But the observer, as he looks on this web, is surprised to find that it has in its whole extent a wondrous pattern. He rises to the contemplation of type in nature, a great truth to which science has only lately opened its eyes. He begins dimly to perceive that the Creator has from the beginning had a plan before his mind, that this plan embraced various types or patterns of existence; that on these patterns he has been working out the whole system of nature, adapting each to all the variety of uses by an infinity of minor modifications. That, in short, whether he study the eye of a gnat or the structure of a mountain chain, he sees not only objects of beauty and utility, but parts of far-reaching plans of infinite wisdom, by which all objects, however separated in time or space, are linked together.
How much of positive pleasure does that man lose who passes through life absorbed with its wants and its artificialities, and regarding with a "brute, unconscious gaze" the grand revelation of a higher intelligence in the outer world. It is only in an approximation through our Divine Redeemer to the moral likeness of God that we can be truly happy; but of the subsidiary pleasures which we are here permitted to enjoy, the contemplation of nature is one of the best and purest. It was the pleasure, the show, the spectacle prepared for man in Eden, and how much true philosophy and taste shine in the simple words that in paradise God planted trees "pleasant to the sight," as well as "good for food." Other things being equal, the nearer we can return to this primitive taste, the greater will be our sensuous enjoyment, the better the influence of our pleasures on our moral nature, because they will then depend on the cultivation of tastes at once natural and harmless, and will not lead us to communion with and reverence for merely human genius, but will conduct us into the presence of the infinite perfection of the Creator.
The Bible knows but one species of man. It is not said that men were created after their species, as we read of the groups of animals. Man was made, "male and female;" and in the fuller details afterwards given in the second chapter—where the writer, having finished his general narrative, commences his special history of man—but one primitive pair is introduced to our notice. We scarcely need the detailed tables of affiliation afterward given, or the declaration of the apostle who preached to the supposed autochthones of Athens, that "God has made of one blood all nations," to assure us of the Scriptural unity of man. If, therefore, there were any good reason to believe that man is not of one but several origins, we must admit Moses to have been very imperfectly informed. Nor, on the other hand, does the Bible any more than geology allow us to assign a very high antiquity to the origin of man relatively to that of the earth on which he dwells. The genealogical tables of the Bible may admit of some limits of difference of opinion as to the age of the human world or æon, and also of that of the deluge, from which man took his second point of departure; but they do not allow us to put the origin of man farther back than that of the present or modern condition of our continents and the present races of animals. They therefore limit us to the modern or quaternary period of geology. The question of man's antiquity, so much agitated now, demands, however, a separate and careful consideration; but we must first devote a few pages to the simple statements of the Bible respecting the Sabbath of creation and its relation to human history.
CHAPTER XII.
THE REST OF THE CREATOR.
"And the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because that in it God rested from all his work which he had created to make."—Genesis ii., 1-3.
The end of the sixth day closed the work of creation properly so called, as well as that of forming and arranging the things created. The beginning of the seventh introduced a period which, according to the views already stated, was to be occupied by the continued increase and diffusion of man and the creatures under his dominion, and by the gradual disappearance of tribes of creatures unconnected with his well-being.
Science in this well accords with Scripture. No proof exists of the production of a new species since the creation of man; and all geological and archæological evidence points to him and a few of the higher mammals as the newest of the creatures. There is, on the other hand, good evidence that several species have become extinct since his creation. Those who believe in the continuous evolution of animals and men, it is true, can see no actual termination of the process with the introduction of man; but even they see that the appearance of a rational and moral being at least changes the nature and order of the development. Nor can they doubt that man is the last born of nature, and that the whole animal creation is crowned by him as its capital or topmost pinnacle. The later speculators on this subject have never reached any truth beyond that long ago stated by the lamented Edward Forbes—a most careful observer and accurate reasoner on the more recent changes of the earth's surface. He infers, from the distribution of species from their centres of creation, that man is the latest product of creative power; or, in other words, that none of those species or groups of species which he had been able to trace to their centres, or the spots at which they probably originated, appear to be of later or as late origin as man. "This consideration," he says, "induces me to believe that the last province in time was completed by the coming of man, and to maintain an hypothesis that man stands unique in space and time, himself equal to the sum of any pre-existing centre of creation or of all—an hypothesis consistent with man's moral and social position in the world."
The seventh day, then, was to have been that in which all the happiness, beauty, and perfection of the others were to have been concentrated. But an element of instability was present in the being who occupied the summit of the animal scale. Not regulated by blind and unerring instincts, but a free agent, with a high intellectual and moral nature, and liable to be acted on by temptation from without; under such influence he lost his moral balance in stretching out his hand to grasp the peculiar powers of Deity, and fell beyond the hope of self-redemption—perpetuating, by one of those laws which regulate the transmission of mixed corporeal and spiritual natures, his degradation to every generation of his species. And so God's great work was marred, and all his plans seemed to be foiled, when they had just reached their completion. Thus far science might carry us unaided; for there is not a true naturalist, however skeptical as to revealed religion, who does not feel in his inmost heart the disjointed state of the present relations of man to nature; the natural wreck that results from his artificial modes of life, the long trains of violations of the symmetry of nature that follow in the wake of his most boasted achievements. But here natural science stops; and just as we have found that, in tracing back the world's history, the Bible carries us much farther than geology, so science, having led us to suspect the fallen state of man, leaves us henceforth to the teaching of revelation. And how glorious that teaching! God did not find himself baffled—his resources are infinite—he had foreseen and prepared for all this apparent evil; and out of the moral wreck he proceeds to work out the grand process of redemption, which is the especial object of the seventh day, and which will result in the production of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. In the seventh, as in the former days, the evening precedes the morning. For four thousand years the world groped in its darkness—a darkness tenanted by moral monsters as powerful and destructive as the old pre-Adamite reptiles. The Sun of Righteousness at length arose, and the darkness began to pass away; but eighteen centuries have elapsed, and we still see but the gray dawn of morning, which we yet firmly believe will brighten into a glorious day that shall know no succeeding night. [100]