If we should stand amid the uncovered treasures which mark the site of ancient Nineveh or Babylon we would doubtless find in the objects, as they are this moment, very much to engage our most interested attention. We would regard with wonder and pleasure the specimens of beautiful architecture, the evidences of human skill and industry which modern exploration has disclosed to view. And yet, full of interest as such an occupation would be, we could not prevent our minds from engaging in another. Without any conscious exercise of will, our thought would revert to the day when these fallen structures stood in all their magnificence; when these halls, now filled with the sand of the desert, echoed to the strains of music and to the voices of the noblest and greatest of the land; when through these arches, now crumbling, armies marched gaily to battle, or returned in triumph, bearing the spoils of conquest. We would not be insensible to the value of the columns and capitals, the statuary and tablets before our eyes, and yet the very grandeur of these ruins would evoke the genius who would lead our thought by an irresistible constraint to look upon the prior vision of those cities in the day of their pristine perfection.
My friends, we do stand amid ruins. We walk day after day amid shattered greatness, in comparison with which the prized relics of Nineveh and Babylon, of Thebes, and Luxor,[1] and Troy, sink into insignificance. Far be it from me to underestimate the work of man, as we see him and know him to-day, or as we read of him in the records of the past. I am aware of what he is, and of what he has done. I am not insensible to his work, and yet I declare that man, great as he is—and he is great—is in certain respects not as great as he was. I mean that he is not what the progenitor of the race was. And viewed in comparison with that primitive condition—that condition at creation—man to-day, considered physically, intellectually, morally and spiritually, is a conspicuous instance of fallen grandeur—not worthless and valueless—far from that; but his perfection has departed; he is vastly inferior to what his great original was. Realizing this, we can not fail to revert in thought to that early day, and seek to see what the greatness was from which we have fallen.
Before, however, we attempt to look upon that picture, it will be necessary to establish and defend the theory of man’s condition and history upon this earth, with which it is inseparably connected.
A view of human history, which has been strongly advocated of late, is that our race began physically, intellectually, and morally at the lowest possible point. Some even maintain that the first men and women were but the latest and highest developments of certain species of brutes. But whether this phase of the theory of evolution be included in it or not, the essential idea of the view to which we refer is that the progenitors of our race were the lowest kind of savages, in their powers and capacities, their tastes and pursuits scarcely distinguishable from the brutes around them, and that from this low beginning men have gradually come to the height of attainment and improvement which they occupy to-day. If this theory be true, the statement which we have made, and which we proposed to consider, is false. If such were the origin of our race, if the first men and women were in all the parts of their nature but a shade removed above the brutes of the forest and the field, of course we of to-day are in no respect their inferiors—of course ours is not, as has been declared, a fallen race. We maintain, however, that the theory which makes our race begin in a condition of barbarism and imbecility is untrue. I know that it is supported by eminent names; I know, too, that it has been pressed upon public attention with much noisy and confident assertion; I know all this, and yet I declare that the theory is unproven; more, I declare that it is untrue.
Let us look at a few considerations which may shed the light of truth upon this matter of the primitive condition of mankind, and by this I mean the condition of those who succeeded Adam himself on the stage of the world’s history:
1. We all know how long, in families which have lost position or power, the memory of former greatness is cherished. You will find in your charitable institutions, in the depths of poverty, and, perhaps, of wickedness, those who will tell you by the hour of the fortunes of their house in remote days, of the distinction which some ancestor, far removed, conferred upon the name. Such memories are preserved with care, and transmitted from generation to generation, and they become more and more precious as the descendants themselves have less and less honor of their own. The same principle operates with nations and with the great tribes of men, particularly when they have themselves sunk so low that they are conscious of no ground of glorying in themselves. Now it is an instructive fact that the traditions of all nations have more or less reference to a golden age, from which men have fallen. This is true in India, in China, in Egypt, among our own Indians, among the inhabitants of Central and South America—wherever traditional knowledge is preserved. It is a vague memory—nevertheless a memory cherished by the race, handed down through the ages, not of an era when humanized monkeys rejoiced in their promotion, but of a golden age, when men as gods dwelt upon the earth. The only explanation of such a wide-spread tradition is that there must have been a fact corresponding to it; there must have been a substance to cast this shadow over so many generations. Those who hold that mankind began at the lowest point, can not satisfactorily account for this tradition of the race.
2. Not only tradition, but history sustains our position. If the true explanation of man’s condition to-day, in the civilized countries, is that he has gradually raised himself from a state of absolute barbarism, we certainly ought to have in the records of authentic history the account of at least one nation, which, as matter of fact, before the eyes of the world, has done the same thing. But no such instance can be found, not one of a people, entirely barbarous, lifting themselves unaided, to the higher plane of even a comparative civilization. Archbishop Whately[2] says: “We have no reason to believe that any community ever did or ever can, emerge, unassisted by external helps, from a state of barbarism unto anything that can be called civilization.” And we may follow the course of civilization from our own land back to western Europe, from western Europe to Italy, from Italy to Greece, from Greece to Egypt and the farther East, and still, as far as history takes us we see the barren portions of the earth continuing to be barren—continuing to bear only the wild fruits of barbarism, until the stream of knowledge, and culture, and civilization, is led to it from some other place. And that stream may be followed all the way back to the beginning of authentic secular history, and in no one instance does the dry ground yield fruit and flower of itself. We maintain that the vivifying stream began to flow because there was in the beginning, in the East, a fountain filled by God himself. Or, leaving the language of allegory, we assert that if our race was utterly barbarous at the beginning, it never would have risen from its barbarism, and authentic history can not adduce a single instance of a nation rising unaided from barbarism to overthrow this position. Mankind, therefore, did not begin at the lowest point, or, judged by all the analogy of history, it would be there still.
3. Again, the records, outside of the Bible, which have come down to us from early times, are few and imperfect, but the oldest of those which do remain indicate the existence of nations in a high state of civilization in the earliest periods of human history. In Egypt, China, Chaldea, these earliest records, whether monumental or written, bear evidence, not of universal barbarism in the previous ages, but of powerful and enlightened nationalities. Such a state of things is inconsistent with the theory which makes the history of our race a gradual development from a brutal and degraded beginning.
4. Still further, the science of paleontology comes forward to prove the same thing. There have been found in Belgium and in France, some human skulls and skeletons, unquestionably of very great antiquity. Concerning them one of the most competent of human judges, Principal Dawson, of McGill University, Canada, says: “These skulls are probably the oldest known in the world.” But what sort of men do they indicate as living at that remote day? “They all represent,” he says, “a race of grand, physical development, and of cranial capacity equal to that of the average modern European.” Further he says: “They indicate also that man’s earlier state was the best, that he had been a high and noble creature before he became a savage. It is not conceivable that their great development of brain and mind could have spontaneously engrafted itself on a mere brutal and savage life. These gifts must be remnants of a noble organization, degraded by moral evil. They thus justify the tradition of a golden and Edenic age, and mutely protest against the philosophy of progressive development, as applied to man.” Again, he concludes from a careful study of these remains: “The condition, habits and structure of Palæocosmic[3] men correspond with the idea that they may be rude and barbarous offshoots of more cultivated tribes, and therefore realize, as much as such remains can, the Bible history of the fall and dispersion of antediluvian men. We need not suppose that Adam of the Bible was precisely like the old man of Cromagnon.[4] Rather may this man represent that fallen yet magnificent race which filled the antediluvian earth with violence, and probably the more scattered and wandering tribes of that race, rather than its greater and more cultivated nations.”—Nature and the Bible, pp. 174-179.
5. In addition to these arguments from tradition and history, and monumental and written records, and an actual study of human remains, which experts pronounce to be older, probably, than the flood, we have evidence within ourselves. We are not unfamiliar with stories of children of noble, perhaps of royal, descent, who have been abducted and brought up among people of low tastes and habits. But ever and anon, in gesture or inclination or bent of life, the blood shows itself, and to an attentive eye tells of the gentler and loftier sphere from which it came. So with us. Our consciousness reveals within us remnants of a former greatness; aspirations which this world has never taught us, longings for peace and purity which we feel we ought to have, but which we know this world never imparts. These things are the impress of the joys of that golden age which all these centuries have been powerless to erase from the souls of Adam’s sons. Morally, we know we are not what we ought to be; we are conscious of our degradation. As regards intellect, we retain powers which have, indeed, accomplished marvelous results; and yet, let some abnormal stimulus affect the brain—whether it be that produced by sudden excitement or passion, or that caused by powerful artificial agencies, and we see flashes of power yet in reserve which intimate what this wondrous human mind may once have been. And physically, our frail bodies, quickly tired and quickly crumbling to dust, tell us daily that here, at least, the theory of development from imperfection to perfection has signally failed.