SIGILLARIA GRŒSERI
(Coal Measures.)
| WHORLED SHELLS OF THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.[23] | |
But the resemblance is not restricted to the constructive department. Both in the Chinese collection and among the Egyptian antiquities exhibited in the British Museum, I found color as certainly as mechanical contrivance. And the color furnished not only a practical example from both the early and the remote peoples of the same sort of chemical science as exists at the present time among ourselves in our dyeworks and pigment manufactories, but it also showed a certain identity with our own of their sense of beauty. The Chinese satins are gorgeous with green, blue, yellow, scarlet, crimson, and purple, and have fringes heavy with thread of gold. Gilding is as common among this distant people as among ourselves, and at once shows a familiarity with the art of the gold beater, and a sensibility to the beauty of a golden surface; and in the painted ornaments I detected the rich tints of vermilion and crimson lake, with the mineral blues, yellows, and greens. In the Egyptian department, though the blanching influences of three thousand years had dimmed the tints and tarnished the metals, I found evidence of the same regard to hue and lustre as exists still in China and among ourselves; all that now pleases the eye in London and Pekin had pleased it in Thebes during the times of the earlier Pharaohs. And just as we infer from the mechanical contrivances of the Creative-Worker that he possesses a certain identity of mind in the constructive department with his creature-workers, and this upon the principle on which we infer an identity of mind between the creature-workers of China, ancient Egypt, and our own country, seeing that their works are identical, must we not also infer, on the same principle, that he possesses in the æsthetic department a certain identity with them also. True, this region of the beautiful, ever surrounded by an atmosphere of obscure, ill-settled metaphysics, is greatly less clear than that mechanical province of whose various machines, whether of Divine or human contrivance, it can be at least affirmed that machines they are, and that they effect their purposes by contrivances of the same or of resembling kinds. And yet the appearance in nature, age after age, of the same forms and colors of beauty which man, in gratifying his taste for the lovely in shape and hue, is ever reproducing for himself, does seem to justify our inference of an identity of mind in this province also. The colors of the old geologic organisms, like those of the paintings of ancient Egypt, are greatly faded. A few, however, of the Secondary, and even Palæozoic shells, still retain the rich prismatic hues of the original nacre. Many of the Tertiary division still bear the distinctive painted spots. Some of the later fossil fishes, when first laid open in the rock, exhibit the pearly gleam that must of old have lighted up the green depths of the water as they darted through. Not a few of the fossil corals preserve enough of their former color to impart much delicacy of tint to the marbles in which they occur. But it is chiefly in form, not in shade or hue, that we find in the organisms of the geologic ages examples of that beauty in which man delights, and which he is ever reproducing for himself. There is scarce an architectural ornament of the Gothic or Grecian styles which may not be found existing as fossils in the rocks. The Ulodendron was sculptured into gracefully arranged rows of pointed and closely imbricated leaves, similar to those into which the Roman architects fretted the torus of the Corinthian order. The Sigillaria were fluted columns ornately carved in the line of the channelled flutes; the Lepidodendra bore, according to their species, sculptured scales, or lozenges, or egg-like hollows, set in a sort of frame, and relieved into knobs and furrows; all of them furnishing examples of a delicate diaper work, like that so admired in our more ornate Gothic buildings, such as Westminster Abbey, or Canterbury and Chichester Cathedrals, only greatly more exquisite in their design and finish. The scroll shells, a very numerous section of the class in the earlier ages, such as Maclurea, Euomphalus, Clymenia, and the great family of the ammonites, were volutes of varying proportions, but not less graceful than the ornament of similar proportions so frequently introduced into Greek and Roman architecture, and of which we have such prominent examples in the capitals of the Ionic, Corinthian, and composite orders. In what is known as the modern Ionic the spiral of the volute is not all on one plane; it is a Euomphalus: in the central volutes of the Corinthian the spiral is an open one; it is a Lituite or Gyroceras: in the ancient Ionic it is either wholly flat, as in Planorbus or the upper side of Maclurea, or slightly relieved, as in the ammonites. There is no form of the volute known to the architect which may not be found in the rocks, but there are many forms in the rocks unknown to the architect. Nor are the spire-like shells (see [Fig. 105]) less remarkable for the rich and varied style of their ornamentation than the whorled ones. They are spires, pinnacles, turrets, broaches; ornate, in some instances, beyond the reach of the architect, and illustrative, in almost all, of his happiest forms and proportions. We detect among the fossils the germs of numerous designs developed in almost every department of art; but merely to enumerate them would require a volume. One form of the old classic lamp was that of the nautilus; another, that of Gyphæa incurva; the zigzag mouldings of the Norman Gothic may be found in the carinated oysters of the Greensand; the more delicate frettings of similar form which roughened the pillars of a somewhat later age occur on Conularia and the dorsal spines of Gyracanthus. The old corals, too, abound in ornamental patterns, which man, unaware of their existence at the time, devised long after for himself. In an article on calico printing, which forms part of a recent history of Lancashire, there are a few of the patterns introduced, backed by the recommendation that they were the most successful ever tried. Of one of these, known as "Lane's Net," there sold a greater number of pieces than of any other pattern ever brought into the market. It led to many imitations; and one of the most popular of these answers line for line, save that it is more stiff and rectilinear, to the pattern in a recently discovered Old Red Sandstone coral, the Smithia Pengellyi. The beautifully arranged lines which so smit the dames of England, that each had to provide herself with a gown of the fabric which they adorned, had been stamped amid the rocks eons of ages before. And it must not be forgotten, that all these forms and shades of beauty which once filled all nature, but of which only a few fragments, or a few faded tints, survive, were created, not to gratify man's love of the æsthetic, seeing that man had no existence until long after they had disappeared, but in meet harmony with the tastes and faculties of the Divine Worker, who had in his wisdom produced them all.
| Fig. 105. MURCHISONIA BIGRANULOSA. (Old Red Sandstone.) | Fig. 106.
CONULARIA ORNATA. (Old Red Sandstone.) |
| Fig. 107.
CALICO PATTERN. (Manchester.) | Fig. 108.
SMITHIA PENGELLYI. (Old Red Sandstone.) |
You will, I trust, bear with me should I seek, in depths where the light shed by science becomes obscure, to guide my steps by light derived from another and wholly different source. In an assembly such as that which I have now the honor of addressing, there must be many shades of religious opinion. I shall, however, assail no man's faith, but simply lay before you a few deductions which, founded on my own, have supplied me with what I deem a consistent theory of the curious class of phenomena with which this evening we have been mainly dealing. First, then, I must hold that we receive the true explanation of the man-like character of the Creator's workings ere man was, in the remarkable text in which we are told that "God made man in his own image and likeness." There is no restriction here to moral quality: the moral image man had, and in large measure lost; but the intellectual image he still retains. As a geometrician, as an arithmetician, as a chemist, as an astronomer,—in short, in all the departments of what are known as the strict sciences,—man differs from his Maker, not in kind, but in degree,—not as matter differs from mind, or darkness from light, but simply as a mere portion of space or time differs from all space or all time. I have already referred to mechanical contrivances as identically the same in the Divine and human productions; nor can I doubt that, not only in the pervading sense of the beautiful in form and color which it is our privilege as men in some degree to experience and possess, but also in that perception of harmony which constitutes the musical sense, and in that poetic feeling of which Scripture furnishes us with at once the earliest and the highest examples, and which we may term the poetic sense, we bear the stamp and impress of the Divine image. Now, if this be so, we must look upon the schemes of Creation, Revelation, and Providence, not as schemes of mere adaptation to man's nature, but as schemes also specially adapted to the nature of God as the pattern and original nature. Further, it speaks, I must hold, of the harmony and unity of one sublime scheme, that, after long ages of immaturity,—after the dynasties of the fish, the reptile, and the mammal should in succession have terminated,—man should have at length come upon the scene in the image of God; and that, at a still later period, God himself should have come upon the scene in the form of man; and that thus all God's workings in creation should be indissolubly linked to God himself, not by any such mere likeness or image of the Divinity as that which the first Adam bore, but by Divinity itself in the Second Adam; so that on the rainbow-encircled apex of the pyramid of created being the Son of God and the Son of Man should sit enthroned forever in one adorable person. That man should have been made in the image of God seems to have been a meet preparation for God's after assumption of the form of man. It was perhaps thus secured that stock and graft, if I may venture on such a metaphor, should have the necessary affinity, and be capable of being united in a single person. The false gods of the Egyptians assumed, it was fabled, the forms of brutes: it was the human form and nature that was assumed by the true God;—so far as we know, the only form and nature that could have brought him into direct union with at once the matter and mind of the universe which he had created and made,—with "true body and reasonable soul." Yet further, I learn by inevitable inference from one of the more distinctive articles of my creed, that as certainly as the dynasty of the fish was predetermined in the scheme of Providence to be succeeded by the higher dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the still higher dynasty of the mammal, so it was equally predetermined that the dynasty of responsible, fallible man should be succeeded by the dynasty of glorified, immortal man; and that, in consequence, the present mixed state of things is not a mere result, as some theologians believe, of a certain human act which was perpetrated about six thousand years ago, but was, virtually at least, the effect of a God-determined decree, old as eternity,—a decree in which that act was written as a portion of the general programme. In looking abroad on that great history of life, of which the latter portions are recorded in the pages of revelation, and the earlier in the rocks, I feel my grasp of a doctrine first taught me by our Calvinistic Catechism at my mother's knee, tightening instead of relaxing. "The decrees of God are his eternal purposes," I was told, "according to the counsel of his will, whereby for his own glory he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass." And what I was told early I still believe. The programme of Creation and Providence, in all its successive periods, is of God, not of man. With the arrangements of the old geologic periods it is obvious man could have had nothing to do: the primeval ages of wondrous plants and monster animals ran their course without counsel taken of him; and in reading their record in the bowels of the earth, and in learning from their strange characters that such ages there were, and what they produced, we are the better enabled to appreciate the impressive directness of the sublime message to Job, when the "Lord answered him out of the whirlwind, and said, Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding." And I can as little regard the present scene of things as an ultimate consequence of what man had willed or wrought, as even any of the pre-Adamic ages. It is simply one scene in a foreordained series,—a scene intermediate in place between the age of the irresponsible mammal and of glorified man; and to provide for the upward passage to the ultimate state, we know that, in reference to the purposes of the Eternal, he through whom the work of restoration has been effected was in reality what he is designated in the remarkable text, "The Lamb slain from the foundations of the world." First in the course of things, man in the image of God, and next, in meet sequence, God in the form of man, have been equally from all eternity predetermined actors in the same great scheme.
I approach a profound and terrible mystery. We can see how in the pre-Adamic ages higher should have succeeded lower dynasties. To be low was not to be immoral; to be low was not to be guilt-stained and miserable. The sea anemone on its half-tide rock, and the fern on its mossy hill-side, are low in their respective kingdoms; but they are, notwithstanding, worthy, in their quiet, unobtrusive beauty, of the God who formed them. It is only when the human period begins that we are startled and perplexed by the problem of a lowness not innocent,—an inferiority tantamount to moral deformity. In the period of responsibility, to be low means to be evil; and how, we ask, could a lowness and inferiority resolvable into moral evil have had any place in the decrees of that Judge who ever does what is right, and in whom moral evil can have no place? The subject is one which it seems not given to man thoroughly to comprehend. Permit me, however, to remark in reply, that in a sense so plain, so obvious, so unequivocally true, that it would lead an intelligent jury, impannelled in the case, conscientiously to convict, and a wise judge righteously to condemn, all that is evil in the present state of things man may as certainly have wrought out for himself, as the criminals whom we see sentenced at every justiciary court work out for themselves the course of punishment to which they are justly subjected.
It has been well said of the Author of all by the poet, that, "binding nature fast in fate," he "left free the human will." And it is this freedom or independency of will operating on an intellect moulded after the image and likeness of the Divinity that has rendered men capable of being what the Scriptures so emphatically term "fellow-workers with God." In a humble and restricted sense, as I have already remarked,—humble and restricted, but in that restricted sense obviously true,—the surface of the earth far and wide testifies to this fact of fellowship in working. The deputed lord of creation, availing himself of God's natural laws, does what no mere animal of the old geologic ages ever did, or ever could have done,—he adorns and beautifies the earth, and adds tenfold to its original fertility and productiveness. In this special sense, then, he is a fellow-worker with Him who, according to the Psalmist, "causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man, and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil that maketh his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart." But it is in a greatly higher sense, and in reference to God's moral laws, that he is fitted to be his fellow-worker in the Scriptural sense. And his proper employment in this department is the elevation and development, moral and intellectual, of himself and his fellow-men, both in adaptation to the demands of the present time, and in preparation for a future state.
All experience, however, serves to show that in this paramount department man greatly fails; nay, that he is infinitely less true to his proper end and destiny than the beasts that perish to their several instincts. And yet it may be remarked, that such of the lower animals as are guided by pure instinct are greatly more infallible within their proper spheres than the higher, half-reasoning animals. The mathematical bee never constructs a false angle; the sagacious dog is not unfrequently out in his calculations. The higher the animal in the scale, the greater its liability to error. But it is not the less true, that no fish, no reptile, no mammal, of the geologic or the recent ages, ever so failed in working out the purposes it was created to serve, as man has failed in working out his; further, in no creature save in man does there exist that war of the mind between appetite and duty of which the Apostle so consciously complained. And we must seek an explanation of these twin facts in that original freedom of the will which, while it rendered man capable of being of choice God's fellow-worker, also conferred on him an ability of choosing not to work with God. And his choice of not working with him, or of working against him, being once freely made, we may see how, from man's very constitution and nature, as an intelligence united to matter that increases his kind from generation to generation in virtue of the original law, the ability of again working with God might be forever destroyed. And thus man's general condition as a lapsed creature may be as unequivocally a consequence of man's own act, as the condition of individuals born free, but doomed to slavery in punishment of their offences, is a consequence of their own acts. A brief survey of the many-colored and variously-placed human family, as at present distributed on the earth, may enable us in some degree to conceive of a matter which, involving, as it does, that master problem of moral science, the origin of evil, seems, as I have said, not to be given to man fully to comprehend.
"The different races of mankind," says Humboldt, employing, let me remark, the language of the distinguished German naturalist Müller, to give expression to the view which he himself adopts,—"the different races of mankind are not different species of a genus, but forms of one sole species." "The human species," says Cuvier, "appears to be single." "When we compare," says Pritchard, "all the facts and observations which have been heretofore fully established as to the specific instincts and separate psychical endowments of all the distinct tribes of sentient beings in the universe, we are entitled to draw confidently the conclusion, that all human races are of one species and one family." "God hath made of one blood," said the Apostle Paul, in addressing himself to the élite of Athens, "all nations, for to dwell on the face of all the earth." Such, on this special head, is the testimony of Revelation, and such the conclusion of our highest scientific authorities. The question has, indeed, been raised in these latter times, whether each species of animals may not have been originally created, not by single pairs or in single centres, but by several pairs and in several centres, and, of course, the human species among the rest? And the query,—for in reality it amounts to nothing more,—has been favorably entertained on the other side of the Atlantic. On purely scientific grounds it is of course difficult to prove a negative in the case, just as it would be difficult to prove a negative were the question to be, whether the planet Venus was not composed of quartz rock, or the planet Mars of Old Red Sandstone? But the portion of the problem really solvable by science,—the identity of the human race under all its conditions, and in all its varieties,—science has solved. It has determined that all the various tribes of man are but forms of a single species. And in the definition of species,—waiving the American doubt until it shall at least become something more,—I am content to follow the higher authorities. "We unite," says M. de Candolle, "under the designation of a species, all those individuals that mutually bear to each other so close a resemblance as to allow of our supposing that they may have proceeded originally from a single being or a single pair." "A species," says Buffon, "is a constant succession of individuals similar to and capable of reproducing each other." "A species," says Cuvier, "is a succession of individuals which reproduces and perpetuates itself."