OBJECTS AND NATURE OF A REVELATION OF ORIGINS--_Continued._
"What if earth
Be but a shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to the other like; more than on earth is thought."
MILTON.
(3) _Character of the Biblical Cosmogony, and general Views of Nature
which it Contains or to which it Leads._--Much of what appertains to the
character of the revelation of origins has been anticipated under
previous heads. We have only to read the Song of Creation, as given in
the last chapter, to understand its power and influence as a beginning
of religious doctrine. The revelation was written for plain men in the
infancy of the world. Imagine Chaldean or Hebrew shepherd listening to
these majestic lines from the lips of some ancient patriarch, and
receiving them as truly the words of God. What a grand opening to him of
both the seen and unseen worlds! Henceforth he has no superstitious
dread of the stars above, or of the lightning and thunder, or of the
dark woods and flowing waters beneath. They are all the works of the one
Creator, the same Creator who is his own Maker, in whose image and
shadow he is made. He can look up now to the heavens or around upon the
earth, and see in all the handiwork of God, and can worship God through
all. He can see that the power that cares for the birds and the flowers
of the field cares for him. He is no longer the slave and sport of
unknown and dreadful powers; they are God's workmanship and under his
control--nay, God has given him a mission to subdue and rule over them.
So these noble words raise him to a new manhood, and emancipate him from
the torture of endless fears, and open to him vast new fields of thought
and inquiry, which may enrich him with boundless treasures of new
religious and intellectual wealth. Imagine still farther that he wanders
into those great cities which are the seats of the idolatries of his
time. He enters magnificent temples, sees elaborately decorated altars,
huge images, gorgeous ceremonials, priests gay in vestments and imposing
in numbers. He is invited to bow down before the bull Apis, to worship
the statue of Belus or of Ishtar, of Osiris or of Isis. But this is not
in his book of origins. All these things are contrivances of man, not
works of God, and their aim is to invite him to adore that which is
merely his fellow-creature, that which he has the divine commission to
subdue and rule. So our primitive Puritan turns away. He will rather
raise an altar of rough stones in the desert, and worship the unseen yet
real Creator, the God that has no local habitation in temples made with
hands, yet is everywhere present. Such is the moral elevation to which
this revelation of origins raises humanity; and when there was added to
it the farther history of primeval innocence, of the fall, and of the
promise of a Redeemer, and of the fate of the godless antediluvians,
there was a whole system of religion, pure and elevating, and placing
the Abrahamidae, who for ages seem alone to have held to it, on a plane
of spiritual vantage immeasurably above that of other nations. Farther,
every succeeding prophet whose works are included in the sacred canon,
following up these doctrines in the same spirit, and added new
treasures of divine knowledge from age to age.
But admitting all this, it may be asked, Are these ancient records of
any value to us? May we not now dispense with them, and trust to the
light of science? The infinitely varied and discordant notions of our
modern literature on these great questions of origin, the incapacity
of any philosophical system to reach the common mind for practical
purposes, and the baseless character of any religious system which
does not build on these great primitive truths, give a sufficient
answer. Farther, we may affirm that the greatest and widest
generalizations of our modern science have, in so far as they are of
practical importance, been anticipated in the revelations of the
Bible, and that in the cosmogony of Genesis and its continuation in
the other sacred books we have general views of the universe as broad
as those of any philosophies, ancient or modern. This is a hard test
for our revelation, but it can be endured, and we may shortly inquire
what we find in the Bible of such great general truths.
Many may be disposed to admit the accurate delineation of natural
facts open to human observation in the sacred Scriptures, who may not
be prepared to find in these ancient books any general views akin to
those of the ancient philosophers, or to those obtained by inductive
processes in modern times. Yet views of this kind are scattered
through the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and are a natural
outgrowth and development of the great facts and principles asserted
in the first chapter of Genesis. They resolve themselves, almost as a
matter of course, into the two leading ideas of order and adaptation.
I have already quoted the eloquent admission by Baron Humboldt of the
presence of these ideas of the cosmos in Psalm civ. They are both
conspicuous in the narrative of creation, and equally so in a great
number of other passages. "Order is heaven's first law; and the second
is like unto it--that every thing serves an end. This is the sum of
all science. These are the two mites, even all that she hath, which
she throws into the treasury of the Lord; and, as she does so in
faith, Eternal Wisdom looks on and approves the deed."[17] These two
mites, lawfully acquired by science, by her independent exertions, she
may, however, recognize as of the same coinage with the treasure
already laid up in the rich storehouse of the Hebrew literature; but
in a peculiar and complex form, which may be illustrated under the
following general statements:
1. The Scriptures assert invariable natural law, and constantly
recurring cycles in nature. Natural law is expressed as the ordinance
or decree of Jehovah. From the oldest of the Hebrew books I select the
following examples:[18]
"When he made a decree for the rain,
And a way for the thunder-flash."
--Job xxviii., 26.
"Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens?
Canst thou establish a dominion even over the earth?"
--Job xxxviii., 33.
The later books give us such views as the following:
"He hath established them [the heavens] for ever and ever;
He hath made a decree which shall not pass."
--Psa. cxlviii., 6.
"Thou art forever, O Jehovah, thy word is established
in the heavens;
Thou hast established the earth, and it abideth;
They continue this day according to thine ordinances,
for all are thy servants."
--Psa. cxix., 90.
"When he established the clouds above;
When he strengthened the fountains of the deep;
When he gave to the sea his decree,
That the waters should not pass his commandment;
When he appointed the foundations of the earth."
--Prov. viii., 28.
Many similar instances will be found in succeeding pages; and in the
mean time we may turn to the idea of recurring cycles, which forms the
starting-point of the reasonings of Solomon on the current of human
affairs, in the book of Ecclesiastes: "One generation passeth away,
and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for the ages. The
sun ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to its place whence
it arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth unto the north.
It whirleth about continually, and returneth again according to its
circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea doth not
overflow; unto the place whence the rivers came, thither they return
again." I might fill pages with quotations more or less illustrative
of the statement in proof of which the above texts are cited; but
enough has been given to show that the doctrine of the Bible is not
that of fortuitous occurrence, or of materialism, or of pantheism, or
of arbitrary supernaturalism, but of invariable natural law
representing the decree of a wise and unchanging Creator. It is a
common but groundless and shallow charge against the Bible that it
teaches an "arbitrary supernaturalism." What it does teach is that
all nature is regulated by the laws of God, which like himself are
unchanging, but which are so complex in their relations and
adjustments that they allow of infinite variety, and do not exclude
even miraculous intervention, or what appears to our limited
intelligence as such. In opposition to this, it is true, some
physicists have held that natural law is a fatal necessity.[19] If
they mean by this a merely hypothetical necessity that certain effects
must follow if certain laws act, this is in accordance with the
Biblical view, for nothing can resist the will of God. But if they
mean an absolute necessity that these laws can not be suspended or
counteracted by higher laws, or by the will of the Creator, they
assert what is not only contrary to Scripture, but absurd, for "blind
metaphysical necessity, which is the same always and everywhere, could
produce no variety of things."[20] It could lead merely to a dead and
inert equilibrium. On the hypothesis of mere physical necessity, the
universe either never could have existed, or must have come to an end
infinite ages ago, which is the same thing. Only on the hypothesis of
law proceeding from an intelligent will can we logically account for
nature.
2. The Bible recognizes progress and development in nature. At the
very outset we have this idea embodied in the gradual elaboration of
all things in the six creative periods, rising from the formless void
of the beginning, through successive stages of inorganic and organic
being, up to Eden and to man. Beyond this point the work of creation
stops; but there is to be an occupation and improvement of the whole
earth by man spreading from Eden. This process is arrested or impeded
by sin and the fall. Here commences the special province of the
Bible, in explaining the means of recovery from the fall, and of the
establishment of a new spiritual and moral kingdom, and finally of the
restoration of Eden in a new heaven and earth. All this is moral, and
relates to man, in so far as the present state of things is concerned;
but we have the commentary of Jesus: "My Father worketh hitherto, and
I work;" the remarkable statement of Paul, that the whole creation is
involved in the results of man's moral fall and restoration, and the
equally remarkable one that the Redeemer is also the maker of the
"worlds" or ages of the earth's physical progress, as well as of the
future "new heaven and new earth." Peter also rebukes indignantly
those scoffers who maintained that all things had remained as they are
since the beginning; and refers to the creation week and to the deluge
as earnests of the great changes yet in store for the earth.[21]
It is indeed curious to observe how in our version of the Bible this
idea of progress in the universe, or of "time-worlds," as it has been
called, has been variously replaced by the words "world" and
"eternity," owing to the defective ideas prevalent at the time when
the translation was made. In the Hebrew Scriptures the term _Olam_,
"age," and in the New Testament the equivalent term _Ai[=o]n_ have
been thus treated, and their real significance much obscured. Thus
when it is said, "by faith we understand that the _worlds_ were
framed," or "by him God made the _worlds_,"[22] or that certain of
God's plans have been hid "from the beginning of the _world_,"[23] the
reference is not to worlds in space, but to worlds in time, or ages of
God's working in the universe. So also these ages of God's working
are given to us as our only intelligible type of eternity, of which
absolutely we can have no conception. Thus God's "eternal purpose" is
his purpose of the ages. So when he is the "King eternal,"[24] and in
that capacity gives to his people "life everlasting," he is the King
of the ages, and gives life of the ages. So in the noble hymn
attributed to Moses (Psalm xc.), where our version has, "from
everlasting to everlasting thou art God,"[25] the original is, "from
age to age thou art, O God." It has perhaps been a defect of our
modern science that it has familiarized us merely with the existence
of worlds in space, and not with their existence in time. It is only
in comparatively modern times that the developments of chronological
geology and of physical astronomy have brought before us, not only the
long ages in which the earth was passing through its formative stages,
but also the fact that still longer aeons are embraced in the history
of the other bodies of our solar system, and of the starry orbs and
nebulae. These grand conceptions were already embodied in the Hebrew
revelation, and were used there as the means of giving some faint
approach to a conception of the unlimited existence of God himself, of
the ages in which his creative work has been going on, and of the
future life he has prepared for his redeemed people.
Such views of development and progress are not unknown to many ancient
cosmogonies and philosophical systems, but they had no stable
foundation in observed fact until the rise of modern geology and
physical astronomy; which enable us to affirm that, in addition to
those changeless physical laws which cause the bodies of the universe
to wheel in unvarying cycles, and all natural powers to reproduce
themselves, and, in addition to those organic laws which produce
unceasing successions of living individuals, there is a higher law of
progress. We can now trace back man, the animals and plants his
contemporaries, and others which preceded them, our continents and
mountain ranges, and the solid rocks of which they are composed--nay,
the very fabric of the solar system itself--to their several origins
at distinct points of time; and can maintain that since the earth
began to wheel around the sun, no succeeding year has seen it
precisely as it was in the year before. The old Hebrew record affirms,
and I presume scarcely any sane man really doubts, that this law of
progress emanates from the mind and power of one creative Being. When
men see in natural law only recurring cycles, they may be pardoned for
falling even into the absurdity of believing in eternal succession;
but when they see change and progress, and this in a uniform
direction, overmastering recurring cycles, and introducing new objects
and powers not accounted for by previous objects or powers, they are
brought very near to the presence of the Spiritual Creator. And hence,
although no science can reach back to the act of creation, this
doctrine is much more strongly held in our day by geologists than by
physicists. It is quite true that the idea of creative acts has been
superseded to a great extent by that of "creation by law," or by that
of "evolution." Still behind all there lies a primary creative power;
and the validity of these ideas and their bearing on theism and
creation we shall have to discuss in the sequel. In one thing only
does the Bible here part company with natural science. The Bible goes
on into the future, and predicts a final condition of our planet, of
which science can from its investigations learn nothing.
3. The Bible recognizes purpose, use, and special adaptation in
nature. It is, in short, full of natural theology, akin in some
respects to that which has been so elaborately worked out by so many
modern writers. Numerous passages in support of this will occur to
every one who has read the Scriptures. It is necessary here, however,
to direct attention to a distinction very obvious in Scripture, but
not always attended to by writers on this subject. The Bible maintains
the true "final cause" of all nature to be, not its material and
special adaptations or its value to man, but the pleasure or
satisfaction of the Creator himself. In the earlier periods of
Creation, before man was upon the earth, God contemplates his work and
pronounces it good. The heavenly hosts praise him, saying, "Thou hast
created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created."
Further, the Bible represents intelligences higher than man as sharing
in the delight which may be derived from the contemplation of God's
works. When the earth first rose from the waters to greet the light,
"the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for
joy." There are many things in nature that strongly impress the
naturalist with this same view, that the Creator takes pleasure in his
works; and, like human genius in its highest efforts, rejoices in
production, even if no sentient being should be ready to sympathize.
The elaborate structures of fossils, of which we have only fragmentary
remains, the profusion of natural objects of surpassing beauty that
grow and perish unseen by us, the delicate microscopic mechanism of
nearly all organic structures, point to other reasons for beauty and
order than those that concern man, or the mere utilities of human
beings; and though there are now naturalists who deny absolutely that
beauty is an object in nature, and assign even the colors of flowers
and insects to utility alone, and this of a very low order, this
doctrine is so repulsive to our higher sentiments that there is
little danger of its general acceptance; while the slightest
consideration shows that the utilities referred to could have been
secured without any of this consummate beauty associated with them,
and our perception of and delight in which mark in a way beyond the
ability of skepticism to cavil at our own spiritual kinship with the
Author of all this profusion of beauty. Yet man is represented as the
chief created being for whom this earth has been prepared and
designed. He obtains dominion over it. A chosen spot is prepared for
him, in which not only his wants but his tastes are consulted; and,
being made in the image of his Maker, his aesthetic sentiments
correspond with the beauties of the Maker's work, and he finds there
also food for his reason and imagination. This view of the subject, as
well as others already referred to, is finely represented in the
address of the Almighty to Job.[26]
The Bible also very often refers to the special adaptations of natural
objects and laws to each other, and to the promotion of the happiness
of sentient creatures lower than man. The 104th Psalm is replete with
notices of such adaptations, and so is the address to Job; and indeed
this view seems hardly ever absent from the minds of the Hebrew
writers, but has its highest applications in the lilies of the field,
that toil not neither do they spin, and the sparrows that are sold for
a farthing, yet the heavenly Father has clothed the one with
surpassing beauty, and provides food for the other, nor allows it to
fail without his knowledge. I may, by way of farther illustration,
merely name a few of the adaptations referred to in Job xxxviii. and
the following chapters. The winds and the clouds are so arranged as to
afford the required supplies of moisture to the wilderness where no
man is, to "cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth." For
similar objects the tempest is ordered, and the clouds arranged "by
wisdom." The adaptations of the wild ass, the wild goat, the ostrich,
the migratory birds, the horse, the hippopotamus, the crocodile, to
their several habitats, modes of life, and uses in nature, are most
vividly sketched and applied as illustrations of the consummate wisdom
of the Creator, which descends to the minutest details of organization
and habit.
It is to be observed here that in holding this doctrine of use and
adaptation in nature, the Bible is only consistent with its own theory
of rational theism. The Monotheist can not refer nature to a conflict
of antagonistic powers and forces. He must recognize in it a unity of
plan; and even those things which appear aberrant, irregular, or
noxious must have their place in this plan. Hence in the Bible God is
maker not only of the day but of the night, not only of the peaceful
cattle but of the voracious crocodile, not only of the sunshine and
shower but of the tornado and the earthquake. Further, in all these
things God is manifested, so that we may learn "his eternal power and
divinity[27] from the things which he has made," and in all these also
there are emblems of his relations to us. This argument from design is
in truth the only proof the Bible condescends to urge for the
existence of God; and it is the only one in which in his later days
our great English philosopher Mill could see any validity.[28]
If the reader happens to be familiar with the objections to the
doctrine of final causes, or teleology, in nature, urged in our day
by Spencer, Haeckel, and others, he will have seen from the foregoing
statements that these objections are in themselves baseless, or
inapplicable to this doctrine as maintained in the Bible. There is no
consistency in the position of men who, when they dig a rudely chipped
flint out of a bed of gravel, immediately infer an intelligent
workman, and who refuse to see any indication of a higher intelligence
in the creation of the workman himself. It is a blind philosophy which
professes to see in primal atoms the "promise and potency of mind,"
and which fails to perceive that such potency is more inconceivable
than the evidence of primary and supreme mind. The men who maintain
that wings were not planned for flight, but that flight has produced
wings, and thousands of like propositions, are simply amusing
themselves with paradoxes to which may very properly be applied the
strange word devised by Haeckel to express his theory of
nature--_Dysteleology_, or purposelessness. It is to be borne in mind,
however, that the teleology of the Bible is not of that narrow kind
which would make man the sole object of nature, and the supreme judge
of its adaptations. Inasmuch as God's plan goes over all the ages past
and future, and relates to the welfare of all sentient beings known or
unknown to us, and also to his own sovereign pleasure as the supreme
object, we may not be in a position either to understand or profit by
all its parts, and hence may expect to find many mysteries, and many
things that we can not at present reconcile with God's wisdom and
goodness. We know but "parts of his ways," the "fullness of his power
who can understand." "His judgments are unsearchable," "his ways are
past finding out."
4. The law of type or pattern in nature is distinctly indicated in the
Bible. This is a principle only recently understood by naturalists,
but it has more or less dimly dawned on the minds of many great
thinkers in all ages. Nor is this wonderful, for the idea of type is
scarcely ever absent from our own conceptions of any work that we may
undertake. In any such work we anticipate recurring daily toil, like
the returning cycles of nature. We look for progress, like that of the
growth of the universe. We study adaptation both of the several parts
to subordinate uses, and of the whole to some general design. But we
also keep in view some pattern, style, or order, according to which
the whole is arranged, and the mutual relations of the parts are
adjusted. The architect must adhere to some order of architecture, and
to some style within that order. The potter, the calico-printer, and
the silversmith must equally study uniformity of pattern in their
several manufactures. The Almighty Worker has exhibited the same idea
in his works. In the animal kingdom, for instance, we have four or
more leading types of structure. Taking any one of these--the
vertebrate, for example--we have a uniform general plan, embracing the
vertebral column constructed of the same elements; the members,
whether the arm of man, the limb of the quadruped, or the wing of the
bat or the bird, or the swimming-paddle of the whale, built of the
same bones. In like manner all the parts of the vertebral column
itself in the same animal, whether in the skull, the neck, or the
trunk, are composed of the same elementary structures. These types are
farther found to be sketched out--first in their more general, and
then in their special features--in proceeding from the lower species
of the same type to the higher, in proceeding from the earlier to the
later stages of embryonic development, and in proceeding from the more
ancient to the more recent creatures that have succeeded each other in
geological time. Man, the highest of the vertebrates, is thus the
archetype, representing and including all the lower and earlier
members of the vertebrate type. The above are but trite and familiar
examples of a doctrine which may furbish and has furnished the
material of volumes. There can be no question that the Hebrew Bible is
the oldest book in which this principle is stated. In the first
chapter of Genesis we have specific type in the creation of plants and
animals after their kinds or species, and in the formation of man in
the image and likeness of the Creator; and, as we shall find in the
sequel, there are some curious ideas of higher and more general types
in the grouping of the creatures referred to. The same idea is
indicated in the closing chapters of Job, where the three higher
classes of the vertebrates are represented by a number of examples,
and the typical likeness of one of these--the hippopotamus--to man,
seems to be recognized. Dr. McCosh has quoted, as an illustration of
the doctrine of types, a very remarkable passage from Psalm cxxxix.:
"I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Marvellous are thy works,
And that my soul knoweth right well.
My substance was not hid from Thee,
When I was made in secret,
And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth:
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect;
And in thy book all my members were written,
Which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there
was none of them."
It would too much tax the faith of many to ask them to believe that
the writer of the above passage, or the Spirit that inspired him,
actually meant to teach--what we now know so well from geology--that
the prototypes of all the parts of the archetypal human structure may
be found in those fossil remains of extinct animals which may, in
nearly every country, be dug up from the rocks of the earth. No
objection need, however, be taken to our reading in it the doctrine of
embryonic development according to a systematic type.
Science, it is true, or rather I should perhaps say philosophical
speculation, has sometimes pushed this idea of plan into that of a
spontaneous genetic evolution of things in time, without any creative
superintendence or definite purpose. This way of viewing the matter
is, however, as we shall have occasion to see, both bald and
irrational, and wants the symmetry and completeness of that style of
thought which grasps at once progress and plan and adaptation, as
emanating from a Supreme Will. The question of how the plan has been
worked out will come up for detailed consideration farther on. In the
mean time we have before us the fact that the Bible represents the
cosmos as not the product of a blind conflict of self-existent forces,
but as the result of the production and guidance of these forces by
infinite wisdom.
It is more than curious that this idea of type, so long existing in an
isolated and often depised form, as a theological thought in the
imagery of Scripture, should now be a leading idea of natural science;
and that while comparative anatomy teaches us that the structures of
all past and present lower animals point to man, who, as Professor
Owen expresses it, has had all his parts and organs "sketched out in
anticipation in the inferior animals," the Bible points still farther
forward to an exaltation of the human type itself into what even the
comparative anatomist might perhaps regard as among the "possible
modifications of it beyond those realized in this little orb of ours,"
could he but learn its real nature.
Under the foregoing heads, of the object, the structure, the
authority, and the general cosmical views of the Scripture, I have
endeavored to group certain leading thoughts important as preliminary
to the study of the subject; and, in now entering on the details of
the Old Testament cosmogony, I trust the reader will pardon me for
assuming, as a working hypothesis, that we are studying an inspired
book, revealing the origin of nature, and presenting accurate pictures
of natural facts and broad general views of the cosmos, at least until
in the progress of our inquiry we find reason to adopt lower views;
and that he will, in the mean time, be content to follow me in that
careful and systematic analysis which a work claiming such a character
surely demands.