_“And calleth those things which be not as though they were.”—Rom.
4:17._
THE prevailing belief of Christendom to-day is, that about six thousand
years ago, somewhere in Asia, the Supreme Creator took common clay and
moulded it into the form of a man, somewhat as a sculptor forms the
model from which the marble statue is to be constructed, and when shaped
to his liking he breathed into the clay model the breath of life, and it
became a living soul. This miraculous work is believed to have been
begun and completed on a particular day; so that in the morning the
earth contained not a man, but in the afternoon the full-grown, bearded
man stood up in his majesty and assumed supremacy over all living
things. This godlike man finding himself lonely, the Creator put him to
sleep, and opened his side and took therefrom a rib, out of which he
formed a woman, who was to be a companion, a wife, to the man; and from
this particular couple have come, by ordinary generation, all the people
dwelling upon the face of the earth. They are said to have been perfect,
but, unfortunately for their progeny, this perfection did not long
continue. Before they were blest with offspring they lost their
Creator’s favor by eating fruit from a forbidden tree, and became
fearfully demoralized, and, instead of begetting children endowed with
their own angelic qualities, they became the unhappy parents of a race
of moral monsters, of which we are all degraded and degenerate
descendants.
The sacerdotal story of the fall of Adam and Eve is based upon the
assumption that it is to be received as literal history, revealed by the
Creator and written down in a book by a man specially chosen and
plenarily inspired; so that there can be no error or mistake in the
record. To question this narrative in its literal sense is most impious,
and subjects the doubter to the charge of favoring infidelity.
While persons “professing and calling themselves Christians” cannot
agree regarding many things deemed by them matters of vital importance,
the fall of man is a matter in which they are fully agreed. The great
basic dogma which underlies all modern systems of theology, Romish and
Protestant, is the utter depravity of the human race through the fall of
Adam, dooming a large majority of the human family to eternal
punishment.
How evil came into the world has been the most perplexing problem of the
ages. Before it the most gigantic minds have been covered with confusion
and paralyzed with doubt. Why sin and suffering should have been
permitted, not to say created, has never been made clear to the human
reason by any system of theology, Romish or Protestant. A few years ago
Dr. Edward Beecher published a book entitled _The Conflict of Ages_.
When reviewed by Dr. Charles Hodge in the _Princeton Review_ he entitled
his paper “Beecher’s Conflict;” but it was rightly called _The Conflict
of Ages_; it was not “Beecher’s Conflict,” and the explanation given by
theology only involves the question in greater doubt and difficulty.
From the first dawning of human reason, even in the mind of inquisitive
childhood, questions like these have been revolved, if not formulated:
Did not God know, when he made Adam and Eve, that they would fall? Why,
then, did he create them? Why did he create a subtle serpent to tempt
them? Why did he create a tree the fruit of which was forbidden? Why did
he make the possible everlasting ruin of innumerable unborn mortals
depend on such a trivial act as the eating of a certain apple? Why did
he not destroy Adam and Eve after their first act of disobedience, and
thus prevent them from propagating a faithless progeny, which should
increase in geometrical progression until the number should be so great
as to exhaust calculation with weariness, stagger reason itself, and
transcend even the powers of the loftiest imagination to conceive? Why
are the teeming millions of the children of Adam held virtually
responsible for this single trivial act of disobedience by an unknown
remote ancestor myriads of ages ago? How could all men sin in him and
fall with him in the first transgression? How could the guilt of Adam’s
sin be imputed to his children?
The circumstances connected with the degradation of man are so
extraordinary that it is not unreasonable to inquire whether the
narrative of the fall is a matter of supernatural revelation based upon
an historic occurrence, or whether it is purely mythical, portraying the
conceptions of the human mind as to the origin of evil at some remote
period of the world’s childhood. For the support of the dogma of total
depravity through the fall of Adam theologians rely primarily upon the
account in the book of Genesis. It is a notable fact that Adam and Eve
are not historically recognized in any other portion of the Old
Testament, and their very existence was totally ignored by the Teacher
of Nazareth, if the Gospels said to contain the only report of his
teachings are to be credited. Nobody pretends that Moses, the doubtful
author of the Pentateuch, wrote from personal knowledge; but it is
claimed that he wrote under inspiration of God, though there is not a
single intimation in Genesis or any other book that he was so inspired,
or that God had anything more to do with his writings than he had with
the writings of Homer, Herodotus, or John Milton. But the assumption
that the dogma of the fall through the sin of Adam was first revealed to
Moses—at most not more then eight or nine hundred years before the
Christian era—is plainly exploded by the fact that this story existed
among many nations centuries and centuries before Moses is said to have
been born or the writing called Genesis existed.
It is not within the lines of our general purpose to here give in detail
the numerous legends—substantially the same, though differing in
particulars—regarding the introduction of sin into this world, found in
the writings of Hindoos, Persians, Etruscans, Phœnicians, Babylonians,
Chaldeans, Egyptians, Thibetans, and others. Any man who would now dare
to deny this statement regarding the prevalence of the story of the fall
centuries before the writing of Genesis existed would justly subject
himself to the charge of ignorance or dishonesty.
Dr. Inman states that Adam is the Phallus and Eve the Yoni—in other
words, that Adam and Eve signify the same idea as Abraham and Sara,
Jacob and Leah, man and woman; thus embodying in the Hebrew the Hindoo
notion that all things sprang from Mahadeva and his Sacti, my lady Sara.
This deduction enables us at once to recognize, as did the early
Christians, the mythical character of the account of the fall; and we
must conclude that the story means that the male and female lived
happily together so long as each was without passion for the other, but
that when a union took place between them the woman suffered all the
miseries inseparable from pregnancy, and the man had to toil for a
family, whereas he had previously only thought of himself. The serpent
is the emblem of “desire,” indicated by the man and recognized by the
woman. “There is a striking resemblance between the Hindoo and Hebrew
myths. The first tells us that Mahadeva was the primary Being, and from
him arose the ‘Sacti.’ The second makes Adam the original, and Eve the
product of his right side—an idea which is readily recognizable in the
word _Benjamin_. After the creation, the Egyptian, Vedic, and Jewish
stories all place the woman beside a citron or pomegranate tree, or one
bearing both fruits; near this is a cobra or asp, the emblem of male
desire, because these serpents can inflate or erect themselves at will.”
General Forlong thus discourses upon this subject: “Most cosmogonies
relate a phallic tale of two individuals Adam and Eve, meeting in a
garden of delight (Gan-Eden), and then being seduced by a serpent Ar
(Ar-i-man), Hoa, Op, or Orus, to perform the generative act, which it is
taught led to sin and trouble, and this long before we hear of a
spiritual god or of solar deities. These cosmogonies narrate a contest
between man and Nature, in which the former fell, and must ever fall,
for the laws of Sol and his seasons none can resist.”... “The Jews
learned most of their faith and fables from the great peoples of the
East; especially did they get the two cosmogonies, and that solar fable,
mixed with truth, of a serpent tempting a woman with the fruit of a
tree, of course in the fading or autumnal equinox, when only fruit
exists and all creation tries to save itself by shielding all the stores
of nature from the fierce onslaughts of angry Typhon when entering on
his dreary winter. The Gan-Eden fable was clearly an attempt by
Zoroastrians to explain to outsiders the difficult philosophical problem
of the origin of man and of good and evil. Mithras, they said—and the
Jews followed suit—is the good God, the incarnation of God, who dwells
in the beauteous orb of day; to which Christian Jews added that he was
born of a virgin in a cave which he illuminated.”
“The tree of life mentioned in Gen. 3: 22 certainly appears,” says Mr.
Smith (Chal. Acct, p. 88), “to correspond to the sacred grove of Anu,
which a later fragment of the creation-tablets states was guarded by a
sword turning to all the four points of the compass; and there too we
have allusions to a thirst for knowledge, having been the cause of man’s
fall; the gods curse the dragon and Adam for the transgression. This
Adam was one of the Zalmat-qaqadi, or dark men, created by Hea or
Nin-Si-ku, a name pointing to Hea being a Nin or Creator, while Adam is
called Adami or Admi, the present Eastern term for man and the lingam,
and no proper name.” The impression that I get from the legends of
Izdubar, or the Flood, or even the creation-tablets, is simply that
these were religious revivals. Nearly every illustration of Mr. Smith’s
last volume shows the serpent as an evil influence. Now, if I am
right—and all I have read elsewhere tends to the same conclusion—then
all the tales as to a temptation by a serpent, a fall, are phallo-pythic
transmutations of faith, and have no more connection with the first
creation of man upon earth than have the flood, the ark, or
mountain-worship of Jews in the desert, or the destruction of Pytho by
Apollo in the early days of Delphi, etc.
“The tree and serpent,” says Fergusson, “are symbolized in every
religious system which the world has known, not excepting the Hebrew and
Christian, The two together are typical of the reproductive powers of
vegetable and animal life. It is uncertain whether the Jewish tree of
life was borrowed from the Egyptians or Chaldeans; but the meaning was
in both cases the same, and we know that the Assyrian tree was a
life-giving divinity. And Moses, or the writer of Genesis, has
represented very much the same in his coiled serpent and love-apples, or
citrons, of the tree of life.
“The writer of Genesis probably drew his idea of the two trees, that of
life and that of knowledge, from Egyptian and Zoroastrian story; for
criticism now assigns a comparatively late date to the writing of the
first Pentateuchal book. After Genesis no further notice is taken in the
Bible of the tree of knowledge. But that of life, or the tree which
gives life, seems several times alluded to, especially in Rev. 2: 7. The
lingam or pillar is the Eastern name for the tree which gives life. But
when this tree became covered with the inscriptions of all the past
ages, as in Egypt, then Toth, the Pillar, came to be called the tree of
knowledge.”
But it must not be supposed that all Christian theologians of the
present day hold the historical and literal truth of the legend of the
fall of Adam. In several of the public libraries of Philadelphia may be
found a book entitled _Beginnings of History_, written by a learned
professor of Archaeology at the National Library of France—Professor
François Lenormant. It was republished by Scribner, New York, in 1886,
with an introduction by Francis Brown, associate professor of Biblical
Philology in the Presbyterian Union Theological Seminary of New York. It
is written from a Christian standpoint, and the writer is a firm
defender of the infallibility of the Hebrew Scriptures, and can never be
suspected of having any sympathy with modern rationalism. He not only
admits that the Edenic story of the introduction of sin, found in
Genesis, is a compilation made up from the Shemitic traditions of
Babylonians, Phœnicians, and other pagan peoples, but he has covered
page after page with proofs of this fact by learned and accurate
quotations from their numerous legends. He puts in the common plea of
lawyers, known as _confession and avoidance_, and takes the ground that
“the writer of the Hebrew Genesis took these fables from floating
tradition as he found them, and cleansed them of their impurities,
altered their polytheistic tendencies, made them monotheistic, and
otherwise so transformed them as to make them fit vehicles of spiritual
instruction by the Divine Spirit which inspired him.”
This is an ingenious device, but it will hardly satisfy sound thinkers.
The question is, whether the story of Adam is historical truth or pagan
fiction. The highest scholarship pronounces it fiction, while certain
orthodox writers admit the fact “that God used prevailing but unreal
fancies to teach important truths.”
The document in which the story of the fall is found is a confused,
inconsistent, and absurd compilation by at least two different writers,
representing each a different God, Jehovah and Elohim, the writers
contradicting each other in many particulars; and this feet is admitted
by candid Christian writers, and by none more frankly than the late Dean
Stanley of the English Establishment. The first account of creation ends
at the third verse of Gen. 2, and the second account begins with the
fourth verse and closes with the end of that chapter. In the first
account the man and woman are created together on the sixth and last day
of creation (Gen. 1:28). In the second account the beasts and birds are
created after the creation of the man and before the creation of the
woman; and it was not until after Adam had examined and named all the
beasts of the fields, and had failed to find among the apes,
chimpanzees, and ourangs a suitable companion for himself, that Eve was
made from one of Adam’s ribs, taken from his primeval anatomy while
under the influence of a divine anaesthetic (Gen. 2:7, 8, 15, 22). In
the first account man was made on the last day, and woman was made at
the same time; in the second account man was made after the plants and
herbs, but before fruit trees, beasts, and birds. So it would seem that,
inasmuch as woman was made after all things, she was an afterthought, a
sort of necessary evil for the solace and comfort of man. These
contradictions run through the whole of the first and second chapters of
Genesis, and plainly show that these narratives were compiled by two
different persons from vague traditions or from different written
documents. Had the Creator undertaken to write or dictate an account of
his own work, he certainly would not have contradicted himself six times
within the limit of a few lines.
The credibility of the document in which is found the account of the
fall is further impaired by the fact that it contains statements openly
at variance with the demonstrations of science. It teaches not only that
the world was made in six days of twenty-four hours each, but that the
whole planetary system was made in a single day. “He made the stars
also.” The discoveries of modern science have lately driven our
sacerdotalists to a new and absurd interpretation of the story of
creation by alleging that the six days spoken of were not periods of
twenty-four hours each, but six indefinite periods of very long
duration. But it would be easy to furnish numerous admissions of
orthodox scholars that the six days of the creative week were intended
by the writers to describe ordinary days, of twenty-four hours each, and
not indefinite periods. Any other interpretation Professor Hitchcock has
pronounced “forced and unnatural, and therefore not to be adopted
without a very urgent necessity.” The venerable Moses Stuart, long
professor of Biblical Literature in the Andover Theological Seminary,
says: “When the sacred writer in Gen. 1 says the first day, the second
day, etc., there can be no possible doubt—none, I mean, for a
philologist, let a geologist think as he may—that a definite day of the
week is meant. What puts this beyond all question,” the learned
theologian adds, “is that the writer says specifically ‘the evening and
the morning were the first day,’ ‘the second day,’ etc. Now, is an
evening and a morning a period of some thousands of years?... If Moses
has given us an erroneous account of the creation, so be it. Let it come
out and let us have the whole truth.” The fact is, that the
indefinite-period hypothesis does not, after all the quirks and special
pleadings, overcome the difficulty. The question arises, Why six
indefinite periods? One indefinite period is as long as six or sixty.
There is nothing in geology to indicate six periods. One need only
consider the attempt to reconcile Genesis and geology to plainly see
that the Mosaic record was intended to be taken in its obvious sense.
The forced interpretations put upon the Hebrew story to make it appear
to be historical and literal truth make it more absurd than it would
otherwise appear. Think of Adam created (according to one account) on
the second day, and Eve on the sixth day, and then accept the hypothesis
that these creative days represent indefinite periods of thousands, if
not millions, of years to each day, so that four indefinite periods of
thousands of years passed away before Adam had his Eve to be his
helpmeet, and what a long, lonely time he must have had! Then how small
the human census must have been for unnumbered ages, and how strange the
fact that the same writer says that Adam “lived nine hundred and thirty
years, and he died;” that is to say, he died several hundred thousand
years before the rib was taken from his side to make him a wife!
But the fact must be emphasized that it is quite useless to criticise
the so-called Mosaic narrative of the fall, because it is acknowledged
to be a huge myth or allegory by the best scholarship of modern times.
The Christian author of the _Beginnings of History_ has with profound
research actually produced and printed the stories of many ancient
peoples in contrast with the narrative in Genesis. He says in the
preface to his book: “This is the problem which I have been led to
examine in comparing the narrations of the Sacred Book with those
current long ages before the time of Moses among nations whose
civilization dated back into the remote past, with whom Israel was
surrounded, from among whom it came out. As far as I myself am
concerned, the conclusion from this study is not doubtful. That which we
read in the first chapter of Genesis is not an account dictated by God
himself, the possession of which was the exclusive privilege of the
chosen people. It is a tradition whose origin is lost in the night of
the remotest ages, and which all the great nations of Western Asia
possessed in common, with some variations. The very form given it in the
Bible is so closely related to that which has been lately discovered in
Babylon and Chaldea, it follows so exactly the same course, that it is
quite impossible for me to doubt any longer.
The school of Alexandria in general, and Origen in particular, in the
first centuries of the Church interpreted the first chapters of Genesis
in the allegorical sense; in the sixteenth century the great Cardinal
Cajetan revived this system, and, bold as it may appear, it has never
been the object of any ecclesiastical censure.”
It is well understood among men of learning that the whole story of
Eden, the talking serpent, and the sinning woman is a myth, and that all
nations of sun-worshippers have had substantially the same legend, and
their priests, poets, and philosophers have not hesitated to acknowledge
among themselves its fabulous character. That early Jewish and Christian
writers freely admitted the allegorical character of the narrative
ascribed to Moses is well known. Maimonides, a learned Jewish rabbi,
said: “One ought not to understand nor take according to the letter that
which is written in the Book of the Creation, nor have the ideas
concerning it that most men have, otherwise our ancient sages would not
have recommended us to carefully conceal the sense of it, and on no
account to raise the allegorical veil which conceals the truth it
contains. Taken according to the letter, this work gives the most absurd
and extravagant idea of divinity. Whoever shall discover the true sense
of it ought to be careful not to divulge it.” Philo, the great Jewish
authority, took the same ground, and wrote mainly to show the
allegorical character of all the sacred books. Josephus held similar
views, and so did Papias and many of the early Christian Fathers. Origen
said: “What man of good sense will ever persuade himself that there was
a first, second, and a third day, and that these days had each their
morning and evening without the not-yet-existing sun, moon, and stars?
What man sufficiently simple to believe that God, acting the part of a
gardener, planted a garden in the East—that the ‘tree of life’ was a
real tree, evident to the senses, whose fruit had the virtue of
preserving life?” etc. St. Augustine held the same views as to the
allegorical character of the so-called Mosaic account of the creation
and fall, and so did Tertullian, Clement, and Ambrose. Some of the early
Christian authorities carried this idea of the allegorical character of
the Scriptures so far as to apply it to the Gospels themselves. “There
are things therein” (said Origen) “which, taken in their literal sense,
are mere falsities and lies;” and St. Gregory asserted of the letter of
Scripture that “it is not only dead, but deadly;” while Athanasius
admonished us that “should we understand Sacred Writ according to the
letter we should fall into the most enormous blasphemies.” It seems to
have been fully realized in early times that there was no rational way
to interpret Moses and his writings but upon the allegorical hypothesis.
As the Mosaic account of the creation and the fall of man is so
evidently the same story that was suggested to the Persians and other
nations by the astronomical phenomena, we are forced to the conclusion
that this is the only key to unlock the mysteries of the first three
chapters of Genesis. If the original story is known to have been founded
upon the ancient astrological religion, the substantial copy in our
Jewish Scriptures must have the same basis. All the ancient religions
had their _Cabala_—secret words and initiations—and the Jewish and
Christian Scriptures are no exceptions, as is seen upon their very
surface. We may not have all their secrets—some of them may not be
proper things to write about in our day—but no fair man of intelligence
can successfully deny that many of those things which are absurd if
taken for historical truth are at once explained by reference to the
solar cults of the ancients.
Many theologians have virtually admitted that there is nothing injurious
to the interests of true religion in the hypothesis here presented, but,
on the contrary, there is much that is truly beautiful and calculated to
elevate and inspire the devout mind. Even the distinguished Albertus, of
the twelfth Christian century, surnamed _the Great_ for his attainments
as a scholastic ecclesiastic, did not hesitate to write: “All the
mysteries of the incarnation of our Saviour Christ, and all the
circumstances of his marvellous life from his conception to his
ascension, are to be traced out in the constellations and are figured in
the stars.” “The Gospel in the Stars” was the significant advertisement
of a course of sermons recently delivered in a prominent Lutheran church
in Philadelphia by a learned doctor of divinity, and, though many of his
hearers thought that the title should have been “The Stars in the
Gospel,” it was certainly an evidence of progress and increasing light
to have a frank admission from such a source that all the truths of the
gospel and the doctrines of the Reformation were prefigured in the
celestial heavens and illustrated in the constellations of the solar
zodiac.
This author admits the identity between the tenets of the astro-theology
of ancient sun-worshippers and the present dominant theology of
Christendom, but assumes that the original construction of the celestial
heavens and its fanciful division into constellations had reference to,
and in fact prefigured, what was literally fulfilled in Christianity. He
finds in the solar zodiac of Esne in Egypt as clear predictions of the
coming of Christ as he finds in Isaiah or any other Jewish prophet.
Thus, he “gives away” the whole argument, and unwittingly admits the
natural origin of all the distinctive tenets of modern dogmatic
theology. This last craze may well be regarded as a compound of
scientific trifling and theological, moonshine.
But it is said by theologians that man is depraved, and that the present
moral status of humanity confirms the dogma of total depravity by
descent through fallen and depraved ancestors. This involves the
question, What is depravity?
That man is not perfect in morality is as true as that he is not perfect
in body nor in mentality. But does not every one know by his own
experience and observation that human shortcomings mainly arise from a
want of perfect development and the influence of environment, rather
than from essential, innate viciousness? What is called “sin” should be
known as “undevelopment,” and, as real as is the law of heredity, it is
no more real than the law of environment. Where there is evidence of
hereditary evil tendencies it is not necessary to go back more than two
or three generations to find the source.
But the fact must here be emphasized and continually kept in mind that
the story of Eden and the fall is substantially found in the annals of
many nations anterior to the existence of the Jewish tribes, varied only
in trivial matters. The story of the serpent in Eden is probably of
Aryan source, to which the conception of the satanic origin of evil was
attached after the Jews came into close contact with Persian dualistic
ideas. To doubt which was the original and which the copy, shows,
regarding the well-established facts of history, a want of information
so great as to make argument on this matter quite useless.
The conclusion is inevitable that if the fall of Adam is a fiction, then
the entire system of evangelical theology is based upon a fiction; and
the fruit must be natural to the tree—a fictitious tree can only bear
fictitious fruit. Orthodox theologians, especially of the logical
Presbyterian stamp, realize that if they give up Adam and Eve as
progenitors of the entire human race, they give up the very
foundation-stones of the “redemptive scheme.” This accounts for
Presbyterian opposition to the doctrine of evolution. They are logical
enough to see that the second Adam as a Saviour in the evangelical sense
must share the fate of the first Adam; and so Professor Woodrow of South
Carolina has recently been degraded on account of his theory of
evolution.
The world moves, and, as Professor Marsh of Yale College has well said,
“The doctrine of evolution is as thoroughly demonstrated as the
Copernican system of astronomy.”
In the _Popular Science Monthly_ for October, 1890, we have a very able
article from Andrew D. White, LL.D., ex-president of Cornell University,
showing how completely science contradicts theology in regard to the
Edenic story. He shows that the tendency of the race has always been
upward from low beginnings. He further shows that Archbishop Whately and
the Duke of Argyll championed the Bible story, but were so conclusively
answered by Sir John Lubbock and Tylor that the views of the archbishop
were seen to be untenable, while the duke, as an honest man and a sound
thinker, was obliged to give up his former views and adopt the
scientific theory. The light thrown upon this subject by Herbert
Spencer, Buckle, Max Müller, and scores of other great scholars is among
the glories of the century now ending. The public declaration of the
celebrated Von Martius, of his conversion to the scientific view of the
story of the Fall, ought to make smaller men less confident of their
views on a subject they have never studied.
In 1875, Commodore Vanderbilt endowed a university in Tennessee, and it
was put in charge of the Methodists. Dr. Alexander Winchell was called
to the chair of Geology. He was distinguished in his specialty by his
successful labors in another university. He openly taught “that man
existed before the period assigned to Adam, and that all the human race
could not have descended from Adam.” The Methodist bishop told him “that
such views were contrary to the plan of redemption.” The Methodist
Conference resolved “that they would have no more of this,” and
Professor Winchell was summarily dismissed from the chair, and the
position, with its salary, assigned to another. The State University of
Michigan recalled him to his former chair in that institution, where he
could teach _science_ regardless of the impotent thunders of _theology_.
The fall of Adam is really the pivotal principle in dogmatic theology of
the orthodox variety. If the entire human race are not descendants of a
real, genuine, historical pair miraculously created (a pair almost
divine in perfections), and who by disobedience fell from their high
estate, and by their federal or representative character involved all
their countless descendants by natural generation and descent in the
same ruin,—if these things are not true, then what is called the
evangelical scheme is based upon a fiction, and is to be so treated,
regardless of the effect upon other theological doctrines. The dogma of
a sudden, special creation of a perfect man is not sustained by the
facts of history nor the science of palaeontology. Scientific
investigators find man, so far as the evidence of his remote existence
can be traced, very nearly allied to apes; and there is abundant
evidence to show that man has been improving in every respect as years
and cycles of years have rolled away. It is thus absolutely demonstrated
that the history of our race shows the rise or ascent of man from a very
low estate, instead of his “fall” from a condition of high perfection.
But it does not follow, because man as we first find him was very much
like the anthropoid ape, that he is a lineal descendant of the ape. The
more rational hypothesis is, that both apes and man were evolved from
still lower animal forms by divergent lines, so that there is a relation
of a very distant cousinship existing between them. There is many a
fool-born jest about man and the monkey, oft repeated by _adcaptandum_
theologians who have never read Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ nor his
_Descent of Man_, and who therefore do not know that there is nothing in
these writings to justify such caricatures.
The fact is, the evolution of man by slow and long-continued processes,
instead of his sudden miraculous creation on a certain day, is now as
well established as the law of gravitation, in the judgment of
scientists who are not hampered and blinded by preconceived theological
dogmas. It cannot be denied that the weight of scientific testimony is
very largely in favor of the _development_ of man, instead of a
miraculous and complete creation at a particular period of time. The
true ground will be found to be _creation by evolution_; and if our
purblind sacerdotalists had accepted this doctrine, as the brightest of
them have privately done, they would have saved themselves the disgrace
of becoming the laughing-stock of the scientific world. If man was
brought to his present high estate by a system of evolution, it is no
less the work of the Supreme Creator of the universe than if he had been
made from clay in an instant of time; and if the character of man,
mentally and morally, is admitted to be based on the degree of his
development, it would solve many a knotty question in theology and
morals. At any rate, the evolution hypothesis has many advantages over
the Church dogma, manifestly founded on a pagan fable. The fact is,
sacerdotalists have always been their own worst enemies, and have always
been defeated in their battles with science and a true philosophy.
It is not intended to ignore the fact that legends of a paradisiacal
period, a real “golden age,” are found among all ancient peoples, also
of periods of general demoralization; but these legends can easily be
accounted for. It is a natural instinct in man to praise the past, and
to think that “the former times were better than the present.” We see
this among aged men and women to-day. Then it is well known that the
stream of human history has never run in an unbroken channel. Our race
has ever had its “ups and downs,” and, comparatively speaking, mankind
has had many _falls_ and _ascents_, while the general or ultimate
tendency and result have been ascending higher and higher. Moreover, the
golden age of Adam in Eden must have been very short, according to the
fable of Genesis, as the fall occurred before he had any children. What
a pity that Adam and Eve could not have maintained their innocence by
blind obedience until at least a son and daughter could have been born
to them! This may be considered irreverent, but everybody knows that,
outside of the pulpit and the Sun-day-school, the story of Adam and Eve
is hardly ever mentioned except as a huge joke, and that witty preachers
often take part in laughing at it. It is difficult to write about a
fiction otherwise than facetiously.
I cannot refrain from again quoting Professor Huxley in summing up my
own conclusions in regard to this matter:
“I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how any one for a moment can doubt
that Christian theology must stand or fall with the historical
trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the
Messiah, or Christ, is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history. The
identification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon the
interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have no
evidential value unless they possess the historical character assigned
to them. If the covenant with Abraham was not made; if circumcision and
sacrifices were not ordained by Jehovah; if the ‘ten words’ were not
written by God’s hand on the stone tables; if Abraham is more or less a
mythical hero, such as Theseus; the story of the deluge a fiction; that
of the fall a legend; that of the creation the dream of a seer,—if all
these definite and detailed narratives of apparently real events have no
more value as history than the stories of the regal period of Rome, what
is to be said of the Messianic doctrine which is so much less clearly
enunciated? And what about the authority of the writers of the books of
the New Testament, who on this theory have not merely accepted flimsy
fictions for solid truths, but have built the very foundations of
Christian dogma upon legends and quicksands?
“The antagonism between natural knowledge and the Pentateuch would be as
great if the speculations of our time had never been heard of. It arises
out of contradictions upon matters of fact. The books of ecclesiastical
authority declare that certain events happened in a certain fashion; the
books of scientific authority say they did not.”
“What we are pleased to call religion now-a-days is for the most part
Hellenized Judaism; and, not un-frequently, the Hellenic element carries
with it a mighty remnant of old-world paganism and a great infusion of
the worst and weakest products of Greek scientific speculation; while
fragments of Persian and Babylonian—or rather Accadian—mythology burden
the Judaic contribution to the common stock. The antagonism of Science
is not to Religion, but to the heathen survivals and the bad philosophy
under which Religion herself is wellnigh crushed. Now, for my part, I
trust this antagonism will never cease, but that to the end of time true
Science will continue to fulfil one of her most beneficent functions,
that of relieving men from the burden of false Science which is imposed
upon them in the name of Religion.”
The fact that well-dressed congregations do not laugh sacerdotalists to
scorn shows how safe it is to rely upon the credulity and indifference
of those who have been taught mere myths as real history from early
childhood. The day will come when even children will laugh in the faces
of priests when they seriously speak of the fall of Adam and Eve as a
matter of actual occurrence. The great curse of true religion to-day is
_literalism_, enforced by priestcraft, in regard to what relates to our
most sacred concerns.
It is no part of our design to here explain the development theory as to
how man did originate from the lower forms of animal existence, but must
refer those who are willing to learn to such works as Darwin’s _Origin
of Species and Descent of Man_, Huxley’s _Man’s Place in Nature_, and to
scores of other books accessible to all. Perhaps ninety-nine-hundredths
of living working scientists repudiate the Adam-and-Eve story, and
regard it as a fable intended to illustrate what man’s attainments at
the time would not enable him to account for on natural principles.