Chapter 11

Let us follow him in some of his destructive criticism, or rather denunciations, in order to observe his mode of procedure. "The discoveries of science ... make it impossible for _sincere_ men to retain the faith," &c., [41] therefore all who differ from Mr. Laing are insincere. "It is _absolutely certain_ that portions of the Bible are not true; and those, important portions." [42] This is based on two premisses which are therefore absolutely certain, (i) Mr. Laing's conclusions about the antiquity of man--of which more anon; (43) his baldly literal interpretation of the Bible as delivered to him in his early "infancy. On p. 253, we have the ancient difficulty from the New Testament prophecy of the proximate end of the world, without the faintest indication that it was felt 1800 years ago, and has been dealt with over and over again. Papias [44] is lionized [45] in order to upset the antiquity of the four Gospels--which upsetting, however, depends on a dogmatic interpretation of an ambiguous phrase, and the absence of positive testimony. Here again there is no evidence that Mr. Laing has read any elementary text-book on the authenticity of the Gospels. He is "perfectly clear" as to the fourth Gospel being a forgery; again for reasons which he alone has discovered. [46] Paul is the first inventor of Christian dogma, without any doubt or hesitation. But the undoubted results of modern science ... shatter to pieces the whole fabric. _It is as certain as that_ 2 + 2 = 4 that the world was not created in the manner described in Genesis."

As regards harmonistic difficulties of the Old and New Testaments, he assumes the same confident tone of bold assertion without feeling any obligation to notice the solutions that have been suggested. It makes for his purpose to represent the orthodox as suddenly struck dumb and confounded by these amazing discoveries of his. He sees discrepancies everywhere in the Gospel narrative, e.g.: [47]

"Judas' death is _differently_ described." "Herod is introduced by Luke and not mentioned by the others." "Jesus carried His own Cross in one account, while Simon of Cyrene bore it in another. Jesus gave no answer to Pilate, says Matthew; He explains that His Kingdom was not of the world, says John. Mary His Mother sat _(sic)_ at the foot of the Cross, according to St. John; it was not His Mother, but Mary the mother of Salome _(sic)_ 'who beheld Him from afar,' according to Mark and Matthew. There was a guard set to watch the tomb, says Matthew; there is no mention of one by the others."

At first we thought Mr. Laing must have meant _differences_ and not discrepancies; but the following paragraph forbade so lenient an interpretation. "The only other mention of Mary by St. John, who describes her as sitting _(sic)_ by the foot of the Cross, is apocryphal, being directly contradicted by the very precise statement [48] in the three other Gospels, that the Mary who was present on that occasion was a different woman, the mother of Salome." Even his youngest readers ought to open their eyes at this. Similarly he thinks the omission of the Lord's Prayer by St. Mark tells strongly against its authenticity. [49]

II.

We must now say something about the great facts of evolutionary philosophy which have shattered dogmatic Christianity to pieces, and have made it impossible for any sincere man to remain a Christian. To say that Mr. Laing is absolutely certain of the all-sufficiency of evolutionism to explain everything that is knowable to the human mind, that he does not hint for a moment that this philosophy is found by the "bell-wethers" of science to be every day less satisfactory as a complete _rationale_ of the physical cosmos; is really to understate the case for sheer lack of words to express the intensity of his conviction. His fundamental fact is that, however theologians may shuffle out of the first chapter of Genesis by converting days into periods, when we come to the story of the Noachean Deluge, we are confronted with such a glaring absurdity that we must at once allow that the Bible is full of myths. For history and science show that man existed probably two hundred thousand years ago, at all events not less than twenty thousand; also that five thousand B.C., a highly organized civilization existed in Egypt, whose monuments of that date give evidence to the full development of racial and linguistic differences as now existing among men; that this plants the common stem from which these have branched off, in an indefinitely remote pre-historic period; that to suppose that the present races and tongues are all derived from one man (Noe), who lived only two thousand B.C., is a monstrous impossibility; still more so, to believe that the countless thousands of species of animals which populate the world were collected from the four quarters of the globe, were housed and fed in the Ark, landed on Mount Ararat, and thence spread themselves out over the world again regardless of interjacent seas. Hence the Bible story of human origins is a mere myth; man has not fallen, but has risen by slow evolution from some ancestor common to him and apes, at a remote period, long sons prior even to the miocene period, which shows man to have been then as obstinately differentiated from the apes as ever. Therefore "all did not die in Adam," and seeing this is the foundation of the dogmatic Christianity invented by Paul, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. [45]

And indeed, given that the Bible means what Mr. Laing says it means, and that science has proved what he says it has proved, that the two results are incompatible, few would care to deny. As regards the latter condition, let us see some of his reasonings. We are told that "modern science shows that uninterrupted historical records, confirmed by contemporary monuments, carry history back at least one thousand years before the supposed creation of man ... and show then no trace of a commencement, but populous cities, celebrated temples, great engineering works, and a high state of the arts and of civilization already existing." [46] Strange to say, Mr. Laing developes a sudden reverence for the testimony of _priests_ at the outset of his historical inquiries, and finds that history begins with "priestly organizations;" [47] that the royal records are "made and preserved by special castes of priestly colleges and learned scribes, and that they are to a great extent precise in date and accurate in fact." Of course this does not include Christian priests, but the priests of barbarous cults of many thousand years ago, who, as well as their royal masters, are at once credited with all the delicacy of the accurate criticism which we boast of in these days--how vainly, God knows. We are told one moment that Herodotus "was credulous, and not very critical in distinguishing between fact and fable," that his "sources of information were often not much better than vague popular traditions, or the tales told by guides;" [48] and yet we are to lay great stress on his assertion that the Egyptian priests told him "that during the long succession of ages of the three hundred and forty-five high priests of Heliopolis, whose statues they showed him in the Temple of the Sun, there had been no change in the length of human life or the course of nature." [49] A valuable piece of evidence _if_ Herodotus reports rightly, and _if_ the priest was not like the average guide, and _if_ the statues answered to real existences, and _if_ each of the three hundred and forty-five high priests made a truthful assertion of the above to his successor for the benefit of posterity.

Manetho's History is, however, the chief source of our information as to the antiquity of Egyptian civilization. He was commissioned to compile this History by Ptolemy Philadelphus, "from the most authentic temple records and other sources of information," [50] whose infallibility is taken for granted. He was "eminently qualified for such a task, being," as Mr. Laing will vouch, [51] "a learned and judicious man, and a priest of Sebbenytus, one of the oldest and most famous temples." Let us by all means read Manetho's History; but where is it? It is "unfortunately lost, ... but fragments of it have been preserved in the works of Josephus, Eusebius, Julius Africanus, and Syncellus.... With the curious want of critical faculty of almost all the Christian Fathers" [52] (so different from the learned, judicious, upright priests of the sun), "these extracts, though professing to be quotations from the same book, contain many inconsistencies and in several instances they have been obviously tampered with, especially by Eusebius, in order to bring their chronology more in accordance with that of the Old Testament, ... but there can be _no doubt_ that his original work assigned an antiquity to Menes of over 5500 B.C." [53] "On the whole, we have to fall back on Manetho as the only authority for anything like precise dates and connected history."

Manetho, however, needed confirmation against the aspersions of the orthodox, who thought he might be deficient in critical delicacy, and prone to exaggerate as even later historians had done. Their casuistic minds also suggested that his list comprised Kings who had ruled different provinces simultaneously. But this "effugium" was cut off by the witness of contemporary monuments and manuscripts. "This has now been done to such an extent that it may be fairly said that Manetho is confirmed, and it is fully established, as a fact acquired by science, that nearly all his Kings and dynasties are proved by monuments to have existed, and that, successively." [54]

What is needed for the validity of this argument is a concurrence, which could not possibly be fortuitous, between the clear and undoubted testimony of Manetho and of the monuments. But first of all, what sort of probability is there left of our possessing anything approximately like the results of Manetho: and if we had them, of their historical accuracy? Secondly, is it at all credible that so fragmentary and fortuitous a record as survives in monuments (allowing again their very dubious historical worth) should just happen to coincide with the surviving fragments of our patch-work Manetho, king for king and dynasty for dynasty, as Mr. Laing would have us believe? On the contrary, nothing would throw more suspicion on the interpretation of these monuments than the assertion of such an improbable coincidence. What, then, is the force of this argument from Egyptology? _If_ the records from which Manetho compiled were historically accurate; _if_ he was perfectly competent to understand them; _if_ he was scrupulously honest and critical; _if_ from the tampered-with fragments in the Christian Fathers we can arrive at a reliable and accurate knowledge of his results; and _if_ the Bible in the original text--whatever that may be--undoubtedly asserts that man was not created till 4000 B.C., then according to certain Egyptologists (Boeck), Menes reigned fifteen hundred years previously, and according to others (Wilkinson), one thousand years subsequently. Similarly as to the argument from coincidence: _if_, as before, we possess Manetho's genuine list intact, and _if_ we have the clear testimony of the monuments giving a precisely similar record, this coincidence, apart from all independent value to be given to Manetho or to the monuments, is an effect demanding a cause, for which the most probable is the objective truth from which both these veracious records have been copied. But the monuments are not written in plain English, and need a key; and we must be first assured that Manetho's list has not been used for this purpose. We are told; for example, [55] that the name "Snefura," deciphered on a tablet found at the copper-mines of Wady Magerah, is the name of a King of the third dynasty, who reigned about 4000 B.C. Now _if_ there were no doubt about the reading of this name on the tablet, and _if_ his date and dynasty were as plainly there recorded, and _if_ all this tallies exactly with equally precise particulars in Manetho's list, it would indeed be a remarkable coincidence and would imply some common source, whether record or fact. But if having credited Manetho with the record of such a name and date, one tortures a hieroglyph into a faintly similar name, and concludes at once that the same name must be the same person, and that therefore this is the oldest record in the world, the confirmation is not so striking. That it is so in this instance we do not affirm; but we should need the assertion of a man of more intellectual sobriety than Mr. Laing to make it worth the trouble of investigating.

Passing over the confirmation which he draws from the "known rate of the deposit of Nile mud of about three inches a century," which would give a mild antiquity of twenty-six thousand years to pottery fished up from borings in the mud, since he admits that "borings are not _very_ conclusive," we may notice how he deals with evidence from Chaldea on much the same principles. Here, again, the source had been till lately only "fragments quoted by later writers from the lost work of Berosus. Berosus was a _learned priest_ of Babylon, who ... wrote in Greek a history of the country from the most ancient times, compiled from the annals preserved in the temples and from the oldest traditions." [56] Still this "learned priest," though antecedently as competent a critic as Manetho, is so portentously mythical in his accounts, that "no historical value can be attached to them," which must be regretted, since he pushes history back a quarter of a million years prior to the Deluge, and the Deluge itself to about half a million years ago. Here, therefore, we are thrown solely upon the independent value of the monumental evidence, and must drop the argument from coincidence. This evidence, we are told, "is not so conclusive as in the case of Egypt, where the lists of Manetho, &c.... The date of Sargon I. [57] (3800 B.C.) rests mainly on the authority of Nabonidus, who lived more than three thousand years later, and may have been mistaken." "The probability of such a remote date is enhanced _by the certainty_ that a high civilization existed in Egypt as long ago as 5000 B.C." If the evidence for the antiquity of Chaldee civilization is "less conclusive" than that for Egyptian, and rests on it for an argument _à pari_, it cannot be said in any way to strengthen Mr. Laing's position.

These strictures are directed chiefly to showing Mr. Laing's incapacity for anything like coherent reasoning in historical matters. Subsequently he uses these most lame and impotent conclusions as demonstrated certainties, without the faintest qualification, and builds up on them his refutation of dogmatic Christianity.

However, it is only in his more recent work on _Human Origins_ that he thus comes forward as an historian, in preparation for which he seems to have devoted himself to the study of cuneiform and hieroglyphs and mastered the subject thoroughly and exhaustively, before bursting forth from behind the clouds to flood the world with new-born light.

It is deep down in the bowels of the earth, at the bottom of a geological well, that he has found not only truth but, also man--among the monsters,

Dragons of the prime Who tare each other in their slime,

and has hauled him up for our inspection. Mr. Laing is before all else an evolutionist, with an unshaken belief in spontaneous generation. He is quite confident that force and atoms will explain everything. He seems to mean force, pure and simple, without any intelligent direction; atoms, ultimate, homogeneous, undifferentiated. No doubt, if the subsequent evolution depends on the _kind_ and _direction_ of force, or on the _nature_ of the atoms; then there is a remoter question for physics to determine; but if, as he implies, force and atoms are simple and ultimate, then evolution is as fortuitous as a sand-storm, or more so. All prior to force and atoms is "behind the veil." "The material universe is composed of ether, matter, and energy." [58] Ether is a billion times more elastic than air, "almost infinitely rare," [59] its oscillations must be at least seven hundred billions per second, "it exerts no gravitating or retarding force;" in short, Mr. Laing has to confess some uncertainty about his original dogma as to the triple constituents of the universe, and say "that it may be _almost doubted_ whether such an ether has any real material existence, and is anything more than a sort of mathematical [why 'mathematical'?] entity." [60] "It is clear that matter really does consist of minute particles which do not touch," and even these we must conceive of as "corks as it were floating in an ocean of ether, causing waves in it by their own proper movement," [61]--an explanation which loses some of its helpfulness when we remember that the ethereal ocean is only a mathematical entity. "A cubic centimetre contains 21,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules," "the number of impacts received by each molecule of air during one second will be 4,700 millions. The distance traversed between each impact averages 95/1000000 of a millimetre," and so on with lines of ciphers to overawe the gaping millions with Mr. Laing's minute certainty as to the ultimate constitution of matter. [62]

As to _how_ atoms came into existence, he can only reply, "Behind the veil, behind the veil;" for it is at this point at last that he becomes agnostic.[63] The notion of creation is rejected (after Spencer) as inconceivable, because unimaginable, as though the origination of every change in the phenomenal world were not just as unimaginable; we see movement _in process_, and we see its results, but its inception is unimaginable, and its efficient cause still more so.

The evolution of man is practically taken for granted, the only question being the _when_.

We have the old argument from embryonic transformism brought forward without any hint that later investigation tends to show differentiation further and further back, prior to segmentation and, according to some, in the very protoplasm itself. Nothing could be more inaccurate than to say "every human being passes through the stage of fish and reptile before arriving at that of a mammal and finally of man." [64] All that can be truly said is that the embryonic man is at certain stages not superficially distinguishable from the embryonic fish--quite a different thing, and no more significant than that the adult man possesses organs and functions in common with other species of the animal genus.

Mr. Laing's own conclusions from skulls and human remains which he takes to be those of tertiary man, show man to be as obstinately unlike the "dryopithecus" as ever, in fact, the reputedly oldest skulls [65] are a decided improvement on the Carnstadt and Neanderthal type. Even then man seems to have been the same flint-chipping, tool-making, speaking animal as now. So convinced is he of this essential and ineradicable difference in his heart, that seeing traces of design in palaeolithic flint flakes, and so forth, he has "not the remotest doubt as to their being the work of human hands,"--"as impossible to doubt as it would be if we had found clasp-knives and carpenters adzes." [66] Perhaps Professor Boyd-Dawkins, who credits the "dryopithecus" with these productions, is a more consistent evolutionist; but at present Mr. Laing is defending a thesis as to _man's_ antiquity. Yet he has just said that these flint instruments are "_only one step_ in advance of the rude, natural stone which an _intelligent_ orang or chimpanzee might pick up to crack a cocoa-nut with." Truly a very significant step, though it be only one. How hard this is to reconcile with what Mr. Laing ascribes to dogs and ants elsewhere, or with what he says on page 173, "These higher apes remain creatures of very considerable intelligence.... There is a chimpanzee now in the Zoological Gardens ... which can do _all but_ speak" [either it speaks, or it does not. It is precisely a case of the "only one step" quoted above. Here if anywhere a "miss is as good as a mile"], "which understands almost every word the keeper says to it, and when told to sing will purse out its lips and try to utter connected notes." [How on earth do we know what it is trying to do?] "In their native state they (apes) form societies and obey a chief." [The old fallacy of metaphors adverted to in relation to ants and dogs.] Yet "no animal has ever learned to speak," "no chimpanzee or gorilla has ever been known to fashion any implement." [67] Their nearest approach to invention is in the building of huts or nests, in which they "are very inferior to most species of birds, to say nothing of insects." On the other hand, "as regards tool-making, no human race is known which has not shown some faculty in this direction." [68] "The difference is a very fundamental one," and "may be summed up in the words 'arrested development.'" Words, indeed! but what do they mean? They mean that these animals have not developed the faculties of speech and tool-making, which would have been most useful to them in the struggle for existence, the reason being _that they did not_; and this reason is exalted into a cause or law of "arrested development." Who or what arrested it? The advantage of the term is that it implies that they were on the point of developing, that they could "all but speak," were "trying to utter connected notes," were "but one step" behind flint axes, when some cosmic power said, "Hitherto shalt thou come and no further."

If the dog had organs of speech or an instrument like the hand by which to place himself in closer relation to the outer world, he would doubtless be on a footing of mental equality with man, according to Mr. Laing. [69] The elephant's trunk accounts for his superior sagacity, and the horse suffers by his hoof-enclosed forefoot. [70] "Given a being with man's brain, man's hand, and erect stature, _it is easy to see_ how intelligence _must_ have been gradually evolved." [71] Now honestly it seems to us that many animals are as well provided as man is with a variety of flexible organs of communication with the outward world (for example, the antennae of insects, the prehensile tails of some monkeys, whose hands are as lithe as man's and articulated bone for bone and joint for joint). But letting this pass, we thought evolutionists allowed that structure is determined by function, rather than the converse; and so the confession that "it is not so easy to see how this difference of the structure arose," [72] surprises us, coming from Mr. Laing; though why this difference should exist at all, on evolution principles, is a far greater difficulty. Yet he confesses that "the difference in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the highest existing ape, [73] is too great to admit of one being possibly the direct descendant of the other." The ape, then, is not a man whose development is arrested. "The negro in some respects makes a slight approximation, ... still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from the chimpanzee or gorilla. Even the idiot is ... an arrested man and, not an ape." [74]