yA^ ^ / -I LIBRARY OK TIIK. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. yy GIFT OF' Received -^^:a^ri<. 1 887 v5 O Shelf No. Accessions No. ^^9^ O Shelf Y v^, >>»^->^Y>V^ ( Digitized by tine Internet Archive in 2007 witin funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcliive.org/details/fablesofinfideliOOpattricli 'V -s- :^ :6i-^:^ ry? THW m 1.SIT sS^llFO^ Sn^^iyROBriei Fables of Infidelity ]p^ACTg Of ]^/ITH BEING AN EXAMINATION OF THE EVIDENCES OF INFIDELITY. BT Rev. ROBERT PATTERSON, D. D. REVISED AND ENLARGED. NEW YORK: H. E. SIMMONS, 150 Nassau Street. 1875. Pv3 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1S75, by WESTERN TRACT SOCIETY, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington, D. C, 3f/^^ Stereotyped by OGDEN, CAMPBELL & CO., 176 Elm St., Cincinnati. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE. Did the World Make Itself? .... 7 Eternity of Matter. Disproved by its Composite Nature. Disproved by its Motion. Evolution only a big Perpetual Motion Humbug. Work of a Designer in the Structure of the Eye. The Eye-Maker sees over a wide Field and far. The Eye-Maker sees Perfectly. CHAPTER IT. Was Your Mother a Monkey? . . , , 34 The Divine Fact of Evolution Quite Different from the Atheistic Theory. State the Question Sharply — Why ? Darwin's Answer. The Ancestral Monkey, Fish, Squirt. Natural Selection. Intended to Exclude God. 1. TJie History of the Theory, Indian; Phoenician; Greek; Popish; La Place's Theory; The Vestiges of Creation. Herbert Spencer's Contradictory Theory. (iii) IV CONTENTS. The Evolutionists' Hell. Spontaneous Generation — two Theories; the Conflicting Theories of Progress; Tremaux; Laraarek; the Cli- matal; Darwin's; Huxley's; Parson's; Mivart's; Hyatt's; Cope's ; Wallace's; the Gods; Denounced by the Princes of Science. Agassiz's Deliverance Against it. Imperfection of the Theory Eked out. Huxley's Protoplasm. TyndiiU's Potency of Life in Matter. Buchner's Matter and Force. Lubbock's Origin of Civilization. Consequences of the Brutal Origin of Man. Propagandism of Atheism. 2. The Theory lUogieal and Incoherent, Darwin Admits Insufficiency of Proof. Useless as an Explanation of Nature. Self-Contradictory; e. g.^ Protoplasm. "Wallace's Self-Contradictions. Incoherency of the Denial of Design with the Assertion of . Progress.. Failure of Alleged Facts to Sustain the Theory. Does not Account for the Origin of Anything. Wild Assumptions Made by Darwin. Erroneous Assumption of the Tendency of Natural Selec- tion to Improve Breeds. Assumption of Infinite Possibility of Progress in Finite Creatures. 3. An Unfounded Theory. No Evidence of the Facts Possible. None Ever Alleged, save Gulliver's. Domestication Disproves Transmutation — Horses; Pigeons; Dogs. The Egyptian Monuments. The Mummied Animals. CONTENTS. The Geological Record. The Limits of Geological Time. 4. Embryology, Testimony of Scientists : * 1. Embryology Only Analogical. 2. Embryos not all Alike. 3. Four Distinct Plans of Structure. 4. Germs Always True to the Breed. 5. Gradations of Species. Lamarek's Statement, Birth Descent not Inferable from Gradation. No such Imperceptible Blending in Nature. The Fact of the Present Existence of Distinct Species. Sterility of Hybrids. Geological Species Distinct. The Intermediate Forms not Found. The Gradation Docs not Begin with the Lowest Forms. Four Kingdoms from the Beginning. The New Species Began with the Giants. The Gaps Fatal to the Theory. The Abyss Between Death and Life. The Gulf Between the Plant and the Animal. The Gaps Between Species Which will not Breed Together.. The Gaps Between Air Breathers and Water Breathers, &c. The Great Gulf Between the Brute and the Man. Natural Selection Could not Have Deprived a Monkey of Hair. Nor Have Given a Human Brain. The Brain- Worker Contravenes Natural Selection at Every Step. Civilization the Contradiction of Natural Selection. Morality and Religion the Direct Contraries of Natural Selection. Tendency Immoral, Degrading, and Atheistic. Vi CONTENTS. CHAPTER III. Is God Everybody, and Everybody God? . . 91 Pantheism Described. An Antiquated Hindooism. A Jesuitical Atheism. Grossly Immoral. A Practical Atheism^ CHAPTER IV. Have We Any Need of the Bible? . . .112 Civilization and the Bible. Revelation Not Impossible. The Mythical Theory. The Inner Light. Many Ignorant of God. Heathen Morality — Plato's. Infidel Morality — Paine's. CHAPTER V. Who Wrote the New Testament? . . .147 The Bible Not Just Like Any Other Book. Two Modes of Investigation. Did the Council of Nice Make the Bible? The Mythical Theory. The Evidence of CeUus. The Fragment Hypothesis. The Bank Signature Book. Could the Now Testament be Corrupted? CONTENTS. Tli CHAPTER VI. Is the Gospel Fact or Fable ? . . . .169 The Nature of Historical Evidence; Letters; Monuments. Contemporary Letters of Peter, Pliny and John. Prove the Existence of Churches. And Their Worship, Holiness, and Sufferings. CHAPTER VIL \ Can We Believe Christ and His Apostlest The Gospel a Unit; Must Take or Refuse it All. Apostles' Testimony Circumstantial. Witnesses Numerous and Independent. Confirm Their Testimony with Their Blood. CHAPTER VIII. Prophecy, 210 Political — Napoleon's — Wrong. Presidential Candidates. Draper's Dogma of Youth and Decrepitude of Nations. Statesmen Prophets. General Claim for All Genius. Instances of Secular Prediction : Cayotte's of the French Revolution. The Oracles of Apollo. Vettius Valen's Twelve Vultures. Spencer's of the Disruption of the American Union. Saint Malachi's Prophecies. Mohammed's Prophecies. Seneca's of the Discovery of America. Dante's of the Keformation. Plato's of Shakespeare. Vlll CONTENTS. Symbolical Language of Prophecy. Anybody may Predict Downfall of Nations. An Awful Truth if it be True. But Bible Predictions Circumstantial — Egypt; Babylon; Nineveh; Judea. Predict Life and Kesurrection. rs; Seven Churches; Messiah. CHAPTER IX. Moses and the Prophets, 266 God the Author of the Bible. Every Other Book Inspired? Connection of Bible History and Morality. Hume's Sophism. Miracles Being Violations of Laws of Nature, Contrary to an Unalterable Experience. No Testimony can Reach to the Supernatural. Records of Facts Not Judged by Your Notions. Rationalistic Explanation of the Miracles. Bible Account of Creation Unscientific. Antiquity of Man. The Anachronisms of the Pentateuch. Bishop Colenso's Blunders : The Universality of the Deluge. Joshua Causing the Sun to Stand Still. Cain's Wife. Increase of Jacob's Family in Egypt. The Number of the First-Bom. The Fourth Generation. ' The Bishop's Blunders in Camp Life. Sterility of the Wilderness. Population of the Promised Land. Modern Discoveries in Bible Lands Egyptian Monuments of Joseph. CONTENTS. IZ Assyrian Ethnology and Genesis, Chaps, x. and xi. Sennacherib's Conquest of Palestine. Belshazzar's Kingship. The Moabitic Inscriptions, and Omri and Ahab, The Samaritan Pentateuch. The Character of the Books — Austere. Variety of "Writers and Unity of Plan. Contained the Surveys, and the Laws of the Nation. Introduced New and Kepublican Usages. Moses' Law in Advance of Modern Social Science. Testimony of the Jewish Nation. Testimony of Christ. The Lost Books. The Law Abolished by the Gospel. The Imperfect Morality of Old Testament. Polygamy, Slavery, and Divorce. The Education of the World a Gradual Process. The Imprecations of Scripture. CHAPTER X. Infidelity Among the Stars, .... 335 Scientific Objections to the Bible. The Infinity and Self-Existence of the Universe. Disproved by Its Evident Limits. Its Composite Materials. Its Steady Loss of Heat. Bufibn's Explosion of Planets. The Nebular Theories. The Fiction of Homogeneous Matter. The Contradictory Theories. The Perpetual Motion Machine. CONTENTS. Contrary to Facts of Astronomy. Contradicted by Astronomers. Impossibility of any Cosmogony. CHAPTER XL Daylight Before Sunrise, 378 Infidel Objections to Genesis. The Hindoo Chronology. The Egyptian Chronology. The Bible Age of the Earth. The Solid Firmament. Light Before the Sun. CHAPTER XII. Telescopic Views of Scripture, .... 423 The Source of the Water of the Deluge. The Stars Fighting Against Sisera. The Astronomers of the Great Pyramid. The Grand Motion of the Sun. The Formation of Dew. The Multitude of the Stars. The DjBscent of the Heavenly City. CHAPTER XIII. Science or Faith? 4G6 Mu«t Faith Fade Before Science ?• Scientists as Partial as Other People. Have no Such Certainty aa is Claimed. CONTENTS. 1. Mathematical Errors. The Infinite Half Inch, Etc. The Doctrine of Chances. No Mathematical Figures in Nature. The French Metric System. The Lowell Turbine Wheel. 2. Errors of Astronomy, Kant's Predictions ; Le Yerrier's. Herschel's Enumeration of Errors. Sun's Distance; Other Measurements. The Moon's Structure and Influence. La Place's Proposed Improvement. The Sun's Structure, Heat, Etc. The Sizes, Distances, and Densities of the Planets. Errors About the Nebulae. Errors About Comets. The Cosmical Ether. The Cold of Infinite Space. From This Chaos Springs the Theory of Development. 3. Errors of Geology. No Fact of Geology Anti-Biblical. All Anti-Biblical Theories Based on an If. No Geological Measure of Time. All Calculations of Time by Geologists, which Have Been Tested, Have Proved Erroneous — the Danish Bogs; the Swiss Lake Villages; Horner's Nile Pottery; the Kaised Beaches of Scotland; Lyell's Blunder in the Delta of the Mississippi; Sir Wm. Thompson's Ex- posure of the Absurdity of the Evolutionists' Demands for Time. Confiicting Geological Theories— the Wernerian, Huttonian, and Diluvian Theories; the Catastrophists and Pro- gressionists; Eleven Theories of Earthquakes; Nine Theories of Mountains; False Geology of America; Scotland Kicked About Too. Xll CONTENTS. 4. Errors of Zoology. Lamarek's Yestiges; Treraaux; Darwin's Contradictions ; Huxley; Mivart, and Wallace. Blunders of the French Academy, Denouncing Quinine, Vaccination, Lightning Kods, and Steam Engines. Uncertainty of Science Increases in Human Concerns. Second-hand Science Founded on Somebody's Say So. 5. All Science Founded on Faith. Reason Also Based on Faith. This Life Depends on Faith. We Demand Truths of which Science is Ignorant. AH Our Chief Concerrs in the Domain of Faith. Religion the Most Experimental of the Sciences. The Only Science wnich can Make You Happy. Try for Yourself. PKEFACE. This is not so much a volume upon the Evidences of Christianity, as an examination of the Evidences of Infielity. When the Infidel tells us that Christianity is false, and asks us to reject it, he is bound of course to provide us with something belter and truer instead; under penalty of being cons"dered a knave trying to swindle us out of our birthright, and laughed at as a fool, for imagining that he could persuade mankind to live and die without religion. Suppose he had proved to the world's satisfaction that all religion is a hoax, and all men professing it are liars, how does that comfort me in my hour of sorrow? Scoffing will not sustain a man in his solitude, when he has nobody to scoflf at ; and disbelief is only a bottomless tub, which will not float me across the dark river. If Infidels in- tend to convert the world, they must give us some positive system of truth which we can believe, and venerate, and trust. A glimmering idea of this necessity seems lately to have dawned upon some of them. It is quite possible that they have also felt the want of something for their own souls to believe; for an Infi- del ha3 a soul, a poor, hungry, starved sou), just like other men. At any rate, having grown tired of pelting the Church with the dirt- balls of Voltaire and Paine, thoy begin to acknowledge that it is, after all, an institution; and that the Bible is an influential book, both popular and useful in its way. Mankind, it seems, will have a Church and a Bible of some sort; why not go to work and make a Church and a Bible of their own ? Accordingly they have gone to work, and in a very short time have prepared a variety of ungodly religion', so various that the worldly-minded man who can not be suited with one to his taste must be very hard to please. Discord- ant and contradictory in their positive statements, they are agreed only in negatives; denying the God of the Bible, the resurrection of the dead, and judgment to come. Nevertheless each discoverer or constructor presents his system to the world with great confi- dence, large claims to superior benevolence, vast pretensions to (1) Z PREFACE. learning and science, and no little cant about duty and piety. "Wonderful to tell, some of them are very fond of clothing their ungodliness in the language of Scripture. No pains are spared to secure the wide spread of these notions. Prominent Infidels are invited to deliver courses of scientific lec- tures, in which the science is made the medium of conveying the Infidelity. Scientific books, novels, magazines, daily newspapers, and common school books, are all enlisted in the work. The dis- ciples of Infidelity are numerous and zealous. It would be hard to find a factory, boarding-house, steamboat or hotel where twelve per- sons are employed, without an Infidel; and harder still to find an Infidel who will not use his influence to poison his associates. These systems are well adapted to the depraved tastes of the age. The business man, whose whole soul is set on money-making and spending, is right glad to meet the Secularist, who will prove to him on scientific principles, that a man is much profited b}'^ gaining the whole world, even at the risk of his soul, if he has such a thing. The young and ill-instructed professor of Christianity, whose long- ings for forbidden joys are strong, has a natural kindliness toward Rationalism, which befogs the serene light of God's holy law, and gives the directing power to his own inner liking. The sentimental young lady, who would recoil from the grossness of the Deist, is attracted by the poetry of Pantheism. Infidelity has had, in con- sequenie, a degree of success very little suspected by simple-minded pastors and parents, and which is often discovered too late for remedy. This book is written to expose the folly of some of these novel systems of Infidelity — leaving others to show their wickedness. It may surprise some who would glory in being esteemed fiends, to learn that they are only foi>ls. If they should be awakened now to a sense of the ab.^urdities which they cherish as philosophy, it might save them from awaking another day to the shame and ever- lasting contempt of the Universe. I have not taken up all the cavils of Infidelity. Their name is Legion. Nor have I troubled my readers with any which they are not likely to hear., Leaving the sleeping dogs to lie, I have noticed only such as I have known to bark and bite in my own neighbor- hood, and know to be rife here in the West. They are stated, as nearly as possible, in the words in which I have heard them in public debate, or in private conversation with gentlemen of Infidel PREFACE. 3 principles. I have made no references to books or writers on that side, save to such as I am assured were the sources of their senti- ments. In such cases I have named and quoted the authors. Where no such quotations are noticed it will be understood that I am responsible for the fairness with which I have represented the opinions which are examined. It is not my design to fight men of straw. j^ Every historical or scientific fact adduced in support of the argu- ments here used is confirmed by reference to the proper authority. But it has not been deemed needful to crowd the pages with refer- ences to the works of Christian apologists. The Cliristian scholar does not need such references ; while to those for whose benefit I write, their names carry no authority, and their arguments are gen- erally quite unknown. One great object of my labor will be gained if I shall succeed in awaking the spirit of inquiry among my read- ers, to such an extent as to lead them to a prayerful and patient perusal of several of the works named on the next page. They have heard only one side of the question, and will be surprised at their own ignorance of matters which they ought to have known^ Books on the Evidences are not generally circulated. Ministers perhaps have some volumes in their libraries ; but in a hundred houses, it would be hard to find half a dozen containing as many as would give an inquiring youth a fair view of the historical evi- dences of the truth of the gospel. Nor, where they are to be found, are they generally read. Being deemed heavy reading, the maga- zine, or the newspaper is preferred. Ministers do not in general devote enough of their time to such sound teaching as will stop the mouths of gainsayers. I have been assured by skeptical gentlemen, who in the early part of their lives had attended church regularly for twentj^-two years, that during all that time they had never heard a single discourse on the Evidences. Moreover, the pr tean forms of Infidelity are so various, and many of its present positions so novel, that books or discourses prepared only twenty years ago miss the mark ; and rather expose to the charge of misrepresenta- tion, than produce c nviction. New books on Infidelity are needed for every goneration. The lectures expanded into this volume were delivered in Cin- cinnati, in 1858. Replying to different, and discordant systems of error, whose only bond is opposition to the gospel, Ihey are neces- sarily somewhat disconnected. No attempt was made to mold 4 PREFACE. them into a suit of royal armor, but merely to select a few smooth pebbles from the brook of truth, which any Christian lad might sling at the giant defiers of the armies of the living God. Having proved acceptable for this purpose, and a steadily increasing demand for repeated editions wearing out the original plates, the author has been requested by British and American publishers to revise the work in the light of the recent discoveries of science. This he has at empted ; with what success the reader will judge. Conscious of its many defects, yet grateful to God for the good which he has done to many souls by its instrumentalit}', the author again com- mends the book to the Father of Lights, praying him to use it as a mirror to flash such a ray of light into many dark souls as may lead them into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. San Francisco, March 30, 1875. The author having been repeatedly asked by inquirers for the names of books on the Evidences of Christianity, subjoins a list of th »8e easily accessible in the West. It is not supposed that any one inquirer will read all these; but it is well to road more than one, since the evidence is cumulative, and it is impossible for any writer to present the whole. Having a list of several works, the inquirer who can not obtain one may be able to procure another. There are many other works on the Evidences on the shelves of all our principal booksellers. Modern Atheism, by James Buchanan, LL. D. Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, by James McCosh, LL. D., and George Dickie, M. D. Religion and Geology, Edward Hitchcock, LL. D. The Architecture of the Heamns, J. P. Nichol, LL. D The Christiayi Philosopher, Thomas Dick, LL. D. Natural Theology, William Paley, D. D. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the (Constitution and (Jourse of Nature, Joseph Butler, D. C. L. The Bridgewater Treatises, Whewell, Chalmers, Kidd, &c. The Cumprehensive Commentary, William Jenks D. D. Th£ Cause and Cure of Infidelity, Rev. David Nelson. A View of the Evidences of Christianity, William Paley, D. D The Eclipse of Faith^ ascribed to Henry Rogers. PREFACE. 5 The Restoration of Belief ascribed to Isaac Taylor. Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity, University of Virginia. The Divine Authority of the Old and New Testaments Asserted^ J Leland, D. D. The Bible Commentary. An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters to Thomas Paine, R. Watson. A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion, S. Jenyns. A Letter to O. West, Esq., on the Conversion of St. Paul, Lord Lyttleton. Observations on the History and Evidence of the Resurrection of Jesics Christ, Gilbert West, Esq. Difficulties of Lifidelity, Faber. Dissertations on the Prophecies, Thos. Newton, D. D. An Introduction to the Critical Study of the Scriptures^ T.H. Home, Vol. I. The Evidences of Christianity, Charles Petit Mcllvaine, D. D. Rawlinson^s Historical Evidences. Modern Skepticism, by Joseph Barker. Haley'' s Discrepancies of the Bible, W. G. Holmes, Chicago. The Superhuman Origin of the Bible, Rogers. Christianity and Positivism,, McCosh. The Supernatural in Relation to the Natural^ McCosh. Aids to Faith, Appleton & Co. Modern Skepticism, Randolph & Son. Modern Doubt, Christlieb. Alexander's Evidences of Christianity. CHAPTER I Did The World Make Itself? ^% Understand, ye brutish among the people ; And, ye fools, when will ye be wise f He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? :>^J^1 He that formed the eye, shall he not see 9 ^^^2;:^- He that chastiseth the heathen, shall he he not correct f He that teacheth man knowledge, shall he Tiot know ? — Psalm xciv. 8, 9. , Has the Creator of the world common sense ? Did he know what he was about in making it? Had he any object in view in forming it? Does he know what is going on in it? Does he care whether it answers any purpose or not? Strange questions you will say ; yet we need to ask a a stranger question: Had the world a Creator, or did it make itself? There are persons who say it did, and who declare that the Bible sets out with a lie when it says, that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Whereas, say they, •* We know that matter is eternal, and the world is wholly composed of matter; therefore, the heavens and the earth are eternal, never had a beginning nor a Creator." But, however fully the atheist may know that matter is eternal, we do not know any such thing, and must be allowed to ask, How do you know? As you are not eternal, we can not take it on your word. (7) 8 DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF ? The only reason which anybody ever ventured for this amazing assertion is this, that "all philosophers agree that matter is naturally indestructible by any human power. You may boil water into steam, but it is all there in the steam ; or burn coal into gas, ashes, and tar, but it is all in the gas, ashes, and tar ; you may change the outward form as much as you please, but you can not destroy the sub- stance of anything. Wherefore, as matter is indestructible, it must be eternal." Profound reasoning! Here is a brick fresh from the kiln. It will last for a thousand years to comej therefore, it has existed for a thousand years past I The foundation of the argument is as rotten as the superstructure. It is not agreed among all philosophers that matter is naturally indestructible, for the very satis- factory reason that none of them can tell what matter in its own nature is. All that t!hey can undertake to say is, that they have observed certain properties of matter, and, among these, that " it is indestructible by any operation to which it can be subjected in the ordinary course of circum- stances observed at the surface of the globe."* The very utmost which any man can assert in this matter is a negative, a want of knowledge, or a want of power. He can say, "Human power can not destroy matter;" and, if he pleases, he may reason thence that human power did not create it. But to assert that matter is eternal because man can not destroy it, is as if a child should try to beat the cylinder of a steam engine to pieces, and, failing in the at- tempt, should say, "I am sure this cylinder existed from eternity, because I am unable to destroy it." But not only is the assertion of the eternity of matter unproven, and impossible to be proved, it is capable of the most demonstrable refutation, by one of the recent dis- *Reid'8 Chemistry, II. § 37. DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? 9 coveries of science. The principle of the argument is so plain that a child of four years old can understand it. It is simply this, that all substances in heaven and earth are compounded of several elements; but no compound can be eternal. We say to our would-be philosophers, When you tell us that matter is eternal, how does that account for the for- mation of this world ? What is this matter you speak of? This world consists not of a philosophical abstraction called matter, nor yet of one substance known by that name, but of a great variety of material substances, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, sulphur, iron, aluminum, and some fifty others already discovered.* Now, which of these is the eterna- matter you speak of? Is it iron, or sulphur, or clay, or oxygen? If it is any one of them, where did the others come from? Did a mass of iron, becoming discontented with its gravity, suddenly metamorphose itself into a cloud of gas, or into a pail of water? Or are they all eternal? Have we fifty-seven eternal beings? Are they all eternal in their present combinations? or is it only the single elements that are eternal ? You see that your hypothesis — that matter is eternal — gives me no light on the formation of this world, which is not a shapeless mass of a philosophi- cal abstraction called matter, but a regular and beautiful building, composed of a great variety of matters. Was it so from eternity ? No man who was ever in a quarry, or a gravel pit, will say so, much less one who has the least smattering of chemistry or geology. Do you assert the eternity of the fifty-seven single substances, either separate or combined in some other way than we now find them in the rocks, and rivers, and atmosphere of the earth ? Then how came they to get together at all, and particularly how did they put themselves in their present shapes ? f Johnson's Turner's Chemistry, § 341. 10 DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? Eacli of them is a piece of matter of which inertia is a primary and inseparable property. Matter of itseJf can not begin to move, or assume a quiescent state after being put in motion. Will you tell us that the fifty-seven primary e'ements danced about till the air, and sea, and earth, somehow jum- bled themselves together into the present shape of this glorious and beautiful world, with all its regularity of day and night, and summer and winter, with all its beautiful flowers and lofty trees, with all its variety of birds, and beasts, and fishes? To bring the matter down to the level of the intellect of the most stupid pantheist, tell us in plain English, /)i6? the paving stones make themselves? For the paving stones are made out of a dozen different chemical constituents, and each one is built up more ingeniously than the house you live in. Now^ did iJte paving stones make themselves? No conviction of the human mind is more certain than the belief that every combination of matter proves the ex- istence of a combiner, that every house has had a builder, and that every machine has had a maker. No matter how simple the combination, if it be only two laths fastened to- gether by a nail, or two bricks cemented with mortar, or the sole of an old pegged boot, all the atheists in the world could not convince you that those two laths, or those two. bricks, or those two bits of leather existed in such a com- bination from all eternity. If any wise philosopher tried to persuade you that for anything you could tell they might have been always so, you would reply, "No, sir! You can't cram such stuff down my throat. Even a child's common sense shows him that those two laths were not always so nailed together; that those two bricks were not always so placed, one on the top of the other; and that those two pieces of old sole leather were not always pegged together in the sole of a boot." There is no conviction more irre- DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? 11 sistible than our belief that no compound can jpossihly he eternal. But the universe is the greatest of all compounds. Ev- erything in it is compound. Chemists speak of simple substances, or elements of matter, and it is well enough to separate the elements of things in our thoughts, for the sake of distinct consideration, and to speak of the proper- ties of pure oxygen, or of pure hydrogen, or of pure car- bon, or of pure gold, or of pure iron, or of pure silver. But then we should always remember that there is nothing pure in the world, that there is no such thing in nature as any substance consisting only of a single element, pure and uncombined with others. Just as your gold eagle is not pure gold, but alloyed with copper, everything in nature is alloyed. Everything in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth, is compound. The air you breathe, simple as it seems, is composed of three gases, and is besides full of what Huxley calls "a stirabout" of millions of seeds of animalculae and motes of dust visible in the sunbeam. That hydrant water you are about to swallow is a rich aquarium full of all manner of monsters, which the oxy- hydrogen microscope will ex- hibit to your terrified gaze, devouring each other alive. Should you get rid of them by evaporating your water, your chemist will tell you that still your pure water must be a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. There is no help for it. Many years ago some astronomers fancied they had found clouds, or nebulae, of gas, quite simple and uncom- pounded with anything else, a great many millions of miles away in the sky. They were so very far away that they thought nobody would ever be able to fly so far to bottle up a specimen of that gas and bring it back here to earth and "analyze it, to find out whether it was pure and simple, or compound. So they felt quite safe in affirming that there was the genuine, simple, homogeneous gas, in the neb- 12 DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? ulae, with which Almighty God had nothing whatever to do, but which had first made itself and then had condensed into our present world. But unfortunately for this bril- liant discovery the spectroscope opened windows into the ncbul83, and showed very plainly that they were on fire; and fire is a compound; it can not burn without fuel and something to support the combustion; so that settled the alleged simplicity of the nebulae. Jt is now demonstrated, therefore, that every known substance existing in nature is a compound, and therefore can not be eternal. And the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. No num- ber of finite existences can be eternal. The universe, then, can not be eternal. Suppose, however, that, for the sake of argument, we should grant our atheistic world-builder his materials, away off beyond the rings of Saturn, or the orbit of Uranus (since he seems to like to have his quarries a good way off from his building), would he be any nearer the completion of his world-making? As Cornwallis declared that the conquest of India resolved itself u timately into a question of bullocks, the prime consideration in the construction of the world, after you have got your materials, is that of transportation. When one beholds the three great stones in the temple of Baalbec, each weighing eleven hundred tons, built into the wall twenty feet high, and a fourth in the quarry, a mile away, nearly ready for removal, he asks, "How did the builders move those immense stones, and raise them to their places?" And when we behold the quarry out of which these stones were taken, and all the other quarries of the world, and all the everlasting moun- tains, and the whole of this solid earth, and boundless sea, brought, as our theorists affirm, from far beyond the orbit of the most distant planet, we raise the question of trans- portation, and demand some account of the wagon and team which hauled them to their places. We can not get DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? 13 rid of the necessity for transportation by evaporating the building stones into gas, for a world of gas weighs just as many tons as the world made out of it. Before we can make a world we must have power; but we can never get power out of the world to build itself The atheists' world is only a great machine. The first law of mechanics is that action and reaction are equal ; consequently machinery can never create power. You will never lift yourself by pulling at your boot-straps j much less can a machine lift and carry itself. It is no matter how big you make the wheels of your machine, as big as the orbits of the planets if you like, still it is only a machine, unless it has a mind in it; and your big machine can no more create power than a little machine as small as a lady's watch. Nor does it make the least difi'erence in respect to making power, of what mate- rials your perpetual motion peddler makes his machine — whether of a skein of silk on a reel in a bottle, or of steel and zinc electro magnets running upon diamond points, or whether he melts up his steel, and zinc, and diamonds into red hot fire mist; it is still only a machine, made of these materials, as destitute of power as the smaller machines/ made out of it. The atheists' universe is only a big ma- chine, and no machine can create power, no more than a paving stone. It has been, however, proposed to manufacture power by the law of gravitation, according to which all bodies attract each other, directly in proportion to their mass, and in- versely as the square of their distances. This law appears to prevail as far as our observation extends through space ; and our world builders affirm that it must have operated eternally, and that not only were the separate parts of our earth thus drawn together, but that all the orbs of heaven were caused to revolve under its influence. Suppose, however, we grant that matter was eternal, and 14 DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? the force of gravitation eternally operating upon it, would- that Bufficiontly account for the building up of even our own little planetary system? By no means. The unresisted force of gravitation would, in far loss than an eternity, draw all things together toward the center of gravity of the universe. Wo should not have separate stars, and suns, and planets, and moons, revolving in orderly or- bits, but one vast mass of matter, in which all motion had long since ceased. There must be some power of resist- ance to gravitation, and nicely balanced against it, a centri- fugal force — no matter whether you call it heat, light, or electricity, or by any other name from which balance of power the movements of the universe are regulated. But here again wo arrive at tho same conclusion from the bal- ance of power to which we were before driven by the com- bination of matter. — regulated power proclaims a regulator, a governor. Power belongeth unto God. In world-building we need not only a quarry of mate- rials, and power for transportation, but a head to plan their arrangement. For, as ten thousand loads of brick and stone dumped down higgledy piggledy will not build a house, neither will ten thousand millions of materials poured into a chaos make a world like this earth, arranged in order and beauty. It is grossly absurd to imagine that tho inanimate materials of the earth arranged thomselvcs in their present orderly structure. Absurd as it seems to every man of common sense, there are persons claiming to bo philosophers who not only assert that thoy did, but will tell you how they did it. One class of them think thoy have found it out by supposing every thing in tho universe reduced to very fine powder, consist- ing of very small grains, which they call atoms; or, if that is not fine enough, into gas, of which it is supposed the particles are too fine t^ bo perceived; and then by different arrangements of these atoms, according to tho laws of at- DID TUE WOIU.I) MAKE ITSELF? 15 traction and el(Htri(tity, tho vnriouH elements of the world wore niatlo, and arranged in its prenent lorin. Suppose wo grant tliin gassy supposition, that the world millions of nges ago existed as a eloud of atoms, does that bring us Jiiiy nearer the ol»je(!t of g(^tting rid of a. Creator thjin before? The atoms must be material, if a mate- rial world is to Ix; madi; iVom them ; and ho they munt be extended ; each one of tln-m must have l(>ngth, ])readlh and thi(!kness. The atheist, then, lias only multiplied his difHeultioH a million timcB, by pounding u[> the world into atoms, whicdi are only little bits of the j)aving stones ho intends to make out of them. Kacli bit of the paving Btone, no matter how small you break it, remains just as incapable of making itself, or moving itself, as was tho whole stont! composed of all these bits. So wo are landed back again at the sublime question, Did the paving stones make thrmsr/vra, and move f./icmsrfvcs? Others will tell you that njillions of years ago tho world existed as a vast eloud of fire mist, which, after a long time, cooled down into granite, and the granite, by dint of eartliquakes, got broken up on the surface, and waslied with rain into clay and soil, whence plants sprang up of their own accord, and the plants gradually grew into ani- mals of various kinds, and some of tho animals grew into monkeys, and finally the monkeys into men. Tho fire mist they stoutly affirm to liave existed from eternity. They do not allege that they remember that (and yet as they thems(dves are, as they say, compoHeok through the eye-hole and the concave lens, properly adjusted, in front of it, wc shall see the image of the object considerably magnified. But f^uppose (ho object DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? 27 draws rcrj near, we see nothing distinctly ; for the rays re- flected from it, which were nearly parallel while it was at a distance, are no longer so when it comes near, but scatter in all directions, and those which fall on the lens are collected at a point much nearer to the lens than before, and the eye-glass must be pushed forward to that focus. Accordingly, you know that the spy -glass is made to slide back and forward, and the telescope has a screw to lengthen or shorten the tube according to the distance of the objects observed. Another way of meeting the case would be by taking out the lens, and putting in one of less magnifying power, a flatter lens, for the nearer object. Now, at first sight, it would seem a very inconvenient thing to have eyes drawing out and in several inches like spy-glasses, and still more inconvenient to have twenty or thirty pairs of eyes, and to need to take out our eyes, and put in a new set twenty times a day. The ingenuity of man has been at work hundreds of years to discover some other method of adapting an optical instrument to long and short range, but without success Now, the Former of the eye knew the properties of light and the properties of lenses before the first eye was made ; he knew the mode of adjusting them for any distance, from the thousands of millions of miles between the eye and the star, to the half-inch distance of the mote in the sunbeam; and he had not only availed himself of both the principles which opticians discovered, but has executed his work with an infinite perfection which bungling men may admire, but can never imitate. The sclerotic coat of the eye, and the choroid which lies next it are full of muscles which, by their contraction, both press back the crystalline lens nearer the retina, and also flatten it; the vitreous humor, in which the crystalline lens lies, a fine, trans- parent humor, about as thick as the white of an egg, giving way behind it, and also slightly altering its form and 28 DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? power of refraction to suit the case. Thus, that which the astronomer, or the microscopist, performs by a tedious pro- cess, and then very imperfectly, we perform perfectly, easily, instantly, and almost involuntarily, with that perfect compound microscope and telescope invented by the Former of the human eye. Surely, in giving us an instru- ment so admirably fitted for observing the lofty grandeur of the heavens and the lowlier beauties of the earth, he meant to allure us to the discovery of the perfections of the great Designer and Former of all these wondrous works. But there is another contrivance in the eye, adapted to lead us further to the consideration of the extent of the knowledge of its power. We are placed in a world of variable lights, of day and night, and of all the variations between light and darkness. We can not see in the full blaze of light, nor yet in utter darkness. Had the eye been formed to bear only the noonday glare, we had been half blind in the afternoon, and wholly so in the evening. If the eye were formed so as to see at night, we had been helpless as owls in the day. But the variations of light in the atmosphere may be in some measure compensated) as we know, by regulating the quantity admitted to our houses — shutting up the windows When we wish to reg- ulate the admission of light to our rooms, we have recourse to various clumsy contrivances ; paper blinds, perpetually tearing, sunblind rollers that will not roll, Venetian blinds continually in need of mending, awnings blowing away with every storm, or shutters, which shut up and leave us in en- tire darkness. A self-acting window, which shall expand with the opening of light in the mornings and evenings, and close up of its own accord as the light increases toward noon, has never been manufactured by mm. But the Former of the eye took note of the necessities and con- veniences of the case, and besides giving a pair of shutters to close up when we go to sleep, he has given the most DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? 29 admirable sunblinds ever invented. The nerve of the eye at the back of its chamber can riot see without light, and its light comes through the little round window called the pupil, or black of the eye — which is simply a hole in the iris, or colored part. Now this iris is formed of two sets of muscles: one set of elastic rings, which, when left to themselves, contract the opening; and another set at right angles to them, like the spokes of a wheel, pulling the inner edge of the iris in all directions to the outside. In fact it is not so much a sunblind, as a self-acting window, opening and closing the aperture according to our need of light, and doing this so instantaneously that we are not sensible of the process. It is self-evident that the Maker of such an eye was ac- quainted with the properties of light, and the alternations of night and day, as well as with the mechanical contriv- ances for adjusting the eye to these variable circumistances. He has given us an eye capable of seeking knowledge among partial darkness, and of availing itself for this purpose of imperfect light; an apt symbol of our mental constitution and moral situation in a world where good and evil, light and darkness, mix and alternate. Perhaps some one is ready to ask, What is the use of so many lenses in the eye ? It seems as if the crystalline lens and the optic nerve were sufficient for the purpose of sight, with the cornea simply to protect them. What is the use of the aqueous humor and the vitreous humor? Light, when refracted through the lens, becomes sepa- rated into its component colors — red, yellow, green, blue, and violet; and the greater the magnifying power of the lens, and the brighter the object viewed, the greater the dispersion of the rays. So that if the crystalline lens of the eye alone were used, we should see every white object bluish in the middle, and yellowish and reddish at the edges; or, in vulgar language, we should see starlight. 30 DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? This difficulty perplexed Sir Isaac Newton all his life, and he never discovered the mode of making a refracting telescope which would obviate it. But M DoUand, an op- tician, reflecting that the very same difficulty must have presented itself to the Maker of the eye, determined to ascertain how he had obviated it. He found that the Maker of the eye had a knowledge of the fact that diiferent sub- stances have different powers of refracting or bending the rays of light which pass through them, and that liquids have generally a different power of refraction from solids. For instance, if you put a straight stick in water, the part under water will seem bent at a considerable angle, while if you put the stick through a little hole in a pane of glass it will not seem so much bent. He further dis- covered that oil of cassia had a diJQferent power of refrac- tion from water, and the white of an egg still a difi'erent power. He discovered also that the first lens of the eye, the aqueous humor, is very like water; that the crystalline lense is a firm jelly, and that the vitreous humor is about ihe consistency of the white of an egg. The combination of these three lenses, of difi'erent powers of refraction, secures the correction of their separate errors. He could not make telescope lenses of jelly, nor water; therefore, he could not make a perfect achromatic telescope, but he learned the lesson of mutual compensations of difficulties which the Maker of the eye teaches the reflecting anato- mist, and procuring flint and crown glass of different de- grees of refraction, he arranged them in the achromatic lens so as nearly to remedy the defect. I think that you will at once admit that Dolland's at- tempt to remedy the evils of confused sight in the telescope indicated a desire to obtain a precise and correct view of the objects ; and that his success in constructing an instru- ment, nearly perfect, for the use of astronomers, gave evi- dence that he himself had a clear idea of that perfect and DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? 31 ac3ur.ite vision which h.2 thus attempted to bestow on thorn. Shall we then imagine any inaccuracy in the sight of Him, who not only desired, but executed and bestowed on us, an instrument so perfectly adapted to the imperfec- tions of this lower world, and whose very imperfections are the materials from which he produces clear and perfect vision? No! in God's eye there are no chromatic refrac- tions of passions, or prejudice, or party feeling, or self- love. He sees no reflected or refracted light. Father of Light! with whom is no variableness, or shadow of turning, open our eyes to behold Thee clearly ! Our text thus leads us to a knowledge of God's charac- ter, from the structure of the bodies he has given us. He that formed my eye sees. Though my feeble vision is by no means a standard or limit for his Omniscience, yet I may conclude that every perfection of the power of sight he has given me existed previously in him. Has he en- dowed me, a poor puny mortal, the permanent tenant of only two yards of earth, with an eye capable of ranging over earth's broad plains and lofty mountains, of traversing her beauteous lakes and lovely rivers, of scanning her crowded cities, and inspecting all their curious productions, and specially delighting to investigate the bodily forms of men, and their mental characters displayed on the printed page ? Has he given me the principle of curiosity, without which such an endowment were useless? Then most undoubted- ly he has Himself both the desire to observe all the works of his hands, and the power to gratify that desire. The Former of the eye must of necessity be the great Observer. Wheresoever an eye is found of his handiwork, and where- ,soever sight is preserved by his skill, let the owner of such an instrument know that if he can see, God can, and as surely as he sees, God does. If it is possible for us to beheld many objects distinctly at once, it is not impossible for God to behold more. If 32 DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF? he has given us an eye to look from earth to heaven, then his eye sees from heaven to earth. If I can see accurately, God's inspection is much more impartial. And if he has given me the power of adjusting my imperfect vision to the varying lights and shades of this changing scene, let me not dream for a moment that he is destitute of a corre- sponding power of investigating difficulties, and penetra- ting darknesses, and bringing to light hidden works and secret things. God is light. In him is no darkness at all. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight, but all things are naked and opened to the eyes of him with whom I have to do. He has seen all my past life — my faults, my follies, and my crimes. When I thought myself in darkness and privacy, God's eye was upon me there. In the turmoil of business, God's eye was upon me. In the crowd of my ungod'y companions, God's eye was upon me. In the darkness and solitude of night, God's eye was upon me. And God's eye is on me now, and will follow me from this house, and will watch me and observe all my actions, on — on — on — while God lives, and wheresoever God's creation extends. " O God, Thou has searched and known me ; Thou knowest my down sitting and mine uprising; Thou understandest my thoughts afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, And art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, But, lo ! Lord, Thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me ! It is high, I can not attain unto it ; Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? And whither shall I flee from thy presence ? DID THE WORLD MAKE ITSELF ? 33 If 1 ascend up into haaven, Thou art there, If I mike my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there I If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there shall thy hand lead me, And thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall cover me,* Even the night shall be light about me ; Yea the darkness hideth not from thee, But the night shineth as the day, The darkness and the liqrht are both alike to Thee." CHAPTER II. Was Your Mothef^ a Monkey? In the previous chapter we saw the evidences of Grod's skill and wisdom in the adaptations of nature, fitting the organs of animals for hearing, walking, and eating, and especially in the structure of the human eye. This has long been owned by candid minds as an unanswerable ar- gument, demonstrating the being of God by the works of his hands. But since that chapter was written a school of scientists has arisen, of whom Mr. Darwin is at present the most popular, claiming to be able to show how all the species of living things can evolve, not only their eyes, but their legs and wings and lungs, and every part of them, from a little bit of primeval life stuff, called protoplasm, by the influence of Natural Selection. Mr. Darwin owns that the formation of an eye is rather a tough job for a little pin point germ of protoplasm ; but he has no doubt that it has been done, and he writes several books to show us how. We propose to look into this self-evolving pro- cess, as he and his brother evolutionists describe their theory. It is necessary, right here at the outset, to distinguish the theory of the evolutionists from the great fact of evo- lution. Almighty God created the world, not only for his own pleasure, but also for his own glory, that men and (34) WAS YCUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 35 angels might learn to know him by his works. Creation is thus God's great object lesson for men and angels to learn. But learning is a process, gradual, slow, from one step to another. Therefore the object lesson must not be precip- it^ited all in a heap upon the infantile intellects of the learners, but unfolded by degrees. Geologists assure us that so it was in the past; that first the lifeless strata were deposited; next, light was evolved^ afterward, fishes, aud marine reptiles, and birds; then came the carboniferous or plant era; afterward the mammalia; last of all man. You observe here an ascending scale of creation, beginning with first principles and simple forms, and ascending to the most complicated ; a series of experiments in God's great lecture-room, illustrative of the various steps of the evolution of the divine idea. But six thousand years be- fore geology was born Moses described this same evolution of creation, in the first chapter of Genesis. As he could not have learned it from any science known in his day, God Himself must have shown it to him. The divine idea is still in process of evolution for our instruction. We behold it in the continual formation of new strata by the destruction of the old ; in the chemical combinations of the elements of the air, sea, and earth; in the evolution of the grass from the seed, and of the oak from the acorn ; in the development of the insect germ into the caterpillar, and the butterfly; in the hatching of the egg into the chicken ; and in the growth of the infant into the man. We observe also a divine development of society, an advance of civilization, a providential guidance of history, and a fall and disorder among mankind, with a process of redemption, medical, educational, political and religious, for the human race. The whole process, there- fore, of the creation, natural history, and moral government of the world, is the development of a divine idea, according to a divine plan, by the direct or mediate efficacy jf divine 36 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? power, for the accomplishment of the divine purpose as revealed to us in the divine word, the Holy Scriptures. Galen taught that the study of physiology was. a divine hymn. This divine developirent is to be clearly and sharply distinguished from the atheistic theory of evolu- tion. They differ in the following particulars : 1. The divine development of the world is a great fact; the theory of atheistic evolution is only a baseless theory, a fiction. 2. The divine development begins in the beginning, with God, creating the heavens and the earth; but the theory of atheistic evolution has no beginning, asserting the eternal existence of a changing world. 8. The divine development is the unfolding of an intel- ligent plan, showing the adaptation of means to ends for the accomplishment of a purpose ; the atheistic theory of evolution denies plan, purpose, adaptation and final cause. 4. The divine development is conducted, and continually reinforced by the will of the Omnipotent God , the athe- istic development evolves only the forces of matter. 5. The divine development has a moral character, and terminates in the highest holiness and happiness of all obedient men and angels; but the atheistic development contemplates and promises only the evolution of animal in- stinct and passions, the eternal death of the individual, and, for the universe, only purposeless cycles of progress, and catastrophies of ruin. In this chapter we diRcuso only the theory of atheistic evolution. In the discussion of all questions affecting human life it is advantageous to trace them to their origin, and to follow them out to their practical results. Thus we get a clear view of the whole subject, and are enabled to assign to it its proper influence. It is also a great benefit to the mass of mankind to conduct such discussions in plain language, and to translate the roundabout phrases, and the Latinized WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 37 words of scientific men, as much as we can, into the vulgar tongue ; to state the subjects of discussion so as to be understood of the people. So we shall put the whole busi- ness of Darwinism and development before you, reader, in a nutshell, by simply asking you the question at the head of this chapter, " Was your mother a monkey ?" What a question ! Well, then, your grandmother ? her grandmother ? or does it seem less offensive, or more likely to you to go back some thousands of years, and say your forefathers were apes ? That is exactly what Mr. Darwin says when we translate his scientific language into the vulgar tongue : " Th^ early progenitors of man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards ; their ears were pointed and capable of movement ; and their bodies were provided with a tail having the proper muscles. The foot, judging from the condition of the great toe in the foetus, was then prehensile, and our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm forest-clad land. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons."* This ancient form "if seen by a naturalist, would undoubtedly have been ranked as an ape or a monkey. And as man, under a gene- alogical point of view, belongs to the Catarhine or Old World stock (of monkeys), we must conclude, however much the conclusion may revolt our pride, that our early progenitors would have been properly thus designated, "f So here you have your genealogy, name and thing fully described. Mr. Darwin thinks it is quite an honorable pedi- gree: " Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodi^^*- ious length, but not, it maybe said, of noble quality. * H« 5{c -The Descent of Man, p. 198, American Edition. tXhc Descent of Man, p. 191, Am. Ed. 38 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? UlIgss we willfully close our eyes, we may, with our pres- ent knowledge, approximately recognize our parentage, nor need we feel ashamed of it. The most humble organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our feet; and no one with an unbiased mind can study any living creature, however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvelous structure and properties."* There are people, however, who do not grow enthusiastic at the idea of their long-tailed progenitors ; but there is no accounting for taste in such matters ! For elderly people, who do not take so enthusiastically to monkeys as his junior readers, Mr. Darwin has provided a rathdr less gymnastic ancestry. How would you like to have a fish for your forefather? If it were one of Nep- tune's noble tritons, or the Philistine fish-god, Dagon, or a mermaid, it might not be so repulsive as the ape ; or even a twenty-pound salmon, flashing its silver and blue in the sunlight as it spins the line off the reel, might not be so utterly disgusting as the monkey burlesque of humanity. But, alas ! Mr. Diirwin has been sent to this proud nineteenth century as the prophet to teach us humility, and here is the scientific statement of the structure of our fishy forefathers: "At a still earlier period the progen- itors of man must have been aquatic in their habits, for morphology plainly tells us that our lungs consist of a modified swim bladder which once siirved as a float These early predecessors of man thus seen in the dim recesses of time must have been as lowly organized as the Lancelot or amphibioxus, or even still more lovflj organized."* That certainly is a very humble origin. We are not, however, by any means to the end of our pedigree. Mr. Darwin says that your codfish arist )cracy are descended from a race of squirts — the squirts which you picked up en * Descent of Man, p. 199, Am. Ed. WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 39 tte shore and squeezed, when you were a boy, discharging these primitive Babcock Extinguishers upon your playfel- lows, irreverently regardless of the harm done the poor sq^uirt, the ancestor of the human race. If you doubt it, hore is the latest deliverance of infallible science upon the subject. He describes the Ascidians : "They hardly ap- pear like animals, and consist of a simple tough leathery sack, with two small projecting orifices. They belong to the Molluscoida of Huxley, a lower division of the great family of the MoUusca ; but they have recently been placed by some naturalists among the vermes or worms. Their larvae somewhat resemble tadpoles in shape, and have the power of swimming freely about. >!< * * We should thus bo justified in believing tfiat, at an extremely remote period, a group of animals existed resembling in many re- spects the larv99 of our present Ascidians, which diverged into two great branches, the < ne retrograding in develop- ment and producing the present class of Ascidians, the other rising to the crown and summit/of the animal king- dom, by giving birth to the vertebrata."* Thus it appears that Mr. Darwin deduces his origin, and that of mankind in general, from one of these Ascidians, or, in plain English, makes them a race of squirts. The notion of evolution is a belief that all living beings, plants as well as animals, have not been created, but, like Topsy, just grew, from the very smallest germs or spores. Evolutionists inform us that all kinds of organisms have been evolved from four or five primeval germs or spores; or more consistently with their great principle, that the simple gave birth to the differentiated, from one primeval germ or egg. Mr. Darwin alleges four or five primal forms, acknowledging that analogy would lead him up to one. But other members of this school consistently and -Descent of Man, 107, Am. Ed. 40 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? t boldly follow up the stream to its fountain, and allege a single primeval living seed as the origin of all living things, and that this must have been a microscopic animalcule, or plant spore, of the very lowest order, which, multiplying its kind, gave birth to improved and enlarged oflfspring; and they, in their turn, grew, and multiplied, and dififeren- tiated into varieties; and so, in the course of endless ages, the poorer sorts perishing and the better sorts prospering? the world became filled with its existing populations, with- out any new creative acts of God, and without any particu- lar providential care over the new species. The particular process according to which this multipli- cation and improvement took place, Mr. Darwin calls Natural Selection. Every creature tends to increase and multiply; and the very slowest breeders would soon fill the earth, were their multiplication not checked by hunger, by the attacks of enemies, and by the struggle for exist- ence. But all are not born alike strong, or swift, or of the same color; some of the same brood are better fitted to escape enemies, or to fight the battle of life, than others. These will survive, while the weak ones perish. This Mr. Wallace calls, the survival of the fittest. They will trans- mit their superior size, or swiftness, or better color, or whatever superiority they possess, to their oiFspring. The process will go on in successive generations, each add- ing an infinitesimal quantity to the stock gained by the past generation; just as breeders of improved stock in- crease the weight of cattle by breeding from the largest; or breeders of race-horses increase the speed by breeding from the swiftest. In this way varieties from the same family will grow into different species. And, as only those differences which are beneficial to the animal are preserved, they will grow into improved species; and, as variations of all sorts take place, so all sorts of varieties and species arise in process of time. All will thus tend to perfect WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY r 41 themselves according to the laws of nature, and without any special oversight or care of God, or of anybody but Natural Selection ; which Mr. Darwin takes special care to describe as an unintelligent selector. He defines the na- ture which selects to be "the aggregate action and product of natural laws," and these laws are "the sequences of events as ascertained by us." He ridicules the idea of Grod's special endowment of the fantail pigeon with addi- tional feathers, or of the bull dog's jaws with strength, and says, " But if we give up the principle in the one case, if we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in order, for instance, that the greyhound, that perfect image of symmetry and vigor, might be formed ; no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations alike in nature, and the results of the same general laws which have been the groundwork through Natural Selection of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided."* This, then, is the grand distinctive difference of Mr. Darwin's mode of producing the various animals; namely, that it is unintelligent, their variations are not designed nor intended by the Creator, but they are the results of a method of trial and error, producing a hit- and-miss pattern. The failures all perish, and the successes live and prosper; but there is no intentional or special guidance of God in the business. And the business in- cludes the whole process of peopling the globe, from the creation of the first four or five germs down to the last formation of human society. God is thus dismissed from the greatest part of the world's life, including all human affiiirs. This is not exactly atheism in theory, but practic- ally it amounts to much the same thing. Jt is this excommunication of God's agency from the *The Variations of Animals, etc., Vol. II. page 515. 42 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? management of tlie world, and especially from human af- fairs, by Mr. Darwin's method, which has so commended his books to the ungodly world. There is a general agree- ment among this class of writers, that Mr. Darwin has d'o- stroyed the basis of the argument for the being of God from design as displayed in the adaptations of birds and beasts to their conditions. Mr. Huxley says that "when he first read Mr. Darwin's book, what struck him most for- cibly was the conviction that teleology, as commonly under- stood, had received its death blow at Mr. Darwin's hands."* "For the notion that every organism has been created as it is, and launched straight at a purpose, Mr. Darwin substi- tutes the conception of something which may fairly be termed a method of trial and error. Organisms vary in- cessantly; of these variations the few meet with surround- ing conditions which suit them and thrive ; the many are unsuited and become extinguished. * * * For the teleologist (the Christian) an organism exists, because it was made for the conditions in which it was found. For the Darwinian an organism exists, because out of many of its kind it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it was found. * H^ * If we ap- prehend the spirit of the Origin of Species rightl}^, then nothing can be more entirely and absolutely opposed to teleology, as it is commonly understood, than the Darwinian theory."t Prof Haeckel argues to the same purpose that Darwin's theory leads inevitably to Atheism aud Material- ism. Dr. Buchner says of Darwin's theory, "It is the most thoroughly naturalistic that can be imagined, and far more atheistic than that of his decried predecessor, La- marck." Carl Vogt also commends it because "It turns the Creator, and his occasional intervention in the revolution of the earth and in the production of species, without any *Lay Sermons, p. 30. f Lay Sermons, 303. WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 48 hesitation out of doors, inasmuch as it does not leave the smallest room for the agency of such a Being. The first living germ being granted, out of it the creation develops itself progressively by Natural Selection, through all the geologic periods of our planet, by the simple law of de- scent. No new species arise by creation, and none perishes by annihilation ; the natural cause of things, the process of evolution of all organisms, and of the earth itself, is of itself sufficient for the production of all we see. Thus man is not a special creation, produced in a different way, and distinct from other animals, endowed with an individual soul, and animated by the breath of God; on the contrary, man is only the highest product of the progressive evolu- tion of animal life, springing from the group of apes next below him."* Whether, therefore, Mr. Darwin himself intends his theory to be atheistic or not, it has had the misfortune to be so viewed by the greater number of its supporters; and, accordingly, it is this view of it which we shall keep prom- inent in the following discussion. Mr. Darwin does un- doubtedly intend his theory to be antagonistic to the Bible account of creation and providence, and an improvement upon it; and, whether atheistic or not, it is undoubtedly anti- Christian. /. The History of the Theory. The first thing which strikes a cl^mmon person on first hearing this theory is that it is a very queer notion for any Christian man to invent. We are naturally curious to know how a man, educated in a Christian country, could have fallen into it. But it is, in fact, no new discovery, but an old heathen superstition. Some four hundred years before Christ, when the world had almost wholly apostatized *Cited by H dge in " What is Darwinism? " Page 73, etc. 44 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? into idolatry, Democritus, among the Greeks, became of- fended with the vulgar heathen gods, and set himself to invent a plan of the world without them. From Eastern travelers the G-reeks knew that the Brahmins, in India, had a theory of the world developing itself from a pri- meval egg. He set himself to refine upon it, and imagined virtually the Nebular Hypothesis. He said that all mat- ter consisted of very small atoms, dancing about in all di- rections, from all eternity, and which at last happened into the various forms of the present world. The ancient Phoenicians held a theory that all life was from the sea; and that, as the wet mud produces all sorts of herbs in spring now, so originally it produced all man- ner of animals. They worshiped it as a god, and called it Mot, or Mud. Anaximander took up the theory and carried it out in true Darwinian style, alleging that the first men sprang from the ground watered by the sea, and that they had spines like sea urchins; evidently deriving them from the Radiates. Lucretius still further developed the theory in a poem in six books. The spread of Chris- tianity, however, hindered the spread of the doctrine, as Mr. Tyndall feelingly laments, until the Saracens over- spread the East, when some of them, it seems, favored it. But it seems to be an unlucky dogma, since, with the down- fall of the power of thj false prophet, the anti Christian form of science went down again. The dogma of the transmutation of species reappeared, however, in the Romish Church in a religious form; the old heathenism, which had never been wholly banished from the minds of men, thus reasserting itself. About the tenth century some began to teach that the bread of the communion of the Lord's Supper was transubstantiated, and the wine also, into the body, and blood, and soul, and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is probably the most complete transmutation of species which has ever been WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 45 imagiaed or described. The evolution of bread into Deity- is only equaled by Mr. Tyndall's endowment of matter with all the potencies of life and thought; a miracle dif- fering from the popish transubstantiation only in the ele- ment of time, but in its essential nature equally supernatu- ral. The dogma excited great discussion for centuries, and produced as many theories of transubstantiation as we now observe of evolution, keeping philosophic minds and pens busy till the dawn of modern science after the Reforma- tion. La Place threw out the Nebular Hypothesis, which is substantially Democritus' concourse of atoms, only La Place endeavored to substitute circular motions under the law of gravitation, instead of Democritus' chance arrangement, as a sufficient cause for the formation and motions of planets. Herschel's discovery of the nebulae was hastily laid hold of by a number of writers, and notably by the author of the Vestiges of Creation, as furnishing the primeval matter necessary for world-making; and till the spectro- scopic discoveries of the composite nature of gaseous neb- ulae, they were claimed as specimens of worlds in process of formation. La Place supposed his nebulous matter to be gas in a state of white-heat combustion, compared with which the heat of the hottest fire would be a cool bath. In no other way could he dissipate the world's substance into sufficient thinness for his vortices. But Spencer saw that this tremendous heat would be fatal to all forms of life, and especially to sensitive beings; and Tyndall shows us that this original matter must have had all the potencies of life and sensation, and a potency of sensation means being able to feel. Now the worst fate threatened against sinners in the Bible is a place in the lake burning with fire and brimstone, which burns at 500° Fahrenheit; but the temperature of the original fire-mist was a thousand times hotter. Some of these scientists call such a fate as the Bible threatens 46 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY? against the wicked, cruel. But here is a hell manufactured by the evolutionists infinitely worse than that of the Bible; ff^v the hell of the Bible is only for the wicked, but the evolutionists' hell is indiscriminately for all, saints and sin- ners, and all sorts of creatures, innocent as babes unborn of iny crime; yet they, or, which is the same thing, the matter containing all the potency of their sensations, that is their power of feeling, were born in this hell, and kept in it from all eternity, until it pleased the evolutionists to begin to cool it down a little. However, it was rather scientific than benevolent reasons which induced Mr. Spen- ser to reverse the order of procedure, and make his star iust cold to begin with, and to heat it up by condensation and pressure to about the temperature of molten iron; which was still an uncomfortably warm lodging for Mr. Tyndall's potencies of sensation for some millions of years. The division of opinion about the original nebulae, how- ever, still prevails; some evolutionists of the old fashioned order still taking their nebulae hot, while others, with Spencer, prefer it cold, with star dust. As to the Spontaneous Generation of life, there has been less progress of opinion, though great variety has been exhibited. Ovid and Virgil describe the way in which a carcass produces bees. It was generally believed that putrid meat produced the maggots, till the blow-flies were discovered laying their eggs. Then it was alleged that the entozoa, the worms found in the bodies of animals, were self-produced, without eggs, until the microscope discovered that one could lay 60,000 eggs. Strauss, however, adhered to the idea that as the tapeworm, as he supposed, was self- produced, so man was originated by the primeval slime.- So also Professor Vogt, and M. Tremaux develop their animals from the land, and the latter accounts for their various qualities from the various qualities of their re- spective birthplaces, the crop being conditioned by the WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY? 47 loil. But Mr. Darwin derives all his organisms from the sea. Electricity in its galvanic form was for a whi.e the agent to fire the earthly or marine mud with the vital spark ; and Mr. Crosse's experiments were supposed instances of the creation of acarii or mites in the battery bath, until it was found that the bath contained eggs and the electricity only hatched them. Some English evolutionists still ad- here to the theory of Spontaneous Generation, but the leading Germans deny any instance of it being known. Huxley denies that any case of it has been established as now practicable ; but supposes that if we could have been present at the begiuDing of the world, when all the ele- ments were young and vigorous, we should have seen the chemical elements of the earth and air combining to form living beings, by the mere powers of their nature. If that were the fact, it would be a fact unique and unparalleled, utterly out of the course of nature, and so as contrary to the theory of evolution as if these living beings had been inspired with life by Almighty God. So the theory here again is divided. Two utterly irre- concilable ideas of the origin of life claim our belief — the theories of Biogenesis, and of ^biogenesis, the one says all life is from the egg, and has always been so; and so we have an eternal begetting of finite creatures; the other al- leges the spontaneous beginning of plants and animals; a fact, if it be a fact, as unparalleled as creation, and far more miraculous. As to the history of the progress of the germs of plants and animals thus produced, we find still greater diversities of opinion, not only as to details, but as to principles. Each inventor has added to, or altered, the original idea of evo- lution, until it has been burdened with more improvements and new patents than the sewing machine ; only the evo- lutionary improvements bid fair to improve the theory out of existence. We hnve seen M. Tremaux, with the au- 48 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? tochthonie Athenians, deriving the powers of improve- ment of plants and animals from their native soils. La- marck on the contrary, inspired all his plants and animals — fungi and frogs, and elephants and apes — with the desire of getting on in the world and improving their limbs by exer- cise ; so the greyhound grew slim and fleet by running ; the giraffe's neck elongated by reaching up to the branches of the trees on which it browsed, and the duck acquired web feet by swimming Others attributed the evolution of dif- ferences to external conditions. The negro became black by exposure to the tropical sun ; the arctic hare received its coat of thick white fur from the cold climate, and the buffalo and camel their humps of fat from the sterility of their pastures at certain seasons, and the consequent need of a reserved store of fat for food for the rest of the body. Mr Darwin's doctrine of Natural Selection refuses La- marck's notion of any conscious attempt of the plant or ani- mal at improvement; and equally denies the power of ex- ternal nature to improve anything, except by killing off poor specimens, save in that very, limited range where good pastures make fat animals for a season or two. An innate power of accidental variation to a very small amount, and the slow but constant adding up of profitable variations during countless generations, with the killing off" of the un- improved breeds by Natural Selection, is his patent; popula- tor and improver. But this theory is too slow for the nine- teenth century, and so neither Huxley, nor Parsons, nor Mivart, nor even Wallace, accepts the doctrine as Darwin propounds it It is, in fact, already becoming unpopular among scientific men. Lyell proposed the origination of new species by leaps; as we see great geniuses born of commonplace parents; and Huxley supports that opinion, and Parsons, Owen and Mivart coincide in this inexplicable explanation. The author of the Vestiges of Creation accounts for improved species from a prolongation of the WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 49 period of gestation. But Hyatt and Cope derive them from quite the contrary process — accelerated development of gestation. MM. Ferris and Kolliker derive them from par- thenogenesis, a mode of genesis of which our world offers no example whatever. The origin of man, with all his mental powers and religious aspirations, is the great difficulty. Mr. Mivart excludes man wholly from the influence of Natural Selection, from the time he acquired a soul. Mr. Wal- lace, rejecting the action of one Supreme Intelligence for everything but the origin of universal forces and laws, "Contemplates the pos-ibllity that the development of the essentially human portions of man's structure and intellect may have been determined by the directing in- fluence of some higher intelligent beings acting through natural and universal laws;"* i. 6., the gods of the old heathen nations. And so after twenty-two centuries wan- dering over the world, we have got back to where Democ- rltus started from— to pure old heathenism. After shch a history of the theory of evolution, and in presence of such contradictory presentations by its advo- cates, I need scarcely say that it is by no means an estab- lished scientific principle, were it not for the insolent man- ner in which some of them assert it as scientifically demon- strated; and denounce the Bible doctrine of creation as mere superstition, "A featherbed of respectable and respected tradition," and warn off Christians from any attempt to inves- tigate theories of cosmogony; and overbear the ignorant by the array of the names of men of science who give their sanc- tion to some phase of the theory. But let it be borne in mind that no well-established scientific principle, no de- monstrated law, exhibits such contradictory and conflicting *Natural Selection, 372 A., Am. Ed. 4 60 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? phases as those we have just witnensed. The laws of grav- itation, or of chemical affinity, for instance, offer no such contradictions of their adherents; because they are founded on facts, while evolution is a mere notion, founded on ig- norance and error, as we shall presently see. Accordingly, by far the greater number of the greatest scientists oppose it, as utterly unscientific, and have recorded their opposi- tion, an 1 the reasons for it. Sir John Herschel and Sir Wm. Thompson, among astronomers, have proclaimed its antagonism to the facts of physical astronomy. No new facts subversive of the foundations of faith in God as rec- ognized in the universe by Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Des- cartes, Leibnitz, Pascal, Paley and Bell, have been discov- ered by such scientists as Whewell, Sedgwick, Brewster, Faraday, Hugh Miller, or our American geologists, Daw- son, Hitchcock, and Dana. Nor have the deliberate and expanded demonstrations of its unscientific character by the late lamented Agassiz been ever fairly met, much less overturned. I refer to these honored names for the bene- fit of that large class who must take their science upon faith in rome scientific prophet or apostle, in dcfjiult of any possibility of personal investigation of the facts. Indeed, to the great majority, even of so-called scientific men, their science must be founded upon faith in the dogma of some scientific pope and council. And to such it may be reas- suring, amidst the evolutionists' cries of Science! Science! to know that a great many of the greatest scientists, in spite of all these confused assertions, do still bcl'eve in Almighty God, do call their soul&> their own, and hope when they die to go to heaven. As a specimen of the contempt in which this theory is held by the princes of science, read the following extract of an address by Agassiz, at a recent meeting of the Acad- emy of Science:* *From the Presbyterian^ December 7, 1872. WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY? 51 "As I grow older in the ranks of science," said the pro- fessor, "I feel more and more, the danger of stretching in- ferences from a few observations to a wide field. I see that the younger generation among naturalists are at this mo- ment falling into the mistake of making assertions and presenting views as scientific principles which are not even based upon real observation. J think it is time that some positive remonstrance be made against that tendency. The manner in wh ch the evolution theory in zoology is treated would lead those who are not special zoologists to suppose that observations have been made by which it can be in- ferred that there is in nature such a thing as change among organized beings actually taking place. There is no such thing o?i record. It is shifting the ground from one field of observation to another to make this statement, and when the assertions go so far as to exclude from the domain of science those who will not be dragged into this mire of mere assertion, then it is time to protest. " He thought it was intolerant to say he was not on scien- tific grounds because he was not falling into the path which was occupied by those who maintain that all organized be- ings have been derived from a few original progenitors. Other supporters of the transmutation doctrine assume that they can dcnonstrate the changes to have taken place by showing certain degrees of resemblance; but what they never touch is the quality and condition of those few first progenitors from which they were evolved. They assume that they contained all that is necessary to evolve what ex- ists now. That is begging the que tion at the outset; for if these first prototypes contained the principle of evolu- tion, we should know something about them from observa- tion, and it should be shown that there are such organized beings as are capable of evolution. "I ask, Whence came these properties? If this power and capacity of change is not inherent to the first progen- 52 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? itors, then I ask, Whence came the impulses by which those progenitors which have not this power of change in themselves acquire them? What is the power by which they are started in directions which are not determined by their primitive nature? From the total silence of the sup- porters of the transmutation theory on these and other points, he did wd think it worth their while to take the sUghtei^t n dice of this doctrine of evolution in his scientific considerations He acknowledged what the evolutionists had done incidentally in scientific research; none had done more than Mr. Darwin. He believed he had been injured woefully by his adherents. He was a far better man than most of his school made him." It u to be acknowledged, however, that many scientists are evolutionists Mr. Darwin is not alone in his belief. If he were, it would not be worth while to spend time in examining it. Quite a number of scientific men have fallen into it, ad lecture and write commendations of it; and it has become quite popular among a certain class who do not like to accept the Bible doctrine that Grod created man^ with its necessary consequence that the creature ought to obey his Creator; and they have proceeded to patch it out into completeness — for, as you observe, it is a little defec. tive ; like its own primeval squirt, it lacks a head and a tail — it has neither a beginning nor an end properly fitted to it. It takes a piece out of the middle of the universe from the management of God, but it leaves the beginning and the end totally unaccounted for; telling us neither whence came the first germs, nor whither tends the final fully developed angel. Mr. Darwin, though he calls one of his works, the Origin of Species, really avoids the question of origin He admits the miracle of the creation of the four or five original germs of life, which, according to tho evolutionists, is as unscientific as if he admitted four or five hundred. They desire to escape the operation of WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 53 God altogether. Moreover, he gives no account of the origin of the law of heredity, by which each being pro- duces its like ; nor yet of the origin of the power of vari- ation, according to which profitable variations occur. Here, then, is still a field in which God reigns. But it is specially with Mr Darwin's admission of the Creator to bestow the origin of life that evolutionists are displeased. If they admit God at the beginning of the world they see plainly that there is no possibility of getting rid of him afterward. Messrs. Huxley, Spencer, Tyadall, Buchner, Haeckel and Vogt combine their forces accordingly to evolve the world as we find it without God's intervention. Mr. Huxley, perceiving that to make either man, or monkey, or nomad, you must have materials, kindly brings a little pitcher of protoplasm, which he calls the physical basis of life. It is the meat our Caesar feeds on, and in- deed, for that matter, all living things. All vegetable and animal tissues are made up mostly of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen ; and as the materials of which all liv- ing beings are built are the same originally, and are simply these chemical substances with a little iron, salt and lime, with their properties, he will have it that all life, includ- ing man's life and thought, is merely a development of protoplasm. This is the clay out of which all the various bricks, and tiles, and tea cups, and porcelain vases of the great world building are built. We don't need to begin with monkeys, nor fish, or pollywogs, now to develop into men, for we go down to the very bottom, since we have the stufi" they all are made of, namely, protoplasm. Still this clay needs a potter to mold and bake it. The difficulty about the protoplasm is that it must be alive. You can not get a living pollywog, no more than a living elephant, out of dead protoplasm. Mr. Huxley shows very well that all protoplasm consists of the same materials ; in fact, that all flesh is grass, as the Scripture 54 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? says. The difficulty is how to convert the grass into flesh, unless by some animal eating it; or to convert the nitro- gen, carbon and water into grass or grain, or any other form of protein or protoplasm, without the previous action of some plant. In short, how are we to make the chemi- cal materials live? Here Mr. Tyndall comes in and en- dows the matter of the universe with life, and with all the potency of producing bodies and souls. In his famous Belfast Address he says: "Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong the vision backward, beyond the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in this matter, which we in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with oppro- brium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life." Yet, after all this marvelous endowment of matter with all potency, we have not got quite back to the beginning. For still the questions arise, Where did this almighty mat- ter come from? Who endowed it with these wonderful potencies? And how does it happen to work so well, in such orderly and regular evolution of star dust, suns, planets, pollywogs, monkeys, men and maggots, in eternal cycles, ever advancing higher and doing better and better for the race, though poorly enough, it appears, for the miserable individuals? Here Buchner, Vogt, Spencer and other ma- terialists come in and perfect that which was lacking; show- ing how the star dust made itself, and how the paving stones made themselves, and are under no obligations to any Crea- tor but themselves. Matter and force are all they need, and endless time in which to work, and they will account for the universe without any Creator at all. Everything and every person must be just as it is, according to the regular oper- ation of the laws of Nature. As Buchner, Vogt and Spencer have given the system a WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 55 head, Lubbock, Evans and others have supplied it with a tail, and demonstrated how society, and morals, and relig- ion have been excogitated by the apes out of tho'r medi- tations in the forests. It is a fearful and wonderful account they give us of the origin of marriage from the battles of the baboons, of the rights of property established by ter- rible fights for groves of good chestnuts, of the begin- nings of morals from the instincts of brutes, and of the dawnings of religion, or rather of superstition, from the dreams of these animals ; tho result of the whole being that civilization, and society, and law, and order, and relig- ion, are all simply the evolution of the instincts of the brutes, and that there is no necessity for invoking any supernatural interference to produce them. The termina- tion of the whole, as far as you and 1 are concerned, is that "We shall fade away as the faint cloud melts into the blue ether," into the eternal sleep of death. It thus appears that there is an orderly succession and attempted adjustment of one part of the doctrine of evo- lution to another, and that all the various workers are co- operating toward one grand result. It is true they diflfcr widely in their professed religious creeds and political par- tialities. Mr. Darwin avows his belief in a Creator. Mr. Huxley votes on the London School Board for the intro- duction of the Bible into the public schools. Mr. Spencer is willing to allow the existence of some great unknowable mystery. Some of the French and German evolutionists dispense with any reference to God, as an unnecessary hypothesis. Others oppose the idea of God altogether, as inimical to progress. M Comte proposed a worship of humanity. M. Strauss would worship the universe. But with all this variety of uniform, and armor, and tactics, the evolutionists are all soldiers of the same army, and are all fighting the same great battle, for the brutal origin of man, and his independence of God. From which independ- 66 WAS TOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? ence of God, and brutal origin of mankind, result very important consequences. For the belief of this notion necessarily destroys all faith in the Bible, and in the Chris- tianity which it reveals, and revolutionizes the basis of the civilization founded upon it, and all the laws protecting life, property, marriage and religion; which laws are based upon the belief of mankind in the dignity of man, the sacred- ness of human life, and the sanction of morality by the All-seeing Judge of all the earth, who will reward every man according to his works. For all practical purposes it makes no great difference whether a man denies that there is any God at all, or admits that there is some kind of a god who created tto world millions of years ago, and just set it a spinning to work out its destiny as best it might, but never after concerned himself about it, or its people, and never will ; for nobody will ever trouble his head about a god who never troubles his head about him. iMost of the evolutionists are zealous advocates of their system. These propagandists have had such a degree of success in attracting public attention, in inspiring a large proportion of the secular press, besides scientific jo'irnals, as advocates of their notions, and in obtaining entrance for them into the common school books, put into the hupds of our children, and into massive quartos published by State legislatures with the money of Christian people, and in the prevalent corruption of public morals and breach of private trusts necessarily resulting from the evolution of thes-^ principles, that we are compelled, in self-defense, to exam- ine the doctrine of evolution. It is all very well for Mr. Tyndall to warn off everybody, but evolutionists, from any investigations into cosmogony; about whi^h he owns that they know very little now, and will not know much for some millions of years to come. But common people, who will not live so long, but who in the meantime have to live and make money, and save it, who have children to rear, WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? . 57 and houses which they do not want burned over their heads, who have taxes to pay, increasing every year, and public plunderers to prosecute and who: e b Hots may be asked one of these days for the substitution of the communes of the original apes, and the lied Republic for these United States, all upon the alleged scientific proof for the truth of the doctrine of evolution, and the consequent abolishment of Christianity — common people, I maintain, by whose money and votes this dogma is to be established, will not be debarred from asking the why and the wherefore, neither by Mr. Tyndall, nor by any other scientific pope. It is a little too late in the day for men who do not know their own mind from the Alps to Belfast, and who doubt whether God made them whenever they are dyspeptic, -to stand up before the public demanding that wc shut our eyes and open our mouths, and swallow every preposterouH notion they think proper to proclaim as science, to the destruc- tion of our faith in the God who made us, of our respect for our brethren of mankind, and of our hope of heaven. //. The Illogical Structure of the Theory. When men come before the world with a dogma freighted with such wide-reaching revolutions, they ought to be pre- pared to furnish the most irrefragable proofs of its truth, and of its obligation and authority. "We should be able to establish it beyond all controversy as based on a series of facts which take their place historically in the line of the inductive sciences; about which all men of science are agreed, as all astronomers, for instance, are agreed about gravitation ; and we should be able to show that each of the alleged consequences flows inevitably and logically from these established facts. Ignorance, hy- pothesis, assumption of facts, sophism^ begging the ques- tion, and the like, are wholly impertinent in any such discussion. Were they even tolerable in the field of 58 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY? metaphysical discussion, they must, by the rules of the Positive Philosophy itself, banishing all but ascertained facts from the halls of science, be excluded from this discussion of an alleged general law of nature. But when we enter on the examination of the dogma oi evolution, we find its parentage among ignoble supersti- tions ; its fundamental facts still lie in the darkness of ig norance and assumption; and its reasoning is illogical an«: absurd. The most prominent feature which arrests our notic; as we look closely at the theory of evolution, as presented by any of its prominent atheistical advocates is, its illogi- cal and incoherent structure. The writer contradicts him- self. The various parts of the theory do not hang to- gether. The alleged facts do not sustain the conclusions deduced from them. Mr. Darwin's books especially abound in the most intolerable assumptions of principles and facts, not only without proof, but in the face of unan- swered and unanswerable objections. And the theory is useless for the purpose of its proposal. All this is utterly at variance with the method of true science. None but a mind debauched by bigoted attachment to a preconceived theory could overlook these fatal defects in the system. Indeed both Darwin and Huxley admit that acceptance of the evidence must be preceded by belief in the principle of evolution. It is marvelous that any properly educated student of mental science should accept a theory so inco- herent, in which the rents are scarcely held together by the patches. We can only exhibit a few specimens of the multitude of these fatal inconsistencies and deficiencies. The theory is useless as an explanation of the arcana of Nature. Mr. Darwin is, by his own acknowledgment, a very ignorant man — ignorant of the very things necessary for him to know before ho can construct a method of crea- tion, and unable to explain to us what he sets out to ex- WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 59 plain. He confesses himself ignorant of the origin and laws of inheritance, by which his whole system hangs to- gether ; of the common ancestors from which he alleges all creatures are derived ; of the laws of correlation of parts, though these are indispensable to development ; of the reasons of the extinction of species, which is the great bus- iness, the very trade of his great agent. Natural Selection. He has no knowledge of the duration of past ages, though that duration is an essential element of his calculations. The spontaneous variations of plants and animals are the very mainspring of his machine; but he tells us he knows nothing of the laws governing them ; nor has he any in- formation about the creation of the primordial forms, nor about the date of beginning, or rate of progress.* All which are necessary to be known in order to the formation of a correct theory. Again and again, when confronted with facts which his theory can not explain, he takes refuge in confessions of ignorance. When he meets facts which flatly contradict his theory of the imperceptible beneficial acquirement of organs, or of properties by in- heritance — such as the sterility of hybrids, the instincts of neuter bees, the battery of the electric eel, the human eye, and the eye of the cuttle-fish, he owns that " it is impossi- hle to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced." When asked for the missing links be- tween existing species, he refers us to the undiscovered fossiliferous strata below the Silurian. So Sir C. Lyell re- fers us for a view of the apes, which developed the first men, to the unexplored geological regions of Central Africa ! And Kev. Baden Powell refers us, for the miss- ing links of the chain of development, to " that enormous period of which we are, from the conditions, precluded -Origin of Species, 4, 10, 127, 9, 97, 100, 409, 410, 415, 423. • Descent of Man, 192, 204, and II.— 15, 257. 60 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY? from hnoioing any tiling whatever." And as to the Origin of Species, the very thing the title of his book proclaims, and how the original germs varied into the four or five primeval forms, and these into the next, he says : " Our i^- Tiorance of the laws of variation is pr-ofoimd / " And that is science ! The Christian acknowledges his ignorance of the method of creation ; but he presents a sufficient cause f r the ex- istence of the facts. The evolutionist ridicules the Bible account of creation as incomprehensible, aod then he gives us an account which he himself owns to be incomprehensi- ble, and which we, besides, perceive to be absurd. He proposes to explain to us the origin of species, and locates it in the geological strata of an unexplored continent, and in those remote ages of which by the conditions we are precluded from hnoming any thing v:hatever ! Objecting to the idea of the God of the Bible, as a self-existent, in- finite, intelligent, omnipotent, good Spirit, because of its unthinkability, Messrs. Spencer, Tyndall, and the rest as- sure us of the eternal self existence of an intelligent cloud of gas, endowed with all promises and potencies, of life and thought, as a simple and intelligible substitute ! Belief in God Almighty is only superstition, but faith in Mr. Tyn- dall's gas-god is science. Mr. Spencer honestly lands in the unknowable. Well, then, what science have we gained of the mysteries of our origin ? Of the self-contradictions of evolutionists, we have an instance in Huxley's treatment of the fundamental fact of his system — protoplasm. The grand question is : How does the protoplasm become alive? In his famous lecture on the subject. Physical Basis of Life, he argues through- out, that life is a property of protoplasm ; that protoplasm owes its properties to the nature and arrangement of its molecules ; that there is no more need to infer or allege a faculty called vitality, to account for the production of WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 61 these various properties of the protophism from its chem- ical constituents, than to infer a power called aquosity, to account for the generation of water from oxj^gen and hy- drogen ; and that our thoughts are the expression of mole- cular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena. Briefly, our minds are manu- factured by our bodies. But in his more recent work, the Classification of Animals, 1860, without any retraction of his previous error, or acknowledgment that he has changed his mind, he flally contradicts his Physical Basis, accept- ing and indorsing " the well-founded doctrine that life is the cause and not the consequence of organization." A still more ridiculous incoherency of the same sort is displayed in the logical department of Huxley's Physical Basis of Life ; where, after trying to persuade us to put our feet on the ladder which leads in the reverse direction from Jiicob's, and to descend with him into the slough of materialism, and affirming that " our thoughts are the ex- pression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena ; " he goes on to say, that he does not believe in materialism. And he tries to vindicate himself by asserting that "we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever as it is." And this after deducing our thoughts from the mole- cular changes of the protoplasm ! A pretty story truly, and an impudent one ! Here is a man who will tell you all about how your body made your soul out of proto- plasm, and in the next page acknowledges that he knows nothing about the composition of either the body or soul as it is 1 And yet this man will mock the believers in the Bible as "smothering their minds under a respectable feather bed of tradition." because they hesitate to shut their eyes, and swallow his contradictions. Mr. Wallace gives us a specimen of this logical incoher- ence affecting if possible still more deeply the foundations 62 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? of philosophic faith.* He heads his paragraph Matter is Force, and goes on to argue that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly understood, does not exist. Then in a couple of pages he goes on to argue "that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, j but actually is, the will of higher intelligences, or of one Supreme Intelligence " But the whole tenor of his book' is thus demolished ; since evolution, if it means anything, means the interposition of natural law between the will of the one Supreme Intelligence and the universe. And on this theory Mr. Wallace's criticisms on Mr. Darwin and others arc impious, being criticisms upon parts of the will of the one Supreme Intelligence. Similar instances of self-contradiction could be given, did space permit, from almost every advocate of evolu- tion. Our space permits the exhibition of but a single instatiQC of the inherent incoherency of the theory. There is nothing in which all the atheistic evolutionists are more emphatic than in the exclusion of design from the uni- verse. All their arguments and sneers are leveled against the idea, that the adaptations of Nature were designed or intended by an intelligent mind ; and the theory of ev- olution is welcomed chiefly because it enables them to give some account of the order of the world, without any ac- knowledgment of a providence guiding it to some end or purpose. But yet all these same evolutionists proclaim progress as the great law of Nature, and expend themselves with wonderful eloquence in tracing the progress of neb- ulae into worlds, and of worms into men. They glory in progress of the past, and prophesy progress in the future, apparently in the most childish unconsciousness, that the very idea of progress involves design, and that the fact of ♦Natural Selection, p. 365. Am. Ed. WAS YOUR MOTHER A SIONKEY? 63 progress asserts providence. Nor is there any escape by alleging necessity of Nature, which is merely endowing the designer of progress with omnipotence as well as omnis- cience. The illogical character of the theory is still further manifested by the failure of its alleged facts to sustain the consequences deduced from them. Suppose all the facts alleged by the atheistic evolutionists were granted, how would they do away with the evidence of the being and government of God ? as they loudly allege they do. Let it be granted that all men grew up from monkeys, and the monkeys from worms, and all worms grew from invisible animalculse, and that the animalculas flashed into life by the chemical contact of the materials of the protoplasm, and that the protoplasm was a natural crop of the cooling globe, and that the cooling globe condensed itself out of fire mist or nebulae or star dust, I demand to know how does all that enable me to get rid of the law of causation ? It is a necessary law of my nature to believe that every effect demands an adequate cause. It is equally a law of my nature to believe that every compound, or composite substance, is an effect, that the compound did not com- pound itself. Here is a great effect — a universe in solution, with all the chemical constituents of our globe and solar system floating in it, and all their laws of chemical afiinity and proportion, and all their electrical attractions and repul- sions, in full operation (else we would never get a universe to thicken down out of it) ; and besides, all the potencies of vegetable and animal life, and all the great powers of the human mind, in a rather vaporous condition, it is true, but still all there— Socrates, Seneca and Solomon, Moses, Solon and Blackstone Homer, Milton and Shakespeare, Demosthenes, Cicero and Daniel Webster, Watt, Stephen- son, Fulton and Morse, popes, puritans and evolutionists, 64 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY? universities and newspapers and congrcs?e3, the United States and the British Empire, and the rest of mankind — all boiled up into Mr. Tyndall's potencies, but all there in potency, just as truly as they ever were here in fact. Well ! here is a great effect just as imperatively demand- ing a great First Cause as the world afterward formed out of it. These substances did not make themselves then, any more than the resulting persons or paving stones make themselves now, and they did not endow themselves with these potencies, nor calculate and establish these laws of chemical combination in exact proportion, nor determine scientifically the laws of gravitation and electricity and light and heat, before they came into being; which must have all been established before a single particle of the Btar dust could begin to cool, or to approach another. The very first idea of matter or of force we can form demands law, and law is merely another name for the divine order of Nature. Whatever foundation for Natural Religion, for faith in God as the Creator and Governor of the world, is afforded by the existing order of the world, it is in no degree logically weakened (though it may be pracfcally) by viewing that order as reached by a process of evolution, since th it process also must have been designed, planned, adapted to its purpose, and divinely superintended. Accordingly, we find that many philosophers, and some divines, acknowledge a process of the evolution of God's great idea, and adore him for the growth alike of forests and firmaments, regarding evolution, thus conditioned, as profoundly religious St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, of old, and many modern speculators, have as- sented to the theory of evolution as perfectly consistent with belief in God, as its Author. It is utterly illogical to allege that evolution has banished final causes. Grant it all its facts, and these facts proclaim God. It is evident, however, that evolutionists are not confi- WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 65 dent of the ability of the facts which they are able to allege to sustain their theory, since they are perpetually postulating assumptions necessary to their argument, but which are utterly unproved, and incapable of proof. Mr. Darwin is the most notorious oiFender against inductive science in this respect. I have now before me a list of eighty-six assumptions of this sort in the Origin of Species alone. Those in his other works are too numerous to mention. He continually mistakes his own assertions, or even his own mere conjectures, for proof, and refers back to them, and builds further assumptions upon them accord- ingly ; and he assumes facts unproven and incapable of proof; and principles which he must know are denied by his opponents. We can only take a few instances at random. He assumes that all dogs are developed from wolves (Descent of Man, page 48); that the instincts of animals are developed (page 38) ; that language was de- veloped (page 53); that there is a wider interval between the lamprey and the ape than between the ape and the man, thus begging the question of man's brutality (page 3-1); that the savage is the original state of man (page 63) ; that parental instincts are the result of Natural Se- lection, after owning utter ignorance of their origin (page 77) ; that the ideas of glory and infamy are the workings of sympathy (page 82); the heredity of moral tastes (page 98) ; that the standard of morality has been rising since the giving of the ten commandments (page 99) ; that our ancestors were quadrupeds (page 116); that there have been thousands of generations (page 125) ; that breeds have the character of species (Origin of Species, page 411); that rudimentary organs are inherited abor- tions (page 424) ; that there are four or five original pro- genitors, and distant evidence of only one (page 425); he assumes descent to prove his geology (page 428) ; and 5 66 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? perpetual progress toward perfection (pages 59, 140, 176, 428), in the face of his own facts of retrogression. Then look at the outrageous character of the assumption that beneficial variations may be added up indefinitely, that is, to infinity. Because a gymnast can leap over two horses, can his son leap over three? and his son over four? and his son over five ? and can we in time breed a man who will leap to the moon? And yet the whole theory is based upon forgetfulness of the maxim, that there is a limit to all things, and of the fact, that in creatures of flesh and blood this limit is very soon reached. Look again at the utterly erroneous assumption that the tendency of the struggle for life is to improve the combatants ; an assumption contradicted by the whole his- tory of famine, war, pauperism, and disease, among brutes and men. Were the survivors of the Irish famine of 1847, or those of the Persian, or Bengali famines improved by their struggle for life ? It is true the fittest survived ; but that was all ; they were miserably emaciated and de- moralized. Were the peasantry of Europe improved by the wars of the French Revolution? On the contrary, though the fittest survived, France was obliged to lower the recruiting standard three inches. In all cases the strug- gle for life injures all concerned. And yet upon these two fundamental assumptions the theory is built ; of which that of the indefinite accumula- tion of small profitable variations is outrageously impossi- ble and absurd ; and the other, of the improvement of breeds by starvation and hardships, is contrary to all ob- servation and experience ! Take away these two assump- tions, and the whole theory of the gradual improvement of plants and animals by such agency vanishes There is no such power of indefinite improvement by Natural Selec- tion, as Mr. Darwin asserts. The utmost it can do is to keep breeds up to the natural standard, or near to it, by WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 67 destroying the weakest ; but at the same time it weakens the strongest also. Were there no other objection, this one would be fatal, that Mr. Darwin assigns an elevating power to a depressing agency, and asserts ^var, famine, hardship, and disease as his holy angels perfecting prog- ress. Mr. Darwin presents the most preposterous assumptions with such coolness and apparent unconsciousness of their utter improbability to his readers, and with such an entire ignoring of the necessity of any further attestation than his own ipse dixit, as to warrant serious suspicions of his sanity. Take, for instance, his bear and whale story. Hearne reports having seen in the Arctic regions a bear swimming in the water for hours, with his mouth wide open, catching flies ; and Mr. Darwin says if the supply of flies were constant (where the winter lasts eight months of the year 40° below zero) he can see no difficulty in the produc- tion at length of an animal as monstrous as a whale! M. Comte's disciples never suspected their master's sanity till he invented a religion for them. 2. This theory, it should be remembered, is mereh/ a the- ory, a mere notion, a hypothesis. It is not even alleged that it is based upon facts actually discovered. The alleged facts of the cooling of the nebulae, the chemical origin of life upon our globe, and the development of the original Ascidian into the fish, and that into the monkey, and of the monkey into the man, never were witnessed by any- body nor could they be witnessed. La Place was honest enough to call his part of the theory, The Nebular Hypo- thesis. He had no idea of claiming for it the rank of a fact of science upon which he, or anybody else, might build a system. Nor are the modern assertors of evolution able to establish a sincrlc instance of the chemical origrin of life at the present day; though thousands of experi- ments have been made attempting that exploit, by English, 68 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? French, and German chemists during the last forty years. Nor has a single case of the transmutation of species ever been observed in wild animals or plants; nor has any change of species been produced in tame ones by domesti- cation or culture. No naturalist has seen a community of apes in the process of improvement toward manhood ; nor has any philologist described the first attempts of the mon- keys toward the articulation of language, or the manufac- ture of clothing, unless we except Mr. Lemuel Gulliver's interesting account of the Yahoos. It must be acknowl- edged that the animals described by that accurate observer, and graphic describer, approach more nearly to those re- quired by Mr. Darwin's theory than any ever seen before, or since. Hence it is greatly to be desired that some scien- tific evolutionists should thoroughly explore those regions, investigate the manners and customs of the Yahoos with the enthusiasm of a true Darwinian, and minutely describe those interesting features which would enable us to decide whether they are monkeys progressing to manhood, or men brutalizing into apehood; but which Mr Gulliver's lack of scientific enthusiasm for evolution prevented him from closely examining. But until the scientific standing ot Mr. Gulliver's Yahoos is determined, the theory of evolu- tion must be assigned to the mountains of speculations, big with expectation, but which yet await the birth of their first fact. Mr. Darwin indeed alleges the results of domestication upon animals and plants, as producing permanent varieties as different in appearance as many which are ranked by naturalists as diff'erent species, and he alleges that Natural Selection carries on a similar process of improvement among wild animals and plants. But the facts of domestication are most emphatic in re- fusing to acknowledge any change of species of the most carefully bred animals. The efforts of breeders have been WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 69 exerted for thousands of years upon the dog, the ox, the goat, the sheep, and the ass, the horse, and the camel, among animals; and upon the goose, the duck, and the pigeon, and for a shorter time, but still for two thousand years, upon the comir.on barn-door poultry. Farmers in all lands, since the deluge, have used their best exertions to improve the cereals, the fruit trees, the vines, and root crops, and vegetables, and the result has been some valu- able modifications of size, shape, flavor, and fertility ; but in no case whatever has any change of species been ef- fected. All the eflforts of breeders have not succeeded in making the horse specifically different from the noble ani- mal described in the Book of Job four thousand years ago. The sheep has not become a goat, nor the goat a sheep, by all the pains of all the shepherds since the days of Abel. The ass displays not the least tendency to be- come a horse, nor the goat to become a cow. Mr. Darwin makes great capital out of pigeons, enumerating all the varieties owned by fanciers, and showing how the Indian emperors bred them a thousand years before Christ. But it is strange that he does not see that this makes against his theory ; since in all that time this most variable of birds has never been transmuted into any other species. The pigeon has never been changed into a crow, or a mag- pie, or a woodpecker, or a chicken ; has never, in fact, be- come anything else than a pigeon. Dogs are also some- what variable in their varieties, and Mr. Darwin relies greatly upon supposed variations from some one assumed ancestral pair of dogs, into the greyhound, mastiff, ter- rier, and lapdog. But granting all these unproven varia- tions, no instance is alleged of a dog ever becoming a cat or a lion by any care or culture. It will not do to allege, that, for anything we know .to the contrary, our present breeds of domestic animals and 70 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? plants may be so diflferent from those called by the same names in ancient times as to be really different species. "We do know many things to the contrary. In the tombs of the Egyptians, and the sculptures of the Assyrians, we have pictures of the various plants, birds, and animals, from three to four thousand years old, as well as of man, the most domestic animal of the whole. These paintings and sculptures assure us that in all those millenniums do- mestication has not produced the slightest change in the races of animals, plants, or men. The Ethiopian has not changed his skin, nor the leopard his spots. The negro was then the same black-skinned, woolly-headed, flat- nosed, thick lipped, long-heeled person he is to day. as pompous, good-humored, and fond of finery. The Assyr- ian statues are good, recognizable likenesses of eminent living Jewish merchants, in London and New Orleans. The old Pharaohs of the monuments can be matched for face and figure any day in the bazars of Cairo. The grey- hound of the tombs is the same variety now used for cours- ing hares in the desert. The camel, the ass, and the Arab, and Assyrian breeds of horses, have not been at all improved in forty centuries. Even Mr. Darwin's favorite pigeons would seem to have ceased to vary; for the carrier- pigeons let loose by Sesostris, to carry the news of his coronation to all the cities of Egypt, do not differ a feather from the modern Egyptian carrier-pigeons. The various wild animals, and many of the plants, are represented on ^ these monuments in great variety. Among these I have noted the lotus, the papyrus, the leek, the palm, wheat, barley, and millet; the crocodile, the frog, the crane, the flamingo, the ibis, the goose, the owl, the ostrich, the peacock; and of beasts the now famous ancestral ape, Ptolemy's tame lion, the leopard, the gazelle, the hippo- potamus, the giraffe, and the wild boar, and many others. WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 71 But there is not the least perceptible change in the corre- sponding species now inhabiting I^gypt and the desert. We can go further than the mere external appearance ; for we can actually dissect specimens of the various ani- mals, and thus satisfy ourselves whether any physiological change, amounting to a transmutation of species, hiS oc- curred, or was in progsess; and the investigation has been conducted by no less a physiologist and zoologist than Cu- vier, whose authority in such matters no naturalist will dis- pute. And this is what he says: " It might seem as if the ancient Egyptians had been inspired by nature, for the purpose of transmitting to after ages a monument of her natural history. That strange and whimsical people, by embalming with so much care the brutes which were the objects of their stupid adoration, have left us in their sacred grottoes cabinets of zoology almost complete. Climate has conspired with art to preserve the bodies from corruption, and we can now assure ourselves with our own eyes what was the state of a good number of species three thousand ye irs ago. * * * I have endeavored to col- lect all the ancient documents respecting the forms of ani- mals, and there are none equal to those furnished by the Egyptians, both in regard to their antiquity and abund- ance, I have examined with the greatest care the en- graved figures of quadrupeds and birds upon the obelisks brought from Egypt to ancient Rome; and all these fig- U7es, one with another, have a perfect resemblance to their ir tended objects, such as they still are in our days. My If arned friend, Geofi'rey St Hilaire, convinced me of the importance of this research, and carefully collected in the tombs and temples of Upper and Lower Egypt as many mummies of aaimals as he could procure. He has brought home the mummies of cats, ibises, birds of prey, dogs, crocodiles, and the head of a bull. After the most atten- tive and detailed examination, not the smallest difference 72 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY 'i is to be perceived between these animals and those of the same species which we now see, any more than between human mummies and skeletons of men of the present day."* There is then not the first fact, or appearance of a fact, to be adduced in proof of the change of species either by domestication, or Natural Selection, or any other process known to man. That any such evolution of any animal, or plant, into one of another species ever occurred, is a mere empty notion, in support of which no facts can be adduced. All the animals and plants of which we know anything have remained unchanged since the beginning of man's observation of them. The theory endeavors to ac- count for a change which never happened. It is a mere empty dream, unworthy of a serious consideration by any mind imbued with the first principle of inductive science — namely, that all science is the orderly knowledge of facts; and whose first rule is, first ascertain your facts. But it is urged, that though such a change has not oc- curred during the brief period of human history, it may have been practicable in the lengthened periods revealed by geology, and while the forces of nature were more vig- orous during the youth of our planet This, in fact, is the grand resource of the modern evolutionists — the al- most infinite periods and possibilities of geology. We refuse, however, to follow Mr. Powell into those un- explored realms of the infinite past and discuss the possi- bilities of ages, of which " by the conditions we can not know anything whatever." We will go as far as the geo- logical strata furnish us with any facts, any evidences of life, any traces of plants or animals of which correspond- ing species still exist, and will unhesitatingly affirm, on the authority of the most eminent geologists, that such geo- logical representatives of existing species furnish no evi- ♦Tbeory of the Earth, 123. WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 73 dence whatever of evolution into higher forms. On the contrary, we shall show that many species have existed without the slightest change for many thousands, aye, and millions of years, sufficiently long to establish the fact of the permanence of species during the geologic ages known to man. Geologists are generally agreed that the first Florida Coral Reef is at least 30,000 years old ; but Agassiz asserts, uncontradicted, that the insect which built it has not altered in the least in that period and he says regarding it: *' These facts furnish evidence, as direct as we can obtain in any branch of physical inquiry, that some at least of the species of animals now existing have been in existence 30,000 years, and have not undergone the slightest change in that period." But we can go still further back, and demonstrate the permanence of vegetable structure. Hugh Miller says : "The oak, the birch, the hazel, the Scotch fir, all lived, I repeat, in what is now Britain, ere the last great depression of the land. The gigantic northern elephant and rhinoc- eros, extinct for untold ages, forced their way through the tangled branches; and the British tiger and hyena harbored in their thickets. Cuvier framed an argument for the fixity of species on the fact that the birds and beasts of the catacombs were identical in every respect with the animals of the same kind that live now. But what, it has been asked, is a brief period of 3,000 years, when com- pared with the geologic ages ? Or how could any such ar- gument be founded on a basis so little extended? It is, however, to no such narrow basis that we can refer in the case of these woods All human history is comprised in the nearer corner of the immense period they measure out; and yet from their first appearance in creation till now, they have not altered a single fiber. And such on this poiut is the invariable testimony of Paleontologic science, testimony so invariable that no great Paleontologist was 74 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? ever yet an asserter of the Development Hvpothesis."* To the same purpose let us hear Huxley's testimony, since no one will suspect him of undue respect for Moses: "Ob- viously if the earliest fossiliferous rocks now known are coeval with the commencement of life, and if their con- tents give us any just conception of the earliest fauna and flora, the insignificant amount of modification which can be demonstrated to have taken place in any one group or animals and plants, is quite incompatible with the hypo- thesis that all living forms are the results of a process of necessary progressive development entirely comprised within the time represented by the fossiliferous rocks. "f We are fully warranted, then, in alleging, that no such transmutation of species is known to science, as an existing fact, or as having ever occurred. As to the supposition on which the evolutionists fall back, that such a miracle might have happened thousands of millions of years before the formation of the lowest rocks known to us, we might well decline the discussion of may -he's as facts of science. But there is a positive denial of unimaginable periods of time for Mr. Darwin's evolution to try its blundering experiments. We are empowered to say positively, No ! There is no such length of time for you, Mr. Darwin, on this little globe at least. This rotating world had a beginning; so had our moon; and our sun, too, began to burn one day. And there are data of the revolu- tion of these bodies, and of the secular cooling of the earth, and of the gradual combustion of the sun, and of the retardation of the earth's motions, from which SirWm. Thompson (in his Treatise on Geological Time) calculates, that our earth has not been in a fit state for plants and anr- mals for more than a hundred millions of years; and he *Testimony of the Rocks, 77. t Address at Annual Meeting of the Geological Society, 1862. WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 75 demonstrates the absurdity of the demand for unlimited time, as contradictory to the facts of physical astronomy. Hence we deny the possibility of evolution in the infinite ages of the past There never were any such ages on this world of ours. 4. Failing to find facts, evolutionists fall back upon analogies, and support their hypothesis by the supposed analogy of the growth of the embryos of all plants and ani- mals from germs alleged to he originaHy perfectly similar — simple protoplasm cells, which by subsequent evolution, differentiate themselves as widely as the moss from the man. The subject is too obscure for popular discussion. I can only announce the results of the latest and most authorita- tive researches * 1. Analogy is a very unsafe guide here, because the dif- ferences between the limited life of the individual, and the alleged unlimited life of the race, are precisely those of which we have no analogy. 2. It is not true that " the original substratum or ma- terial is in every instance alike," nor that the "primordial cell is in every instance the same," whether of the 'lichen or the man ; ''f nor as others allege, "■ that chemical reagents detect no diflferences between them." Chemical reagents are very clumsy instruments for the analysis of living be- ings, and their properties and powers; which are the antag- onists of chemical reactions. Nevertheless, heat is a well- known chemical agent, and the application of heat to a fertilized, and to an unfertilized, germ develops a whole world of difference between them. The one becomes a chicken, the other an addled egg. Moreover, the applica- tion of different degrees of heat to different germs pro- ♦Agassiz's Methods of Study. f Draper's Human Physiology, 506. 76 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? duces the most various reactions. The germs of trout are speedily killed by the moderate temperature of 65° Fahren- heit, while the germs of most animalculae and plants de- velop rapidly at that temperature. Such instances might be multiplied, but these are sufficient to contradict the rash assertion of sameness, because a hasty observer did not take pains to discover differences. 3. There are four distinct plans of structure in the ani- mal kingdom, and at least three, perhaps more, in the veg- etable kingdom; and every germ, from the first instant when its evolution can be seen at all, is seen to develop only according to its own proper method. There is no more confusion of germs, or embryos, than of p'ants or an- imals. 4. No instance has ever been known of a germ produc- ing an animal, or plant, of another species, by any process of stopping short of ripening, or undue prolongation of it. Every seed breeds true to its kind, or not at all, or produces a deformity. Embryology utterly refuses the notion of the transmutation of species. Mr. Darwin's various references to rudimentary organs, like the bones of a hand in the flipper of the whale, or the teats of male animals, and the like, can hardly be called arguments. He tries to account for them and fails; ac- knowledging ignorance of the laws of heredity. Some of them he will have to be young organs in process of evo- lution, others organs aborted for want of exercise. In this category he ought to place the tail which he ought to have inherited from his ancestors, as he is greatly exercised to know what became of it. But it is evident that his at- tempts to build arguments on such things, and to account for occasional variations by atarism, are in contradiction to his principles Most of the known instances of the origination of permanent varieties were not the result of infinitesimal improvements, but were sudden and com- WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 77 plete at once. The Japan peacocks, the short-legged sheep, the porcupine man and his family, and the six-fin- gered men, were not at all the results of a slow process of evolution ; on the contrary, tbey were born so, complete at once, in utter contradiction of the theory. 5. The only other line of argument, which has any show of probability, is that based upon the gradations of the various orders of plants and animals. Not but that there are many other arguments adduced, but they are of too technical a character to be intelligible to any but zoologists, and of too little weight to demand consideration after the leading arguments are overturned. But this argument from gradation, though logically unsound, is plausibly specious, and therefore demands notice. By far the ablest exhibition of this argument is that made by Lamarck, and we give it as he presents it: *'The greater the abundance of natural objects assembled to- gether, the more do we discover proofs that everything passes by insensible shades into something else ; that even the more remarkable differences are evanescent, and that nature has for the most part left us nothing at our disposal for establishing distinctions, save trifling, and in some re- spects puerile particularities. We find that many genera among plants and animals are of such an extent, in conse- quence of the number of species referred to them, that the study and determination of these last have become almost impracticable. When the species are arranged in a series, and placed near to each othes, with a due regard to their natural affinities, they each differ in so minute a degree from those next adjoining, that they almost melt into each other, and are in a manner confounded together. If we see isolated species, we may presume the absence of some more closely connected, and which have not yet been dis- covered. Already there are genera, and even entire or- ders, nay, whole classes which present this state of things." 78 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? He then goes on to present, "as a guide to conjecture," what his successors now assert as a fact: "In the first place, if we examine the whole series of known animals, from one extremity to the (Tther, when they are arranged in the order of their natural relations, we find that we may pass progressively, or at least with very few interruptions, from beiniiS of more simple to those of more compound structure; and in proportion as the complexity of their organization increases, the number and dignity of their faculties increase also. Among plants a similar approx- imation to a graduated scale of being is apparent. Sec- ondly, it appears, from geological observations, that plants and animals of more simple organization existed on the globe before the appearance of those of more compound structure, and the latter were successively formed at more modern periods, each new race being more fully developed than the most perfect of the preceding one."* From this gradation of nature, thus stated, the evolu- tionists go on to infer genealogy, the birth descent of the larger from the smaller, and of the more complex from the simpler forms, as the only scientific explanation. But it is by no means the only scientific explanation of the order of nature. The best naturalists, from Moses to Agassiz, have regarded the order of nature as the development of the divine idea, have prosecuted their researches on that view, and have regarded that as a sufficient and scientific explanation of the gradation of plants and animals, as they actually exist. The idea of birth descent can not be logically connected with that of gradation; especially with a gradation upward. Were the order of nature such as Lamarck describes, how could any man logically infer the birth descent of each of its classes from the next below ? Here is an ironmonger's sample card of wood screws, beginning with those one- ♦Lyell's Principles of Geology, Book III., Chapter 33. WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 79 quarter of an inch long, and proceeding by gradations of one-sixteentli of an inch to those of four inches. Does the gradation show that the little ones begot the big ones? It may be said the wood screws do not beget progeny. Well, here is a hill containing twenty- three potatoes, weighing from half an ounce to half a pound, and quite regularly graded. Did the small potatoes beget the big ones? The inference of birth descent from gradation is utterly illogical, and of a piece with the incoherency which we have seen in the other parts of the theory. It never could be inferred from the facts stated, even did nature correspond to Lamarck's description. But nature does not correspond to Lamarck's descrip- tion. That description corresponded moderately, perhaps, to the science of his day, which was based chiefly upon external resemblances; but no scientific naturalist of the present day would accept it as a correct statement of the facts revealed by modern science. In the first place there is no such imperceptible blend- ing and shading off of species as the description would imply, obliterating all distinctions of species, and rendering it impossible even for a naturalist to distinguish one species from another. Since the time of Lamarck, structure and physiology have been more studied than mere external ap- pearances ; so that from a tooth or bone Cuvier or Agassiz could reconstruct an animal, and indicate its internal or- ganization, as well as its form and habits. But even in Lamarck's days, and even to the most uneducated, there was no such imperceptible shading and blending as the theory requires. It is well to look here at its requirements, for they are not fully presented by its friends. Mr. Dar- win gives us a diagram exhibiting the variation of' an orig- inal species into a score or so of varieties, ending in distinct species. But this is very far, indeed, below the necessities of the case. The horse hair worm lays 8,000,000 of eggs; 80 WAS TOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? and tte primeval germ, whatever it was, could hardly be less fertile, since fertility increases with simplicity of struc- ture. But, taking 8,000,000 to begin with, here were as many varieties; since no two of them, or of any creature, could be exactly alike. The next generation would give 8,000,000 times as many varieties, and so on till Natural Selection began to thin off the feeble. But here we have, instead of a few well-marked varieties, an infinite multitude of imperceptible variations, rendering classification impos- sible. And as all these were only varieties of the same breed, they would breed together, and thus still more con- fuse the complexity, and render distinction of species im- possible. For, in spite of all Mr. Darwin has to say about the extinction of the weaker varieties, the fact is, they are not at all extinguished, but keep their ground as well as the higher classes, or perhaps better. And if a snail, or a worm, can contrive to live now in an unimproved condition, why should its improving cousin die oflF? Did its improve- ment kill it? And so of improving mollusks, and well- doing radiates, and aspiring rabbits, and all the rest. The world ought to be so full of them that no man could sort them ofiF into species, or tell which was fish, which was flesh, and which red herring; and no pork packer could distinguish hog from dog. But instead of any such horrible confusion of a world full of mongrels, we discover a clear and well defined dis- tinction of species, known even to the poor animals them- selves, and by their instincts made known to all mankind. The Creator, who created all creatures after their kind, implanted in them an instinct of breeding only with their own species; and placed a bar in the way of man's vain attempts to work confusion of species, by rendering the hybrid ofispring of diff'erent species sterile, or only capable of breeding back to the pure blood. Innumerable attempts have been made by fraud and force to procure cross breeds WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 81 of diflferent fipecies of plants and animals, but always with the same result — the extinction of the progeny of the hy- brid, unless bred back to nature. While a mingling of various breeds of the same species —horses, sheep, or cat- tle — generally increases fertility, the attempt to mingle different species, as the horse and the ass, though so sim- ilar, always produces sterile offspring. It is imposKible to conceive any form in which the Creator could more em- phatically protest against the attempt to confuse thjB dis- tinctions of species He established. God has fixed a barrier against the mixture or confusion of species by cross breeding, by ordaining the sterility of hybrids. Mr. Darwin labors in vain to explain away this great fact. It can not be explained into conformity with the evolution theory; for in that theory all species are only breeds or varieties of one species, and ought to in- crease their fertility by cross breeding. With all scientific naturalists, as with all people of common sense, this proves that species have a distinct existence in nature, and that the Creator has ordained the continuance of their distinct existence; which is the denial of evolution. When Mr. Darwin retreats into the geologic ages, and confessing that his principle has ceased to be opera- tive now in our world, and refers us to them for such evolution of one species from another, he abandons the fundamental principle of his school — the uniformity of nature — and falls back on Christian ground, the necessity for supernatural origins. He virtually admits the death or superannuation of Natural Selection, since it has re- tired from the business of species-making. But when we go back to those old geologic ages, we find that species were then not only as distinct as now, but that the distinctions were even bolder and more visible. Many of them have ceased to exist, but they have left their 6 82 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? shells, their petrified casts, and their bones, by which we can see that they stood apart in well-defined groups, with- out any such blendinj^ and confusion as the evolution theory asserts. Over three thousand species are already classified. Between every two of them there ought to be, on Mr Darwin's showing, a hundred intermediate variations at the least ; and between some of the more widely separated forms there ought to be thousands of intermediate varieties; as for instance between the bear and the whale ; and a still greater number between the mollusk with its external shell, and the vertebrate with its internal skeleton. And we ought to find these intermediate forms closely connected with their parents and their children. For intermediate forms in another continent could not be the connecting links between the mollusks and vertebrates of a distant country, say of England. In the same strata in which we find the two ends of the chain, and lying between the two ends of the chain, we ought to find the connecting links. And we ought to find a hundred connecting links for every specimen of distinct species, since Mr. Darwin alleges that they must have lived and died somewhere ; and we have seen they must have lived and died right there where they were born, and where they begot their progeny. The geo- logical strata ought to be full of connecting links. But when we come to look for them they are not there. Geology knows nothing about them. It has plenty of dis- tinct, well-defined species — trilobites, and ammonites, and echinoderms, palms, ferns, firs, and mosses, all sorts of quadrupeds from a mouse to a mastodon, and all just as clean-cut and well-defined as the species of existing ani- mals. Mr. Darwin can not find his connecting links be- tween the species, which ought to have been a hundred times more plentiful than the species they connected. These connecting links are missing links. He ought to be able to overwhelm his opponents, and bury them under WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 83 mountains of the bones of intermediate species. But all his friends can do is to suggest about half a dozen, while he needs three hundred thousand. He can not pay half a cent on the dollar. In his grief he turns round and abuses the defectiveness of the geological record, which he says he could never have suspected of being so defective but for this failure to meet his drafts. But he need not blame the geological record for not preserving bones of animals which never lived. Geology says there never was any such con- fusion of species as evolution asserts. But not only does the general structure of the web of nature present a clearly striped pattern, instead of the mottled gray of the theory — neither the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end is like what the evolution theory would produce. The gradation does not begin, as the theory asserts and demands, with the monads. On the contrary, we find that there are four kingdoms of animal life — in an ascending scale — the radiate, or starfish; the mollusk, or oyster; the articulate, or insect; and the vertebrate, or animals with backbones. Now the evolution ought to have begun at the bottom, with the radiate, the coral, and the starfish; it should have gone upward, the coral developing into the oyster, and the oyster into the lobster, and the lobster into the salmon, and so on. But instead of that we discover, away down in the Silurian strata, at the very beginning of life, all the four kingdoms — the radiates, the mollusks, the articulates, and the fish! Evidently, then, there was no such beginning of the world as evolutionists suppose. Then as we work upward along the line of march, and of the development of the divine idea, we observe that when new species were introduced, they did not work up slowly from small and weak beginnings ; beginning with dwarfs and growing up to giants ; but, on the contrary, the giants head the column. The geological books are full of 84 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? them — sharks forty feet long, frogs as big as oxen, ichthyo- saurus and plesiosaurus of fabulous proportions — were not their skeletons preserved— pterodactyles, ox bats, as big as a dog, the mastodon giganteus, beside which an ordinary modern elephant is like a Shetland pony beside a dray horse, ferns as big as oak trees, and mosses eighteen inches in diameter, shell fish of the nautilus order the size of din- ner plates, and crusteceans, cousins to the lobster, three feet long. And all this at the very first start in life of these respective families, and in overwhelming multitudes. That was no age of small beginnings, and small progressive improvements. On the contrary, these old families, like some other old families, seem to have rather lost rank, and bulk, and influence ; at least their modern representatives cut no such figure in the world as their predecessors. As we proceed along the line we meet gaps which slay the theory of genealogical descent altogether. A gap is fatal to it. If a family dies out, that is the end of it. You can not resuscitate it after a few centuries, and go on with that breed ; much less can you pick up a breed quite dif- ferent, and attach it to your old genealogy. But in the line of evolution we meet these fatal gaps ; and no evolutionist has bridged them, because they can not possibly be bridged. The first great gap is the abyss between death and life. No human power can cross it. How could the chemical actions of dead matter infuse vitality into the first germ, or bud of a plant? For chemical actions are the antago- nists of life, and constantly laboring to destroy the living organism, and finally they succeed. There is no process of evolution known to man which can carry evolution across this abyss. But till evolution crosses this gulf it can not even begin to operate. This first abyss is its grave. But, supposing life begun in the plant first, as the theory requires, there is another gap between the life of the plant and that of the animal ; for all animal life is sustained by an- WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY? 85 other sort of food than that which feeds the vegetable. The vegetable feeds solely on chemical, unorganized matters ; the animal solely on matter organized, on some plant, or on some other animal which feeds on plants. No animal can live on the food of plants. Here then is another gap which can not be bridged over, nor crossed; for the plant in process of conversion into an animal is in process of star- vation, and when the process is about to be completed, it will end like the miser's horse, whose master diminished his oats Darwinianly, a single grain a day, until he had brought him to live on just one grain per day, when, alas! the victim of the experiment died. And so ends evolution experiment No. 2. Then we come on a multitude of gaps, breaks in the uni- formity of nature, called for by the evolutionists, between the species which will not breed together. There ought to be no such species on the theory; or, if there are, there ought to be a multitude of intervening varieties toning down the interval ; for instance, between the horse and the cow, and between the sheep and the hog. All the in- genuity of all the evolutionists has been tasked in vain to produce any instance of the confusion of two such species, or of the production of a new true species by the intermix- ture of blood. But they might just as well try to convert iron into gold, or sulphur into carbon. In fact, evolution is the modern physiological form of the old chemical su- perstition, alchemy, substituting for the transmutation of metals the problem of the transmutation of animals. It were endless to attempt to exhibit the impossibilities of crossing the gaps between the water-breathing fish and the air-breathing animal ; between the flying-bird and the quadruped ; between instinct and education ; between brute selfishness and maternal afi"ection; between the habits of the solitary and those of the gregarious, and those of the colonial insects and animals. No one of these is accounted 86 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? for satisfactorily by the theory of evolution. But space forbids the attempt. We only cite one other gulf which the theory can not cross : the gulf between the brute and the man. We should rather say the three gulfs; for between man's body and that of the brute there is a gap which Natural Selection can not cross ; another between man's intellectual powers and those of brutes ; and the third, and widest of all, be- tween his conscience and their brutal appetites. The gulf between man's body and that of any brute is marked along the whole line, from the solid basis of the feet, enabling him to stand erect, look upward and behold the stars; along the line of the stiff backbone, maintaining the dignified posture ; to the hands, on which treatises have been written, displaying their wonderful superiority over those of all other creatures, and enabling man to do what no other animal has done, to fill the world with his handiworks, and alter the very face of nature with his ax, and spade, and steam engine. His tongue and organs of articulate speech alone, were there no other characteristic, proclaim him different from all other animals ; none of those resembling him in outward form making the slightest attempts toward articulate language or being able to do so. Man alone, of all the animals, possesses no natural cov- ering, but is exposed naked to the inclemency of the ele- ments. What little hair he possesses is chiefly on the breast, where it is of little use as a covering, and on the head, which in other animals is never better protected than the body. Mr. Darwin alleges that the first men were hairy, like apes. Well, how did they lose their hair? Not by Natural Selection, which only perpetuates profitable varia- tions; but the loss of hair to an ape would be as unprofit- able as the loss of your clothes to you. Not by Sexual Selection, for there is not the slightest evidence that nudity was ever popular in apedom. We have undoubted cviJcuco, WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? 87 in the two bone needles found with the bones of the man of Mentone, that the primeval men were naked, and com- plete proof that Natural Selection could not eflfect such a disadvantageous change had they been hairy. Here, then, we have an inferiority to other animals in the animal struc- ture, strangely at variance with the general superiority, and only to be accounted for as an educational provision. But chiefly in the human head does the great outward distinction appear. The brain is the great instrument with which the mind works. You can gauge the strength of Ulysses by his bow, and the bulk of the giant by the staff of his spear, which was like a weaver's beam. The brain of the largest ape is about thirty two cubic inches. The brains of the wildest Australians are more than double that capacity. They measure from seventy- five inches to ninety. Europeans' brains measure from ninety to one hundred inches. There are instances of Esquimaux meas- uring over ninety. Even the brain of an idiot is double the size of that of the orang otang. But how did man get this extraordinary development of brain, far beyond his necessities? For the cave man of Mentone, who hunted the bison, had as good a head as Bismarck. Natural Selec- tion could not develop an ape's brain in advance of his necessities. But here we have a prophetic structure ; man's head developed far in advance of his necessities. Here is a power at work superior to Natural Selection. With such an instrument man has gone to work and sup- plied his deficiencies. Inferior to many animals in strength and speed, he has manufactured weapons, and subdued them all, asserting himself as the lord of creation, conquer- ing even the mighty mastodon, and piercing the huge Cale- donian whale with his reindeer harpoon. He has remedied his want of hair by the manufacture of clothing fj-om the spoils of his victims. He has rendered himself independent of the weather by the shelter of his house. He has ceased 88 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? to be dependent on the spontaneous fruits of the forest by the cultivation of the soil, and so has become a cosmopolite, confined to no province of creation. He has constructed ships, and provisioned them for long voyages, and visited, and colonized every coast of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. He has formed civilized societies with laws, government, and religion. He has leveled roads, navigated rivers, tunneled mountains, dug navigable canals, constructed steamboats, built railroads, invented electric telegraphs, and steam printing presses ; and generally he has developed ideas of society, nationality, and of the universal brother- hood of man, not only not possible under the laws of Nat- ural Selection, but in the most direct contrariety to those laws, which work only for the benefit of the individual. Never under those laws could any great community of ani- mals be formed, never could they obtain the notion of rep- resentative government, never combine their powers for any national enterprise, nor could the most hairy and muscular- tailed of Mr. Darwin's ancestors secure subscribers suflBcient to warrant him in starting even a county newspaper. But it is in the moral sense which enables man to distin- guish right from wrong, the conscience, which forbids and reproves the unbridled indulgence of the animal appetites, that we observe the grand distinction between man and the brute. There is nothing in the writings of evolutionists more pitiable than their attempts to degrade conscience into a mere gregarious instinct, an outcome of utility to the tribe, and to pleasurable sensations, resulting from the exercise of the social instincts. It would appear that these writers had so sophisticated their own minds that they have ceased to understand the fundamental, world-wide difference between right and gain, between duty and pleasure. " Do justice, though the heavens fall," could never be evolved by Natural Selection. That is the law of the sharpest tooth, and the longest claws, and the biggest ball; tha Napoleonic WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY? 89 theology, whose god is always on the side of the strongest battalions; the law of the perdition of the weak, and the survival of the strongest. In obedience to its laws the birds forsake their parents as soon as they can shift for themselves; the herd tramples down the wounded deer; the wolves devour their wounded brothers; the queen bee puts her sisters to death, and the neuters sacrifice all the males of the hive. In obedience to the laws of Natural Selection, the males fight for the most attractive females, and keep as many as they can, and form societies on that basis. But man has a sense of justice, and mercy, and gratitude, and love. Here is an animal who knows he ought to tell truth, and do right, and honor his parents, and respect and love his brethren. Whether he always does his duty or not, he feels and owns he ought to do it. Justice, and mercy, and the fear of God, are not at all the attributes of brutes, and never could have been produced by the evolution of their instincts. No animal possesses any knowledge of God, nor practices any form of religious worship. Religion, then, could not be the evolution of what has no existence. We have now considered the theory of the atheistical ev olution of man, and of all plants and animals from one primeval germ, by the unintelligent operation of the powers of nature. We have seen that there are as many contra dictory applications of the theory as there are advocates of it; that in any shape it is incoherent, illogical, and absurd; that it is destitute of any support from facts ; that the al leged analogy of embryology fails to give it countenance; that the order of nature in its gradations is contradictory of the theory; that it utterly fails to account for the origin of life, for the distinctness of the four classes of the animal kingdom, for the distinctness of species which refuse to breed together, for the absence of the intermediate forms necessary to the theory; and, above all, that it can give no satisfactory account of man's bodily, mental, and moral su- 90 WAS YOUR MOTHER A MONKEY ? periority to all other animals, nor for his possession of a knowledge of God. Its tendency, moreover, is inevitably to degrade man, to destroy that sense of his dignity which is the principal se- curity of human life, to obliterate a belief in the divine or- igin and sanction of morality, and in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and so to promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of men to the level of brutes, living only under the laws of their brutal instincts. For all these reasons we reject the theory as unscientific, absurd, degrading to man, and offensive to the God who made him. CHAPTER III Ts God Everybody, and Everybody God? Pantheism is that perversion of reason and language which denies God's personality, and calls some imaginary- soul of the world, or the world itself, by his name. While Pantheists are fully agreed upon the propriety of getting rid of a God who could note their conduct, and call them to account for it hereafter, and who would claim to exercise any authority over them here, they are by no means agreed, either in India, Germany, or America, as to what they shall call by his name. Public opinion necessitates them to say they believe in a God, but almost every one has his own pri- vate opinion as to what it is. We shall speak of it as we hear it pronounced from the lips of its prophets, here, as well as in the writings of its expounders, in Europe, and Asia. Some of them declare, that it is some absolutely unknown cause of all the phenomena of the universe, and others, that it is the universe itself. A large class speak of it as the great soul of the world, while the more materialis- tic regard it as the world itself, body and soul ; the soul being the sum of all the imponderable forces, such as gravitation, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, vegetable and animal life, and especially the mesmeric influence, of which many of them regard intellect as a modification ; and the body being the sum of all the ponderable substances, such as air, water, earth, minerals, vegetables, and bodies of ani- (91) 92 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? mals and men. This creed is popularly expressed in the sentence so often heard, *' God is everything, and everything is God." But this vast generalization of all things into the higher unity — this exalting of monkeys, men, snails, and paving stones to the same level of divinity — by no means meets the views of the more unphilosophical and aspiring gods and goddesses, for the very reason that it is so impar- tial. To deify a man and his cat by the same process is not much of a distinction to the former ; and of what advantage is it to be made a god, if he does not thereby obtain some distinction? This leveling apotheosis is generally confined to the German Pantheists ; their more ambitious American brethren ascribe the contented humility which accepts it to the continual influence of the fumes of tobacco and lager beer. Man is the great deity of the other class. Renan boldly says : " For myself, I believe there is not in the universe an intelligence superior to that of man; the absolute of justice and reason manifests itself only in humanity; regarded apart from humanity that absolute exists only as an abstraction. The infinite exists only when it clothes itself in form."* And as the soul of man is, rather inconsistently for people who believe everything God, supposed to be superior to the rest of him, they go oflF into great rhapsodies of adoration of their own souls. " The doctrine of the soul — first sotd, and second soul, and evermore sour'f — is the doctrine which is to regenerate the world. God, in their view, is nothing till he attains self- consciousness in man. " The universal does not attract us till housed in the individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all *Cited in Pressense's Jest4s Christy His Life atid Times. Page 10. tEmerson. IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVEEYBODY GOD? 93 mere egotism vanishes. The currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am part or particle of God." "I stand here to say, ' Let us worship the mighty and trans- cendent soul.' " " God attains to self-consciousness only in the human soul." "Honor yourself." "Reverence your own individuality." "The soul of man is the highest intelli- gence in the universe." Such are the dogmas which, under the name of Philosophy, are poured forth oracularly, un- supported by reason or argument, by the prophets of the new dispensation — the last and highest achievement of the human intellect. It is very unfortunate, however, for the honor of the prophets of the nineteenth century, that this profound dis- covery was invented, and illustrated, patented, and peddled, by the Hindoos, among the people of India, two thousand years before the divinity Rad struggled into self conscious- ness in the mighty and transcendent souls of Schelling, Hegel, and Strauss, of Atkinson, Parker, or Emerson. We mean to show in this lecture, that it is an Antiquated^ ^i/p- ocrltlcal, Demoralizing Athnsm. 1. Pantheisin is an Antiquated Ilere&y. — It has rotted and putrefied among the worshipers of cats, and monkeys, and holy bulls, and bits of sticks and stones, on the banks of the Ganges, for more than two thousand years ; yet it is now hooked up out of its dunghill, and hawked about among Christian people, as a prime new discovery of modern phi- losophy for getting rid of Almighty God. As the Hindoo Shasters are undoubtedly the sources from which French, German, and American philosophers have borrowed their dog- mas, and as they have not had time to take the whole system, we shall edify the public by a view of this sublime theology as exhibited in the writings of the Pantheistic philosophers of India, as follows : " When existing in the temporary imperfect state of Sjgun^ Brahm (the Pantheist deity) wills to manifest the 94 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? universe. For this purpose he puts forth his omnipotent energy, which is variously styled in the diflferent systems now under review. He puts forth his energy for what? For the effecting of a creation out of nothing? 'No/ says one of the Shasters, but to '■produce from his own divine sub- stance a midtiform universe.^ By the spontaneous exertion of this energy he sends forth, from his own divin* substance, a countless host of essences, like innumerable sparks issuing from the blazing fire, or myriads of rays from the resplen- dent sun. These detached portions of Brahm — these sepa- rated divine essences — soon become individuated systems, destined, in time, to occupy different forms prepared for their reception ; whether these be fixed or movable, animate or inanimate, forms of gods or men, forms of animal, vege- table, or mineral existences. " Having been separated from Brahm in his imperfect state of Sac/un, they carry along with them a share of those prin- ciples, qualities, and attributes that characterize that state, though predominating in very different degrees and propor- tions; either according to their respective capacities, or the retributive awards of an eternal ordination. Among others it is specially noted, that as Brahm at that time had awak- ened into a consciousness of his own existence, there does inhere in each separated soul a notion, or a conviction, of its own distinct, independent, individual existence. Labor ing under this delusive notion, or conviction, the soul has lost the knowledge of its own proper nature — its divine or- igin, and ultimate destiny. It ignorantly regards itself as an inferior entity, instead of knowing itself to be what it truly is, a consubstantial, though it may be an infinitesi- mally minute portion of the great whole, a universal spirit. ''Each individual soul being thus a portion of Brahm, even as a spark is of fire, it is again and again declared that the relation between them is not that of master and servant, ruler and ruled, but that of whole and part ! The soul is IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? 95 pronounced to be eternal a parte ante; in itself it has had no beginning or birth, though its separate individuality originated in time. It is eternal a parte post; it will have no end — no death; though its separate individuality will terminate in time. Its manifestation in time is not a crea- tion ; it is an effluence from the eternal fount of spirit. Its disappearance from the stage of time is not an extinction of essence — a reduction to nonentity; it is only a refluence into its original source. As an emanation from the supreme, eternal spirit, it is from everlasting to everlasting. Neither can it be said to be of finite dimensions ; on the contrary, says the sacred oracle, ' being identified with the Supreme Brahm, it participates in his infinity.' "After having enumerated all the elementary principles, atoms, and qualities successively evolved from Brahm, one of the sacred writings states, that though each of these had distinct powers, yet they existed separate and disunited, without order or harmonious adaptation of parts ; that until they were duly combined together, it was impossible to pro- duce this universe, or animated beings ; and that therefore it was requisite to adopt other means than fortuitous chance for giving them an appropriate combination, and symmetri- cal arrangement. The Supreme, accordingly, produced an egg, in which the elementary principles might be deposited, and nurtured into maturity." "All the primary atoms, qualities, and principles — the seeds of future worlds— that had been evolved from the substance of Brahm, were now collected together, and deposited in the newly produced egg. And into it, along with them, entered the self-existent him- self, under the assumed form of Brahm ; and then he sat vivifying, expanding, and combining the elements, a whole year of the creation, or four thousand three hundred mil- lions of solar years ! During this amazing period, the won- drous egg floated like a bubble on the abyss of primeval waters, increasing in size, and blazing refulgent as a thousand 96 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? suns. At lengtli the Supreme, who dwelt therein, burst the shell of the stupendous egg, and issued forth under a new form, with a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, and a thou- sand arms. Along with him there issued forth another form, huge and measureless. What could that be? All the elementary principles having now been matured, and disposed into an endless variety of orderly collocations, and combined into one harmonious whole, they darted into visible mani- festation under the form of the present glorious universe ! A universe now finished, and ready made, with its entire apparatus, of earth, sun, moon, and stars. What, then, is this multiform universe ? It is but a harmoniously arranged expansion of primordial principles and qualities. And whence are these ? Educed or evolved from the divine sub- stance of Brahm. Hence it is that the universe is so con- stantly spoken of, even by mythologists, as a manifested form of Brahm himself, the supreme, invisible spirit. Hence, too, under the notion that it is the manifestation of a being who may assume every variety of corporeal form, is the uni- verse often personified, or described as if its different parts were only the different members of a person, of prodigious magnitude, in human form. It is declared that the hairs of his body are the trees of the forest; of his head, the clouds; of his beard, the lightning. His breath is the circling at- mosphere; his voice, the thunder; his eyes, the sun and moon ; his veins, the rivers ; his nails, the rocks ; his bones, the' lofty mountains !* ''The substantial fabrics of all worlds having now been framed and fitted up as the destined abodes of different or- ders of being, celestial, terrestrial, and infernal, the question next arises. How or by whom were produced the various or- ganized forms which these orders of being were designed to animate? Though hosts of subtle essences or souls flowed * Duff's India, pages 99-114. IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD? 97 forth from Brahm, all of these remain inactive till united to some form of materialism. From this necessity the gods themselves are not exempted. While the souls of men, and other inferior spirits, must be encased in tabernacles fash- ioned out of the grosser elements, the souls of the gods, and all other superior spirits, must be made to inhabit ma- terial forms, composed of one or other of the infinitely at- tenuated and invisible rudimental atoms that spring direct from the principle of consciousness. "Interminable as are the incoherencies, inconsistencies, and extravagancies of the Hindoo sacred writings, on no subject, perhaps, is the multiplicity of varying accounts and discrepancies more astonishing than on the present. Vol umes could not sufiice to retail them all. Brahma's first attempts at the production of the forms of animated beings were as eminently unsuccessful as they were various. At one time he is said to have performed a long and severe course of ascetic devotions, to enable him to accomplish his wish; but in vain; at another, inflamed by anger and pas- sion at his repeated failures, he sat down and wept; and from the streaming tear drops sprang into being, as his first boon, a progeny of ghosts and goblins, of an aspect so loath- some and dreadful, that he was ready to faint away. At one time, after profound meditation, different beings spring forth : one from his thumb, another from his breath, a third from his ear, a fourth from his side. But enough of such monstrous legends."* There now, reader, you have the original of the Develop- ment Theory, with Vestiges of Creation enough to make half a dozen new infidel cosmogonies, besides the genuine original of Pantheism, from its native soil. Our western Pantheists will doubtless reverence their venerable progeni- tors; and, should the remainder of the family find their *Dufi's India, page 119. 98 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? way here in a year or two, via Germany, the public will be better prepared to give a fitting reception to such distin- guished visitors, including their suite of divine bulls and holy monkeys, their lustrations of cow dung, ecstatic hook swingings, burning of widows, and drowning of children, and other Pantheistic Philosophies, from the banks of the Ganges. What an outrage of decency for such men to call themselves philosophers and Christians ! The relationship of American Pantheism with that of India is unblushingly acknowledged by the recent Pantheis- tic writers: "When ancient sages came to believe in the absolute goodness, justice, love, and wisdom of the deity, or providence, they fell into that peace which needed noth- ing, feared nothing, and therefore worshiped nothing. Noth- ing to blame, nothing to praise ; the perfect whole became one great divinity. It was so in Magadha and Benares ; it is so in Concord and Boston."* 2. Pantheism is a System of Deception and Hypocrisy. — Has any man a right to pervert the English language, by fixing new meanings to words, entirely different from and contrary to those in common use? If he knows the mean- ing of the words he uses, and uses them to convey a con- trary meaning, he is a deceiver. The name God, used as a proper name, in the English tongue, means "the Supreme Being; Jehovah; the Eternal and Infinite Spirit, the Crea- tor and Sovereign of the Universe. "f If, then, a man says he believes in God, but when forced to explain what he means by that name, says he means steam, heat, electricity, galvanism, magnetism, mesmeric force, odyle, animal life, the soul of man, or the sum of all the intelligences in the universe, he is a deceiver, and vain talker, abusing language to conceal his impiety. Pantheism is simply Jesuitical *Man'8 Origin and Destiny, 293. tWebstcr's Dictionary. IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? 99 Atheism. Willing to dethrone Jehovah, but unable and unwilling to place any other being in his stead, as Creator and Ruler of the universe, yet conscious that mankind will never embrace open Atheism, Pantheists profess to believe in God, only that they may steal his name to cloak their Atheism. We, in common with all who believe in God, demand, that, as their divinity is, by their own confession, essentially different from God, they shall use a different word to describe it. Let them call it Brahm, as their breth- ren in India do, or any other name not appropriated to any existing being in heaven or earth, or under the earth; and let them cease to profane religion, and insult common sense, by affixing the holy name of the Supreme to their thousand- headed monster. But the very perfection of Jesuitism is reached, when Pantheists profess their high respect for the Christian relig- ion. They do not generally speak of it as a superstition, though some of the vulgar sort do ; nor do they decry its mysteries, as Deists are in the habit of doing; nor, as So- cinians, and Unitarians, and Rationalists, do they attempt to reduce it to a mere code of morals. They grant it to be the highest development of humanity yet reached by the majority of the human race. The brute, the savage, the polytheistic idolater, the star worshiper, the monotheist, the Christian, are all, in their scheme, so many successive developments of humanity in its upward progress. There is only one step higher than Christianity, and that is Pan- theism. Well knowing that Christianity is diametrically opposed to their falsehoods, and that the Bible, everywhere, teaches that the natural progress of man has ever been down from a state of holiness to idolatry and barbarism, they have yet the hardihood to profess respect for it, as a system of concealed Pantheism, and to clothe their abominations in Scripture language. They speak, for instance, of the "beauty of holiness in the mind, that has surmounted 100 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? every idea of a personal God;" and of "God dwelling in us, and his love perfected in us," when they believe that he dwells as really in every creature : in that hog, for instance. Then they will readily acknowledge that the Bible is in- spired. They can arce/)<— that is the phrase — they can ac- cept the Book which denounces death upon those fools who, "professing themselves to be wise, change the truth of God into a lie, and worship and serve the creature more than the Creator," as merely a mystic revelation of the Pantheism which leaves man to " erect everything into a God, provided it is none: sun, moon, stars, a cat, a monkey, an onion, un- couth idols, sculptured marble; nay, a shapeless trunk, which the devout impatience of the idolater does not stay to fashion into the likeness of a man, but gives its apotheo- sis at once." Oh, yes; they accept the Bible as inspired — a God inspired Book— inasmuch as every product of the human mind is a development of Deity. The Bible, then, when we have the matter fully explained, is quite on a level with Gulliver's Travels, or Emerson's Address to a Senior Class of Divinity. There is nothing, however, in this vast system of mon- strosities, which fills the soul of a Christian with such loath- ing and detestation, as to hear Pantheists profess their ven- eration for the Lord Jesus, and claim him as a teacher of Pantheism. If there is one object which they detest with all their hearts, it is the Judge of the quick and dead, and the vengeance which he shall take upon them that know not God, and obey not the gospel. Any allusion to the judg- ment seat of Christ fills them with fury, and causes them to pour forth awful blasphemies. They know that the Lord Jesus repeatedly declared himself the Judge of the living and the dead — that "the hour is coming in which all that are in their graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth : they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damna- IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD? 101 tion;" and that the very last sentence of his public dis- courses is, "And these " ^ the wicked) " shall go away into ever- lasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal." When they drop the mask for a moment, they can accuse apostles and disciples with " dwelling with noxious exagger- ation about the person of Christ. "-i^ Christ, as revealed in the gospel, they hate with a perfect hatred. But when it becomes necessary to address Christians, and beguile them into the deceitfulness of Pantheism, the tune is changed. Christ becomes the model man — ''one conceived in "condi- tions favorable to the highest perfectibility of the individual consciousness; and so possessed of powers of generalization far in advance of the age in which he lived. They can listen to and honor one of the best expounders of God and nature in the Man of Nazareth. "f The vilest falsehoods of Pantheism are ascribed to Jesus, that those who, ignorant of his doctrine, yet respect his name, may be seduced to receive them. Of him who declared, " Out of the heart of man proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, thefts, false witness, blasphemies," they have the hardihood to declare, " He saw with open eyes the mystery of the soul ; alone, in all history, he estimated the greatness of man." Calculat- ing upon that ignorance of the teaching of Christ which is so general among^ their audiences, they dare to represent the only begotten Son of God as teaching Pantheism: "One man was true to what is in you and me ; he saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possessson of his world. He said in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am divine. Through me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me ; or see thee when thou also thinkest as I now think.' Because the ♦Emerson's Address to a Senior Class in Divinity. tHennell's Christian Theism, which shows how Theists of every nation — Christian, Jew, Mohammedan, or Chinese— can meet upon common ground. 102 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? indwelling Supreme Spirit can not wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury." Yes, truly, the divine nature is emphatically denied to all unregcnerated men, and denied, too, by that divine teacher thus eulogized. Hear him: "Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him. We be not born of fornication ; we have one Father, even God. Jesus said unto them. If God were your Father, ye would love me ; for I proceeded forth and came from God ; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not under- stand my speech? Even because ye can not hear my word. Ye are of your father, the devil ; and the works of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh it of his own; for he is a liar, and the father of it." Let Pantheists, then, cease to wind their serpent coils around Christianity, and to defile the Bible with their filthy lickings. The Lord Jesus will not suffer such persons to bear even a true testimony to him, and his followers will not permit them to ascribe their falsehoods to him, without re- proof. Let them stand out and avow themselves the ene- mies of Christ and his gospel, as they are, and cease their abominable pretenses of giving to the world the ultimate development of Christianity. What concord hath Christ with Belial? 3. Pantheism is a System of Immorality. — It loosens all the sanctions of moral law. If there is anything upon which all Pantheists are agreed, it is in the denial of the resur- rection, the judgment, and the future punishment of the wicked. Their whole system, in all its range, from Spirit- ualism to Phrenology, is expressly invented to get rid of God's moral government. If man is the highest intelli- gence in the universe, to whom should he render an account IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? 103 of his conduct? Or who would have any right to call him to account? Then, if we are developments of deity, deity can not offend against itself. Further, if our development, both of body and mind, be the inevitable result of the laws of nature — of our organization and our position — man is but the creature of circumstances, and, therefore, as is abundantly argued, can not be made responsible for laws and their results, over which he has no control. " I am what I am. I can not alter my will, or be other than what I am, and can not deserve either reward or punishment."'^ Before hundreds of the citizens of Cincinnati, a lecturer publicly denied the riorht of either God or man to invade his indi- o viduality, by taking vengeance upon him for any crime whatever. Thousands, who are not yet Pantheists, are §o far infected with the poison that they utterly deny any right of vindictive punishment to God or man. But this is not all. Again and again have we listened with astonishment to men, declaring that there was no moral law — no standard of right and wrong, but the will of the community. Of course it was quite natural, after such a declaration, to assert that a wife who should remain with a husband of inferior intellectuality, or unsuitable emotions, was committing adultery; that private property is a legal- ized robbery; and that when a citizen becomes mentally or physically unfit for the business of life, he confers the high- est obligation on society, and performs the highest duty to himself, by committing suicide, and thus returning to the great ocean of being ! We might think that confusion of right and wrong could not be worse confounded than this; yet there is a blacker darkness still. The distinction between good and evil is ah- solutely denied. The Hindoo Pantheists declare that they can not sin, because they are God, and God can not offend ♦Atkinson's Letters, page 190. 104 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? against himself; there is no sin — it is all maya — delusion. So the American and English school tells us it lives only in the obsolete theology. Evil, we are told, " is good in an- other way we are not skilled in."* So says the author of "Representative Men." " Evil," according to old philoso- phers, " is good in the making ; that pure malignity can ex- ist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent. It is Atheism ; it is the last profanation." " The divine effort is never relaxed ; the carrion in the sun will convert itself into grass and flow- ers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true."t Emerson, in a lecture in Cincinnati, is reported by the editor of The Central Herald^ as saying in his hearing: " To say that the majority of men are wicked, is only to say that they are young." "Everyman is indebted to his vices — • virtues grow out of them as a thrifty and fruitful plant grows out of manure." "There is hope even for the rep- robate, and the ruffian, in the fullness of time." If these were only the ravings of lunatics, or the dream- ings of philosophers, we should never have hunted them from their hiding-places to scare your visions; but these doctrines are weekly propounded in your own city, and throughout our land, from platform and press, to thousands of your children and their school-teachers, of your work, men and your lawgivers, to your wives and daughters. Again and again have our ears' been confounded in the squares of New York, and the streets of Philadelphia, and the market- places of Cincinnati, by the boisterous cry. What is sinf There is no sin. It is all an old story. Let men who fear no God, but who have lives, and wives, and property to lose, look to it, and say if they act wisely in giving their influ- ence to a system which lands in such consequences. Let * Festus, page 48. t Swedenborg, or the Mystic (quoted by Pierson, 41), p. 68. IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD? 105 tliera devise some religion for the people whicli will preserve the rights of man, while giving license to trample upon the rights of God ; or, failing in the effort, let them acknowledge that the enemy of God is, and of necessity must be, the foe of all that constitutes the happiness of man. Impiety and immorality are wedded in heaven's decree, and man can not sunder them. 4. Pantheism is Virtually Atheism. — It may scarce seem needful to multiply proofs on this head. How can any one imagine a being composed of the sum of all the intelligences of the universe? Such a thing, or combination of things, never was distinctly conceived of by any intelligent being. Can intelligences be compounded, or like bricks and mortar, piled upon each other? If they could, did these finite in- telligences create themselves? If the soul of man is the highest intelligence in the universe, did the soul of man* create, or does the soul of man govern it? Shall we adore his soul? Some Pantheists have got just to this length. M. Comte declares, that "At this present time, for minds prop- erly familiarized with true astronomical philosophy, the heavens display no other glory than that of Hipparchus, or Kepler, or Newton, and of all who have helped to establish these laws." Establish these laws! Laws by which the heavenly bodies were guided thousands of years before Kep- ler or Newton were born. Shall we then adore the souls of Kepler and Newton? M. Comte has invented a religion, which he is much displeased that the admirers of his Posi- tive Philosophy will not accept, in which the children are to be taught to worship idols, the youth to believe in one God, if they can, after such a training in infancy, and the full-grown men are to adore a Grand Etre, "the continuous resultant of all the forces capable of voluntarily concurring in the universal perfectioning of the world, not forgetting our worthy auxiliaries, the animals^^*^ Our Anglo-Saxon Pan- * Politique Positive, Vol. II. page 60. 108 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD? theists, however, are not quite philosophical enough yet to adore the mules and oxen, and therefore refuse worship al- together. " Work is worship," constitutes their liturgy. "As soon as the man is as one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action."* "Labor wide as earth has its summit in heaven. Sweat of the brow, and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart ; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all sciences, all spoken epics, all acted heroisms, martyrdoms, up to that agony of bloody sweat, which all men have ac- counted divine ! Oh, brother, if this is not worship, then I say, the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky." "No man has worked, or can work, except religiously. "f "Adieu, Church! Thy road is that way, mine is this. In God's name, adieu! "J Such is the theory. How faithfully acted out, you can learn from the thousands who are now, publicly, upon God's holy Sabbath, working religiously upon the bridge that is to span the river, or less ostentatiously in their shops and work- rooms throughout the city. Within a circle of three miles' radius of the spot you now occupy, one hundred thousand intelligent beings in this Christian city worship no God. The abstraction, which the Pantheist calls God, is no ob- ject of worship. It is not to be loved. If it does good, it could not help it, and did not intend it. It is not to be thanked for benefits. It, the sum of all the intelligence of the universe, can not be collected from the seven spheres to receive any such acknowledgment. It can not deviate from its fated course of proceeding ; therefore, says the Pantheist, why should I pray? It neither sees his conduct, nor cares for it; and he denies any right to call him to account. It did not create him, does not govern him, will not judge him, * Emerson, t Carlyle— Past and Present. J Carlyle-Life of Sterling. IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD? 107 can not punish him. It is no object of love, fear, worship, or obedience. It is no god. He is an Atheist. He believes not in any Grod. Hear, O Israel! the Lord our God is one Lord. He is distinct from, and supreme over all his works. He now rules, and will hereafter judge-all intelligent creatures, and will render to every one according to his works. 1. Reason declares it. The world did not make itself. The soul of man did not make itself The body of man did not make itself They must have had an intelligent Crea- tor, who is God. God is known by his works to be distinct from them, and superior to them. The work is not the workman. The house is not the builder. The watch is not the watchmaker. The sum of all the works of any worker is not the agent who produced them. Let an architect s^end his life in building a city, yet the city is not the builder. The maker is always distinct from, and superior to, the thing made. You and I, and the universe, are made. Our Maker, then, is distinct from, and superior to us. One plan gives order to the universe ; therefore, one mind orig- inated it. The Creator is over all his creatures. 2. Our consciousness confirms it. If a blind god could not make a seeing man, a god destitute of the principle of self-consciousness (if such an abuse of language may be tolerated for a moment) could not impart to man the con- viction, / am — the ineradicable belief that I am not the world, nor any other person; much less, everybody; but that I am a person, possessed of powers of knowing, think- ing, liking and disliking, judging, approving of right, and disapproving of wrong, and choosing and willing my con- duct. My Maker has at least as much common sense as he has given me. He that teacheth man knowledge, shalfhe not know? 3. Our ignorance and weakness demand a Governor of the world wiser than ourselves. The soul of man is not the high- 108 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD ? est intelligence in the universe. It can not know tlie mode of its own operation on the body it inhabits, much less the plan of the world's management. Man may know much about what does not concern him, and about things over which he has no control; but it is the will of God that his pride should feel the curb of ignorance and impotence where his dearest interests are concerned, that so he may be com- pelled to acknowledge that Grod is greater than man. He may be able to tell the place of the distant planets a thou- sand years hence, but he can not tell where himself shall be next year. He can calculate for years to come the mo- tions of the tides, which he can not control, but can not tell how his own pulse shall beat, or whether it shall beat at all, to-morrow. Ever as his knowledge of the laws by which Grod governs the world increases, his conviction of his im- potence grows ; and he sees and feels that a wiser head and stronger hand than that of any creature, planned and ad- ministered them. Ever as he reaches some ultimate truth, such as the mystery of electricity, of light, of life, of grav- itation, which he can not explain, and beyond which he can not penetrate, he hears the voice of Grod therein, demand- ing him to acknowledge his impotence. "Where is the way where light dwelleth, "And as for darkness, what is the place thereof? " Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, "Or loose the bands of Orion? "Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his seasons? "Or canst thou guide Arcturus, with his sons? "Knowest thou the .ordinances of heaven? "Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? a Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, "That abundance of waters may cover thee? " Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go "And say unto thee, * Here we are ? ' " IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD? 109 4. Our consciences convince us that God is a Moral Gov- ernor. The distinction between brutes ^ndmen is, that man has a sense of the distinction between right and wrong. If we find a tribe of savages, or individuals who indulge their appetites without rule, and who do wrong without any ap- parent remorse or shame, we designate them brutes. Even those who in words deny any difference between right and wrong, do in fact admit its existence, by their attempts to justify that opinion. Though weaker, or less regarded in some than, in others, every man is conscious of a faculty in himself which sits in judgment on his own conduct, and that of others, approving or condemning it as right or wrong. In all lands, and in all ages, the common sense of mankind has acknowledged the existence and moral author- ity of conscience, as distinct from and superior to mere in- tellect. No language of man is destitute of words convey- ing the ideas of virtue and vice, of goodness and wickedness. When one attempts to deceive you by a willful lie, you are sensible not only of an intellectual process of reason detect- ing the error, but of a distinct judgment of disapprobation of the crime. When one who has received kindness from a benefactor, neglects to make any acknowledgment of it, cherishes no feelings of gratitude, and insults and abuses the friend who succored him, we are conscious, not merely of the facts, as phenomena to be observed, but of the ingratitude, as a crime to be detested. And we are irresistibly constrained to believe that he who taught us this knowledge of a differ- ence between right and wrong, does himself know such a distinction ; and that he who implanted this feeling of ap- proval of right, and condemnation of wrong, in us, does him- self approve the right, and condemn the wrong. And as we can form no notion of right or wrong unconnected with the idea that approbation of right conduct should be suit- ably expressed, and that disapprobation of wrong conduct ought also to be suitably expressed —in other words, that 110 IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD? right ought to be rewarded, and wrong ought to be punished — so we are constrained to trace such a connection from our minds to the mind of him who framed them. This convic- tion is God's law, written in our hearts. When we do wrong, we become conscious of a feeling of remorse in our consciences, as truly as the eye becomes conscious of the darkness. We may blind the eye, and we may sear the con- science, that the one shall not see, nor the other feel ; but light and darkness, right and wrong, will exist. The awful fact which conscience reveals to us, that we sin against God, that we know the right, and do the wrong, and are conscious of it, and of God's disapprobation of it, is conclusive proof that we are not only distinct from God, but separate from him — that we oppose our wills against his. And every pang of remorse is a premonition of God's judgment, and every sorrow and suffering which the Governor of the world has connected with sin— as the drunkard's loss of character and property, of peace and happiness, the frenzy of his soul, and the destruction of his body — is a type and teaching of the curse which he has denounced against sin. 5. The World's History is the record of marts crimes, and God's punishments. Once God swept the human race from earth with a flood of water, because the wickedness of man was great on the earth. Again, he testified his displeasure against the ungodly sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, by consuming their cities with fire from heaven, and leaving the Dead Sea to roll its solemn waves of warning to all ungodly sinners, to the end of time. By the ordinary course of his providence, he has ever se- cured the destruction of ungodly nations. No learning, commerce, arms, territories, or skill, has ever secured a re- bellious nation against the sword of God's justice. Ask the black record of a rebel world's history for an instance. Egypt, Canaan, Nineveh, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Borne. Where are they now? Tyre had ships, colonies?, and com- IS GOD EVERYBODY, AND EVERYBODY GOD? Ill » merce; Rome an empire on wliicli tlie sun never set; Greece had philosophy, arts, and liberty secured by a confederation of republics; Spain the treasures of earth's gold and silver, and the possession of half the globe. Did these secure them against the moral government of God? No ! God's law sways the universe ; that law which, with the brazen fetters of eternal justice, binds together sin and misery, crime and punishment, and lays the burden on the backs of all ungodly nations, irresistibly forcing them down — down — down the road to ruin. The vain imagination that refuses to glorify God as God, leads to darkness of heart, thence to Atheism, thence to gross idolatry, onward to sel- fish gratification, violent rapacity, lust of conquest, and lux- ury, licentiousness, and efl'eminacy begotten of its spoils; then military tyranny, civil war, servile revolt, anarchy, famine and pestilence, and the sword of less debauched neighbors, Christ's iron scepter, hurl them down from the pinnacle of greatness, to dash them in pieces against each other, in the valley of destruction; and there they lie, wrecks of nations, ruins of empires, naught remaining, save some shivered potsherds of former greatness, to show that once they were, and were the enemies of God. Oh, America, take warning ere it be too late ! God rules the nations. " He that chastiseth the heathen, shall he not correct you?" A day of retribution, reader, comes to you, as an individ- ual. Neither your insignificance nor your unbelief can hide you from his eye, nor can your puny arm shield you from his righteous judgment. His hand shall find out his ene- mies. Oh, fly from the wrath to come! "Seek the Lord while he may be found." He is not far from every one of us. His breath is in our nostrils. His "Word is in our hands. "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved." CHAPTER IV Wave We Any Need of the Bible? Religion consists of the knowledge of a number of great facts, and of a course of life suitable to them. We have seen three of these : that God created the world ; that he governs it ; and that he is able to conquer his enemies. There are others of the same sort as needful to be known. Our knowledge of these facts, or our ignorance of them, makes not the slightest difference in the facts themselves. God is, and heaven is, and hell is, and sin leads to it, whether anybody believes these things or not. It makes no sort of difierence in the beetling cliff and swollen flood that sweeps below it, that the drunken man declares there is no danger, and, refusing the proffered lantern, gallops on toward it in the darkness of the night. But when the mangled corpse is washed ashore, every one sees how foolish this man was, to be so confident in his ignorance as to refuse the lantern, which would have shown him his danger, and guided him to the bridge where he might have crossed in safety. Some of the facts of religion lie at the evening end of life's journey; the darkness of death's night hides them from mortal eye ; and living men might guide their steps the better by asking counsel of one who knows the way. If they get along no better by their own counsel in the next world than most of them do in this, they will have small cause to bless their teacher. Who can tell that ignorance, and wickedness, and wretchedness are not as tightly tied together in the world to come, as we see them here ? (112) HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? 113 Solomon was a knowing man and wise ; and better than that, in the esteem of most people, he made money, and tells you how to make it, and keep it. You will make a hundred dollars by reading his Proverbs and acting on them. They would have saved some of you many a thousand. Of course such a man knew something of the world. He was a wide-awake trader. His ships coasted the shores of Asia, and Africa, from Madagascar to Japan ; and the overland mail caravans from India and China drew up in the depots he built for them in the heart of the desert. He knew the well-doing people with whom trade was profitable, and the savages who could only send apes and peacocks. He was a philosopher as well as a trader, and could not help being deeply impressed with the great fact^ that there was a wide difference among the nations of the world. Some were en- lightened, enterprising, civilized, and flourishing; others were naked savages, living in ignorance, poverty, vice, and starvation, perpetually murdering one another, and dying out of the earth. Solomon noticed another great fact. In his own country, and in Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and some others, God had revealed his will to certain persons for the benefit of their neighbors. He did so generally by opening the eyes of these prophets to see future events, and the great facts of the unseen world, and by giving them messages of warn- ing and instruction to the nations. From this mode of rev- elation, by opening the prophets' eyes to see realities invisi- ble to others, they were called seers, and the revelations they were commissioned to make were called visions ; and revelation from God was called, in general, vision. Solomon was struck with the fact that some nations were thus favored by God, and other nations were not. The question would naturally arise, What difference does it make, or does it make any difference, whether men have any revelation of God's will or not? 8 114 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? Solomon was led to observe a third great fact. The na- tions which were favored with these revelations were the civilized, enterprising, and comparatively prosperous nations. In proportion to the amount of divine revelation they had, and their obedience to it, they prospered. The nations that had no revelation from God were the idolatrous savages, who were sinking down to the level of brutes, and perishing off the face of the earth. He daguerreotypes these three great facts in the proverb : " Where there is no vision the people perish ; but he that keepeth the law, happy is he." Oh, says the Rationalist, the world is wiser now than it was in Solomon's days. He lived in the old mythological period, when men attributed everything extraordinary to the gods. But the world is too wise now to believe in any supernatural revelation. " The Hebrew and Christian religions like all others have their myths." " The fact is, the pure historic idea was never developed among the Hebrews during the whole of their political existence." " When, therefore, we meet with an account of certain phenomena, or events of which it is expressly stated or implied that they were pro- duced immediately by God himself (such as divine appari- tions, voices from heaven, and the like), or by human beings possessed of supernatural powers (miracles, pcophecies, etc.), such an account is so far to be considered not historical." " Indeed, no just notion of the true nature of history is pos- sible without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles."* A narrative is to be deemed mythical, 1st. " When it proceeds from an age in which there were no written records, but events were transmitted by tradition ; 2d. When it presents, as historical, accounts of events which were beyond the reach of experience, as occurrences connected with the spir- itual world ; or 3d. When it deals in the marvelous, and is ♦Strauss' Life of Jesus, 64, 74, 87. HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? 115 couclied in symbolical language."* So also a host of others, who pass for biblical expositors, lay it down as an axiom, that all records of supernatural events are mythical, viz : fables, falsehoods, because miracles are impossible. Of course, from such premises the conclusion is easy. A reve- lation from God to man is a supernatural event, and super- natural events are impossible ; therefore, a revelation from God is impossible. But it would have been much easier, and quite as logical, to have laid down the axiom in plain words at first, that a revelation from God is impossible, as to argue it from such premises ; for it is just as easy to say, that a revelation from God is impossible, as to say that mira- cles are impossible ; and as for proof of either one or the other, we must just take their word for it. One can not help being amazed at the cool impudence with which these men take for granted the very point to be proved, and set aside, as unworthy of serious examination, the most authentic records of history, simply because they do not coincide with their so-called philosophy ; and at the credulity with which their followers swallow this arrogant dogmatism, as if it were self-evident truth. Let us look at it for a moment. Other religions have their myths, or fables, therefore, the Hebrew and Christian records are fables, says the Rationalist. Profundity of logic ! Counter- feit bank bills are common, therefore none are genuine. " The fact is, the pure historic idea was never developed among the Hebrews," i. e., Moses and the prophets were all liars. That is the fact, you may take my word for it. " In- deed, no just notion of the true nature of history is possible without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles" — which translated into plain words is simply this : No man can un- derstand history who believes in God Almighty. " A narra- *Bauer's Hebrew Mythology. 116 HAVE WE ANY NEED OP THE BIBLE? tive is to be deemed fabulous when it proceeds from an age in which there were no written records," such, for instance, as any account of the creation of the first man — for no event could possibly happen unless there was a scribe there to write it. Or, of the fall of man — we do not know that Adam was able to write, and no man can tell truth unless he writes a history. '' A narrative is to be deemed fabulous when it presents, as historical, accounts of events which were beyond the reach of experience, as events connected with the spiritual world." Is it not self-evident that you and I have had experience of everything in the whole universe, and whoever tells us anything which we have never seen is a liar. " When a narrative deals in the marvelous," such as Xenophon's Retreat of the Ten Thousand, Herodotus' His- tory, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, dealing as it does in such marvelous accounts as the death of half the inhabitants of the empire in the reign of Gale- rius, or any other history of wonderful occurrence — it is of course a myth. Does not is very one know that nothing mar- velous ever happened, or, if it did, would any historian trouble himself to record a prodigy ? " Or, if it is couched in symbolical language," as is every eloquent passage in Thu- cydides, Robertson, Gibbon, or Guizot, the records of China, and of India, the picture-writing of the Peruvians, and es- pecially the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were fondly ex- pected to do such good service against the Bible — it must be at once rejected, without further examination, as mytho- logical and unworthy of any credit whatever. Thus we are conclusively rid forever of the Bible, for sure enough it is couched in symbolical language. Blessed deliverance to the world ! But then, alas ! this great deliverance is accom- panied with several little inconveniences. All poetry, three- fourths of the world's history, and the largest part of its philosophy, is couched in symbolical language, and especially the whole of the science of metaphysics, from which these HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? 117 very learned writers have deduced sucli edifying conclusions, is, from the beginning to the end, nothing but a symbolical application of the terms which describe material objects, to the phenomena of mind. Alas ! we must forever relinquish "the absolute," and "the infinite," and "the conditioned," with all their " affinities and potencies," up to " higher uni- ty," and " the rhythm of universal existence," and all the rest of those perspicuous German hieroglyphics, whether en- tombed in their native pyramids for the amazement of suc- ceeding generations, by Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, or " worshiping in the great cathedral of the immensities," "with their heads uplifted into infinite space," or "lying on the plane of their own consciousness," in the writings of Carlyle, Emerson, and Parker. They are myths, the whole of them, for they " are couched in symbolical language ;" and Bauer, De Wette, and Strauss have pronounced every thing couched in symbolical language to be mythical. Let us henceforth deliver our minds from all anxiety about his- tory, philosophy, or religion, and stick to the price current and the multiplication table, the only accounts that are not "couched in symbolical language." Such is the sort of trash that passes for profound philoso- phy when once it is made unintelligible, and such are the canons of interpretation with which men calling themselves philosophers and Christians sit down to investigate the claims of the Bible as a revelation from God. If they would speak out their true sentiments, they would say, " There can not be any revelation from God, because there is no God." But they could not call themselves professors of Christian colleges, and pastors of Christian churches, and reap the emoluments of such situations, if they would hon- estly avow their Atheism. Besides, the world would see too plainly the drift of their teaching ; therefore it is cloaked under a profession of belief in God, the Creator, who how- 118 HAVE WE ANY NEED OP THE BIBLE ? ever is to be carefully prevented from ever showing himself again in the world he has made. No proof is attempted for the declaration that miracles are impossible. Yet, surely, if it implies a contradiction to say so, that contradiction could be shown. That it is not self-evident is shown by the general belief of mankind that miracles have occurred. No man who believes in a supernat- ural being can deny the possibility of supernatural actings. The creation of the world is the most stupendous of all mir- acles, utterly beyond the power of any finite causes, and entirely beyond the reach of our experience, yet some of these men admit that this miracle occurred. Supernatural events then are not impossible, nor unprecedented. The vain notion that God, having created the world at first, left it for ever after to the operation of natural laws, is conclusively demolished by the discoveries of geol- ogy. These discoveries established the fact recorded in Scripture, that in bringing the world into its present form there were several distinct and successive interpositions of supernatural power, in the distinct and successive creations of diiTerent species of vegetable and animal life. In former periods, they tell us, the earth was so warm that the present races of men and animals could not have lived on it, and the plants and animals of that age could not live now. These very men are profuse in proving that the earth ex- isted for ages before man made his appearance upon it. This being the case, we are compelled to acknowledge the crea- ting power of God above the laws of nature, for there is no law of nature which can either create a new species oi plants or animals, nor yet change one kind into another, make an oak into a larch, or an ox into a sheep, or a goose into a turkey, or a megatherium into an elephant, much less into a man. Some men have dreamed of such changes as these, but no instance of such a change has ever been al- leged in proof of the notion. The most distinguished anat- HAVE WE ANY NEED OP THE BIBLE? 119 omists and geologists are fully agreed that no such change of one animal into another ever took place ; much less that any animal ever was changed into a man. Cuvier, from his comprehensive survey of the fossils of former periods, es- tablishes the fast, " that the species now living are not mere varieties of the species which are lost." And Agassiz says, " I have the conviction that species have been created suc- cessively, at distinct intervals."^ Revelations of God's special interpositions in the affairs of this world are thus written by his own finger in the fossils and coal, and en- graved on the everlasting granite of the earth's foundation stones. Dumb beasts and dead reptiles start forward to give their irrefutable testimony to the repeated supernatural acts of their Creator in this world which he had made. Every distinct species of plants and animals is proof of a distinct supernatural overruling of the present laws of na- ture. The experience of man is not the limit of knowledge. His own existence is a proof that the chain of finite causes is not inviolable. Creology sweeps away the very foundations of skepticism, by demonstrating that certain phenomena produced immediately by God himself — the phenomena of the creation of life —have occurred repeatedly in the history of our globe. Revelation is not impossible because super- natural. The world is just as full of supernatural works as of natural. Nor is it incredible because it records miracles. The miracles recorded in the coal measures are as astonish- ing as any recorded in the Bible. The Rationalist next assures us, however, that any ex- ternal revelation from God to man is useless, because man is wise enough without it. The vulgar exposition of this sen- timent is familiar to every reader, " You need not begin to preach Bible to me. I know my duty well enough with- out the Bible." The more educated attempt to reason the * See Pearson on Infidelity, page 93, 40th edition ; and Agassiz's Penikese Lectures. 120 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? matter after this fashion : " Miraculous phenomena will never prove the goodness and veracity of God, if we do not know these qualities in him without a miracle."* We may remark, in passing, that there are some other attributes of God besides goodness and veracity — holiness and justice for instance — which are proved by miracles. ''Can thunder from the thirty-two azimuths, repeated daily for centuries, make God's laws more godlike to me ? Brother, no. Per- haps I am grown to be a man now, and do not need the thunder and the terror any longer. Perhaps I am above being frightened. Perhaps it is not fear but reverence that shall now lead me ! Revelation ! Inspirations ! And thy own god-created soul, dost thou not call that a revelation ?"f It is nmnifest, however, that if Mr. Carlyle needs not the Sinai thunder to assure him that the law given on Sinai was from God, there were then, and are now, many who do, and some of his own sect who doubt in spite of it. If he is above the weakness of fearing God, all the world is not so. The claims of a divine teacher are as unceremoniously re- jected as those of a divine revelation. " If it depends on Jesus it is not eternally true, and if it is not eternally true it is no truth at all," says Parker. As if eternally true, and sufficiently known, were just the same thing; or as if be- cause vaccination would always have prevented the small- pox, the world is under no obligation to Jenner for inform- ing us of the fact. In the same tone Emerson despises instruction : " It is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing." Again says Parker, " Christianity is dependent on no outside au- ♦Newman's Phases of Faith, 157. tCarlyle's Past and Present, 807. HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? 121 thority. We verify its eternal truth in our soul."* His aim is " to separate religion from whatever is finite — Church, book, person— and let it rest on its absolute truth."f "It bows to no idols, neither the Church, nor the Bible, nor yet Jesus, but God only; its Redeemer is within; its salvation within; its heaven and its oracle of God. "J The whole strain of this school of writers and their disciples is one of depreciation of external revelation, and of exaltation of the inner light which every man is supposed to carry within him. Eeligion is "no Morrison's pill from without," but a "clearing of the inner light," a "reawakening of our own selves from within. "§ So Mr. Newman || abundantly argues that an authoritative book revelation of moral and spiritual truth is impossible, that God reveals himself within us and not without us, and that a revelation of all moral and relig- ious truth necessary for us to know is to be obtained by in- sight, or gazing into the depths of our own consciousness. The sum of the whole business is, that neither God nor man can reveal any religious truth to our minds, or as Parker fe- licitously expresses it, "on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing." Now, we are tempted to ask. Who are these wonderful prodigies, so incapable of receiving instruction from any- body? And to our amazement we learn, that some forty odd years ago they made their appearance among mankind as little squalling babies, without insight enough to. know their own names, or where they came from, and were actually dependent on an external revelation, from their nurses, for sense enough to find their mothers' breasts. And as they grew a little larger, they obtained the power of speaking articulate sounds by external revelation, hearing and imita- ting the sounds made by others. Further, upon a memorable * Discourse on Religion, p. 209. t Carlyle's Past and Present, p. 312. tib. p. 37. § The Soul, p. 342. jj lb. p. 359. 122 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? day, they had a "book revelation" made to them, in the shape of a penny primer, and were initiated into the mys- teries of A, B, C, by "the instructions of another, be he who he may." There was absolutely not the least " insight," or " spiritual faculty," or " self-consciousness " in one of them, by which they then could, or ever to this hour did, "find true within them " any sort of necessary connection between the signs, c, a, t— d, o, g — and the sounds cat^ dog, or any other sounds represented by any other letters of the alpha- bet. Faith in the word of their teachers is absolutely the sole foundation and only source of their ability to read and write. On "the word of another, and as his second, be he who he may," every one of them has accepted every intel- ligible word he speaks or writes. There h living on Martha's Vineyard an old man who has never been oflf the island, and the extent of his knowledge is bounded by the confines of his home. He has been told of a war between the North and South, but as he had never heard the din of battle, nor seen any soldiers, he considered it a hoax. He is utterly unable to read, and is ignorant to the last degree. A good story is told of his first and only day at school. He was quite a lad when a lady came to the district, where his father lived, to teach school. He was sent, and as the teacher was classifying the school, he was called upon in turn and interrogated as to his studies. Of course he had to say he had never been to school, and knew none of his letters. The schoolmistress gave him a seat on one side until she had finished the preliminary examination of the rest of the scholars. She then called him to her and drew on the blackboard the letter A, and told him what it was, and asked him to remember how it looked. He looked at it a moment, and then inquired : " H-h-how do you know it's A?" The teacher replied that when she was a little girl she had been to school to au old gentleman, who told her so. HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? 123 The boy eyed the A for a moment and then asked : "H-h-how do you know but he 1-1-lied?" The teacher could not get over this obstacle, and the poor boy was sent home as incorrigible. Mr. Emerson, and the whole school of those who despise instruction, had better appoint this man their prophet of the inner light, and endow Martha's Vineyard as the Penikese of skepticism. But the knowledge of letters is not half of their indebt- edness to external revelation. For they will not deny that a Fiji cannibal has just the same "insight," "spiritual faculty," '-mighty and transcendent soul," "self-conscious- ness," or any other name by which they may dignify our common humanity, which they themselves posesss. How does it happen, then, that these writejs are not assembled around the cannibal's oven, smearing their faces with the blood, and feasting themselves on the limbs of women and children? The inner nature of the cannibal and of the Rationalist is the same —whence comes the difference of char- acter and conduct? And the inner light, too, is the same; for they assure us that " inspiration, like God's omnipres- ence, is coextensive with the race." Is it not, after all, mere external revelation, in the shape of education — aye, moral and religious teaching that makes the whole differ- ence between the civilized American and his inspired Fiji brother? These gentlemen not only acknowledge, but try to repay their obligations to external revelation. As it is impossible for God to give the world a book revelation of moral and religious truth, they modestly propose to come to his assist- ance, it being quite possible for some men to do what is im- possible for God. Accordingly, we have a book revelation of moral and religious truth, from one, in his treatise on "The Soul," an "external revelation" from another, in his "Discourse Concerning Religion," a " Morrison's pill from the 124 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? outside," from a third, in his "Past and Present," and "an- nouncements" from a fourth, which assuredly the great mass of mankind never "found true within them," else his ora- tions and publications had not been needed to convert them. It is to be understood, then, that an "external revelation," or a "book revelation" of spiritual truth is impossible, only when it comes from God, but that these gentlemen have proved it quite possible for themselves to deliver one. In so doing they have undoubtedly attempted to meet the wishes of the greater part of mankind, who have in all lands and in all ages longed for some outward revelation from God, and testified their desire by running after all sorts of omens, auguries, and oracles, consulting witches, and treasuring Sibylline leaves, employing writing mediums, and listening to spirit-rappers. The " inspiration which is limited to no sect, age, or nation — which is wide as the world, and com- mon as God,"* has never produced a nation of Rational- ists; a fact very unaccountable, if Rationalism be true; and one which might well lead these writers to acknowledge at least one kind of total depravity, namely, that inspired men should love the darkness of external revelations, and even of book revelations, and read Bibles, and Korans, and Vedas, and "Discourses Concerning Religion," and "Phases of Faith," while yet "everything that is of use to man lies in the plane of our own consciousness." Surely, such a universal craving after an external revelation testifies to a felt necessity for it, and renders it probable, or at least de- sirable, that God would supply the deficiency. Is the re- ligious appetite the only one for which God has provided no supply? The fact is undeniable, that the grand distinction between man and the brutes presents itself right at this point. God guides animals by direct revelation — by their instincts ; but having given man reason, and free will, he gives him the * Parker's Discourses, 171, 33. HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? 125 whole field of life for their exercise upon the indirect reve- lations he makes to us through the mediation of others. For all that we know of history, geography, politics, me- chanics, agriculture, poetry, philosophy, or any of the com- mon business of life, from the baking of a loaf of bread, or the sewing of a shirt, to the following of a funeral, and the digging of a grave, we are indebted to education, not to in- spiration. All analogy then induces the belief that religion also will be taught to mankind by the ministry of human teachers, rather than by the direct inspiration of every in- dividual. But we are instructed, that, "as we have bodily senses to lay hold on matter, and supply bodily wants, through which we obtain naturally all needed material things, so we have spiritual faculties to lay hold on God, and supply spiritual wants ; through them we obtain all needed spiritual things." That we have both bodily senses and spiritual faculties is doubtless true ; but whether either the one or the other ob- tain all needed things is somewhat doubtful. I can not tell how it is with mankind in Boston, for I am not there; and this being a matter in which religious truth is concerned, Mr. Emerson will not allow me to receive instruction about it from any other soul ; but I see from my window a poor widow, with five children, who has bodily senses to lay hold on matter, and supply bodily wants ; yet in my opinion she has not obtained naturally all needed material things ; and if there be a truth which lies emphatically in the plane of her own consciousness, it is, that she is in great need of a cord of wood, and a barrel of flour, for her starving chil- dren. I know, also, a man, to whom God gave bodily senses to lay hold on matter, and supply bodily wants, who, by his drunkenness, has destroyed these bodily senses, and brought his family to utter destitution of all needed material things. From one cause or another, I find multitudes here in pov- erty and destitution, notwithstanding they have bodily 126 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? senses. It is reported, also, that there is a poor-house in Boston, and poverty in Ireland, and starvation in Madeira, and famine in the inundated provinces of France, and mis- ery and destitution in London ; which, if true, completely overturns this beautiful theory. For, if, notwithstanding the possession of bodily senses, men do starve in this world for want of needful food and clothing, it is very possible that they may have spiritual faculties also, and yet not ob- tain through them all needed spiritual things. The second part of the theory is as baseless as the first. All men have spiritual faculties, and have not obtained by them all needed spiritual things. They have not in their own opinion, and surely they are competent judges of "what lies wholly in the plane of their own consciousness." In proof of the fact that mankind have not, in their own opin- ion, obtained all needed spiritual things by the use of their spiritual faculties, without the aid of external revelation, "we appeal to all the religions of mankind. Heathen, Moham- medan, and Christian. Every one of these appeals to reve- lations from God. Every lawgiver of note professed to have communication with heaven, Zoroaster, Minos, Pythag- oras, Solon, Lycurgus, Numa, Mohammed, down to the chief of the recent revolution in China. " Whatever becomes of the real truth of these relations," says Strabo of those be- fore his day, " it is certain that men did believe and think them true.'' If mankind has found the supply of all their spiritual wants within themselves, would they have clung in this way to the pretense of external revelations? Is not the abundance of quack doctors conclusive proof of the exist- ence of disease, and of the need of physicians ? Not only was the need of an external revelation of some sort acknowledged by all mankind, but the insufficiency of the pretended otacles which they enjoyed was deplored by the wisest part of them. We never find men amidst the dim moonlight of tradition, and the light of nature, vaunt- HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? 127 iiig the sufficiency of their inward light ; it is only amidst the full blaze of noonday Christianity that philosophers can stand up and declare that they have no need of God's teaching. Had such men lived in Athens of old, they would have found men possessed of spiritual faculties, and those of no mean order, engaged in erecting an altar with this in- scription, " Jb the Unknown God.'' One of the wisest of the heathen (Socrates) acknowledged that he could attain to no certainty respecting religious truth or moral duty, in these memorable words, "We must of necessity wait, till some one from him who careth for us, shall come and instruct us how we ought to behave toward God and toward man." The chief of the Academy, whose philosophy concerning the eternity of matter occupies a conspicuous place in the creed of American heathens, had no such confidence in the suffi- ciency of his own powers of discovering religious truth. " We can not know of ourselves what petition will be pleas- ing to God, or what worship we should pay to him ; but it is necessary that a lawgiver should be sent from heaven to in- struct us." "Oh how greatly do I long to see that man!" He further declares that " this lawgiver must be more than man, that he may teach us the things man can not know hy his own nature.''-'^ Whether this want of a revelation from God was real, or merely imaginary, will appear by a brief review of the opinions and practices of those who never en- joyed, and of those who reject the light of God's revelation. They knew not God. If there is any article of religion fundamental, and indispensable to its very existence, it is the knowledge of God. It is admitted by Rationalists that the spiritual faculties are designed to lay hold on God. It has been proved in the previous chapter, and it will be ad- mitted by all but Atheists, that God is an Intelligent Being. And further it has been proved that God is not everything * Plato. Kepublic. Books IV. and YI., and Alcibiades II. 128 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? and everybody, but distinct from and supreme over all his works. Besides, in this country at least, there will not be much difference of opinion as to the propriety of a rational being adoring a brute, or a log of wood, or a lump of stone. It will be allowed that such stupidity shows both ignorance and folly. Now let us inquire into the knowledge of God possessed by the people who have no vision. The Chaldeans, the most ancient people of whom we have any account, and who had among them the immediate de- scendants of Noah, and whatever traditions of Noah's proph- ecies they preserved, were probably the best instructed of the heathen. Yet we find that they gave up the worship of God, adored the sun, and moon, and stars of heaven, and in process of time degenerated still further, and worshiped dumb idols. From this rock we were hewn ; the common names of the days of the week, and especially of the first day of the week, will forever keep up a testimony to the necessity of that revelation which delivered our forefathers and us from burning our children upon the devil's altars on Sun -days. The Egyptians were reputed the most learned of man- kind, and Egypt was considered the cradle of the arts and sciences. In her existing monuments, hieroglyphic inscrip- tions, and tomb paintings, we have presented to us the materials for forming a more correct opinion of the religion and life of the Egyptians than of any other ancient peo- ple; and the investigation of these monuments is still add- ing to our information. Infidel writers and lecturers have not hesitated to allege that Moses merely taught the Israel- ites the religion of Egypt; and some have had the hardi- hood to allege that the ten commandments are found written on the pyramids, as an argument against the necessity of a revelation. If the statement were true, it would by no means prove the conclusion. Egypt was favored with divine revelations to several of her kings, and enjoyed occasional HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? 129 visits from, or the permanent teachings of, such prophets as Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses, for four hundred years; a fact quite sufficient to account for her superiority to other heathen nations, as well as for the existence of some traces of true religion on her monuments. But the alleged fact is a falsehood. Some good moral precepts are found on the Egyptian monuments, but the ten command- ments are not there. It may be charitably supposed that those who allege the contrary never learned the ten com- mandments, or have forgotten them, else they would have remembered that the first commandment is, " Thou shalt have no other gods before me;" and that Pharaoh indig- nantly asks, " Who is Jehovah that I should obey his voice? I know not God :" and that the second is, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image," etc., and would have paused before alleging that these commands were engraved on the very temples of idols, and by the priests of the birds, and beasts, and images of creeping things which they adored. It is very doubtful if they be- lieved in the existence of one supreme God, as most of the heathen did; but if they did, "they did not under any form, symbol, or hieroglyphic, represent the idea of the unity of God," as is fully proved by Wilkinson.* On the contrary, the monuments confirm the satirical sketch of the poet,t as to the " monsters mad Egypt worshiped ; here a sea-fish, there a river-fish; whole towns adore a dog. This place fears an ibis saturated with serpents ; that adores a crocodile. It is a sin to violate a leek or onion, or break them with a bite." Cruel wars were waged between differ- ent towns, as Plutarch tells us, because the people of Cyn- opolis would eat a fish held sacred by the citizens of Latop- * Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians, Second Series, Vol. II. page 176, et passim, t Juvenal, Satire XV. 9 130 HAVE WE ANY NEED OP THE BIBLE? olis. Bulls, and dogs, and cats, and rats, and reptiles, and dung beetles, were devoutly adored by the learned Egyp- tians. A Roman soldier, who had accidentally killed one of their gods, a cat, was put to deatli for sacrilege/'^- When- ever a dog died, every person in the house went into mourn- ing, and fasted till night. So low had the "great, the mighty and transcendent soul," been degraded that there is a picture extant of one of the kings of Egypt worshiping his own coffin ! Such is man's knowledge of God without a revelation from him. The Greeks, from their early intercourse with Egypt, borrowed from them most of their religion; but by later connections with the Hebrews, about the time of Aristotle and Alexander, they gathered a few grains of truth to throw into the heap of error. After the translation of the Scrip- tures into Greek, in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, any of their philosophers who desired might easily have learned the knowledge of the true God. But before this period we find little or no sense or truth in their religion. And the same remarks will apply to the Romans. Their gods were as detestable as they were numerous. Hesiod tells us they had thirty thousand. Temples were erected to all the passions, fears, and diseases to which humanity is subject. Their supreme god, Jupiter, was an adulterer, Mars a mur- derer, Mercury a thief, Bacchus a drunkard, Venus a harlot; and they attributed other crimes to their gods too horrible to be mentioned. Such gods were worshiped, with appro- priate ceremonies, of lust, drunkenness, and bloodshed. Their most sacred mysteries, carried on under the patron- age of these licentious deities, were so abominable and in- famous, that it was found necessary, for the preservation of any remnant of good order, to prohibit them It may be supposed that the human race is grown wiser Diodorus Siculus, Book I. j HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? 131 now than in the days of Socrates and Cicero, and that such abominations are no longer possible. Turn your eyes, then, to India, and behold one hundred and fifty millions of rational beings, possessed of "spiritual faculties," "insight," and "the religious sentiment," worshiping three hundred and thirty millions of gods, in the forms of hills, and trees, and rivers, and rocks, elephants, tigers, monkeys, and rats, crocodiles, serpents, beetles, and ants, and monsters like to nothing in heaven or earth, or under the earth. Take one specimen of all. There is "the lord of the world," Jugger- nath. " When you think of the monster block of the idol, with its frightfully grim and distorted visage, so justly styled the Moloch of the East, sitting enthroned amid thousands of massive sculptures, the representative emblems of that cruelty and vice which constitute the very essence of his worship ; when you think of the countless multitudes that annually congregate there, from all parts of India, many of them measuring the whole distance of their weary pilgrim- age with their own bodies ; when you think of the merit- earning assiduities constantly practiced by crowds of devo- tees and religious mendicants, around the holy city, some remaining all day with their head on the ground, and their feet in the air; others with their bodies entirely covered with earth ; some cramming their eyes with mud, and their mouths with straw, while others lie extended in a puddle of water; here one man lying with his foot tied to his neck, another with a pot of fire on his breast, a third enveloped in a network of ropes; when, besides these self-inflicted tor- ments, you think of the frightful amount of involuntary suffering and wretchedness arising from the exhaustion of toilsome pilgrimages, the cravings of famine, and the scourg- ings of pestilence ; when you think of the day of the high festival— how the horrid king is dragged forth from his tem- ple, and mounted on his lofty car, in the presence of hun- dreds of thousands, that cause the very earth to shake with 132 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? shouts of ' Victory to Juggernath, our Lord ; ' how the offi- ciating high priest, stationed in front of the elevated idol, commences the public service by a loathsome pantomimic exhibition, accompanied with the utterance of filthy, blas- phemous songs, to which the vast multitude at intervals re- spond, not in the strains of tuneful melody,. but in loud yells of approbation, united with a kind of hissing applause; when you think of the carnage that ensues, in the name of sacred olfering — how, as the ponderous machine rolls on, grating harsh thunder, one and another of the more enthu- siastic devotees throw themselves beneath the wheels, and are instantly crushed to pieces, the infatuated victims of hellish superstition ; when you think of the numerous Gol- gothas that bestud the neighboring plain, where the dogs, jackals and vultures seem to live on human prey; and of those bleak and barren sands that are forever whitened with the skulls and bones of deluded pilgrims which lie bleach- ing in the sun,"* you will be able to see an awful force of meaning in the words of our text, and to realize more fully the necessity of a revelation from God, for the preser- vation of animal life to man. Literally, where there is no vision the people 'perish. Man doth not live by bread only, but by every word which proceedeth from the mouth of God. Take one other illustration of ignorance of God in the minds of those who close their eyes against the light of rev- elation — the heathen of Europe and America, possessing that inspiration which is wide as the world, looking abroad upon all the glorious works of the great Creator, and de- claring there is no God. On the other hand, we have men, possessed of this same inspiration, deifying everything, and outrunning even the Hindoos in the multitude of their di- vinities, declaring that every stick, and stone, and serpent, Duffs India, page 222. HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? 133 and snail that crawls on the earth is God, and making pro- fessions of holding spiritual communings with them all. To crown the monument of folly, the chief of the Positive Philoso})hy comes forth with a revelation from his spiritual faculties, in which by way of improving on the proverb "both are best," and of being sure of the truth, he unites Atheism, and Pantheism, and Idolatry — teaches his child to worship idols, the youth to believe in one God, and himself and other full-grown men to adore the "resultant of all the forces capable of voluntarily contributing to the perfeetion- ing of the universe, not forgetting his worthy friends, the animals^ To such darkness are men justly condemned who shut their eyes against the light of God's revelation. Where there is no vision the people perish intellectually. He who turns away his ears from the truth must be turned unto fables. " Hear ye and give ear, be not proud, for the Lord hath spoken. Give glory to the Lord your God be- fore he cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and while ye look for light, he turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross darkness." Without a revelation from God the mind of man can at- tain to no certainty regarding the tnost important of all his interests, the destiny of his immortal soul. He knows well — for every sickness, and sorrow, and calamity declares it, and quick returning troubles will not allow him to forget — that the Ruler of the world is offended with him; and conscience tells him why. The sense of guilt is common to the human ra:e. This is, indeed, "the inspiration which knows no sect, no country, no religion, no age; which is as wide as humanity." Reason asks herself, Will God be always thus angry with me? Shall I always feel these pangs of remorse for my sins? Will misery follow me forever, as I see and feel that it does here? Or shall my soul exist under God's frowns, or perish under his just sentence, even as my body perishes? Does the grave hide forever all that I loved? 134 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? Have they ceased to be? Shall we ever meet again? Or must I say, "Farewell, farewell! An eternal farewell !" And in a few days myself also cease to be? The only answer Reason gives is — solemn silence. The wisest of men could not tell. Who has not dropped a tear over the dying words of Socrates, " I am going out of the world, and you are to continue in it, but which of us has the better part is a secret to every one but God." Cicero contended for the immortality of the soul against the multi- tudes of philosophers who denied it in his day ; yet, after recounting their various opinions, he is obliged to ?ay, "Which of these is true, Grod alone knows; and which is most probable, a very great question."* And Seneca, on a review of this subject, says: "Immortality, however desir- able, was rather promised than proved by these great men."f The multitude had but two ideas on the subject. Either their ghosts would wander eternally in the land of shadows, or else they would pass into a succession of other bodies, of animals or men. From the nakedness and desolation of un- clothed spirit, and the possibility which this notion held out of some close contact with a holy and just judge, the soul shrank back to the hope of the metempsychoois, and hoped rather to dwell in the body of a brute, than btj utterly unclothed and mingle with spirits. This is the delusion cherished by the people of India and many other lands to this day. How unsatisfactory to the dying sinnei this un- certainty. " Tell me," said a wealthy Hindoo, who bad given all his wealth to the Brahmins who surrounded his dying bed, that they might obtain pardon for his sins, "Tell me what will become of my soul when I die?" "Your soul will go into the body of a holy cow." "And after that?" "It will pass into the body of the divine peacock." "And «■ Tiisc. Qua^t. lib. 1. t Seneca, Ep. 102. HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? 135 after that?" " It will pass into a flower." <' Tell me, oh ! tell me," cried the dying man, "where will it go last of all?" Where will it go last of all? Aye, that is the question Reason can not answer. The rejectors of the Bible here are as uncertain on this all- important subject as the heathen of India. They have every variety of oracles, and conjectures, and suppositions about the other world; but for their guesses they offer no proof. When they give us their oracles as if they were known truths, we are compelled to ask. How do you know? The only thing in which they are agreed among themselves is in denying the resurrection of the body; a point which they gathered from their heathen classics, A poor, empty, naked, shivering, table-rapping spirit, obliged to fly over the world at the sigh of any silly sewing girl, or the bidding of some brazen-fa ed strumpet, is all that ever shall exist of Washington, or Newton, in the scheme oP one class of Bible rejectors. To obtain rest from such a doom, others fly to the eternal tomb, and inform us that the soul is simply an acting of the brain, and when the brain ceases to act, the soul ceases also. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. But even this hog philosophy is reasonable, compared with the dogma of the large majority, that a man may blas- pheme, swear, lie, steal, murder, and commit adultery, and go straight to heaven — that "many a swarthy Indian who bowed down to wood and stone — many a grim-faced Cal- muck who worshiped thp great god of storms — many a Grecian peasant who did homage to Phoebus Apollo when the sun rose or went down — many a savage, his hands smeared all over with human sacrifice — shall sit down with Moses and Jesus in the kingdom of God."* To such wild unreason does the mind of man descend when it rejects the Bible. Life and immortality are brought to light by the gospel. * Parker's Discourse, 83. 136 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? Where there is no vision , hope perishes. The only plausible creed for him who rejects it is the eternal tomb, and the heart-chilling inscription: "Death is an eternal sleep!" Without a revelation from God, men are as ignorant hoto to live, as how to die. They have no rule of life having either truth or authority to direct them. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, of the purity of whose blood we are so proud, trusted to their magical incantations for the cure of dis- eases, for the success of their tillage, for the discovery of lost property, for un charming cattle and the prevention of casualties. One day was useful for all things; another, though good to tame animals, was baleful to sow seed. One day was favorable to the commencement of business, an- other to let blood, and others wore a forbidding aspect to these and other things. On this day they were to buy, on a second to sell, on a. third to hunt, on a fourth to do noth- ing. If a child was born on such a day, it would live; if on another, its life would be sickly ; if on another, it would perish early.* Their descendants who reject the Bible are fully as superstitious. Astrologers, and Mediums, and Clairvoyants, in multitudes, find a profitable trade among them ; and one prominent anti-Bible lecturer will cure you of any disease you have, if you will only inclose, in a letter, a lock of hair from the right temple, and — a — five dollar bill. The precepts of even the wisest men, and the laws of the best regulated States, commanded or approved of vice. In Babylon prostitution was compulsory on every female. The Carthaginian law required human sacrifices. When Aga- thoclas besieged Carthage, two hundred children, of the most noble families, were murdered by the command of the senate, and three hundred citizens voluntarily sacrificed themselves to Saturn. f The laws of Sparta required * Turner's Anglo-Saxons, b. vii. chap. 13. t Diodorus Siculus, b. xx. chap. 14. HAVE WE ANY NEED OP THE BIBLE? 137 theft, and the murder of unhealthy children. Those of ancient Kome allowed parents the power of killing their children, if they pleased. At Athens, the capital oF heathen literature and philosophy, it was enacted " that infants which appeared to be maimed should either be killed or exposed."* Plato, dissatisfied with the constitution, made a scheme of one much better, whiih he has left us in his Republic. In this great advance of society, this heathen millennium, we find that there was to be a community of women and of property, just as among our modern heathens. Women's rights were to be maintained by having the women trained to war. Children were still to be murdered, if convenience called for it. And the young children were to be led to battle at a safe distance, " that the young whelps might early scent carnage, and be inured to slaughter." The teachings of all these philosophers were immoral. He may lie, says Plato, who knows how to do it. Pride and the love of popular applause were esteemed the best motives to virtue. Profane swearing was commanded by the example of all their best writers and moralists. Oaths are frecjuent in the writings of Plato and Seneca. The gratification of the sensual appetites was openly taught. Aristippus taught that a wise man might steal and commit adultery when he could. Unnatural crimes were vindicated. The last dread crime — suicide — was pleaded for by Cicero and Seneca as the mark of a hero; and Demosthenes, Cato, Brutus, and Cassius, carried the means of self-destruction about them, that they might not fall alive into the hands of their enemies. The daily lives of these wisest of the heathen corresponded to their teachings, so far at least as vice was concerned. The most notorious vices, and even unnatural crimes, were prac- ticed by them. The reader of the classics does not need to * Aristotle, Polit. lib. vii. chap. 17. 138 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? be reminded that such vices are lauded in the poems of Ovid, and Horace, and Virgil; that the poets were rewarded and honored for songs which would not be tolerated for a moment in the vilest theater of New York. Recently some daily papers and broad-church preachers have taken to the canonization of heathen saints ; they de- nounce vigorously the bigotry of any who will not open to them the gates of heaven, or who will, in general, deny sal- vation to good heathens. But we do not deny salvation to good heathens, or to good Jews, or to good Mohammedans, or to anybody who is good. God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh right- eousness is accepted of him. Nor are we about to usurp Peter's keys, and lock anybody out of heaven, or into it either ; we are only acting as jurymen upon the life and con- duct of men held up to our children as noble examples of a good life, in their classics, by heathens like themselves, and recommended now by Christian clergymen, as fitter for the kingdom of God, than bad Christians ; which last may be very true, and so much the worse for the bad Christians. But the question is not to be thus decided by comparisons, or by generalities ; we must have specified individual hea- then saints. When, however, we come to look for them, these saints and heroes prove to be only fit for the penitentiary, according to the laws of any of our States ; and were they living now, and behaving themselves according to their ac- customed habits, the best of them would be fortunate if they got there before they were tarred and feathered by an outraged public. Socrates, Seneca, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, form the stock specimens trotted out of the stables of heathen morality, for the admiration and reverence of Christians in this nineteenth century. But it has been well. remarked of Socrates, that no American lady would live with him a year without applying for a divorce, and getting it, too, upon very sufficient grounds. Seneca, HAVE WB ANY NEED OP THE BIBLE ? 139 who wrote so beautifully upon morals, was an adulterer ; and, moreover, prostituted his pen to write a defense of a man who murdered his mother. And Marcus Aurelius di- rected the murder of thousands of innocent men and women, causing young ladies to be stripped naked and torn to pieces by wild beasts, in the public amphitheater, and others to be roasted alive in red-hot iron chairs, for no other offense but that they avowed themselves Christians. Such are these boasted saints and heroes of heathendom. What, then, must the lives of the vulgar have been? In the very height of Roman civilization, Trajan caused ten thousand men to hew each other to pieces for the amuse- ment of the Roman people ; and noble ladies feasted their eyes on the spectacle. In the Augustan age, when the in- vincible armies of Rome gave law to half the world, fathers were in the habit of mutilating their sons rather than see them subjected to the slavery and terrible despotism of their officers. What, then, must the state of the people of the vanquished countries have been? Whole provinces were frequently given over to fire and sword by generals not reputed inhuman ; and such was the progress of war and anarchy, and their never-failing accompaniments, fam- ine and pestilence, that, in the reign of Gallienus, large cities were left utterly desolate, the public roads became un- safe from immense packs of wolves, and it was computed that one-half of the human race perished. This was just before the toleration of Christianity. God would allow the wisest and bravest of mankind to try the experiment of neg- lecting his gospel and living without his revelation, until all mankind might be convinced that such a course is sui idal to nations. "Where there is no vision, the people perish." A brief reference to the codes of morals which the mod- ern opposers of the Bible would substitute for it in Chris- tian lands shall conclude our proof of the necessity of such 140 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? a revelation of God's law to man, as shall guide his life to peace and happiness. The family is the basis of the commonwealth. Destroy family confidence and family government, and you destroy society, subvert civil government, and bring destruction on the human race. Mankind are so generally agreed on this subject, that adultery, even among heathens, is regarded and punished as a crime. The whole school of Infidel writ- ers and anti-Bible lecturers, male and female, apologize for, and vindicate this crime. Lord Herbert, the first of the English Deists, taught that the indulgence of lust and anger is no more to be blamed than the thirst occasioned by the dropsy, or the drowsiness produced by lethargy. Mr. Hobbes asserted that every man has a right to all things, and may lawfully get them if he can. Bolingbroke taught that man is merely a superior animal, which is just the modern development theory, and that his chief end is to gratify the appetites and inclinations of the flesh. Hume, whose argu- ment against miracles is so frequently in the mouths of American Infidels, taught that adultery must be practiced, if men would obtain all the advantages of life, and that if practiced frequently, it would by degrees come to be thought no crime at all — a prediction as true as Holy Writ; the ful- fillment of which hundreds of the citizens of Cincinnati can attest, who have heard a lecturer publicly denounce the Bible as an immoral book, and in the same address declare that if a woman was married to a man, in her opinion of in- ferior development, it was her duty to leave him and live with another. This duty is by no means neglected, as the numerous divorces, spiritual marriages, separations, and elopements among this class of perpons, testify. Voltaire held that it was not agreeable to policy to regard it as a vice in a moral sense. Rousseau, a liar, a thief, and a debauched profligate, according to his own printed "Confessions," held the same high opinion of the inner light as our American HAVE WE ANY NEED OF IHE BIBLE ? 141 Spiritualists. ^^ I have only to consult myself, ^^ said he, ^^ con- cerning what I do. All that I feel to he right , is right."^ In fact, the purport of this inner light doctrine is ex- actly as Rousseau expressed it, and amounts simply to this, Do lohat you like. On this lawless principle these men acted. Take, for ex- ample, the chief saint on the calendar of American Infidel- ity, whose birthday is annually celebrated by a festival in this city, and in whose honor hundreds of men, who would like to be reputed decent citizens, parade the streets of Cin- cinnati in solemn procession — Thomas Paine — the author of "The Ag^ of Reason," as his character is depicted by one who was his helper in the work of blaspheming Grod and se- ducing men, and whose testimony, therefore, in the eyes of an Infidel, is unimpeachable — William Carver. " Mr. Thomas Paine : I received your letter, dated the 25th ult., in answer to mine, dated November 21, and after minutely ex- amining its contents, I found that you had taken to the pitiful sub- terfuge of lyiuff for your defense. You say that you paid me four dollars per week for your board and lodging, during the time you were with me, prior to the first of June last ; which was the day that I went up, by your order, to bring you to York, from New Rochelle. It is fortunate for me that I have a living evidence that saw you give me five guineas, and no more, in my shop, at your departure at that time ; but you said you would have given me more, but that you had no more with you at present. You say, also, that you found your own liquors during the time you boarded with me ; but you should have said, ' I found only a small part of the liquor I drank during my stay with you ; this part I purchased of John Fellows, which was a demi-john of brandy, containing four gallons,' and this did not serve you three weeks. This can be proved, and I mean not to say anything I can not prove, for I hold truth as a precious jewel. It is a well-known fact that you drank one quart of brandy per d&j, at my expense, during the different times you boarded with me ; the demi-john above mentioned ex- cepted, and the last fourteen weeks you were sick. Is not this a * Home's Introduction of the Scriptures, Vol. I. page 25. 142 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE? supply of liquor for dinner and supper." * * * * " I have often wondered that a French woman and three children should leave France and all their connections, to follow Thomas Paine to Amer- ica. Suppose I were to go to my native country, England, and take another man's wife and three children of his, and leave my wife and children in this country, what would be the natural conclusion in the minds of the people, hut that there was some criminal connection between the woman and myself?"* The death of this man was horrible. The Philadelphia Presbyterian says: "T^fere is now in Philadelphia a lady who saw Paine on his dying-bed. She informs us that Paine's physician also attended her father's family in the city of New York, where in her youth she re- sided, and that on one occasion whilst at their house, he pro- posed to her to accompany him to the Infidel's dwelling, which she did. It was a miserable hovel in what was then Raisin Street. She had often seen Paine before, a drunken profligate, wandering about the streets, from whom the children always fled in terror. On entering his room she found him stretched on his miserable bed. His visage was lean and haggard, and wore the expression of great agony. He expressed himself without reserve as to his fears of death, and repeatedly called on the name of Jesus, begging for mercy. The scene was appalling, and so deeply engraven on her mind, that nothing could obliterate it." — Philadelphia Presbi/terian, March 17, 1857. The physician's statement has been common, many years, and corresponds with the above. So do Grant Thorburn's representations agree with both. And the piece published by Rev. Jas. Inglis in his "Waymarks in the Wilderness," which has proved so distasteful to the Paineites here, sub- stantially agrees with all the others. It is only the truth- fulness of it which is so off'ensive. It may be of interest to * Printed repeatedly in New York newspapers, and given entire in the report of the discussion between Dr. Berg and Mr. Barker. W. S. Young, Philadelphia, 1854. HAVE WE ANY NEED OP THE BIBLE? 143 state, that the facts therein named are the recollections of old Dr. Mo Clay, a Baptist minister of known power and ver- acity. The I'act of Paine's miserable, and cowardly, and man-forsaken end is too true. Let no one be foolhardy enough to follow them, rejecting to do it, a fourfold cord of strong testimony ; nay, we may add, a stronger cord of five- fold testimony, as Paine's nurse testifies like the rest. In the East tlie^e facts are so notorious that even Infidels diiown allegiance or attachment to Paine, if they wish to be considered respectable. Some of the severest denuncia- tions against him, which we ever heard, have been from In- fidels. Indeed this is more than plain from the very fact of all the Infidels having forsaken Paine on his death-bed. Who was his doctor? A Christian. "Who was his nurse? A Christian? Who were his most constant visitors and sympathizers? Thorburn, McClay, etc.. Christians. They went, for mercy's sake; Infidels, having no "bowels of mer- cies," kept away. Carver, Jefi'erson, etc., were ^ar from him in his extreme hour. The testimony of Mons. Tronchin, a Protestant physician from Geneva, who attended Voltaire on his death -bed, was: That to see all the furies of Orestes, one only had to be present at the death of Voltaire. ("T^owr voir toutes les furies d' Oreste, il ny avait qua se trouver a la mort de Voltaire^) "Such a spectacle," he adds, "would benefit the young, who are in danger of losing the precious helps of religion." The Marechal de Richelieu, too, was so ter- rified at what he saw that he left the bedside of Voltaire, declaring that "the sight was too horrible for endurance."* And these are the saints, and apostles, and heroes of In- fidelity, to whose memories Infidels make orations and festi- vals, and whose writings are reprinted in scores of editions, * Tlie Occident, 20th August, 1 874, San Francisco. 144 HAVE WE ANY NEED OF THE BIBLE ? not only over Christendom, but even in India, to teach man- kind how to live and how to die ! Such are the lives and deaths of those who denounce the Bible as an immoral Book, and blaspheme the Grod of the Bible as too unholy to be reverenced or adored! "But, beloveJ, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ; how that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts. These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit." In the Free Love Institute about to be established in our vicinity, we shall have the full development of these filthy principles and practices. Let fathers and husbands look to this matter. Especially let ungodly men set to work and devise some law of man capable of binding those who renounce the law of God, and with it all human authority. For there can be no law of man, unless there is a revealed law of God. " What right," says the Pantheist, the Fourierist, the Spiritualist, the Athe- ist, "what right have you to command me? Eight and wrong are only matters of feeling, and your feelings are no rule to me. The will of the majority is only the law of might, and if I can evade it, or overcome it, my will is as good as theirs. Oaths are only an idle superstition ; there is no judge, no judgment, no punishment for the false swearer." Take away the moral sanction of law, and the sacredness of oaths, and what basis have you left for any government, save the point of the bayonet? Take away the revealed law of God, and you leave not a vestige of any au- thority to any human law. " We hold these truths to be self-evident," said the immortal framers of the basis of the American Confederation, "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalien- able rights." It was well said. The rights of God are the only basis of the rights of man. One of the most sagacious HAVE WE ANY NEED OP THE BIBLE ? 145 of modern statesmen has borne his testimony to this funda- mental truth — that religion is the only basis of social order — in words as trenchant as the guillotine which suggested them. "It is not," says Napoleon, "the mystery of incar- nation which I perceive in religion, but the mystery of social order. It attaches to heaven an idea of equality which pre- vents the rich from being massacred by the poor."-!^ Once in modern time;?, the rejectors of the Bible had op- portunity to try the experiment of ruling a people on a large scale, and giving the world a specimen of an Infidel Repub- lic. You have heard one of them here express his admira- tion of that government, and declare his intention to present a public vindication of it. Of course, as soon as practicable, that which they admire they will imitate, and the scenes of Paris and Lyons will be re-enacted in Louis- ville and Cincinnati. Our Bibles will be collected and burned on a dung-heap. Death will be declared an eternal sleep. Grod will be declared a fiction. Religious worship will be renounced ; the Sabbath abolished ; and a prostitute, crowned with garlands, will receive the adorations of the mayors and councilmen of Cincinnati and Newport. The reign of terror will commence. The guillotine shall take its place on the Fifth Street Market place. Proscription will follow proscription. Women will denounce their hus- bands, and children their parents, as bad citizens, and lead them to the ax ; and well-dicssed ladies, filled with savage ferocity, will seize the mangled bodies of their murdered countrymen between their teeth. The Licking will be choked with the bodies of men, and the Ohio dyed with their blood; and those whose infancy has sheltered them from the fire of the rabble soldiery will be bayoneted as they cling to the knees of their destroyers.f The common * Ardeches' Life of Napoleon I. 222. t Home's Introduction to the Scriptures, Vol. I. page 26, where ample references to cotemporary French writers are given. 10 146 HAVE WE ANT NEED OF THE BIBLE? doom of man commuted for the violence of the sword, the bayonet, the sucking boat, and the guillotine, the knell of the nation tolled, and the world summoned to its execution and funeral, will need no preacher to expound the text, Where there is no vision, the people perish. CHAPTER V. Who Wrote The New Testament? " The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle : so I write. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen." — 2 Thess. iii. 17. Religion rests not on dogmas, but on a number of great facts. In a previous chapter we found one of these to be, that people destitute of a revelation of God's will ever have been, and now are, ignorant, miserable, and wicked. If it were at all needful, we might go on to show that there are people in the world, who have decent clothing and com- forlable houses, who work well-tilled farms and sub-soil plows, and reaping machinery, who yoke powerful streams to the mill whee^, and harness the iron horse to the market wagon, who career their floating palaces up the opposing floods, line their coasts with flocks of white-winged schoon- ers, and show their flags on every coast of earth, who invent and make everything that man will buy, from the brass but- ton, dear to the barbarian, to the iolio of the philosopher, erect churches in all their towns, and schools in every vil- lage, who make their blacksmiths more learned than the priests of Egypt, their Sabbath scholars wiser than the phi- losophers of Greece, and even the criminals in their jails more decent characters than the sages, heroes, and gods of the lands without the Bible ; and that these people are the people who possess a Book, which they think contains a (147) 148 WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT ? revelation from God, teaching them how to live well ; which Book they call the Bible. This is the book about which we make our present inquiry, Who wrote it ? The fact being utterly undeniable, that these blessings are found among the people who possess the Bible, and only among them, we at once, and summarily, dismiss the arro- gant falsehood presented to prevent any inquiry about the Book, namely, that "Christianity is just like any other su- perstition, and its sacred books like the impositions of Chi- nese, Indian, or Mohammedan impostors. They, too, are religious, and have their sacred books, which they believe to be divine." A profound generalization indeed! Is a peach-tree just like a horse-chestnut, or a scrub-oak, or a honey-locust? They are all trees, and have leaves on them. The Bible is just as like the Yi King, or the Vedas, or the Koran, as a Christian American is like a Chinaman, a Turk, or a Hindoo. But it is too absurd to begin any discussion with these learned Thebans of the relative merits of the Bible as compared with the Vedas, and the Chinese Clas- sics, of which they have never read a single page. Let them stick to what they pretend to know. The Bible is a great fact in the world's history, known alike to the prince and the peasant, the simple and the sage. It is perused with pleasure by the child, and pondered with patience by the philosopher. Its psalms are caroled on the school green, cheer the chamber of sickness, and are chanted by the mother over her cradle, by the orphan over the tomb. Here, thousands of miles away from the land of its birth, in a world undiscovered for centuries after it was fin- ished, in a language unknown alike at Athens and Jerusa- lem, it rules as lovingly and as powerfully as in its native soil. To show that its power is not derived from race or clime, it converts the Sandwich Islands into a civilized na- tion, and transforms the New Zealand cannibal into a British shipowner, the Indian warrior into an American editor, and WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT? 149 the Negro slave into the President of a free African Ke- public. It has inspire 1 the Caffirs of Africa to build tele- g-aplis, and to print associated press dispatches in their newspapers; while the Zulus, one of whom would have con- verted Bishop Colenso from Christianity, if he had been a Christian, are importing steel plows by hundreds every year. It has captured the enemy's fortresses, and turned his guns. Lord Chesterfield's parlor, where an infidel club met to sneer at religion, is now a vestry, where the prayers of the penitent are offered to Christ. Gibbon's house, at Lake Lemon, is now a hotel ; one room of which is devoted to the sale of Bibles. Voltaire's printing press, from which he issued his infidel tracts, has been appropriated to print- ing the Word of God.* It does not look as if it had fin- ished its course and ceased from its triumphs. Translated into the hundred and fifty languages spoken by nine hun- dred millions of men, carried by ten thousand heralds to every corner of the globe, sustained by the cheerful contribu- tions and fervent prayers of hundreds of thousands of ar- dent disciples, it is still going forth conquering and to con- quer. Is there any other book so generally read, so greatly loved, so zealously propagated, so widely diffused, so uniform in its results, and so powerful and blessed in its influences? Do you know any? If you can not name any book, no, nor any thousand books, which in these respects equal the Bible — then it stands out clear and distinct, and separate from all other authorship ; and with an increased emphasis comes our question, Who wrote it? With all these palpable facts in view, to come to the ex- amination of this question as if we knew nothing about them, or as if knowing them well, we cared nothing at all about them, and were determined to deny them their natu- * The Family Christian Almanac for 1859, p. 57, American Tract Society, New York. 150 WHO WROTE THE NEW TESTAMENT? ral influence in begetting within us a very strong presump- tion in favor oF its divine origin, were to declare that our heads and hearts were alike closed against light and love. But to enter on this inquiry into the origin of the Book which has produced such results, with a preconceived opin- ion that it must be a forgery, and an imposition, the fruit of a depraved heart, and a lying tongue, implies so much home- born deceit that, till the heart capable of such a prejudice be completely changed, no reasoning can have any solid ful- crum of truth or goodness to rest on. It is sheer folly to talk of one's being wholly unprejudiced in such an inquiry. No man ever was, or could be so. As his sympathies are toward goodness and virtue, and the happiness of mankind, or toward pride and deceit, and selfishness and savageness, so will his prejudices be for or against the Bible. On looking at the Bible, we find it composed of a num- ber of separate treatises, written by different writers, at various times; some parts fifteen hundred years before the others. We find, also, that it treats of the very beginning of the world, before man was made, and of other matters of which we have no other authentic history to compare with it. Again, we find portions which treat of events connected in a thousand places with the affairs of the Roman Empire, of which we have several credible histories. Now, there are two modes of investigation open to us, the dogmatic and the inductive. We may take either. We may construct for ourselves, from the most flimsy suppositions, a metaphysical balloon, inflated with self-conceit into the rotundity of a cosmogony, according to which, in our opinion, the world should have been made, and we may paint it over with the figures of the various animals and noble savages which ought to have sprung up out of its fornea, and we may stripe its history to suit our notions of the progress of such a world, and soaring high into the clouds, aft