Part 3

The choice of food, the choice of habitation, the construction of dwelling-places for themselves or their offspring, methods of defence, methods of attack, are variously carried out by myriads of species. The processes employed, in man we call for the most part rational; in the lower animals we call them instinctive; but there are processes employed for these self-same objects by vegetables as well as by men. For plants, in one sense stationary, travel towards water by their roots, towards light by their branches; they assimilate the elements of nutriment that suit them, rejecting others. The Sensitive plant shrinks from the touch, Venus’s fly-trap closes round unwary insects and destroys them. Tendrils fasten on the supports that are offered them. Trees keep in their delicate blossoms till the weather is genial. Many a corolla folds carefully round stamens and pistils when the chilly twilight approaches.

Pass from proceedings like these to the swimming movements of a beheaded Dytiscus[16], and other reflex actions in animals, to the food-seeking movements of the tentaculæ of the Hydra or fresh-water Polype, which hover doubtfully between reflex and instinctive action: go forward through the innumerable gradations of instinct till you come, for instance, to the spider, weaving its symmetrical web, rushing out of its lair to seize the prey when the web is shaken lightly, but keeping itself close from a too dangerous foe when the web is vehemently shaken. Examine the nest of the Mygale (the trap-door spider) lined with silken tapestry, furnished with a door on a silken hinge, which it covers above with materials like the surrounding soil, and holds from beneath against an intruder, by applying its claws to the most advantageous point, the point most distant from the hinge: consider the little Sylvia Sutoria, or tailor-bird, which draws filaments of cotton from the cotton-plant, and sews leaves together with its beak and feet to form a nest; go to the huts and river-dams of the beaver; attend a conclave of rooks judging an offender; look into the hive of the hive-bee; observe the conscious vanity of the peacock; preach liberty to the slave-making ants; watch the sagacious ways of dogs and horses; and then lastly see if it be possible to resist the conclusion that, were all forms that ever existed, from the earliest geological times to our own, present before us in the order of their genealogies, we should see them to be the members of a single family, now, indeed, immensely divergent, yet all united by some affinity or affinities, whether dimly or conspicuously shown.

How strangely men and beasts are united by similarity of blood and fibre! How strangely fishes, birds, and mammals by the likeness of the vertebrate skeleton! How strangely plants and animals by the phenomena of generation, not only in the union of the sexes, but also in (_agamogenesis_) or asexual reproduction! Need we wonder at community of origin between a coral and a cactus, a whale and a sloth, a wolf and a Shylock, when we find that a lady’s silken tresses, the bristles of a boar, the quill of the porcupine, the feathers of the owl, and the horns of the buffalo, are parallel and specifically interchangeable developments?

Consider the vine, with its stem, branches, twigs, roots, rootlets, leaves, tendrils, and the luscious grapes of the ripe cluster. From one seed sprang all of these. On the bough of an orange tree there live and grow together leaf and petiole, flower and fruit, the green unripe fruit, the yellow and the golden-ripe. All these from one seed. Yet there is no jealousy among them. No one disowns a kindred origin for the root of the tree and its golden fruit, utterly unlike as these are, but, like so many other utterly unlike things in this world, sprung from the same germ.

To have produced and accumulated the vast divergences that now exist, a lapse of time, indeed, must be conceded, unmeasured and perhaps immeasurable; but this lapse of time is precisely what geology, independently of Darwinism, has already demanded. As the Scriptures speak of the earth as immoveable, because so it is in reference to the senses of man, they speak also of the everlasting mountains, and with them the rocks are a type of the eternal: compared with the life of man these expressions are truthful and well-chosen, but they do not mean to say the rocks are as eternal as God, nor yet everlasting compared with the existence of the globe. It may have taken ten thousand centuries to rear up a mountain, and yet, if we reckon the age of the globe on the scale of a man’s life, the mountain be but of yesterday.

The immense antiquity, not only of the globe, but of that thin crust of it open to our inspection, has been ascertained by geology. Geology, again, has made it certain that during millions of years, changes on the earth’s surface have been in continual progress, so that not once merely, but many times over, continents and oceans must have yielded to one another, yet by no sudden, but ever by a gradual transposition, such as is in constant progress at the present day.

Seeing that the dwelling-place of living creatures is thus continually and continuously changing, how clumsy an arrangement it would have been had the forms of life been made constant, instead of being endowed, as they clearly have been, with a wonderful power of adaptation. The question, be it remembered, is not for a moment whether God has made the universe, but _how_ He has made that portion of it which He has enabled us to see and examine. Nor yet, to be thoroughly accurate, is it in question _how_ He has worked, but how He has been pleased to exhibit His operations to the reasoning minds of men. What is worthy of God we cannot indeed judge. We can only believe that the things which are, stand worthiest of His wisdom and goodness, whatever faults may seem in them to our rashly-judging short-sightedness. But comparing theories of creation according to human notions, is it a nobler conception that God should have made successively groups of beings to fill the world, and then swept them away to make room for others nearly like them; each time, as it were, improving on His first idea, and so arguing the imperfection of what had gone before by the very improvement of what followed; or that, foreseeing the perfect types from the beginning, He should have called into existence seeds of life capable, under the laws He gave them, of rising in successive generations through countless ages, to endowments of the noblest order, to a conscious life, to a reasoning faculty, to a moral sense, to a knowledge of God? In such an origin there is for man no degradation, since the lowliness of his parentage has ever been traced back to the dust of the ground; and the lowest form of life is higher in our imaginations than the dull brute earth. Indeed, if we desire to exalt our self-appreciation, whether is it grander for us to have been the work of an instant, or to have been elaborated with Divine care through millions of ages? Will not any miracle in our behalf, however stupendous, seem more credible on the latter than on the former supposition? When we see what Development has already done for the human species, we can the more readily imagine what, under the same Lawgiver, it may do in the future for the individuals of our race. When we find it possible or probable that our own bodies contain resemblances to ancestors enormously remote in time, simply because they contain atoms from the bodies of those very ancestors living again in ourselves, we can understand how in a future, whether near or enormously remote, atoms from the very body of the man that dies may be called into a renewed existence, and clothed again with all that is necessary to personal identity, though haply more transformed and higher raised above the old self, than would be an orang-outang or a naked savage, were either of these enabled to combine the chivalric courtesy of Sir Philip Sydney with the genius of Sophocles and Shakespeare.

THE NOACHIAN FLOOD.[17]

Darwinism implies almost throughout that no universal Deluge has drowned our globe, either within the last ten thousand years, or even within a period indefinitely longer. Let us speak with due respect of the contrary belief. It _seems_ to rest upon the testimony of a Volume the most precious in the world. It was taken for granted till a few years back as much in science as in religion. For a while, the arguments that began to be raised against it were met by counter-arguments so plausible, and the objectors differed so widely among themselves, that unscientific opinion had a kind of right and prudence in adhering to that which had been taught for centuries, and was still taught without deviation in nursery, and school, and pulpit.

We should have asserted a better right and shown a higher prudence, had we waited, in a matter which concerned science full as much as it concerned religion, till, by learning facts and weighing arguments, we had become able to form an opinion no longer unscientific, or, at the very least, to appreciate the difficulties involved in the ancient belief.

We are forced to take a controversy of this kind as it stands; otherwise, there is a simple principle which ought to make all controversy on the subject needless. All authors endowed with common sense, let alone divine inspiration, use language which their intended readers may be expected to understand, and language appropriate to the scope and design of their writings. Unless, therefore, we suppose that the Old Testament writers proposed to teach natural science to the Hebrew nation, we ought to expect from them what we actually find: as to natural phenomena, past and present, they use the language not of far-advanced knowledge and minute particular research, but simply the language current in their own day and nation.

But, setting aside the general principle, in the present instance there is a second possibility of quashing the controversy, if it can be shown or made probable that the author, whose narrative is in question, never meant to imply that which for thousands of years has been held to be his meaning.

The whole point at issue is the _universality_ of the Noachian Deluge, and the narrative has been thought to be uncompromising in its declarations that all the earth, to the very mountain-tops, was indeed enveloped in water, and, excepting the handful rescued in the ark, that all men and cattle and creeping things and fowls of the air were inexorably destroyed. But to this view of the narrative there is more than one objection upon the very surface of the narrative itself. And, by way of preface, let it be remarked how vague and indefinite is the use in ordinary language of such terms as ‘all’ and ‘every’ and ‘universal.’ For instance, if a popular lady gives a kettledrum, we say, ‘all the world was at it,’ although 500 persons could not have been squeezed into the rooms without being suffocated; or we say, ‘so and so is a thing which every school-boy knows,’ when we only mean that a good many lads of a particular age, in a particular rank of life, and belonging to one particular country, have most probably been taught it. And again we say, ‘smoking is universal with the Dutch,’ without implying that every baby in Holland has a pipe instead of a rattle. You are not to suppose that this is a view of language invented for the occasion, frivolously explaining grave and sacred composition by the trivialities of common speech. On the contrary, it is precisely to the unquestioned prevalence of such phraseology, in all but the most exact scientific writing, that the late Dr. M’Caul appealed, and appealed successfully, against more than one of the objections to the authority of the Pentateuch, which were raised some time ago by the well-known and ingenious arithmetician who presides over the see of Natal. When we read that ‘there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus that _all the world_ should be taxed: and _all_ went to be taxed, _every one_ into his own city,’ are we to infer either that the clever practical Roman decreed the taxation of barbarians over whom he had not the faintest shadow of control, or that every Israelite, without exception, found and visited his ancestral home in Palestine--merchants from Gades and Ophir and Tarshish, slaves and prisoners, sucking children, bed-ridden old men, dying sufferers? We shall not, if we are wise, shut up either Cæsar Augustus or the Evangelist St. Luke to so preposterous a meaning.

In this and ten thousand other instances, our general knowledge of the attendant circumstances, or what we call ‘the nature of the case,’ supplies the necessary exceptions. To have them all drawn out in detail would be tedious and troublesome. Suppose a glorious comet is about to make its appearance, and some astronomer publicly advises every one to be on the look-out for it on a certain night, how ridiculous would he appear if he made express exception of persons on the other side of the globe, of persons immured in dungeons, of persons not yet born, of persons who were blind, of persons who were dead! Yet an author, writing some three or four thousand years back, and borrowing perhaps from picture-records, certainly from the traditions, however delivered, of an age long anterior to his own, when language was far less ample and precise than it has since become, is treated as though every word must bear the full and exact force which it would have in a carefully-written treatise upon logic in the present day. We may assume that the author either had sound and accurate information in the ordinary course of human tradition, or else that he was endowed with a super-human knowledge of the historical events in question. But, on either assumption, what conceivable warrant have we for imagining that he was deprived of common sense? Either he knew the contradictions which natural science offers to the belief in a recent universal deluge, or he did not know them. If he knew them, we may infer from his silence that his narrative was not open to those contradictions; in other words, that the deluge of which he speaks was not universal. If he did not know them, his ignorance points to the same conclusion: otherwise, we shall have a divine miracle, intended for the warning and the benefit of the human race, yet so contrived that all its most surprising circumstances should be absolutely unknown to one half of mankind, and as absolutely incredible to the other half.

The historical account informs us that ‘the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered. Fifteen cubits upwards did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.’ But Europe possesses mountains rising to a height of more than 10,000 cubits or 15,000 feet--one peak in Asia is 29,000 feet above the level of the sea--so that, on the common interpretation, the waters of the flood must have risen to a thickness above the ordinary sea-level of nearly 30,000 feet over the whole of the globe. But, on this supposition, the narrative is not only bewildering and morally impossible, but positively untruthful, for it declares the physical means employed in the production of the flood to be the fountains of the great deep and the rain from heaven--means entirely sufficient to produce a partial flood over a limited area, but utterly and ludicrously inadequate to produce a total deluge enveloping ‘all the high hills under the whole heaven.’ The notion is self-contradictory that the ocean can be employed to raise its own level, or that its general height can be increased by the rain which it is its own part to supply. Nor is there any indication afforded that a supernatural supply of water was added to our planet, to the extent of several hundred millions of cubic miles of liquid, which would have been required for the purpose of drowning the Caucasus and the Alps and Teneriffe and Popocatapetl and Chimilari. We must consider also the difficulty of breathing, and the intense cold that would have been experienced at that stupendous altitude. There is the old question of space in the ark; there is the old question of the food-supply, sufficient and appropriate, to be stored and sorted for its various occupants, carnivorous and herbivorous, beasts of prey, carrion-birds, and amphibious monsters. But what are these compared with the question how life could be sustained in the bitter freezing atmosphere, thousands of feet above the line of perpetual snow, by creatures accustomed to the lowlands of the tropics? Supposing, however, the atmosphere to have been completely warmed by the rise of the ocean, or even if the air within the ark was kept warm by its enormous crowd of denizens, we are confronted by a new difficulty, one that might seem laughable and improper to mention but for its vast and pressing importance in our own days, thwarting the physician, perplexing the statesman, baffling the chemist and the engineer. To this supposed epitome of the world’s inhabitants, shut up for months within the ark, who were the scavengers?

But suppose every one of these problems to be solved by a miracle, although of such miracles not a hint is given, there still remains the statement to be dealt with, that ‘God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged.’ Surely this, if nothing else, is conclusive that the writer had all along been describing a local and partial deluge upon which a wind could have some sensible effect, not an universal flood wrapping all the mountains of the globe in water, in which case the mightiest wind that ever was, or could be dreamed of, could only have laid bare the surface of the land by piling up great hills and precipices of water upon the ocean.

When we wish to expose the miracles of a false religion or of a superstitious aberrant creed, we point out, as the case may be, that they are frivolous, useless, unmeaning, devoid of adequate motive, the end achieved and the means employed bearing no reasonable proportion; or we show that the testimony in their favour is inconsistent with itself, or that the consequences which should have flowed from the miracle, had it been genuine, are certainly wanting, unless, to bolster up one extreme improbability, a hundred others are invented and swallowed. To every one of these imputations the common theory of the Noachian Deluge lies open. But concede a few grains of common sense to the narrator; read his narrative in the spirit in which such a person must have written it; remember that he is not writing a scientific treatise, nor using the phraseology of modern Europe; bear in mind that he is speaking in an idiom no longer or now but seldom used, yet a just and noble idiom, which ascribes to God all that is done upon earth, whether good or evil, the works of man and the common processes of nature, as well as things super-human and miraculous; and, with these considerations before us, we shall save the venerable record from every imputation, either of folly or of falsehood.

That which we have described to us is a vast penal catastrophe sweeping away some great centre of civilization by means of a terrible inundation. Along some ocean-border the far-stretching plains were dotted thickly with towns and villages. There were fields waving with corn; the vine and the olive, the orange and the palm abounded; there were cattle feeding in green pastures beside the still waters; there were populous tribes and nations carrying on all the business and revelry of life; they bought, they sold, they builded, they planted, they were marrying and giving in marriage, when suddenly the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the earthquake wave rolled in upon them, and swept all the beauty and the glory and the sin remorselessly away. At the same time, the angry heavens were overcast, and the floodgates of the clouds poured down their volumes of ceaselessly-descending rain. The distant mountains were torn from the sight; nay, every high hill under the whole heaven was itself covered and enfolded in a liquid veil, for every rill was now a torrent, every tiny silver thread of a cascade now a dark unbroken avalanche of waters. One family alone, alone obedient to the warning which all had received, were saved amidst this universal ruin, and took with them into the ark of their refuge specimens of every bird and beast and creeping thing that their own country produced, and that was in any way serviceable to man. When cloud and mist had rolled away from the mountain-tops, when the face of the ground was once more dry--with these creatures they stocked their new settlement. The well-watered plain was speedily replenished; the vine flourished; the cattle brought forth abundantly; the children of the patriarch multiplied rapidly and spread far and wide over their rich and undisputed inheritance.

Such is the narrative as it glimmers through the haze of forty centuries, only told in the original with unrivalled simplicity and force, grander than any description by forbearing to describe, told as one would tell it, who in that convulsion of nature had lost kindred, friends and countrymen, as one who had seen the whole world, so far as he knew it or cared for it, foundering in the waves, and yet had lived on through all the unutterable calamity to see himself once more surrounded by fruitful fields and smiling homesteads, and all that might make what was to him emphatically a new world the counterpart of the old.

Some may permit themselves for a moment to set aside the limitation we have suggested to the number of animals in the ark as fanciful and unwarranted. It will be proper therefore to draw out the consequences attaching to the old opinion. We find from the words of the narrative, that the patriarch Noah was intrusted with the task of collection. To achieve it, then, he must have gone in person, or sent expeditions, to Australia for the kangaroo and the wombat, to the frozen North for the Polar bear, to Africa for the gorilla and the chimpanzee; the hippopotamus of the Nile, the elk, the bison, the dodo, the apteryx, the emeu and the cassowary must have been brought together by vast efforts from distant quarters. The patriarch or his agents must have been endowed with a supernatural knowledge of natural history far surpassing Solomon’s or that of our own times, that they might properly distinguish varieties and species, so that no species might be omitted and none represented by more than one variety. To accomplish this with the minutest insects, they must have been provided with powerful microscopes. Every portion of the dry land of the globe must have been accessible to them; every jungle, cavern, and ravine. The little islands that lose themselves in mid-ocean must all have been ransacked; the search, too, that might not neglect any acre of ground in all the continents of the world, would be distracted with the most varied and incongruous pursuits. Sheep, game, caterpillars, beasts of prey, snails, eagles, fleas and titmice, must all have their share of attention. Unusual pains must be employed to secure them uninjured. They must be fed and cared for during a journey, perhaps, of thousands of miles, till they reach the ark; they must be hindered from devouring one another while the search is continued for rats and bats and vipers and toads and scorpions, and other animals which a patriarch, specially singled out as just and upright and a lover of peace, would naturally wish and naturally be selected to transmit as a boon to his favoured descendants.