“My substance was not hid from Thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in Thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”
But all such assertion, discussion, and attempt at proof I allow only to what is physical and finite, and is therefore a legitimate subject of assertion on merely physical data; for I do not desire to discuss, beyond simple mention, the Spencerian doctrine of evolution, that materialism which would make thought and soul only successions in a series (even if the highest and best) of evoluted developments. To account for the religious nature in man by evolution I regard as a thing that cannot be done. It is a tenable position held by evolutionists such as Dana, Winchell, and the late Professor Le Conte of California, that “at the creation of man the divine fiat asserted itself, and ‘breathed into man the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’ Immortality cannot be evolved out of mortality. If Spencerian evolution is true, either everything is immortal or nothing is immortal; man and vermin in this hypothesis go together.”
Man’s soul came to him direct from God, a part of His own infinite life, in His “image,” and like Him in His holiness. Man’s thoughts of God were holy. The expression of them in words and acts was his practical religion, the visible, audible link that “bound” (ligated) him to God. In this there could be no evolution, unless that, in the many forms and ceremonies used in the expression of religious thought (which ceremonies constitute worship), there could be, and were, variation, change, development, or retrogression.
Therefore I cannot accept the conclusions of those who in their study of ethnology claim to find that the religious beliefs of the world, and even the very idea of a Supreme Being, have been evolved by man himself ab intra. They claim that this evolution has been by primitive man, from low forms of beliefs in spiritual beings, through polytheism and idolatry, up to the conception of monotheism and its belief in the one living God. This process they claim to be able to follow on lines racial and national, under the civilizations of Chaldee, Greek, Roman, Teutonic, and other stocks.
“Until some human being can be found with a conception of spiritual existences without his having received instruction on that point from those who went before him, the claim ... that primitive man ever obtained his spiritual knowledge or his spiritual conceptions from within himself alone, or without an external revelation to him, is an unscientific assumption in the investigation of the origin of religions in the world.”[3]
The rather I find, in my own ethnological observations during these more than forty years in direct contact with aboriginal peoples, that the initial starting-point of man’s knowledge of God was by revelation from Jehovah himself. This knowledge was to be conserved by man’s conscience, God’s implanted witness,—a witness that can be coerced into silence, that may be nursed into forgetfulness, that may be perverted by abuse, that may be covered up by superimposed falsities, that may be discolored by the blackness of foul degradation, but which can never be utterly destroyed; which on occasions, like the Titans, arouses itself with volcanic force; which at God’s final bar is to be His sufficient proof for the verities and responsibilities of at least natural religion (“natural” religion, a recognition of certain attributes of God as revealed in the works of nature). This knowledge of God, a treasure hid in earthen vessels, rightly used and cherished, was to grow and develop under subsequent divine revelation, so that man might become more and more like his divine original; or, if abused, neglected, or perverted, it would carry him even farther away from God.
“Not alone those who insist on the belief that there was a gradual development of the race from a barbarous beginning, but also those who believe that man started on a higher plane, and in his degradation retained vestiges of God’s original revelation to him, are finding profit in the study of primitive myths, and of aboriginal rites and ceremonies all the world over.”[4]
I do not impeach the sincerity of those students of primitive thought who teach that man in his religious beliefs has reached his present monotheism by progressive growths from polytheism, or that he has attained his present conception of the very existence of a Supreme Being by a gradual emergence from a state of ignorance in which even the idea of such a being did not exist; but I do discount the competency of many of the witnesses on whose testimony they base their conclusions.
Whatever may be proved in a complete investigation by science into the arcana of nature,—of archæology and other channels of research,—a reverent comparison of these results of finite intelligence will find them not inconsistent with the statements of God’s infinite Word. Indeed, that Word was not written to make any definite statement on astronomy or geology, or any other human science. The only science of the Bible is that of man’s relation to his divine Father; its only history a history of redemption, as promised to Eve and her seed, the Jewish nation, and as fulfilled in the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Apparent conflicts of the Bible with science are not always real; too often a claim is set up, based on a single observation, perhaps hastily made, and not verified by a comparison of the variable factors in that observation.
I suppose that it is true that in the theology of even the worst forms of religion there is more or less truth, and almost equally true that in the theology of the best forms there may be somewhat of superstition. This is so because, as I believe, all religions had but one source, and that a pure one. From it have grown perversions varying in their proportion of truth and error.