THE REST OF THE CREATOR.
"And the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the
host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work
which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all
his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day
and sanctified it, because that in it God rested from all
his work which he had created to make."--Genesis ii., 1-3.
The end of the sixth day closed the work of creation properly so
called, as well as that of forming and arranging the things created.
The beginning of the seventh introduced a period which, according to
the views already stated, was to be occupied by the continued increase
and diffusion of man and the creatures under his dominion, and by the
gradual disappearance of tribes of creatures unconnected with his
well-being.
Science in this well accords with Scripture. No proof exists of the
production of a new species since the creation of man; and all
geological and archaeological evidence points to him and a few of the
higher mammals as the newest of the creatures. There is, on the other
hand, good evidence that several species have become extinct since his
creation. Those who believe in the continuous evolution of animals and
men, it is true, can see no actual termination of the process with the
introduction of man; but even they see that the appearance of a
rational and moral being at least changes the nature and order of the
development. Nor can they doubt that man is the last born of nature,
and that the whole animal creation is crowned by him as its capital or
topmost pinnacle. The later speculators on this subject have never
reached any truth beyond that long ago stated by the lamented Edward
Forbes--a most careful observer and accurate reasoner on the more
recent changes of the earth's surface. He infers, from the
distribution of species from their centres of creation, that man is
the latest product of creative power; or, in other words, that none of
those species or groups of species which he had been able to trace to
their centres, or the spots at which they probably originated, appear
to be of later or as late origin as man. "This consideration," he
says, "induces me to believe that the last province in time was
completed by the coming of man, and to maintain an hypothesis that man
stands unique in space and time, himself equal to the sum of any
pre-existing centre of creation or of all--an hypothesis consistent
with man's moral and social position in the world."
The seventh day, then, was to have been that in which all the
happiness, beauty, and perfection of the others were to have been
concentrated. But an element of instability was present in the being
who occupied the summit of the animal scale. Not regulated by blind
and unerring instincts, but a free agent, with a high intellectual and
moral nature, and liable to be acted on by temptation from without;
under such influence he lost his moral balance in stretching out his
hand to grasp the peculiar powers of Deity, and fell beyond the hope
of self-redemption--perpetuating, by one of those laws which regulate
the transmission of mixed corporeal and spiritual natures, his
degradation to every generation of his species. And so God's great
work was marred, and all his plans seemed to be foiled, when they had
just reached their completion. Thus far science might carry us
unaided; for there is not a true naturalist, however skeptical as to
revealed religion, who does not feel in his inmost heart the
disjointed state of the present relations of man to nature; the
natural wreck that results from his artificial modes of life, the long
trains of violations of the symmetry of nature that follow in the wake
of his most boasted achievements. But here natural science stops; and
just as we have found that, in tracing back the world's history, the
Bible carries us much farther than geology, so science, having led us
to suspect the fallen state of man, leaves us henceforth to the
teaching of revelation. And how glorious that teaching! God did not
find himself baffled--his resources are infinite--he had foreseen and
prepared for all this apparent evil; and out of the moral wreck he
proceeds to work out the grand process of _redemption_, which is the
especial object of the seventh day, and which will result in the
production of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness. In the seventh, as in the former days, the evening
precedes the morning. For four thousand years the world groped in its
darkness--a darkness tenanted by moral monsters as powerful and
destructive as the old pre-Adamite reptiles. The Sun of Righteousness
at length arose, and the darkness began to pass away; but eighteen
centuries have elapsed, and we still see but the gray dawn of morning,
which we yet firmly believe will brighten into a glorious day that
shall know no succeeding night.[100]
The seventh day is the modern or human era in geology; and, though it
can not yet boast of any physical changes so great as those of past
periods, it is still of much interest, as affording the facts on which
we must depend for explanations of past changes; and as immediately
connected in time with those later tertiary periods which afford so
many curious problems to the geological student. The actual connection
of the human with preceding periods is still involved in some
obscurity; and, as we shall see, there has recently been a strong
tendency to throw back the origin of man into prehistoric ages of
enormous length, on grounds which are, however, much less certain than
is commonly imagined. This question we have to examine; but before
entering upon it may shortly sketch the actual import of the
statements of the Hebrew Scriptures respecting what may be called the
prehistoric duration of the human species. This is the more necessary,
as the most crude notions seem very widely to prevail on the subject.
I shall, therefore, in this place notice some general facts deducible
from the Bible, and which may be useful in appreciating the true
relation of the human era to those which preceded it. It will be
understood that I shall endeavor merely to present a picture of what
the Bible actually teaches, and which any one can verify by reading
the book of Genesis.
1. The local centre of creation of the human species, and probably of
a group of creatures coeval with it, was Eden; a country of which the
Scriptures give a somewhat minute geographical description. It was
evidently a district of Western Asia; and, from its possession of
several important rivers, rather a region or large territory than a
limited spot, such as many, who have discussed the question of the
site of Eden, seem to suppose. In this view it is a matter of no
moment to fix its site more nearly than the indication of the Bible
that it included the sources and probably large portions of the
valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and perhaps the Oxus and
Jaxartes. Into the minor difficulties respecting the site of Eden it
would be unprofitable to enter, and it will matter little if we accept
that view, which, however, I think less probable, that it was placed
in the lower part of the valley of the Euphrates. I may merely mention
one particular of the Biblical description, because it throws light on
the great antiquity of this geographical delineation, and has been
strangely misconceived by expositors--the relation of those rivers to
Cush or Ethiopia and Havilah, a tribal name derived from that of a
grandson of Cush. On consulting the tenth chapter of Genesis, it will
be found that the Cushites under Nimrod, very soon after the deluge,
are stated to have pushed their migrations and conquests along the
Tigris to the northward, and established there the first empire. It is
probably this primitive Cushite empire, called Ethiopia in our
translation, which in the epoch of the description of Eden occupied
the Euphratean valley, and being bounded on one side by the river
called Gihon, was thus believed to extend over the old site of Eden.
Thus the Cush or Ethiopia of the description has no direct connection
with the African Ethiopia, and speculations based on such a supposed
connection are groundless. On the other hand this feature furnishes an
interesting coincidence with other parts of Genesis, and throws light
on many obscure points in the early history of man; and since this
Cushite empire had perished even before the time of Moses, it
indicates a still more ancient tradition respecting the primeval abode
of our species.
2. Before the deluge this region must have been the seat of a dense
population, which, according to the Biblical account, must have made
considerable advances in the arts, and at the same time sunk very low
in moral debasement.[101] Whether any remains of the central portions
of this ancient population or its works exist will probably not be
determined with absolute certainty till we have accurate geological
investigations of the whole country in the neighborhood of the Caspian
Sea and along the great rivers of Western Asia, though there is
nothing unreasonable in the belief that some of the old prehistoric
men whose remains are discovered in caves and river gravels in Europe
may belong to the antediluvian race. Should such remains be found, we
might infer, from the extreme longevity and other characteristics
assigned to the antediluvians, that their skeletons would present
peculiarities entitling them to be considered a well-marked variety of
the human species, and this not of a low type of physical
organization. We may also infer that the family of man very early
divided into two races--one retaining in greater purity the moral
endowments of the species, the other excelling in the mechanical and
fine arts; and that there were rude and savage outlying communities of
men then as at present. If the so-called palaeolithic men of Europe are
antediluvian, they were probably of such outlying tribes, and possibly
of the mixed race which sprung up in the later antediluvian age, and
who are described as mighty men physically, and men of violence. It
would be quite natural that this intermixture of the Sethite and
Cainite races should produce a race excelling both in energy and
physical endowments--the "giants" that were in those days.[102] If any
remains of the two central nations of the antediluvian period are ever
discovered, we may confidently anticipate that the distinctive
characteristics of these races may be detected in their osseous
structures as well as in their works of art. Farther, it is to be
inferred from notices in the fourth chapter of Genesis, that before
the deluge there was both a nomadic and a settled population, and that
the principal seat of the Cainite, or more debased yet energetic
branch of the human family, was to the eastward of the site of Eden.
No intimations are given by which the works of art of antediluvian
times could be distinguished from those of later periods; but that
curious summary of the treasures of antediluvian man contained in the
notice that the land of Havilah produced gold and agate and pearl
(Gen. ii., 12) would lead us to believe that the early antediluvian
age was on the whole an age of stone, in which flint for weapons, and
gold and shell wampum for ornaments, were the leading kinds of wealth.
On the other hand, the notices of antediluvian metallurgy, and the
building and construction of the ark, would lead us to infer that the
later antediluvians had attained to much perfection in some
constructive arts--a conclusion which harmonizes with the otherwise
inexplicable perfection of such art soon after the deluge, as
evidenced not only by the story of Babel, but also by the early works
of the Assyrians and Egyptians.
3. When the antediluvian population had fully proved itself unfit to
enter into the divine scheme of moral renovation, it was swept away by
a fearful physical catastrophe. The deluge might, in all its
relations, furnish material for an entire treatise. I may remark here,
as its most important geological peculiarity, that it was evidently a
_local_ convulsion. The object, that of destroying the human race and
the animal population of its peculiar centre of creation, the
preservation of specimens of these creatures in the ark, and the
physical requirements of the case, necessitate this conclusion, which
is now accepted by the best Biblical expositors,[103] and which
inflicts no violence on the terms of the record. Viewed in this light,
the phenomena recorded in the Bible, in connection with geological
probabilities, lead us to infer that the physical agencies evoked by
the divine power to destroy this ungodly race were a subsidence of the
region they inhabited, so as to admit the oceanic waters, and
extensive atmospherical disturbances connected with that subsidence,
and perhaps with the elevation of neighboring regions. In this case it
is possible that the Caspian Sea, which is now more than eighty feet
below the level of the ocean,[104] and which was probably much more
extensive then than at present, received much of the drainage of the
flood, and that the mud and sand deposits of this sea and the
adjoining desert plains, once manifestly a part of its bottom, conceal
any remains that exist of the antediluvian population. In connection
with this, it may be remarked that, in the book of Job, Eliphaz speaks
as if the locality of those wicked nations which existed before the
deluge was known and accessible in his time:
"Hast thou marked the ancient way
Which wicked men have trodden,
Who were seized [by the waters] in a moment,
And whose foundations a flood swept away?"
--Job xxii., 15.
On comparing this statement with the answer of Job in the 26th
chapter, verse 5th, it would seem that the ungodly antediluvians were
supposed to be still under the waters; a belief quite intelligible if
the Caspian, which, on the latest and most probable views of the
locality of the events of this book, was not very remote from the
residence of Job,[105] was supposed to mark the position of the
pre-Noachic population, as the Dead Sea afterward did that of the
cities of the plain. Some of the dates assigned to the book of Job
would, however, render it possible that this last catastrophe is that
to which _he_ refers:
"The _Rephaim_ tremble from beneath
The waters and their inhabitants.
Sheol is naked before him,
And destruction hath no covering."
The word _Rephaim_ here has been variously rendered "shades of the
dead" and "giants." It is properly the family or national name of
certain tribes of gigantic Hamite men (the Anakim, Emim, etc.)
inhabiting Western Asia at a very remote period; and it must here
refer either to them or to the still earlier antediluvian
giants.[106]
It is also an important point to be noticed here that the narrative of
the deluge in Genesis is given as the testimony or record of an
eye-witness, and is to be so understood; and that the terms of the
record imply, not as usually held that all sorts of animals were taken
into Noah's ark, but only a selection, the character of which is
clearly indicated by a comparison of the five lists of animals given
in the narrative. Bearing this in mind, and noticing that the writer
tells of his own experience as to the rise of the water, the drifting
of the ark, the disappearance of all visible shore, and the sounding
fifteen cubits where a hill had before been, all the difficulties of
the narrative of the deluge will at once disappear. These difficulties
have in fact arisen from regarding the story as the composition of a
historian, not as what it manifestly is, the log or journal of a
contemporary, introduced with probably little change by the compiler
of the book.
After the deluge, we find the human race settled in the plains of the
Euphrates and Tigris, attracted thither by the fertility of their
alluvial soils. There we find them engaging in a great political
scheme, no doubt founded on recollections of the old antediluvian
nationalities, and on a dread of the evils which able and aspiring men
would anticipate from that wide dispersion of the human race that
appears to have been intended by the Creator in the new circumstances
of the earth. They commenced accordingly the erection of a city or
tower at Babel, in the plain of Shinar, to form a common bond of
union, a great public work that should be a rallying-point for the
race, and around which its patriotism might concentrate itself. The
attempt was counteracted by an interposition of divine Providence; and
thenceforth the diffusion of the human race proceeded unchecked,
carrying with it everywhere the memory of the celebrated tower, which
perpetuated itself not only in the mounds of Assyria and Babylon and
the pyramids of Egypt, but in the teocallis and temple mounds of the
New World. The Babel enterprise is in fact the first recorded
development of that mound-building instinct which the earlier races
everywhere evince, and which has been a distinguishing characteristic
more especially of the Cushite or Turanian race, and has apparently
made them the teachers of constructive arts to all other peoples.
Perhaps a dread of the total decay and loss of the surviving
antediluvian arts in construction and other matters may have been one
impelling motive to the building of Babel. Perhaps it was connected
with the communistic ideas of the Turanian race, and their conflict
with the patriarchal habits of the Semites. Out of the enterprise at
Babel, however, arose a new type of evil, which, in the forms of
military despotism, the spirit of conquest, hero-worship, and the
alliance of these influences with literature and the arts, has been
handed down through every succeeding age to our own time. The name of
Nimrod, the son of Cush, has been preserved to us in the Bible, and
also apparently in the tablets and inscriptions of Assyria, as the
founder of the first despotism. This bold and ambitious man,
subsequently deified under different names, established a Hamite or
Turanian empire, which appears to have extended its sway over the
tribes occupying Southwestern Asia and Northeastern Africa, everywhere
supporting its power by force of arms, and introducing a debasing
polytheistic hero-worship, and certain forms of art probably derived
from antediluvian times. The centre of this Cushite empire, however,
gave way to the rising power of Assyria or the Ashurite branch of the
sons of Shem, at a period antecedent to the dawn of profane history,
except in its mythical form; and when the light of secular history
first breaks upon us, we find Egypt standing forth as the only stable
representative of the arts, the systems, and the superstitions of the
old Cushite empire, of which it had been the southern branch; while
other remnants of the Hamite races, included in the empire of Nimrod,
were scattered over Western Asia, and, migrating into Europe, with or
after the ruder but less demoralized sons of Japheth, carried with
them their characteristic civilization and mythology, to take root in
new forms in Greece and Italy.[107] Meanwhile the Assyrian and Persian
(Elamite) races were growing in Middle Asia, and probably driving the
more eastern remnants of the Nimrodic empire into India, borrowing at
the same time their superstitions and their claims to universal
dominion. These views, which I believe to correspond with the few
notices in the Bible and in ancient history, and to be daily receiving
new confirmations from the investigations of the ancient Assyrian
monuments, enable us to understand many mysterious problems in the
early history of man. They give us reason to suspect that the
_principle_ of the first empire was an imitation of the antediluvian
world, and that its arts and customs were mainly derived from that
source. They show how it happens that Egypt, a country so far removed
from the starting-point of man after the deluge, should appear to be
the cradle of the arts, and they account for the Hamite and perhaps
antediluvian elements, mixed with primeval Biblical ideas, as the
cherubim, etc., in the old heathenism of India, Assyria, and Southern
Europe, and which they share with Egypt, having derived them from the
same source. They also show how it is that in the most remote
antiquity we find two well-developed and opposite religious systems;
the pure theism of Noah, and those who retained his faith, and the
idolatry of those tribes which regarded with adoring veneration the
objects and stages of the creative work, the grander powers and
objects of nature, the mighty Cainites of the world before the flood,
and the postdiluvian leaders who followed them in their violence,
their cultivation of the arts, and their rebellion against God. These
heroes were identified with imaginative conceptions of the heavenly
bodies, animals, and other natural objects, associated with the
fortunes of cities and nations, with particular territories, and with
war and the useful arts, transmitted under different names to one
country after another, and localized in each; and it is only in
comparatively modern times that we have been able to recognize the
full certainty of the view held long since by many ingenious writers,
that among the greater gods of Egypt and Assyria, and of consequence
among those also of Greece and Rome, were Nimrod, Ham, Ashur, Noah,
Mizraim, and other worthies and tyrants of the old world; and to
suspect that Tubalcain and Naamah, and other antediluvian names, were
similarly honored, though subsequently overshadowed by more recent
divinities. The later Assyrian readings of Rawlinson, Hincks, and the
lamented George Smith, and the more recent works on Egyptian
antiquities, are full of pregnant hints on these subjects. It would,
however, lead us too far from our immediate subject to enter more
fully into these questions. I have referred to them merely to point
out connecting-links between the secular and sacred history of the
earlier part of the human period, as a useful sequel to our comparison
of the latter with the conclusions of science, and as furnishing hints
which may guide the geologist in connecting the human with the
tertiary period, and in distinguishing between the antediluvian and
postdiluvian portions of the former.
It may be said, however, that all this Biblical history, however it
may accord with the little that remains to us of the written annals of
early Oriental nations, is entirely at variance with those modern
archaeological discussions which point to an immense antiquity of the
human race, and to a primitive barbarism out of which all human
culture was little by little evolved; and which results of
archaeological investigation, while contradictory to the Hebrew
Scriptures, are entirely in accord with the evolutionist philosophy.
The prominence now given to such views as these renders it necessary
that we should denote a special chapter to their discussion.