"We must then give up the problem as insoluble; for if reason be insufficient to give authority to the Bible, and criticism fails to discover its truth, how are we to know that it possesses either?"
Just as you would discover the truth of any other history, or the authority of any other law. You do not say, "The tale of the successive swellings of the Catawba, the Yadkin, and the Dan—three times in a fortnight, in February, 1781, immediately after the American army had retreated across these rivers, preventing Cornwallis and the British forces from crossing till the little handful of weary and famished patriots had escaped—savors of the marvelous and leans so much toward the superstition of a special providence, that it must be rejected as not historical." You inquire if there be sufficient testimony to the fact. You do not say, "The Revised Statutes present internal evidence of being a collection of political tracts by various authors, written at different times, differing also in style, and of various degrees of merit, many of them contrary to my inmost personal convictions; therefore I can not acknowledge them as true and valid." You simply ask if this be a true copy of the laws passed by the legislature and signed by the governor? Our inquiry about the truth of the history, and the authority of the laws of the Bible, must be of the same kind—an inquiry after testimony. Is this Book genuine or a forgery? Is it a true history or a lying romance? Have we any testimony on the subject?
But it is alleged that the Book contains in itself evidence of having been written in an unscientific age, and in an unhistorical manner; and, particularly, that its statements of the creation of the world, and of mankind, only six thousand years ago, are refuted by the discoveries of geology; which show us, that the world is many millions of years old, and that man has been on this world at least one hundred thousand years. In support of this last assertion, geologists refer to the remains of the lake dwellings in Switzerland; to skeletons of men found in caves, with bones of animals now extinct; to flint tools and weapons found in gravel beds, said to be of remote antiquity; to bones found deep in the Mississippi bottom; and to the monuments of Egypt.
In replying to this objection, we have first to say that we have elsewhere, in this volume, shown that the Bible nowhere alleges that God created the earth only six thousand years ago, but in many places emphatically affirms the contrary.
In the second place, as to the antiquity of man, the Bible nowhere says, that Adam was the first human being whom God created; nor that he and his posterity were the only intelligent beings occupying this world before our tenancy of it; nor that we are even now the exclusive occupants. On the contrary, it makes very distinct allusions to other races, capable of assuming serpentine, swinish, and human bodies, and of meddling disastrously in earthly affairs in former times; though, as it does not profess to teach us truths which do not concern us, it gives us no narration of the creation or history of pre-Adamite animals or men. But there is no more ground of objection against the Bible for neglecting to give us a history of pre-Adamite men, if there were such men, than for neglecting to describe the pre-Adamite animals, or the coal measures, or the nebulæ, or the climate, soil, population, and politics of Jupiter. The Bible has one great object—to teach men how to be holy and happy; and it can not be shown that the chronicles of the pre-Adamites, if they kept chronicles of their alleged savage state, would help us in the acquisition of holiness.
No discoveries, then, which geologists may make of pre-Adamite races of men, can at all affect the credit of Moses' account of the creation of Adam, and of the history of his family. They may fill museums, if they please, with their flint arrow-heads and axes, they may pile up pyramids of stone mortars, they may perhaps some day discover an old-world bronze railroad, and bronze-clad or copper-bottomed steamboats, they may produce pre-Adamic electric, aeronautic engines, and magnetic sewing machines, or bone needles, we care not which; and we will admire them, and confess that they are very curious, and perhaps very old; but unless they can show that Adam was descended from these old-world folks, we have no biblical quarrel with them. Like Moses, we will let them rest in peace.
But we would remark, thirdly, that no such discoveries have yet been made. No human bone, implement, or monument, has yet been discovered which can be proved to be more ancient than Adam, or nearly so ancient. There is not a single indisputable fact to show, that any of the tools, bones, or monuments; alleged in this discussion, is of any specific date whatever, save that the Danish bogs came down to the date of the Danish invasion of Ireland in the eleventh century; the burnt corn of the Swiss lake dwellings was probably that which Julius Cæsar describes the Helvetians as burning preparatory to their invasion of Gaul; and the monuments of Egypt, for which Bunsen claimed twenty thousand years, are now acknowledged by the best Egyptologists to reach not quite to 3000 B. C. As to the bone found at the base of the bluff at Memphis, it was not found in situ, and probably was washed out of some Indian grave at the top, and buried in the debris. The Abbeville skull[126] had a fresh tooth in it, for which thirty-five thousand years was claimed, until examination by a competent committee exposed the deception. Where there is a good paying demand for pre-Adamite skulls, there will always be a good supply. Dr. Dowler calculates the age of a skeleton of an Indian, found at the depth of sixteen feet in digging the gas works at New Orleans, at fifty thousand years; while the U. S. Coast Surveying Department show that the whole Delta is not more than four thousand four hundred years old.
These gross errors, which affront our common sense, wherever we are able to test geological calculations, fill us with mistrust of their allegations of evidence, which, from the nature of the case, we can not test.
Of this class is the discovery of human bones in caves containing the bones of cave bears, rhinocerii, mammoths, and other extinct animals. The argument is that man and these animals lived at the same time. Very well, what time was that? There is no evidence to show that it was a hundred thousand years ago. The Siberian hunters fed their dogs on the flesh of a mammoth they found frozen in mud bluffs at the mouth of the Lena, and its hair and wool are now in the museum of St. Petersburg. Dr. Warren's mastodon giganteus had some bushels of pine and maple twigs, in excellent preservation, in its stomach, when exhumed in Orange County, New York; and you may see for yourself the vegetable fiber found in its teeth in his museum in Boston.[127] Does any one believe that the vegetable fiber and maple twigs have kept their shape one hundred thousand years? The mammoth found in the ditch of the Tezcucoco road must have fallen in after the Incas had dug that ditch. The Indians have a tradition that their fathers hunted a huge deer with a hand on his face, which slept leaning against the trees. And there is good geological reason for believing that the final extinction of the mammoth, the European rhinoceros, and their contemporaries, was caused by the change of climate in Northern Europe, Asia, and America, caused by the elevation of these northern lands, which has been going on since the tenth century, and which, about three centuries ago, closed the Polar Sea, rendering Greenland uninhabitable. The juxtaposition, then, of the bones of man and extinct animals is no proof of the remote antiquity of either. And no proof has been made from the nature or depth of the overlying deposits.
The shape, size, and general character of the skulls alleged to be of such remote antiquity give no countenance to the theory of man's brutal origin; which is the great thing to be gained by giving him a remote antiquity. The Enghis skull is in no way inferior to many good modern Indian skulls; and the man of Mentone stood six feet one in his stocking soles (if he wore stockings), having a good John Bull head between his shoulders, with a facial angle equal to that of Generals Grant or Von Moltke; and in fact being a fine old Gallic gentleman, all of the good old times.