But at some risk of rendering myself obnoxious to his censure, I shall attempt indicating at least the general scope and character of what the schoolmen might term a possible poem; which, if vivified by the genius of some of the higher masters of the lyre, broad of faculty, and at once great poets and great men, might prove one precious boon more to the world, suited, conformably to the special demands of these latter times, to
"assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."
There has been war among the intelligences of God's spiritual creation. Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen like fire from heaven; and our present earth, existing as a half-extinguished hell, has received him and his angels. Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits vitality exists; but not yet in all the universe of God has the vitality been united to the matter; animal life, to even the profound apprehension of the fallen angel, is an inconceivable idea. Meanwhile, as the scarce reckoned centuries roll by, vacantly and dull, like the cheerless days and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there is a slow change taking place in the condition of their prison-house. Where a low, dark archipelago of islands raise their flat backs over the thermal waters, the heat glows less intensely than of old; the red fire bursts forth less frequently; the dread earthquake shakes more rarely; save in a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no longer boils like a pot; and though the heavens are still shut out by a gray ceiling of thick vapor, through which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen spirit—profound and active beyond the lot of humanity—would have found ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly asking what these strange things might mean.
With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,—as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,—must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,—scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with him, how thoroughly must he not have seen, and with what bitter malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know! "Shall he that coutendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?" With what wild thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth, barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away, and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean,—how, when looking back upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been, the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds,—how must he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening, and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence,—how must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner mysteries of animal life, with their strange prophecies, the truth had at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast coming to the birth,—man, the moral agent,—man, the ultimate work and end of creation,—man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals, vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy have quickened,—how must solicitude have grown,—when, after the dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and the proud waves of ocean had been stayed,—when, after species and genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his experience,—stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God's spiritual universe,—that all animals should die,—that all moral agents should live. How, in this new creature,—this prodigy of creation, who was to unite what never before had been united,—the nature of the animals that die with the standing and responsibility of the moral agents that live,—how, in this partaker of the double nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute immortality, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with and shade into the mortality which, let us extend the term of previous vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final annihilation and the ceasing to be?
At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by God's own finger, and in God's own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made. And yet, left to the freedom of his own will, there is a weakness in the flesh that betrays his earthly lineage. It is into the dust of the ground that the living soul has been breathed. The son of the soil, who, like the inferior animals, his subjects, sleeps and wakes, and can feel thirst and hunger, and the weariness of toil, and the sweets of rest, and who come under the general law, "increase and multiply," promulgated of old to them, stands less firmly than the immaterial spirits stood of old; and yet even they rebelled against Heaven, and fell. There awakes a grim hope in the sullen lord of the first revolt. Ages beyond tale or reckoning has this temple of creation been in building. Long have its mute prophecies in fishes and in creeping things, in bird and in beast, told of coming man, its final object and end. And now there needeth but one blow, and the whole edifice is destroyed, God's purposes marred and frustrated, and this new favorite of earth dashed back to the dust out of which he was created, and brought, like the old, extinct races, under the eternal law of death. Armed with the experience in evil of unsummed ages, the Tempter plies his work: nor is it to low or ignoble appetites that he appeals. It is to the newly-formed creature's thirst for knowledge; it is to his love stronger than death. The wiles of the Old Serpent prevail; man falls prostrate before him; creation trembles; and then from amid the trees of the garden comes the voice of God. And lo! in an enigma mysterious and dark a new dispensation of prophecy begins. Victims bleed; altars smoke; the tabernacle arises amid the white tents of the desert; the temple ascends all glorious on the heights of Mount Zion; prophet after prophet declares his message. At length, in the fulness of time, the Messiah comes; and, in satisfying the law, and in fulfilling all righteousness, and in bringing life and immortality to light, abundantly shows forth that the terminal dynasty of all creation had been of old foreordained, ere the foundations of the world, to possess for its eternal lord and monarch, not primeval man, created in the image of God, but God, made manifest in the flesh, in the form of primeval man. But how breaks on the baffled Tempter the sublime revelation? Wearily did he toil,—darkly did he devise, and take, in his great misery, deep counsel against the Almighty; and yet all the while, while striving and resisting as an enemy, has he been wielded as a tool; when, glaring aloof in his proud rebellion, the grasp of the Omnipotent has been upon him, and the Eternal Purposes have encompassed him, and he has been working out, all unwittingly, the foreordained decree, "For our God maketh the wrath of the wicked to praise him, and the remainder thereof doth he restrain."
But enough, for the present, of the poems that might be. Permit me, however, to add, in the words of one of the most suggestive, and certainly not least powerful, of English thinkers, that "a fall of some sort or other,—the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute,—is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis," he adds, "man is unintelligible,—with it every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight." Such, in this matter, was the ultimate judgment of a man who in youth had entertained very opposite views,—the poet Coleridge.
It has been said that the inferences of the geologist militate against those of the theologian. Nay, not those of our higher geologists and higher theologians,—not what our Murchisons and Sedgwicks infer in the one field, with what our Chalmerses and Isaac Taylors infer in the other. Between the Word and the Works of God there can be no actual discrepancies; and the seeming ones are discernible only by the men who see worst.
"Mote-like they flicker in unsteady eyes,
And weakest his who best descries."
The geologist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province exclusively his own; and were the theologian ever to remember that the Scriptures could not possibly have been given to us as revelations of scientific truth, seeing that a single scientific truth they never yet revealed, and the geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science those truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science these truths were never yet found, there would be little danger even of difference among them, and none of collision. Nay, there is, I doubt not, a time coming in which the Butlers and Chalmerses of the future will be content to recognize the geologic field as that of their richest and most pregnant analogies. It is with the history of the pre-Adamic ages that geology sets itself to deal; and by carefully conning the ancient characters graven in the rocks, and by deciphering the strange inscriptions which they compose, it greatly extends the record of God's doings upon the earth. And what more natural to expect, or rational to hold, than that the Unchangeable One should have wrought in all time after one general type and pattern, or than that we may seek, in the hope of finding, meet correspondences and striking analogies between his revealed workings during the human period, and his previous workings of old during the geologic periods,—correspondences and analogies suited to establish the identity of the worker, and, of course, from that identity to demonstrate the authenticity of the revelation? Permit me to bring out, in conclusion, what I have often thought on this subject, but have not been able so tersely to express, in a brief quotation from one of the most instructive works of the present age, the "Method of the Divine Government," by the Rev. Dr. M'Cosh:—"Science has a foundation," says this solid thinker and accomplished writer, "and so has religion. Let them unite their foundations, and the basis will be broader, and they will be two compartments of one great fabric reared to the glory of God. Let the one be the outer and the other the inner court. In the one let all look, and admire, and adore; and in the other let those who have faith kneel, and pray, and praise. Let the one be the sanctuary where human learning may present its richest incense as an offering to God, and the other, the holiest of all, separated from it by a veil now rent in twain, and in which, on a blood-sprinkled mercy seat, we pour out the love of a reconciled heart, and hear the oracles of the living God."