Part 7

According to a principle now well known, the earlier the period of life the greater the resemblance is likely to be between creatures akin to one another. Hence we may explain the phenomenon that some children, throughout their childhood prone to causeless mischief and stubborn resistance, become at length reasonable and self-controlled men. As for the child, so for the brute, a future of enlightened reason and self-control may be in store. The largest and most generous minds are now beginning to contemplate the possibility of an immortal destiny for all animals whatsoever. To my own mind, as doubtless to many of yours, such a conception has often seemed fanciful and ridiculous, as the greatest and best notions often do to minds that are narrow or unexpanded by a wisdom higher than their own. So it was that the gossips and philosophers of Athens mocked when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, though St. Paul was preaching only the resurrection of human beings. To extend this belief in the resurrection to all the animate creation is to extend our conception of the power and the goodness of God, to make easy many things that otherwise seem appallingly difficult in regard to His justice and His mercy. Does it seem a thing impossible with you that God should raise the dead? Is the Lord’s arm shortened that it cannot save, whether it be man, or the worm that Scripture deems his fitting emblem? Or, as the Jews were jealous that the Gentiles should be saved, are we jealous that for creatures which we slaughter, trample on, enslave, and crowd out of existence, happiness and life should yet be in store as well as for ourselves?

Be willing to believe that language, reason, spiritual insight, which is the reason elevated to the capacity of knowing God--be willing to believe that these have been gradual acquisitions to humanity, and the whole course of God’s Providence will at once stand out in a clearer, purer light. Supposing the soul of man thousands of years back to have been precisely what the soul of man is now, its requirements and its aptitudes must have been the same then as they are to-day, so that if the doctrine of the Trinity is essential now, it must have been essential then, when it had not been revealed. On the same supposition, too, either the record of God’s will in the earliest portion of the Bible is incredibly defective, or the record of it in the completed canon of Scripture must be charged with bewildering superfluity.

But God has not dealt so with His children. He has given them their heavenly food as they were able to bear it. First by allegory and parable He unfolds His will, as a father tells his little ones the stories which they love to hear, minding ever within the stories and by means of the stories to present the truth, the lessons of the beautiful and the upright. The earliest revelation of God presents Him in the simplest form, the easiest for us to understand, as the Great Patriarch of mankind. Along with this revelation came simple commands and prohibitions, the requirements of external sacrifice, the promise and warning of temporal rewards and punishments. The law of retaliation, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, seems brutal now, but it is the beginning of a noble education. It says indeed, ‘Do to others as they have done to you,’ but then in regard to injuries it bids you exact no more than you have suffered, instead of taking a brutal revenge by repaying the injury tenfold: and in regard to benefits it bids you never forget to be grateful. From it springs the higher and better law, of doing to others, not as they have done to you, but as you would have them do to you. Without these beginnings the human mind could never have comprehended or received the highest education--that we are not only to forgive but to love our enemies. The system of material sacrifices trained men to a capability of understanding and of offering the sacrifice of the heart; the outward cleansings demanded by the law led them by degrees to recognize the need of inward purity. By the law came the knowledge of sin. Not till man knew that sin was sinful could he either wish for or receive a Saviour. Hence it was that Christ came not at the beginning, but only in the fulness of time. The gift of the Holy Ghost was not outpoured till men in part were ready to receive it. That it is still bestowed with so sparing a hand is not the fault of God’s liberality, but of our backwardness to believe in God, to commune with Him, and thereby to grow up into His likeness. We are the mirror in which the divine image shines, if only the mirror can be made to receive the requisite brightness.

To know that sin is sinful is to become conscious of the will of God, to become conscious of a good and perfect will to which our own ought to be conformed. Not to know this will is to be still brutish; to know it only by the teaching of others is to be still among the things of a child; to know it of oneself, which is in other words to know it by the teaching of the Holy Ghost, who alone can implant the doctrine with unfailing demonstration and enable us to receive His discipline,--this at length is to be a man made in the image of God. For the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and to depart from evil that is understanding; and to love God with all the heart and all the understanding and all the soul and all the strength, is the single aim as it is the crowning effort of the highest and purest intelligence. To be able to pray to God is the glory of reason; to do it, is the safeguard of life.

THE LAPSE OF TIME.

The divergence of opinion between scientific and unscientific persons is scarcely anywhere more conspicuous than in their measurements of the age of the world we live in. A popular impression still prevails that the old beldame earth, as Hotspur calls it, is about six thousand years of age. A little margin is sometimes allowed. By an exercise of heroic liberality a period of ten or twelve thousand years is occasionally conceded for the earth’s existence. Any chronology discontented with these ample limits comes within the domain of rash and dangerous speculation. Some, indeed, who would fain conciliate all parties, are willing to extend the bounds on certain conditions. They will grant a large extra slice of time, provided that during that period the earth was a shapeless uninhabited lump, or if inhabited, not inhabited by men. ‘Come, now,’ says the cheap-jack, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you; I’ll throw you in another five thousand years; fifteen thousand years! and take the lot. What! not do? I’ll make it twenty thousand. Now, I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you: I’ll make it five-and-twenty thousand years, and if that won’t satisfy you, you aren’t worth arguing with.’

What scientific men think of the cheap-jack’s offer it is the object of this essay to consider.

The problem upon which many thoughts and speculations of science are for the moment converging is the origin of life. There are some who believe that under certain chemical conditions living creatures are continually coming into existence, ungenerated by any living parent, born as it were without birth, acquiring an animated existence, with powers of motion, feeding, and reproduction, from substances previously wanting in one or all of these capacities; such creatures, in short, as, if asked for their parentage, could but answer, each for itself, my father was an atom, and my mother a molecule. It should be remembered that the little animals supposed to arise in the manner described first become visible, if at all, as the tiniest objects that microscopes can detect. But whether there is or is not in these days a continual coming into existence of these infinitesimal pigmies, they are just such productions as the Theory of Development would suppose to have arisen originally, constituting the first outburst of life upon the globe, ancestral to the noblest forms of animated nature now extant, progenitors in an unbroken line of man himself. As a rule, among living things we find that offspring bear a tolerably exact resemblance to their parents. The lower the organism the less easy is it to distinguish specimens of one generation from those of another; and even in the most highly organized creatures the points of resemblance generally far outweigh the points of difference between the parents and their children. In short, under ordinary circumstances, not one generation only, but a hundred, may pass away without registering any perceptible alteration in the character of a species. A hundred generations of mankind would require a period of about three thousand years. A hundred generations of less important creatures might not perhaps require even as large a number of hours. But between the two extremes the necessary periods would bear a kind of ratio to the perfection of the organism. Variations might now and then follow one another in quick succession, and then a pause come of a thousand generations or so before any further changes in the character of a species.

Such are the conditions under which Mr. Darwin and his followers believe it possible for the whole sequence of changes to have been effected, which have ended in peopling the whole earth with a countless variety of the most diverse forms of life. Many persons are horrified at the notion of linking together a man and a monkey even by the most distant ties of consanguinity; what will they say to a genealogy which begins with an almost invisible speck and ends with a Patagonian giant--a genealogy which asserts that, through the slow process of minute changes occurring for the most part at rare intervals, our fair humanity has been developed or evolved out of creatures which no unaided human eye could distinguish from the dust on which we carelessly trample. To some ears such a theory must sound wild and preposterous beyond all the boundaries of sane and rational thinking. And, in truth, no censure could be too severe, no ridicule too keen for so extravagant a piece of folly as this theory must be, if the old and still prevailing notions about the age of the world have any foundation in fact. It only begins to be reasonable, if we can afford to stretch our notions of history from the narrow margin of six thousand to the broader field of six hundred thousand years, with an indefinite past in the background.

This vast lapse of time, as commensurate with the existence of the inhabited globe, is essential to the Theory of Development. It must be established, as it has been, by independent evidence of its own, before it can give to that theory its absolutely necessary support. But the Theory of Development in its turn helps the mind to believe and realize this enormous lapse of time, with its seemingly never-ending march and flow, rank upon rank, wave upon wave, by finding work and employment for all its almost measureless duration. It explains, as it were, why the drama of life still goes on, why the play was not long ago played out, and the curtain let fall upon all the busy multitudinous actors.

Time of itself does nothing; but nothing can be done without time. It is not a personal agent, but a necessary condition. We cannot even think, much less reason, of things as occurring out of time and independently of it, any more than we can think or reason of matter as existing independent of space. Every occurrence takes time: and yet we may not leap from this fact to the conclusion that a countless multitude of occurrences will require a vast duration of time. Professor Tyndal, in his Lecture on the Scientific Use of the Imagination, refers to waves of light less than 1/50000 of an inch in length. How many do you suppose of such waves would be required to compass a mile? How many to accomplish the 185,000 miles which light travels in a second? Each undulation is a separate occurrence, so that we have millions of millions of occurrences following one upon another in a second of time. In studying, therefore, the complete fabric of the globe, or even of the whole material universe as far as it comes within our ken, the problem for solution is not whether these great results could or could not have been brought to pass in an indefinitely short space of time, in the twinkling of an eye, as one might say, but whether the space of time employed in their production has actually and in fact been indefinitely short or indefinitely long. We ought also to bear in mind that the terms we use when we speak of _long_ and _short_, are relative not absolute--relative to the duration of our own lives, or to some other arbitrary standard which we are pleased to set up for purposes of comparison. Thus a year is long compared with a minute, but short compared with a millennium; a thousand years would be an enormous length for the life of a mortal man, but compared with the ceaseless flow of ages, which we call eternity, this same thousand years becomes, as it were, an imperceptible speck, less than a drop of water compared to the Atlantic, a point of time so inconceivably minute, that no human mind could grasp it as an intelligible unit of measurement. For time, we have an inexhaustible past on which to draw. Against any given theory of production, no objection pure and simple that the theory makes too large a demand upon time, can be maintained. An objection, to be valid against the existence of life on the earth a million of years back, must postulate that there was no earth then in existence, or none capable of supporting life; for if we choose to stand by the doctrine of final causes, life upon the earth must have begun as soon as life upon the earth was possible, otherwise we should have a fair and perfect design with its purpose unaccomplished; or, if we prefer the Theory of Development carried out to its legitimate consequences, equally must we admit, that as soon as the earth was fitted for living creatures, living creatures would be generated upon it.

In tracing back the duration of the globe, the first demand of the uninitiated will be for the written evidence of historical records. The popular impression claims to be founded upon such evidence of the most authoritative description. Little do the upholders of this impression in general understand that they are building their faith, not upon the Book of Genesis, or the inspiration of the Hebrew lawgiver, but on the arithmetical speculations of an Irish archbishop, who lived in the seventeenth century.

Before we can accept the Hebrew genealogies as competent data for historical chronology, we must understand the principles on which they were framed. In ancient languages we have abundant evidence to show that the ties of blood were not as sharply distinguished as among ourselves. The same word sufficed to designate son and grandson, and even the most remote descendant. A man’s heir was called his son; an usurping successor might receive the same title[43]; and, beyond all this, it has been shown to have been ‘a common practice with the Jews to distribute genealogies into divisions, each containing some favourite or mystical number; and that, in order to do this, generations were either repeated or left out.’ Some persons, perhaps, will say, ‘We don’t believe it, or we don’t believe it in regard to any of the biblical genealogies.’ And yet the very first chapter of the New Testament is the most conclusive and incontrovertible proof of the statement; for our Lord’s genealogy[44] is there expressly divided into three periods of fourteen generations each, and the middle period has been stripped of three generations in order to bring it down to the pre-determined number. The names of three well-known princes (Ahaziah, Joash, Amaziah), whose histories occupy several chapters in the Second Book of Kings, are omitted, and Amaziah’s son is described, without further note or comment, as a son begotten by one who was really his father’s great-grandfather. In a matter so obvious, there cannot attach to the compiler of the genealogy the very faintest suspicion of bad faith. He was following the custom of his country, for reasons then deemed, and perhaps in those days actually being, good and sufficient. Can we make as satisfactory an apology for men in the present day, who shut their eyes to the nature of the evidence on which they build opinions about the age of the world opposed to the discoveries of science? If in the first century of the Christian era, in times of comparative enlightenment, by men of approved truth and uprightness, genealogies could be compiled without the smallest regard being paid to the actual number of successive generations, it becomes impossible to attach any value as chronological evidence to Hebrew genealogies fifteen hundred, or, for all that we can tell, fifteen thousand years more ancient. Had the genealogy on which this conclusion rests admitted a chance of error, had there been any motive for fraud in its construction, did any suspicion lie against its authenticity, the case would be weakened. But just because there neither was nor could have been error in the mind of the writer, or deceit in his intention, just because what he wrote, he wrote deliberately and of set purpose, it is certain that his record is not, and was never meant to be, a measure of time; and that those who persist in measuring time by similar records, are the victims of a manifest delusion, ensnared, it may be feared in too many cases, with their eyes open.

There is an old jest that, in the pride of antiquity, a Welshman generally traces back his lineage not only as far as Adam, but a great deal further. Nothing was easier, before the age of historical criticism, than for men or nations, whose real origin was lost in obscurity, to link their names to an illustrious past. Nothing was easier than to develope the obscurity itself into a long line of remote ancestors, whose names and virtues could be invented and multiplied at pleasure. What the poet was only too willing to imagine, the mathematician seemed able to confirm, by registering astronomical occurrences in far-distant long-past ages with as much precision as those which he predicted, and predicted truly, for his own and future times. The Hindoo chronology reckons the age of the world by millions of years. The Egyptians twenty centuries ago used to tell of 330 kings of whom they knew no more than the names. There were Greeks who claimed to be older than the moon; others who anticipated the theory of _abiogenesis_ by claiming to be sprung from the earth itself without the intervention of parents; and yet others, who with more modesty or more pride, as we please to regard it, derived their origin from gods and demigods. None were willing to be thought new people. The man of yesterday, the _novus homo_, the upstart, the parvenu, has ever been disliked and laughed at by society. And in like manner, among nations, a new rival excites the fears and encounters the ridicule of the established clique. Claims to antiquity, therefore, were as advantageous to possess as they were easy to forge. Those that have been mentioned, being unattested by any corroborative facts, and, where they are not obviously false, being unsusceptible of proof, are worthless in themselves. One thing they tend to show, namely, that all remembrance of the real origin of mankind, and of the date of that origin, had been absolutely lost to those ancient peoples. From over the sea, from beyond the mountains, from the bright east or the frozen north, they might know that their forefathers had made pilgrimage in distant ages--or they might know of no time, however far back, when the seat of their habitation had not been occupied by their own progenitors. In either case their ignorance of primeval history is as absolute as it is conspicuous. One prevailing tradition, it is true, is current alike in sacred and profane literature, of a far-off golden time, an age of simplicity, when man conversed with the beasts of the field, when the earth brought forth her fruits spontaneously, with her bosom as yet unvexed by the ploughshare, ere the knowledge or the discrimination of good and evil had come into the world--the record, in one word, as all these details tend to prove, of a time before man had become a moral being; a dim mysterious recollection, almost like a dream, of a time before the animal nature had been decisively exalted into humanity.

Some persons believe, against all probability of evidence, that spoken language was a sudden original inspiration instead of a gradual invention. None, however, assert the right of believing the same thing in regard to letters or written language. The progressive origin of alphabetical signs is admitted on all sides, so that there must have been a time when man had to trust to his fallible memory instead of written memoranda. The growth of picture-writing itself must have been extremely slow, from the difficulty of establishing an agreement as to the meaning of particular representations. What this difficulty amounts to may to some extent be tested any day in a picture-gallery, where all the appliances and skill of modern art are at our service. Without the aid of a descriptive catalogue, it is but seldom that any two accounts of the meaning of the same picture would be found to agree. The art of drawing, it may well be supposed, was not an inspiration. It had to be invented. The very idea of transmitting a record to future ages would only occur with the advance of civilization. The crumbling surface of the rock, the decaying bark of trees, would be the first perishable and soon obliterated manuscripts. Before account could be taken of months and years, astronomy must have made some progress. Before the flow of centuries could be accurately noted, arithmetic must have advanced far beyond the stage at which we still find it among numerous savage nations. An Esquimaux couple, it is said, find it difficult to count their own children, even when they are no more than four or five[45].

From these considerations alone we may feel perfectly certain that numbers of ages elapsed before men acquired the means of recording the duration of time by any definite measurements. Unconsciously and without set purpose, perhaps the very earliest tribes and the most untutored have left behind them traces not only of their existence but of the date and era at which they lived; traces which we are only now beginning to decipher, and to read with faltering lips.