When the Glacial period passed away, our nameless simian man, or manlike ape, might naturally be supposed to revert to its original condition, and to establish itself as of old in the new forests of the Modern period. For some unknown reason, however, perhaps because it had gone too far in the path of improvement to be able to turn back, this reversion did not take place. On the contrary, the ameliorated circumstances and wider range of the new continents enabled it still further to improve. Ease and abundance perfected what struggle and privation had begun; it added to the rude arts of the Glacial time; it parted with the shaggy hair now unnecessary; its features became softer; and it returned in part to vegetable food. Language sprang up from the attempt to articulate natural sounds. Fire-making was invented and new arts arose. At length the spiritual nature, potentially present in the creature, was awakened by some access of fear, or some grand and terrible physical phenomenon; the idea of a higher intelligence was struck out, and the descendant of apes became a superstitious and idolatrous savage. How much trouble and discussion would have been saved, had he been aware of his humble origin, and never entertained the vain imagination that he was a child of God, rather than a mere product of physical evolution! It is, indeed, curious, that at this point evolutionism, like theism, has its “fall of man;” for surely the awakening of the religious sense, and of the knowledge of good and evil, must on that theory be so designated, since it subverted in the case of man the previous regular operation of natural selection, and introduced all that debasing superstition, priestly domination, and religious controversy which have been among the chief curses of our race, and which are doubly accursed if, as the evolutionist believes, they are not the ruins of something nobler and holier, but the mere gratuitous, vain, and useless imaginings of a creature who should have been content to eat and drink and die, without hope or fear, like the brutes from which he sprang.
These are at present our alternative sketches: the genesis of theism, and the genesis of evolution. After the argument in previous pages, it is unnecessary here to discuss their relative degrees of probability. If we believe in a personal spiritual Creator, the first becomes easy and natural, as it is also that which best accords with history and tradition. If, on the contrary, we reject all these, and accept as natural laws the postulates of the evolutionists which we have already discussed, we may become believers in the latter. The only remaining point is to inquire as to which explains best the actual facts of humanity as we find them. This is a view of which much has been made by evolutionists, and it therefore merits consideration. But it is too extensive to be fully treated of here, and I must content myself with a few illustrations of the failure of the theory of derivation to explain some of the most important features presented by even the ruder races of men.
One of these is the belief in a future state of existence beyond this life. This belongs purely to the spiritual nature of man. It is not taught by physical nature, yet its existence is probably universal, and it lies near the foundation of all religious beliefs. Lartet has described to us the sepulchral cave of Aurignac, in which human skeletons, believed to be of Post-glacial date, were associated with remains of funeral feasts, and with indications of careful burial, and with provisions laid up for the use of the dead. Lyell well remarks on this, “If we have here before us, at the northern base of the Pyrenees, a sepulchral vault with skeletons of human beings, consigned by friends and relatives to their last resting-place if we have also at the portal of the tomb the relics of funeral feasts, and within it indications of viands destined for the use of the departed on their way to a land of spirits; while among the funeral gifts are weapons wherewith in other fields to chase the gigantic deer, the cave-lion, the cave bear, and woolly rhinoceros—we have at last succeeded in tracing back the sacred rites of burial, and more interesting still, a belief in a future state, to times long anterior to those of history and tradition. Rude and superstitious as may have been the savage of that remote era, he still deserved, by cherishing hopes of a hereafter, the epithet of ‘noble,’ which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as the primitive condition of our race.”[BF]
[BF] “Antiquity of Man,” p. 192
In like manner, in the vast American continent, all its long isolated and widely separated tribes, many of them in a state of lowest barbarism, and without any external ritual of religious worship, believed in happy hunting-grounds in the spirit-land beyond the grave, and the dead warrior was buried with his most useful weapons and precious ornaments.
“Bring here the last gifts; and with them
The last lament be said.
Let all that pleased and yet may please,
Be buried with the dead”
was no unmeaning funeral song, but involved the sacrifice of the most precious and prized objects, that the loved one might enter the new and untried state provided for its needs. Even the babe, whose life is usually accounted of so small value by savage tribes, was buried by the careful mother with precious strings of wampum, that had cost more months of patient labour than the days of its short life, that it might purchase the fostering care of the inhabitants of that unknown yet surely believed-in region of immortality. This
“—wish that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?”