dimly or conspicuously shown.
How strangely men and beasts are united by similarity of blood and
fibre! How strangely fishes, birds, and mammals by the likeness of the
vertebrate skeleton! How strangely plants and animals by the phenomena
of generation, not only in the union of the sexes, but also in
(_agamogenesis_) or asexual reproduction! Need we wonder at community
of origin between a coral and a cactus, a whale and a sloth, a wolf and
a Shylock, when we find that a lady’s silken tresses, the bristles of
a boar, the quill of the porcupine, the feathers of the owl, and the
horns of the buffalo, are parallel and specifically interchangeable
developments?
Consider the vine, with its stem, branches, twigs, roots, rootlets,
leaves, tendrils, and the luscious grapes of the ripe cluster. From one
seed sprang all of these. On the bough of an orange tree there live
and grow together leaf and petiole, flower and fruit, the green unripe
fruit, the yellow and the golden-ripe. All these from one seed. Yet
there is no jealousy among them. No one disowns a kindred origin for
the root of the tree and its golden fruit, utterly unlike as these are,
but, like so many other utterly unlike things in this world, sprung
from the same germ.
To have produced and accumulated the vast divergences that now exist,
a lapse of time, indeed, must be conceded, unmeasured and perhaps
immeasurable; but this lapse of time is precisely what geology,
independently of Darwinism, has already demanded. As the Scriptures
speak of the earth as immoveable, because so it is in reference to
the senses of man, they speak also of the everlasting mountains, and
with them the rocks are a type of the eternal: compared with the life
of man these expressions are truthful and well-chosen, but they do
not mean to say the rocks are as eternal as God, nor yet everlasting
compared with the existence of the globe. It may have taken ten
thousand centuries to rear up a mountain, and yet, if we reckon the
age of the globe on the scale of a man’s life, the mountain be but of
yesterday.
The immense antiquity, not only of the globe, but of that thin crust of
it open to our inspection, has been ascertained by geology. Geology,
again, has made it certain that during millions of years, changes on
the earth’s surface have been in continual progress, so that not once
merely, but many times over, continents and oceans must have yielded
to one another, yet by no sudden, but ever by a gradual transposition,
such as is in constant progress at the present day.
Seeing that the dwelling-place of living creatures is thus continually
and continuously changing, how clumsy an arrangement it would have been
had the forms of life been made constant, instead of being endowed,
as they clearly have been, with a wonderful power of adaptation. The
question, be it remembered, is not for a moment whether God has made
the universe, but _how_ He has made that portion of it which He has
enabled us to see and examine. Nor yet, to be thoroughly accurate, is
it in question _how_ He has worked, but how He has been pleased to
exhibit His operations to the reasoning minds of men. What is worthy
of God we cannot indeed judge. We can only believe that the things
which are, stand worthiest of His wisdom and goodness, whatever
faults may seem in them to our rashly-judging short-sightedness. But
comparing theories of creation according to human notions, is it a
nobler conception that God should have made successively groups of
beings to fill the world, and then swept them away to make room for
others nearly like them; each time, as it were, improving on His first
idea, and so arguing the imperfection of what had gone before by the
very improvement of what followed; or that, foreseeing the perfect
types from the beginning, He should have called into existence seeds
of life capable, under the laws He gave them, of rising in successive
generations through countless ages, to endowments of the noblest order,
to a conscious life, to a reasoning faculty, to a moral sense, to a
knowledge of God? In such an origin there is for man no degradation,
since the lowliness of his parentage has ever been traced back to
the dust of the ground; and the lowest form of life is higher in
our imaginations than the dull brute earth. Indeed, if we desire to
exalt our self-appreciation, whether is it grander for us to have
been the work of an instant, or to have been elaborated with Divine
care through millions of ages? Will not any miracle in our behalf,
however stupendous, seem more credible on the latter than on the former
supposition? When we see what Development has already done for the
human species, we can the more readily imagine what, under the same
Lawgiver, it may do in the future for the individuals of our race.
When we find it possible or probable that our own bodies contain
resemblances to ancestors enormously remote in time, simply because
they contain atoms from the bodies of those very ancestors living
again in ourselves, we can understand how in a future, whether near or
enormously remote, atoms from the very body of the man that dies may
be called into a renewed existence, and clothed again with all that
is necessary to personal identity, though haply more transformed and
higher raised above the old self, than would be an orang-outang or a
naked savage, were either of these enabled to combine the chivalric
courtesy of Sir Philip Sydney with the genius of Sophocles and
Shakespeare.
THE NOACHIAN FLOOD.[17]
Darwinism implies almost throughout that no universal Deluge has
drowned our globe, either within the last ten thousand years, or even
within a period indefinitely longer. Let us speak with due respect
of the contrary belief. It _seems_ to rest upon the testimony of
a Volume the most precious in the world. It was taken for granted
till a few years back as much in science as in religion. For a
while, the arguments that began to be raised against it were met by
counter-arguments so plausible, and the objectors differed so widely
among themselves, that unscientific opinion had a kind of right and
prudence in adhering to that which had been taught for centuries, and
was still taught without deviation in nursery, and school, and pulpit.
We should have asserted a better right and shown a higher prudence,
had we waited, in a matter which concerned science full as much as it
concerned religion, till, by learning facts and weighing arguments,
we had become able to form an opinion no longer unscientific, or, at
the very least, to appreciate the difficulties involved in the ancient
belief.
We are forced to take a controversy of this kind as it stands;
otherwise, there is a simple principle which ought to make all
controversy on the subject needless. All authors endowed with common
sense, let alone divine inspiration, use language which their intended
readers may be expected to understand, and language appropriate to the
scope and design of their writings. Unless, therefore, we suppose that
the Old Testament writers proposed to teach natural science to the
Hebrew nation, we ought to expect from them what we actually find: as
to natural phenomena, past and present, they use the language not of
far-advanced knowledge and minute particular research, but simply the
language current in their own day and nation.
But, setting aside the general principle, in the present instance there
is a second possibility of quashing the controversy, if it can be shown
or made probable that the author, whose narrative is in question, never
meant to imply that which for thousands of years has been held to be
his meaning.
The whole point at issue is the _universality_ of the Noachian
Deluge, and the narrative has been thought to be uncompromising in
its declarations that all the earth, to the very mountain-tops, was
indeed enveloped in water, and, excepting the handful rescued in the
ark, that all men and cattle and creeping things and fowls of the air
were inexorably destroyed. But to this view of the narrative there is
more than one objection upon the very surface of the narrative itself.
And, by way of preface, let it be remarked how vague and indefinite is
the use in ordinary language of such terms as ‘all’ and ‘every’ and
‘universal.’ For instance, if a popular lady gives a kettledrum, we
say, ‘all the world was at it,’ although 500 persons could not have
been squeezed into the rooms without being suffocated; or we say, ‘so
and so is a thing which every school-boy knows,’ when we only mean that
a good many lads of a particular age, in a particular rank of life, and
belonging to one particular country, have most probably been taught
it. And again we say, ‘smoking is universal with the Dutch,’ without
implying that every baby in Holland has a pipe instead of a rattle. You
are not to suppose that this is a view of language invented for the
occasion, frivolously explaining grave and sacred composition by the
trivialities of common speech. On the contrary, it is precisely to the
unquestioned prevalence of such phraseology, in all but the most exact
scientific writing, that the late Dr. M’Caul appealed, and appealed
successfully, against more than one of the objections to the authority
of the Pentateuch, which were raised some time ago by the well-known
and ingenious arithmetician who presides over the see of Natal. When we
read that ‘there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus that _all the
world_ should be taxed: and _all_ went to be taxed, _every one_ into
his own city,’ are we to infer either that the clever practical Roman
decreed the taxation of barbarians over whom he had not the faintest
shadow of control, or that every Israelite, without exception, found
and visited his ancestral home in Palestine--merchants from Gades and
Ophir and Tarshish, slaves and prisoners, sucking children, bed-ridden
old men, dying sufferers? We shall not, if we are wise, shut up either
Cæsar Augustus or the Evangelist St. Luke to so preposterous a meaning.
In this and ten thousand other instances, our general knowledge of the
attendant circumstances, or what we call ‘the nature of the case,’
supplies the necessary exceptions. To have them all drawn out in detail
would be tedious and troublesome. Suppose a glorious comet is about
to make its appearance, and some astronomer publicly advises every
one to be on the look-out for it on a certain night, how ridiculous
would he appear if he made express exception of persons on the other
side of the globe, of persons immured in dungeons, of persons not yet
born, of persons who were blind, of persons who were dead! Yet an
author, writing some three or four thousand years back, and borrowing
perhaps from picture-records, certainly from the traditions, however
delivered, of an age long anterior to his own, when language was far
less ample and precise than it has since become, is treated as though
every word must bear the full and exact force which it would have in
a carefully-written treatise upon logic in the present day. We may
assume that the author either had sound and accurate information in the
ordinary course of human tradition, or else that he was endowed with
a super-human knowledge of the historical events in question. But,
on either assumption, what conceivable warrant have we for imagining
that he was deprived of common sense? Either he knew the contradictions
which natural science offers to the belief in a recent universal
deluge, or he did not know them. If he knew them, we may infer from
his silence that his narrative was not open to those contradictions;
in other words, that the deluge of which he speaks was not universal.
If he did not know them, his ignorance points to the same conclusion:
otherwise, we shall have a divine miracle, intended for the warning
and the benefit of the human race, yet so contrived that all its most
surprising circumstances should be absolutely unknown to one half of
mankind, and as absolutely incredible to the other half.
The historical account informs us that ‘the waters prevailed
exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills that were under
the whole heaven were covered. Fifteen cubits upwards did the waters
prevail; and the mountains were covered.’ But Europe possesses
mountains rising to a height of more than 10,000 cubits or 15,000
feet--one peak in Asia is 29,000 feet above the level of the sea--so
that, on the common interpretation, the waters of the flood must have
risen to a thickness above the ordinary sea-level of nearly 30,000 feet
over the whole of the globe. But, on this supposition, the narrative is
not only bewildering and morally impossible, but positively untruthful,
for it declares the physical means employed in the production of
the flood to be the fountains of the great deep and the rain from
heaven--means entirely sufficient to produce a partial flood over
a limited area, but utterly and ludicrously inadequate to produce a
total deluge enveloping ‘all the high hills under the whole heaven.’
The notion is self-contradictory that the ocean can be employed to
raise its own level, or that its general height can be increased by the
rain which it is its own part to supply. Nor is there any indication
afforded that a supernatural supply of water was added to our planet,
to the extent of several hundred millions of cubic miles of liquid,
which would have been required for the purpose of drowning the Caucasus
and the Alps and Teneriffe and Popocatapetl and Chimilari. We must
consider also the difficulty of breathing, and the intense cold that
would have been experienced at that stupendous altitude. There is the
old question of space in the ark; there is the old question of the
food-supply, sufficient and appropriate, to be stored and sorted for
its various occupants, carnivorous and herbivorous, beasts of prey,
carrion-birds, and amphibious monsters. But what are these compared
with the question how life could be sustained in the bitter freezing
atmosphere, thousands of feet above the line of perpetual snow, by
creatures accustomed to the lowlands of the tropics? Supposing,
however, the atmosphere to have been completely warmed by the rise
of the ocean, or even if the air within the ark was kept warm by its
enormous crowd of denizens, we are confronted by a new difficulty, one
that might seem laughable and improper to mention but for its vast
and pressing importance in our own days, thwarting the physician,
perplexing the statesman, baffling the chemist and the engineer. To
this supposed epitome of the world’s inhabitants, shut up for months
within the ark, who were the scavengers?
But suppose every one of these problems to be solved by a miracle,
although of such miracles not a hint is given, there still remains
the statement to be dealt with, that ‘God made a wind to pass over
the earth, and the waters assuaged.’ Surely this, if nothing else, is
conclusive that the writer had all along been describing a local and
partial deluge upon which a wind could have some sensible effect, not
an universal flood wrapping all the mountains of the globe in water, in
which case the mightiest wind that ever was, or could be dreamed of,
could only have laid bare the surface of the land by piling up great
hills and precipices of water upon the ocean.
When we wish to expose the miracles of a false religion or of a
superstitious aberrant creed, we point out, as the case may be, that
they are frivolous, useless, unmeaning, devoid of adequate motive, the
end achieved and the means employed bearing no reasonable proportion;
or we show that the testimony in their favour is inconsistent with
itself, or that the consequences which should have flowed from the
miracle, had it been genuine, are certainly wanting, unless, to bolster
up one extreme improbability, a hundred others are invented and
swallowed. To every one of these imputations the common theory of the
Noachian Deluge lies open. But concede a few grains of common sense to
the narrator; read his narrative in the spirit in which such a person
must have written it; remember that he is not writing a scientific
treatise, nor using the phraseology of modern Europe; bear in mind that
he is speaking in an idiom no longer or now but seldom used, yet a just
and noble idiom, which ascribes to God all that is done upon earth,
whether good or evil, the works of man and the common processes of
nature, as well as things super-human and miraculous; and, with these
considerations before us, we shall save the venerable record from every
imputation, either of folly or of falsehood.
That which we have described to us is a vast penal catastrophe
sweeping away some great centre of civilization by means of a terrible
inundation. Along some ocean-border the far-stretching plains were
dotted thickly with towns and villages. There were fields waving
with corn; the vine and the olive, the orange and the palm abounded;
there were cattle feeding in green pastures beside the still waters;
there were populous tribes and nations carrying on all the business
and revelry of life; they bought, they sold, they builded, they
planted, they were marrying and giving in marriage, when suddenly
the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the earthquake
wave rolled in upon them, and swept all the beauty and the glory and
the sin remorselessly away. At the same time, the angry heavens were
overcast, and the floodgates of the clouds poured down their volumes of
ceaselessly-descending rain. The distant mountains were torn from the
sight; nay, every high hill under the whole heaven was itself covered
and enfolded in a liquid veil, for every rill was now a torrent, every
tiny silver thread of a cascade now a dark unbroken avalanche of
waters. One family alone, alone obedient to the warning which all had
received, were saved amidst this universal ruin, and took with them
into the ark of their refuge specimens of every bird and beast and
creeping thing that their own country produced, and that was in any
way serviceable to man. When cloud and mist had rolled away from the
mountain-tops, when the face of the ground was once more dry--with
these creatures they stocked their new settlement. The well-watered
plain was speedily replenished; the vine flourished; the cattle brought
forth abundantly; the children of the patriarch multiplied rapidly and
spread far and wide over their rich and undisputed inheritance.
Such is the narrative as it glimmers through the haze of forty
centuries, only told in the original with unrivalled simplicity and
force, grander than any description by forbearing to describe, told as
one would tell it, who in that convulsion of nature had lost kindred,
friends and countrymen, as one who had seen the whole world, so far
as he knew it or cared for it, foundering in the waves, and yet had
lived on through all the unutterable calamity to see himself once more
surrounded by fruitful fields and smiling homesteads, and all that
might make what was to him emphatically a new world the counterpart of
the old.
Some may permit themselves for a moment to set aside the limitation
we have suggested to the number of animals in the ark as fanciful and
unwarranted. It will be proper therefore to draw out the consequences
attaching to the old opinion. We find from the words of the narrative,
that the patriarch Noah was intrusted with the task of collection. To
achieve it, then, he must have gone in person, or sent expeditions,
to Australia for the kangaroo and the wombat, to the frozen North for
the Polar bear, to Africa for the gorilla and the chimpanzee; the
hippopotamus of the Nile, the elk, the bison, the dodo, the apteryx,
the emeu and the cassowary must have been brought together by vast
efforts from distant quarters. The patriarch or his agents must
have been endowed with a supernatural knowledge of natural history
far surpassing Solomon’s or that of our own times, that they might
properly distinguish varieties and species, so that no species might be
omitted and none represented by more than one variety. To accomplish
this with the minutest insects, they must have been provided with
powerful microscopes. Every portion of the dry land of the globe must
have been accessible to them; every jungle, cavern, and ravine. The
little islands that lose themselves in mid-ocean must all have been
ransacked; the search, too, that might not neglect any acre of ground
in all the continents of the world, would be distracted with the most
varied and incongruous pursuits. Sheep, game, caterpillars, beasts of
prey, snails, eagles, fleas and titmice, must all have their share of
attention. Unusual pains must be employed to secure them uninjured.
They must be fed and cared for during a journey, perhaps, of thousands
of miles, till they reach the ark; they must be hindered from devouring
one another while the search is continued for rats and bats and
vipers and toads and scorpions, and other animals which a patriarch,
specially singled out as just and upright and a lover of peace, would
naturally wish and naturally be selected to transmit as a boon to his
favoured descendants.
It might be asked how, with the supernatural knowledge requisite for
collecting all the terrestrial animals of the globe, and the unique
opportunity for observation afforded by a residence of some months
with them in the ark, no more scientific classification was arrived at
than that into birds and beasts and creeping things? But letting this
pass, or scattering it and other objections to the winds by inventing a
miracle to explain the gathering together of the animals, we shall then
have to give some account of their re-distribution. Instead of worrying
ourselves with the problem, shall we at once solve it by asserting
that they were miraculously re-transferred to the habitations from
which they came? This will be a highly satisfactory plan, if only it
will stop the mouths of those inquisitive persons who never know when
they are beaten in an argument. But one cavil may easily be foreseen,
requiring a new miracle to satisfy it; for many of the animals must
either have been miraculously supplied with provisions, or miraculously
enabled to do without them; or else, to take a single instance, two
spiders would have been limited to a couple of flies, and when the
flies had become extinct, because devoured by the spiders, the spiders
also would have become extinct through having no more flies to devour;
and thus their preservation in the ark, at the expense of a great many
unrecorded and highly improbable miracles, would have been utterly
useless.
Suppose, however, that they were spread over the earth again by the
slow process of natural distribution. Certain perplexities, indeed,
may have arisen when they first issued from the ark, when the cobra
and the rattlesnake, the hungry wolf and the relentless tiger were let
loose upon the impoverished world and its defenceless inhabitants.
For at that conjuncture to have destroyed even one cruel and venomous
beast might have blotted out a whole species. It is surely a little
remarkable that ravenous beasts and birds of prey should have been
limited, even while in the ark, to feeding upon animals in a ceremonial
or ecclesiastical sense clean; but if, after they had left the ark,
and had once more to provide for themselves, the wily panther and the
treacherous hyena must be imagined debating before every meal whether
their victim belonged to the sevens of the clean or the couples of the
unclean animals, shall we not turn in pity and vexation from any view
that involves and admits so monstrous a supposition?