There is a possibility that these conceptions may have come from Christian sources instead of primitive Chinese traditions, possibly from early Nestorian missionaries, though this is scarcely probable, as Chinese emperors have been slow to introduce foreign conceptions into their august temple service to Shangte; its chief glory lies in its antiquity and its purely national character. Buddhism had already been in China more than a thousand years, and these prayers are far enough from its teachings. May we not believe that the ideas here expressed had always existed in the minds of the more devout rulers of the empire? In similar language, the Edda of the Icelandic Northmen describes the primeval chaos.
Thus:
"'Twas the morning of time
When yet naught was,
Nor sand nor sea was there,
Nor cooling streams.
Earth was not formed
Nor heaven above.
A yawning gap was there
And grass nowhere."
Not unlike these conceptions of the "Beginning" is that which Morenhout found in a song of the Tahitans, and which ran thus:
"He was; Toaroa was his name,
He existed in space; no earth, no heaven, no men."
M. Goussin adds the further translation: "Toaroa, the Great Orderer, is the origin of the earth: he has no father, no posterity."[171] The tradition of the Odshis, a negro tribe on the African Gold Coast, represents the creation as having been completed in six days. God created first the woman; then the man; then the animals; then the trees and plants; and lastly the rocks. God created nothing on the seventh day. He only gave men His commandments. The reversal of the order here only confirms the supposition that it is an original tradition. We find everywhere on the Western Hemisphere, north and south, plain recognition of the creation of the world by one Supreme God, though the order is not given. How shall we account for the similarities above indicated, except on the supposition of a common and a very ancient source?
Still more striking are the various traditions of the Fall of man by sin. In the British Museum there is a very old Babylonian seal which bears the figures of a man and a woman stretching out their hands toward a fruit-tree, while behind the woman lurks a serpent. A fragment bearing an inscription represents a tree of life as guarded on all sides by a sword. Another inscription describes a delectable region surrounded by four rivers. Professors Rawlinson and Delitzsch both regard this as a reference to the Garden of Eden.
"The Hindu legends," says Hardwick, "are agreed in representing man as one of the last products of creative wisdom, as the master-work of God; and also in extolling the first race of men as pure and upright, innocent and happy. The beings who were thus created by Brahma are all said to have been endowed with righteousness and perfect faith; they abode wherever they pleased, unchecked by any impediment; their hearts were free from guile; they were pure, made free from toil by observance of sacred institutes. In their sanctified minds Hari dwelt; and they were filled with perfect wisdom by which they contemplated the glory of Vishnu.
"The first men were, accordingly, the best. The Krita age, the 'age of truth,' the reign of purity, in which mankind, as it came forth from the Creator, was not divided into numerous conflicting orders, and in which the different faculties of man all worked harmoniously together, was a thought that lay too near the human heart to be uprooted by the ills and inequalities of actual life. In this the Hindu sided altogether with the Hebrew, and as flatly contradicted the unworthy speculations of the modern philosopher, who would fain persuade us that human beings have not issued from one single pair, and also, that the primitive type of men is scarcely separable from that of ordinary animals…."[172]
Spence Hardy, in speaking on this subject, describes a Buddhist legend of Ceylon which represents the original inhabitants of the world as having been once spotlessly pure, and as dwelling in ethereal bodies which moved at will through space. They had no need of sun or moon. They lived in perfect happiness and peace till, at last, one of their number tasted of a strange substance which he found lying on the surface of the earth. He induced others to eat also, whereupon all knew good and evil, and their high estate was lost. They now had perpetual need of food, which only made them more gross and earthly. Wickedness abounded, and they were in darkness. Assembling together, they fashioned for themselves a sun, but after a few hours it fell below the horizon, and they were compelled to create a moon.[173] An old Mongolian legend represents the first man as having transgressed by eating a pistache nut. As a punishment, he and all his posterity came under the power of sin and death, and were subjected to toil and suffering.[174] A tradition of the African Odshis, already named, relates that formerly God was very near to men. But a woman, who had been pounding banana fruit in a mortar, inadvertently entering His presence with a pestle in her hands, aroused His anger, and He withdrew into the high heavens and listened to men no more. Six rainless years brought famine and distress, whereupon they besought Him to send one of His counsellors who should be their daysman, and should undertake their cause and care for them. God sent his chief minister, with a promise that He would give rain and sunshine, and He directed that His rainbow should appear in the sky.[175] The inhabitants of Tahiti have a tradition of a fall which is very striking; and Humboldt, after careful study, reached the conclusion that it had not been derived through any communication with Christian lands, but was an old native legend. The Karens of Burmah had a story of an early temptation of their ancestors by an evil being and their consequent apostasy. Many other races who have no definite tradition of this kind have still some vague notion of a golden age in the past. There has been everywhere a mournful and pathetic sense of something lost, of degeneracy from better days gone by, of Divine displeasure and forfeited favor. The baffled gropings of all false religions seem to have been so many devices to regain some squandered heritage of the past. All this is strikingly true of China.